The burden of innocence

The Jonathan Chait piece that I commented on Tuesday drew a fierce reaction from liberals who thought he went too easy on conservatives and too readily gave them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to race. Chait clarified his arguments in a follow-up, explaining that what his piece searched for was essentially a fair standard to govern our racial discourse in politics. But it is disagreement about exactly what this standard should be – and, implicitly, what race discrimination actually means – that drives both this debate and parallel arguments in our civil rights legal regime.

Chait argues for a “presumption of innocence” in our racial discourse – that conservatives should be innocent of discriminatory intent until affirmatively proven guilty before liberals tar them with the tag of discrimination. “There’s no contradiction between grasping the deep and continuing power of white supremacy in American politics and culture while still affording one’s opponents a basic presumption of fairness,” Chait argues. “One might even call this an important part of the definition of liberalism.”

Many of the critics of Chait’s original piece thought this standard overly lenient. Ed Kilgore argues that racism is an objective phenomenon to which individual intent is largely irrelevant. “[D]escribing a policy, a message, or even an item of political philosophy as objectively ‘racist’ is no less legitimate than any other term of opprobrium,” he asserts.

Jamelle Bouie likewise says that we should look at the adverse impact of policy choices to assess the state of our racial politics. “Of course, it’s not accusing conservatives of ‘racism’ to note that particular policies—say, tax cuts to defund the social safety net, or blocking the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act—have a disparate impact,” he argues. “That’s just reality.”

To Chait, it’s unfair to lob accusations of discrimination absent an egregious revealing statement or some other smoking gun. To his detractors, however, actions and policies speak louder than words and intent.

This same debate rages in the legal regimes against discrimination. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act each allow victims to prove discrimination through a showing of disparate impact without affirmative discriminatory intent. That is, civil rights plaintiffs can show that an employer’s policies systematically disadvantage employees or applicants from a minority group. This creates a presumption of discrimination, which the employer-defendant has the burden of disproving.

Which is to say, Chait’s presumption of innocence is toast. The theory behind this is that plaintiffs should not be helpless against discriminators who are simply wise enough to keep their animus private. Open and blatant discrimination is now both rare and roundly condemned, but maybe that has simply driven racism underground and made discriminatory intent harder to prove.

Both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act adopted disparate impact standards legislatively to make it easier for plaintiffs to prove discrimination. The Supreme Court, however, has long been uncomfortable with these rules because they allow for a finding of discrimination without a finding of bad individual intent. For instance, the Court has said that the Fourteenth Amendment requires something more than just discriminatory effect to make out an equal protection violation – additional evidence such as a damning statement is necessary.

That is why in Texas, the government has sought and obtained access to state legislators’ emails to try to find whether discrimination was behind Texas’s strict voter ID law. The government alleges that the voter ID law violates both equal protection and the Voting Rights Act. It knows that the case becomes immeasurably stronger under either theory if it can find a reckless email exposing malicious intent motivating the enactment of voter ID.

So there is fundamental disagreement in these debates. Some believe that discrimination can only be shown through some statement that reveals personal prejudice. But others think that discrimination is a more objective truth that can be shown through outcomes rather than beliefs. Given the tension between Congress and the Supreme Court on this question, there is some worry that the Roberts Court may soon go after the disparate impact provisions of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

How do we import one of these dueling standards governing racial treatment into our politics? Some may think that the legacy of conservatism as a vehicle for discriminatory policies should put conservatives on the defensive – that so long as they support policies that negatively impact minority groups, they bear the burden of disproving discrimination. Others believe that our political discourse is best served by a more neutral standard that presumes good faith unless proven otherwise. Unlike employers and employees, liberals and conservatives stand on equal ground and can debate on equal terms – no one needs a leg up or deserves a handicap.

Discrimination is a weighty charge. While the effort to redefine it as a neutral and objective reality and a judgment on policy outcomes is understandable, this is contrary to our cultural understanding of the charge. Even where the law permits finding discrimination on the basis of adverse impact, such a finding is rare and the result of an overwhelming impact suggesting that discriminatory intent was at play.

Discrimination is an indictment on the conscience – a judgment that one possesses bad individual beliefs. It claims more than just that your policies had bad outcomes – it says you meant for those bad outcomes to happen. Some evidence revealing the inner-workings of that conscience, then, should be essential to such a charge.

