The Great American Nightmare

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect:

Steven Calabresi waxes hysterical and ludicrously implausible: "If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food."

The kerfuffle over the New Yorker cover featuring Barak Obama in Muslim garb fist-bumping Michelle in an Angela Davis afro petered out long ago. Latte-swillers were afraid that Joe and the hockey moms would catch a glimpse of it at newsstands and take it seriously. They didn't.

I thought that this cover was a very good idea. There are all kinds of inchoate fears swirling around in people's heads that they never scrutinize and can't quite articulate. Bring them to light, display them clearly, and they're embarrassed: "Do I really believe that Michelle Obama is a terrorist packing an assault weapon? That Barak Obama will hang a picture of Osama Bin Laden over the mantle and burn the American flag? Jeez--I'm an ass."

What we need here is a new Handmaid's Tale displaying, with great clarity, the content of working class conservative's worst nightmares in the way that the original represented the nightmare vision of secular liberals.

Here it is. Legions of Welfare Queens taking advantage of their constitutionally guaranteed right to welfare living high on the hog. You can see it now: the greater part of urban areas turned into boiling slums where the idle poor spend their days sitting on the stoops drinking, playing craps in the streets and driving around in their Cadillacs at the taxpayers expense while near-destitute white people (yup, white) toil at two or three jobs to support them.

Affirmative action gone wild. Small business owners continually monitored, forced to hire representative numbers of blacks, Hispanics and Muslim terrorists. High tech firms employing illiterate black dudes with gold chains and ornamental gold teeth as software engineers to meet their quota, paying them to explore porno sites on the internet.

Government-financed abortions through the third semester: heavily pregnant Welfare Queens queuing up outside Planned Parenthood, where squalling babies are dumped in the trash out back. The mass freeing of criminal defendents: hoards of dangerous criminals pouring out of the prison gates to rape and pillage.

Corporate officers and directors harrassed continually with frivelous lawsuits. Zorba's Greek Buffet of Chula Vista slapped with a multimillion punitive damages suit for moussaka.

That's it, i'n'it? But show them what they believe and they might have second thoughts. Display it Hieronymous Bosch style--the obese Welfare Queens dipping into buckets of Colonel Sanders as they drive around in their Cadillacs and homocidal psychopaths pouring out of prisons to sack American cities as Grand Ayatolla Obama in his turban and Michelle in her afro cheer them on. Reducio.

But maybe I'm wrong. Most people I know took The Handmaid's Tale seriously. They're convinced that there are hoards of Fundamentalists who enjoy vast political power, who could very well take over and would, if they did, establish exactly the sort of regime it portrayed. And I know quite a few people who believe that all Christians are secretly on board with this agenda or are, at the very least, "enablers."

I detest the working class, but I do think they're smarter than this.

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.

Plastic Obama

Op-Ed Columnist - Thinking About Obama - NYTimes.com

We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now, and in all that time there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control. This has been a period of tumult, combat, exhaustion and crisis. And yet there hasn’t been a moment when he has displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness...There has never been a moment when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious. Through some deep, bottom-up process, he has developed strategies for equanimity, and now he’s become a homeostasis machine...Obama, the sojourner, seems to go through various situations without being overly touched by them.

What a thoroughly unpleasant human being--if he is a human being. My mini-theory is that Obama is a hologram projected by MoveOn.org. After extensive marketing research, the Democratic party has re-branded itself with the logos, color schemes and candidate that Americans will buy.

Even apart from his remarks in camera to big bucks supporters about blue-collar voters "clinging to guns and religion" it isn't hard to see why he's been branded as an "elitist." He instantiates the quintessence of posh, along with the MacMansions to which Americans aspire, the shopping malls which are our agoras and the groomed, uniformed flight attendants ushering us from one immaculate airport to another. This is what we want: a flight-attendant-in-chief, immaculately groomed, without quirks, eccentricities or passions, without aggression or fight, who effortlessly floats to the top without striving.

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.

John McCain: Straight Shooter?

http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/keatingvideo

A friend sent this to me. Check it out.

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.

