The Revolution is On!

I wonder now how deeply implicated the US was in keeping the despots in the Middle East in power. I'd suspect lots. And I was taken in by the propaganda--was blind and now I see.

The real question always was: "Do we want these countries to like us or to be like us." The propaganda intentionally muddles the two questions. So the Bush administration pushed for regime change by persuading us that democracy meant installing one of our clients as a benevolent despot. And of course we assumed that our friend Saudi Arabia, where it's illegal to build a church and women can't drive, was a model of freedom, justice and the American Way.

Well, I sincerely want them to be like us. And I no longer assume that being our friend, or being under our thumb, is either necessary nor sufficient for being a democratic, decent human society.

Class Warfare

God and Politics, Together Again - NYTimes.com: "Mr. Obama, who once looked as if he might be able to end the nation’s ideological polarization, has instead become engulfed in it, just like his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Let us get real: this is class warfare between us, the urban-coastal upper middle class and the proles. Pundits, who belong to the urban-coastal upper middle class don't dare admit that because it would commit them to the Ultimate Heresy: to the recognition that in class warfare it's the working class who are the bad guys. It would mean that the victims, the oppressed, those who are less well off are responsible for culture wars and most of our social problems. It would be Blaming the Victim.

Evangelical Christianity is only a symbol. Ecumenism, Obama's cadre of vaguely evangelical spiricual advisors and his condescending appeals to us "People of Faith" don't make any difference. Any one us can smell his atheism and his condescension.

The problem is obvious: we have a working class that's doing badly and they're angry. There's a growing gap between the rich and poor. And increasingly, white proletarians who imagined themselves "middle class" are being forced to recognize that they are not. The solution is also obvious: narrow that gap. The problem is that it's those very proles who block programs that would narrow that gap and create both more equality and more opportunity for them.

AIG bonuses | Salon

The right's brain trust is yelling that the tax is a bill of attainder that will scare off 'the investor class,' but GOP politicians, facing pitchfork-waving mobs who want to string up that 'investor class,' have stopped following orders. The pearl of Alfred E. Neumann wisdom from the right, priceless in its political tone-deafness, is the repeated assertion that bonuses must be paid to retain 'the best and brightest' executives. The best and brightest? Would that be the frauds and mountebanks who made gazillions of dollars on three-card-monte credit default swaps that destroyed the U.S. economy? For Americans who are warming themselves by burning their worthless 401Ks, like the starving artists at the beginning of Puccini's 'La Boheme,' the idea of rewarding these geniuses is like giving a raise to the navigator on the Titanic. This long-overdue outburst of populist rage could mark a decisive shift in Americans' attitudes toward income inequality.

Right. Populist rage and pitchfork-waving peasants. But who was responsible for this mess in the first place if it isn't the peasants who are now wielding those pitchforks?

Don't blame firms: their business is, of their essence, to maximize profit. Don't blame Wall Street fat cats: they were no more greedy than anyone else--they were just in a better position to satisfy their greed. By pure moral luck the rest of us are Cromwells innocent of our country's blood. Truth--which of us wouldn't do the same if we were in their position? People want to get as much money as they can given the amount of time and effort they're prepared to put in. There are a few kids who want to so Teach for America or go into the Peace Corps and more who say they want work for a better world, but there are very few who want to make a career of it.

Blame the voters who kept conservatives in power and pushed the country hard right. It's government's business to promote the interests of its citizens by regulating the activities of the country's self-interested agents--including firms. Citizens cannot expect firms to behave nicely: as near-omnipotent, necessarily self-interested agents they must crush any lesser being if that is in their interest. If citizens object to being crushed their only recourse is to rely upon the state to control powerful private interests on their behalf. If voters don't give the state that power then they have only themselves to blame if they get crushed.

But what were those proletarian Republicans thinking? I doubt that they were even thinking about the possibility that more powerful agents might crush them. Some were even so vain as to imagine that there were no more powerful agents than they.

They were thinking about how they could--and would--crush people further down the pecking order. They wanted to beat up on the mythic Welfare Queen who was living in luxury at their expense. They were persuaded that government as such favored people who were beneath them at their own expense. So, out of what they supposed was self-interest, they wanted government shrunk and drowned in the bathtub.

And now, mirabila dictu, ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee. It was the deregulation and pro-business policies the Republican "base" favored that screwed over that Republican base: the white working class.

So, of course there is a volte face. Now they see that their social superiors are screwing them over and recognize that government can act in their interests so they call on government to regulate, nationalize or control big business and punish the fat cats who screwed them over. They're even prepared to sacrifice the maltruistic pleasure of screwing over others in order not to get screwed over themselves: self-interest trumps sadism.

No one dares to say that it was the lower classes who are responsible for this mess. We need their support and if pitchfork-waving populism gets them on board, that's great. And of course we good liberals are all prissy about "blaming the victim." And some of us still harbor that undergraduate Marxist romanticism about the working class, who were supposed to be "interesting" and "real"--not hypocritical, materialistic and phony like our parents.

But the bottom line for anyone honest and willing to do the calculation is that it was the lower classes who made 30 years of conservative misrule possible and destroyed the economy. They were the ones who were stupid enough to get mortgages they couldn't carry. They were the ones who imagined that they were rich because they could get go into debt to buy expensive, worthless crap and positional goods, and so supported policies that favored the rich. They were the ones who wanted to screw over the poor--until they discovered that they were poor and were getting screwed over themselves.

Wither Feminism?

We are a group of professionals from various disciplines who study women's place in the economy. We are collecting signatures to a letter to President-Elect Obama concerning jobs for women at the following site. Please go there to sign and forward it to people who would like to join in the effort. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/genderequity

A while ago I was invited by a colleague to be on a panel discussing "Feminist BS." I did my research and, armed with the latest data on discrimination, sex segregation in the labor force, and male-female wage gaps, sallied forth to enter the fray.

The venue, as I discovered, was a small theater with black walls and various avantgarde accoutrements. The panel consisted of me and another female academic, an extremely tribal gay guy and the drama critic of the local PBS radio station who was dressed in a witchy/ethnic outfit I suspect she ordered from the Pyramid Collection. The topic, it turned out, was whether feminism as a theatrical style was out-dated. My data fell flat and I felt like a fool.

I never realized that feminism was a "theatrical style" in the first place. I thought it was all about sex segregation in the labor force, male-female wage gaps and, more generally, eliminating gender-based constraints, restrictions and expectations that limit the choices of both men and women. I thought it was about removing unnecessary restrictions and providing more real options for everyone.

Feminism as a theatrical style is certainly bs and so, I believe is feminism as the ethic of care, the exultation of the Eternally Feminism, and Goddess worship, feminism as the Battle of the Sexes and feminism as the Solidarity of the Oppressed. Feminism is about jobs, wages and opportunities.

That is what this petition is about. Please sign at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/genderequity. Here is the text:

To President-Elect Obama:

We applaud your intention to establish a sizeable and productive program that will help to stimulate the economy, and that will provide improved infrastructure for the country. However, we are concerned that, unless specific steps are taken, your program will provide jobs almost exclusively for men. Women are 46 percent of the labor force. Their unemployment rate is rising with that of men. Moreover, many millions of women are raising children without a husband or partner, and unemployment for them will mean great deprivation, and possible homelessness, for them and their children.

We suggest three lines of action that will insure that women get a fair
share of the benefits from your program:

1. Revive and enforce the Labor Department regulations that require government contractors to institute affirmative action plans that provide a share of the jobs for women and minorities. Closely monitor the contractors for compliance.

2. In connection with the infrastructure projects, institute apprenticeships, and insure that at least one third of the positions go to women.

3. Add projects in health, child care, education, social service that will both provide jobs to women, and also provide needed services to them.

