I was really pleased to see Tim Noah's The Great Divergence sharing front page billing in the New York Times Book Review today and garnering well deserved kudos.
The Great Divergence is a concise, lucidly argued study of rising inequality in the United States, one which starts with the premise that such escalating levels of inequity are unhealthy in a democracy. However, despite having a clear moral point of view, Noah does what all too few polemicists do these days (particularly fatuous clowns on the right like Jonah Goldberg) -- he argues using solid facts and sound history, he doesn't overreach, and he doesn't pretend to have comprehensive answers to a complex and, in some respects, a global problem. Noah traces the history of studying income and inequality in the U.S., something that began with a handful of sociologists in the Progressive Era. It is an interesting and informative chapter and one of which I knew little. Noah also discussed why he has chosen to focus on income rather than wealth, arguing that the former rather than the latter is the more important aspect of economic life over the last hundred or so years. (I understand this decision but I do not think wealth should be understated as a matter of importance, especially in an age in which pensions are becoming things of the past -- the accumulation of wealth is going to have to be part of achieving some security in old age. Moreover, the ability of a small segment of society to accumulate and then pass on wealth -- exempt from estate taxes -- is likely to further exacerbate inequality.)
Noah sees the rise of inequality as a multi-faceted process, one which has been exacerbated by a combination of factors -- political, technological, demographic, and cultural. He cites, among other things, the concerted efforts by business, in conjunction with their Republican political partners, to crush organized labor over the last thirty years (an effort that started in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley Act), the undermining of the industrial base through global trade, the dominance of right wing economic policy over the last three decades, including the erosion of the progressive income tax, the deregulation of the financial sector, and the relative shrinking of the public sector, the impact of undocumented workers on certain segments of the working class, the unbridled growth of business influence over policy, and ultimately, the growth of a culture that has allowed greed to flourish and the sense of the common good to wither. Noah discusses how the confluence of these phenomena has resulted in this world of growing inequality and much more limited social mobility.
The book concludes with a series of recommendations to attack inequality -- 1) eliminate the Bush tax cuts and add some additional brackets for very high income individuals; 2) expand government payrolls and enact some New Deal style jobs programs; 3) import highly skilled individuals from abroad; 4) universalize pre-school; 5) impose price controls on college tuition; 6) re-regulate Wall Street; 7) elect Democratic presidents; and, most importantly, 7) revive the labor movement.
All of this is set out in clear, concise, highly readable prose, with the book clocking in at 195 substance-filled pages (and about fifty pages of backnotes). It's a timely and thoughtful treatment of a subject of increasing importance. I strongly recommend it -- and would also note that Tim is a truly good guy as well -- so you can feel good about buying it for that reason as well.
That's not the only thing we owe our troops, but it should certainly be at or near the top of the list. Those who have joined the military have placed their lives and bodies at our disposal, to be used as our President, with the concurrence of Congress, sees fit. The least we can do is take that commitment seriously, particularly by:
Understanding what the stakes look like to the people in the country we're going to war in, rather than what they look like from our generally distant perspective;
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of both our allies and our enemies;
Understanding what the true obstacles are likely to consist of;
Determining whether our objectives are achievable without war, and achieving them peacefully if possible;
Not getting into a war for domestic political reasons;
Not staying in a war due to fear of domestic political fallout;
When it becomes clear that a war is placing inordinate burdens on our volunteer army, spreading the burden via conscription if popular support for the war remains, or wrapping things up and getting out if it doesn't; and
Acknowledging when we've reached the point where if we were going to achieve our goals and be able to exit on our desired terms, we'd have done so already, and acting on that acknowledgement by winding things down and getting out.
I'm sure you folks can think of others to add to the list. Basically, they boil down to going to war (and continuing to fight) for the right reasons, and having a clue about what's going on in the war.
We haven't done very well by our troops, have we? We've basically thrown their lives away by the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the tens of thousands in Vietnam before that. The best that can be said for any of these wars is that we might've been able to wrap up our involvement in Afghanistan fairly quickly, if Bush, Cheney & Co. hadn't had Iraq on their minds.
Someday, somebody ought to apologize to our troops who fought in these wars, and their survivors, for our wanton waste of their lives. Nobody will, of course, because not even the soldiers whose bodies have been mangled, or the survivors of those who were killed, want to hear that their lives were basically wasted.
I can't say I blame them. But I can't come up with any other conclusion about the meaning(lessness) of their sacrifice.
This Memorial Day, we ought to commit ourselves to no more wars where we don't have a clue about what we're getting into, and no more lives sacrificed in such wars. It's about the only way I can think of to honor the sacrifices already made by our troops in recent years.
Continuing with the Boss-town sound -- nice cover of the Joy Division/New Order song.
Sorry for the limited appearances. It's been meetings, meetings, meetings, the last couple of days. Heading off to a couple more in about ten minutes. Then hopefully a slow pre-holiday afternoon dedicated to getting my act together at the office and then home.
As I expected, the horse race coverage in the presidential race is going full throttle. It all seems a little premature to me and in the end seems to keep coming back to the same thing -- a fairly tight race with both parties having their bases largely intact, trying to persuade the few persuadables and crank up the voter turnout among loyalists. I think Obama continues to have the edge in terms of paths to 270 and in his overall appeal as a candidate, but continue to worry that things out of his control may prove problematic. I am anxious to see the next jobs report and have my fingers crossed that Europe will continue to muddle through until November. (I see no good end there -- merely the putting off of even more turmoil to come.)
It occurs to me that we are also about a month away from hearing from the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act. I am less optimistic than I once was and worry that a negative ruling is going to leave in place only a crumbling system with no hope of reform.
I am encouraged on the other hand by the recent polling on gay marriage. It would be great to win a couple of statewide referenda, even though I am loathe to have civil rights decided by popular vote. A couple of wins on this score would signal that the changing dynamics we see in polling have really come to fruition.
Alright, I need to get on the road, but I put things in your capable hands for the next few hours.
TPM had this brilliant video of the asshats at CNBC getting all excited about the Facebook IPO and then sinking into disappointment when the stock went nowhere. It's really amazing to watch these clowns as they relive those golden moments of the late 1990s when the NASDAQ hit 5000 and all the old rules were abolished. For a few months. And then came the deluge.
But these fools will continue to pretend that the last twelve years haven't happened, that the internet will prove to be a modern form of alchemy, that heroic entrepreneurs, delivering essential services like ways to post videos of your cat or inform people that you are at the supermarket, will provide us with a life of unprecedented abundance. We should all be proud as Americans to live in this the best of all possible worlds blessed as we are to call Facebook our own, to have Mark Zuckerberg as our fellow citizen. If only we would just let these great men have the freedom that they need and if only we would believe in their dreams and the value of their stock options.
CNBC is really a disturbing place to visit. All of these charlatans pretending to know something about economics, cheerleading for the rich like they are our champions -- "a lot of American wealth being generated." "People are very proud that this is an American company." Really, I couldn't give a fuck less and really can't imagine anyone I know feeling differently.
I actually can't imagine investing in something as ephemeral as Facebook by the way. I suspect that the company will prove to be only marginally profitable in the long run and will not be able to justify even its $38 a share price. And if it crashes and burns, I for one will be a happy American, reveling in the schadenfreude of it all.
What can I say -- I'm in a Boston kind of mood these days. (That's David Robinson, later drummer for the Cars and Jerry Harrison, later of Talking Heads, next to Jonathan Richman in the front row.)
- I actually thought the thirty day sentence for Darhun Ravi was about right. Being a jerk is not a criminal offense. If it were, our already overcrowded prisons would likely need to be expanded ten fold. Anyone interested in the case should check out this excellent New Yorker article, which leaves more questions than answers.
- I am not sure how people can read about the many wrongful convictions that take place in the United States -- for the most serious of crimes -- and still favor the death penalty. Essentially it indicates that one believes it is acceptable for an innocent person to be put to death from time to time. And this strikes me as monstrous.
- Speaking of monstrous, what is wrong with these people? It's depressing that certain aspects of the American political dialogue are unchanged over forty years.
- Update: I meant to link to this excellent article by Katha Pollitt in The Nation regarding "attachment parenting." Once again, these trends and inflammatory cover stories like that recently featured in Time all seem geared to manipulating women, to spreading guilt and promoting division, all the while remaining grossly unrepresentative of the population writ large. Men remain totally immune to this sort of thing -- basically anything we do in this sphere is seen as above and beyond the call. (From the time that our son was four months old until he was about 12 I did most of the dropping off and picking up from day care and school because we were a one car family and my wife took the subway to work while our son was in Metro inaccessible places. As a result I also did a lot of the mid-day school functions and the like. When you do this sort of thing as a man, you get treated like some kind of hero. I used to laugh about this a lot to my wife, who strangely was less amused about it than I was.) The day that a man who says he is going to "babysit" his kids gets ostracized will be the day when you know that progress has been made on this score.
Trying to get a couple of posts done on Tim Noah's The Great Divergence and a recent Wall Street Journal travesty attacking union-sponsored pension plans. In the meantime, I turn it over to you.
"Mama Kin" and "Prettiest Girl" - The Neighborhoods
Our discussion about Boston's hideous city hall made me remember this video of local legends the Neighborhoods performing on the plaza there doing a kick ass cover of an early Aerosmith song and their own should have been a hit song Prettiest Girl. This one's for oddjob and my younger sister, one of the world's biggest 'hoods fans, who is counting down the last thirty days before the school year is over (while also getting sad about having her class of kids leaving her).
- Naturally, this story in the New York Times about the fact that non-white births now exceed white births in the United States made my day. I hate to be such a self-hating white man, but I feel like this is most promising path to a better political day in this country. A United States that is a little browner, a little less religious, a little less married is a country where the present style of Republican politics will eventually become unsustainable. I am not sure how long that will take, but it will be in my lifetime. The GOP will start losing and losing badly and consistently -- and then -- but only then -- it will change although in exactly what ways I cannot predict. But I don't think that it can continue to be the whites only fest that it's been for the last several decades and prosper.