Middleclassness

Op-Ed Columnist - How McCain Wins - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal...the only Democrats to win the presidency in the past 40 years — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — distanced themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety liberal. He also has radical associates in his past...Obama quotes from the brochure of Reverend Wright’s church — a passage entitled “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.” So when Biden goes on about the middle class on Thursday, Palin might ask Biden when Obama flip-flopped on Middleclassness.

That's strange: I thought that the whole point of liberalism, in particular the orthodox garden-variety, was precisely to promote middleclassness by seeing to it that more people could achieve it. I did take a quick look at some sites to get a better idea of what it was that Rev. Wright meant to repudiate under the rubric of "middleclassness." The National Review site, much as I gag to quote it, was actually illuminating:

Vallmer Jordan, a church member who helped draft the precepts, said..."The big question mark was racism"...He acknowledged that the principle on "middleclassness" was a hard sell, even then. "There was a hunk of resistance to that principle," Jordan said. But eventually committee members came to understand its intention: "Any black person who identifies himself as middle-class psychologically withdraws from the group and becomes a proponent of strengthening and sustaining the system," he said. Harris-Lacewell, the Princeton professor, said the "disavowal of the pursuit of middleclassness" is simply an argument against materialism and the pursuit of the American standard of wealth. Many white Christian churches also preach against materialism.

Seems pretty innocuous--indeed, edifying: exactly what one expects to hear in church, and thoroughly uncontroversial. It's in the Bible too. After the Israelites get out of Egypt, Moses tells them never to forget that they were sojourners in Egypt, where they were treated harshly, and so that they should remember to treat resident aliens amongst them well and to maintain solidarity with those who were less well off. That to me is one of the most remarkable passages in the Old Testament because it would have been easier to make quite a different inference in defense of the hazing principle: "You got beat up on. Now you're in power and can beat up on other people. Have fun!"

What's puzzling is why Rev. Wright identified materialism and indifference to plight of those who were less well-off as "middleclassness." But it's not all that puzzling if we remember that Wright was formed during his seminary days in the late '60s. At that time, when Marxism was still a viable ideology, "bourgeois" was bad and the rich brats who shaped the New Left of the period, were contemptuous of middleclassness because they'd never seen the alternative, lowerclassness, close up. They believed that the proletariat was populated by gonzo journalists, folk singers who composed rousing union songs, and working class intellectuals, ready to be organized into "circles" for the study of Marcuse and ripe for Revolution.

This was pure adolescent fantasy, but became institutionalized in the New Left. At puberty, my peers, like most other children, discovered that their parents were imperfect and inferred that they were positively evil. By mid-adolescence they had concluded that it was not only their parents but their parents' friends and all adults like them, middle class adults, who were thoroughly wicked and that the source of all this evil was "middleclassness"--because they hadn't seen the alternative, and because they didn't understand that even though middleclassness was not sufficient for basic human decency, it was necessary.

Beyond that, critics of middleclassness also had an extremely simplistic view of the springs of human action and assumed that it was a universal truth that people would only be motivated to work for the benefit of others if they thought well of them and liked them. So political activists who were committed to promoting social justice refused to recognize that the individuals who they recognized were treated unjustly and whose situation they wanted to improve were hateful, despicable, thoroughly sickening, disgusting human beings who detested them and rejected their most fundamental values. Given this assumption, these good liberals had to practice self-deception and virtuoso-level double-think to avoid recognizing that the alternative to middleclassness, lowerclassness, was a compound of bigotry, violence, ignorance, stupidity, brutality, sexism, and unreflective dogmatism.

I vividly remember one episode: I'm not sure when it happened--it may have been on a slumming expedition in Chicago in which I participated as an undergraduate. I was walking through a white ethnic slum with a group of fellow students who were exuding admiration for the life and color of the neighborhood, and the virtues of the local residents who, they marveled, were "real"--not dull, uptight puritans or hypocrites like their parents, their parents' friends, or middle class people like their parents and parents' friends. A man appeared, dragging a boy by the collar, yelling incomprehensible obscenities at him and beating him over the head. "There you have it," I said, "the proletariat"--but I don't think anyone paid any attention because they didn't dare.