Family Values

Why churches fear gay marriage | Salon News

While conservative churches are busy trying to whip up another round of culture wars over same-sex marriage, Rodriquez says the real reason for their panic lies elsewhere: the breakdown of the traditional heterosexual family and the shifting role of women in society and the church itself. As the American family fractures and the majority of women choose to live without men, churches are losing their grip on power and scapegoating gays and lesbians for their failures.

Churches have a vested interest in supporting sex roles and the "traditional family." Traditional women are the backbone of the church and historically, in the US especially, people go to church "for the sake of the children."

Working women don't have the time to work for the church or the motivation. In the past, churches provided educated, energetic women with a venue in which they could do jobs in which they could organize, manage, play with significant sums of money and exercise authority--work that was not available to women in the secular world. Now that women get responsible, interesting positions outside the church, they have little reason to make alternative careers in church volunteer work.

Churches serve the interests of traditional women. For men, and working women, church-going is a hassle: after the work week they want to sleep in, lounge around in grotty old clothes and relax. For stay-at-home moms churchgoing is a break in their routine: a chance to dress up, get out of the house, and socialize with other adults. For older women, who have made careers of "doing for" their families, the church affirms the worth of the caring work and gives them opportunities to do more caring work once their husbands and children are no longer around to do for.

Churches not only provide opportunities for "caring work"--they valorize traditional femininity. Playing to their "base," they flatter traditional women who have invested their lives in doing for their families by identifying caring work as the epitome of Christian virtue. But the more they promote traditional femininity, the business of caring, the more they turn off women who are not invested in doing for their husbands, children or others and want no part of caring work or traditional femininity.

Rodriguez has not got it quite right. He suggests that Christianity needs to be feminized:

The desert religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are male religions. Their perception is that God is a male god and Allah is a male god. If the male is allowed to hold onto the power of God, then I think we are in terrible shape. I think what's coming out of Colorado Springs right now, with people like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, is either the last or continuing gasp of a male hierarchy in religion. That's what's at stake. And women have a determining role to play.

I don't know about Judaism and Islam, but Christianity is already too feminized, and is becoming even more so as non-traditional women, and men, drop out leaving the church to traditional women and and churches cater increasingly to their smarmy sentimentalities and taste for caring work.

Churches have evolved to satisfy the interests of traditional families: they provide activities for traditional women and sell themselves as socializing agencies for the young. When young adults postpone marriage and child-rearing or forgo it altogether church membership declines. When women enter the labor force and, more particularly, when they enter as full-time careerists, churches lose support. Perhaps most importantly, when the traditional family ceases to be the norm and loses prestige, the Church, whose fate is inextricably linked with the traditional family, loses prestige.

Gay marriage is a symbolic blow to the ideal of the traditional family as a cultural norm and that undermines the prestige of the Church. Materially, if fewer individuals form traditional families, churches lose membership and support. They have every reason to be worried.

Raised on the Dick and Jane readers, I yearned for what I thought of as a "real Dick and Jane Family." By the time I got married, at 22, I was desperate. I wanted a suburban house furnished with a husband, three kids, a dog and a cat. I wanted to get into what I thought of as the World of Sunshine, the 1950s sitcom world, where Young Families went on picnics, had family meals, and went to church. I wanted to be a soccer mom.

I got it, and loved every minute of it. During summer vacation, when I would drive my kids around in my van and people thought I was a real soccer mom--a housewife--I was tremendously proud: I had made it, I felt, into the Dick and Jane world.

Everyone I knew thought I was nuts. If there was one thing they wanted to avoid, or at least postpone, it was the suburban family life that I was desperate to get. Most people I knew never got married, and most who got married never had children. They wanted to live in Manhattan or San Francisco, work in publishing, journalism or the arts, live in lofts, go to concerts and to the theater, try out restaurants and engage in various urban entertainments. They regarded life in the 'burbs as boring, declasse and certainly not the thing for people like us.

I could easily understand the resentment of red-state, church-going Nascar Dads and Soccer Moms. They recognized that there was an urban coastal elite who thought the Dick and Jane life they chose to live was ridiculous and were contemptuous of them. And they believed that the progressive policies this elite promoted, including gay marriage, would make it difficult to get or maintain the Dick and Jane life, and squeeze them out. So, in California, they voted for Prop 8, which was represented not as anti-gay but as pro-family.

Most had nothing against gays and opposed anti-sodomy laws as invasions of privacy; most supported civil unions. They simply wanted affirmation that the Dick and Jane sitcom life was the good life, that it was the norm, and that it wouldn't be taken away from them. And churches supported Prop 8 de jure because they regarded homosexuality as a sin but de facto because Dick and Jane families were their bread and butter.

The Great Reductio

Sidney Blumenthal: McCain is on the verge of a defeat that marks the end of the Republican era | Comment is free | The Guardian

Now, certain factors that have dominated US politics for 40 years seem destined to recede to the far corners. In economics, supply-side panaceas and deregulation created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, requiring a conservative Republican administration to part-nationalise banks, something unimaginable under any Democratic administration. In foreign policy, neoconservatism led to the morass in Iraq and Afghanistan while undermining the western alliance. In social policy, the evangelical right battered science, the separation of church and state, and the right to privacy. Finally, the conservative principle of limited government has become a watchword for incompetence, cronyism, corruption, hypocrisy, and contempt for the rule of law.

Pray, brethren, that in 24 hours this nightmare will be over.

Americans put their faith in what Bush senior in an unguarded moment called Voodoo Economics. The Market would work--in the short run before we were all dead. We would go deeper and deeper into debt but grow our way out. We even managed to persuade policy-makers in other countries to follow our lead--at least gingerly. And now we've pulled down the world economy. Reductio.

But it wasn't simply recondite economics that that drove us, and the world, into this pit. It was the American Dream--the vision of the Good Life as one of endless drudgery and unlimited consumption. When a woman at a Republican rally prior to Election 2004 complained that she was working at 3 jobs, Dubya didn't even get it. His response was, "Good for you!" That's the American way: spend all your waking hours during the week working and your weekend shopping until you drop. After that drudgery you're brain-dead and don't have the ability to enjoy anything but buying more and more and more crap.

Of course some people still don't recognize a reductio when they see one. So McCain is still chanting the mantra of "Wealth creation, not wealth redistribution." Pump more money in at the top and it will, eventually, trickle down. When? Cut taxes on businesses and they'll create more jobs--so that more people can spend more of their time in mind-numbing drudgery, and buy more and more stuff to create more rotten service sector jobs where more people can spend even more of their time doing miserable shit work.

Of course it hasn't worked. Unemployment is up, people are losing their houses and can't afford more stuff. But even if, per impossibile, it had this is surely a vision of hell--days of drudgery and constraint, buried alive until the magical moment on Saturday when you go to the mall for a brief ecstasy of consumption.

There was bit on the Animal Channel about a species of frog that spends most of its lifecycle buried alive. They hatch, swim around for a bit as tadpoles and then burrow into the mud where they stay for months until the rains come. Then they dig themselves out, copulate, and die, within the course of a day. That is exactly the American Dream--the work ethic. Spend most of your life buried alive, at work, and then, for a brief moment in the sun, eat, copulate and shop. Of course you don't die right away after that--you just burrow back into the mud for another week of work, buried alive. Arbeit macht frei: "Good for you!"

I suppose it's a vicious circle. Here were people locked into the Wheel--didn't the Buddha have something to say about this? But the only thing that got them out was that the Wheel stopped so that they couldn't consume any more--and some couldn't work any more. Seems like a more interventionist deity trumped the Buddha there.

Let us pray.