- Strangely enough, I actually sympathize quite a bit with this article in the Weekly Standard by Andrew Ferguson excoriating the pseudo-scientific claims of Chris Mooney and Jonathan Haidt regarding (mainly) conservative political attitudes. I bow to no one in my contempt for contemporary right wing thinking and the degree to which it is dismissive of empiricism. I seriously doubt, however, that such attitudes are the product of genetics or evolution or anything that can be explained through sound science. Nor do I think liberal attitudes are similarly dictated by biology. Political allegiances and attitudes are one of the most socially-based forms of behavior there is. If they were products of biology, one would expect them to be more or less randomly distributed across society and fairly stable phenomena. Does anyone seriously believe that there is a genetic explanation as to why blacks vote 90% Democratic? What bit of collective brain chemistry explains the evolution over the Twentieth Century of the states of the Great Plains from the most left wing region of the country to being among its most conservative. The answer is that they don't. Yes, people often have a poor grasp of the reasons for their political opinions. Yes, in recent years the overwhelmingly ideological nature of contemporary right wing thought has led many of its adherence to reject certain kinds of science with which their ideology conflicts. This does not render such behavior biological in nature -- unless one wants to make the meaninglessly broad point that tribalism is an evolutionary survival strategy. As Ferguson points out, this kind of biologically-based pseudoscience renders politics effectively meaningless:
The real problem with Haidt’s psychopunditry is that it shares with other kinds of determinism a depressing moral impoverishment. Haidt’s own centrism is an artifact of his Science. If the appeal of one idea versus another is explained by a man’s biology (interacting with a few environmental factors) rather than its content, there’s really not much to argue about. Politics is drained of the meaning that human beings have always sought from it. Haidt criticizes his peers for using psychology to “explain away” conservatism, and good for him. Unfortunately, he wants to explain away liberalism too, so that our politics is no longer understood as a clash of interests and well-developed ideas but an altercation between two psychological and evolutionary types.
- Having graduated from college thirty years ago today and as the parent of a child who will be starting college in three months, I found this post amusing. I cannot really imagine talking to my parents multiple times a day while a college student (as I recall once a week did the trick). (And I am and always have been quite fond of my parents.) Nor can I imagine calling my son daily -- when he was away this year doing an internship, I think I spoke to him probably about twice a week. At one point where he seemed a little down I called him on three consecutive days, which was really hovering for me. I also can't imagine scheduling my time as a college student in the way that is described in this piece. One of the great joys of college -- possibly the greatest joy -- was the sheer amount of unstructured time, time that I spent listening to music, bullshitting, falling in love, having sex, getting drunk, and bullshitting some more. It was a life for which I was made. The micromanaged life described in this post makes me think youth is indeed being wasted on the young.
You keep all your smart modern writers Give me William Shakespeare You keep all your smart modern painters I'll take Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and Gainsborough
It seems like time for a general free for all, so please join in. Before I resume billing, here are a couple of things that I've been enjoying.
- The epic, albeit entirely predictable, failure of Americans Elect has been a source of much mirth in the lefty blogosphere and deservedly so. I found myself in the strange position of agreeing with Douthat on this -- that is, there is actually zero appeal to a party geared to the Friedmannite center -- as Atrios would say, no one really gives a shit about the deficit and no one actually wants to have their Social Security or Medicare benefits cut. I think the most promising route for a third party candidate would be a populist oriented campaign aimed at the white working class -- it would be pro-trade barriers, anti-immigration, pro-gun, and pro-growth, even if that growth was spurred by government programs and employment. It would be much more Pat Buchanan than Michael Bloomberg. It certainly wouldn't win -- but it could attract the resentful right who understand that capital gains tax cuts don't do them any good. There is virtually no constituency for the Simpson-Bowles world view other than the well-heeled folks who spend their Sundays working as talking heads.
"There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards" - Ian Drury
For some reason, Sully linked to this preposterous piece by Charles Murray -- I suppose that is a tautology -- which posits, among other foolishness, that "religiosity is indispensable to a major stream of artistic accomplishment." Murray worries that in an increasingly secular world, great art will not be created because people will cease to concern themselves with the big questions about the meaning of life. In Murray's sclerotic world view, worthwhile art largely ceased to be made in the 19th Century as secularism and nihilism have stripped life (and art) of the possibility of transcendence. (I was amused to be reminded that Murray had put together numerical ratings of past human greatness in the arts and sciences in his book Human Accomplishment- a sort of Bill James Baseball Abstract of the western canon.)
Murray is also concerned that our lives are too long and cushy. As he puts it, "can a major stream of artistic accomplishment be produced by a society that is geriatric? By a society that is secular? By an advanced welfare state?"
Murray derides what he calls the "Europe Syndrome" and claims that post-World War II Europe is essentially devoid of meaningful artistic contribution:
What are the productions of visual art, music, or literature that we can be confident will still be part of the culture two centuries from now, in the sense that hundreds of European works from two centuries ago are part of our culture today? We may argue over individual cases, and agree that the number of surviving works since World War II will be greater than zero, but it cannot be denied that the body of great work coming out of post-war Europe is pathetically thin compared to Europe’s magnificent past.
Thus Murray writes off the works of writers like Primo Levy, Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, Graham Greene, Harold Pinter, Czeslaw Milosz, Samuel Beckett, Jean Paul Sartre -- none of whom evidently can compete with Homer or Virgil or Dante -- one gets the sense with Murray that literature effectively ceased before it began, as Goethe, who died in 1832, is the most modern writer to make Murray's list of top five writers in Human Accomplishment. He ignores as well as the amazing flourishing of post-war film and popular music in Europe. Is there truly nothing of lasting value in the works of Truffaut or Fellini or the Beatles or the Rolling Stones? One gets the sense that Murray's aesthetic are those of the perennial old fogey, a world in which all art has the musty smell of the museum piece.
Most disturbingly -- and it is something I have seen in the works of other reactionary thinkers -- is the notion that a long, secure, and pleasant life, blessed with abundance leads to an inherently trivial existence:
The indirect indictment of the Europe Syndrome consists of the evidence that it is complicit in the loss of the confidence, vitality, and creative energy that provide a nourishing environment for great art. I blame primarily the advanced welfare state. Consider the ironies. The European welfare states brag about their lavish “child-friendly” policies, and yet they have seen plunging birth rates and marriage rates. They brag about their lavish protections of job security and benefits and yet, with just a few exceptions, their populations have seen falling proportions of people who find satisfaction in their work. They brag that they have eliminated the need for private charities, and their societies have become increasingly atomistic and anomic.
The advanced welfare state drains too much of the life from life. When there’s no family, no community, no sense of vocation, and no faith, nothing is left except to pass away the time as pleasantly as possible.
I believe this self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When I have spoken in Europe about the unparalleled explosion of European art and science from 1400 to 1900, the reaction of the audiences has invariably been embarrassment. Post-colonial guilt explains some of this reaction—Europeans seem obsessed with seeing the West as a force for evil in the world. But I suggest that another psychological dynamic is at work. When life has become a matter of passing away the time, being reminded of the greatness of your forebears is irritating and threatening.
One is struck both by what a lousy and repetitive writer Murray is and the degree to which he is offended by the idea of people living pleasant lives. What becomes evident is that Murray, like many right-wingers, is opposed to genuine human freedom, especially the notion of lives where people actually choose whether to get married or to have children and they do so without the fear that not doing those things will lead to them starving in the streets in their old age. If people are embarrassed when Murray delivers his screeds about how they don't make writers like Shakespeare anymore, one gets the sense that they may be embarrassed for him and the vacuity of his numerical rankings for complex works.
Ultimately, it seems to me that anyone who has actually partaken of life -- even those of us who live in comparative ease and security -- are reminded often enough of our fragility and the contingency of our lives. Even in a society where most of us will live to see 80, enough of our cohort will fall by the wayside, victims of disease and caprice, that reminders of our mortality are never actually that far way. And for those of us who do not believe in an afterlife, there is the always serious question of how to live that one life that you have and to imbue it with meaning. Great artists have and will continue to explore these issues because there is no cure for our mortality. It is Murray's loss that he is unable to see the artistic greatness that has been out there in his own life time -- and it speaks poorly of him and his philosophy that he is filled with revulsion at the notion of ordinary people living pleasant and secure lives.
On the road again, this time back in the home town in Massachusetts to gather up the lad and bring him home for a few weeks. It's been a trains, planes, and automobiles kind of week.
- President Greg Marmalard - I haven't had a chance to weigh in on the Romney bullying story. All I can say is that it doesn't surprise me much. And yes, I do think it is indicative of his character. Choosing to be a bully -- even if you're a 16 or 17 boy -- is very much a morally revelatory act. Romney has always seems like a kiss up, kick down type of guy, so this is just seems like one more ugly aspect of the smug, entitled prick -- now we know he's a mean-spirited, cowardly, smug entitled prick. Of course, being a bully or a coward will never be deemed a disqualifying defect in the Republican Party. I assume the faithful will rally around him.
- One of the more enjoyable aspects of reading Paul Krugman over the last year or so has been his consistent practice of slapping down David Brooks (and occassionally Thomas Friedmann) without ever mentioning his name. The columns are usually brutal refutations of whatever fatuousness Brooks has pulled out of his butt and called a column a day or two before. I thought this was a very good example of the genre.
- Dean Baker makes a plea for policy makers to recognize the ongoing tragedy of widespread and long-lasting unemployment. Sadly, I would not hold my breath waiting for policy makers to respond.
- And Arianna Huffington argues against the austerity that is destroying the future of Greek youth and suggests that leaving the Euro and defaulting on its debt is likely the only reasonable path to protect the younger generation of Greeks.
Alright, time for bed to get some rest before an early flight tomorrow. Hope to be checking in in early afternoon. Until then, give us your collective wisdom.
It's nice to know that President Obama is still capable of surprising in a positive way. Today, the day after a rather bad showing for the side of marriage equality proponents in the crucial swing state of North Carolina, President Obama nonetheless came out -- as it were -- for the first time in favor of same sex marriage.
