UPDATED: Realignment of coalitions

I’ve mentioned in the past that we are going through a jumbling of the coalitions that make up each party as we make this social and political transition. While it is a little simplistic it is an easy model to follow.

There are four main folkways in America, although I do argue for a possible fifth one. These four, from Albion’s Seed, are the Quakers, Puritans, Cavaliers and Borderers. A very quick description of each: Quakers – egalitarian, anti-hierarchical, anti-doctrine; Puritans – hierarchical, elitist, community focussed, freedom to establish own rules; Cavaliers – status from family/money, strongly hierarchical; Borderers – clan oriented, individual freedom.

There are fuller descriptions here but the general tendencies can be seen from the areas each colonized. Puritans in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Cavaliers in Virginia and Borderers in Appalachia.

As the US has matured, the political coalitions can often be seen as mixtures of these 4 groups. Recently, the political spectrum has been coalitions of Cavaliers/Borderers on the Republican side and Quaker/Puritan on the Democratic side.

But these coalitions are under stress and are in the process of coming apart. The Borderers in the GOP have been livid for some time and appear to be breaking away in the form of the teabaggers.

And the Quaker side of the Democratic part is beginning to do the same thing. Obama actually ran as a Quaker-style candidate (Clinton was more of the Puritan flavor).

But after getting elected, Obama has not been able to govern in any fashion that would really appeal to the ‘Quaker’ side of the coalition. He has done little on the issues many of them are concerned about (i.e. DADT). Much of the legislative power actually remains in the hands of the Puritan side of the coalition or in the Borderer hands of the GOP. Governing that appeals to the Quaker folkway is almost non-existent.

Which is beginning to really infuriate the Quaker base. They elected a Quaker President. They expect to see Quaker ideals presented in the daily operation of the government. It is not happening and they are getting upset.

I expect to really start seeing a splintering of the Quaker coalition in the Democratic side. Some are calling to kill the Senate bill as it is currently being formed and start over. Howard Dean is being called a movement leader in much the same way Sarah Palin is. I expect the quakers of the Democratic party will be getting more and more upset with the direction of government and the apparent ‘corruption’ of its members.

In fact, the anger at government corruption is also a hallmark of the Borderer split from the GOP. Both groups are developing a tremendous urge to just clean house. If both groups seriously split from the coalitions of each party, we could be in for many, many years of very odd governance, with no real power for any group to get anything done and multiple third or fourth party candidates.

An interesting possibility is if the Quakers and Borderers could find common ground based on hatred of the wealthy elites (which in many cases are part of the Puritan/Cavaliers folkways). While at the moment, these two groups are at opposite ends of the spectrum, they also represent the two largest folkways. A coalition of these two groups could hold power for quite a long time.

It seems impossible now but stranger things have happened in politics. All it may take is a few more years of government that is really unresponsive to the needs of the people.

[UPDATE: Perhaps the incipient Quaker/Puritan split can be healed. If you want to get an idea of some of the discussions revealing this split and indicating how hard it can be to fix, check out something John Cole wrote and the comments. Cole’s post typifies one side, who just does not really understand Dean’s anger and the feeling that one side wants a Democratic “bloodbath in 2010 to teach those damned Senators a lesson.”

And then there is this nice comment that seems to do a good job of presenting the Quaker side. From Citizen Allen:

Okay, John, your Republican roots are showing. Back in 2002, lots of Republicans (possibly including you) accused people like me of rooting for Bush’s failure in Iraq. We were not rooting for him to fail; we all hoped that against all odds, the Iraq War would ultimately be successful. We just thought that the odds of that happening were so fantastically remote and the likelihood of disaster was so high that we would have been much better off not doing it. And in the fullness of time, we were proven correct, not that anyone ever gave the left credit for being right about what a stupid, fucking idea the Iraq War was.

Now, your accusing a lot of the same people of hoping that Obama fails with health care reform. We’re not. If this stupid, idiotic bill passes, we all hope that despite all our fears it will somehow magically reduce health care costs and stop Americans from being forced into penury by medical bills and magical ponies for everyone. We just don’t think it will. We think it much more likely that this bill, if passed, will become the greatest domestic policy fiasco in living memory, that it will achieve nothing for consumers remotely good enough to justify the mammoth subsidization of corrupt monopoly insurance companies, that it will cost us the House in 2010 and the Senate and White House in 2012, and that it will turn literally an entire generation irreversibly against the Democratic Party.

We don’t want to be right about this. And believe me, we’re not looking forward to 2012, when all our predictions come true and folks like you are still blaming people like Howard Dean for the disaster because we didn’t clap hard enough.

Notice the anger against corrupt corporations and the inability of the political process to represent their views. Sounds similar to what some teabaggers have been saying. In fact, another commenter, Lev states:

Is there any real difference between the far left and the far right anymore? They’re sure sounding the same these days.