Politics and Modality

Is Anybody Happy? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Joe the Plumber! Joe is, of course, the conservative guy from northwestern Ohio who told Obama: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more” because he planned to buy a business that he hoped would reel in more than $250,000 a year in profits. The proper answer, as Obama should have known, was: “No, it won’t.”...Joe the Plumber, it turns out, is actually named Samuel and is not a licensed plumber. He has a lien on his house for unpaid taxes. While his professional life is still a little hazy, there is not much evidence he’s ever going to become a small business owner. And he would be a beneficiary of the Barack Obama tax plan.

So why is Joe/Sam not a rational self-interested chooser?

It depends on what you mean by "self." Sam, a grunt who works for a local handyman outfit, is interested in the well-being of a possible self, Joe the Plumber--his counterpart at another possible world. Lost in logical space, he imagines that he is Joe, a hard working plumber at that possible world, who is about to buy a business that will bring in $250,000 a year. So Sam supports actual world policies that will benefit Joe who is, in a latitudinarian sense, a "self."

This is no more or less rational than Diana-Worship. During Princess Di's brief, inconsequential life millions of fat, working class housewives adored her. It is hard to understand way they didn't resent her. Here was a woman who had everything anyone could possibly want, including immense wealth and the prospect of being Queen of England but was still whining. But instead, lost in logical space, they empathized with her vapors and her silly romantic notions. They had princess-counterparts at other possible worlds and a "self"-interested concern for their well-being.

Maybe that's one of the differences between economic liberals and conservatives. Conservatives are modal optimists. They imagine themselves at possible worlds where they are better off, where their counterparts are rich plumbers or even richer princesses and, out of modal "self"-interest, support policies that would benefit their privileged counterparts even at their own expense. Liberals, like me, are modal pessimists. We obsess over the plight of our unlucky counterparts and promote policies that would benefit them--usually at our own expense.

I never did like Princess Di or have any lively sense of what my taller, slimmer, richer counterparts are up to at their respective possible worlds. But I have a very vivid sense of my unlucky counterparts' lives and constantly spin out their stories in great detail.

I have never gone through a check-out line without imagining what it would be like to be a supermarket checker, trapped in a 2 x 2 space for 8 hours a day, doing endless, boring, repetitive tasks, with no product to show, no possibility of achievement and no way out. When I order stuff on the phone, I imagine being a "customer service representative" locked into a cubicle in a room full of women in cubicles taking phone orders, thinking about ways out. I could go to beauty school at night or take a course to be a medical records clerk, but how much better would that be? Besides, after a day at this job I'm knackered. I go home and cook, clean up, and then all I'm good for is vegging out in front of the TV. I can also easily imagine myself as a data entry operator, trapped in a cubicle inputting meaningless figures. I'm under constant supervision and every keystroke is monitored. There's no way out. The only other jobs I could get are equally bad.

I imagine myself a working class housewife pushed out of the house by my husband, Joe the plumber. "Get your fat ass down to Walmart and get a job, bitch." What can I do? If I leave this jerk I'll be working at Walmart anyway and be poor to boot. I once had options, when I was too young to appreciate them, but I don't any more. I could have gotten better grades in high school, gone to college and got a more interesting job. But I didn't. So now I'm stuck in a life of soul-sucking, mind-killing drudgery and there's no way out--at least not in this possible world: I can still read romance novels, follow the lives of the rich and famous on TV and imagine being Princess Di.

Whose fantasies are more rational? Harsanyi pumps our intuitious about fairness by asking us to imagine ourselves living everyone's life in turn. This is, now that I think of it, a restricted possible worlds fantasy and one that poses some metaphysical difficulties. We are to imagine a range of possible worlds, one for each member of the current population, which are qualitatively exactly similar to the actual world but where we ourselves are different people. Alternatively, we are to imagine ourselves as modal super-persons, transworld merelogical sums of persons at these possible worlds, and ask how the world should be in qualitative terms to make the modal super-person of which we are world-bound parts better off.

This pumps liberal intuitions very effectively because there are ever so many more miserable lives than good ones.

We could imagine it using that the clock metaphor pop science shows use to help us understand geological time: "At 11:30 pm the dinosaurs emerge; at 5 seconds to midnight we have the Industrial Revolution." Imagine: for 12 hours you are an illiterate peasant farmer working to eat and eating to work; for another hour or so you're a member of a hunting and gathering tribe, trudging endlessly through the jungle looking for edible berries and hoping for a large mammal kill so that you can get a little protein and take a rest; for another 3 or 4 hours you're a beggar, prostitute or hustler in an urban slum; for most of the time left you're scanning groceries, inputting data, flipping burgers or working in a call center; for half a minute you're successively a college professor, a lawyer, a dentist and a plumber with a $250,000 a year business; for a nanosecond you're a movie star, a professional athlete, a best-selling author and Princess Di.

For perhaps 5 or 6 hours you're sick and in pain. For most of the day you're physically exhausted. For all but two or three minutes you're engaged in mind-killing drudgery--trapped, constrained, in an agony of boredom.

Harsanyi got it right: this is the version of the Golden Rule that bites. The problem with political conservatives and other Romantics is not a lack of sympathy but a lack of imagination.

Joe the Plumber and the American Dream

Plumber From Ohio Is Thrust Into Spotlight - NYTimes.com

Mr. McCain...[cited] “Joe the Plumber” [Wurzelbacher] as a symbol of how Mr. Obama’s tax policies would hurt small businesses. Since his initial exchange with Mr. Obama, Mr. Wurzelbacher has become a favorite of anti-Obama bloggers and television commentators. On Neil Cavuto’s program on Fox News, for example, he was asked if Mr. Obama’s response about “spreading the wealth around” satisfied him, and gave an explanation that the McCain campaign was quick to send around to reporters. “His answer actually scared me even more,” Mr. Wurzelbacher said. “He said he wants to distribute wealth. And I mean, I’m not trying to make statements here, but, I mean, that’s kind of a socialist viewpoint. You know, I work for that. You know, it’s my discretion who I want to give my money to; it’s not for the government decide that I make a little too much and so I need to share it with other people. That’s not the American Dream.”

I'm working right now on a paper for a conference on the American Dream so these issues are much on my mind. American Dreamers assume that the Market is perfectly efficient and so, given that people respond to incentives, will produce the greatest desire-satisfaction for the greatest number. The Fundamental Theorem of the American Dream is that there are trade-offs between equality and opportunity, security and freedom.

It is easy to see how opportunity preludes equality. Some people are just going to be more productive than others because of their native ability and propensity for hard work. If you smack them down with redistributive tax schemes in the interests of promoting equality, they'll have no incentive to produce and we'll all be worse off because there will be less stuff to go around. It is also easy to see why security and freedom are incompatible. People need the stick as well as the carrot. Where there are social safety nets in place, potentially productive individuals won't be driven to extend themselves out of fear and will, as a consequence, be less productive.

The Theorem however is false, which shows that there's either something wrong with derivation or the axioms from which it was derived. The US trails affluent, industrialized nations in both equality and social mobility: American men are less likely to find themselves in different economic segments of the population from their fathers in the US than in social democratic, egalitarian Denmark. As for the fear factor, insecurity discourages risk-taking. Americans, contrary to all expectations, turn out to be more risk-averse than Chinese who, relying on economic safety nets provided by kin and by the state, can afford to extend themselves.

After 15 years of hard work Joe the Plumber was in the process of buying a plumbing business, which he anticipated--rightly or wrongly--would net him more than $250,000 a year. An unseen presence throughout the debate, McCain invoked him in an appeal to the nation of shopkeepers Americans imagined themselves to be. But in fact there are are relatively few small business owners in the US and, of those, very few net $250,000 or more:

According to figures compiled by the Small Business Administration, there are fewer than six million small businesses that actually have payrolls. The rest are so-called nonemployer firms that report income from hobbies or freelance work done by their registered owners, earning as little as $1,000 a year. Of these, according to a calculation by the independent, non-partisan Tax Policy Center, fewer than 700,000 taxpayers would have to pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s plan. But even some of these are not small-business owners in the traditional sense; they include lawyers, accountants and investors in real estate, all of them with incomes that put them in the top tax brackets.

