Screenshot from a video of Donald Trump and Billy Bush that made national headlines during the presidential race.
Mark Feinberg, a clinical psychologist and health and human development research professor at Penn State, recently wrote an op-ed about the psychology of bullying in relation to some events during the 2016 presidential campaign. Here’s an excerpt:
“There are parallels here to the peer dynamics involved in bullying among kids. Researchers observe that there are more than just bullies and victims in schoolyard bullying situations. The bully often has lieutenants and supporters, and the presence of these kids creates enough fear to help silence and control the largest group of kids: the silent bystanders. One component of anti-bullying programs is sending the message to bystanders that silence enables more bullying, that they share in the responsibility if they don’t at least tell an adult.
Mark Feinberg
“But how do bullies and their lieutenants form their loyal mutual-aggression pacts with each other? How do they know they can trust each other? After all, they surely don’t say, ‘If I go trip Bethany, will you guys to stand there and scare her friends into silence?’ Researchers have discovered that one important bonding mechanism is ‘deviant talk.’ Although a terrible label, deviant talk refers to the usually jovial and spirited discussions among kids that center on antisocial, anti-authority or aggressive themes. For the kids who engage in it, deviant talk is downright enjoyable—it usually involves a lot of laughter and fun. And this shared laughter and encouragement reinforces kids’ existing tendencies toward oppositional, delinquent or violent behavior. Research shows that deviant talk among friends or siblings predicts increased levels of antisocial and aggressive behavior from year to year.”
Exceptions prove the rule. Extremes reveal what is indispensable.
The phenomenon “Trump” is both an exception and an extreme: His brand of politics proves and reveals just how important democratic civility is to a vibrant democracy.
As a philosopher who looks at the the ways in which emotions impact political freedom, I am interested in how humans have established civility and how we sustain and strengthen it in order to bequeath it to future generations of citizens.
Modeling uncivil behavior
From the very beginning of his run for the White House in June 2015, Donald Trump has demeaned and insulted American Muslims, Mexican Americans, journalists, women, U.S. generals, President Obama, the Republican speaker of the house, beauty contestants and many more. In fact, just days before the election, The New York Times compiled a list of the 282 people, places and things Trump has insulted on Twitter.
Trump the candidate has, over the past 15 months, modeled and sanctioned the kind of uncivil discourse and behavior that has not been acceptable since the 19th century, in which candidates would call each other “atheists,” “murderers,” “pimps” and all kind of character assassination epitaphs. In the case of then Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, they went so far as to duel unto death.
Among the slogans coined by Trump’s supporters, one of the least offensive, because of its brevity, but most enlightening, is “Trump that Bitch.” This slogan reveals that his supporters understand something about their candidate: that Trump is a verb of maximal violence.
It is one thing, however, to insult an opponent. It is another to gratuitously demean innocent bystanders. What Trump has excelled at, and what makes him fall outside the mainstream of U.S. political discourse and culture, is his cruelty. As political theorist Judith Shklar famously claimed, in her book “Ordinary Vices,” cruelty is the summun malum, or “supreme evil,” of civil democracies, a moral and political failure that must be avoided at all costs.
That Shklar thought cruelty the worst thing that a democrat can do underlines one of the essential dimensions of democratic civility in which we acknowledge each other’s equality and liberty.
Civility: A history
“Civility” – the word and the concept – has a long and meandering history.
It begins in the 4th century B.C., in Greece, with Aristotle’s use of the expression “koinia politike” to refer to the type of human connection that happens in the polis (city) and the agora (gathering place) that is different from the type of relationship that we find in the private sphere, the space of the family.
Bruni’s translation unleashed a series of linguistic innovations but also ambiguities.
Civil society is linguistically related to city, civil, civilization and another term that is difficult to translated into English, the French word “civilité.” This term is sometimes translated as “having or related to good manners,” or etiquette.
It was the translation into French of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s 1530 book “De civilitate morum puerilium” (On Good Manners for Boys) that popularized the word civilité. In this book, and in similar texts aimed at the general civic education of Christians, Erasmus linked civil and moral virtues.
Good manners are a sign of moral excellence. For Erasmus civilité is not simply a mask, a way of comporting oneself in “polite” society, but a way of relating to oneself. How we treat others reveals how we treat ourselves morally in as much as we treat others as moral equals. To have good manners, then, is a sign of one’s membership in a community of mutual regard and mutual respect.
What sometimes gets lost in the translations, but which is nonetheless buried deep in the semantic layers of the word civitas, is that this virtue of mutual regard is directed at strangers.
In the polis, or city, strangers gather as equals. Civility, in other words, is an ethics of respect for strangers. It therefore follows that how you treat strangers is the measure of your moral excellence.
The process of civilizing
In his seminal book, “The Civilizing Process,” sociologist Norbert Elias argues that there is a genealogy that links the evolution of “manners” with the development of “state formation” or the rule of law. Governing, or what we call “administration,” presupposes a modus vivendi that is enacted through rules of political etiquette.
Where did these manners come from? They are the descendants of Christian virtues such as charity and gratitude. They are adaptations of the customs or courtesies practiced at royal courts. Courtesy may have, over time, acquired negative connotations associated with deception and a hollow respectability. But what civility retains from the notion of courtesy is the idea of nobility. Democratic civility can therefore be seen as the nobility of a citizenry that treats itself with moral and political regard.
Elias’ genealogy confirms the association that Erasmus made centuries earlier. Civility is, on the one hand, manners or behavior in public, and, on the other, an ethical relationship with oneself.