Maybe rifts will be healed or maybe new coalitions will be formed. I hope it happens soon because we have things we, as a country, need to do.

Gore speaks facts; deranged denialists go nuts

Gore Derangement Syndrome
[Via Climate Progress]

UPDATE: The videos of Gore’s talk at COP-15 can be found here. Here is his powerful closing (transcript below) — I have an excellent graph (large PDF) of ice volume trends from several leading scientific institutions based on Maslowski’s 2009 paper at the end:

Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013′

That’s the headline from a December 2007 BBC story on Professor Wieslaw Maslowski’s American Geophysical Union talk about “Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer.” In fact, I heard Maslowski in a May 2006 seminar predict that we could be ice-free in the Arctic by 2016 (search my book, Hell and High Water for “ice-free”).

[More]

Gore uses facts. His opponents distort his comments and call him a liar. Watch the video they put together. They talk about surface area of ice, not the volume. They lie about what he said and then smear him.

Ice extent has its uses but is not what Gore described at all. Ice extent is only a two dimensional view. Ice volume describes the entire quantity of ice in the Arctic. The ice has been thinning out each year. So the surface area of ice is about the same but the volume has been decreasing at a rapid rate.There is a thinner and thinner shell of ice in the Arctic summer each year. Current trends indicate that this shell may be so thin in a few years that it could be non-existent.

The denialists’ argument is that as long as the extent of that shell, even if it is millimeters thick, remains the same, things are great. That is a lie.

To try and claim that things are actually getting better is to do more than simply getting something wrong. It actually requires knowingly misrepresenting the facts in a way to further an objective. Or we could just call it lying.

Let’s look at who is bearing false witness. The volume of Arctic sea ice has dropped precipitously. There is data to show this. Look at this figure that Climate Progress references:

Just a few years ago, researchers were saying that the Arctic might be ice free in 50 years or so. Now some data indicates that there might be little ice during the summer before 2020. We could argue about the validity of the models or whether more recent data suggests a similar trend. That would be what rational people do. Something Gore would have done. Something few deniaists do.

Let’s look at a little recent data. The thickest, multiyear ice has decreased substantially in winter since 2005. The overall thickness has decreased by 0.6 meters in 4 years. The trendline here would result in zero thickness in about 13 years. A wide extent of a very thin piece of ice would, to the denialists, indicate that everything is just fine. Few rational people would agree.

Finally, the volume of multi-year ice, that is the ice that does not melt in the summer, lost in the last 4 years is about 6300 cubic kilometers (0.63 in the graph above).It is very possible that the volume of ice during this last year was the lowest ever.

Currently, much of this lost volume is being replaced by first-year ice, which is much thinner (this figure shows the winter volume, which should represent the peak volume).

In 4 years from 2004 to 2008, the amount of multi-year ice in the winter dropped from 11,000 to 4700 cubic kilometers. That trend would result in the complete loss of multi-year ice in about 4 years., with its replacement mostly by first year ice.

The overall trend in the loss of volume since 2004 is about 1 cubic kilometer a year, which corresponds to the black line in the first figure.

By definition, first year ice did not exist in prior years. That means that as more and more multi-year ice is replaced by first-year ice, it becomes more and more likely that there will be no ice at some period during the year. The black line reaches the zero point about 2016.

That is what the data regarding volume shows. There continues to be a significant drop in Arctic sea ice volume, mainly due to loss of multi-year ice. The trends that were seen using data and models up to 2004 have continued to be seen with data collected from 2004 to 2008. If there is no significant change in the trend, which has now extends over a decade, then there could likely be an ice-free Arctic during the summer months around 2016.

Those are the numbers and that is pretty much what Gore said. All it takes is a few minutes using Google to find this data. It is written in language that is understandable for anyone who really wants to understand. The data demonstrate that Gore was not lying.

But the denialists take a different tack entirely. They do effectively lie. They take a cherry-picked set of data that does not have anything to do with what Gore said. Then they smear him. No one does that by mistake.

Gore simply described what scientists have written. The denialists misrepresented what he said and accused him of lying. As Al Franken, paraphrasing Patrick Moynihan, recently said, “We are entitled to our own opinions; we are not entitled to our own facts.”

Tell that to the denialists. They have a deranged opinion and then misrepresent the facts to support that opinion. Gore did not misrepresent the facts. A priori, which one should be listened to? The one who correctly states data in order to educate or those who misrepresent data to smear an opponent?

This sort of response by denialists is pretty typical. Use of rhetorical tricks rather than actual data. Ad hominems against opponents. It is usually fairly easy to see who is lying. Unfortunately, some people feel much more comfortable with lies than with reality.