But politics is more complicated than law. When determining whether someone discriminated or was discriminated against, law only looks backwards in time. Politics, however, looks in all directions. The distributive impact of policy choices reveals who a political party is looking out for today and who it hopes to include under its tent tomorrow. With our politics becoming more racially polarized, it will become harder to disentangle discrimination from constituency protection. Such polarization will only fuel our disunity and heighten mutual suspicions of tactical racial appeals. This, of course, is an awful fate for our democracy.

It will be hard to cabin politics to a neat and neutral standard. While a presumption of innocence may be a laudable goal, our foreseeable destiny may instead be a presumption of distrust.

The Civil Rights Act at 50: “a moral issue”

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law fifty years ago. Upon introducing the bill into Congress in June of 1963, President Kennedy delivered a striking address calling on Congress to alleviate our “moral crisis” of race discrimination:

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. [. ] The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

Kennedy framed the debate around the Civil Rights Act in distinctly moral terms. He invoked equality, freedom, and civic obligation to fellow man, calling on Congress and the American people to act against social, educational, and electoral injustice. Significantly, he appealed to conscience, asking us if whites would be willing to trade races to stand in the place of black Americans. This foreshadowed the Rawlsian idea of a veil of ignorance. This idea – a core liberal conception of justice – tells us that we should create the kind of society and policies that we’d want if we didn’t know what our social status would be – that is, the kind of society we’d want were we born into a disadvantaged minority group. This is essentially a thought experiment of a more famous ethical maxim: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” (Hence Kennedy’s appeal to the Scriptures.) Theoretically, such a conception of justice should lead to a more equitable and reciprocally decent society.

These are powerful ideas. Yet too often, contemporary liberals show discomfort making the case for their vision in explicitly moral terms. In our recent politics, conservatives claim the mantle of the “values party” on issues from abortion to marriage to even the federal debt, unflinchingly making their policy pitches through moral terms. Liberals instinctively debate with one hand behind their backs, ceding moral territory to make dry technocratic justifications for their policy proposals.

Consider our extended national debate over health care reform from 2009 to 2010. Reflecting on the substance of the debate, we heard far too much from the reform’s advocates about “bending the cost curve” of health care and making insurance more affordable for the middle-class. These are certainly worthy goals, but hardly the stuff of moral inspiration. While conservatives raged against the law as an assault on freedom, liberals largely failed to present the ways that reform makes us freer and more just, instead relying on comfortably sterile economic arguments – arguments that should be ancillary to the goal of universal health coverage. It’s as if Kennedy had advocated for the Civil Rights Act based on the economic gains from integrating restaurants and public accommodations.

In part, I think liberals neglected to make a strong moral argument on the behalf of health care reform because they took it for granted that the moral imperative was well understood. In President Obama’s 2009 address to Congress, he said: “Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy.” Because liberals assumed that the moral crisis was well known, it became an afterthought to their arguments when it needed to be front and center.

Toward the end of his speech, Obama reflected on the memory of the late Senator Ted Kennedy who – echoing the words of his brother – reminded us that health care presented “a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” To Obama, Kennedy’s “large-heartedness – that concern and regard for the plight of others – is not a partisan feeling. [. . .] Our ability to stand in other people’s shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand.”

This appeal to community, social solidarity, and Golden Rule empathy lie at the heart of the liberal vision of society. They also happen to be the strongest arguments in favor of it. Writers like George Packer and public philosopher Michael Sandel have long urged liberals to abandon bloodless technocratic arguments in favor of appeals grounded in moral principles. For it is these types of arguments that can move the country to do big things. They are arguments that have the force to build momentum toward liberal projects like immigration reform, LGBT rights, gun control, and protection against climate change. For the liberal vision is fundamentally one of community, and that requires asking us to stand in one another’s shoes; to rest in one another’s skin.

Birth pangs

Fresh off his debate on race and poverty with Ta-Nehisi Coates (which I wrote about here), Jonathan Chait published a piece that attempts to reconcile our collective racial anxiety during the Obama presidency. To Chait, this anxiety has been both subterranean and omnipresent, unleashing crisscrossing resentments from all sides. Chait ultimately attributes this “racial obsession” to our unique historical moment, tipping from one demographic norm to a new and different one. “We are living through the angry pangs of a new nation not yet fully born,” he contends.

It’s a complex terrain, one laden with mutual senses of suspicion and aggrievement. Liberals stand guard against efforts to delegitimize our first black president. They see racial distrust (or worse) as central to the ferocity of opposition against President Obama and his policies. Conservatives lash out against liberals too eager to characterize principled opposition as racism. They feel stifled by dishonest efforts to marginalize conservative ideas and to silence dissent.

