Daily Archives: September 22, 2021

Simple Reasons Why Progressives Don’t Do Well in Red States

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

As a political scientist currently working in the State of Texas, one of the things that often bothers me is whenever the national media tries to create a narrative that a red state is potentially turning purple (i.e., previously conservative state starts trending towards becoming more liberal). Whenever I read (or hear or watch) such proclamations, my immediate thought is that I’m receiving wishful thinking much more than actual news content. But every election cycle, these claims happen, and as often happens immediately after the election, rarely do those predictions come true.

This was my thought when there was so much effort put into claiming that Texas was going to be turning blue during the last election (and slightly before it). In recent memory, there were claims that Beta O’Rourke was going to overcome Ted Cruz for US senator, which never happened. And then there was a weird belief that President Trump was going to lose to Joe Biden in the state vote, and now I’m hearing claims that due to “popularity” Beta O’Rourke has a strong chance of becoming governor against Greg Abbott when he runs for reelection. Again, wishful thinking along with further beliefs that the state is on the verge of becoming that ever so elusive “purple” state.

Probably not going to happen.

But it could. If only progressives actually did something about making those predictions come true, something they NEVER do no matter how much blustering they do.

Now, before you get all “Duane, stop with your crappy conservative man-child crying,” I should probably point out that I’m not saying these things because I want red states to remain red, but because I’d be quite happy if they did turn blue, or at least purple. I just realize they’re probably not going to, and the reason is the rationality for why these areas always stay the same.

So, your argument right now is probably, “okay, smarty pants, tell us how progressives can actually win in these areas if you think you know better.”

And therefore, I will.

First, progressives need to understand the canvas on which they are trying to paint this bizarre approach to “winning” future elections. And they need to understand why their predictions rarely come true. And then, second, once they understand those reasons, they need to work as a network to make sure that they actually do something to change their direction, because continuing to pull from the same playbook is never going to achieve long-lasting results that work in their favor. So, here goes:

Stop treating conservative behavior as inherently wrong. Instead, try to understand conservative ideals and see how they can start to fit into a progressive agenda.

Being a progressive means being a person who advocates for change. But in order to convince people to want to change something, you have to do more than just point at something you don’t like and say that’s wrong. You need to have actual solutions. Example: One of the hot issues in Texas is guns. Saying that people have guns is bad isn’t going to change the mind of a person who grows up believing that guns are a part of the national fabric and that it may have served as a necessary evil in the building of this nation. Pointing out that guns are used to kill people might seem like a logical ploy to persuade, but all it does is point out a simple fact that doesn’t lead to alternative outcomes.

Think about it this way: If I give up my guns in order to achieve some elusive sense of safety so I don’t accidentally kill myself, I’m still stuck with the struggle of logic once I realize that bad people use guns to hurt other people, and thus, being without a gun means always being perceived as a victim to actual armed people. It doesn’t even matter if I’m already a progressive; I still exist in this society where guns already exist, and unfortunately, there are people who tend to use those guns to do bad things to other people. It feels inevitable that one is going to need guns in order to simply survive. Or we take another page from the conservative playbook and realize that we can cut down on guns eventually, as long as we bolster up the police forces that work around us to protect us from those evil people who want to do us harm.

But honestly, why do we even think that there are people out there who want to do us harm? How many of us have actually seen those “people” face-to-face on a daily basis? I’d say not many of us.

Most people will understand the threat of violence due to a situation or two they may have encountered in their lifetime, usually when they have gone into a bad neighborhood or just made a stupid decision that didn’t turn out as good as they hoped it would end up. Maybe your house or car was broken into.

But let’s look at that last possibility (mainly because it’s the most likely one to occur to someone rather than random violence). How would having a gun have made a burglary or a car vandalism (that led to property loss) have turned out better? I’d argue that in most of those cases, a gun wouldn’t have made a single difference because most of those incidents happen out of your sight.

Yet, in one’s mind, he or she is going to perceive that incident as “violent”. And if anything, you should be asking yourself how that conclusion was reached, because in the end if you’re arguing for gun rights as a way to counter such horrible circumstances, logic would tell you that a gun wouldn’t have made a difference whatsoever. Yet, it’s often tied to issues like this one, and is on one’s mind when making future decisions about such policy issues.