I had been worried that his "evolution" on the matter would not occur until sometime in January of 2013 and that we were going to be subject to some painful evasions of the issue between now and then. But to his great credit, he has made a stand that will serve him well from a historical perspective. How this will translate in the electoral arena remains to be seen. My gut reaction is that it will not change many votes, although it certainly may drive up enthusiasm in certain quarters.
I also hope it will prove helpful with some of the black churches in places like Maryland where there has been some real ugliness shown on the issue.
Anyway, it is something worth celebrating. And I hope that people on our side will give the President due credit for this. It is a genuine act of courage by a politician who is often accused by the left of playing things too safe. This is not one of those instances.
Update: As I suspected there is naturally some liberal quibbling ("libbling?") about the President not having done enough. In this instance it is Dan Savage, Dana Goldstein, and John Cook -- the latter with a particularly jejune post entitled "Obama's Bullshit Gay Marriage Announcement" (Jesus wept) -- all opining that Obama's announcement lacks significance because he indicates that marriage remains a state issue. Cook is especially dismissive, saying the President's endorsement "amounts to much less than meets the eye. He now believes that gay couples should be able to marry. He doesn't believe they have a right to do so." Thus, what Obama has done is actually "a half-assed cowardly cop out." [What a churlish asshole this guy is.]
There are days when being on the left is as enjoyable as having a pitch fork driven into your eyes.
Where to begin? Marriage is in fact traditionally something that is handled at the state level in our system. Obama by himself has little power to change this. At an immediate level there are a couple of approaches he can take. One is to undermine the Defense of Marriage Act, which, among other things, stands as an impediment to lawful same sex marriages being recognized in all states. And hey, what do you know, the Obama Administration has opined that DOMA is unconstitutional and has withdrawn from defending it in the federal courts. Beyond this, arguments on behalf of a constitutional right to same sex marriage are the province of the courts. Only they can decide that the equal protection clause guarantees the right to same sex marriage to all Americans. The second is to appoint judges likely to determine that such a constitutional right exists -- even after LBJ signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, interracial marriage remained unlawful in many states until the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 -- it was not something that LBJ was able to remedy. (But I guess given how minimal the value of Obama's efforts, that a President Romney would be just as likely to do this.) And lastly, the President can help try and move the culture writ large to recognize the dignity of all Americans and advance the cause of equality. I have faith that he will do this.
Again, I would urge everyone of good will to view this as a pretty monumental day and ignore this naysaying.
- Once again Republicans in pursuit of the ideologically pure have turned an easy Senate win into a serious contest. I don't think that Richard Mourdock is quite in the same territory as Christine O'Donnell or Sharron Angle -- in fact, I would predict he will likely win this race. Still, the loss by Lugar took what was pretty close to a sure thing and gave the Democratic candidate, Congressman Joe Donnelly, a fighting chance. I think organized labor is going to be primed for this race given what has been going on in Indiana. A win here would be a clear sign that it is going to be a very good evening for us in November.
- I see that David Brooks and Moral Hazard are going to be my new neighbors -- he'll be about a mile and half due south of where I live. Maybe Stanley and Moral Hazard can become friends. I love that Brooks is moving into a quintessential upscale urban liberal neighborhood in DC -- Cleveland Park is a really nice part of the world -- rather than opting for some virtuous red state exurb, easily available over the river in places like Loudon County Virginia. But true to form, those who pay lip service to the heartland virtues of such places seem to want the amenities associated with the godless cities of the coasts. I can't wait to run into him.
- The Wisconsin recall election is going to be an interesting harbinger for the fall. I cannot stress how important it is for Tom Barrett to prevail. If the Democrats can win the governorship and take at least one of the state senate seats that are also being contested, it would be a powerful repudiation of the worst that the Republican Party has to offer. Turnout for both parties in the primary was pretty high, with the Democratic vote only exceeding the Republican vote by about 24,000 voters.
Governor - Dem Special Primary
May 09, 2012 - 08:58AM CT
Wisconsin - 3423 of 3423 Precincts Reporting - 100%
Name
Party
Votes
Vote %
Barrett , Tom
Dem
390,109
58%
Falk , Kathleen
Dem
228,940
34%
Vinehout , Kathleen
Dem
26,926
4%
La Follette , Doug
Dem
19,461
3%
Huber , Gladys
Dem
4,842
1%
Governor - GOP Special Primary
May 09, 2012 - 08:58AM CT
Wisconsin - 3423 of 3423 Precincts Reporting - 100%
Name
Party
Votes
Vote %
Walker , Scott (i)
GOP
626,538
97%
Kohl-Riggs , Arthur
GOP
19,920
3%
This is going to be a close, close election.
- Defining deviancy down. As Ed Kilgore points out, the continued treatment of the filibuster by the press as though it were a perfectly normal thing under our constitutional system makes me crazy. The Democatic attempt to take care of the pending increase in interest rates for student loans was blocked by a party line vote of Republicans against cloture. And in the Profiles in Courage Department, lame duck Senator Olympia Snowe voted "present" on the issue. Her uselessness is hard to quantify. Truly one of the most overrated human beings on the planet.
- This chart about the recent decline in public sector employment is getting a lot of attention and deservedly so. I have to believe that at some point in time people will look back on this madness and wonder what could have possessed our political leaders to embrace such a self-defeating approach.
- The result of the North Carolina referendum on gay marriage was a sobering reminder of the fact that progress on this issue is still a hit or miss thing. And it can't have helped with respect to President Obama's evolution on this issue. The Obama campaign really wants to carry North Carolina and I don't see this helping move him along to where he should be on the issue.
- Very happy to see the Socialists prevail in the French presidential election. I am hoping that this will be the beginning of a revivial of a European left that actually considers unemployment -- not pleasing bankers and the German right -- to be the continent's most pressing problem. Yglesias has some thoughts on the constraints under which Hollande will operate. Of course, the short term concern here is that turmoil in Europe will harm Obama's re-election prospects. Ultimately though if the left is to regain its vitality in Europe it needs to move beyond the discredited deregulatory policies of the Blair-Brown (and Clinton) third way, and get people -- especially the young -- back to work.
- Meanwhile, the Greek elections seem to offer a cautionary tale about where the continued failure of the mainstream parties to meaningfully address the European economic crisis could lead. (Marine LePen's showing in the first round of the French elections are also illustrative of this potential.) The collapse of the vote for Greece's two leading parties to about one-third of the total vote is a stunning repudiation of the country's political establishment.
- Krugman is pleased to see the voters strike back at austerity. The question is whether new governments can embrace a politics of growth without destroying the Euro. Ultimately I think the Euro is a failed and anti-democratic experiment, but its demise would undoubtedly cause severe short term dislocation. Maybe the most hopeful development for the continent would be the defeat of Merkel and her coalition in next year's German elections. There are signs of slippage there, although the SPD shows disappointing strength even in the wake of Merkel's problems. Once again, fringe parties -- in this case the German "Pirate" party -- seem to be attracting voters who are disenchanted with the traditional political alternatives.
This strikes me as a pretty dangerous moment for European democracy as the established parties show themselves inadequate to the moment. I only hope that its spillover effect does not harm Obama in November.
Sorry I've been scarce here lately: in between two busy weekends with the kid, I managed to come down with a nasty cold. Better now, thanks.
The other day, Ed Kilgore related the two parties' different attitudes towards killing bin Laden to the differences between the two parties' approches to the war on terror, with the Dems being more narrowly focused on al Qaeda, and the GOP's pursuit of a much broader struggle against 'Islamofascism' (or whatever they're calling it these days) everywhere.
While I fundamentally agree with the Democratic approach for what seem like obvious reasons - sure, Hamas or Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood or someone besides al Qaeda might choose to bomb an American target someday, they aren't in any hurry to do so because their focus is elsewhere - it has never made sense to me that this should have any bearing on whether or not we should track bin Laden to the ends of the earth, and capture or kill him if we find his whereabouts, no matter where that turns out to be.
You'd think that even - especially - the Right wouldn't let even their own get away with this sort of nonsense. Whether you see the enemy as al Qaeda, or all radical Islamist movements everywhere, the fact is, bin Laden is the man responsible for killing nearly 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001.
To quote Humphrey Bogart (as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon):
When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's-it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.
It's hard for me to break away from the underlying logic of that statement. If you're the President, you can't go letting people kill your countrymen. They're you're fellow citizens, and you're supposed to do something about it. It's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every American everywhere.
If there were ever a next bin Laden, would we want him to believe that if he were able to elude us for a while, the Americans would get distracted, let the trail grow cold, and eventually just let him off the hook altogether? Fuck, no. This is why tracking down bin Laden wasn't so much a matter of eliminating a threat, or even of revenge. It was a grim necessity. If someone hits us like that, we must be implacable and unbending in our pursuit for as long as it takes, just as a matter of basic statecraft.
It boggles my mind that we're in a world where the left understands this and the right doesn't. This used to be the sort of shit they were able to claim they understood and the left didn't, that any issues of war and peace implicitly favored them.
They've given up that advantage, and it's hard to see how they can get it back anytime soon. Which is fine with me.
So what's on your minds? I think all the threads are implicitly open threads these days, given the infrequency of threads, so don't feel you have to talk about bin Laden.
As for me, it's a spectacularly beautiful afternoon here in the greater DC area. I'm going to take the kid to a playground. It's too good a day to pass up.
On the road, writing from Tulsa, OK, which I am in the process of not really seeing. One of those trips where you are in a place that is not conducive to walking anywhere, which I find tends to keep me stuck in the hotel -- not really my favorite way to travel.