The American Dream Joe described is out of reach for most Americans, and may not even be feasible for Joe. The odds are stacked against small business owners and even if his business doesn't fail in the first year, as most small businesses do, it is unlikely that he'll make $250,000 a year out of it.

Most people can't even make a start on Joe's American Dream. I could never even dream of starting a plumbing business because I couldn't be a plumber. I'm a woman: women can't get apprenticeships in plumbing or other blue collar trades. That's just the way it is. Back when I was a kid even being male wasn't enough to open the magic door to plumbing: you had to be Italian. And even then, it wasn't easy if your grandparents came from the wrong part of Italy.

There are a thousand assumptions, customs, practices, informal procedures and unwritten rules that restrict people's options in virtue of sex, race, ethnic origin, family connections or lack thereof, economic status and circumstance. School and scouting are fair meritocracies: if you're smart, hard-working, ambitious and persistent you get your grades, credentials and merit badges. But adult life in the Real World, particularly in the part of it working class Americans inhabit, is nothing like that.

Most grown-ups know that the official rules are a sham. Everyone knows that women have to work harder than men to prove themselves and that there are some jobs women just can't get--as well as jobs men just can't get. Everyone knows that it's not what you know but who you know. Everyone knows that open bidding is usually nothing but window-dressing: construction projects go to relatives and croneys. Everyone knows that hard work, initiative and persistence rarely pay off. A few very lucky people have jobs where achievement and advancement are feasible. Most work at routine jobs where there is simply no way to to show their stuff: you clock in, do what your told or look busy if there's nothing to do, and clock out.

It isn't big government or high taxes that impose constraints, but the customs, practices and unwritten rules operating under the radar that restrict our freedom, limit our options and undermine initiative. Government is the liberator. By legislating and enforcing official rules to achieve fair meritocracy, the state imposes relatively minor restrictions on the few but opens wider opportunities for the many and expands overall freedom.

A Herd of Mavericks

Biden Teaches Palin the Meaning of 'Maverick'

When my husband was a starving student he used to get his teeth fixed for free by dental students at his university who needed live subjects for practice. It was always an adventure and, on one occasion, a student slipped and drilled a hole in his cheek.

I wouldn't trust a trainee dentist, much less an amateur, to work on my teeth or go to a maverick dentist with a penchant for unorthodox dental procedures. Neither would most Americans. But, at least until recently, when it comes to politics Americans want amateurs and mavericks. Why?

Because most believe that in areas outside of mechanics and technology, expertise is a sham. Dentistry is a mechanical business, like engineering and computer repair so certainly we want people with training, skills and credentials to do these jobs. But everything else, most particularly politics, is just a matter of common sense. The pretense of academics in the humanities, journalists, politicians or others who don't monkey with machinery or push symbols to expertise is nothing put a scam. People who set up as "professionals" in these disciplines are just corrupt, overpaid hucksters who band together to feather their nests and to exclude others from jobs that any sensible person could do--and, indeed, do better than they can. The subtleties and complications they talk about are nothing but a smoke screen to obscure the fact that they have no real expertise and their machinations only make them less effective in doing jobs that really take nothing more than common sense and good will.

That, I suspect, is the thinking behind Americans' contempt for "professional politicians" and "Washington Insiders," and their demand for term limits to insure that politicians never become professional. It's also the source of Americans' sympathy for conspiracy theories, contempt for all components of The Establishment and conviction that there is an enormous amount of vital information that every Establishment organization, from the mainstream media to the medical profession, doesn't want us to know. There is, we believe, the technology to produce light bulbs that will burn forever but the Establishment doesn't want us to know that. MMR vaccine causes autism but the Medical Establishment is hushing that up, just as it hushes up the virtues of herbal cures and alternative medicine. Aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, but that information was suppressed by the Military-Industrial Complex.

Enter the mavericks. A maverick is an outsider, a loner, an independent thinker who rejects Establishment orthodoxies. Americans admire mavericks because we believe that outside of strictly technical areas, expertise is nothing but a sham--a stifling, corrupt, entrenched orthodoxy. And so, fully one third of Americans are political "independents," unaffiliated with any political party. They regard themselves as mavericks and support politicians who claim that they are not politicians, who assure self-styled maverick voters that they will not toe the party line.

In the course of the Vice Presidential debate yesterday, Sarah Palin was at pains to assure voters that both she and John McCain were mavericks. When asked how her policies would differ from McCain's if he were unable to complete his term in office and she were to assume the presidency, she assured the audience that she and McCain disagreed about a variety of issues (without getting specific) because they were both mavericks.

If I were a Republican and believed this I would certainly not want either McCain or Palin in office any more than I would want a maverick dentist drilling my teeth. I would want someone who would faithfully represent my political agenda and had a cadre of technocrats on tap to implement it. But I'm a Democrat, and I want professional Democratic politicians in office to promote my agenda.

Both Palin and Biden, following their bosses, made a fuss about bipartaisanship. I don't want bipartisainship any more than I would want "fair and balanced" coverage of evolution and "intellegent design" in the public schools or equal time for astonomy and astrology. Evolution is good science; "intelligent design" is junk. I don't want equal time for good science and junk science or for science and superstition, and I don't want any compromise in politics or equal time for the Republican junk agenda. Americans' preoccupation with bipartasinship is just another manifestation of the assumption that ideology is balony so that partisanship is no more than corrupt, self-serving factionalism.

But the Rodney King program is bs: we can't, and shouldn't "all get along" because some of us hold view that are correct while others hold views that are incorrect and pernicious. We should no more compromise with Republicans' agenda than oppositon parties should have compromised with Hitler's program, or proposed 3 million Jews to be gassed rather than 6 million.

If this sounds extravagant it may be because progressives don't take their own program seriously. Millions of Americans have been trashed: they've lost their jobs, their health insurance and their homes. The economy is in meltdown and we're mired in an unwinnable war in Iraq that has trashed the country and cost thousands of lives. This isn't a consequence of personal incompetence or of corruption: it is the direct result of a wrong-headed, failed ideology. The Bush administration is the reducio of that ideology and nothing is going to change until Americans get it.

It's the Philosophy, Stupid!

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect:

The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store...I certainly don't fault Senator McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. It's a philosophy we've had for the last eight years – one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. It's a philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises. Well now, instead of prosperity trickling down, the pain has trickled up – from the struggles of hardworking Americans on Main Street to the largest firms of Wall Street. This country can't afford another four years of this failed philosophy.

Play it again, Sam, because what Americans don't get is precisely this: that when they cast their ballots, they're voting for a philosophy--not for a plumber.

When I chat about politics, to fellow Democrats as well as Republicans, I'm struck by the extent to which they imagine voting is hiring someone to do a job rather than choosing ideology and policy. They want someone who's honest, experienced, competent and, if possible affable--someone who will pay attention to them and clean up the shit, that is, a plumber.

There's nothing controversial about plumbing--no competing theories of toilet repair or washer replacement and no disagreement about what constitutes a successful job. And when it comes to plumbing, fancy degrees and credentials don't matter: you sure don't want some high-powered hydraulics engineer who can't operate a pipe wrench or is too hoity-toity to clean up the shit. You want a guy who can do the job. And of course, you want a guy who is honest. You don't want a plumber who will claim to discover all sorts of problems that aren't really there and soak you for all you're worth "fixing" them.

