(From back when the straight kids first starting going to gay clubs.)
Great news from Washington State where the Senate has just approved a marriage equality bill by a vote of 28-21. They even managed to snag four Republican votes in the process. The House is expected to pass the bill as well, and Governor Christine Gregoire, who was so enthusiastic about the bill that she stood on the Senate floor throughout the vote, will sign it. And just like that another victory for equality. Expect Maryland to follow suit soon. And then possibly New Jersey.
I'm down in southern Florida for a couple of days filled with meetings, so posting may be a bit spotty.
Let's dissolve the working class and elect another - Like a moth to a flame and flies to, um, honey, you knew that David Brooks could not long resist the allure of Murray's morality tale. And so here he is today, right on schedule, arguing in favor of some form of national service so the rubes can be taught lessons in how to behave by their betters. I am amused a bit because Brooks and Murray seem to have finally caught up with the data set forth in Red Families versus Blue Families, which illustrated the fact that liberals on the coasts lived the lives -- centered around stable, intact families -- that were allegedly the province of real Americans with heartland values. But the Red Families, Blue Families argument was not that gaps in behavior were the product of insufficient virtue on the part of red staters or working class people. Rather, the book argued for policies -- evidence-based sex education, the ready availability of contraceptives for teenagers, protection of abortion rights, and delays in starting families and entering into marriage so that people could become educated and mature enough to enter family life with some decent chance at success. (Brooks was once an outspoken opponent of this world view.)
Again, Brooks and Murray offer no practical policy changes. Instead they suggest that if the upper class would stop being so insular and mingle more with the great unwashed, virtue among the masses would no doubt follow like night follows day. Brooks appeals to the moral vanity of his Times readership -- how nice to be among the virtuous after all of these years -- they are "phenomenally productive" after all. And he indicates that the "top twenty percent" are not to blame for the plight of the bottom thirty percent. On this point we agree -- it's not the top twenty percent who have caused the downfall of the working class -- it is the top one/half percent who decided that the jobs of the working class could be better done overseas, that belonging to a union was a luxury that these people couldn't afford, and who pushed for a tax system that leads to neglect of education, infrastructure, and other services that help spread prosperity. This idea that there were no victims and no victimizers in the great wealth shift of the last three decades is preposterous.
It will be interesting to see the degree to which this strain of thinking permeates Republican ranks. It's going to come as a bit of a shock to the white working class that they have gone from paragons of American virtue to being moral basket cases who don't work hard enough. But I am sure that they will take it in the spirit in which it is intended.
(Originally done as an update -- but I think Brooks deserves his own thread of comment invective.)
One of the more maddening things about so-called thinkers of the right is the degree to which their purported concerns about certain issues never actually lead to them advocating public policies that might alleviate the problem in question. Thus, for instance, despite their long time obsession with births out of wedlock, right wing intellectuals virtually never voice support for policies that would make contraception cheaper and more readily available or practical sexual education for young people that would enhance its use. And God forbid that abortion be seen as something that should be accessible, covered by insurance, and not stigmatized. But then again, right wing intellectuals aren't really interested in solving problems, they are interested in being able to fulminate against people's failings and to make sure that there are votes enough to perpetuate the interest of the wealthy in the halls of power.
The area where one sees this disingenuousness in perpetually full flower is the treatment of the white working class by the intellectual right. Time and again, one reads about the identification of the Republican Party with working class whites -- a vital element of the base after all -- and yet one struggles in vain to think of a single policy advocated by the right which would have the practical effect of improving working class life. I seriously could not sit here at the moment and come up with one thing on the conservative agenda that would help working people. Instead, the loyalty of white working class voters is sought through appeals to tribalism, ressentiment, bigotry, and attempts to make the white working class feel victimized by so-called liberal elites.
One gets the sense as well that certain elements within the right wing intelligentsia find the white working class to be something of an embarrassment, a disappointing people who are failing to uphold their rightful position as exemplars of American values, the good patriotic, God-fearing, hard-working yemonanry that campaign commercials love. It has dawned on at least a few of these thinkers that the working class of Red State America is a place where divorce and unwed births are far more common than in the decadent liberal enclaves of the coasts, a fact that causes them no small amount of discomfort.
Charles Murray of Bell Curve infamy is one such thinker and he has recently published an article in the Wall Street Journal (and a book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010) devoted to this subject, in which he blames the break down of working class family life on liberals. It is a classic of the genre, one which Roy (twice), TBogg, and Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice have already taken a crack at, leaving pretty much nothing but a dead body for me to kick around -- but I can't pass up even that chance.
Murray looks at the differences in marriage and divorce rates, out of wedlock births, participation in the labor force, and crime rates in 1960 compared to those of the recent past and pronounces white working class communities to be in trouble, especially when compared to how these numbers look in communities in which white professional congregate. (Murray omits brown people from his book -- they are hopeless after all.) Murray uses two communities to illustrate his claims -- Belmont Massachusetts, an affluent bedroom community of Boston, and Fishtown, a working class section of Philadelphia -- and finds that the people in Fishtown are crime-prone shirkers who don't go to church, fornicate promiscuously and either don't get married when having children or marry but divorce. This, of course, is the fault of people in Belmont who between striving all day at their high paying jobs and drinking imported beer in the evening, have no time to lecture the people of Fishtown on their moral failings. (Read the article and tell me that this is not an accurate summary.)
So deindustrialization is not the problem, nor is the decline of unions*, the degree to which the tax code has become skewed in favor of the very wealthy (the non-working wealthy, by the way, like Mitt), and a rapacious capitalism that treats working class people like expendable cogs in a machine. (Incidentally, in 1960, 28.6% of the American work force belonged to a union. This was before the rise of big public employee and service unions and when women constituted a far smaller percentage of the work force. I think it is fair to say that probably half of American working class white men in 1960 belonged to a union.) No, the problem is the morality of the 1960s, coupled with the degree to which snooty liberal professionals have isolated themselves from these real Americans, depriving them in the process of their superior moral example. No government programs are necessary to arrest the state of moral decay in working class America -- instead, we who live in the "super zip codes" need to leave them and our Belgian ales and endive salads behind, move into neighborhoods where we would find our blue collar brethren -- perhaps we could be bused in -- and lecture them about their moral deficiencies. How could such a plan not succeed?
[*One would think that unions would be an institution that "small c" conservatives (who actually don't exist) would enthusiastically support. They are decentralized, democratic organizations that help give people a sense of identity and belonging in their communities, they promote economic stability, and they undertake the kind of private charitable efforts -- passing the hat for members in distress is a common occurrence at meetings -- that conservatives claim to value.]
**"More Brandy Please" is the intellectual property of Charles Pierce. but I am sure he wouldn't mind me borrowing it, even if it is not being used to describe David Brooks.
"The Last Day of Our Acquaintence" - Sinead O'Connor
(The Gingrich affair reminded me of this most epic of divorce songs -- I saw Sinead on this tour and she was really quite extraordinary -- a huge voice and a ton of charisma. But I digress. . . .)
I am going to try to get another substantive post up after a good night's sleep. In the meantime, I turn over to your capable hands.
Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store Just like the ones we made before ‘ Cept this one came from Singapore I guess we can’t make it here anymore
Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in Should I hate ‘em for having our jobs today No I hate the men sent the jobs away I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams All lily white and squeaky clean They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed Their kids won’t bleed in their damn little war And we can’t make it here anymore
- One of the continually endearing things about libertarians (and by endearing, I mean annoying as shit) is the failure to honestly come to grips with economic power and the ways in which wielding such power distinguishes those that have it from the rest of us. So Will Wilkinson wants to know what's so special about the 1% and why we're all making such a fuss about these people who are just like you and I, except for their shitloads of money and the power to make and break so many of us.
