It’s rare to see a macroeconomics experiment play out in real time in the way we are seeing it right now in Japan and Europe.  Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has embarked on aggressive measures to stimulate Japan’s long-moribund economy since he took office in December, and the result so far has been strong growth — and, perhaps, liftoff after a triple-dip recession. Europe, on the other hand, remains mired in the muck of austerity and economic contraction.

To briefly recap Japan’s economic woes: the Japanese economy has been largely stagnant for the last two decades. Since the financial crisis in 2008, it has gone through three bouts of negative growth. Its economic output per person — GDP per capita — was actually lower in 2012 than it was in 2008.

In the economics profession, this is what they refer to in technical terms as “not good.”

However, Japan’s economy surged in the first quarter of this year, growing at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent. For its part, the Abe administration credits a three-pronged economic strategy, dubbed Abenomics: “unprecedented monetary stimulus, a big boost to government spending, and structural reforms designed to make Japanese industry and institutions more competitive.”

Then there’s Europe, which refuses to shift away from austerity. Its economy shrank for the sixth consecutive quarter — its longest downturn since World War II.

“The real economy is responding [in Japan],” said Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “The last five, six months, there’s been a mini consumer boom. All the things that people said could never happen in Japan have turned around.”

He added: “Japan’s central bank is supporting recovery, and it’s working. The European Central Bank is supporting stagnation, and it’s working.”

Some in Europe understand that austerity is the problem, not the solution. Unfortunately, that “some” does not include the people making the decisions:

“The elites in Europe don’t learn,” said Stephan Schulmeister, an economist with the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. “Instead of saying, ‘Something goes wrong, we have to reconsider or find a different navigation map, change course,’ instead what happens is more of the same.”

Schulmeister added that German Chancellor Angela Merkel — austerity’s champion and the one person who could push Europe to change course — is “not willing to learn” the lesson offered by Japan’s recent switch from contraction to growth.

Apparently, Europe (read: Germany) sees austerity as a kind of “morality play” whereby the profligate must suffer for their sins. And yet the people most responsible for Europe’s economic crisis are the ones suffering the least from austerity. Although unemployment in the euro zone reached a new high in March, you don’t see bankers and politicians on the unemployment line. What’s really immoral is an austerity policy that punishes the innocent while one guilty party bails out the other.

Regardless of who is hurting, austerity is simply not always the best way to achieve its supposed goal: reducing government deficits. As Europe reminds us, it prevents recession-battered economies from growing. The alternative is to prime the economic pump by having governments engage in fiscal and monetary stimulus. When economies grow under this approach, Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman argue, governments collect more in the way of revenues, straightening out their finances faster than they would by reducing their spending.

Once a country’s economy is again operating at capacity, government should cut spending — and increase taxes on those who can afford it — in order to deal with the problem of deficits in a balanced, moral way that neither grievously harms the economically vulnerable nor sacrifices the long-term investments by government that are necessary to further growth over time.

The lessons to be drawn from the recession are counterintuitive. The dominant morality tells us to tighten our belts and save up. But if the government as well as the private sector hoards cash during a recession, the economy slows to a crawl. That is the kind of economic suicide that Europe has leaped into: painful cuts, no growth, and rampant unemployment. America has avoided the worst of Europe’s fate thanks in part to the stimulus passed in 2009, and Japan, at last, looks to be hurtling in the opposite direction due to its recent stimulative policies. The key question is whether the pro-austerity politicians who currently control the purse strings in Washington and Brussels will take a hard look at the evidence accumulating around them — or retreat back into their comfortable, self-righteous views of the world.

John Maynard Keynes, the father of the proactive approach to economic policy that now bears his name, had something to say on this topic as well.  Responding to a critic who questioned his shifting position on monetary policy during the Great Depression, the British economist answered: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

The U.S. Census Bureau just released its report on voter turnout in America’s 2012 presidential elections. For the first time, the percentage of eligible blacks who voted surpassed that of eligible whites. Meanwhile, explosive growth in the country’s Asian and Hispanic populations continues to mean that those who go to the polls are increasingly nonwhite.

The turnout story is not just about Barack Obama running for president. In 1996, when the government began to collect this kind of data,  whites outvoted blacks by eight percentage points. Black turnout has increased in every election since then.

The turnout rates for Hispanics and Asians — both just shy of 50 percent — continue to lag far behind the other two groups, with much smaller gains over the years. And yet their share of the voting public almost doubled over that same span of sixteen years, even as the white share of voters dropped nine percentage points, to 74 percent.