Politics is controversial in all the ways that plumbing isn't: it's not only controversial how to achieve various goals--it's disputed what goals are desirable. But Americans, chanting the mantra that both parties are the same, don't seem to get that. And they also don't seem to get the idea that when it comes to running the country vast bodies of theoretical knowledge as well as practical competence and plain, brute intelligence are of vital importance.

So even in economic hard times, even in the teeth of foreclosure, unemployment and the drain of fighting an unpopular war, a substantial minority of Americans will vote Republican because they see their troubles as a consequence of professional incompetence rather than the failure of a philosophy. Bush was a bad plumber, but plumbing is plumbing.

I doubt that a president has all that much to do with running the country. Voters choose their preferred ideology by voting for one of the major political parties. The technocrats, bureaucrats and secretaries who run government formulate and implement policies consistent with that ideology--which is why I'd be perfectly happy to vote for a yellow dog running on the Democratic ticket. Of course, George W. Bush claimed to be The Decider. But I'm skeptical about that since if he really were, things would probably be even worse.

Social Justice or the Common Good?

Party in Search of a Notion | The American Prospect

For many years -- during their years of dominance and success, the period of the New Deal up through the first part of the Great Society -- the Democrats practiced a brand of liberalism quite different from today's. Yes, it certainly sought to expand both rights and prosperity. But it did something more: That liberalism was built around the idea -- the philosophical principle -- that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest.

This, historically, is the moral basis of liberal governance -- not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity. Liberal governance is about demanding of citizens that they balance self-interest with common interest. Any rank-and-file liberal is a liberal because she or he somehow or another, through reading or experience or both, came to believe in this principle. And every leading Democrat became a Democrat because on some level, she or he believes this, too.

Michael Tomasky has been pushing this analysis of what went wrong for the Left in the 1960s for quite some time now and he has it exactly backwards. On his account the New Left transformed the agenda of American liberalism from a communitarianism, aimed at promoting the "common good," to an ideology of individual rights, individual opportunity and social justice.

In fact the New Deal and Great Society, which he applauds as effective, if flawed, programs were devoted to promoting individual rights, individual opportunity and social justice. Roosevelt added "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want" to the traditional four freedoms guaranteed in the constitution. The Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and early '60s, which Tomasky cites as a prime example of Americans pulling for the common good was precisely about individual rights, in particular, the right of individuals to be "treated as individuals" rather than as members of separate estates defined by skin color.

The New Left, by contrast, was deeply communitarian. The New Left merely replaced the the old, conservative commitment to the common good of a national community that excluded racial minorities, stigmatized gay people, and failed the poor, with the communitarian identity politics of restricted communities, defined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and the like.

The difference between the Old Left and the New Left was one of objectives and mechanisms for achieving them. Old-style liberalism was narrowly focused and its goals were clear: economic security, material well-being and opportunity. It embodied a vision of the Good Life represented by Norman Rockwell's "Freedom From Want." The Good Life was Levittown--on this traditional liberals and conservatives agreed, even as they disagreed about the means for attaining it.

Old-style New Deal liberals believed that government programs, contrived by technocrats, were the fairest and most effective means for promoting the Good Life. The WPA, CCC and an alphabet soup of New Deal programs would provide jobs. The GI bill would provide education, training and the opportunity for more Americans to move into the middle-class. FHA and VA loans would finance homes in leafy suburbs. All (white male) Americans would have good jobs that paid a "family wage" so that all (white) Americans could be bourgeois. Economic experts in government service would design programs to make that feasible and government bureaucrats would administer them.

The goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to desegregate Levittown--to make the bourgeois life feasible for minorities. The values, means and ends were the same. The Good Life was the life of the white, Anglo middle class and the aim of the Civil Rights Movement was to see to it that members of racial and ethnic minorities could get it too. The means were also the same: government programs and social engineering.

The New Left repudiated the values and goals to which old-style liberals were committed. Children who had grown up in Levittown did not want to move back and were contemptuous of working class strivers who struggled to achieve and maintain a way of life they rejected. In addition the New Left were deeply distrustful of traditional mechanisms for social improvement. They did not merely reject the Establishment as it was--they rejected establishment as such: they distrusted hierarchal institutions, credentialed experts and impersonal mechanisms.

It is easy to see why most Americans found this program repugnant. The institutions that comprised the Establishment--schools and universities, government and the military-industrial complex--provided reasonably fair opportunities for individuals to achieve their goals. The rules and requirements were clear. You got grades and passed tests so that you could go to college. You got more grades and passed more tests to get a credential that guaranteed a good job with a regular paycheck, benefits and a retirement plan. You saved money for the down payment on a house, maintained good credit and got a mortgage. You didn't need to be hooked into a social network or "have contacts"; you didn't need to be socially skilled, lucky or likable. The system was transparent--and it served the interests of "middle American" careerist strivers.

Once the New Left became established, the Democratic Party lost its focus on economic issues and "liberal" was redefined. Environmentalism, reproductive rights, peace and other projects that had nothing to do with the defining agenda of the left as it had been became signature issues of the New Left, which dominated Democratic politics. To the extent that Democrats cared about bread-and-butter issues at all their concern was focused primarily on the underclass and in particular on individuals who could not, or more often, would not pay their dues. Democrats became the Mommy Party with a vision of the state as a secular communitarian church devoted to caring for the least of the brethren. It embodied the sentimentalities and romantic fantasies of the elite but had little to offer the great body of working class Americans who did not regard themselves as victims and did not want care or compassion but fairness, opportunity and the guarantee that if they played by the rules their rights would be respected.

So I agree with Tomasky. Democrats need to "kick some old habits." But it's the habit of framing social issues in communitarian terms and describing their agenda in the language of compassion, care and the common good that they need to break if they are to win over most Americans, who want transparency, a level playing field and the assurance that if they pay their dues they can achieve their goals.

Whining? Whatever...

Peter Schweizer on Liberal Whine on National Review Online

Howdy, boys and girls. Did you know there's a new word that has replaced whatever as an argument-stopper and conversational trump-card--at least for those of you who're of the conservative persuasion? Yes, indeed. The new W-word is whining.

You may wonder how a verb which has fairly stringent criteria for application can take the place of "whatever," a mere flatus vocis suitable for all occasions. But don't worry: the strict-constructionist dictionary definition is passé. Nowadays "whining" covers any dissatisfaction with one's circumstances or critique of the status quo. So, as evidence of liberal whining, National Review pundit Peter Schweitzer notes:

A wide body of research shows that modern liberals are much more likely to complain about things in their lives. Conservatives are more content with their lives. When asked “How satisfied are you with life these days? Sixty-six percent of conservatives said “very satisfied” compared with only 46 percent of liberals. Conservatives are more likely to say they love their jobs (53 percent vs. 41 percent) and even enjoy their hobbies more (63 percent vs. 51 percent). When asked by the Social Capital Survey whether they were satisfied with their income, liberals were more than three times as likely to say “not at all satisfied” — even when they earned the same as conservatives.

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that conservatives are more satisfied with their lives than liberals. After all, being conservative means wanting to conserve the status quo, so it stands to reason conservatives would be more satisfied with the way things are than others. In fact, you don't need to produce data to show that conservatives are more satisfied with the way things are than non-conservatives: that's true by definition.

I'm not sure why conservatives think that liberals' dissatisfaction reflects adversely on them. After all, dissatisfaction comes from setting high standards. What can be wrong with that? I'm dissatisfied with my weight, with my students' performance in logic and with the rudeness and incompetence of various "customer service representatives" with whom I deal. Would I be a better person if I were satisfied being a fat slob, if I didn't care whether my students could do logic problems or whether people did their jobs properly?

