The Fork that Isn't

The fork in the roadway of your electrical career - you remember it well - the point at which you chose what kind of electrician you were to be. Having been accepted into the apprenticeship and ushered with two dozen fellow apprentices into a large room at the training center, our instructors introduced us to that iron clad truth of the industry: no electrician could be both book-smart and skilled at electrical work. Good electricians don’t read or write particularly well, and book-smart electricians are electricians in name only. Every apprentice had to choose which electricians they’d be. Teachers teach because they can’t install, “book-smart” electricians make for lousy electricians, and good electricians make for awful teachers. To our budding electrical minds, the logic made sense.

I remember being made to take the blood-oath that bound me to one of two irreconcilable paths. Down one, I’d be an electrician on paper and, down the other, I’d be a craftsman. As a book-smart electrician I’d know the NEC as well as Mozart knew the piano, and be as familiar with Ugly’s as a project manager is with business causal attire. I was told that soon after the completion of my apprenticeship, I’d land a teaching gig at the training center or an office job. Either way I’d be nestled in the safety of climate-controlled comfort, a steady 72 degrees. Daily necessities would be done in a sanitized haven, as opposed to the corruption of a port-o-john. I’d remain removed from the dirt, grime and horrors that accompanied the frightful world of the typical electrical job. 

However, no instructor or journeyman told me that by choosing to be a “book-smart” electrician, I’d resign myself to a lifetime of electrical mediocrity at best, or abject incompetence at worse. On those rare occasions I’d be allowed onto the job-site, I’d be shuttled with haste to the office trailer, where confined, I’d be set to office-like tasks: resolving obscure code questions, ruminating on the ideal font size and page-margins for a letter to the client and, ensnaring hapless passersby, to whom I’d burden with highlights from last year’s NFPA code conference and expo. When permitted to wield tools, or let anywhere near a triple nickel, I’d grow confused and agitated, and transform into a whirling, unpredictable menace to be avoided at all costs. 

Choosing the other career path, being a good electrician, the end of my apprenticeship would mark my ascent to the Pantheon of electrical construction. I was told that in time, I would dazzle others with visionary foresight and an uncanny ability to manipulate any space according to my electrical will, on time and under budget. I’d develop a mastery of every technique, know backwards and inside out, every material known to the industry, and acquire such exquisite skill of every tool that fellow journeymen would swear I’d made the tool myself. Every bend and conduit conundrum that I resolved would leave my book-smart counterparts drooling with envy. I’d be Neo in the Matrix, toward the end of the movie when he defeats those creepy authoritarian types. 

But as the case with the other path, there’s a catch. Our instructors neglected to inform me that what I gained in electrical skill I’d lose in book-smarts. My devotion to all things electrical would leave me functionally illiterate, my hobbies would center around large, diesel-run machines standing sentry in my shop, hunting, machines I take hunting, and the weekend’s cookout, sumptuously supplied by my Traeger. Having chosen the path of the good electrician, I’d be a virtuoso in the field but a knuckle-dragging troglodyte of books. 

We all made our decision. We knew what it would cost and made our choice chose. Now we have to live with it. It’s a bummer, though - I kind of liked being smart. 

An Insidious Malady

Brothers! Sisters! I speak to you today of a grave malady. A plague that infects the very life-blood of our proud and resilient trade. It penetrates the impermeable, corrupts the incorrigible and lingers around the job site like a snake, ready to infect the brains and speech-centers of every electrician. Few comprehend the nature of this…unwholesome condition…fewer still know its cause. Its cure, a hopeless mystery. And there you go about your business, spreading along the way. What are you going on about? An ailment? Who’s sick? Oh, dear reader! I’ve heard you on the job giving orders, laying out, instructing, clarifying, collaborating, offering your diagnosis for this and that problem, and everything you say indicates your abject infection. And you’re far from alone: your apprentice, your foreman, her foreman and his, too…even – indeed! – our beloved at the hall – everyone plagued! 

Stop snickering. I’m not deranged. The flood of pronouns that spew ceaselessly from your mouths is indicative of what doctors (well, one, anyway) call, pronounamania, an uncontrollable urge to replace useful words with pronouns, often to the unmitigated detriment of clarity. Yes – pronouns! “Over here. Right there. That thing goes on this thing. Take that conduit, go around that box over there by that thing (thing: vague and useless, yes, but not a pronoun) and bring it up and over here…thhhaaaaaaaat…way it can feed this one, here. 

The effects of pronouns vary depending on electrician, but the results are always disastrous. Correct: it, he, she, they, them, their, there, her, his, who, which, here, and over there are fine and dandy in the employ of the skilled interlocutor. But from the mouth of the careless, pronouns go forth with the indiscriminate lethality of a cluster strike, accidentally deployed from a fighter-jet bouncing along the underside of earth’s upper atmosphere, piloted by a trainee, who asks…“Did we lose something?”