I really liked this piece by Tim Noah on Richard Grenell's resignation from the Romney campaign. Grenell, a vehement (and rather obnoxious) neocon and right wing true believer, is also an openly gay man who unabashedly supports gay marriage. This had not stopped him from attaining a significant degree of success in right wing foreign policy circles -- he was John Bolton's spokesperson -- until now. Although it is not completely clear what led Grenell to quit before he began as Romney's foreign policy spokesperson, it seems as though the most likely reason was the objections of members of the evangelical right to his appointment. Although closeted gay men have long been part of the right wing power structure, it seems apparent that at this point in history -- one where acceptance of gays in the U.S. is a pretty mainstream sentiment -- those who run the Republican Party dare not openly accept them. As Tim puts it:
Not to put too fine a point on it, if you are gay you'd have to be out of your mind to support today's Republican party. And if you believe in tolerance, or the necessary role of government in helping others, or the existence of global warming, or Darwin's theory of natural selection, or just about any notion of equality, you'd have to be out of your mind to vote for the GOP's presidential candidate, even though Romney likely believes in all these things (except maybe equality). The GOP will eventually learn to embrace these values, but that won't change until after Romney loses in November, as I think he will do, and it may take a few more big losses after that.
I think that a Romney loss, coupled with something like a fifty-fifty congressional result, is not going to prompt any soul searching in right wing circles. I think Romney will bear the blame, largely for not being a true conservative. I think it will require many more losses of substantial magnitude to change the minds of Republicans with respect to this and many other issues.
So what else is going on out there that's grabbing your attention?
I finally got off my ass and wrote a post last night and just prior to sending my laptop battery ran out, without warning, and the work disappeared. I hate it when that happens. But once more unto the breach:
- I picked up Tim Noah's new book, The Great Divergence, which deals with the growth of income inequality in American, expanding on a great series that he wrote for Slate. I have just read the first couple of chapters, but it seems quite promising. I have no doubt Tim will bring the kind of intellectual rigor and honesty that the topic demands (and I don't just say that because he quotes me at one point in the book on the impact of undocumented workers on wages in the building trades). I have some flying time this week, so I hope to finish the book and have a complete report by the end of the week.
- James Poulos, the man who taught us what women are for, had a sad post the other day in which he argues against student loan debt relief, something that would be of great help to him. Poulos clearly harbors great shame for having made what he perceives as a terrible choice to go to law school and then abandon that venture, but not before accumulating a fairly staggering debt. So deep is his guilt that he argues the government would somehow "own his future" if he and others were allowed some break with respect to their obligations. Evidently it would be preferable to Poulos to have a bank own his future, then to catch a break at the hands of his ideological foes.
- And speaking of money and the future, Joe Nocera had a good column yesterday about the fact that on the cusp of sixty he finds himself in a position where he may well never have enough money to retire, despite the fact that he has made a good income over the years and has a fair amount of expertise in matters financial. Nocera's plight is yet another illustration of the utter failure of the 401(k) to serve as an adequate replacement for traditional defined benefit pension plans. We are going to be facing a crisis with people in Nocera's age bracket on down as they cease to be able to work and lack the means to support themselves. At some point this fact is going to have to translate into some type of policy response or we will be returning to the days when retired people are going to be living in the homes of their children -- who will also seemingly still have their adult children at home who cannot find employment. I guess this can be sold as strengthening the traditional family.
- I think that the notion that China represents the country of the future is shown to be delusional by its treatment of one dissident. This is not the act of a strong and secure power, but rather one of a government that feels its very legitimacy remains in doubt. I think the U.S. remains the power of the future simply by default. For all of our weaknesses, our possible competitors all have worse problems.
Break your back to earn your pay and don't forget to grovel."
- It's nice to see the intellectual leader of the conservative judiciary showing his continued grasp of the fine points of the law. What a fucking fatuous gobshite this clown is. That he is taken seriously as a judge is a measure of just how far we have fallen. The notion that he is somehow a brilliant jurist rather than a transparently political hack really should be put to rest after this argument and the one over ACA.
- Speaking of right wing intellectual clownishness, Pierce, in brilliant fashion, finishes what Michael Sean Winters began -- the complete and utter gutting of Ross Douthat's newly minted, spectacularly ahistorical piece on America's loss of its good old fashioned religious wisdom circa 1950. Douthat, like his intellectual soul mate at the Times, David Brooks, has pretensions to being an intellectual, but, alas, possesses the withered mind and soul of the propagandist. Facts are selectively distorted or omitted to fit Ross's thesis, which is that once there was a golden age in which Protestants and Catholics of all stripes joined together and denounced sexy time and made us a better nation for it.
- And to continue picking on right wing Catholics, both the U.S. Conference of Bishops and the faculty at Georgetown University seem to have an issue with the budget proposed by Paul Ryan, the man Pierce memorably describes as the "zombie-eyed granny starver," who tried to claim that his work was consistent with Catholic notions of social justice. The Georgetown faculty begged to differ in rather stark terms:
“Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” says the letter, which the faculty members sent to Mr. Ryan along with a copy of the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church — “to help deepen your understanding of Catholic social teaching.”
That means that if we leave it to 'the market' to solve this problem, too many women here in the U.S. will have to choose between purchasing contraceptives and paying the bills. It's that simple. They will be unable to afford the relatively small upfront cost of avoiding the much, much more costly event of having a child that they can afford even less. No woman should ever have to be in this position.
And for what it's worth, this is true for married women as well as single women. Because married couples, too, are often stretched to the limit, and have no money left over to pay for contraception. So even if we buy into their abhorrent slut-shaming rhetoric, married women who supposedly have the blessing of the wingnuts for their sexytime are forced into an untenable position by the cost of contraceptives.
You'd think even wingnuts could grasp this logic. Except I'm betting they're perfectly OK with this. While they haven't yet overtly defined genital sex as a luxury good that you should only engage in if you have the time, energy, and above all the money to raise another kid, it's pretty much the direct implication of the positions they've taken in recent months.
It's just a matter of time before they say it in so many words. You can hear them now: "There is a third option: not having sex." Well, yeah. And how do we feel about this? If a couple is perpetually struggling just to pay the rent and keep food on the table, does that mean they no longer have the moral right to have sex?
Yep, that's what they're saying. The sooner they say it out loud, and can be forced to publicly own that belief, the better.
_______________________________
*Defined as earning less than 2/3 of the median hourly wage of one's country.
"Man on Fire" - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Ah the week is done. The lawyer gig is really eating into my blogging these days. I'm finding myself a little bit worn out for writing and a little bit uninspired. Part of it is that we are heading into the election silly season and I am already finding the endless horse race crap annoying. The notion of six straight months of this is hard to take. It's going to be polls, polls, and more polls, with the media doing precious little to actually educate the public on the issues at hand. I am going to try to avoid getting sucked into this too much as it really ceases to be interesting and extremely difficult to say anything new or interesting.
- Having said that, I do think that although the recent Ann Romney kerfuffle was largely a lazy made for TV drama cynically flogged by the right, it did expose the fascinating Republican divide on the virtues of stay-at-home motherhood. The always excellent Katha Pollitt -- who would really improve any of the major op-ed pages in the U.S. -- has a great take on how the value placed on stay-at-home mothers is fraught with class and racial implications. As Pollitt puts it:
But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself. Just ask Mitt Romney. In a neat catch that in a sane world would have put the Rosen gaffe to rest forever, Nation editor at large Chris Hayes aired a video clip on his weekend-morning MSNBC show displaying Romney this past January calling for parents on welfare to get jobs: “While I was governor, 85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. And I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”
Ah, work will set you free -- where have I heard that before? Any of us who have raised children know how hard the work can be. My wife, who resumed full time work in a new career four months after our son was born, and I used to laughingly say "thank God it's Monday" as we looked forward to a leisurely moment with a cup of coffee in a quiet office, enjoying the company of adult colleagues and the psychic rewards of having status. I would never deride what Ann Romney did as not being work. But I would note that she never had to worry about the decision to forego income or career, never had to grapple with the difficulty of paying the rent or a mortgage on one income, and no doubt had the wherewithal to afford just about any kind of help she ever might have needed. In that sense, she, like her husband, is hardly representative of any of us. I am pretty confident that the GOP esteem for motherhood extends only to the right kind of women -- "good girls" as Amanda describes them -- not the millions of single or lower income mothers trying to scrape by in an exceedingly harsh economy.
- I found this piece on the conflict between unions and environmentalists over the XL Pipeline in the Nation to be interesting. Although its author, Jane McAlevy, expresses sympathy with the quest for jobs motivating union leaders, she still seems to have difficulty grasping why the various building trades unions whose members will build the pipeline are angry at its opponents. Confession: I have avoided writing about the pipeline because I support it and I know this is not likely to be the most popular of positions around these parts. I support the pipeline for reasons that are simple and possibly a bit venal: 1) because it will provide thousands of really good paying jobs to people I represent for a living; 2) because the notion that not building the pipeline will somehow prevent further exploitation of the Canadian tar sands oil is hopelessly naive; 3) because I believe that the claim that the building of the pipeline itself will be environmentally destructive is largely trumped up by people who simply object to the notion of more oil being made readily available domestically -- to which I would respond that the country is covered with tens of thousands of miles of pipelines [Update: here is a link to a pipeline map] that have minimal impact on the environment and that, as noted above, this oil is going to be used by someone in the world market. The conversion to a reliance on non-petroleum based energy is just too far away to practically stop an energy source of this magnitude from being used. The union leaders that McAlevy castigates are elected by their members to help them secure work with favorable terms. Many of these unions are suffering from prodigious rates of unemployment right now. As democratically elected leaders, they see their first obligation as being to their constituents. I think that building trades leaders are also frustrated with what they perceive to be an overall indifference to job creation by environmental groups -- that even alternative energy projects involving wind and solar technologies tend to run into opposition when they get to the actual building stage.
- The Democratic Party continues to lag badly with white working class men. Although I understand that this is demographically a less and less significant group, it nonetheless pains me deeply to see this.
- Reading LeVon Helm's obituary the other day, which was really an interesting piece, -- check out the photo of The Band, who look like the living antidote to phsychedia -- I was struck by the fact that he died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, New York's world class cancer facility. (As, by the way, did Danny Federici of the E Street Band.) I am quite familiar with MS-K and can attest to its excellence. But I also know that it charges $4,000 a night for a semi-private room. It seems to me that it would make much more sense for cases like this to be handled in a much lower cost hospice setting or with home hospice care, where the expertise in pain relief would really be the essential element. We really need to look at these end of life care issues with a clearer head if we are ever going to get a handle on runaway medical costs.