First of all, we need to distinguish between the bottom of the 1% who are largely highly paid professionals -- lawyers and doctors and the like. These people are pretty much wage earners who although paid handsomely have little economic control over other people and whose earnings are not really mysterious. For instance, I bill for my services at a certain rate per hour (a very reasonable one if you must know), I work a certain number of hours per year, based on which, me and my fellow lawyers at my firm get paid. There is no alchemy or mysterious value added with most professionals -- a service is provided, a price is paid, and from it wages derived, even six figure wages.
The real one percenters are guys like Mitt Romney, people who extract huge sums of money from the economy via financial manipulation -- the people who run hedge funds, private equity firms, and investment management firms -- you know, the people who brought us the financial crisis -- or the highest levels of management at large corporations, people who create enormous corporate profits in large part by ruthlessly exploiting the labor of others -- the Wal-Marts and, yes, the Apples of the world. These people have removed themselves from concerns over the greater good here in America and shamelessly take advantage of the global poor. And let's be clear -- Apple is nothing special as corporations go and Steve Jobs was an arrogant, greedy bastard, not some sort of Zen progressive paragon. Fuck him. (Update: Scott Lemieux has an excellent post on this very subject. Again, as big bad wolf points out, a keen sense of aesthetics does not make you any less of a corporate exploiter.)
The clueless clowns like Wilkinson and Thomas Friedman, who somehow think there is a way for the average worker to win this rigged game, are delusional. The deregulated global free-for-all that we have lived through over the past three decades is not a path to a better world. The half of one-percent who control this global casino are not heroic role models -- they are by and large a plague, a threat to any kind of stable and humane society. I remember back in 1984 when Gary Hart tried to make the case that it was the entrepreneur who was the hero of the Democratic Party and I remember thinking fuck no, it isn't. The hero of the Democratic Party is and should be the ordinary guy who turns a wrench every day to support his family, the nurse pulling a twelve hour shift to care for the ill, the union organizer working to bring voice and dignity to those who toil, the cop on the beat, the teacher in the classroom. The other party can take care of the entrepreneur or the entrepreneur can take care of himself. We need a party for those who work for a living, a party that will shape policies that honor that work and don't view it as a disposable commodity.
I am going to try and live blog the speech and would love to have your input.
The President starts the evening with a nice shot in the arm as a result of the Romney tax return release. I've got to believe that as he lays out some of the inequities and injustices of the tax system -- and the manner in which the Republicans would like to exacerbate those issues -- that Romney will be the example that a goodly number of people will think about.
I think it is fair to say that every initiative that Obama highlights this evening is going to be dead on arrival if it has to be approved by Congress. It is clear that the Republicans on Capitol Hill have no interest in anything that might make the President look successful or effective, so this is largely a positioning speech for the election.
"I intend to fight obstruction with action" after saying he will work with anyone.
He vows to rebuild American manufacturing.
"Some said we should let it (the auto industry) die." To whom would the President be referring?
"We can make it happen [the rebuilding of manufacturing] in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh" to name three cities chosen entirely at random.
(I popped over to Sullivan's place and note that he finds the idea of industrial policy, economic nationalism, and protectionism to be depressing. I am heartened by his depression.)
I don't like the applause line for firing bad teachers -- it's probably good politics, but it feeds a pernicious myth.
A quick pitch for comprehensive immigration reform and -- I believe -- the DREAM Act.
Now extolling the growth in American oil production. Not exactly my appaluse line of choice either. Followed by a pitch for natural gas fracking with the caveat that producers must disclose the chemicals used in extraction. He notes the crucial role of federal financing of research in developing the fracking technology.
Pledges exectuve action and the use of the Department of Defense to develop alternative energy.
"If you make more that a million dollars a year you should pay at least thirty percent in taxes." And no, this is not the politics of envy. Hmmm -- who could that be aimed at?
And finally an attack on the filibuster, the central political problem of the moment in many respects.
I do agree with Sullivan that the speech is Clintonesque, i.e. a stem-winding laundry list -- which were more effective than one might think -- and rhetorically the weakest of Obama's SOTUs so far. The language is pretty pedestrian and there are no real admirable rhetorical flights that I can recall. But I think the substance of the speech is aimed in the right places for the election.
It was, as Rachel Maddow described it, an assertive speech without necessarily being a terribly memorable one. It was very nationalistic -- in a way I thought effective. Lawrence O'Donnell aptly described it as having a lot of "tax fairy dust sprinkled throughout," something which O'Donnell viewed skeptically.
And now here's Mitch:
After a nod to civility, Mitch engages in a litany of Republican disinformation about the President's program. He's aiming somewhat at young people who have suffered high unemployment in recent years. He tries to make the case that becoming rich is the greatest public service one can do. And that Steve Jobs created more jobs than the stimulus. (I am skeptical about this -- unless he is talking about jobs in China.) Mitch is going to save the safety net by destroying it.
The "Obama Administration's constant efforts to divide us." That is rich.
I propose that the phrase "shining city on a hill" be forever banned.
Mitch is a dour, grim little man -- how the fuck he could be anyone's beau ideal of a presidential candidate is a mystery to me.
Well Romney has released his taxes for two years and they are even worse than I had imagined. I can't wait until he gets pressured to release returns from years in which he wasn't already planning on running for the presidency -- I cannot imagine how horribly illustrative they will be in terms of the fundamental unfairness of the American tax system.
Just based on the brief things that I have read and heard this morning, it looks like Romney had income over $20 million for both years and paid an effective tax rate of 13.9% in 2010. Unbelievable.
I pulled my 2009 taxes out of my filing cabinet this morning -- I think 2010 is still at my office somewhere -- just to see how my wife and I stacked up against Mittens and his wife. I am an equity partner in my law firm, which means I derive income based on firm profits and that I am treated as self-employed under the law, meaning I pay both the employer and employee sides of the FICA tax. My income can fluctuate quite a bit from year to year as profits ebb and flow, but I make a pretty nice living by any reasonable standard after 25 years of plying my craft. My wife is a salaried professional who makes a six figure income in her own right, so in terms of family income we hover right around the top 1-2% depending on the year. (Typical of most people I know in this demographic, we have virtually no investment income to speak of -- we fully fund our retirement accounts, pay our big mortgage and tuition bills, take a nice vacation or two, and try to save a bit, but we do not have capital gains or interest income worthy of mention.)
In 2009, which was a very good year for me (although not in quite up to Mitt's speaking fee income), we paid an overall federal tax rate of 30.3%. (We get hit increasingly by the Alternative Minimum Tax, which wipes out a good bit of our mortgage interest deduction.) We paid an additional 7% effective tax rate to the District of Columbia.
I never complain about my taxes. I feel incredibly fortunate to be where I am in life and would not object to paying a bit more for the greater good. (And I can assure people that marginal tax rates have no impact at all on our business decisions in terms of trying to make money.) But when I look at the tax rate paid by this "unemployed" rich kid I see red. The meager taxes paid on capital gains and the gaping tax loophole that allows ordinary income for these investment management types to be treated as "carried interest" are completely outrageous.