The point to underline here is that both Erasmus and Elias make us aware that democratic civility is not a natural state but demands work: It is one of the accomplishments of civilization.
Democratic hope
Political philosopher Richard Boyd has referred to civility as a restraint on political discourse. I would argue that this restraint is also a form of democratic care and solicitude. With both restraint and solicitude, civility enables democratic hope and human solidarity.
The arc of the moral universe that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of so many times is bent toward justice by the discourse of equals who revel in their difference.
Trumpism may have vulgarized and debased our electoral politics, but he has also unwittingly illuminated brilliantly one of our proudest and greatest accomplishments: a civil democracy that elevates and does not denigrate, that inspires hope and not cynicism and that models moral and political excellence.
News organizations widely report that there are 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. But where does this figure come from?
Donald Trump has falselyasserted: “It could be three million. It could be 30 million. They have no idea what the number is.”
Jennifer Van Hook
In the third debate, Hillary Clinton said, “We have 11 million undocumented people. They [undocumented parents] have 4 million American citizen children. 15 million people.”
The confusion is warranted. After all, the U.S. Census Bureau does not ask people about their immigration status, so how can we know much about the unauthorized foreign-born population?
Well, demographers have figured out a simple and effective way to estimate the number of unauthorized immigrants. In the last five years, my colleagues Frank D. Bean, James D. Bachmeier and I have conducted a seriesofstudies that evaluate this method and its assumptions. Our research on the methods used to estimate the size of this group indicates that these estimates are reasonably accurate.
Here’s how it works.
A simple formula
Beginning in the late 1970s, a group of demographers consisting primarily of Jeffrey Passel, Robert Warren, Jacob Siegel, Gregory Robinson and Karen Woodrow introduced the “residual method” for estimating the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the country. At the time, Passel and his collaborators were affiliated with the U.S. Bureau of the Census and Warren with the Office of Immigration Statistics of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Much of this work was published in the form of internal reports, but some of it appearedinmajorjournals.
The residual method uses an estimate of the total foreign-born population in the country (F), based on U.S. Census data. Researchers then subtract from it the number of legal immigrants residing here (L), estimated from government records of legal immigrants who receive “green cards” minus the number that died or left the country. The result is an estimate of the unauthorized population (U):
F – L = U
Various adjustments are typically made to this formula. Most adjustments are minor, but a particularly important one adjusts for what researchers call “coverage error” among the unauthorized foreign-born. Coverage error occurs when the census data underestimate the size of a group. This can occur when people live in nonresidential or unconventional locations – such as on the streets or in a neighbor’s basement – or when they fail to respond to the census. Coverage error could be particularly high among unauthorized immigrants because they may be trying to avoid detection.
Currently, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pew Hispanic Center are the two major producers of estimates of the unauthorized foreign-born population. This report, compiled by Passel, who now works at Pew, summarizes many of the estimates. It shows that the estimated number increased steadily from 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million in 2007, but declined between 2007 and 2009 and has since stabilized at around 11 million.
How accurate are the estimates?
The residual method has been widely used and accepted since the late 1970s. Within a reasonable margin of error, it predicted the number of unauthorized immigrants to legalize under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which, among other things, granted permanent residency status to unauthorized immigrants who had been living in the country since 1982. The residual method predicted that about 2.2 million met the residency requirement and the actual number to come forward was about 1.7 million.
Both Department of Homeland Security and Pew have used the residual method to produce estimates of the unauthorized population since 2005. Despite using slightly different data and assumptions, Pew’s and the Department of Homeland Security’s estimates have never differed by more than 600,000 people, or 5.5 percent of the total unauthorized population.
Nevertheless, many skeptics question a key assumption of the residual method, which is that unauthorized immigrants participate in census surveys. Both Pew and the Department of Homeland Security inflate their estimates to account for the possibility that some unauthorized immigrants are missing from census data. Pew inflates by 13 percent and the Department of Homeland Security by 10 percent. But is this enough?
My colleagues and I estimated coverage error among Mexican immigrants, a group that composes 60 percent of all unauthorized immigrants. Even if they are not counted in a census, populations leave “fingerprints” of their presence in the form of deaths and births. Because people give birth and die with known regularity regardless of their legal status, we were able to use birth and death records of all Mexican-born persons to determine the number of the Mexican-born persons living in the U.S. We also looked at changes in Mexican census data between 1990 and 2010 to gauge the size of Mexico’s “missing” population, most of whom moved to the United States.
We then compared these estimates based on births, deaths and migration with the number of estimated Mexican immigrants in census data.
Based on this analysis, we found that the census missed as many as 26 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the early 2000s. We speculated that this could have been due to the large numbers of temporary Mexican labor migrants who were living in the United States at the time. Because many worked in construction during the housing boom and lived in temporary housing arrangements, it may have been particularly difficult to accurately account for them in census surveys. However, when the Great Recession and housing crisis hit, many of these temporary workers went home or stopped coming to the U.S. in the first place, and coverage error declined. By 2010, the coverage error may have been as low as 6 percent.
If current levels of coverage error for all unauthorized immigrants were as high as 26 percent, then the number living in the country could be as high as 13 million. But if coverage error were as low as 6 percent, then the figure could be as low as 10.3 million.
What this boils down to is that we have a pretty good idea of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. It most likely falls within a narrow range somewhere between 10.3 million and 13 million. If coverage error has declined as much as we think it has, then the truth is at the lower end of this range. Despite widespread beliefs, unauthorized immigration is not increasing out of control and certainly is not as high as 30 million. Instead, it has probably really has stabilized somewhere around 11 million.