Wary of dog whistle tactics to undermine Obama, liberals have not hesitated to point out suspected conservative racial appeals. While some liberal objections have been unavoidable (think of the McCain-Palin campaign’s efforts to paint Obama as the exotic “other,” “paling around with terrorists”), liberals have also grasped for more nuanced cries of race. Chait himself is not immune. In 2012, he claimed to identify the real reason that Romney ads blasting Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comments were effective:

“The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.”

To some, this kind of reasoning back to find racial motive is so attenuated and abstract as to suggest cynical bad faith on the part of accusers like Chait. But to others, the Obama years (and the corresponding digital media environment) have been valuable moments to smoke out discreet racial appeals in our politics that had gone undetected and unchallenged for too long. As Chait says, “[o]ne of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life.” Many liberals now want to chase discrimination from its private spaces too – to attack the ways that submerged animus and subconscious bias can shape our public discourse.

Consider a parallel movement happening on college campuses: the exposure of so-called “microaggressions.” This movement wants to educate victims and perpetrators alike about the unintentional slights and invalidations that minorities face in daily interactions. The theory’s author, Columbia University psychologist Derald Wing Sue, describes racial microaggressions as “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent to them.”

This all-encompassing definition includes everything from outright slurs (i.e. implying a minority got accepted into college because of affirmative action), to ill-conceived qualified compliments (“You’re pretty for a dark-skinned girl,” or our own Vice President’s characterization of candidate Obama as “articulate” and “clean”), to unintended reminders of foreignness through oblivious ethnic inquiries (“Where in Asia are you from?”).

To its advocates, the microaggression movement is a valuable tool to force white people to confront the degrading effects of unconsidered assumptions and linguistic goofs that they’d otherwise find de minimis.

To critics, however, the theory aims to unfairly malign well-intentioned whites. Writing for the conservative National Review, Alec Torres warns that, “without a ‘multicultural’ education for the young and a thorough reeducation for the rest, all in the ‘empowered’ class may be interminably consigned to unknowingly making racist remarks or unintentionally engaging in sexist and homophobic behaviors. For all they know, they already are.” Another skeptic argued that the idea of microaggressions “exaggerate[s] the meaning of such encounters in the interest of perpetually seeing oneself as a victim.”

As in our modern politics, an attempt to redefine the sphere of what constitutes discrimination and to expose covert bias is met with objections against unfair overreach. Such is our racial politics in 2014.

As a liberal, I have no doubt much of the conservative opposition to Obama comes from honest policy disputes, yet I also suspect that race contributes to the intensity of the right’s instantaneous hostility to Obama’s presidency. The effort to delegitimize a cautious center-left pragmatist who was twice elected by majority vote has been relentless: he’s a socialist tyrant, he’s a Kenyan, he’s a terrorist. There can be little doubt that race fuels these delusions.

I understand the conservative frustration with liberals seeing racism lurking around every corner. But these suspicions are not exactly unwarranted. Throughout still recent history, conservatives have been all too willing to dip into murky waters; all too comfortable exploiting racial divisions for electoral gain.

As Chait writes, race and politics are bound up by our growing polarization. For instance, have Red States declined to expand Medicaid because safety net programs are anathema to conservatism, or because the benefits would flow disproportionately to Other People? Is there any difference between the two? We know that racial pluralism has hampered the American welfare state project – is this project anathema to conservatism because it benefits Other People? And what of the fact that the Other People also vote for the Other Party?

In the American story, race is inseparable from how we construct our political coalitions. Our appeals, our language, and our policy choices matter – for who we appeal to and who we appeal against, for who our policy proposals benefit and who they disinherit.

So perhaps this is all a political Rorschach test. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama compared himself to a blank screen for self-projection. Maybe our complicated racial discourse under his presidency is such a blank screen. If so, the debate tells us more about ourselves, our political futures, and our racial anxieties than anything else. Conservatives, seeing the power of their narrow coalition already jeopardized by demographic shifts, fear deliberate and hastened marginalization from public debate by undue charges of racism. Liberals, observing an ascendant class of young people and minorities asserting their claim to power, seek to blunt any attempt – subtle or blatant, hidden or public – to delegitimize this group’s political rise. Birth pangs of a new nation, indeed.

Whose corruption is it anyway?