I have got to believe that these tax returns -- and the carried interest, Swiss bank accounts, money offshored in the Caymans, and the like -- are really going to hurt Romney. He will be Exhibit A in the case about the unfairness of our tax system and how it is manipulated by the 1% of the 1% so that they pay far less than their fair share. The notion that this group could not pay a bit more in taxes has got to strike just about everyone in the country as preposterous. This is not going to be a one day or even a one week story. It is going to follow Romney throughout the entire election season and should give President Obama a pretty fat target at which to to shoot.
Oh yeah, and this is how the great "job maker" made his tens of millions a year. I am sure people will be impressed by his contribution to the economy.
Seems like we needed another one of these - the last one was getting pretty full.
A little music from Al Kooper and friends to spice up your evening.
Very interesting: I don't know what you folks are seeing, but what I'm seeing on the main page is "Take My Heart Away" by Johnny Clegg & Savuka, but on the page for this thread, I'm seeing the song I intended, "My Days Are Numbered, by the Al Kooper version of Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
Very strange. What the hell, they're both good songs. Enjoy.
(This song just popped into my head for some reason.)
- As I alluded to in comments, this David Brooks piece was really too much. I was particularly taken by his notion of multi-generational grittiness, a kind of immigrant DNA that is evidently handed down to the right kind of people -- people like Mitt Romney, who is just a step removed from hearty pioneers and immigrant coal miners. (As someone who has spent a small chunk of his career trying to deal with sons who have driven their fathers' construction companies into the ground, I nearly spit my coffee out at this notion -- the name Paris Hilton also immediately jumped to mind.) The only thing that matters about Romney is that he has shown the work ethic and persistence of the salt of the earth working man types of which Brooks has heard tell.
His wealth is, according to Brooks, a sideshow. No one cares that he pays a 15% tax rate on his eight figure income or that he has up to $100 million in his freakin' IRA (really??!!), or that he is off-shoring some part of his considerable fortune in the Cayman Islands. No, this hard working white man, this starched-shirt striver, is just what the zeitgeist demands.
To which I say, keep telling yourself that story David.
We got an inch of snow last night and it's a little bit icy, so an excellent day to hang around and see what's going on in South Carolina.
Whats doing with you?
A little liveblogging update: MSNBC has already called it for Gingrich, CNN just showed exit polls with Gingrich up by 9%, and Fox News has also called it for Gingrich. This is surely good news for John McCain.
David Gergen just referred to Newt Gingrich as an "alpha male." Only in the odd world of Republican politics. In my world, he would have been the guy whose lunch money would have been up for grabs on a daily basis.
There have been some questions about whether there would be a gender gap in Gingrich's results given his dubious record in matters marital. My previous research on gender gaps in voting showed very little historical difference between southern white women and men. (And the South Carolina Republican primary is virtually all white.) This is not the case in the northeast or northwest where white men and women often diverge by a good 10-15% in their voting (by which I mean, for example [from memory] 67% of white women in Rhode Island voted for Obama, while only 50% of the white men there did]. There is a slight gender gap between black men and women, with men voting about 90% Democratic and women about 95%.
Gingrich's victory strikes me as a triumph of his ability to tap into the southern Republican Id-- a place where the "food stamps president" line is deemed a virtue. And once again this seems to stem from a fantasy that in a debate Gingrich will give Obama the ass-kicking that the fraudulent teleprompter addict deserves.
A couple of more things: First, on MSNBC they were discussing the exit polls that showed Gingrich beating Romney on the question of electability by ten points. This is a nightmare for Romney -- electability is his strongest argument in many respects. (It also indicates how delusional South Carolinian Republicans are -- at least in my estimation.) Second, they are noting, contra Brooks, how much the tax issue may have hurt Romney. I am guessing it did , even with this constituency.
Mitt is speaking and basically ignoring the result, making a perfunctory nod to Gingrich, and then launching into the identical anti-Obama speech that he gave when he won in New Hampshire. Strange. And it really is replete with lie upon lie. He is a contemptible sonofabitch. Oh wait, he has added a CODA attacking the idea of a candidate who has never run a business or a state. And now he is condeming the frontal assault on the free enterprise system by his Republican opponents. "We celebrate success in this party." "Those who pick up the weapons of the left today will find them turned against them tomorrow." You flatter us Mitt. He accuses Gingrich (not by name) of demonizing success and disparaging the free market. He cannot be too happy though. A week ago he looked to have this thing sewn up -- now he will need to spend more money and take more hits. I still think it will be him, but how long this thing will go on remains to be seen.
This is a huge loss for Romney. He got trounced and is bleeding from every orfice. If Gingrich can somehow take Florida, there is going to be panic all over the GOP establishment.
AND STILL MORE:
So a 14 point win for Gingrich and Romney stuck at 27% -- numbers that are really chilling for those in the Republican Party who understand just how toxic Gingrich would be in a general election. The question is whether Gingrich can get enough people to open their wallets for him. If he can, God help Mitt, who I suspect is going to be writing checks to make sure that Santorum stays in the race a bit longer. If Santorum drops out, this thing is wide open again.
Speaking of which, I remain baffled by the decision of the religous right groups attempting to rally around Santorum. Why would you take a chance on a fairly marginal campaign at this moment -- in the process exposing your weakness and inability to actually deliver your vote.
A couple of other things. This was the first race in which it appears that Romney's Mormonism seemed to hurt him. I'm not sure if this will prove an isolated event or will prove to be an issue in other southern states. If so, it's pretty fascinating. Basically, there's a group of evangelical voters who would prefer a thrice married, Catholic convert who is a serial adulterer to a solid family man who is also a Mormon.
One wrinkle in the Florida campaign is that there has been considerable early voting. This will almost certainly help Romney, although to what degree is difficult to say.
Romney had been making noises about skipping a debate next week in Florida. I am guessing that that isn't going to happen now.
And he is most certainly going to have to release his taxes soon. The issue is not going to go away and I think Gingrich will be more than willing to slap him around on this if he doesn't cough them up -- which will also mean that he can't wait until his 2011 taxes are filed. He will have to come up with an earlier and no doubt less carefully prepared return for public consumption.
Who knew Newt would pull off yet a second resurrection in this craziest of all political seasons? But now that it's happened, it almost seems foreordained: this guy is the Republican id, the basher of all the 'elites' that conservatives feel victimized by - hippies, liberals, academics, the media, Democrats in Congress, anyone who's not One Of Us from their perspective.
(Funny how the right wing's list of offending elites never includes the economic elites, the corporations and wealthy people who actually pull the strings. But I digress.)
Anyhow, I've been saying the Tea Partiers needed two criteria to be satisfied: first, their candidate had to be someone they believed was fundamentally on their side. They have no qualms about Newt in that respect - he hates the same people they do. And that's all elections are about for them: they have little in mind that they want to see government do. They just want to keep it out of the hands of their enemies, by any means available.
They didn't feel this about Romney. He could mouth the words from their hymnal all he wanted, but he had no idea what the tune was. And who in their right mind would trust Romney about anything anyway?
Their second criterion was equally simple, if more benign: their candidate had to be able to play a President on TV without being an embarrassment, from their perspective. This is where the long string of previous anti-Romney wannabes failed. Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain were all part of their tribe, but they turned out to be embarrassments even from the perspective of the Teahadists. Newt, not so much. So he's their guy, at least for this political season.
I doubt that the Marianne Gingrich interview will make much of a difference. Newt already took that on, head-on, last night, and successfully turned it into a morality play about the evil media who hate conservatives. The wingnuts want a guy who can tell the media (and everyone else they despise) where to stick it, and Newt showed them, last night, that he was that man.
I don't know if he can win the nomination when up against Romney's relentless millions, but I bet he wins tomorrow, and gives Mitt a major headache for another month or two. Pass the popcorn!