Furthermore, partisanship is becoming more racial and regional. In the last four elections, Republicans have tended to get just under three-fifths of the white vote, while Democrats have consistently drawn about nine-tenths of the black vote (only slightly higher with Obama on the ballot). Meanwhile, Hispanic and Asian voters have moved significantly toward Democrats. Between 2004 and 2012, the Asian Democratic vote jumped 17 points, to 73 percent, while the Hispanic Democratic vote jumped 18 points, to 71 percent. Across that same period of time, the white vote for Democrats was lower in the South than any other region, and lowest in the deepest Southern states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama). 

It does not bode well for the GOP that its voters were almost 90 percent white in 2012.  If America’s minority voters continue to turn out for Democrats, and their share of the population continues to grow as rapidly as projected, it will become ever harder for Republicans to win the White House.

I am a progressive, but I don’t celebrate these trends. For the sake of this country’s multiethnic democracy, I want Republicans to do better among nonwhite voters. A society where ethnicity defines the political parties is doomed to disaster. The political process becomes a zero-sum game where each ethnic group fights for its share of the pie. Any commitment to a broader common good is lost, as is any sense that citizens of different backgrounds can come together and feel a strong patriotic bond.

My hope is that the GOP’s leaders read these numbers and adopt both a tone and policy stances that unite rather than divide. Too many on the right — from Rush Limbaugh to Mitt Romney to Sarah Palin — have sought to gin up white anxiety over demographic changes, to motivate white voters by fear.

Giving up this losing strategy is the best way to win over the growing ranks of minority voters. We’ll see in the coming months whether that happens. The impending vote over immigration reform will be a crucial test. But for the health of their party — and the health of our country — Republicans need to change.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

After protracted, months-long negotiations, Kosovo and Serbia recently agreed to a compromise on sovereignty and autonomy that would end two decades of conflict. In extinguishing the last embers of war in what was Yugoslavia — the volatile, ethnically divided nation where the assassination of an Austrian archduke launched World War I, and where civil war throughout the nineties led to ethnic cleansing and other atrocities — Europe is nearing the end of its long journey to overcome its tribal enmities and build a cohesive, peaceful civilization.

These hopeful developments overseas have been on my mind recently. This semester, I’ve been teaching a course built around on the debate within the West over human nature: What are we? What can we be? Why do we act the way we do? John Locke argued that we are born a blank slate, that our experiences and interactions form our character. Overall, Enlightenment thinkers believed people could, if properly educated, learn to act solely based on reason.

My students later encounter Friedrich Nietzsche, who praised the “will to power” as motivating the strong to dominate, and Sigmund Freud, who feared that our inclination toward aggression could destroy civilization. Freud believed that although we could be rational at times, we’d never “enlighten” away our instinctual impulses. He recognized Nazism as the extreme manifestation of these impulses, a system based on hate that rejected the idea of justice — that the strong must be prevented from subjugating the weak — on which rested his definition of civilization.

Centuries after the Enlightenment, we’ve arrived at a more humble view of the possibilities of reforming human nature. We’ve seen too much evil — above all, in the cataclysm of World War II — to expect a paradise of reason. Yet democracy, significant warts and all, stands virtually alone in a West that has rejected Nazism and communism. Although they don’t always live up to them, democracies operate from principles centered on equality before the law. Democracy proclaims that the strong cannot — by virtue of their will to power — claim the right to dominate the weak.

Serbia holds some of the last vestiges of Europe’s ancient blood feuds. In the 1990s, Serbs clung to the idea that racial superiority justified their rule over supposedly inferior neighbors. Serbian ethnic nationalism stirred up people’s base instincts, fomenting hate as a motivation for murder and conquest.

The European Union, alternatively, appealed to reason. It offered little in the way of emotional attraction or visceral triumphs, and drew on no traditional identities. During the 1990s, the EU’s expansion into Eastern Europe stood alongside the tribal bloodshed unleashed in the former Yugoslavia by Serb leader Slobodan Milošević.

One question I’ve posed in my class is whether Europeans will ultimately choose EU integration over ethnic nationalism. Membership in the European Union — which, despite the travails of Greece and Cyprus, offers the promise of greater prosperity — is a strong incentive to choose peace. And yet Freud’s concern about humanity’s indelible aggressive urges remains relevant. One country can drag a continent into darkness.