You’ll know when you come across the aftermath of a pronoun carpet-bombing. Apprentices spin in tight circles with heads arched ceiling-wise, mouths ajar, eyes fixated on an inadvisably-planned conduit run, deciding whether to confront their journeyman with yet more questions or, surrender their fate to the toss of a coin: what did he mean by here? When the JW said this one, did he mean that or this?  Journeymen, ever the model of productivity, form pockets of idle tools and gossipy lips and, one-by-one, sojourn to the bathroom – that refuge of quiet contemplation – hopeful to ascertain the foreman’s meaning of this, that and there.  

Pronouns! – anything but the happy literary devices your grammar teacher said they were. Sure – pronouns eliminate redundancy so a writer needn’t burden readers with an endless repetition of nouns. Yes: we use them everyday in nearly every context. Indeed: with pronouns, “Donny is a blowhard, and Donny writes shamelessly sloppy prose because Donny was born on Mars,” becomes, “Donny is a magisterial writer who creates scintillating prose because he was born in the vicinity of Olympus.” But in our line of work, the only good pronoun is the one we leave unstated.

Sisters! Brothers! I hereby declare the end of the pronoun’s ruinous reign. Vague. Unspecific. Utterly useless claptrap, no help in building sophisticated systems of electrical awesomeness. We electricians are too good for pronouns. Stop using pronouns. Use specific, tedious, overly-helpful words and phrases such as, The 4-inch rigid conduit feeding Cabinet A-1; Box B directly adjacent to the 50kv transformer labeled XMFR-B. And so on.

By eliminating pronouns you, too, can stamp out pronoun malady for good. The electrical trade is depending on you.

Mad Skills

The 19-year old former Duke standout-turned-NBA-phenom Zion Williamson is what people call, raw. Exceptionally raw, in fact. The next LeBron James raw, rawer than Kobe when Kobe wore an afro, raw. But everyone knows that raw isn’t enough. The lethal three-point jumper, the Oracle-like vision that converts fast breaks into points…takes skill - developed through a lot of hard work over a long time. Tom Brady may have been born with the physical prerequisites for a Howitzer-like arm, but there has yet to be born a quarterback endowed by his DNA with the ability to diagnose and surgically dissect NFL defenses to the tune of six Super Bowls and nine AFC championships. The world’s best electrician doesn’t execute eye-catching rows of breathtakingly-complex rigid conduit because the parents handed down their genes. No, silly apprentice - those rows come from skill. There’s a career-sized scrap pile of misbends, mismeasurements and darn-its! bearing witness to an ineluctable fact: being good at something is learned, through practice and over time by employing well-established rules, until…perfection. 

Thinking is like that. Not a happy byproduct of genetics, a matter of being smart, but a skill to be cultivated. Disagree? Consider politicians (and to a lesser extent, Facebook users), most of whom earned college degrees and in many cases, law degrees - that’s, Doctor of Jurisprudence, to you. But few areas of public discourse include more instances of smart people uttering dumb things than politics, which they do when they forsake sound thinking for political expediency (and when charlatans on social media remain oblivious to it).  The mounting heap of intellectual refuse contaminating public discourse owes much more to the disregard of thinking than it does to a lack of smarts.

If your conduit runs make all the electricians say “ooohhh”, it’s because you follow the rules of geometry, know code, know your bender, take accurate measurements, foresee obstacles, know what tools to use and, of course, bend gobs of pipe. Thinking is comparable. Rules dictate how to think well; students of thinking must know those rules, faithfully adhere to them and know what tools are at their disposal. After lots of studying and lots of practice, she becomes skilled enough to spot leaps of logic and shield her mind from deception.

My editor - bless her heart! - limits me from expounding too voluminously on the rules of thinking - there are many - so I’ll pass along just one. 

Argument from Authority. The grizzled electrician’s been at it since before you were in diapers, and the early-term apprentice has next to no experience in the electrical trade. Yet, even though his years of experience make him an authority, he’s proven quite capable of getting things wrong. Similarly, even as a newcomer and hardly an authority, the early-term apprentice is known to propose ingenious solutions to complex problems. Authority is far from decisive when it comes to settling a question or debate. Sure, expertise is relevant - I’d consult a medical doctor about those chest pains before I consulted my local shaman.  But being an authority isn’t the final say. Authority doesn’t enshrine an opinion in truth any more than coming from the mouth of a “stable genius” magically imbues a policy with effectiveness. 

