Adventures Of The Minute Women -
A Prayer For Our Political Future

Another chapter with a lecture in it.  How else would you know that it's me? As this is the last chapter, I wanted to end with an uplifting message.  I also wanted to say that there are things each of us can do that would make America better.  Of course, as an economist/social scientist, I am well aware of the 'free rider' problem.  It really will only matter in aggregate if a good fraction of the overall population will do these things.  And if the things are costly to do, then there is incentive for each individual to avoid doing them.  The individual incurs the cost and one person's behavior won't impact the aggregate in a large population. This is very much like the 'paradox of voting' which we have partially overcome but certainly not fully.  I thought the analogy with forming a new habit was useful, because that is the way this better behavior can be sustained. I must say, there are reasons to be pessimistic about all of this.  Even though I...

As a voter, as a consumer, and previously as a campus administrator I have/had an intense dislike for unsolicited contact, invariably with the intent of a hard sell.  Robocalls are the absolute worst of these.  If you want an example where technology has made things worse, that is it.  Emails are a close second.  I still get many of these as if I am still an administrator, even though I retired a dozen years ago. Then there are those who come door to door. There seems to be a romanticized notion of making this type of contact.   When it is a kid selling something, then okay, especially if the kid is from the neighborhood.  The political solicitations and the offering of home services/products this way, I don't like.  I'm uncomfortable with strangers in this circumstance and can't have conversations easily on these topics with somebody I don't know. Much of what I wrote about regarding the relationship between Liaisons and Affiliate candidates refl...

In Elena's speech, a big thing is made of tracking numbers.  That's about how many Affiliates there are.  But more than numbers need to be tracked.  Consider, in particular, the case of a Republican Affiliate in a state and/or in a Congressional district where the Republican candidate does not support The Minute Women's principles.  What does this Affiliate do at the ballot box or, indeed, does the Affiliate choose to abstain from voting (at least in those races) rather than vote for the Democratic candidate? Abstaining can be thought of as one less vote for the Republican candidate.  Voting for the Democratic candidate is both one less vote for the Republican candidate and one more vote for the Democratic candidate.  Aggregating over all the Republican Affiliates, it matters which of these choices likely will be made.  That needs to be tracked as well as the numbers in themselves.  An additional thing that matters this way is whether the Affiliat...

In preparation for writing this chapter I did a bit of look up on the composition of the Supreme Court in 1973, when Roe was decided.  The results can be found in this Excel file or in the screen shot below. Comparing then to now, there were 6 Justices nominated by Republican Presidents in each case.  But in 1973, 5 of those Justices supported the Roe decision (and 1 of the 3 Justices nominated by a Democratic President did not).  This illustrates pretty starkly that over those almost 50 years, the Republican party has moved a great deal to the right. It made me wonder whether Republican voters all moved along with that or if instead it was the uber rich, evangelical Christians, and the MAGA types who moved way to the right, while others remained much more moderate.    I did not include this reference explicitly in Chapter 11 , but underlying the ideas there is that many Republican voters are still located near the middle on the left-right spectrum.  If th...

The reader will have no way of knowing this, but getting Elena to take over from Caroline is a way for me to mark a change in my own thinking, both about the story line and about the underlying ideas.  There is some foreshadowing of this early in the chapter where Elena engages in reflection about how to get things done.  Implicitly, she is also engaging in what should be done. This chapter serves as setup for the next, which have the most important ideas in the book. Much of that I only began to realize as I was writing Chapter 10. 

For anyone following this novelette in serial form, it will be evident that the chapter flow stopped more than a month ago. I hope to begin it again in the near future. Part of the issue was involvement with another project. Another part was writer's block. I think I'm past that now and can complete the work.

Near the end of this chapter we take up the issue whether The Minute Women, sans Caroline, will be taken as a shill of the Democratic Party.  If so, it would seem to doom their goal of getting many Republican voters as supporters.   I likewise have wondered in writing the entire book whether I've been sufficiently even handed to get Republican readers or if they'd find what is argued too over the top.   In the absence of a real world group like The Minute Women in the book, my hope is that the book itself would spread the word about these issues and/or a few early readers embrace the themes of the book and it is them who spread the word. The question is whether this can be done largely in a nonpartisan way.  I hope that is possible but I'm not sure it is. I also want to note that I was quite unsure of the remaining plot when writing this chapter.  Would Caroline come back or not?  This was a mystery not just for the reader.  I was unsure abou...

This chapter marks the beginning of some changes in my own thinking.  I had previously thought that some extralegal steps would be necessary to get to the goals that The Minute Women wanted to achieve.  But I began to see this was a non-starter and the story from here on out would have to focus on legal alternatives only.  There is mention in the chapter that some organization outside of The Minute Women might take extralegal measures and do so without the knowledge of The Minute Women.  But that line is not pursued in the rest of the story.  I don't want to deny that the possibility remains, but here I think it is a distraction more than anything else.  The chapter also highlights the enormous pressure that Caroline has been operating under, pressure that she didn't anticipate at the outset.  This strain is noticeable to others.  The Congressman saw it in the previous chapter.  Mark Askren sees it in this one. This parallels my on experience...