The key question for Serbia, in Freud’s terms, has been which part of its “mind” will triumph: the id — its nonrational instincts — or the superego — the part that suppresses those instincts in favor of pursuing the norms of “civilization” and the material benefits that accompany it.

The compromise between Serbia and Kosovo is a sign that reason has won out. The EU brokered the agreement, and made clear that its acceptance removes the existing roadblocks to membership for both countries. Each one moved off its maximalist positions — despite the emotional cost of those concessions — because the benefits outweighed that cost. That’s a rational decision of the kind Freud wasn’t confident societies would make.

Civilization will always have challenges to overcome, but the end of racial wars of conquest in a continent long riven by them gives hope that humanity is, finally, making progress.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

Prejudice can kill. George Zimmerman saw a young black male wearing a hoodie, and made a decision that reflected the dictionary definition of prejudice — a “preconceived judgment or opinion … An adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.” Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator of a gated community in Sanford, Florida, didn’t know Trayvon Martin, the teenager he followed. Martin didn’t do anything specific that would have been suspicious to an unprejudiced observer. He was unarmed and gave no indication that he harbored criminal intent of any kind. Zimmerman simply prejudged him. And it cost Martin — a seventeen-year-old out to buy some Skittles — his life.

Prejudice killed Trayvon Martin. But there are other, less obvious forms of prejudice, ones that even those of us who would rightly condemn a man like Zimmerman might be tempted to practice and justify.

Recently, I had a disagreement with friends over the PBS documentary Kind Hearted Woman, which profiles the Oglala Sioux woman Robin Charboneau, a divorced single mother and recovering alcoholic living on North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation. The filmmaker, David Sutherland — who also made the celebrated 1998 documentary The Farmer’s Wife — is white. 

My friends argued that only someone who was Sioux  — or at least Native  — could do justice to the life experience of this woman, who as a child endured repeated rapes and molestation at the hands of her foster family and as an adult struggles to win custody of her kids and take her ex-husband to court over the abuse of her daughter. They were particularly upset that someone like Sutherland was doing the film, given the centuries of injustices that white men have inflicted on American Indians. For his part, Sutherland has said that he originally meant for the documentary to focus on the theme of abuse on the prairie — “My thought was, middle-aged white men have caused [Native Americans] enough trouble” — but after interviewing fifty women, he settled on Robin. (Since the film’s completion, Robin has decided to go by Robin Poor Bear, using her mother’s last name rather than her ex-husband’s).

I can respect and sympathize with the criticisms that my friends made. There is understandable sensitivity about who tells the stories of historically disadvantaged groups, given the barriers they have faced in telling their own stories in Hollywood and elsewhere. For American Indians, these concerns are all the more poignant: well into the twentieth century, the U.S. government sought to wipe out their tribal cultures (a campaign darkly remembered in the phrase, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man“).

But fundamentally, this line of criticism — that artists or writers can’t tell a particular story because they are of a different ethnic background from the subjects of the film or history — is a form of prejudice, too. It may not have the life-and-death stakes of the kind of prejudice that motivated George Zimmerman, but it is prejudice nonetheless.

This is a topic I’ve written about in the past. When his book The Corner was turned into an HBO miniseries, David Simon came under fire. The plight of black drug addicts in Baltimore was not “his story to tell,” critics said, because Simon is white. What I wrote back then applies to today’s criticism of Kind Hearted Woman as well:

This assumes that only black people can or should write about black people, and implies that there exists a single, unanimous perspective that all black Americans hold.

Many black Americans did not grow up in an inner-city community, so they would not be any better ”witnesses” than Mr. Simon to such a story. If this philosophy is pushed to its fullest conclusion, only autobiographies will become acceptable representations of life. If we accept that race and ethnicity have trumped our ability to understand, empathize and write about the sufferings or joys of those with whom we share this country, we are finished as a society.

Of course, The Corner would go on to inspire Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire,  which the current president and prominent African American scholars alike have lauded as a deeply realistic and moving portrait of inner-city America and a groundbreaking analysis of the roots of urban inequality.

And that is my point: if someone of any background tells the story of a community or ethnic group in a way that is disrespectful or just plain wrong, by all means call them out on it. Yes, history has countless examples of stories that have been misused, misappropriated, or simply stolen for personal gain. But assuming that there is one acceptable perspective (or that all or most people from a particular group share that perspective) is prejudice, any way you look at it. And if we argue that prejudice is acceptable in the “right” circumstances, then how do we, as a society, determine which are those circumstances? This kind of thinking just provides intellectual cover for those who would justify racial profiling. It becomes harder to argue that prejudice is wrong in certain cases when you insist it is okay in others.