About Our Past

IBEW members have much to be proud of, particularly of its inclusion of a broad spectrum of individuals. Many enter its ranks regardless of political ideology, race, sex and gender, age, etc. and take advantage of high-quality training, nice pay, access to affordable health care and comfortable pension. For years the IBEW has offered new leases on life (me included) and means to provide for families (mine, too).

But like any human institution, the IBEW has a checkered past with regard to inclusion. In a pattern that would for many years contradict the AFL’s proclamations of interracial unionism (*historical note: the AFL merged with the CIO in 1955), the IBEW joined many other craft unions in excluding black Americans from its ranks.

The story of how unions addressed the position of black Americans in the workplace can be written in more ways than one. Much ado can be made of the AFL-CIO’s unyielding support of the Civil Rights movement, particularly of UAW president Walter Reuther’s advocacy of MLK and of his support of the NAACP and Caesar Chavez. In another version, a chorus of criticism from within the labor movement can be given a fair hearing. A. Philip Randolph and Herbert Hill, two among many exasperated by AFL and AFL-CIO leadership for its failure to confront racism both within its own ranks and in its affiliated unions, lamented the “profound disparity between the public image…and the day-to-day experience of many [black] workers”.

The disparity dates to 1899, when the AFL admitted to membership the rigid “lily-white” International Association of Machinists, even though the AFL’s policy prohibited such unions. Throughout the first-half of the century, such reversals would belie official AFL policy.

Whatever the AFL’s official stance on race at the turn of the century, that of its president, Samuel Gompers, was straightforward. Among his opinions, Gompers promoted the Chinese Exclusion Act and favored a ban on immigration from Eastern Europe. Most egregiously, in 1917, Gompers helped foment the East St. Louis Massacres. This incident was one of America’s worst labor-riots. During the riot white-led mobs pillaged black neighborhoods, leaving over 200 dead and many more homeless. Gompers was unapologetic. 

Gompers’ successor William Green continued a policy of outward inclusion and tacit acceptance of racist policies. This was most notable in the AFL’s continued embrace of “Jim Crow” auxiliary locals. For background: AFL affiliates established separate "auxiliaries” for black workers, in which blacks were denied full union membership and access to skilled, high-paying jobs, denied the right to vote on matters that affected them and excluded from the collective bargaining process. Instead, black workers were relegated to the most menial, lowest-paying, filthiest jobs, and they watched as their skilled jobs were handed over to junior (white) workers. Given the NLRA - the federal law that established unions as the sole bargaining unit in a workplace - black workers were forced to swallow whatever terms their white-majority union negotiated for them. 

In some cases, black workers were encouraged to help organize a workplace, but were shuffled into an auxiliary local once the union won the right to represent them. One black worker noted the irony: “We were the first to come out for the union. We helped get it started here…But now the whites get all the benefits and we are left behind again. Turned out [union] meant one thing for the white and another thing for us.”The AFL’s continued toleration of Jim Crow auxiliary locals remained a source of bitter contention for labor activists and black union members.

By 1944, 22 AFL affiliates excluded black members, and as late as 1959 the newly formed AFL-CIO admitted two more such locals, in contradiction to its official policy on the matter. For many years, apprenticeships, particularly in construction trades, were simply off-limits to black workers. As late as 1972, Seattle’s IBEW, 1 out of 1715 of its members were black and not until 1980 had that number risen to 9%.

The complete story is no doubt much longer and complex than what’s been said here. Union’s role in excluding so many Americans from jobs, just by virtue of race, should offend - but it shouldn’t keep us from moving forward. Unions have a track record of doing a great deal of good for a great many people. For that, the IBEW and AFL-CIO have much to commend themselves. When confronting the past, we should do so honestly, keeping in mind how far we’ve come and the great good we continue to do.

Buying 'Merican

Buying American is sometimes as easy as finding an American-flag-on-a-tag. The rectangular scrap of cloth, conspicuously terse MADE IN AMERICA, or Old Glory amulet adhered to a shoelace anoints the product and signifies a patriotic purchase. The single act of patriotism won’t staunch the exodus of good American jobs, but compounded over a lifetime and adopted by other patriots over their lifetimes…brace yourself for a tidal wave of American economic superiority. Answering how the greatest economic juggernaut in human history is to be revitalized by everyones’ buying American isn’t particularly interesting. But, rest assured, your conscientious purchase of American wares will return to the US, like a hen gathers her chicks under her wing - metaphor! - those high-wage union jobs that have been AWOL since the Chinese, Japanese, and who-knows-who-else started selling us their affordable goods.   