- And finally, yesterday was the hundredth birthday of Fenway Park. It's been forty-five years since I first went to a game at Fenway, during the magical 1967 season, when I was all of seven years old -- a game the Red Sox lost to the light-hitting but stingy Chicago White Sox. Last night I was running through the list of some of the players I had seen there -- Hall of Famers like Mickey Mantle (in 1968, his final season), Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Al Kaline, Luis Aparicio, Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage, Rollie Fingers, Rickey Henderson, Ferguson Jenkins, Tom Seaver, Orlando Cepeda, Dennis Eckersley, and, of course, Carl Yazstremski, Jim Rice, Carlton Fisk, and Wade Boggs -- and sadly, I fear, non-Hall of Famer Roger Clemens -- as well as guys who didn't make the Hall but burned bright for a time: Frank Howard, Freddie Lynn, Vida Blue, Willie Horton, Norm Cash, Denny McLain, and Tony Olive leap to mind and Red Sox stalwarts like Luis Tiant, Dwight Evans, Bill Lee, and Rico Petrocelli. (More recent Sox stars I've primarily seen at Camden Yards -- I've only been to Fenway once in the last decade or so.) It was kind of a fun exercise, although things have blurred a bit in my mind as to whether I saw certain teams at Fenway or since I moved down here. Update: Oh my God -- I am watching the Red Sox blow a nine run lead to the Yankees. Their bullpen is a special kind of bad. Jon Papplebon, come back, all is forgiven. I think Bobby Valentine may have an exceedingly short stay in Boston.
Levon singing Randy Newman -- a favorite of mine. Sadly, he appears to be quite ill. Just a great evocative voice and I think an underappreciated drummer.
- I've always been a little bit wary of terms like "white male privilege" and the like, probably because I've spent so much of my life representing organizations that were primarily made up of white men, where every gain represented something pretty hard fought and where those gains have long been under threat. But then I read something like this drivel by by Paul Theroux on the Trayvon Martin case in a recent issue of Newsweek, and I can't help but think in those exact terms. Theroux, in a classic example of a smart person writing nonsense, basically tries to make the case that since a cop once yelled at him during a traffic stop, black people are often simply mistaken when they perceive racism as being the cause for police brutality or, I guess, being gunned down when you are unarmed. The piece, offensively titled "If I had a son he would look like George Zimmerman," is so redolent of privileged cluelessness and weak logic that it takes one's breath away. I am sure that Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, and Michael Stewart, among others, would have sympathized with Theroux if they weren't dead.
- I have to say I have been enjoying Atrios's "Wanker of the Decade" feature. It was a potent reminder of why I started blogging in the first place. I just remember my incredible frustration in the early to middle aughts at the insipid state of media coverage in this country -- from the natterings of Ceci Connelly and MoDo during the Bush Gore election, to the ludicrous amen corner for war in Iraq, featuring Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Klein, the ridiculous centrism tropes from the likes of Friedman again, David Broder, Will Saletan, and the whole gang-wank they call the Washington Post. A number of these folks -- especially Klein and Sullivan -- have behaved better in recent years, but I think the overall state of mainstream journalism and punditry has not much improved, despite what should have been the incredibly chastening events of the decade. I remain in awe of the sheer intellectual laziness of the elite media, their arrogance, their complacency, and their shallowness. I think the thing that Atrios also hits on the head is that the problems here were not by and large the right wing pundits -- yes, they were hopelessly wrong too and were completely in bed with the Bush Administration in all of its folly -- from whom not much could be legitimately expected. But those of the allegedly sensible center, like Friedman, Klein, and Saletan, illustrated again and again the inadequacy of the centrist world view.
Update: Well, I guess it's a new decade in which to wank. Friedman strikes again today with yet another insipid what we need is a third party column. Today it is Michael Bloomberg who will be our savior. He will increase the speed of the Acela, fix Amtrak's crappy cell phone service (which I have to admit is distressingly bad), and pave the roads around Union Station (which are actually being resurfaced right now -- that's why they are bumpy) all the while magically balancing the budget. Jesus. All a Bloomberg candidacy would do is help elect Mitt Romney. I am so ashamed to share an alma mater with this guy. The fact that Friedman is a widely respected pundit says so much about the sorry state of this country's media and political elite.
- Meanwhile, the world of false equivalency journalism -- at which Friedman has set the standard -- continues to dominate in the mainstream press. Rarely a day goes by where one does not see an egregious example. Tonight's wonderful example is an article in Newsweek yet again discussing the book What Money Can't Buy by Harvard professor Michael J. Sandal, who is well known for his course on justice. Sandal is critical of the over emphasis on markets in the American world view and centers his critique on the "consumerist idea of freedom." In other words, Sandal stands for the radical notion that there are some things in life that just aren't for sale or as reviewer Michael Fitzgerald describes it, "he thinks markets shouldn't replace our moral judgment." Fitzgerald's next sentence is just amazing though: "If his talk of morals scandalizes liberals, conservatives will squirm at his assault on their easy acceptance of markets." Does Fitzgerald really think liberals are "scandalized" by talk of morals? It seems to me that liberalism, with its emphasis on fairness, justice, equality, etc. is nothing but a non-stop call to morality. How can someone who is not a right wing propagandist write this kind of sentence in good faith?
- And speaking of right wing propaganda, another of the many things that I continue to be irritated by, is the notion that the liberal-left is suffering from its own brand of "epistemic closure" because we do not engage our right wing brethren in debate and dialogue. The question that leaps to mind is with whom would we have such a debate or discussion. It seems to me that the world of right wing journalism, whether online or of the dead tree variety, has reached a point where dialogue is virtually impossible. A case in point (to come full circle) is Obama's recent comment that if he had a son that he would have looked like Trayvon. This pretty innocuous and humanizing remark has been deemed hate speech by, among others, Glenn Reynolds and John Hindraker. Now theoretically, Reynolds and Hindraker should be people with whom one could have a discussion. Respectively a law professor and a partner at a good-sized law firm, Reynolds and Hindraker obviously possess at least the kind of intelligence necessary to do this kind of work, which presumably includes the ability to write reasoned arguments that might have appeal beyond their ideological fellow travelers. And yet, what you get from both of them is hysterical propaganda of this kind -- Obama the hate monger, Obama the enemy of freedom, Obama the destroyer of America, Obama the socialist, Obama the great apologizer, and so on. This stuff is so transparently ridiculous that addressing it beyond this kind of cursory description would be an enormous waste of time. I have a difficult time thinking of anyone presently writing political stuff on the right with whom you could have a factual, intellectually honest, policy-oriented dialogue with of any substance -- maybe Reihan Salam. Can you think of anyone?
- And here on tax day, is my tax plan. It reduces the deficit by nearly 24% in 2012. Why won't the Washington Post treat me as being even braver than Paul Ryan?
Young Conor Friedersdorf may have moved to Venice California, but his head and his heart are still firmly planted in the media village we call DC. He has produced a perfect specimen (and I choose that term deliberately) of the classic village trope -- both sides are doing X and the truth is Y, which naturally falls into the middle of where the two sides are -- why can't we all be reasonable and cut out this extreme talk, all of which we really know is merely political posturing. In this case, Friedersdorf deems silly the Democratic contention that the Republicans are engaging in a war on women and, with the fine impartiality that makes the man a future Sunday television show guest, condemns as well the Republican outrage over the Democrats alleged disrespect for motherhood. Friedersdorf does not bother to distinguish between the fact that the latter is a manufactured outrage aimed at the infelicitous remarks of an obscure Washington PR flak, while the former is a political shorthand for something quite real, a concerted attempt on a national level by the Republican Party to undermine or eliminate women's reproductive rights.
Thus, in response to a perfectly factual attack on the Blunt Amendment by Deborah Wasserman Schultz in which she objected to "bosses" being able to decide "what kind of access to health care women can have," Friedersdorf asserts that
It's perfectly legitimate to criticize the Blunt-Rubio bill and to set forth reasons why its passage would be bad for women. What's objectionable is 1) the implication that the Republicans who voted for this bill are motivated by antagonism toward women and engaged in an aggressive campaign to war on them (the truthful motivation is some mix of concern for protecting religious liberty and pandering to religious conservatives and opponents of sweeping health-care mandates). 2) The sly invocation of the phrase "access to contraception," as if what's at issue here is the ability to buy condoms or birth control as opposed to a debate about who covers their cost.
Friedersdorf is guilty of multiple sins here. First, he is typical of the libertarian boys who think of access to contraception and abortion as frills -- things that are not really "health care." This is nonsense. There are few things more important in terms of women's overall health and their sexual and economic autonomy than the ability to control fertility. The ability to avoid or terminate unwanted pregnancies or to optimally space the birth of children goes right to the very heart of a women's life for a very long period of time.
Second, although he seeks to minimize it, Republicans have consistently fought over the last several years -- especially since 2010 -- with a venomous vehemence against access to birth control. Let us count the ways: The Blunt Amendment is only the most recent battle -- think about their concerted effort against Title X, which they seeks to defund in their budget, their war -- and I think that is the only appropriate term -- against Planned Parenthood on both the federal and state level, their efforts to offer expansive "conscience" clauses to pharmacists so that they don't have to dispense contraceptives if they don't want to, and their fight against making Plan B available as an over the counter drug.
Third, in addition to these concrete policy measures, Republicans, most visibly Rick Santorum, have expressed hostility to the very constitutional underpinnings that make access to contraception a constitutionally protected right as they attack the Griswold decision and the right to privacy. The undermining of Griswold and Roe v. Wade are central planks of Republican thinking, not some marginal tendency. All of these waiting period requirements and ultrasound laws are designed to effectively destroy the right of women to have abortions or, at a minimum, to cause inconvenience and humiliation to those who dare exercise that right.
And yet, Friedersdorf blithely asserts that
the life prospects of my fiance, my sister, my mother, and my female friends and acquaintances, I can only conclude that they're mostly unaffected by whether President Obama wins the White House or Mitt Romney manages to unseat him. Were my preferred candidate, Gary Johnson, to improbably be elected, Muslims, innocents accused of terrorism, and folks proximate to the drug trade would be better off. But I doubt he'd do much to make the lives of women appreciably better. It's one of the many privileges of living in this country: daily life goes on largely unaffected by the whims of the man or woman who inhabits the White House. Unlike in Saudi Arabia or Iran, women as a class aren't vulnerable to gendered oppression.