So that begs the question: Where did we get such ideas that petty crimes are somehow tied to the senseless violence we perceive exists all around us?

Well, where do we actually experience this type of violence that so much of us believe is prevalent? Well, this might surprise you, but if you think about it, the majority of us encounter this type of violence in the media we consume as a natural part of our lives. If you watch television on a regular basis, you’re inundated with more violence than you can possibly imagine. Just yesterday, I received the line-up of new shows on one network alone (CBS), and I was overwhelmed by how many of their television shows airing right now are all about police and crime (NCIS, NCIS: Hawaii, FBI, FBI: Most Wanted, FBI: International, S.W.A.T., Magnum, P.I., Blue Bloods, CSI: Vegas, Bull, the Equalizer, and NCIS: Los Angeles). That’s just one network.

Now add all the other networks with the violent shows they air, and the add in all of the 24 hour news that constantly tells us how much in danger we are from practically everything that exists around us (from school shootings to crazy people on the national highways), and you start to see a sense of why people go to bed and then wake up in the mornings convinced that violence is going to be coming at them from every direction. Keep in mind that a lot of this programming we consume comes from historically liberal sources (meaning mostly fed to people who would tend to be progressives). That doesn’t even get into the mass hysteria that is fed daily on right-wing media channels that take that sense of fear and turns it up to 11.

And then go into those areas saying that “we need to control guns”, and you have an immediate response of hatred for practically everything else that you have to say after that.

And that’s just one issue. Now imagine you have five issues of progressive importance that you want to feed to a red state. Let’s just choose 5 random ones that tend to get trotted out a lot: guns, abortion, health care, national defense and education in schools. Keep in mind, there are hundreds to thousands of other issues that could be important to any one individual, yet for the sake of simplicity, I’m keeping it down to just these five to show how difficult it is to maintain a party message that can sway an audience that doesn’t already agree with you.

We talked a little bit about guns already, but let’s just touch on the others for a moment.

Abortion: Remember, you’re appealing to the average person in a red state. Most often, the arguments used to “sway” people on this issue are along the lines of “my body, my choice,” which if seen on a surface level can be perceived to be specifically a gender based issue that would only be important to a woman who might be seeking a potential abortion. Yet, the people who seem to be boisterous about this are both men and women, and they’re often split right down the middle of the issue itself. Conservatives tend to gravitate towards arguments that point out connections to religious doctrine, even if that religion doesn’t have actual policy or doctrine on that specific issue. Many people are willing to just turn off thinking any further about an issue if they suspect that a religion they follow might side one way or another on this particular issue (quite often selective, depending upon parish and specific leadership of any particular church). Rational people can make some pretty irrational decisions based on erroneous beliefs, yet they’ll cling to deal life to those beliefs, regardless of how much persuasion is attempted to reverse those decisions.

Health Care: Most people who have health care don’t even know what their health care covers. Due to insurance secrecy, they quite often don’t even know how much they’re paying for the prescriptions (and usually don’t find out until their insurance doesn’t cover it). Some people with crappy coverage think they have Cadillac coverage, and some people, like members of Congress, have the greatest coverage of all and somewhat suspect that everyone should be happy with the coverage they have, even though their constituents have little to no coverage.

National Defense: Most people don’t know how much of the national budget is spent on defense, and even those that do tend to not have a clue how much corruption is built into the system to reward major defense industry corporations that provide munitions and logistics. And when we find out, we tend to just file it away under “stupid things the government does” because we have little to no say so on how spending is decided. Years back, there was a national outrage about how much the government was spending just to buy hammers for the military, and then almost immediately after, the outcry stopped. Did we fix the problem? No. We just stopped paying attention to it. That alone defines our approach to dealing with national defense.

Education in Schools: There is so much baggage wrapped up in education that it’s almost hard to determine what to do about the transgressions that occur here. Much of the debate from conservative channels on education is that it is used to indoctrinate younger people to liberal values, yet much of the debate against conservatives is that they are trying to use education to indoctrinate people to ignore much of history, like slavery, the honoring of confederate leaders, and even the presentation of confederate symbology. Progressives tend to boil it down to simpler terms, as all three of those issues are generally wrapped around in the ideology of promoting racism, and thus much of the problem tends to be addressed in attempts to shame conservatives into compliance. And to their chagrin, it rarely stings as much as they hope it will. More on that to follow.