In short, we have to take a morally consistent approach. We should judge people based on what they do, not on a simplistic group label. We must loudly condemn prejudice of all kinds, and not just the kinds that seem the most harmful to us. That is the best way to overcome the strain of deluded and dangerous thinking that led George Zimmerman to get out of his car that February night in Sanford.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

I have a remarkable story to tell you about forgiveness. A week ago, a man named Elwin Wilson died. A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Wilson was part of a group of white men who attacked two Freedom Riders in South Carolina in 1961. The victims, one white and one black, were traveling together throughout the South to protest Jim Crow segregation laws, and had stopped in a bus station in Rock Hill. When the two dared to step foot in a waiting area marked as “whites only,” Wilson and his group jumped them, leaving them bloodied.

The two Freedom Riders, Albert Bigelow and John Lewis, refused to fight back and did not press charges. Lewis, a pacifist, later became the chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a major leader in the civil rights movement. Decades later, he bears visible scars from having his skull fractured on “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state troopers beat civil rights protesters during the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

Four years ago, the story took an amazing turn. Wilson, then in his seventies, sought out the civil rights protesters he had harmed and asked for forgiveness. He learned that one of them was Lewis, now a Georgia congressman.

Lewis not only accepted Wilson’s apology — the first one, he noted, that any white supremacist had ever offered him — he also went on the road with his old nemesis. The two appeared on Oprah and accepted recognition from various organizations. Lewis said he wanted to use the occasion as an opportunity for racial reconciliation. It brought to mind words that the Reverend Martin Luther King once spoke of the day that “the lion and the lamb shall lie down together” — the one-time oppressor and one-time victim now hailing each other as “friend,” with the irony that their positions of power had been, in many ways, reversed.

At the end of his life, Wilson revealed a fundamental decency. If we had grown up in the same climate of hate, how many of us would have had the strength not just to overcome it, but to reach out to those we had wronged so many years ago? We should recognize men and women like Wilson who radically change for the better, who embrace love and reject hate.

But I also want to emphasize the courage it took for Lewis to accept that apology. Forgiving someone who not only beat you but rejected your very humanity takes tremendous character. It requires denying a very natural desire to hurt the person who hurt you, to inflict some of the pain that person inflicted on you, even if not through an equivalent act of violence.

Rather than taking his crimes with him to the grave, Wilson repented. Rather than indulge the impulse for vengeance, Lewis forgave. We could all learn from their example.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

In a recent email exchange, an acquaintance wrote, “I’ve got nothing but love for my culture and my people.” As someone who writes about ethnic and national identity, this statement immediately piqued my interest.

When spoken by a person of color, as it was in this case, this sentiment comes across as an uncomplicated and straightforward expression of ethnic and cultural pride. America has seen progress recently, but negative depictions of people of color have permeated U.S. history. As a result, some Americans from groups that have faced discrimination push back against these negative depictions by expressing strong feelings of pride and solidarity. As a white, Jewish American, I considered how I express my relationship to my own culture, ethnicity, and national identity.

I benefit in countless ways from being seen as white, no matter my self-identification or feelings of affinity with white people as a group. My whiteness is complicated by the fact that I’m Jewish, which means many racist white nationalists don’t see me as white. And my Jewishness is qualified by my nonconformity to Hasidic tradition, which would clearly mark me as such were I to follow it.

I identify with Jewish history in a personal way, but would I say Jews are “my people,” and that I love their/our/my Jewish culture? I certainly feel more connection to the American Jewish community than I do to whites in general because of our shared history and cultural similarities. When I think of American Jews, and even Jews worldwide, I think in terms of “us.”

Ultimately, being an American is my primary group identity. I strongly identify as a part of this group whose shared, multifaceted history is defined by cultural, religious, ethnic, sexual, and ideological diversity and a commitment to democratic principles. I can’t say I love American culture in its entirety, but I believe Americans have an obligation to one another to contribute to a common good. I believe in a culture that demands respect for our differences of opinion and desire for freedom. This isn’t love in the way I love my family and closest friends, but it is a meaningful feeling of community and national pride.

Loving my fellow Americans doesn’t mean I feel negatively toward people from other countries, and it doesn’t mean I think America is perfect. I’m fully aware of this country’s strengths and its flaws, of the tremendously positive and the terribly harmful treatment America has shown to Americans and foreigners alike. Taken as a whole, I identify with American history much like Michael Lind: “Even if our genetic grandparents came from Finland or Indonesia, as Americans, we are all descendants of George Washington—and his slaves.”