Heading into an arbitration in a few minutes, so no time for much of substance.
I was amused, but not at all surprised, to see that Romney likely paid 15% income tax on the bulk of his no doubt very lofty income. I cannot wait to see the details. Any guy who thinks of $374,000 a year in speaking fees as some sort of incidental income is likely to have an eight figure income.
I think he may be the perfect opponent in many respects for the current national mood. We shall see.
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at Riverside Church on the Vietnam War
This is one speech that you will not hear quoted much on MLK Day -- especially on Fox News -- one given on April 4, 1967, a year to the day on which he would be assassinated (and the speech in which he used the phrase "the fierce urgency of now").
I feel like I repeat myself every year at this time, but I think it vitally important to stress the degree to which MLK was a man of the left and a harsh social critic of the United States -- a man fearless in his convictions and one willing to state the most unpalatable truths about this country in a way that would be unthinkable today. The speech demonstrates the degree to which King was willing to break with LBJ, a shocking rebuke to a political ally with whom he had helped to achieve landmark change. King was, in short, a radical figure who cared little for establishment respectability.
As I feel like I do at this time every year, I commend to you Taylor Branch's magisterial trilogy on King's life, Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan's Edge, and David Garrow's Bearing the Cross -- extraordinary works about an extraordinary life.
Well that was quick. John Huntsman has dropped out of the race and endorsed Mitt Romney. I never really understood the rationale for his run or where he thought his votes were coming from. And for those who think that this was a dry run for 2016, I tend to think not -- there are just so many more high profile Republicans likely to run in 2016 that I think Huntsman will have no problem replicating his 2012 performance.
I am sure all of the folks at Americans Elect are quietly weeping.
And Erik, lighten up dude. One can enjoy the Huntsman story and decry li'l Mitch's move for "right to shirk." Twitter's inherently frivolous anyway.
"Couldn't I Just Tell You" - Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs
Sorry for the dearth of posting -- it was quite the busy week as I had feared.
- There is a very interesting piece in the New Yorker this past week about Marco Rubio -- in part about his difficult relationship with Univision. Unfortunately the piece is subscription only -- I read the dead tree version waiting in a doctor's office -- but there is an online interview with Ken Auletta, the author of the piece, which gives you a feel for it. Actually, one of the most interesting aspects of the article was about Univision itself -- and what a sleeping giant it is, an entity that draws as big an audience as the four major television networks on occasion and one which dominates the viewing habits of its watchers. The management of Univision is very much in favor of immigration reform and understandably unhappy with the bashing of Hispanic migrants that has become the norm within the Republican Party. Rubio and Univision have a feud ongoing, which became the excuse for Republican presidential candidates to boycott a Univision sponsored debate. My sense is that the Republicans have made a powerful enemy here and have done so with no real feel for its implications.
Like many people, I think that Rubio will be at the top of the short list for Republican vice presidential choices. I also think that if chosen (and he accepts, which is not a given) he is likely to disappoint both in terms of being able to deliver Florida to the GOP and particularly in terms of his ability to deliver Hispanic votes. Rubio is the child of Cuban immigrants (although not exiles as he has falsely claimed), a group that is really sui generis among America's Hispanic voters. They are generally more affluent, better educated, and very far to the right of their latino brethren. Most importantly of all, Cubans have long had free access to the U.S. in a way that other Hispanics -- the bulk of whom come from Mexico -- could only dream. In short, Cubans are deeply unrepresentative of the broader Hispanic vote in the country.
As a result, I suspect that if Rubio is on the ticket (or later runs nationally) he will have only limited appeal in the community of voters he is supposed to be able to attract. (As I noted in comments below, I think he will be effective in the way that Sarah Palin was effective in attracting Hillary Clinton supporters.)
I continue to think that the Hispanic vote is going to be the key in 2012 and the next couple of presidential elections that follow. And now I think -- to make a bad pun -- that Univision really bears watching. I am betting the Obama campaign will be spending a small fortune there this year.
Alright, so what else has been going on while I've been playing lawyer?
A very good piece by Robert Wright on the Marines urinating on the dead Taliban imbroglio. It is really hard for me to believe that anyone is shocked by the idea that young men who are trained to go out and kill a given group of people do not then show the utmost respect for the dead bodies of that enemy (who of course are trying to kill them as well). I would imagine that in the general history of warfare this kind of thing ranks as less than utterly routine. One of the problems -- indeed probably the greatest problem with the theory of counterinsurgency warfare is that it turns every asshole eighteen year old kid with a rifle into some kind of ambassador -- our representative to the exotic peoples of foreign lands. The military are not social workers with guns. They are part of an apparatus that projects national power by killing other people and destroying their military infrastructure -- no more, no less. And oddly enough, those who are related to or are part of the national or ethnic or political group to whom the dead belong will tend to hate those who are killing their kin and countrymen. Winning hearts and minds through the kind of amorphous, open-ended warfare that characterizes counterinsurgency has never struck me as a particularly realistic notion. The fact that this kind of war is now likely to be accompanied by all manner of video and picture-taking -- images that are then easily disseminated to all corners of the earth -- well that makes it even more fanciful.
I am not a pacifist. Sadly, I think that there is sometimes a need to use violence in this world. But it must always be used with intelligence and with the utmost seriousness -- morally and politically.
A decade into the Afghanistan venture, it is more than clear to me that it is time to accelerate our departure. This at least seems like a slightly hopeful sign toward making that happen. It can't happen soon enough.
Well, it looks like there is no particular surprise with the New Hampshire results, at least with respect to Mitt Romney's victory. It appears that he is going to take about 37% of the vote and beat his closest competitor, Ron Paul, by about 13% of the vote. I'm watching his victory speech right now and thus far it is pretty well done. It's a fairly punchy attack on Obama, pretty crisply delivered (with the aid of a teleprompter of course), one that touches all of the hot buttons of the Republican electorate. (Of course it's replete with lies, including the ever-popular "apologizing for America," but that won't bother this electorate.) He has to be happy as well to be able to get this done by 8:40.
Ron Paul pulled an impressive 24% of the vote, which suggests to me that he is likely to continue on for quite some time through the primary season. He has a self-sustaining campaign and I think he enjoys making mischief and drawing attention. He can possibly grab some delegates and have a presence at the Convention. It will be interesting to see. His second place finish is a great help to Romney. It effectively precludes the emergence of a viable non-Romney in the field. (Listening to Paul talk about the Fed and monetary policy reminds one of what an utter wingnut he is -- Sullivan's continued boosting of his candidacy baffles me.)
Update: Sullivan does pose a worthwhile question regarding Paul's significant youth vote and its future place in the Republican Party. Here's my thought: it has no place in the Republican Party -- at least as presently constituted and as it is likely to remain for some time. The party of the neo-cons, the evangelicals, and other culture warriors, is not going to be receptive soil for the vast majority of these young voters. This is not a big tent party and the world view of the bulk of these voters doesn't strike me as congruent with the dominant voices within the GOP.
John Huntsman came in third with 17% of the vote. I think you will see some attempts by certain media members to give this result moe weight than it merits. Huntsman put all of his chips down in New Hampshire and he got half the vote that Romney got, and he got beaten pretty badly by Ron Paul. South Carolina will not be very hospitable ground for him. And with it, the Huntsman campaign will be over.