Spoken like a privileged, clueless, complacent, sheltered, glib white man. In case Friedersdorf hasn't noticed, the president has any number of powers that have real daily relevance to women's lives -- and yes, since women are the only ones who get pregnant, they are quite vulnerable to gendered oppression in this country. Indeed, the Republican Party seems dedicated to such oppression -- and no, the fact that there are women in the GOP like Jan Brewer who will joyfully go along with the oppression, does not make it any less oppressive. President Obama has drawn a line in the sand to protect Title X, his administration has fought measures to defund Planned Parenthood, and has sought to assure that family planning be a part of the basic health care services offered under all health plans in the United States. Most importantly of all, Obama has appointed two women to the Supreme Court who will assuredly uphold Roe v. Wade.
Romney, by contrast, has endorsed the Ryan budget, which will defund Title X, has enthusiastically claimed that he would "defund" Planned Parenthood, has indicated that he opposes the contraception mandate, and, in fact, would seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act altogether. And, of course, he will seek to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade.
If Friedersdorf thinks that these policy differences would leave most women "unaffected" he simply has no idea of the centrality of reproductive rights in women's lives. And that is a reflection, not of the trivialities of these issues, but of the callowness of Friedersdorf's world view.
Personally, I think all of the Bush tax cuts should be phased out in all income levels and that a couple of higher brackets -- a 45% and a 50% bracket -- should be added to kick in when incomes reach $750,000 and $1.5 million.
I fully agree with this, and then some.
The reality is that some people have annual incomes that dwarf $1.5 million. And it's my belief that they should hit new brackets all the way up. The brackets should be spread far apart so that there's no question of 1970s-style 'bracket creep', but if someone made $600 million in a year, he should pay a higher rate on his last dollar of income than someone who made 'only' $100 million. And if someone were to have income of $5 billion in a year, he should pay a higher rate on his top dollar than the $600 million guy.
So I think there should be additional brackets at, say, $5 million (55% tax rate), $10 million (60%), $40 million (65%), $100 million (70%), $400 million (75%), $1 billion (80%), $5 billion (85%), and even $10 billion (90%). Someday someone will have that much annual income, if they haven't already.
I'd argue that this principle should apply even more so to the Federal estate tax, which after a certain point should become all but confiscatory.
Currently, the first $5 million of the value of a decedent's estate is exempt from tax. I'm OK with that part, because it mostly shuts up the nincompoops who claim that the tax is going to force the breakup of a family farm or the sale of a family business. (It wouldn't be true anyway: the tax from such an estate can be spread out over 15 years.) But the tax is only 35% on the excess, so someone who dies with an estate of $50 billion can pass $32.5 billion to the kids.
Nobody should get that sort of money just for having chosen the right set of parents. And this year, we've seen the downside of individuals having so much money that they can dump tens of millions of dollars into a political campaign that even they know is probably going nowhere. It can't hurt to reduce the number of people who've gotten that sort of money without having had to do anything to get it.
If the Bush tax cuts were to lapse at the end of this year (and the Democratic position should be to let them all lapse, then negotiate an "Obama tax cut" targeted more at the lower brackets), the Federal estate tax rate would return to 55%, with the first $1 million exempted.
Like I said, I'm OK with keeping that at the current $5 million. But the 55% rate shouldn't be dropped; in fact, the same brackets that apply to income above that number should apply to the estate tax too, only with additional brackets at $40 billion (95%) and $100 billion (99%).
It isn't like the heirs to billionaires would be hurting under this plan. Persons leaving $1 billion in their estates under such a tax regime could pass $280 million to their heirs; they'd be able to get by somehow.
I realize, of course, that none of this is anywhere close to politically feasible as things stand. But it won't ever get any closer to feasible if we never propose the idea in the first place. So I'm proposing it: tax brackets ought to go all the way up.
- I haven't written much at all about the Trayvon Martin case -- I feel like a lot of what has gone on has just added a whole lot of noise and little light to the process -- but I was happy to hear the announcement that his killer George Zimmernan will be prosecuted. I am not sure that the prosecution can make its case stick, but I am confident that had Trayvon been a white 17-year old that this case would have been handled rather differently from the outset. I hope now -- however futilely -- that everyone can take a step back and let the facts of the case unfold in the criminal justice process. I know I have my own strong gut feelings, but these should never be confused with facts, evidence, meeting burdens of proof, etc. I wanted an arrest and a prosecution because it seems to me the few facts one could ascertain in the media seemed to warrant it. Having crossed that important threshold, I'd like to see the rest left to the attorneys, the judge and the jury.
- Has anyone else been troubled by the dual role of Al Sharpton in the Trayvon affair and the fact that MSNBC has let him play both advocate and journalist in the process? I am not a fan of false journalistic neutrality - too often it comes with its own built in biases that obscure rather than highlight truth. But it seems awfully strange to have a guy both handling a press conference with a rather vehement point of view and then have that press conference broadcast on his daily show. I have to confess I am not and never have been a big Sharpton fan. He will always be a bit of a charlatan in my eyes and I think he is a horrible television host in terms of his skills. It's hard to exaggerate how much of an improvement it would be to have Chris Hayes get a nightly show in his stead. And if MSNBC would like to have an African-American host -- which I support -- it has a couple of very talented and telegenic women who would do a far better job than Sharpton. Indeed, I'd like to see Sharpton and Ed Schultz sent to the showers and have Hayes and Melissa Harris Perry or Alex Wagner pick up their slots.
- Speaking of prosecutions, Nancy pointed out this disturbing case in comments below -- about a poor woman in Idaho who is being threatened with imprisonment for inducing her own abortion with Mifepristone. I am hoping that some people in the reproductive rights community will come to her defense. There are some astonishingly good legal minds in the pro-choice legal community -- I've had the pleasure of reading some of their briefs before and they are truly first rate -- and I am sure that they could be of great assistance to this poor, isolated woman.
- Ezra points out the degree to which the Democrats have been shifted to the right by the Bush tax cuts, such that the strategic electoral tactic of focusing on raising taxes on only the highest earners has now become a policy position. Personally, I think all of the Bush tax cuts should be phased out in all income levels and that a couple of higher brackets -- a 45% and a 50% bracket -- should be added to kick in when incomes reach $750,000 and $1.5 million. I would also phase in a 28% tax on capital gains, dividends and interest. We need substantially more revenue than we currently have to do all of the things that need to be done, including getting the long term fiscal house in order.
So what do you all think? And I was encouraged by one frequent commenter to try to lure the lurkers out there to join in the fray. We would love to have a few more voices join in the mix.
I guess John Derbyshire just wasn't able to muster the strength to engage in suitable euphemism. I mean, shit, it isn't hard to do the minimum necessary to avoid NRO shutting you down for racism -- Christ, look at Victor Davis Maximulist Assholacist Hanson, who weekly and weakly gets to denounce those with darker skin hues for their crimes against the white race (and chainsaw owners), without drawing the ire of Rich Lowry. But long self-admitted racist Derbyshire evidently did not see the need to keep the pasties of respectabilty on any longer.
What is in its own way more remarkable is that even when the author admits he is a racist, even when he claims that whites are inherently smarter than blacks, and exhorts his children to avoid black neighborhoods or any gathering at which blacks might be a substantial part of those in attendance, or even living in cities run by black politicians, there is still outrage on the right that some dare call the man a racist, something he unabashedly calls himself.
I read quite a lot of the comments -- the type of hazmat work I usually leave to Edroso -- and found it fascinating how many of them think Derb just spoke the common sense that we all understand, including we phony liberals. How do you explain to these fearful ignoramuses that this is just not the case? That many of us have long lived in places with large, even majority, black populations, that we do so without spending every day cringing in fear or clinging to our guns, that we walk the streets and ride the subways and go to bars and restaurants and clubs without becoming paralyzed by fear that "they" are out amongst us.
I am coming up on thirty years in DC (my first three were spent in heavily racially mixed cheap suburbs) and have somehow miraculously avoided being victimized by crime. When I first lived here -- in Prince Georges County, the first majority black suburban area in the U.S. -- I spent a great deal of my free time playing basketball, which was the ultimate in cheap entertainment. I was often the only white guy on the court -- I was certainly the only one going to law school -- and yet, I was not subject to hostility or ill treatment of any kind. I think I was viewed as a bit of a curiosity for a while, but after a couple of weeks of steadily enduring the stunning heat of a DC summer, I pretty much blended in. Thereafter, I lived in a variety of gentrifying or marginal neighborhoods in the District itself. This was from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s -- not exactly the city's golden age in terms of crime -- but again, I did not feel like I was living under a state of siege. I kept my wits about me and probably enjoyed some degree of luck, but I just didn't experience the supposed wanton criminality of my neighbors.
I've also now experienced five different black mayors since I've lived here and, what do you know, I feel rather differently about each of them -- Marion Barry is a scumbag and racist, who I despise about as much as I have any politician I've ever known. Tony Williams was a remarkably effective chief executive who did great things for the city. Adrain Fenti was both admirable and infuriating -- he too did a lot of good, but unnecessarily burned a whole lot of bridges and lost office. I don't know what to think of Vince Grey at the moment. Sharon Pratt Kelly was sadly in over her head. In other words, each of them was an individual in his or her own right, with a sum of strengths and weaknesses that made them succeed or fail or fall somewhere in between.
As for Derbyshire's notion that black politicians are uniquely corrupt, well this was news to me. When I was a kid, I recall a pretty steady stream of politicians making their way to the slammer for feathering their own nests. Not a one was black -- they were almost always Irish or Italian, the yeomanry of graft in the Bay State, with the odd Greek thrown in for good measure. The attainment of power will always be for some -- and here race is truly unimportant -- the opportunity to take a little money that isnt' legitimately theirs. This is now new.