Last week, the Supreme Court struck down federal limits on aggregate campaign contributions by large donors. The case, McCutcheon v. FEC, concerned a Republican contributor who wanted to make donations of $1,776 to as many congressional candidates as possible. The aggregate limit law, however, prevented him from donating to more than sixteen candidates. He sued, claiming that this law violated his right to unencumbered political speech. While the outcome of the case was never in doubt after the Court dismantled other campaign finance regulations four years ago in Citizens United, McCutcheon nonetheless raised important questions about what kind of corruption we want to defend our democracy against.

The Supreme Court has recognized that donating to candidates is protected political speech under the First Amendment. But this does not create an absolute bar on government regulation over campaign finance. The government can override the individual’s liberty interest in free political speech in order to regulate against potential corruption.

The key question in McCutcheon, then, was what constitutes corruption. Conservatives and liberals have different understandings of what corruption means, and are specifically concerned with fundamentally different conceptions of what is being corrupted.

To conservatives, corruption means moral and ethical corruption of the individual officeholder. They believe that government intervention is justified to prevent bad acts by officeholders that violate a representative duty to their constituents. This focus on the individual’s ethical integrity narrows corruption to conscious decisions to accept goods in exchange for specific political or policy favors – a quid pro quo.

Liberals hold a broader view of corruption. While they too abhor individual corruption, liberals see equally grave harm in systemic corruption of our democratic process. They worry about distorted constituent voice and unequal representation in our political process, believing that government should be able to regulate against such constitutional harm. In McCutcheon, liberals feared that lifting the aggregate contribution limits would lead to party-wide dependence on a narrow band of wealthy donors, skewing our politics.

According to law professor Lawrence Lessig, the Constitution’s Framers largely agreed with the liberal view. Lessig researched the Framers’ written and oral statements about corruption, and determined that they held a concern about corruption that reached beyond a blatant quid pro quo. Instead, the Framers worried about an “improper dependence” on political benefactors. The Framers, then, supported a broader view of what kinds of corruption our Constitution should guard against.

The Supreme Court itself has also previously adopted the liberal view of corruption in judicial elections. Election law professor Rick Hasen explains that, in the 2009 case Caperton v. Massey, the Court agreed that corruption (or the appearance thereof) can sweep beyond an explicit quid pro quo. In that case, a wealthy CEO bankrolled the campaign of a candidate for a judgeship in West Virginia. After being elected, the judge refused to recuse himself when his CEO benefactor appeared before his court with a $50 million lawsuit. The judge then ruled in favor of the CEO. The Supreme Court determined that the CEO’s “pivotal role” in electing the judge meant that the judge should have recused himself – even though “no[] . . . bribe or criminal influence” took place.

I myself find the liberal view of corruption convincing. Sure, unethical corruption of an individual officeholder is bad, but we really only give that ethical wrong constitutional weight because of the distorting effect it has on our democracy as a whole – it leaves a constituency underrepresented and our system of government delegitimized. If it’s the political system that we care about, then I don’t see why the government couldn’t be similarly concerned about the harm flowing from a freewheeling campaign finance regime that leads our political process to over-represent the wealthy and under-represent the many to degrees even greater than ours already does today.

None of this reasoning stopped the Supreme Court from choosing, for reasons largely unstated, the conservative view of corruption. This definition is too narrow to sustain any campaign finance regime that goes beyond regulating against a blatant bribe.

With this regulation brought down, what does McCutcheon portend for other campaign finance rules, such as base campaign contribution limits? Federal campaign finance law limits individuals to donating $2,600 to any one candidate per election cycle. McCutcheon in part suggests that this cap is a linchpin against corruption – that the Court could confidently remove the aggregate limits without unleashing a wave of corruption because the individual contribution limits prevent a single donor from gaining excess influence over a politician.

However, McCutcheon refers to the individual limits as “prophylaxis” – excess protection against the government’s interest in guarding against quid pro quo corruption. In the criminal procedure context, we know that when the Supreme Court labels a rule prophylactic, it means that the rule is not part and parcel of our constitutional protection – the Supreme Court doesn’t see it as being necessary or essential to upholding the Constitution. For example, the Supreme Court had said that the Miranda warnings were not constitutionally required, but were prophylactic protection for the constitutional right for a criminal defendant to avoid self-incrimination. Likewise, the individual cap on political contributions is prophylactic protection for prohibited quid pro quo corruption. There may, then, be ample space yet for the Supreme Court to attack these contribution limits.

But for now, McCutcheon’s direct effect is to expand the project started in Citizen’s United: unlimited spending by the wealthy. Within hours of the decision, political leaders were redialing rainmakers who had maxed out their aggregate contributions. The campaign finance arms race spirals evermore.