This chapter plays a straightforward role, to establish that the white papers by The Minute Women are being taken seriously within Congress.  This is a different way to measure their impact, apart from the number of hits and the number of comments online.   It also establishes an insider connection between The Minute Women and Congress, which can serve to coordinate activity.  That is not a big deal for the story.  But if such an effort were to actually occur, it might matter a lot.  The chapter also foreshadows what comes next in the story.  That politicians worry about potential violent threats, to themselves and to those they care about, must be comparatively new.  It surely is part of the equation now.

This is the chapter with the cheat that was mentioned in the Preface.  The initial video goes viral.  Presumably, it tapped into some as of yet unfilled need. I have to say here that this goes well beyond anything I have ever experienced.  I have had reader reactions to my online writing that were strongly positive and similarly I've had such reactions to some of the (instructional) videos I've made.  But that has never created a chain reaction of new readers or new viewers. So this chapter is more fantasy than anything else.   The chapter makes a point of distinguishing hits on the white papers, which grow but in a more modest way, from hits on the videos, which grow in a viral way.  The videos themselves are readings of the executive summaries from the white papers.  So a lot of people are getting an overview, and seem to be engaged with that, but much fewer are getting the in depth argument in the white papers.   I wrote this as my wa...

This was the first chapter where some of the ideas weren't there at the beginning.  That writing produces discovery of new thoughts - I think it's called writing to learn - is quite familiar to me.  The part that was new here is the time lag it took to produce the new thoughts, weeks instead of hours or days.  One advantage for me as a learner is to allow that sort of gestation period to occur on its own by staying with the overall project for a greater length of time. In this case the big connection is that for Checks and Balances to be effective, it must result in compromise.  Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court instead of Robert Bork provides a great example.   The issue of how far we might go in order to achieve an effective compromise is not something we talk about much these days.  I slipped in something of this sort into the narrative when Caroline observes that her father was a Reagan Republican.  In much writing by liberals (which I'm mo...

Before writing this chapter I spent several days searching the Internet and reading pieces about possible malfeasance by Trump and Republicans in Congress.  I must admit that beforehand I was unaware of the role played by the National Rifle Association and the strong possibility that Russia penetrated the organization. I found this column by Michelle Goldberg extremely interesting. But it raised issues for me that are beyond my ability to resolve. Why weren't there more such columns?  Is this a bid deal or not?   I didn't write explicitly about this, but Trump being unwilling to release his tax returns seems to me to be a huge story.  It may go beyond fraud that he was trying to conceal.  It may also make more evident the Russian connection. Again, the tax returns story was reported on, but then it receded into the background.  Why was that? One other comment about the chapter bears mentioning.  The first half of it is on the more mundane aspects...

Somebody should write a "what if" history of America that begins with the Senate following the Advice and Consent process after President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  Our history surely would have been quite different had that happened.  I think it is important to dwell on this particular egregious violation of the Constitution, rather than move on, because it seems so pivotal in retrospect.  As I noted in the chapter, it might have seemed more pivotal in the prospect if we got past reporting about polling that predicts the popular vote and instead focused on polling that predicts the vote in the Electoral College.   This is also one that can't be pinned on Trump.  It was the Republicans in the Senate who did this on their own, without knowing yet who would be their candidate for President.  It may not be the "first cause" for all that ensued, but it surely was a very important one.  I want to observe one other thing....

This is probably a little campy, but Caroline explaining things to Jackie offers me to explain things to the reader.  The question, then, is this.  Does the reader buy the explanation? My guess is that for most Democrats, they would have no problem with the explanation whatsoever.  For those who still support Trump, in contrast, they would find the argument bogus.  There were no crimes - by Trump and thus no crimes by Congress.  The audience that remains a mystery to me is the so-called no-longer Trumpers. Their situation is taken up some in Chapter 11, but it takes a while to get there.  In the meantime, how do they regard the argument?  I'm quite sure they want all of this to go away, like trying to forget a bad dream.  But denying reality is not a good option.  This won't go away.  How they come down on the argument is critical in determining whether The Minute women can reach their goal. It may very well be that the specifics of the ...

If you go further in the book and read about the work of The Minute Women, you then have to wonder what type of person would start such an organization.   My thinking was to get a talented and committed person, otherwise ordinary, who becomes totally extraordinary because of unanticipated life events.  The role played by the unanticipated passing of Caroline's father is to provide those extraordinary circumstances.  That is the main reason the story begins with that.  There is a secondary purpose as well, to give Caroline startup funds via her inheritance so that didn't provide an obstacle, at least not initially.  I want to take a step back here and ask why couldn't an ordinary person under ordinary circumstances (admittedly during Covid nothing really has been ordinary) be taken as the one to initiate The Minute Women?  The answer, I hope this is obvious so I don't need to argue it at length, is that the odds initially of such a venture succeeding wo...