The IQ stuff remains startlingly offensive and Sullivan and Murray should do penance for giving this kind of crap the veneer of respectability.
Ulitmately, I think Derbyshire's world view is held by a pretty signficant swath of the right, but most of them under the age of 60 understand that they cannot express this in such unabashed terms. But, and this is the subject for another day, those who are clamoring for an unabashed economic politics of the left better understand that this is read in many quarters as a call to give money to undeserving black people. And that remains, something that can be said and treated with respect in large swaths of the country, with only a minimal amount of camoflauge.
What do you all have to say? (Sorry for the slowness in posting -- both work and home have been quite busy.)
I strongly recommend the video for the sheer pleasure of the performance. Men having fun and not worrying about being cool.
- Impending Signs of the Apocalypse Dept. - Maureen Dowd wrote the perfect column yesterday in response to the Village fainting couch set who criticized President Obama for pushing back at the Supreme Court. As Dowd notes, the right wing of the Court continue to act like partisan hacks, with their intellectual leader and purported great legal mind sounding like a Fox anchor, invoking the "Cornhusker Kickback" in oral argument and complaining about the burden of having to read the law in its entirety. Really, Dowd said pretty much all that I have to say on the subject. Even if Obama were the biggest disappointment to liberalism who ever lived -- and he isn't -- he needs to be reelected solely to keep any more right wing ideologues from getting on the Court. This is matter of profound, generational concern.
- Speaking of outrageous judicial behavior, I was just stunned by Judge Jerry Smith on the United States Court of Appeals confronting a Justice Department lawyer during oral argument about President Obama's criticism of the Court, using the term "Obamacare," and assigning her homework to get a three page single spaced letter specifically addressing whether the Attorney General and the Department of Justice "recognize the authority of the federal courts, through unelected judges, to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases." Now I've done quite a few oral arguments in my day, but I have to admit I would have been totally floored by such a question. I would like to think that I would have responded by asking the judge to recuse himself from the case given the obviously inappropriate nature of his conduct, but you know those robes are pretty daunting some times. If Judge Smith thinks he struck a mighty blow for the legitimacy of America's courts, he is sadly mistaken.
- The always excellent Linda Greenhouse, truly one of the finest reporters of this or any other generation, lends some more light than heat to the goings on in the Supreme Court with respect to both the ACA and the recent strip search decision. It's well worth reading. Greenhouse seems to be implying that when the dust settles that the ACA is more likely to be upheld than not. Let's hope so.
- Tim Noah, whose book on income inequality will be out in a couple of weeks, has a useful corrective to those who continue to suggest that low income people bear no tax burden.
One of the more tiresome features of the New York Times Op-Ed pages is those days when its house conservatives, David Brooks and Ross Douthat, play moralist. Although there are differences between the two in age and religion, they both share a disquieting tendency to extol the virtues of sacrifice without ever conveying the depth of what they ask. In their world, people should stay in marriages that make them unhappy, give birth to children that they feel they cannot raise, and endure lives that are bereft of hope or pleasure. Never is there a sense conveyed of the true meaning of such sacrifice, of the fact that our lives are quite finite, and that there is often a kind of permanence in these sacrifices, that happiness foregone is frequently lost for good.
This is not to argue against a sense of duty in life and of an understanding that there are things bigger than ourselves in the universe. However, I'd like to see people like Brooks and Douthat actually acknowledge the weight of sacrifice and what it means and how sometimes it taxes people beyond endurance.
Today Brooks scolds Charles Darwin Snelling, an 81-year old man who killed his wife, who had suffered for years with Alzheimer's disease, and then committed suicide. This same man had written an uplifting essay for Brooks about the redemptive nature of having spent the last six years of his sixty-one year marriage caring for his wife as she slipped away from him. Four months after the essay was published, Snelling committed the murder/suicide. Brooks is offended that Snelling failed to "respect the future" (and, one senses, annoyed that one of his star essay writers failed to live up to his uplifting words). I guess it doesn't occur to Brooks that perhaps Snelling saw the future all too clearly and that it led to a cul de sac of harrowing decline, death, and aloneness. I wouldn't presume to speak for Snelling, but I can certainly imagine that he might well have felt unending pain and exhaustion, that his struggle of so many years may have seemed futile, that the disappearance of his companion of six decades, even as her heart still beat, was unbearable.
When I was reading this sad tale, I was reminded of this passage from one of Camus' Notebooks: "One must love life before loving its meaning Dostoevsky said. Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning consoles us for it."
It is perhaps unfair to expect profundity in daily newspaper columns (or blog posts for that matter). But it seems to me that if one is going to venture into territory like this, one should possess a tad more gravitas than does Mr. Brooks.
(A band for whom I have a big soft spot -- they remind me of a Scottish Ramones -- every song sounds more or less the same, but it's a song I really like -- dark and poppy at the same time.)
- I opened the Sunday Review section of the New York Times in bleary-eyed fashion (curse you NCAA)and was treated to two columns devoted to sexual matters in popular culture, one by Maureen Dowd and one by Frank Bruni. I wish this was an April Fool's Day joke, but it does not appear to be. Dowd, ever the ingenue -- she really should be banned from writing about sex -- seems stunned and titillated that sadomasochism exists (despite having perused her brother's copy of the Story of O back in the 70s) and that it is the subject of a popular novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. It seems beyond Dowd's imagination that in the world of S&M a large number (if not a majority) of submissives are men. Bruni, possibly the only person in the world less qualified to write about heterosexual sex than Dowd, (well maybe Rick Santorum too), weighs in as well on women's bleak sexual prospects as evidenced by a new HBO series Girls and, of course, Fifty Shades of Grey.Nicholas Kristof rounds out the day with yet another installment in his 5,000 part series of sexual trafficking, in this case his crusade against ads in the Village Voice for prostitution. (I knew I was desperate when I found myself seeking solace in a halfway sensible Thomas Friedman article.) All of this seems to me to part and parcel of a certain kind of middle-aged elite hysteria against sexual freedom for women -- this would be the liberal side of the hysteria. For the right wing side of this hysteria I invite you to read the comments to a sex and feminism-positive piece by Hannah Rosin in the Wall Street Journal. Amazing stuff if you can get through it.
- On the other hand, I quite liked this piece in the Baffler by Thomas Frank in which he notes the amazing fact that a decade of unmitigated folly by Washington elites -- in both the media and in policy circles -- has prompted virtually no recriminations. The hideous mistakes and blinkered ideology behind the twin stock market collapses of the decade, the bubbles in high tech and real estate and their consequences, the disaster of financial deregulation, and, for variety, the debacle of the Iraq war, have cost no one their slots on the Sunday talk shows or their column spaces or quotes. Frank, who is at his best in this kind of writing, attributes this outcome to an ethic of perverse solidarity and ideologically like-mindedness among those who form the narrow segment of political and economic thought deemed acceptable in Washington. (Big tip o' the hat by the way to Kathleen Geier who is back and really lighting it up on the weekends at the Washington Monthly.)
- Coincidentally, Scott LeMieux had a piece at LG&M yesterday in which he sagely states the same argument regarding the ACA that I was asserting in comments the other day -- that the law was inherently constrained by the policy prescriptions that would be acceptable to senators like Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Blanch Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman, and that no bully pulpit in the world was going to give Barack Obama significant leverage with respect to these lawmakers.
- Speaking of the ACA, Suliivan had a piece the other day in which conservatives were arguing that people on the left were surprised by the hostility of questions from the Supreme Court on the mandate because we live arrogantly inside an ideological bubble. Jonathan Chait has a great, albeit depressing, rejoinder to this. Those of us with legal expertise have generally been most optimistic about the law's prospects because we understand that ample precedent strongly suggests that the law falls comfortably within mainstream commerce clause jurisprudence. Those on the left who view the Republican Supreme Court members as just more right wing politicians in robes have been warning us -- using Bush v. Gore and Citizens United as cautionary examples -- that the conservative (a true misnomer) members of the Court are largely committed right wing ideologues, loyal first and foremost to the cause not the Constitution. I'd like to think this is not the case, but I do worry.
- And just to remind everyone the kinds of things that are at stake. The notion that enormous asshole John Podhoretz, who owes his entire living to his cosmically scummy parents, thinks that covering children up to age 26 is a laughing matter is yet further testament to the fact self-awareness apparently doesn't exist on the right.
Time to do house work -- those goddamned clothes aren't going to fold themselves nor the rugs vacuum themselves. If I only had a slave.
It's open to your thoughts and concerns as always.
Great cover of the Tom Petty - Traveling Wilbury's song. I've been busy as hell, but also trying to get a little distance from the cacophony of the last few days, especially the obsessive coverage of the Supreme Court health care argument and the Trayvon Martin killing. But somewhere in the standard blogging contract I believe that each of these subjects must be addressed and so here goes:
- I am trying to decide how much to read into the oral argument on the Affordable Care Act. I know Jeffrey Toobin's already consigned the law to the ash heap of history, but I feel a little more hopeful. Oral argument is often a bit of a sideshow in any Supreme Court case, a last chance for the justices to test the arguments of the parties and themselves. A line of questioning does not necessarily foretell where a given justice may be going with the case. (Note: I do wish the Solicitor General didn't choke during the argument, which I'm pretty sure he did, although others disagree.)
Having said that, I am obviously concerned that a Court cursed with so much right wing arrogance could really overstep and strike down the most important piece of social legislation passed since the mid-1960s.
The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. It's a bit of a jury-rigged mess, overly complex, not easily explained, it keeps many of the worst features of American health care delivery -- for-profit insurers, an over reliance on employer-based coverage, and its roll out was designed to be painfully slow. But let's be clear -- and I wish bloggers like Atrios would actually engage with this fact -- it was the best legislation that could be achieved given the structural impediments and enormous vested interests that stand in the way of change in the health care arena. Tens of millions of people who are currently uninsured will receive coverage through expansions in Medicaid, subsidized insurance available through the new exchanges, and from greatly expanded community health center programs. This is not some abstract point, it is a concrete reality that will improve peoples lives. Additionally, the law prescribes truly meaningful minimum coverages that have to be extended to the insured -- with no annual or lifetime maximums permitted, certain basic services that must be provided without cost sharing, allowing children up to age 26 to stay on parental policies, and, of course, most meaningfully, the elimination of pre-existing condition conclusions.