Liberal education reform after Obama

Throughout the Obama administration, the president and his supporters have had to reconcile his post-partisan campaign vision with the political trench warfare reality of the last six years. Republicans determined early on that their electoral incentives pointed rightward and against any collaboration with the president. After getting repeatedly spurned by Republicans refusing to meet halfway on policy, Democrats eventually wrote off any hope of bipartisan cooperation.

Yet many may not realize that there has been one significant policy area where the parties’ respective centers have coalesced: education. The Obama administration has loosened and modified parts of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education reform law, such as by granting states waivers in exchange for individualized accountability standards. But the administration has continued the same policy commitments embedded in No Child Left Behind, including greater school choice, greater uniformity (through the Common Core standards), and data-driven accountability.

But eight years in the presidency has masked the Democratic schism on education. The party hosts two vastly different flanks of education policy. It has a center-left flank that has come to embrace the bipartisan education reform movement, including figures like President Obama, Andrew Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, and Corey Booker (who even supports vouchers to pay for low-income children to attend private schools). At the same time, there’s a populist wing that resists some of the key tenets of education reform, featuring the likes of Mayor De Blasio, teachers’ unions, and other progressive education reform skeptics.

The pro-education reform wing has been subsumed into the national Democratic platform, but will this outlive the Obama administration? Obama may have been a unique Democratic candidate. His meteoric ascent meant that he was less encumbered with commitments to traditional interest groups like teacher’s unions than other national Democrats have been. Plus, the recent rise of Democratic figures like De Blasio and Elizabeth Warren has been heralded as a progressive shift in Democratic politics.

Would this endanger the Democratic embrace of education reform? Has Obama been an aberration? It is worth looking to De Blasio’s recent charter school battles in New York and to the anti-charter case made by education reform skeptics like Diane Ravitch to see what the future landscape of liberal education policy might look like.

In New York, Mayor De Blasio just emerged from a damaging face-off with New York City’s charter school sector (really just a face-off with Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy schools). No one had to wait for the dust to settle to see the verdict: the mayor got trounced. Even before the state intervened and overruled De Blasio, he was already backpedaling from his aggressive stance on cutting back on charters. After (partially) following through on campaign rhetoric –that there was “no way in hell” Moskowitz’s schools should operate rent-free – by denying space for three new Success Academy schools, De Blasio soon had to soften his approach. Besieged by media and advocacy ads, the mayor backed down and promised that he’d find space for the rejected schools.

Ultimately, state lawmakers interceded, prohibiting the city from charging public charter schools rent, along with boosting per pupil charter school funding from the state. In exchange, De Blasio got funding toward his universal pre-kindergarten plan, but his anti-charter crusade appeared largely dead.

What does this episode tell us about the politics of education reform? Certainly, we saw that charter schools can be a powerful political force of their own. They have a concentrated and energized natural constituency of students, families, and educators, while also enjoying lavish support from major financial interests. The advertising barrage launched against De Blasio showed that charters have become a force to be reckoned with.

Perhaps the De Blasio-Moskowitz battle doesn’t tell us much outside of New York’s political environment. After all, a pro-charter governor trumps a charter-resistant mayor. But it certainly seems that if a progressive like De Blasio had to agree to accommodate charters, then any national Democrat likely would too.

Setting aside power politics, however, the charter school resistance is also just plain losing the debate. Bill Moyers interviewed Diane Ravitch last week. Ravitch is a preeminent education historian and one of the most visible charter school opponents. While she received zero push back from Moyers, her interview was a useful summation of many of the flaws of her new book (Reign of Error) and the weak rhetorical deceits that charter school opponents often employ.

Charter opponents often imply or outright assert that charter schools are not public schools. For instance, Ravitch warned that cities across the country are in danger of having no public schools in the near future – “where public schools become, if they still exist, they will be a dumping ground for the kids that the charter schools don’t want.” To Ravitch and others, charter schools epitomize a creeping privatization of public education.

This, however, is demonstrably false. Charter schools are unquestionably public schools. They accept all students who apply (resorting to a lottery or waiting list after they hit capacity) and do not charge tuition. They are authorized under state law, whereby a governmental authority grants a charter to an organization to operate a public school. Ravitch harps on the small number of charter schools that are run by for-profit organizations, telling Moyers that “[t]he worst thing about the charters is the profit motive.” But these account for only about 12% of all charter schools nationwide. Most charters are instead run by non-profit groups of education reformers and teachers.