Sometimes it’s easy. Red Wing and Danner manufacture their boots in the USA out of materials sourced in the USA, by tanners and shoe-makers here, in the USA. But Red Wing manufactures lines qualified by globalist-sounding caveats, such as “Made in USA with Imported Materials” as well as “Assembled in the USA with Imported Components”. Keen, no stranger to hawking non-American products, was compelled - whether by market or morals, is unclear - to offer boots that display a small but conspicuous patch of Old Glory on the tongue. Their version of Old Glory is a black-on-gold rendering of the real stars and stripes, one that captures the motto, “assembled in PDX from the finest materials from around the world”. The most American-sounding jean, Wrangler, offers a special database of US-made clothing, each piece embroidered with a patch indicating as such, and, if purchased on-line, buyer can view pictures of these items alongside pictures of dependable, hardy farmers from the heartland.

“despite his conviction that a Dodge/Ford/Chevy is as ‘Merican as baseball and NASCAR, some of these car manufactures are quite content to manufacture their cars in Mexico - en serio! ”

Other times…as when buying large items such as cars, there’s something a Dodge pickup-driving, scold-his-wife-for-not-buying-him-American-work-pants-for-Christmas, remind-everyone-at-work-to-buy-American may find unsettling: support of the US economy may mean abandoning a US brand in favor of something…more global. But we can’t blame our only slightly caricatured brother for failing to realize that, despite his conviction that a Dodge/Ford/Chevy is as ‘Merican as NASCAR, some of these car manufactures are quite content to manufacture their cars in Mexico - en serio! Nor can we expect him to appreciate that some foreign auto companies may contribute more to the US economy - by manufacturing their cars in America, source their parts from America, and employ more Americans - than some of the America’s most ‘Merican companies.  

The following question may help clarify the enterprise of buying American. Which better supports the American economy: purchasing from an American company, say Ford or Buick, that builds its (some of its) cars in Mexico or Canada; or, purchasing a car from a Japanese company, say Honda or Toyota, that builds its cars in America? As we will see, cars are increasingly less subject to being made either in the US or outside the US. The complexity inherent to buying an American car is what we’d expect from buying almost any product in a global economy. Furthermore, “made in American”, particularly with regard to cars, is a matter of degree. So, the question facing conscientious car buyers isn’t whether a car is American-made, but, to what extent a car American made. (Another question whose answer would add clarity is, to what extent does a company’s country of origin impact the US economy. At least in the circles I travel in there’s a half-baked notion that the profits earned by a foreign company - even when it has plants, workers and stores in the US - that those profits go back to the mother country and somehow don’t benefit the US economy).

Thankfully, since 2006, Cars.com has published its American-Made Index, inserting much needed objectivity into a discussion about as objective as a political discussion at a union break table. The index uses data from five sources to determine to what extent a vehicle is made in American: where a car is assembled; a car’s domestic-parts content; where a car’s engine and transmission come from; and, how many U.S. factory workers its parent automaker directly employs. The results reveal that the Honda Odyssey, Ridgeline and Passport score 2, 3, and 4, respectively, and the Acura MDX and RDX score 6 and 10. The Honda Accord, Toyota Avalon and Toyota Tundra are also in the top-15. In other words, some Toyotas and Hondas do more for the American economy than some Fords, Dogdes and Chevys. Consider too that the Ford Fusion and Fiesta are made in Mexico, the Jeep Renegade is made in Italy, and the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 LD and GMC Sierra 1500 Limited, are made in Canada - information likely to cause a kerfuffle, eh?

While some products lend themselves to the Made in America/not Made in America distinction, large, expensive and complex items like cars, clearly do not. This is not to suggest that consciously supporting the US economy by sussing out what vehicles are American-made and then buying one. Buying American is a worthy enterprise - as is buying local, but I digress - because doing so clearly bolsters US jobs. There’s also something nostalgic about buying American, about seeing cobblers at Danner do their cobbling and those rugged farmers supplying us with rugged, snug-fitting jeans. 

What we call American runs much deeper than an hood ornament. Those who want to buy American and a Toyota Tundra or Honda Odyssey can do so, it seems, in good conscious, and can even mount a solid defense for doing so. The Cars.com index should serve as a cautionary tale for those cheeky enough to mock Toyota owners for insufficient ‘Mericanness. Afterall, depending on the model and year - it could be more American than a Chevy.

Labels are Lazy

Overheard at a dinner party: “It’s easy: just don’t vote for Nazis.” What a sublime piece of political insight. If only I had thought of it myself; my mind hadn’t been thus blown since I learned that North Korean leader Kim Jung Il authored 1500 books and shot 39 under par. I declared: “By golly - you’re right!” 

Heaven help us when the freest people in the history of the world bemoan their country as fascistic and their president a Nazi.

Nazi-like creatures exist in America to this day. Many make little secret of it, all are anti-semitic, and are to be found on both the political right and left. They marched in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us”; they represent the dark underbelly of the far-right; and they inhabit a number of easy-to-find on-line chatrooms. Even the Women’s March was tainted with anti-semitism, a few leaders of which openly praised an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist and shed light on a portion of the left’s uncomfortable proximity to Nazi-esque ideology. All of this while New York City is experiencing a surge of physical assaults against religious Jews.