Gingrich and Santorum each pulled an insubstantial 10% of the vote. Done and done I think. South Carolina will be the last gasp of both as well. (Sullivan points out that the two Mormons garnered 61% of the Catholic vote, while the ostentatious Catholics Santorum and Gingrich got 21% of the Catholic vote -- a sign again, as Sullivan notes that the politics of these two is geared to the Vatican, not American Catholics.)
Rick Perry got less than 1% of the vote. What else do you need to say? Stick a fork in his ass, his head, or any other part of him, he, too, is finished. And what an embarrassment. A guy who was once the presumptive front runner -- admittedly in my eyes -- looks like he might not break 1,000 votes.
Looking at these vote totals, I am once again struck by how few Americans get to dictate the results in these nomination contests. Last week Romney won with 30,000 votes. This week he will probably grab about 75,000 votes (about the same vote that he got in 2008). So in other words, approximately 100,000 voters in two of the least diverse states in America will dictate the nominee for one of the two major parties. I still think a system of rotating, multistate, regional primaries might be a better approach.
Busy, busy week ahead, but I wanted to at least invite your thoughts on what is going on out there. I worked all weekend and did not even pick up the newspaper on either day, so I feel slightly out of it beyond the fact that God proved himself to be a New England Patriots fan yesterday -- well that's how I see it anyway.
One of the big themes of the last year -- one to which many on the left have subscribed -- is the idea that Obama and the Democrats will be burdened by an enthusiasm gap in the 2012 election, due in considerable part to disenchantment based on the perception that Obama has been weak and inconstant at crucial moments. My sense was always that the likelihood of an electoral outcome dictated by such an enthusiasm gap was vastly overstated and that once traditional Democratic constitutencies had a chance to see what the Republicans had to offer in a national election, that sufficient enthusiasm would return to assure a pretty robust vote. (I continue to think that, among other things, the African-American vote is going to be huge again in 2012.)
As we sit here at the start of 2012, I feel more and more confident that this will be the case, especially if we continue to see the decent (although not adequate) job growth of the last couple of months. If the next few months continue to see job growth of over 200,000, then I think Obama's hand has been strengthened substantially. I also think that Republican enthusiasm is going to ebb quite a bit as Romney solidifies his position as the inevitable nominee, which appears to be more and more likely. He is a hard guy to really like for many people and that is particularly true for the hard right wing base of the GOP despite Romney's persistent pandering to them. Now don't get me wrong -- Obama hatred is going to make most of the Romney skeptics on the right rally around him. You watch -- Rush will be his biggest fan come Labor Day.
Still I don't think the red meat GOP constituency is going to feel that enthusiasm in their bones and at some level will think that they have been deprived of a genuine conservative by the machinations of the party's leaders. Then you have as well the Mormon issue, which I think remains hard to gauge in terms of its impact on the evangelical right. And finally, you have the fact that this guy is a rich, out-of-touch, vulture capitalist, something that strikes me as just about the worst occupational background one can have heading into this election. When his income taxes show (and he will be forced to release them -- just you watch) he has made tens of millions while "unemployed" (and helping others become unemployed) and that he has paid a 15% tax rate on his income, the fallout will be significant with independent voters. I think this is the sort of thing that Obama can exploit quite effectively.
So all in all, I am starting to feel reasonably good about an Obama - Romney matuchup. We just need continued job growth and no major blow ups in Europe.
What do you think? And what else is on your minds?
A blogger and his best friend circa February 2010.
One of the things that I have learned to reject over the years is grand theories that purport to explain the entirety or large parts of human behavior -- see e.g. Marxism and Freudian psychology to name two. In recent years, it seems to me that badly applied behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology have taken up this mantle, with equally dissatisfying results. People who become overly enamored of this kind of thing tend to engage in a baffling combination of either overly-reductive thinking to explain that which is complex and nuanced, while perversely complicating things that are not that hard for living, breathing human beings to explain. To wit:
- I haven't picked on Yglesias for a while but this post in which he expressed skepticism over people's claims that they would not kill their favorite pet for $1 million strikes me as the response of your classic pod-person who has spent way too much time reading about behavioral economics and too little time in the company of a beloved dog or cat. As frequent readers here know, my dog Stanley is rather near and dear to my heart. Truly, I love that little dog and I say that without exaggeration. Indeed, I too often contemplate his mortality and it depresses the hell out of me. There simply isn't a sum of money on earth large enough that would tempt me to kill him and merely contemplating the question made me feel vaguely nauseous. So nothing about this response strikes me as shocking, except maybe for the fact that there are 11% of people who claim that they would do such a thing (libertarians should not be allowed to have pets). It seems to me that one of the most fundamental aspects of human behavior is that we form bonds that transcend this kind of transactional analysis. People are willing to die for those that they love -- surely this is a mysterious way in which to maximize one's utility.
There are concepts of human behavior that are simply impossible to put into economic models -- for instance, notions of honor. One can behave in a way that one finds to be so dishonorable that it literally negates the value of your life in your own eyes -- killing a small, beloved dog for money would be one of those things to me. I literally could not allow myself to live if I did something like that.
- And then there is your garden-variety economic asshole type arguments like this and this, in which utterly clueless people cannot understand why we limit by statue the straight time work hours of certain kinds of employees. Robin Hanson, the blogger in question, is yet another clown from the Economics Department at George Mason University, who needs to be given a pallet full of sixty-five pound cinder blocks and a trowel on a 95 degree day here and told to work twelve hours at straight time. I am guessing that if he survived the ordeal, he might have some greater insight into this question. Let's be clear -- the law does not generally require that employees not work more than forty hours in a week -- it mearely requires that if they do so they be compensated at one and a half times their normal hourly rate for these additional hours. The purpose of this law is to fully compensate the employee for the loss of leisure time, to recognize the hardship associated with working such hours, and to encourage employers to think about hiring additional personnel to do the work, rather than working existing employees to death. (Sometimes hours are in fact capped for public safety reasons, see e.g. truckers and pilots -- does this too shock and offend Mr. Hanson?)
I find it astonishing that allegedly smart people do not understand 1) the imbalance in power relations between employer and employee; 2) the physical toll that working long hours takes on people who do not engage in mental masturbation for a living; and 3) the fact that people value their time away from work and do not want to be compelled to spend all of their waking hours in toil without some reasonable reward for what that sacrificed leisure is worth. Once full employment is restored in the building trades, I would happily offer Mr. Hanson a chance to spend a week doing seven-twelves for straight time to see how he'd like it. I am pretty confident he wouldn't be back for day two.
- How the fuck bad does a field of candidates have to be for Rick Santorum, who lost his Senate seat by 18% of the vote in 2006, to possibly win the first primary election for the presidency? He is neck and neck with Romney right now -- with 93% of the vote in, Santorum now leads by 45 votes -- who despite all of his money and endorsements still can't crack 25% of the vote. Let me repeat -- this guy is a smug entitled prick who is not going to wear well over the long haul. Especially once the voters realize that Mitt is paying 15% capital gains taxes on the millions of dollars he continues to earn from vulture capitalist frim Bain Capital.
- An electorate that looks like America: well at least America as it appears to me each morning in the mirror while I shave. The turnout is in the Iowa caucus skews old (60% over the age of 50, 10% under the age of 30), white, and male. And I am guessing needs to lose a few pounds.
- And it sounds like Rick Perry will be joining the great Texas tradition of electoral futility established by John Connally and Phil Gramm. (All three incidentally turncoat Democrats.)
- Watching Ari Fleischer on CNN, it is apparent that he is doing his best to pull for Romney.