Ravitch’s broader objection is the claim that wealthy financiers are running the charter school movement. True, many highly regarded charter schools enjoy financial support from hedge funds and financial institutions. But there is little evidence to suggest that this is part of a deeper scheme to privatize and monetize public education, as Ravitch does. Instead, these financiers seem to be drawn to charter schools for the same reasons the Gates and Broad foundations have been. Charter schools retain the flexible dynamic environment that financiers like, offering space for innovation and experimentation. Financiers see charter schools as a place where they can have a meaningful philanthropic impact for their money. To Ravitch, Wall Street investment in charter schools seeks financial returns through some (ill-defined) profitmaking scheme. However, the more likely explanation is that these financiers are instead seeking a knowable and reliable positive social return on their investments, rather than a financial one.

Ravitch also makes a second – and more fundamental – critique of charter schools and education reform generally: that it’s completely unnecessary because our schools are doing just fine. “American public education is not failing,” Ravitch says. “It’s not declining. It’s not obsolete.”

How does Ravitch deny the existence of any pressing public education crisis? She attributes the persistent achievement gap separating middle-class and white kids from low-income and minority kids to crushing poverty that schools can do little to overcome. This view – that student demography foretells their destiny – draws on research by James Coleman and other academics, arguing that student achievement is nearly entirely preordained by socioeconomic status. Education reform opponents argue that teachers and schools should not be held accountable for societal inequality, troubled households, deteriorating schools, and relentless poverty.

There is substantial truth in these points. Lowering our achievement gap would be immensely easier if we provided economic security and physical safety for all American children. But the demographic fatalism of Ravitch and others takes a dim view of the potential impact that a great school can have. Education reformers reject the idea that demography is destiny, laying their hopes on the crucial caveat to this otherwise dismal research: that socioeconomic disadvantage can be overcome by heroic teaching.

If Ravitch’s education crisis denialism amounts to an argument that our achievement gap is nothing more than the natural reflection of poverty, so there’s no need to reform our education system – well, then such grim resignation is a losing argument. True, charter schools have room to improve. For instance, more charters should backfill vacated seats by admitting students from their waiting lists. Charters point to their waitlists to demonstrate the high demand for school choice, but many refuse to admit students from these lists mid-year for fear of academic disruption. More backfilling, however, would blunt the accusation that charters don’t play by the same rules as traditional public schools do and weaken the incentive to push out high needs or problematic students to game test scores.

On average, charter schools seem to achieve at similar levels as public schools.  But certain charter schools have repeatedly proven able to succeed with populations that have long been failed by our public school system. This success undermines the skeptics’ demographic resignation while building a larger network of believers. As Mayor De Blasio found out, this network has serious heft to it. So when we consider the prospects for liberal education reform after Obama, the De Blasio stand-off increasingly looks like something else entirely: the last gasp of resistance from the populist left to the idea that school choice should play a meaningful role in our education and anti-poverty efforts.

Cultural paternalism and liberal thought

Since the release of Moynihan Report in 1965, policymakers have clashed over what role – if any – culture plays in perpetuating urban poverty. Authored by sociologist and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the Johnson administration Department of Labor, the report famously attributed urban poverty to a “tangle of pathology” afflicting low-income African-Americans. Moynihan fixated on the role of cultural institutions in perpetuating black poverty – such as supposedly weakened family structures to community dysfunction – when coupled with economic disadvantages like dreary job prospects.

In a sense, Moynihan’s report had something for everyone. Liberals latched on to his demand for action against concentrated unemployment and economic misery, while conservatives embraced his critique of urban cultural blight. It is the latter point that has proved the most divisive, pitting liberals against conservatives – and at times, liberals against liberals – over the idea of a malignant “culture of poverty.”

Over the past two weeks, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine and Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic have reignited this debate. The volley between Coates and Chait sparked after Paul Ryan’s comments attributing urban poverty to cultural deficiencies and poor work ethic among “inner city men.” Coates argued that Ryan’s misguided cultural diagnosis was not significantly different from targeted critiques that liberals like President Obama have also made. Chait responded, arguing that there was meaningful space separating the arguments made by Obama and Ryan, but maintaining that culture cannot be fully dismissed as a subsidiary factor in perpetuating poverty.