I don’t think my party-going compatriot believes that Trump and Republicans are Nazis hellbent on transforming America into a fascist state, goose-stepping, as it were, upon the constitution’s guaranteed freedoms of press, religion, and pretty-much-anything-anyone-wants-to-do/be-so-long-as-it-doesn’t-harm-anyone-else-ism. Rather, he probably employed the term to describe an ideology he associates with conservative ethos, of which Trump is merely the foulest embodiment. For some the Trump presidency (really, anything smacking of politically or culturally right-of-center) is accurately summed up as authoritarian, inflexible, and dictatorial. Add to this the conviction that Trump stands at the vanguard of a white supremacist coup hell-bent on extirpating constitutional rights, and the term “Nazi” offers an edgy way to demonstrate one’s deep political engagement and strong moral conviction.

Of course, the “Nazi” label suffers from the fact that it can’t be taken literally, not even by stretching it to “neo-Nazi”, or by employing the purportedly synonymous term, “fascist”. If either were true of America or were being imposed on its citizens by the Trump administration, Americans wouldn’t enjoy limitless freedom to air grievances as frequently and as numerously as they please. As is both well known and taken for granted, Americans are free to rally en masse in full view of the government, without being teargassed, arrested or killed. Contrast this with the Chinese government’s response to pro-democracy protests, most infamously at the Tiananmen Square protests, during which violent suppression created the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and more recently in the arrests and beatings in Hong Kong. Soviet responses to the Prague Spring, the Venezuelan government’s reaction to its citizens’ protests, and countless other such responses from governments the world over and throughout history, highlights how kindly the U.S. government treats dissent and makes a mockery of the notion that America is teetering on the brink of fascism, or that the Trump administration is gearing up to unleash more than Stephen Miller and snarky tweets.

But large, vocal protests are only one indication that America remains fascist-free. Opposition is as easy as having a phone, as is made clear by the daily deluge of countless tweets, from elected officials waging virtual fingers to basement-dwelling political neophytes. Five minutes on either Twitter or Facebook, make it clear that however Trump may be reshaping the tenor of U.S. politics, he isn’t stifling free expression in the U.S. Consider, too, the large and vibrant pundit class made up of journalists, policy wonks and professors who share their hostility, derision, skepticism, etc. about the administration. In fascist states, opposition punditry is found more in hiding - if not already in prisons or graves - than on widely televised shows or in the op-ed section of every national newspaper. Add to this that politicians both inside and outside Trump’s party condemn him. Outspoken criticism of the government is remarkable for its presence and intensity, and stands in glaring contrast to the absence of freedoms in places like China, North Korea, Russia and Turkey.  

“Nazi”, “fascists”, and their rightwing relatives, “femi-nazi” and “communist” deems these recipients pariahs and therefore deserving of certain kinds of treatment. There is now a moral obligation to treat them and their ideas as being beyond the reach of reasonable dialogue. Accordingly, such types are best ignored, and, when they do demand an audience, exclusion, or if necessary, destruction. As most, I see the utter exclusion of Nazism from public discourse as a net gain. However, the broad and promiscuous application of “Nazi” and “fascist” is where we go our separate ways. That America remains one of the safest places in history to express political dissent tells me that when people apply these labels to the president or the country, they are either historically obtuse or, too clever by half.

If every conservative were a fascist - and every progressive a communist (for the left isn’t the only side that mislabels) - reasonable people wouldn’t laugh when a yarmulke-wearing, Orthodox Jew is called a Nazi, or when Hillary Clinton is called a communist. If the Trump-voting conservative is a Nazi, and Elizabeth Warren is a communist malefactor, you needn’t weigh the evidence she presents, sort through data she provides, or subject her ideas to critical evaluation. Because fascists, Nazis and commies are evil, we are called to ignore, or malign, or harm them and to take to social media to remind people of our good deeds. In the face of evil, we have little choice but to identify and publicly shame them, suppress their ideas with whatever means, and bring them in line with the correct way of thinking.

In other words, to employ fascism.

Civil Rights, Then and Now

Bernie Sanders, bane of establishment left and patron saint of progressive causes, recently ran afoul of the new left normal when he - are you sitting down? - claimed that “we have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age” and, adding with stunning nonchalance that a “nondiscriminatory society…looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.” 

There was a time when Bernie’s sentiments would evoke little more than a nod, if not a roll of the eyes owed to so naive an observation. After all, Martin Luther King Jr. said the same words over 60 years ago, and since then they’ve become the unofficial motto of American opportunity and racial equality.