Which brings us to the real problem that progressives have when trying to change the minds of red state ideology. With the Internet came a new process for dealing with dissent, in which our old procedures were to participate in public forums where both sides could present their side and then let the public decide. The Internet destroyed the gatekeeper model, in which the media was often the go between for the two sides, and now because distance is no longer an issue, the Internet allows like minded people to converse with each other and completely ignore any opposing viewpoint. Rather than direct confrontation, the subsequent result has been either shaming or cancellation. Shame was the previous model, in which addressing such divisions in the open would result in change of procedure or policy. Think of it as the Karen Effect, in which the original approach to dealing with people who were caught on film doing bad things was to shame them, exposing their behavior, which would push them to try to do better in the future. Now, take that Effect a bit further, and no longer do we just try to push such behavior in the open to use shame as a change agent, but now we tend to use that same vehicle to locate the original offender and then hunt them down until we can expose them to their employers and get them fired if they ever do something out of line. In other words, we stopped shaming for the sake of changing their behavior but are now shaming them to bring about their complete destruction.

This is a major reason why shame isn’t working with red state behavior. If a governor does something that is perceived as horrific, like Governor Abbott of Texas did when he claimed eliminating abortion wouldn’t be an issue, especially with women who were raped because Texas would somehow magically eliminate all rape, well, the first part of shaming was utilized when pointing out that Texas doesn’t even process a fraction of the rape kits it gathers. But because shaming doesn’t work any more as a change agent, the attempt is to use that same shaming process to build about an eventual removal from office (as they’re arguing that it may assist Beta O’Rourke in his future campaign to become the next governor).

So, what solutions do we have that might actually cause progressives to do better in red states? Well, for one, progressives need to actually address issues that can make situations better for all. Every issue has multiple potential responses that could serve to solve those problems in ways that don’t necessarily attack the right as the “cause” of the problem. Like I mentioned with gun violence, attacking gun owners as bad people doesn’t cause people to buy into the argument; it alienates people. Whereas, attacking the element of fear itself, more of a Rooseveltian approach, might actually lead people to think that the need for a gun isn’t as prevalent as it used to be. Sure, there would still be people who would want guns (something that shouldn’t have ever been a problem), but it would no longer be perceived as something necessary just to survive on a day to day basis.

Think about countries like Great Britain. They don’t have the gun violence that we have, even to the point that their police don’t often feel the need to carry guns (unless they perceive a situation that would warrant it). But look at their police procedurals they air on their networks. Quite often, the detective detects, rather than participates in mass shootouts that make Quentin Tarentino blush, something practically every police procedures in the United States does. We feed into the fear here, and thus, make it a part of our culture. There’s certainly something to be said for that.

Part of the problem red state people perceive with progressives is that progressives don’t generally take red state people seriously, but treat them like children who would do so much better if they just swallowed the red pill. That’s NEVER going to convince them. You don’t win anyone over by treating them as if they’re stupid, even if they sometimes act that way. Fox News and OANN didn’t come around because that source of news has always been there; it came about because liberal news treated them like illiterate imbeciles. After a certain amount of time of being told you’re a moron, you’re going to stop listening to that type of news and look for sources that don’t treat you like you’re stupid. When conservatives watch Fox News, they generally don’t feel threatened by the people who tell them the news; unfortunately, the style of news is designed to scare them of the bigger world, but newsflash: The liberal media sources have been doing that all along; the only positive conservative news has for its viewers is that it doesn’t insult them while scaring them.

The days of Walter Cronkite types of news coverage have ended. The news is no longer dispassionate and dry. Instead, it’s filled with tons and tons of news celebrities that have image consultants and follow specific agendas. In 1960, you watched three anchors deliver prepared news reports. In 2020, a dozen or so people sit around a desk and argue their personal opinions, and quite often even someone who tries to use facts gets drowned out by people who laugh and quickly change the subject.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret that progressives don’t really ever reveal to themselves: Elections are cyclical, which means that in one election cycle, they might convince a bunch of people to support their ideas, but in the next election those ideas will be dropped to the junk heap by a very impatient public. Just getting people to even participate in the electoral process is a chore, which is why whenever I hear poll numbers, I laugh because I realize that when someone on the street says he or she is definitely voting for one candidate or party but then when it comes to the election, he or she is too busy updating his or her Instagram page to worry about frivolous things like elections.