Chait further argued that successful anti-poverty efforts embraced by liberals concede that culture plays a role in poverty, pointing to the methods at high-profile charter school chains. “People are the products of their environment. Environments are amenable to public policy. Some of the most successful anti-poverty initiatives, like the Harlem Children’s Zone or the KIPP schools, are designed around the premise that children raised in concentrated poverty need to be taught middle class norms.” These schools are hallmarks of contemporary education reform and anti-poverty efforts. Does this mean that liberals have acquiesced to the idea that inferior culture keeps the poor down?

A closer look at how these schools operate is telling. After Chait’s column, Education Next interjected to direct readers to a 2008 article excerpting David Whitman’s book Sweating the Small Stuff. There, Whitman profiles six high-achieving schools that utilize the “no excuses” education reform model, including schools from the KIPP and Achievement First charter school chains. Whitman argues that these schools are fundamentally paternalistic in that each is a “highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values.” This translates to authoritative discipline coupled with firm expectations of behavioral conduct in and outside the classroom.

Should liberals recoil from cultural paternalism imposed by highly educated white education reformers on low-income minority children? Not at all, according to Whitman. Today’s paternalism, he says, is a “new paternalism” – caring, benevolent, distinctly maternalistic – with its eye on getting students to succeed in high school, college, and beyond. He contrasts this with “old paternalism” practiced in American Indian boarding schools in the late 19th century, where white educators undertook “civilizing” American Indian children. This was a malevolent project of cultural extinguishment, where children’s hair was cut and traditional clothing banished.

The new paternalism exercised in today’s charter schools, Whitman argues, is necessary for these schools to make effective strides against the achievement gap. These schools see that cultivating a safe and structured environment is a threshold issue for their students’ academic success, buying into the “broken windows” theory of strict enforcement for seemingly minor infractions. Yet their instruction on middle-class values is fundamentally about empowerment – with arming their students with the norms and values necessary to break themselves out of the cycle of poverty and to better navigate the channels of social and economic power.

Elsewhere, the new paternalism explicitly becomes parental paternalism. In Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, low-income expecting parents can enroll in Baby College, where instructors teach them middle-class childrearing techniques. Canada’s broader project has been nationally embraced, coming to prominence in Waiting for Superman and serving as the model for President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative.

Are new paternalist charter schools the convergence of liberal and conservative anti-poverty commitments? Whitman suggests exactly that. “While liberals applaud these schools for placing poor kids on the path toward college (and out of poverty),” he writes, “conservatives cheer them for teaching the work ethic and traditional virtues.”

These dueling goals, however, draw out the significant distinction between how liberals and conservatives approach culture and poverty. The modern liberal ideological commitment is to reduce poverty by giving the poor access to middle-class resources. One of these resources is knowledge of middle-class cultural norms. Cross-distribution of norms and values has long underlay liberal support for racial integration of schools, but deep residential segregation and political resistance means that many students will be educated in racially and socioeconomically homogenous environments. These schools must rely on instruction to simulate the integrative effect on norms and values. As Matt Yglesias put it: “[K]ids seem to benefit from picking up certain bourgeois modes of behavior. Bourgeois kids generally pick them up from their parents. Poor kids can pick them up from their peers, but only if they go to a school with a relatively low concentration of poverty. Poor kids in a high-poverty school can also receive explicit instruction in bourgeois conduct.”

Conservatives, on the other hand, continue to lay the primary blame for poverty on cultural degradation. The conservative commitment is to replace the culture in low-income communities with middle-class values. This posture abandons moral neutrality, veering toward outright condemnation. This becomes clear when looking back at Paul Ryan’s comments that sparked this debate: “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

Liberals refute this analysis as confusing cause with effect. Where conservatives see weakened culture as propagating poverty, liberals see black male detachment from the workforce and lack of faith in our economic system as a result of systemic disinvestment in urban communities.

Paternalism is an uncomfortable charge in American politics. White-on-black and wealthy-on-poor paternalism causes particularly acute discomfort, given our history of ugly nativist “civilizing” endeavors. But not all paternalism is equal – it’s the difference between social empowerment and cultural displacement.

The liberal brand of paternalism has been about empowering low-income children and families with middle-class tools, not displacing preexisting cultural norms. For liberals, culture is one prong in an arsenal of anti-poverty fixes, wielding it as a single means of easing access for the poor into the middle class. Conservative paternalism, however, focuses on cultural rescue – dispatching middle-class values to lift low-income Americans out of cultural rot. Cultural advancement is the only solution conservatives offer for combating poverty because they reject the efficacy of targeted public efforts and yearn to slash key safety net programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

After Chait asserted that no-excuses charter schools “are designed around the premise that children raised in concentrated poverty need to be taught middle class norms,” Coates pushed back: “No,” he said, “they need to be taught that all norms are not transferable into all worlds. In my case, physical assertiveness might save you on the street but not beyond it.”