Conservatives however invariably make an intuitive leap from people's expressions of dissatisfaction to the charge that they are representing themselves as "victims," a habit they hold defines liberalism:

Barack Obama understands the language of victimhood and uses it effectively. And victimhood has become a central tenant of modern liberalism. As Kenneth Minogue argues in his classic book The Liberal Mind, modern liberalism is completely wrapped up in “suffering situations.”

Funny I never noticed that. Obama, preaching the audacity of hope, always seemed to me a very optimistic, up-beat guy. In fact the only people I ever hear talking about victimization are conservatives who whine about liberals' supposed proclivity for claiming to be victimized.

I guess what puzzles me, given the new latitudinarian concept of whining, is whether it is possible to express any dissatisfaction with the status quo without counting as a whiner. If not, then the conservatives' complaint that liberals, those of us who are not altogether satisfied with the way things are and work for improvement, is simply the claim that liberals are not conservatives. And being a liberal myself I don't think that's something they have any right to whine about.

Krugman on Obama

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/opinion/25krugman.html?hp

A few months ago the Obama campaign was talking about transcendence. Now it’s talking about math...Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation....Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class...Let me offer an alternative suggestion: maybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for.

Transcendence and transformation, whatever they are, are luxuries for the elite. Whatever else Obama is offering, this inspirational, idealistic rhetoric grates on the nerves of people who have real problems: "stuff your transcendence--we want jobs and financial security, health insurance, good schools and safe neighborhoods."

Obama, his groomers and handlers, and his elite groupies don't even get it: they don't understand that this rhetoric plays as "let them eat cake." Of course I don't doubt that if Obama is elected he will actually deliver cake, and bread as well. It is just that this "idealism" as such, and the rhetoric of transcendence and transformation, arouse suspicion and distrust in people who have been fobbed off with symbolic gestures for too long, and offered cheap, worthless intangibles while the material conditions of their lives have steadily degraded.

Unlike Krugman, I do think that Obama will win resoundingly in November--if the Democrats make the case that the misery of these last 8 years hasn't been a result of Bush's personal incompetence but is in fact the inevitable consequence of a failed ideology, and that government is the solution not the problem. That ideology is now so ingrained that it's virtually unfalsifiable. If things go badly we blame that on incompetence or assume that we haven't been consistent in applying the ideology or that we haven't gone far enough or allowed enough time to get the results.

How do you convince the American public, the working class in particular, that for almost 3 decades the US has been involved in a radical experiment which has failed? That for a generation, we have been spending down our capital and going into debt, and that now the chickens have come home to roost?

Obama the Elitist

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/us/politics/12campaign.html?ex=1365739200&en=7092dcb8d6a829b5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

At the fund-raiser in San Francisco last Sunday, Mr. Obama outlined challenges facing his presidential candidacy in the coming primaries in Pennsylvania and Indiana, particularly persuading white working-class voters who, he said, fell through the cracks during the Bush and Clinton administrations.

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Mr. Obama said, according to a transcript on the Huffington Post Web site, which on Friday published the comments.

The remarks touched off a torrent of criticism from Mrs. Clinton, Mr. McCain and Republican activists and party officials, all accusing Mr. Obama of elitism and belittling the working class.

This has legs--because it's true. And because it's one of the true things that no one dares to say.

So much for the bowling. Yes, we do know in our hearts that Obama doesn't bowl any more than Bush mucks out the cowsheds back at the Crawford ranch. Yes, we know it's an act directed at us. But it seemed well-intentioned: rather like President Karzei wearing a conglomerate Afghan costume concocted out of bits and pieces of the garb of various tribes. When politicians affect the folkways of hoi poloi or make local references to establish a connection to our states and towns they're just trying to make a connection with us, to show they're aware of us and our lives--that they're on our side.

But then a remark like this slips out and we're reminded of what they really think of us and, more fundamentally, that they see us as other--as "you people" who are venting your frustrations by "clinging" to guns or religion, you working class bigots who are stupidly prejudiced against immigrants and minorities because you don't understand the importance of proletarian solidarity. Now we see what a patronizing act the whole thing was all along: we're hurt, and ashamed of having been taken in. We've had a peek behind the scenes and it's ruined the show.

What a pity this had to happen now, because Obama will be nominated and this will dog him. And it's much worse than the Wright episode because it taps into the real problem Obama has with the white working class which is not, as the pundits have repeatedly spun it, race but class. Obama is just too posh: he is an elitist of the worst sort--like the pundits who spin his problem with the white working class as a race problem.

I suspect that the problem most working class people have isn't with race but with latte-drinking liberals who assume that they have a problem with race, write off their legitimate concerns as an irrational response to frustration and imagine that they can be handled--by cute tricks and faux folksiness.

They have real problems and legitimate concerns. They're the ones who compete with immigrants for jobs, and whose wages and benefits are being driven down by cheap immigrant labor. They're the ones who have to worry about a criminal underclass: they don't have the bucks to live in gated communities or safe class-segregated neighborhoods. They're the ones who have to send their kids to public schools where an influx of underclass kids and immigrants with poor English drags their kids down. But instead of taking these concerns seriously, these patronizing elitists assume that they're just ignorant bigots and can be managed.

Obama the Feminist: No Thanks

Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama - New York Times

The Obama campaign is, in some ways, subtly marketing its candidate as a postfeminist man, a generation beyond the gender conflicts of the boomers. In the video released this week, Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, says that Mr. Obama understands issues of concern to women “in his gut,” not as “a kind of pandering.” The writer Alice Walker describes Mr. Obama as “someone who honors the feminine values of caring for all.” Obama strategists also highlight his leadership style — his promise of consensus-building and moving beyond the politics of polarization and fear — as especially appealing to women. “His message is about listening, bringing people together, the skills women appreciate,” said Betsy Myers, the campaign’s chief operating officer.

What a bullshitter--and what patronizing, sexist crap: "feminine values of caring for all" and the idea that "consensus-building" is supposed to be "appealing to women." It's good to know that women are still going for tough old Hillary.

There was not a damn thing in this article on Obama's "feminist pitch" about what Obama proposes to do for women, or for anyone else. Is he going to promote equal pay for equal work--or even better, equal work for women? Is he planning to establish universal pre-school? Does he have any views about family leave? Does he have any ideas about training programs for low-income women? Not that I could see.

This man is vacuous. But much, much worse he, or at least his groomers and trainers, are sexists of the worst sort, imagining that even though he isn't offering women anything, women will vote for him because he's a caring Sensitive New Age Guy. And women will of course prefer to have a man in authority, providing that he's sensitive, protective and "caring," than a fellow-women.

Sorry. Women, particularly working class women, are still enthusiastic about Hillary. And Hillary also gets a bigger share of the black vote than Obama. Working class women and minorities, who have serious practical concerns, don't care about Obama's "caring."

I'm still for Edwards. He's more focused on bread-and-butter issues than any of the other candidates and further to the left. That's all that matters to me. But I warm to Hillary and will be delighted to vote for her if she's nominated. My second-favorite president, after Teddy Roosevelt, was Lyndon Johnson--that ugly cuss of a professional politician, consumate wheeler-dealer, tough guy and master of the Senate, who established the Great Society and took down Jim Crow. Kennedy, beatified as a martyr, really wasn't much of anything: he botched things with Cuba and almost got us into a nuclear holocaust; he did little or nothing for civil rights or for the alleviation of poverty. We don't need another JFK or, even worse, another Clean Gene McCarthy leading a Children's Crusade. We need a tough, pragmatic--even corrupt--politician who can get results.