But not since segregation has echoing MLK proved so risky; Bernie’s remarks earned immediate scorn. Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress was appalled: “At a time where folks feel under attack because of who they are, saying race or gender or sexual orientation or identity doesn’t matter is not off, it’s simply wrong.” 

The controversy surrounding Sanders’ claim results from an uncharitable interpretation, but also from an ideological shift among the left. Sanders isn’t asserting the patently false claim that race, gender and sexual orientation don’t matter. It’s obvious that peoples’ race, gender and sexual orientation shape how they view themselves, how they view the world around them, and how they are viewed by others. Not everyone thinks about identity as much as everyone else, and contemplating identity usually depends on how many others are like you in a particular context. Follow me here: if you are one of only a few black people in a school, neighborhood or job, you’ll think a lot about being black; not all the time, but more often than otherwise. This happened to me; growing up as one of my neighborhood’s only black people caused me no shortage of contemplation: a girl’s rejection, a reluctant friend or a teacher’s rebuff - were many times interpreted through the prism of race, whether or not race actually applied. My point is that my difference in race caused me to contemplate being of a different race than those around me.

Sanders’ claim, that individuals are more than the sum total of their race, gender or sexual orientation, provoked controversy because it flies in the face of a new ideology, prevalent on the left, called identity politics. Identity politics defines people as the sum total of their racial or gender identities; it also entails that whatever race individuals are, whatever gender, is more significant than their ideas or abilities. But this isn’t the only way identity movements differ from civil rights movements of the past. 

A shift in focus, from ability and ideas to identity: Bernie didn’t say that race, gender and sexual orientation don’t matter, only that they don’t matter most. For identity politics, abilities and ideas do not transcend matters of race, gender and sexual orientation; rather, abilities and ideas are subordinate to matters of identity. For many proponents of identity politics, individuals are little more than the sum total of their racial or gender identities. 

The ends justify the means: The new civil rights movement encourages coercion to achieve goals. Proponents employ social media mobs, doxxing (sharing the private information of opponents), public humiliation and threats to livelihood. Their wrath isn’t confined to opponents; for instance, even fellow progressives who dare question aims and methods are subject to waking nightmares. The means identity politics promotes, amounts to a sad spectacle more akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution than the peaceful - and effective - protests of MLK.

It’s all or nothing: Identity politics treats issues relating to identity as matters life or death and portrays opponents as monsters, rather than, as Mark Lilla says, “fellow citizens with different views.” 

Identity movements have their origins in a noble cause - the civil rights movement of the past. However, such movements have focused too heavily on the significance of race, gender and sexual orientation in everyday life. The emphasis results in the absurd tendency of the movements’ leadership to assert claims that would sound racist coming from anyone else. What should be clear but isn’t, is that the only people we should expect to judge candidates on account of their race are racists. Bernie, as well as MLK, was right: in a nondiscriminatory society, voters select candidates on the strength of their ideas and abilities, not their race, gender or sexual orientation.

Unsolicited Advice from an Early-term JW

With the passage of Janus and the blow many predict it will strike to public sector unions, it’s a good time to think of strategies to increase membership. I don’t claim to know all the answers, and I’m no union veteran (4 and half years and counting). However, I think my status as a newcomer may provide a fresh perspective to recalcitrant problems. So, without further ado, those tips.

Number one: brag and state the obvious. We make a good living. Our benefits are nice and our pension favorable. By the standards of construction, our work conditions are good. Our contractors are forced to care about safety, and we have powerful representatives who advocate on our behalf. We have a vacation fund. We have mobility to move from one contractor to another, on a whim. Compared to the average American construction worker, we have it made. But our problem isn’t having it made; it’s that the average American construction worker, let alone the average American, doesn’t realize how good we have it. (Our brothers and sisters do a commendable job of advertising our compensation, on Pandora, social media and on a number of other platforms. Their work notwithstanding, I think much of the work in this domain falls on the shoulders of the rank-and-file, the brothers and sisters who have uncles, nieces, nephews, friends, many of whom hunger for something more fulfilling, and lucrative to boot. A comment around the dinner table, watching a game, or over a drink may be the first steps to your family-member enjoying a much greater standard of living. Also, we want our non-union electrician friends to know what they’re missing; just as we want those in high-school, in college and incarcerated to know what awaits them when they join our ranks.  Highlighting our pay and package is all the easier because they are good; we just have to let people know.