But what the new paternalism of these schools seeks to do is give their students norm fluency to transfer into other worlds – namely, white middle-class worlds. They aim to teach social charms and parenting tips, discipline and rhetoric – those skills that our social integration failures have prevented from diffusing naturally – so as to ease their students’ movement from poverty into middle-class institutions like college and business.

So while liberals and conservatives may live in convenient harmony in supporting the new cultural paternalism in these schools, there remains a gulf of difference in their broader analyses of the role culture plays in poverty. Where conservatives condemn a “tailspin of culture,” liberals see an opportunity to supplement government efforts to change economic conditions in low-income communities with a set of norms that might make transition into the middle-class a little bit easier.

Not all paternalism is something that needs to be shunned. Liberals can acknowledge the value of teaching middle-class norms in low-income schools without having to claim that a culture of poverty is a primary force behind urban disadvantage. Indeed, such an effort is entirely consistent with core liberal beliefs: that public institutions can distribute resources to the disadvantaged to strengthen the possibility of social mobility.

Obamacare strikes midnight

Normally, I would find the breathless coverage of Obamacare sign-up numbers superficial and vapid. Over the past few days, it has verged on horse race style coverage that we expect from coverage of political races, chronicling every upward tick in state enrollment numbers and every traffic burst on Healthcare.gov.

But there is something admittedly satisfying about watching the law’s enrollment numbers meet (or maybe exceed) expectations in the closing hours. For a law that has been under siege from its inception, this is a moment of vindication. Obamacare now has a number to put on its constituency – a measure of the social good that it is achieving.  The “silent plurality” that liberals wanted to reach now have their moment of recognition, unassumingly putting the noisy opposition that has relentlessly attacked the law on its heels.

Early estimates report that the law has spread health insurance to over 9.5 million previously uninsured Americans – through health insurance marketplaces, Medicaid expansion, and through children under 26 staying on their parents’ health insurance. This is a tremendous accomplishment, but is little more than a solid start in providing coverage to the estimated 45 million Americans that were uninsured before marketplaces went live.

A big reason for this shortcoming is that nearly half of all states have refused to expand their Medicaid programs. Obamacare asks states to expand their Medicaid programs to cover people earning up to 133% of the poverty live. In 2012, however, the Supreme Court made this expansion wholly optional (with no consequences) for the states. This greatly weakened the law’s ability to penetrate states with the highest rates of uninsured. As Alec MacGillis explains, “[n]o one really wanted to say this during the law’s drafting, but its underlying goal was to get coverage to people in red states where there was no local political will to address the problem.”

The states with the gravest insurance coverage crises tend to be red states with skimpy Medicaid eligibility, but are governed by conservatives with deep political opposition to conforming with Obamacare. The law, then, has been unable to reach the populations that need it most. For example, in Texas, Medicaid eligibility is limited to parents making no more than 19% of the poverty line. That’s a mere $4,531 per year. If Texas agreed to expand Medicaid, over one million people would gain health insurance. But with Texas steadfastly refusing to do so, these people fall into the law’s “coverage gap”: too poor to receive the law’s marketplace subsidies, too “rich” (if we can honestly call making 20% of the poverty line “rich”) to join Medicaid – but mostly too cursed by geography. The people stuck in the coverage gap have therefore received absolutely no benefit from Obamacare.

There is no morally defensible reason to refuse to expand Medicaid. Conservative governors warn of future burdens on state budgets and excessive federal control. Yet the expansion is fully funded by the federal government in its first years, and 90% federally funded from 2020 and beyond.

Perhaps more states will come around to accepting a free offer of expanded health insurance for their poor and near-poor populations. The Obama administration has been amenable to compromise solutions from states like Arkansas that want to use Medicaid funds to enroll low-income people in private insurance plans. But some states like Texas will likely remain intransigent for the foreseeable future, neglecting the interests of the politically marginalized uninsured. National uniformity is sacrificed as a consequence of the cooperative state-federal structure of Medicaid.

Obamacare’s enrollment numbers are a great achievement, but we have more work to do in achieving health care justice for all. Specifically, we need to continue to cultivate an ethic of solidarity around health insurance and to cast into moral isolation those who reject the imperative of providing health insurance to the poor. Obamacare does a great job of starting us down this road, but we still have far to travel to reach the rest of the 45 million.