Tough-Minded Liberals

Full disclosure: I spent 7 years trying, with all my heart and soul and strength, to get ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church before our local bishop had the decency to tell me that it wouldn't be worth my while to keep trying--and that I would simply be wasting the time of the Commission on Ministry if I tried again. They were right to turn me down, given what I discovered they were looking for in clergy, but I do wish they'd played it straight and given me a better idea how things worked before I compromised my career and neglected my family to become "involved in the church" in order to build my ordination vita.

When I first inquired about ordination I was told that they key was to be "involved" so I diligently participated in activities, joined organizations and got on committees. I liked choir, but detested everything else. The worst was the Daughters of the King. Once a month we met to tweek the Daughter's Prayer List, adding members of the parish who were sick or had other "needs" and striking those whose problems had been solved, or whom the Daughters concluded had been prayed for enough. In addition to these meetings the Daughters maintained a Prayer Chain so that when a Daughter got word of a Need she could pass it to other members of the local chapter for immediate attention. I had the Prayer Chain structure posted over my desk so that when the Daughter before me on the chain called to tell me of a new prayer request I could call the next Daughter to pass it on. It was I who usually broke the chain--shilly-shallying and praying that the next Daughter would have her answering machine on until, by an alternative route, the prayer request passed through the chain and came back to me again.

I thought these women were sickening. They had the best of intentions and, from the moral point of view were better people than me, but I found their interest in the minutia of other peoples lives, particularly their interest in other people's various miseries, incomprehensible and their compassion and smarm disgusting. They weren't merely gossips and they certainly weren't malicious--they were really interested in people's affairs, really cared and really wanted to help which is surely good from the moral point of view--but from the aesthetic point of view, in my very gut, I was nauseated. And that is what, rightly, disqualified me from ordination. The diocese had other reasons for not wanting me, illegitimate ones, but this was the correct reason for zapping me.

From the aesthetic point of view I like hard, cold, tough, aggressive, intense and angular. I've always wanted to live in a Mondrian world. That's why I got into Ayn Rand in my teens. Always operating according to Kant's maxim, "The Spirit of Thoroughness is not yet dead in Germany," I diligently read everything she wrote--from her essays in The Virtue of Selfishness and For the New Intellectual to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I liked the idea of striving and fighting, exerting energy and achieving. Most of all, I liked the idea of hard, cold rationality--and Rand represented herself as the Knight of Reason in a world populated by Atillas and Witch Doctors, dumb thugs and smarmy-wimpy Daughters of the King.

By the time I was 16, as a high school senior writing my term paper on her opus, I was skeptical but it was only after spending 5 months as a clerk-typist at Intercity Trans. Co., Inc. that I repudiated the whole program. I saw that in the adult world of work most people just didn't have the opportunity to strive, fight, exert energy and achieve. Work I discovered was simply drudgery--filling time and coping with boredom. Striving and exerting energy didn't pay off and there was no way to excel. So I was converted--and have kept the Faith. Lots of people get into Ayn Rand at the time of their lives that I did and get out when I did.

But it still seems to me that lots of liberals just don't understand that aesthetic preference for hard, tough, aggressive and angular or the gut level disgust most of us feel for the Daughters of the King program. They don't understand the appeal of get-toughism, or why Americans like the idea of capital punishment, three-strikes laws or programs that purport to "get tough on crime." They don't understand why street gangs are appealing to ghetto youths. They don't understand why we like guns. They don't understand why people, particularly those who aren't engaged in combat, like the idea of war. When I was a kid I regularly watched a TV series called "Combat." I was never clear what the combat was about: was it WWII, Korea, Vietnam or something else? I don't think there was an answer: the program showed soldiers with greenery stuck in the net on their helmets, crawling through swamps with their weapons, intent on capturing territory. That was good enough for me: I liked it.

Lots of my fellow liberals don't seem to get it so they ask the wrong questions. Why do ghetto youths join street gangs? What's the matter with Kansas?: why do working class Americans vote against their economic interests? Why do Muslim youths support al-Qaida? They assume we're all, by nature, Daughters of the King. The answer is that violence, rage and the taste for toughness are the default: we are, after all, carnivores and our nature as a species is to like toughness, beat people up if we can, and to kill. War and violence are natural. What takes explanation is why, in civilized societies, there is a large population of people who could, if they chose, join street gangs, do violence, beat people up and engage in warfare--but don't. The answer is opportunity costs. If you believe, with good reason, that you'll do better by suppressing the natural tendency to do violence you won' t do it.

Readling lots of liberal stuff, I'm amazed at how denatured many liberals are--how they fail to understand the natural tendency for violence and the aesthetic appeal of toughness, how they just don't get the fact that we're carnivorous, that rage is our natural condition, and how they utterly fail to understand the contempt and disgust most us feel for the Daughters of the King, for smarm, whining, softness, weakness, and what passes as "compassion." Because of this "tough-minded liberal" strikes most Americans as an oxymoron. Until liberals--or "progressives" as we now style ourselves--can break that link between liberalism and this sickening smarm sensibility we will lose. Until we can re-brand liberalism as macho we haven't got a chance. There's nothing virtuous about machismo: it's simply what most people, male and female, like. Until we accept what we are as human beings, until we accept that anger, hatred and violence are at the core of the human condition, albeit something we need to overcome, and that for all our self-deceptive and hypocritical maneuvers we're in our guts disgusted by old-lady smarm and "compassion" we will never win hearts and minds.

Authenticity: "It's One of Those Counterfactuals"

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2007&base_name=post_3945#comments

"Authenticity" as it figures in the political arena cashes out to being a regular guy like me. But "like," as we know, is both vague and ambiguous. We ask: (1) like in what respect and (2) which respects matter and how are they weighted when it comes to assessing likeness simpliciter?

Suppose I'm a regular guy. George Bush is like me because he cuts brush at his Crawford "ranch." John Edwards is not like me because he gets $400 haircuts. But if I had George Bush's bucks and weren't interested in impressing folks like me for political purposes, I wouldn't be cutting brush, so in that respect Bush is not like me. And if I had Edwards' bucks, I'd live in a big house and get $400 haircuts. Counterfactually, Edwards is just like me.

[A]assertions of "authenticity" are not only feeble tautologies that are worthless as criteria of value. As Krugman points out, this focus -- with the focus on the haircuts of John Edwards being the most recent example -- on balance cuts strongly against progressive politics. Although there's no reason that a wealthy person can't advocate policies that help the poor -- FDR came from considerably greater means than Reagan -- suddenly any politician with lots of money (i.e. any politician who could be a serious national candidate under the current system) can be tarred as "inauthentic" if they propose progressive economic policies (although a rich actor renting a pickup as a campaign prop is good enough for a Republican to be "authentic.")

What matters to people: actual or counterfactual similarity? I suspect the latter. Leaving political playacting aside, think of how most of us feel about privileged individuals who repudiate privilege--not out of some bizarre religious conviction or sacrificially in order to provide benefits to the rest of us but because they're jaded, want to experience the life the other half (or 99/100ths) live or even, out of some misguided sense of solidarity, want to live like us. We resent it. What are these people playing at? We resent the Universe for being organized in such a way that privileges we'd appreciate and use to advantage are wasted on them, and we transfer that resentment to them.

When rich college kids (like me) demonstrated in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention, the Chicago cops, who would have loved to have had the chance to go to fancy colleges and were working hard to see to it that their kids had the chance, busted our heads in. Real blue collar workers were outraged by rich hippies pretending to be working class. More recently, when a journalist went for a stroll in Kabul wearing a burqa the was surrounded and threatened by Afghan women in burqas, who recognized that she was a Westerner by her running shoes, outraged that she was voluntarily doing what they had to do and didn't want to do. When another journalist, black and African but visibly overweight, was "embedded" with a poor family in rural Ethiopia to share their life and report, the entire village was outraged and only, grudgingly, accepted him when he persuaded them that he was "doing a study."