- Update: Landslide Mitt's eight vote win is likely to be enough to propel him to the nomination. Not that I think the party rank-and-file has much enthusiasm for him as evidenced by his inability to expand on his share of the vote, notwithstanding the collapse of theoretically more credible opponents like Perry and Gingrich. Notwithstanding Romney's weakness though, I just can't see a way forward for any of his opponents. Romney looks like he is headed for a big win in New Hampshire. Santorum has no money, no organization, and little appeal beyond hard core social conservatives. Gingrich also has no money and no organization. Theoretically they could be competitive with Romney in South Carolina, but even if they are, the lack of money in big states like Florida or when the contests shift to multiple states on the same day will prove crippling. Perry and Bachmann are done, Huntsman will be finished after next Tuesday. Santoroum and Gingrich aren't even on the ballot in Virginia, a failure that is symptomatic of their inability to run a tuly national race. It is pretty clear that the GOP money men have no interest in either of their candidacies. Ron Paul will continue to do what Ron Paul does, but it will not be relevant.
It will be fascinating to watch this unfold as a race that has had a fairly high level of interest among the GOP's ultra-conservative core peters out into a tepid Romney victory procession across the country. I have no doubt that in the end most of the right-wingers will coalesce around Romney as they badly want to defeat Obama. Still, I can't help but believe that there will be enormous frustration with this outcome and that enthusiasm will be somewhat muted for a candidate who seems to lack all conviction, the thing that the party's faithful values above all things.
As I had alluded to the other night, I wanted to address the foolishness being perpetrated by the perennially fatuous Glenn Greenwald and the historically illiterate Matt Stoller and their claim that, in essence, liberals attack Ron Paul viciously because he holds a mirror up to our progressive ideals and we are found wanting, as evidenced by our supporting history's worst monster, Barack Obama, slaughterer of Muslim children. Once again, Roy has beaten me to the rhetorical punch, but I still think it is worth discussing a bit further the folly, bad faith, and completely ahistorical nature of their assertions.
Greenwald seems to lack all sense of what it is that people of the left value and the degree to which Paul's right wing strand of libertarianism is at odds with virtually every aspect of those beliefs. Stoller strikes me as a guy with the most minimal passing acquaintance with history and logic -- someone who can't begin to understand why it is that wanting better policy or more accountability from the Federal Reserve might be a tad different from wanting to abolish the Federal Reserve altogether and return to the halcyon days of the Nineteenth Century where an obsession with hard money and the shockingly frequent bank panics created mass immiseration for American workers for decades. (His attacks on FDR in his post -- which Greenwald characterizes as "brilliant" -- are really quite extraordinary for a self-proclaimed leftist.)
I despise Ron Paul because he is a right wing lunatic, a racist, a purveyor of outlandish one-world conspiracy theories, a man who advocates a deregulated economy in which corporate power would have virtually no checks on it, and a withered federal state that would cease to perform virtually all of its current social welfare and regulatory functions. His vision is literally of a return to late Nineteenth Century America. a time which some libertarians may view as a paradise of freedom, but that to most of us on the left is the very embodiment of what we despise -- and which many of us fear the Republicans and their libertarian allies wish to return us.
In short, libertarianism is anathema to anyone truly of the left -- it is the philosophy that is the triumph of social-Darwinism, a mode of governing in which everyone is left at the mercy of the markets, and in which those at the top of the heap cease to have even the smallest obligation to the greater good. And this is not simply a matter of economics -- it also applies in the area of civil liberties, the area with which Greenwald, who seems to think he sleeps with justice every night, purports to be most concerned. Under a libertarian regime, and certainly under a Paulist libertarian regime, the government would not interfere with the rights of private actors to discriminate on the basis of race nor would it protect employees subject to sexual harassment. Don't these constitute civil liberties? Under a Paul regime, the right of women to be able to legally terminate a pregnancy would cease. Is this not a rather profound liberty issue? Virtually the entirety of the framework of laws and regulations that protect minorities, workers, and the environment would be dismantled or severely eroded were Paul and his fellow Republicans given unfettered power over the federal government. (And the important thing to remember here is that Paul is a Republican -- yes, he might not care if you smoke pot and he might not want to pick up the white man's burdens, but in the end his policies fit quite nicely with the GOP and its pro-plutocrat platform.)
Ron Paul is an old-fashioned isolationist. His opposition to military adventurism is not rooted in profound concern for the lives of those Muslim children who are keeping Greenwald awake at night, but simply because he doesn't really care about them one way or another. (I wonder how much sleep Glenn is losing over the children in Syria right now or for those who lived under Taliban rule?) I actually agree that a move in our politics away from reflexive militarism would be a good thing. I just don't think my reasons for thinking so and Ron Paul's really stem from the same thought process.
Obama has brought the war in Iraq to an end, with no lasting American military presence in that country despite claims by many of his critics on the left that he would fail to do so. (And much to the consternation of the right.) He has escalated the war in Afghanistan -- I suspect futilely, but in a manner that was consistent with his own campaign promises. He has also taken the war to al Qaeda as he said he would. I suspect most Americans approve. It is here that the drone issue has come to the fore and it is not without its disturbing aspects. It does, however, have the virtue of actually being aimed at those who have sought to do violence against the people of the United States unlike the dozens of other military actions engaged in by American presidents since McKinley on behalf of corporate and colonial interests that were completely divorced from the security of the American people.
Unlike prior American administrations faced with similar choices, he opted not to try to save the Mubarak regime in Egypt, despite its longstanding ties to the U.S. He has been supportive of the Arab Spring movement generally, most obviously by backing the recent intervention in Libya. In so doing, does Greenwald consider Obama to have been a killer of innocent Muslim children? If so, what would standing by while Qadaffi's forces slaughtered his opposition have made him? Life gets complicated sometime on this score. (See also Clinton in the Balkans.) If Muslim children are slaughtered by other Muslims (or non-Americans) is it a more morally palatable thing to Greenwald and Stoller?
The notion of Obama as a blood-thirsty imperialist -- and thus a source of shame to those of us on the left -- is, in any kind of historical context, ridiculous. The world is a complicated place and the role of the U.S. president within it is fraught with pitfalls. But in the manichean world in which Greenwald dwells one is allowed no shades of gray -- well, except I guess Ron Paul.
I could go on and on -- and probably should in a more systematic and less impressionistic fashion, but given my day job, this will have to do for now. The bottom line is that for people on the left the use of the instrument of government to promote economic and social justice is paramount. We share no common ground with libertarians in this fundamental respect. At this time and place, the Republican Party, in toto, has become a force for darkness in virtually every sphere of public policy without exception. Its wholesale defeat in electoral politics is paramount to any effort to create a liberal/left society. Ron Paul represents just one more strand of right-wing Republican thought -- anachronistic, plutocratic-oriented economic polices coupled with Lindberghian strains of isolationism. There is nothing progressive about it.
For a host of reasons 2011 will not go down as a personal favorite. And so I wish it goodbye with this rather unique take on the great Roy Orbison song by Michael Caine from the movie "Little Voice." (Another one of those great late career performances by Caine if you ever want to check it out -- quirky but good.)
- As the year winds down, I turn once again to Roy -- this time taking down one of my favorite targets, our Mr. Brooks, for a column by Brooks about one of Roy's favorite targets, crunchy con church lady Rod Dreher, purveyor of "artisinal conservatism." Brooks writes the incredibly hackneyed column about the virtues of small town America -- this time a small town in Louisiana rallying around Dreher's terminally ill sister. (My immediate cynical thought is that this is the kind of town that probably had the odd lynching and hate crime for when things got dull.) Brooks cheers on people holding bake sales to pay for Dreher's siblings medical care, which is all well and good. But he should just note, that there are many of us virtuous big city liberal types who would like to see not only Dreher's sister's medical bills paid but those of all Americans via universal health coverage guaranteed by the government. It makes for a lot fewer opportunities for this kind of kitsch politics, but I would suggest that people who are truly compassionate would prefer a society in which the anguish of facing a deadly disease without health insurance is a thing of the past.