Should the Court strike down the law it will show incredible contempt for the elected branches of government -- in a fashion not really seen since the early New Deal era. In the end, such an act would bring tremendous discredit on the Court, particularly since I don't foresee any opportunity to address this issue again in a meaningful way for a period of many years, possibly decades. A reversion to the status quo will be disastrous -- employer coverage will continue to erode, costs will continue to soar, the ranks of the uninsured will continue to swell, and problems with uncompensated care will continue to plague many hospitals. And solutions -- even imperfect, compromised solutions -- will not be forthcoming. The Republican Party is no longer a party interested in solutions and will act to block anything aimed at alleviating these problems.
Let's hope that the justices avoid the temptation to hubristic recklessness. I actually think they will.
- I haven't commented on the Trayvon Martin killing because I find that criminal cases can often make those who jump to quick conclusions look foolish. I've been a bit turned off by the degree to which MSNBC in particular has made the case a kind of 24/7 cause celebre, one which seems to shed a whole lot more heat than light. But I must say it has been revealing in terms of bringing to the fore the barely concealed racism that animates so much of the right wing. God the ugliness that lies just beneath the surface with these people is astonishing. And so they turn the case into a partisan matter, one in which some poor 17-year old who had the bad sense to be black and wear a hoodie and got into some trouble at school obviously deserved to die. Somebody's child was shot to death in highly dubious circumstances -- you'd think the gravity of that basic fact might make them all little but circumspect -- but alas, no.
Hauntingly beautiful song about Gram Parsons and what he meant to her.
- I am debating whether to read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a book that has been getting a lot of buzz recently. Haidt, a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia, writes about the mental processes by which people acquire their political views and highlights, in particular, what he sees as an overemphasis on reason by people on the liberal side of the ledger. Haidt stresses that reason tends to be something done retrospectively when it comes to politics -- in other words, we arrive at our political positions intuitively and then resort to reason to sell it to others (and ourselves). I pretty much buy that world view, although I think it sells short the reasoning process and how undertaking that exercise -- even in the interest of self-justification -- can lead us to interesting places and instill the habit of thinking seriously about things.
Haidt appears to hit on themes that have been a frequent subject of discussion around here and one that several of you I think have had particularly good insights about -- the frequent lack of compelling narrative in the liberal approach to politics, a failure to deal well with the tribal and the mythic, a certain comfort with our own rectitude, coupled with a tendency to overestimate our own numbers.
Of course I was bit put off the book by the fact that Will Saletan was chosen to review it by the Times. Saletan enjoys nothing so much as to castigate liberals while turning the flaws of the right into virtues. He is the ultimate totebagger -- smug and self-loathing all at once. Saletan's review is full of gems like this:
People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.
You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.
So in other words, resorts to tribalism, religious primitivism, and reflexive nationalism are the equivalent of adding spinach, broccoli, and quinoa to your diet -- they make you -- huh? -- more broad-minded. It is all well and good to understand that these impulses animate the politics of many people and that communication strategies need to be designed to appeal to aspects of this world view. But having a broader array of reflexive prejudices does not make one more "broad-minded."
(I also find it interesting the Saletan stresses the left's electoral failures. It's worth noting that Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections and came rather close in the fifth. Should Obama win in 2012, that will represent popular vote victories in five of the last six presidential elections, something that the Democrats have not done since winning five straight elections from 1932 through 1948. The Republicans accomplished the five out of six feat between 1968 and 1988, but although people like Saletan never quite notice, they haven't really dominated national politics since then. I am not suggesting that this has been a liberal golden age, but it's not 1994 in perpetuity either.)
Most annoyingly, Saletan, like his right wing doppelganger David Brooks, resorts frequently to glib suggestions that political attitudes are products of evolutionary biology. Really, can someone just make this crap stop. Political attitudes can transform over the course of a relatively few years -- see e.g. gay marriage -- they are not some sort of immutable biological fact.
Ultimately whatever its flaws, we should not forget the degree to which liberalism's narratives have often succeeded in our politics. Appeals to the universal nature of human equality have succeeded to a marked degree in the struggles of blacks, women, and the gay community over the last fifty years. There are powerful aspects of the American mythos that have been effectively harnessed in these causes -- and if you talk to young people you realize the degree to which they have taken root in the culture. The struggle it seems to me is to take the strengths that liberalism has shown in this arena and look to ways to make similar appeals in the economic arena, the place where I believe we have not made much progress in recent decades. These are in some respects more complicated arguments to make and ones that prompt fierce opposition by vested interests, but I think that they can be made in a way that is both respectful and persuasive.
(Wow, I am watching Colbert really take it to Charles Murray right now -- it's pretty interesting to see how steely Colbert can be -- one gets the sense that Murray gets under his skin in a way that the usual buffoons don't.)
Alright, I've got to catch an early flight to Louisville in the morning -- consider this an open thread.
THE Prophet Jonah was sent to Nineveh. St. Paul was sent to Athens, Macedonia, Rome. And now Tim Tebow has been sent to New York City...Babylon-upon-the-Hudson.
O ye of little faith. Did you think that the Lord God of Hosts, having raised Tebow up as a Gideon of the gridiron, would pass up the opportunity to put his faithful servant to the test? Did you think that the angelic screenwriters responsible for scripting last year’s succession of Tebow-related improbabilities had nodded off after the Broncos were dispatched in the A.F.C. playoffs? Did you think that the archons and demiurges who preside over America’s culture war would be content to let Tebow fade into obscurity — some red-state-friendly endorsement deals, a few 6-10 finishes, and then early retirement and a lifetime of under-the-radar charity work? ...
No, this was where the Tebow story was always destined to end up. Denver was his Galilee; New York will be the Roman Colosseum.
Did he really say that on the op-ed page of the New York Times? Yes, he did. I can only assume that the NYT is following the WaPo into "they'll print anything" territory.
After that, his column abandons 'totally over the top' for more standard stupidity:
Why is Tim Tebow such a fascinating and polarizing figure? Not just because he claims to be religious; that claim is commonplace among football stars and ordinary Americans alike. Rather, it’s because his conduct — kind, charitable, chaste, guileless — seems to actually vindicate his claim to be in possession of a life-altering truth.
Nothing discredits religion quite like the gap that often yawns between what believers profess and how they live. With Tebow, that gap seems so narrow as to be invisible....He fascinates, in part, because he behaves — at least in public, and at least for now — the way one would expect more Christians to behave if their faith were really true.
Tebow’s religion doesn’t just promise a path to personal transformation. It claims that every human life is actually a story with an Author, and that a genuinely Christian life should make that divine Authorship manifest.
Shorter Douthat: while practically all the people who get to define Christianity in our popular discourse are charlatans and mountebanks, hey looky here, I've found one who may not be! So that shows the whole thing is really true!
If we statisticians had a name for this, it would be something like "proof by outlier." The bulk of my data says X, but I've managed to find one data point that says Y instead - so my conclusion is Y. Because that's the conclusion I was going to come up with, no matter what the data said.
"Harlan County Line" - Dave Alvin & the Guilty Ones
Calling it an end to a long, long week. March has been surreally beautiful around here with the last couple of days in the mid-80s -- of course it is going to rain all weekend. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom yesterday when I drove by the Tidal Basin. My only fear is that if it's 85 in March is it going to 105 in July?
- Go to jail, go directly to jail - Wow, it appears that Jon Corzine ordered that customer accounts be raided in order to cover an overdraft of an MF Global corporate account. This is what we call stealing or, if you want to be all fancy, "conversion." Methinks Mr. Corzine has upcoming reservations at the gray bar hotel. I am baffled by this sort of thing -- Corzine is an extraordinarily wealthy individual. Why would you risk imprisonment in this kind of situation -- why not just let the company go bankrupt? (Of course the question might also be asked why are you still trying to make money -- why not do something decent with the rest of your life?)
- The latest polls from Virginia would suggest that vaginal wanding is not a winning position for the Republicans and Obama is the beneficiary of the crazy. Obama has a 17 point lead over Romney in the latest NBC/Marist poll. Two predictions - if Obama once agains carries Loudon and Prince William County, he wins Virginia. And if he wins Virginia, he wins the election.
It's primary day in Louisiana -- a probable Santorum win, although it looks like his lead in Wisconsin has been evaporated once again under an onslaight of Romney advertising. The Human Etch a Sketch is blasting his way to one ugly win.
Time to begin the weekend chores. Be back later.
Update: The polls just closed in Louisiana and CNN has already called it for Santorum, who leads Romney 40% to 29% thus far in very early voting. I don't know if it's just me, but I get the sense that Santorum is getting very little mileage for his win. Maybe because it's a Saturday night, maybe because it's in the middle of the NCAA tournament, or maybe people have just gotten bored and (rightly) don't see this vote as a game changer, but this seems to be generating no buzz at all. Too bad. I am in favor of any additional discomfort that can be thrown the way of the Romney campaign.
Santorum has stretched his lead now to 49% to 26% with about 70% of the vote in. I believe that if Romney falls under 25%, he does not take any of the delegates allocated by the primary vote unless he wins in an individual congressional district, which seems unlikely at this time. You would think that this might be a bit of an embarrassment and may generate comment in the press tomorrow.
And speaking of embarrassments, Gingrich is getting only 16% of the vote in a deep southern state. This really would be the last gasp for any normal candidate -- but for the grifter supreme, I assume that some preposterous reason to soldier on -- no doubt for the good of the republic and civilization -- will be asserted.
Ron Paul garners another paltry 6% of the vote. Would someone remind me again why we were supposed to take this guy seriously?
Well it looks like Santorum will take 49% of the vote and Romney will just limp over 25%, finishing with about 26.5% -- not a stellar performance. Turnout was light, but superior to 2008, when Mike Huckabee just slipped by John McCain. Interestingly, once again in a southern state, Santorum performed significantly better than he polled.
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