Even if we resent rich people for not sharing their wealth or powerful people for undermining our prospects, we don't resent them for enjoying their wealth and power because that is exactly what we would do in their position. Absent overriding conditions--doing a study, giving excess wealth to the poor, embracing poverty for the Kingdom of God's sake--we resent them for not being like us. it's the counterfactuals that matter.

Counterfactuals, unfortunately, are invisible. The public sees Bush doing what they do and Edwards doing things they can't afford to do--they don't notice those other possible worlds. However it would be easy enough for politicians to draw their attention to them instead of pretending that they're actually just regular guys who cut brush and drive pick-ups. "Now y'all listen up: you bet I live in a big, fancy house, get $400 haircuts and hire other people to do yard work. I was lucky, worked hard, and got rich. I live exactly the way you would if you lucked out, as I did, and got rich. And I'm gonna work to see to it that you do better and have more opportunities to get the good stuff I got and to enjoy it. Where's the beef?"

So much for democracy...
www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/magazine/27wwln-idealab-t.html

Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself...To encourage greater economic literacy, he suggests tests of voter competence, or “giving extra votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy.”

I'm on with that, though I'd be nervous about just what "economic literacy" is supposed to be. But would it be paternalism? Roughly, paternalism means preventing people from getting what they want "for their own good" but that poses the question of what is is to prefer a given option. If we go with ordinary usage I think people do operate according to an "informed preference" notion: we talk about what people "really" want and that assumes, if not perfect information, enough to make decent educated guesses.

Some people have enough information but make what most regard as bad decisions anyway. Some know the costs and risks of smoking but smoke anyway. Stopping them would be paternalistic. However if Caplan is correct, when it comes to policy most voters don't have a clue:

Caplan’s own evidence for the systematic folly of voters comes from a 1996 survey comparing the views of Ph.D. economists and the general public. To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration.

The foreign aid issue is the most glaring: some time back a survey indicated that the average guess Americans made about the percentage of GDP the US spends on foreign aid was 23% when it's a little over 0.1%. There was also a poll indicating that 17% of Americans believed that they were in the wealthiest 1% of the population and another 17% were confident that that some time in their lives they'd get there.

Now this is simply factual error that could easily be fixed--not a matter of religious beliefs, "values," or tastes. The remarkable thing is that politicians, obsessed with focus groups, spin, and propaganda have been so reluctant to set people right by stating, and repeating, simple facts. It would be easy enough to set citizens straight on these matters: charities make a fuss about how "for just pennies a day" you can feed a village or send a child to school--why don't politicians? Are Americans opposed to taxes as a matter brute fact or do they simply assume that taxation isn't cost effective? Seeing how it looks from the ground it looks like the latter. Here is the public, imagining that they pay almost a quarter of their income in taxes to feed, clothe and shelter ungrateful "natives" without much effect, and even more to finance local "welfare queens," while "for just pennies a day" private charities do a better job without waste and corruption.

Sometimes though it isn't simple facts but educated guesses about the consequences of various policies. Still, politicians seem peculiarly bad at getting inside the heads of voters and maybe more importantly refuse to recognize that they're rational choosers with legitimate goals. Americans recognize that the US health care system is broken but resist a single-payer system. Why? Because they imagine that it will impose a huge financial burden (not taking into account the savings on private insurance schemes and improvement in efficiency) and that what they'll get is rationed, meatball medicine: long waits for appointments and every visit to the doctor's office like a trip to the DMV, shuffled through an impersonal system, waiting in a grim holding pen to get perfunctory attention from government functionaries--like black-and-white films of immigrants on Ellis Island being screened for TB.

They imagine that immigrants will turn their neighborhoods into dangerous slums, reeking of greasy food, with families sitting outside at all hours of the day and night screaming to one another in foreign languages, young toughs hanging on street corners harassing women and dirty little shops lining the streets. They believe that Bad Guys, domestically and abroad, are out to get them and that only brute force, and lots of it, will keep them in check. They believe that lowering the drinking age and legalizing marijuana will turn the country into the beach at Spring Break. They believe that strictness, corporal punishment and rote learning will make their kids decent, educated, productive citizens. They believe that taxes are little more than tribute to politicians and don't pay for any services that benefit them apart from police, prisons and the military, that government by its nature is corrupt and inefficient, that grassroots efforts, volunteerism and neighborliness will solve social problems, and that common people exercising commonsense can always do better than experts and careerists. They believe--judging from a pro-Walmart propaganda film--that Walmart is a benefactor of the working class and that rich elitist liberals, offended by Walmart on aesthetic grounds, want to close down cheap, efficient big-box stores to make way for over-priced boutiques and health food shops.

If I believed any of these things I'd vote differently--but I don't. Maybe I'm mistaken about some of the facts. One way or the other though it is a matter of facts and not of "values" or tastes, and that can be fixed.

The Sarkozian Buzz

What happens now in France is of crucial importance for all of us who wish to escape from the neo-liberal race to the bottom. Two choices face us, the emulation of the American model, long working hours, pitiful minium wage, zero welfare state, brutal exploitation and denial of citizenship to migrant workers, or the sort of resistance we saw last year in France to the CPE employment law.

Sarko wins--what a bummer.

I suppose everyone has to try sado-conservatism once. An occasional dose might not hurt: a little buzz of entrepreneurship and the adrenalin rush of risk-taking. The problem is addiction. Once the buzz wears off you want more to recapture the thrill and pretty soon there isn't any thrill--just chronic insecurity, endless drudgery and the costs of containing an unproductive, anti-social underclass: the American model.

At that point there's no turning back. Try to cut down and you get the shakes so you shoot up again, increasing the dose, just to avoid the withdrawl symptoms.

It's an expensive habit. A free-enterprise health care system costs more than the National Health and sado-conservative social programs for the lower classes--prisons and the military--are expensive in human as well as monetary terms. Americans however are prepared to pay much more for these programs, which they regard as a necessity, than for education and social safety nets. The lower classes clamor for them: prisons provide service sector jobs for unskilled workers and the military provides opportunities for education and training. Ambitious working class kids sign on for four years and, if they aren't shot dead, get funding for college when their hitch is up. Of course it would be a lot cheaper to provide these benefits without maintaining a massive standing army and going to war regularly to justify its existence. But who's counting? Not addicts, who are notoriously bad at weighing costs, benefits and risks.

No one thinks they'll become addicted when they shoot up. Apart from the underclass, who are socially isolated and don't vote, most Americans believe that they're in the top 10% of the population, the best and brightest, who will get the buzz and not the addiction--the few who will benefit from an inegalitarian, high-risk system rather than the many who will get stuck with the chronic insecurity and grinding drudgery, fighting to keep afloat.

Of course, in a sado-conservative society admitting, even to yourself, that you are in the bottom 90% rather than the talented tenth at the top is taboo. Once the system is established, no one (except socially isolated, politically inert members of the underclass) dares to think that they might benefit from social safety nets and more egalitarian arrangements, so the system perpetuates itself, promoted by the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that only the Other ("welfare recipients," the poor, minorities, immigrants) will benefit from a welfare state.

Our Founder said: "know thyself." For any individual, the odds are 9 to 1 against his being in the talented tenth so, for any given individual, there is a very high probability he will do better in a more secure, more egalitarian system. Taking Our Founder's wisdom to heart, I think it's highly unlikely that I am a member of the minority (whatever its size) that would do better in an high-risk sado-conservative meritocracy than in a welfare state. I want those social safety nets and leveling programs, that social engineering, state interference and regulation for me--not for some inferior or "disadvantaged" Other.

Watching Sarko's triumphant motorcade through Paris I see that the French are getting that first rush. Lucky for them that they despise us and so are unlikely to emulate the American model or go on to full-blown addiction.