Class, income and a shift in American politics

Make Me Smart March 11, 2024 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Born ready, Charlton . Born freakin ready. Why is that so funny?

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s what I say all the time. That’s why that’s so funny.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh gosh, we’re mind melding now. Hello everyone, I’m Kai Ryssdal. I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Kai Ryssdal 

I am, in fact, Kai Ryssdal. Today is Monday. It’s the 11^th of March. Yes, that’s what it is. The 11^th of March.

Kimberly Adams 

It is. And today, we’re going to do some news and some smiles, starting with the news. Mr. Real Kai Ryssdal, what caught your attention today?

Kai Ryssdal 

So, I just want to make the, I mean, you know, this and a lot of people who listen to us know this, but you know, on the off chance that people don’t really know it. That whole budget thing that is leading the New York Times today and most of the major news publications, and also NPR newscasts and all that jazz. It’s fantasyland. It’s never going to happen. It’s the president’s spending plan. The president, you know, proposes, Congress disposes, let’s not get all hot and bothered about it. That’s item one. The really substantive part of it is this thing that Nick Timiraos wrote in The Wall Street Journal picked up on, that the White House is kind of expecting higher interest rates this year, which is really interesting. Predicting the three-month bill is going to average 5.1%. This year, which is a touch up, you know, and the government’s doing a lot of borrowing no matter who’s in the White House. So higher interest rates, you know, this is what the market is saying. It’s not necessarily what the Fed is saying, is going to cost the government, which means you and me some money, and that’s worth keeping an eye on.

Kimberly Adams 

So, here’s why I do think these documents matter. Like, yes, they are.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright. Go ahead.

Kimberly Adams 

I feel like this is our State of the Union fight all over again. Or debates. It was debates that we were talking about that I still think have value. This has value as a policy document, especially in an election year because this is basically an agenda for what Biden is saying he would like to do if A.) he gets reelected and B.) more Democrats come into Congress, and we heard some of this in his State of the Union address. He said, you know, if you send people to Congress, who will you know, more Democrats to Congress, here are the things that I will do. And yes, you know, all the things about congressional dysfunction, and Republicans not wanting to let anything through. Fine, whatever. But what he’s laying out is effectively his election policy platform not just for him, but for the Democratic Party more broadly. And so, from that perspective, I think it has some value.

Kai Ryssdal 

I don’t disagree with that. I think that’s fair. I just, I think so, let me back up. Yes. Period. I think sadly the way it gets covered in the media sometimes is, “This is what the president is going to do with this year with the budget.” And the president doesn’t get to decide, you know.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, this is very true. And also, let’s take a moment to note that just this past weekend, we got the first batch of appropriation bills from the last fiscal year. Past. Not even all of them. And this is for the coming fiscal year that’s supposed to start in October. Yes. They started in October. One. Yes. So, even if this was real policy, it is unlikely to be real policy in the upcoming fiscal year. So, there’s that too.

Kai Ryssdal

Exactly. All right, what do you got?

Kimberly Adams

So, I ventured over into your territory. I was over on X today and saw this.

Kai Ryssdal

How that go?

Kimberly Adams

You know, I sort of dip my toe in every so often and then recoil in horror. But I did find this super fascinating thread by columnist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times John Burn-Murdoch. And he basically threaded a column that he has in the Financial Times about a shift. I’ve been sort of individually noticing, and also reading some occasional polling about, which is the shift of more African Americans and Latinos to the Republican Party. Party groups of people that have been very traditionally Democratic but are starting to, in some polling, show up is shifting more Republican, which given some of the rhetoric from the Republican Party of recent years, confounds a lot of people. And as John points out in his thread, a lot of folks have been saying it’s a polling error, or that the polls are, you know, sampling wrong or something like that. But he lays out in many, many charts, that this is a real shift that’s happening, and that there are some real economic reasons for it, as well as social reasons for it. I highly recommend people look at these charts, look at the threads. Look at the thread. But one thing is that right now, Democrats tend to skew wealthier and more educated in this country whereas Republicans are gaining a lot more support among working class, lower income groups, people who have maybe a high school education, or are, you know, degrees or other kinds of certifications that don’t require a four-year college degree, I should say. And that aligns very well with some of the disadvantaged groups in our economy, including African Americans and Latinos. So, from that perspective, the shift makes sense. Also, he highlights that older generations of African Americans in particular, who remember the civil rights movement and lived through it, you know, they might be more likely to suppress their own conservative values to vote Democratic or vote Democrat. I always mess that up. Because of, you know, historical racism or the support of that party for, you know, civil rights agenda, etc., etc., because they lived through, you know, the horrors. Whereas younger generations who might have the same kind of conservative values about religion, about abortion, about gun rights, and things like that would vote, are less likely to vote Democratic just because. It’s incredibly fascinating. There’s a lot of detail in there. But one line that I really want to highlight. Let me find this one particular point that he made. Let’s see. He said, “I don’t think everyone appreciates that the familiar ‘young favor Dems, old favor Republican’ gradient we see in US population overall is inverted among the Black population.” And there’s a chart that shows that, but there’s so much interesting detail in here. And, you know, especially given the problems that Biden is having with young Democrats of color right now, or young people of color, given the situation in Gaza and his response to it. This is another compounding factor to that. And it’s very interesting, so that’s my news.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, no, let’s just. It’s super complicated. So, we’ll put it on the show page, and you should read it.