People are generally fickle, and they rarely vote for their best interests, even if they vote at all.

The Rise and Fall of Mega Music Bands

Memoirs, Music, Uncategorized, , , , ,

Years back, I was the security investigator for a major hotel chain, and I had been assigned to one of their large properties in San Francisco. As a somewhat superfluous member of that institution’s security department, it was never really understood where I stood in the chain of command, but it was always assumed that I was probably somewhere near the top, but never high enough to be one to make actual decisions. For a young man fresh out of the military, it was kind of comfortable because being in such a position meant access to whatever was going on without much of the responsibility for what was happening. If I had to sum it up, I was an executive at just looking good and being present for anything important happening.

Well, one of those things that happened was a major convention for a national music organization that sponsored a major headliner show featuring Huey Lewis & the News with an opening act by a young group Wilson Philips.

Now, at this time, Huey Lewis & the News was probably one of the biggest bands in America. And Wilson Philips, which acted as their starter band, was gaining a lot of traction with three hit songs that had been released earlier that year. So, it was expected that a lot of people were going to show up for this shindig to see the hottest show in town.

As this “important” security person, I was literally right there in the wings of the stage as the bands went on to perform. Around me were all sorts of music insiders who had serious clout with various record companies. And as I was dressed in a suit rather than casual wear, it actually appeared I was more connected to this industry than I was. In reality, I was the glorified security, but because my position was mostly a specialty of remaining undercover, people just assumed I was part of their crowd.

So, why am I sharing this? Well, one of the perks of this kind of position and such placement is that you begin to discover that musicians quite often are quite bored backstage and are constantly inundated with attempts by industry people to get their attention. My focus is always on just watching the crowd, so I kind of stood out because I was one of the few people there who didn’t appear all that interested in trying to gain the attention of the people who perform on stage. As a result, these stars had a tendency to sidle up next to me and start conversations.

And there were many of them, but one of them struck me as more interesting than the others. Chynna Philips, the lead singer for Wilson Philips, was wandering around backstage after their set, while Huey Lewis & the News were performing. She stood next to me and said: “Aren’t they great?”

I nodded and said, bluntly: “They used to be my favorite group.”

She seemed kind of surprised by my statement. I assumed most people probably spoke in awe of that band to her as she was basically delegated to being the starter band for a rock band that was extremely popular at the time. “Used to?” she said.

I nodded. “They’re kind of on their way out. Bands like yours are going to quickly replace them.”

She seemed actually pretty interested and then continued talking to me about Huey Lewis & the News, music in general and how interesting the industry was. Then she mentioned she needed to use the restroom, and did I know where one might be. I think she had realized I was some kind of higher up with the hotel because a couple of the security officers had walked over to me to pass on information to me while Chynna and I were talking. So, I walked her through the bowels of the infrastructure of the hotel to take her to the women’s restroom, choosing that path because I knew it would keep onlookers from intercepting her during the journey (something I’m sure happened quite often to a musician who was dressed in a very Hollywood-ish type ensemble for her performance.

During out trip, she shared a lot of interesting information about herself and the industry, and to be honest, I think she was just happy she was able to talk freely without having to answer questions as a “star”, which probably was the only kind of conversation she had been entertaining since gaining mass celebrity as a musician in a very popular band.

Anyway, this story isn’t really about that encounter, but to point out that she introduced a really interesting subject to me, something I hadn’t given much thought to before, and that’s that bands have an interesting life cycle that almost always seem to lead to inevitable conclusions. Even the band Wilson Philips made that journey, gaining mega fame almost overnight and then disappearing in a wisp of smoke so soon after appearing on the horizon.

What I hadn’t mentioned is that right before my conversation with Chynna Philips, one of the band members of Huey Lewis & the News was fuming backstage before they went on. This was while Wilson Philips was playing their set. But as I watched him, I had no idea what was bothering him, although he wasn’t focused on the music playing; something else seemed to have triggered him. And then they went on and did their full set, putting on what I honestly thought was one of their best performances to date. However, when they left the stage and walked by those of us on stage, I remember one of the stagehands saying “Good show!” to them as they passed him, and that musician gave him the dirtiest look I’ve ever seen from one man to another. I doubted the two of them even knew each other (that look he gave was more a “how dare you!” than a “Not this again!”). It was right about that time that I determined this band was about to end, and I didn’t know anything personal about any of their dynamics.