Second: we help solve America’s labor shortage and student debt crisis. America’s oft-cited and enduring labor shortage has become cliché. Politicians and business leaders bemoan a work force too unskilled to build America. College grads decry their staggering student debt. While grad school or a barista gig appeal to some, there are plenty college grads interested in trades’ work. America need plumbers, electricians, carpenters and the like; companies hand out signing bonuses to qualified tradespeople in addition to paying them well. Everyone appreciates a delicious, carefully-frothed latte (heaven knows I do) but not every college grad needs to sojourn as a barista before charting her next career path, and very few will repay their student debt from behind the coffee counter. What better solution to this shortage than an apprenticeship that teaches a trade, has a proven track record, and fills the labor void immediately? As it turns out - I know a program! Politicians and economists can breath a sigh of relief. The IBEW is here to save the day.

On a side note, it’s no secret that union apprentice programs - at least in the electrical field - are superior to their non-unions counterparts. Our schooling is longer, more rigorous and more demanding; in the field, apprentices learn every facet of the trade and graduate as professional electricians, ready to build America. My knowledge of non-union programs isn’t based on a university study, but on every answer from every non-union apprentice I’ve asked. We have the program, and we have the answer to the labor shortage; we just need to let others know.

The third rule: make friends with the other side. A myth prevalent in union circles is that conservative political ideology is inherently at odds with unionism. Some label those union members who vote Republican as either ignorant or treasonous. But is this true? Is there something about conservatism or the Republican party that pits it in a life-and-death struggle against unions? Many would have us believe so; talking heads and too many would-be leaders insist we see debates between left and right as “the fight of our lives”. However, I’m not sure this needs to be the case, even if today it seems it is. I say this because I know of prominent conservatives (one a syndicated talk-show host, another the head of a major conservative think tank; I could cite more) who find nothing wrong with and even belong to, unions. It is simply a myth that conservative ideology is antithetical to unionism. It was, after all, capitalism’s shinning star, Milton Friedman, who opposed Right-to-Work; and it is, after all, conservative-minded libertarians who argue against a government’s right to interfere in the relationship between unions and employees. These same folk insist that unions have a constitutional guarantee to form. It may seem futile to talk to someone who supported Janus, but Janus is one slice of the pie, and it isn’t as if the passage of Janus alone spells the ruin of both public and private sector unions. If our reaction to all things conservative is knee-jerk hostility we risk pushing potential allies (about 1/3 of Americans identify as conservative) forever into camps that are hostile to our own. Furthermore, if we ignore that conservatives help make up unions, we alienate those conservatives in our own union. The more we tolerate the idea that unions are at war with the right, the less likely we will broaden our support and the more we invite political fights we can’t afford - even if the Democratic Party can. 

We have a choice: continue to entertain politicians and union leaders who pit conservatives against unions in a life-and-death struggle for the middle class; or, take advantage of that strain of conservative thought that abhors government meddling in the affairs of freely formed groups. Give conservative leaders a chance to support unions by finding common cause with them rather than demonizing them from the start.

On a final note - and completely uncontroversial (just joking): avoid hyperbole, rise above the fray. Unions traditionally align themselves with the left, and have done so routinely enough that Democratic leaders take the union vote for granted. Some even refer to unions as a wing of the Democratic Party. For an organization such as our own - one that exists to for its members’ sake rather than any party’s - to be labelled a wing of any party is more stigma than badge of honor. We don’t belong to anyone but ourselves and we should caution politicians against assuming we put their interests above our own.

We don’t have to stand with Bernie, we don’t have to stand with Trump; we don’t have to don Antifa black or march with the alt-right. What we have to do is suss out each political movement and pinpoint what about their platform helps our cause and America as a whole. 

Groups such as Antifa and the alt-right represent extremes of the ideological divide. So, it should come as no surprise that the closer we align ourselves with either side the more we alienate ourselves from anyone who finds themselves, as most Americans do, somewhere near the middle. Rather than tilting too heavily toward one side or the other, or taking up causes secondary to the existence of our union, our message should focus on matters our members care about, such as earning a decent wage, sustaining medical benefits for our families, and working in safe environments. Taking sides in every cultural and political battle of our day is best left to individual members. Narrowing our focus will go a long way in dispelling the notion that union members make up a monolithic blob of single-minded voters, rather than the diverse and motley crew we are.

(Some of) The Perils of Social Media

Imagine a world in which political success depends on demagoguery and fame, a world in which the meter of public opinion is moved by emotion and theater, superficial stats and reasonable-enough soundbites; a world in which every political fight is the fight of our lives won not by appeals to reason, but by megaphones, marches, clenched fists and grit teeth.

Such a world could serve as the backdrop to a post-apocalyptic novel, but I'm describing something close to home. Close enough, in fact, that it's probably on your desk or in your pocket - you may be holding it in your hand this very moment. With a click on "fb" or a icon of a white bird on blue background, the imaginary world above becomes reality.