In the end, one thing you can bet is that Brooks will not be deserting the cozy environs of Bethesda anytime soon to join these salt of the earth types, even though opportunities abound not all that far away from here. As always read the comments at Roy's -- they are awesome -- especially this one by Fats Durston:
Earl: "Whut?"
Brooks: "I can tell by your greasy chapeau, mister, that you are a solid, red-blooded American male. Forgive me for lacking clarity earlier, I merely requested the name of the most proximate manicurist."
Earl: "Frank, I think we have a faggot in here."
Brooks: "No, no, you are mistaken, good fellow. I hate the, um, ... fags, um, getting married as much as you do. We are allies in that political struggle. It's just that I am unable to type my missives to the New York, um, I mean sports page, with ragged nails."
Earl: "Uh, you can borry my pocketknife."
Frank: "Shit, Earl, Rayleane can probly fit him in today, and maybe frost that hair and make him purty."
- And still more kitsch and confusion from the right side of the Times Op-Ed pages -- this time its Chunky Bobo -- this was Ross's Christmas Eve homage to public policy made by angels just like they did in "A Christmas Carol," "It's a Wonderful Life," and, of course, once upon a time in a manger. Douthat decries the absence of a family policy in the United States that might help support the modern day Cratchits and Baileys of today. Well, many of us on the left favor mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave, universal health coverage, and minimum mandated sick and vacation leave, and a greater federal role in providing day care, all of which would be a great benefit to stressed out and stretched parents. But that's too European for Ross. Instead, he argues for a greater tax credit for families with children -- and that's it. (This description of the tax credit Ross favors makes it clear it wouldn't exactly fly with his GOP brethren.) The bottom line is that there is much that we could just to do as a society that would make the lives of ordinary Americans easier and far more secure -- but it would require higher taxes and a greatly expanded role for the federal government. Tax credits alone just won't suffice. I guess there's always the angels for Republicans like Ross. (All I could think of when I first read the column was Tony Soprano saying to AJ who had invoked the Godfather as a model for action: "Jesus Christ, A.J. I mean, you make me wanna cry. It's a movie. Ya gotta grow up. You're not a kid anymore.")
And tomorrow, in the spirit of the mainstream media, I will pick on crackpots of the left.
I hope you all had a splendid New Year's eve. Let's hope for a splendid 2012.
- Roy performs the definitive takedown on Ron Paul's special brand of libertarianism and those on the left who are apologists for him. (He seems to have a strange hold on certain gay white male bloggers -- yes, I'm looking at you Sullivan, Greenwald, and Savage. Really what the fuck is it with these guys?) I particularly liked Roy's take on what binds the various strains of crazy that define the Republican Party and its constituents:
These guys can always work together, because they all came out of the same Big Bang of hatred for the New Deal and its legacy: Big Government and the coalition that sustains it -- blacks, gays, unionized workers, women, et alia. Each conservative tribe has its own relationship to that legacy -- some of them (the more intelligent ones, generally) are deeply cynical, and some are as sincere as any schizophrenic street preacher. But all of them deeply hate that a bunch of minorities have coalesced to get something that they think belongs by right to them and people like them, and many of them have learned that it would be more effective (and, these days, more popular) to strike at the state that enables that coalition than at the minorities themselves.
What mania, particularly, animated Paul's newsletter stories of criminal-natured blacks and AIDS-drama-queen gays doesn't matter to me. I know that he's a Republican Libertarian and, having been born earlier than yesterday, that is enough for me.
- Speaking of Greenwald and Paul, No More Mister Nice Blog does a pretty thorough dismantling of America's bestest and bravest civil libertarian's apaulogies for the candidate who opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believes that women have no right to an abortion, and claims that there is no constitutional basis for the separation of church and state. Not to mention has had his name on some of the foulest racist tracts written in the last twenty years. Because clearly the civil liberties concerns of women and African-Americans are not nearly as important as Glenn's vendetta against Obama.
- Perfect, except that it is a Golden Retriever named "Moral Hazard", not an Irish Setter. Charles Pierce takes on the same insipid Brooks article that I wrote about the other day, but does it better.
In the best of times "conservative thinker" tended to be an oxymoron and we sure as shit aren't living in the best of times. Nonetheless, I read today's latest from Bobo with cringing dismay as his never ending quest to miss the point reached its apotheosis: to sum up -- it is incorrect to compare present times to the Great Depression because then people loved government and now they fear it. Also too they now fuck too much and fail to marry those whom they fuck. It is also incorrect to compare the present moment to the Progressive Era because then we needed government to rein in irresponsible businesses. Now that that has all been taken care of, we really need government to stop people from fucking too much and failing to marry those whom they fuck. (Well you do a better summary in a paragraph.)
Alright David, let me spell it out for you. We compare the present moment to the Great Depression because current economic conditions, including high levels of joblessness (albeit not nearly as severe as those experienced in the early 1930s) and the attendant lack of aggregate demand have created a self-reinforcing tendency toward economic sluggishness that seems to have no end in sight. The present moment is not completely analogous to the Great Depression because government programs put into effect to combat the Depression and some fairly aggressive actions by both the Bush and Obama administrations prevented a complete meltdown of the financial system, thereby ameliorating some of the ill effects of the currrent downturn. The present moment is also reasonably analogous to the Progressive Era in that we too live in age plagued by grotesque speculation and galling inequality -- one crying out for government response.
Brooks does posit an analogy to our times and the Progressive Era, and I must say, it is a head scratcher:
Then, as now, we are seeing great concentrations of wealth, especially at the top. Then, as now, the professional class of lawyers, teachers and journalists seems to feel as if it has the upper hand in its status war against the business class of executives and financiers.
What the hell does this mean? Do teachers really feel that they have the upper hand in the status war against business executives and financiers? On the one hand, one can make a salary in the high 40 thousands and eventually collect a pension -- every plutocrat's dream -- on the other there are stock options, bonuses, golden parachutes, and the magic of carried interest. Clearly teachers are winning this batte in a rout.
As to why Brooks thinks lawyers are aligned with teachers as opposed to business executives and financiers is beyond me. Does Brooks really not understand what large law firms do and how much money the people who run them make? And for whom they work? As for journalists, it seems to me that they spend a lot more time criticizing teachers than they do our business elite.
As always with Brooks our problems are never the result of the failed free market ideology he has long embraced nor of the business elites whose side he invariably takes -- no, we (the unwashed masses) suffer because we deserve to suffer -- because we are morally deficient. If we would only embrace the good old fashioned Victorian ideals of chastity and self-abnegation (again, only an ideal for the masses, not the rich and powerful), the economy would no doubt turn around on a dime. If only we were worthy.
(Seems to be the Christmas song that best captures the zeitgeist.)
Happy holidays to one and all. As the year winds down I wanted to thank all of you for reading and especially those of you who have commented -- you are frequently the best reason to stop by here. I was going to name names, but then feared leaving someone out and causing inadvertent offense -- but you know who you are. It's nice to be part of a community that ranges as far as the jungles of Brazil and the cities of Australia. I've also greatly enjoyed having had the opportunity to meet and break bread (or clink glasses) with a number of you -- big bad wolf, kathy a. Jeanne Marie, Mandos, T.R. Donohue -- during the year. As pleasant as virtual community can be, there is really nothing quite like seeing people face to face. I hope I get the chance to meet more of you during 2012.