Kimberly Adams 

I tried to summarize it as best I could, but it’s a lot.

Kai Ryssdal 

No, that’s fair. No, it’s a lot for sure. All right. All right, you do bees, and then I’ll do the other thing you sent me because I had nothing today.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, bees. So, I saw this in ScienceAlert, which is a summary of a piece of research out in Nature magazine. But the headline is, “Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed.” And the idea is that bees can teach, bumblebees in particular, can teach other bumblebees how to do something. So, they taught these bumble bees how to like, solve this little puzzle, and then brought in some other bees that had never seen this puzzle. And the demonstrator bees, as they call them, taught the other bumblebees how to, you know, solve the puzzle and get the treat or whatever. Now teaching other members of their species a skill is something that has, you know, kind of been thought of as a human thing to do. But I’m going to read this bit that I thought was very interesting. “Humans have a long history of ‘moving the goalposts’ on what sets our species apart from all others. Once it was thought that humans were the only animals with culture. But ‘viral’ songs among sparrows, the evolving dialects and traditions of whales, the regional hunting strategies of orcas, and the learned tool tricks of apes, crows, and dolphins, all suggest that socially transmitted behaviors are also present in animal societies, too. Some of these cultural behaviors even show signs of refinement and improvement over time. Homing pigeons, for instance, learn from each other and adjust their cultures flight paths year on year. An influential way to move the goalposts on human intelligence is to say that humans are unique from other animals because we can learn things from each other that we could not invent independently.” And anyway, now that’s gone too. That’s gone too. So, we are no different from the bees.

Kai Ryssdal 

We have opposable thumbs. All right, so here’s mine, but it’s really Kimberly’s. But it’s right up my alley. It’s super cool. It’s from The Conversation. It’s a piece by David B. Hollander. He’s a professor of history at Iowa State University. And it’s about voting in ancient Rome. So, Professor Hollander pulls up this coin. He shows a picture of a coin. It’s a 2000-year-old silver denarius from ancient Rome. And it shows in his description that figures walking across a narrow bridge and dropping something into a box. And here’s what it represents. It represents people voting, and here’s why that’s interesting, right? It’s Rome’s chief voting officer, the guy who did this coin was a guy by the name of P. Licinius Nerva, the official responsible for this coin. Why would he choose to depict such a banal activity? Here’s why. In ancient Rome, you voted by wealth, and the more wealth you had, and more elite you were, the more voting power you had, the more voting block you had, and the ability to keep your vote secret. Ordinary citizens voted, not only did they vote in public, but they voted orally and in the view of these elites, thus making it possible for the elites to influence the votes of the general voting citizenry of ancient Rome. So, what this guy did was, and these ancient official voting officials did was they instituted paper ballots, and they started the tradition and the habit 2000 years ago of voting secretly by paper ballot, putting it into a box, and that is what is on this silver denarius. A person crossing a bridge to walk over to the ballot box and put something in the ballot box. It’s just amazingly cool. It’s so cool.

Kimberly Adams

I knew you’d like it.

Kai Ryssdal 

History matters, you guys. Come on. Here’s the last couple of sentences from this thing. The “changing state voting laws and election lawsuits are nothing new. The fight over voter access to the ballot is an inevitable side effect of democracy.” History matters. That’s so cool. I love that.

Kimberly Adams

History matters.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thank you for that. That was great. That was awesome.

Kimberly Adams 

You’re welcome.

Kai Ryssdal 

That was awesome. All right. We’re out today. On that note, back tomorrow. Till then, send us your comments or questions. You know how to do that. Email is makemesmart@marketplace.org. Or leave us a voicemail 508-U-B-SMART.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program was engineered by Charlton Thorp. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. And our intern is Thalia Menchaca.

Kai Ryssdal 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and today On-Demand. We’ll see what she’s doing tomorrow.