Feeling connected to my country and to all its citizens is consistent with my progressive beliefs, in particular because Americanness can be — even though it hasn’t always been — an inclusive form of national identity. Americanness can offer a model whereby people of every imaginable background see themselves as part of a single community, a model that stands in powerful contrast to fundamentalism and hate. That’s the kind of identity that builds bridges rather than walls. And that’s the kind of America I can wholeheartedly love.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

Last month after a dinner, I was sitting in my friend’s car, and for the first time in our two-year relationship, we discussed our shared experience of growing up with abusive fathers and abused mothers who did nothing to save us. Recently, I’ve been making an effort to be more transparent about the experiences I had growing up, opening up in ways that go beyond the obligatory statement that my dad isn’t a nice man.

“How do you explain this to people?” I asked my friend. “How do you explain that you were terrorized by your parent when you were a kid, continue to endure their abuse as an adult, and still go out of your way to help and care for them?”

My friend, who finds himself in oddly similar circumstances to mine, replied, “You can’t explain it. It’s cultural.”

I am a twenty-eight-year-old Latina feminist who lives with her dad. Every day, I pack his lunch for work. Every day, I make him dinner and literally serve him his meal. I buy all of his groceries. I give him money. I help him pay the mortgage and utility bills. I can afford to move out and live on my own, but I don’t because I feel an obligation to look after my father.

Everything I do is with the hope of making him proud, making him feel loved, and trying to repair whatever is broken inside of him that causes him to be abusive. But the thing that makes him so unkind and me so invisible in his eyes is that I am not one of his sons. I am the same knobby-kneed kid who cowered in a closet, covering my eyes with my hands and praying for the slapping to stop. I am the seven-year-old girl who ran as fast as I could through my childhood home, trying to avoid the belt licking at the backs of my legs. I am the tiny child with long hair and big brown eyes whose mom clutched her against her chest, whispering, “Tell your daddy to be nice to me.”

There is a big part of me that still plays the role of peacemaker. Despite my dad being a small man, he seemed to tower over my mom and me. Even though I was terrified as he stood shaking with rage, I would still speak up and tell him to be nice to my mom. On those days, I saved her at the expense of myself.

Now, twenty years have passed, and my dad is not the same man he used to be. Time has mellowed him out, and he is more lighthearted. The smiles come a little easier, but he still rarely has a kind thing to say about anyone and still knows nothing of gratitude. My dad doesn’t hit me anymore, but I still remember the countless times I’ve wished he would disappear to deny him the satisfaction of my tears and knowing his barbed tongue had once again hurt me deeply.

I am fully aware of how crazy my actions seem to those who grew up in families that shared a healthy love, cultures that don’t emphasize caring for one’s elders, or with parents who demand that respect be earned, not given. I want to be more than the “good Latina daughter” who did everything she was supposed to at her own expense. It is my hope that I will one day learn to love my father in a healthy way, even if he is unable to do the same in return.

My first step has been to have honest conversations in an attempt to unravel the connections between Latinas and family and violence. When I recently interviewed artist Favianna Rodriguez, who has struggled immensely with the expectations thrust upon her by her family and community, she told me that the most important and transformative work we can do is within our own families. You can love your people and your culture, but that doesn’t mean you can’t openly address their shortcomings.

For me, loving my culture means wanting to embrace it and smash it at the same time. It means I am proud of who I am and have immense love for my family, in spite of the machismo and patriarchy that was deeply ingrained in my home. It means I have so much work to do, so many chains to break, and so many generations of abuse to unlearn.

Growing up in Mexico with an alcoholic, abusive father, a complacent mother, and fifteen siblings he felt responsible for, my dad never made the connection between his hitting my mom and me and the violence he experienced as a child. Despite knowing the tragedy of being beaten by someone he loved, he couldn’t understand how to spare us from experiencing the same. Although they possessed the virtue of being born male, my brothers did not escape our father’s beatings, and they inherited some of his vices.

In some ways, writing these words feels like a betrayal to my father and brothers. I am finding the courage to speak about the things we’ve been taught not to publicly discuss. But it’s a crucial step for my health and my healing. Attempting to unravel what it means to be a Latina in a violent and unhealthy family is vital not only to my own recovery, but it is connected with the recovery of a culture that understands we must unravel our pain together.

Originally published by International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region.

Tina Vasquez