As for 2011, it had a lot of bleak moments, but I am hopeful that we are seeing a little bit of a turning tide both politically and economically. If things continue to perk up in the economy (let's hope Europe muddles through), then I think the 2012 election could have a respectable outcome -- one that will keep the White House and Senate in Democratic control and stymie the worst impulses of the right. And hopefully we will take back the House and send Scott Walker packing as well. It's uphill on several of these fronts, but doable. We all need to be clear that whatever our frustrations, it remains vitally important to win these electoral battles.
Whatever happens, I am looking forward to sharing it with you. In the meantime, I hope you all have great holidays and a safe, healthy, and happy New Year.
Strangely busy given the time of year, so I think I need to turn it over to you for content. Well a couple of things first:
- Do you think Obama's recent rebound in the polls is indicative of the public getting an eyeful of the clown car sweepstakes to pick his opponent? Suddenly, the cool, professorial guy in the White House starts looking awfully good in comparison.
- Did any of you old folks out there read this and envision this?
- Not to continue to kick Hitchens whilst he lies in the grave, but I thought this piece by Katha Pollitt was an incredibly important corrective to much of the hagiography -- especially from Sully, who seems to share Hitchens' problem with women.
- I share Sullivan's amazement, however, at this piece in the Guardian criticizing Vaclav Havel for not realizing all of the great things that communism had done for Czechoslovakia. Jesus, I didn't realize that dupes like this still walked the earth.
Very saddened to hear of the passing of Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president, playwright, essayist, dissident, and human rights activist. Havel's improbable trajectory from frequently imprisoned and banned artist to president first of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic was one of the great stories of my lifetime. (Probably neck and neck with that of Nelson Mandela on the political improbability meter.)
Havel became a hero of mine (and I don't really have a lot of heroes) in 1988 when I read his book Letters to Olga, a series of letters that he wrote to his wife while imprisoned by Czech authorities from 1979-1982. The letters are tremendous works of humanity, exquisite dissections of a totalitarian society in which no one, including its leaders, actually believes in its foundational myths. I would still recommend reading this work, as well as later compilations Open Letters and Disturbing the Peace. There is a fascinating combination of profundity and humility in these works, a man speaking plain and audacious truths to his oppressors, while at the same time remaining conscious of his own limitations.
Following the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Havel was transformed from dissident to president in a stunning turn of events. (I think it is a little difficult to describe now just how unlikely this would have seemed to anyone first encountering Havel's works both as a political essayist and playwright.) Despite ascending to political power, Havel remained an artist at heart, one who enjoyed the spirit of rebelliousness always. Among his earliest acts as the Czech president were meetings with Lou Reed and Frank Zappa -- really not the sort of thing one expects from the average chief of state.
Havel demonstrated what it means to be a real dissident and man of political courage -- hint, it doesn't mean exchanging one set of cocktail party friends for another -- someone who was willing to face artistic banishment and the constant threat of forced exile or imprisonment. One thing that struck me in reading his works was the fact that he always had a little kit packed containing necessities in the event that any given day might prove to the day that the authorities imprisoned him, something that happened multiple times throughout his life. Throughout it all, however, Havel maintained his humanity, his abhorrence of political violence, and a certain kind of equanimity that is hard to fathom.
- There has been an awful lot of words written about Christopher Hitchens over the last twenty-four hours. I don't have too much to say that would add a lot to what I wrote about Hitchens last year (back in more convivial times around the blog by the looks of the comments). He seemed to have faced the horrors of his illness in an incredibly resolute way. But I think that the last thing Hitchens would want is to be white-washed beyond recognition. And to me, he remains a dubious thinker -- a guy with a sharp tongue and pen and a gift for insult, but not really someone whose work really holds up all that well. And for fuck's sake, he was no George Orwell. To me, he will always be the guy who gave aid and comfort to those who were trying to impeach Bill Clinton, was contemptuous of Al Gore during the 2000 election -- he really was the original firebagger -- and was an unending enthusiast for the disaster that was the Iraq War. None of these mark him as either a terribly serious thinker or practical man of the left. He was a bit of a wrecker and a vandal, albeit a sometimes entertaining one. Anyway, I think Kevin Drum and Amanda Marcotte both have useful correctives to the general hagiography. Steve at No More Mr. Niceblog concurs.
What else is going on? I am going to decorate the tree tomorrow with the family and then settle in to watch the Patriots ask Tim Tebow "where's your God now?"
The Republican Party continues to amaze with its capacity for cruelty and caprice, especially when dealing with the most hard-pressed of our fellow citizens.
The latest outrage is the attempt to link continued funding of emergency unemployment benefits to the requirement that people collecting benefits submit to drug testing -- and to require anyone who is collecting benefits and not a high school graduate to show that they are pursuing a GED. Isn't it bad enough to be without a job in the midst of the worst recession in the post-World War II period? Who feels the need to harass and demean people who are in many instances facing economic ruin -- or at the least tremendous insecurity?
This sort of thing just confirms my sense that to be a Republican these days is to not be fully human. (Even those who try reveal themselves to be sporting a heart that is three sizes too small.) One has to have some kind of hole in one's soul to really embrace this sort of punitive thinking.
This just fucking pisses me off. One of the must frustrating things about being a Democrat is that there is always some clown in the party who has to go off message and give aid and comfort to the enemy.
This time it's Ron Wyden hopping into bed with Paul Ryan on Medicare reform -- in the process helping give the Republicans cover on what should be a great issue for us in the 2012 election. Why, why, why you might ask. And honestly, I couldn't fucking tell you.
A friend of mine with extensive dealings on the Hill posits that Wyden has been politically incoherent for much of his career, is a little bit crazy, and very enamored of his own ideas and rectitude. Sounds completely plausible to me.
Sorry for my lack of production -- I was down all day in the former Confederate capital. I am afraid my writing production is slipping. I can't tell if it is a symptom of the end of cultural history, general ennui, or the fact that I haven't been drinking much lately. (Not due to any commitment to clean living -- I just find that when I have a couple of drinks and sit here with my laptop, I have a distressing tendency to fall asleep.) So just a couple of quick thoughts before returning to the culture discussion, which I continue to find interesting.
- Isn't this sort of thing a form of mental illness? Seriously, why does an immensely rich guy who has achieved all kinds of success need to engage in this kind of bullshit? There is something pathological about our masters of the universe class. (h/t to Atrios.)
- We had a discussion the other day about the blogger who had been hit with a $2.5 million judgment for libel. I had given a pretty cursory analysis about why I did not find the case alarming and, indeed, on the basis of the offending blog post had a feeling that the case was correctly decided. Paula points out this article in the NY Times today that confirms my reaction.
- I think that there is much to be said for this description of why many Republicans -- against all reasonable judgment -- cannot resist the temptation to back Newt -- or any other non-Romney candidate.
- The other impact of the dominant role of the debates is to provide an abundance of free media to underfinanced candidates like Gingrich. This, in turn, has diminished the need for a traditional campaign organization. (Someone also pointed out to me recently that the process in Iowa for Republicans is much less complex than that used by the Democrats -- there is less need for the traditional "ground game" in this setting.) .
- Sullivan linked to this pretty good bit of advice about how to blog well. I try my best to follow rule # 1 at least.
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