Facebook's raison d'être remains idealist: to make the world a better place. From its outset, FB would be a world of users connecting with users. Connectivity would be a good in itself, and users could expect a better life if and when they connected; the more they expanded their webs of connections, the better off they'd be. For it's part, Twitter was conceived as cyberspace pub where friends could come together, unwind and discuss everything under the sun.

Both platforms have proven wildly successful. Facebook has around 2 billion users and Twitter around 350 million. Neither is waning in popularity, despite being implicated in providing a platform for Trump and his more unsavory supporters; nor does the publicity surrounding the effects social media has on human brains, particularly those of adolescents. 

The growth of social media would make for a fascinating history book, but most significant about the social media is not how well it's connected people but how much it's shaped the way people get their news. According to Niall Ferguson, Facebook is now the largest and most powerful content publisher in history, as proven by the fact that 45% of Americans get their news from Facebook. Given this grip on news, Ferguson estimates that FB founder Mark Zuckerberg is 10x more powerful a media mogul than was William Randolph Hearst at the height of his power.

Zuckerberg's rise as media mogul and gatekeeper of news coincides with the waning of traditional sources of news. Print media, particularly newspapers, have seen dwindling subscriptions and add revenue for at least a decade. In filling some - but not all - of the void left by print media, social media has redefined what counts as news, so much so that traditional news and news you'll find on Facebook and Twitter are guided by different constraints and even aims.

Whereas Facebook and Twitter see themselves as social media, traditional news outlets, on the other hand, view themselves as just that. The latter are guided by a commitment to truth and accuracy, and they rely on credible sources for information. Such things are taken for granted by reputable news outlets, even given the ever-present claims of bias. For Facebook and Twitter exist to connect and engage, thus connectivity or engagement - the online equivalent of attention in the forms of "likes", views and clicks, is the guiding principle. Each outlet generates revenue by means of engagement - the more likes, views and clicks, the more revenue. So, FB and Twitter care a great deal about the number of clicks their content attracts. The truth, accuracy and well-reasoned tone aren't goods in themselves. Rather, the good - or end - in itself is attention in the form of views, clicks and likes. Different principles produce different cultures, and for reasons mentioned, social media cultivates clicks over credibility. Either platform (FB or Twitter) will give you news, but it will be news with an inherit bias toward engaging users, and thus far more susceptible to dubious reporting sprouting up on peoples' newsfeeds as would otherwise be the case.

That is not all: because of their obligation to generate revenue for shareholders, and because they've linked generating revenue to generating clicks, Facebook and Twitter are bound by their very nature to promote engagement over credibility when it comes to news.

The mandate to engage explains why Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) has been the source of engaging but nonsensical stories (anyone remember "Pope Endorses Trump"?) as well as a culture that rewards hyperventilating and loud indignation over every political decisions, from ObamaCare to tax-cuts. It should come as no surprise to anyone who's so much as dabbled on Twitter that tweets are 20% more likely to be retweeted for the inclusion of every emotive or moral word, or that Facebook users are as likely to heap praise on cancer survivors as they are to unleash hell on political opponents. Social media is - among its permutations - the platform of "extreme views and fake news". It's no wonder the one-time cyber-pub has become a brawls-and-flying-barstools kind of place, after all, fists and war-cries are more engaging than civilized and reasoned debate. Yesterday we clamored to watch fights on the school yard and today we click to see adults hurl vitriol at each other on Twitter. When the quest to engage - and the desire to be engaged - drive political debate, much has gone awry. 

More than anything in recent memory, Facebook and Twitter cultivate clusters of ideologically homogenous users who flock to those like themselves and attack those whom they see as different. Users "like" each others' posts, retweet each others' musings and crucify those of other clusters. Homophily - what those outside of academia call "birds of feather flock together" - remains the default setting for political and ideological thought on social media. The thoughtful user before waxing political calculates her posts beforehand: she prepares being placed within a cluster she may not place herself; she takes for granted that she'll pay a price for eschewing emotion for reason; and she realizes that her qualifications and nuance will fall on deaf ears. She knows all things are black and white, and to any cluster there is only "for" or "against".

Donald Trump's election may be the most visible price of Facebook and Twitter's engagement mandate. But the highest cost may be the debasement of public discourse and the overall tone of political debate, even among otherwise cool-headed commentators. American politics and its brightest stars didn't represent the best of reasonable and nuanced debate prior to Facebook. But even as Facebook and Twitter connects users, and even as we find much amusement watching cat videos, reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones, what is sowed in connectivity is reaped in fragmentation.

Social media connects. But it does so at the cost of causing people to double-down on the ideology they already embrace and to confine their perspective on the world to what they already know. Facebook will bring us together, but only if we think alike; Twitter's a great place to meet a member of my cluster, but who wants to live in a homogenous world, and who wants to sacrifice perspective for a few "likes". Hopefully not me.