However, a short time later, the band fizzled and died.

This got me to thinking that most bands tend to go through this cycle of discovery, mega stardom and then collapse soon after. It’s almost as if they are only designed to last a certain amount of time before they implode and dissolve.

So, I thought I would focus on the different reasons why bands collapse after they reach their apex of success. So, generally, what are these reasons?

  1. Break-up: The quintessential example of this is probably the Beatles, a band that broke into the stratosphere and then imploded one day after recording “Let It Be”. It’s that one band that so many wished would have gotten back together again, but which turned out to be sustainable with each member alone until, unfortunately, several of their members lost their lives. As of now, two members are still active in their own careers, but the two we lost were definitely legends all on their own. Other groups that have gone this direction (with pushes and shoves to regroup and try again), include: the Eagles, the Everly Brothers, and Fleetwood Mac (although many others probably fit this category).
  2. Departure of a Main Influencer: This happens when one or a few members of a band decide to go their own way, and generally don’t come back. Examples of this include Van Halen when they lost David Lee Roth and Journey when they lost Steve Perry. The bands continue to try to recapture their momentum going forward, but in many cases they are never perceived to be the same powerhouse band they were back when they were previously together. This was somewhat the storyline of “This is Spinal Tap,” even though the band was mostly fictitious (but possibly better than some bands that actually took themselves seriously).
  3. Bands That Take a Bad Turn: This is really the story I probably started telling when I first started this article, as this was, in my opinion, the direction that Huey Lewis & the News took. Back in their prime, HL & the News probably could do no wrong, and it was a band that was at the forefront of setting trends during this period. And then, out of nowhere, they sort of died off. Strangely enough, I kind of predicted this was going to happen the first time I heard their last big hit, Hip to Be Square, in which it really felt like the band was trying to carry-over its coolness factor by purporting to be so cool that it could do so while being a total square. It sort of set them off on a trajectory of obsolescence.
  4. The Trend is Over: As much as I liked Wilson Philips, this was the direction they took when they released their second and third album. People were thrilled with their first album, but the follow-up albums felt a lot like they weren’t breaking any new ground. And they had received so much play time with the first album that people generally didn’t perceive any reason to want to continue buying much of the same. This is why a lot of groups really need to go big with their second and third albums, because the public is extremely fickle when it comes to music. If the audience doesn’t feel like the band is growing, quite often they will turn off the band going forward. A good example of bands and entertainers that have defeated this problem are Taylor Swift, Kiss, Madonna and AC/DC. While I definitely wouldn’t lump their music in the same category, their sustainability is about as legendary as the Rolling Stones.
  5. A Primary Member Dies: This is quite similar to one of the main influencers leaving, except that there’s not going to ever be a reunited tour somewhere off in the future. Lynyrd Skynyrd, besides being one of the hardest bands to spell correctly, was already established as a powerhouse in the music scene when its lead Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and back-up singer Cassie Gaines died in a plane crash in South Carolina; while the band has tried to recover with new players over the years, it has never reached the apex it achieved during those earlier years. Other bands that lose one influential member to death quite often lead to their demise as well.
  6. Unpopular Music Direction: From time to time, a band will have had a career of solid music and then take a completely different turn in its music, which immediately causes its audience to seek other entertainers instead. While this is a more subjective category, such bands can be included with this designation as Jefferson Airplane, Chromatics, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. What makes this category controversial and debatable is that quite often musicians that go this direction can make massive strides moving forward, but just in a completely different venue.

If anything can be said about the whole phenomenon of music sustainability, it’s that the artists rarely know what’s about to happen to their longevity before it happens. But that one evening that Huey Lewis & the News performed, it was obvious that that musician started to realize things were starting to unravel for his group. Either that, or he was just generally a sour person.

But one thing that was for sure was that Huey Lewis & the News stopped being the powerhouse it once was and no attempts to recover that lost popularity was ever going to succeed. So they may have been hip to be square, but unpopular was never going to be cool.