I grew up with this and watched my childhood playmates' fathers treat them this way. The men, in sleeveless undershirts sat in beach chairs on the sidewalk during long summer evenings and expounded their views on politics, family values and a variety of other issues. "All deese kids unnerstand is de strap." And if there was a kid around on which to demonstrate, they would: BAM! "Shut up yer mouth and don't give yer mudder no lip." BAM, BAM, BAM! The women for their part were whining drudges who dragged around in housedresses, watched soap operas, and for light entertainment discussed obstetrical problems. This is the alternative to middleclassness.

I suppose one might wonder why, given that I hate people like this, I would have any interest in improving their lot. Several reasons, I suppose, the most important one being that I don't want people like this to exist. I want them fixed, made middle class, and I believe that that is feasible. I also recognize that it is nothing more than a matter of pure dumb luck that I am not one of them--and that this is grossly unfair. The pretense that they are decent people, that their way of life is worthy, does them no favors: they want out, if not for themselves, for their children--they want middleclassness but don't have the resources or the knowledge to achieve it.

Of course Rev. Wright didn't mean what I mean by "middleclassness" having been schooled in the Black Liberation Theology that was popular during his seminary days. And it is the ambiguity of "middleclassness" that conservatives like Kristol play to their advantage. When Wright preaches against middleclassness he is using the rhetoric that was in fashion 40 years ago to repudiate selfishness and promote solidarity with those who are less well off, re-packaging Moses' agenda. But, when the majority of Americans, who desperately want middleclassness, hear Wright they imagine that he is repudiating everything to which they aspire: a decent standard of living, an orderly, secure life, a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood and a good education for their kids. And people I came up with did repudiate this, though I can't imagine why. What on earth was their problem? What did they imagine the alternative to middleclassness was?

Of course there were features of this life I didn't want--in particular, the obligation to dress up and take care of my appearance but that is peripheral and it wasn't just this that my peers didn't want. I can't understand what the problem was or what it was that they didn't want. But whatever it was, liberals have got to understand, and not only understand, but empathize with the aspirations of most Americans. People want middleclassness because they know what the alternative is and Democrats have got to make it clear that middleclassness is that they will deliver--and stop despising people for wanting it.

More Stuff White People Like

Stuff White People Like

I quite often doubt the value of what I do, and have done for most of my adult life: teaching and research in a humanities discipline. I'm lousy at math so I didn't have any choice.

I don't imagine for one minute that what I do is worth anything close to what engineers, doctors or nurses do--but I do think it's worth something. My research advances knowledge, albeit knowledge of a peculiarly useless sort, but much more importantly I believe that in teaching I can do some good. I promote clarity, reflection and abstract thinking, all of which seem to be largely missing from discourse in the public square. And most importantly: I debunk. That seems to me the most important thing philosophy can do.

But now I am just sick at heart because the message I've been getting is that what we're supposed to be doing is teaching what's current and what students want. This is the way in which theologians have been operating for years. Most don't believe in God so they're working in a field which, for them, has no subject matter. So they prefer to call their discipline "religious studies" and spend their time engaging in speculative anthropology, armchair psychology and "critical theory." I've asked friends in theology why they're obsessed with Freud, Marx and Feuerbach who are not only hostile to religious belief but not even intellectually respectable. They tell me it's because Freud, Marx and Feuerbach are "Thinkers" who are influential in "intellectual discourse" and so that they need to "come to terms" with them.

That is to say, Freud-Marx-Feuerbach is Stuff White People Like. It doesn't matter whether they make sense or not. What matters is that the right people, those who contribute to our culture's "intellectual discourse," think that they make sense and, more importantly, talk about them. So, as academics in humanities disciplines, we're supposed to know about them, talk about them and teach our students to talk about them so that they can pass themselves off as intellectuals at the better cocktail parties. I suppose that by the same reasoning we should teach students to talk intelligently about herbal medicine and chiropractic.

This isn't what I signed on for.

How White of Them

Intolerant Chic

[D]ismissing something or someone as “so white” has long been a favorite put-down among those who like to view themselves as right-thinking, hierarchy-defying nonconformists—that is, White People. Recall those ads extolling “the new face of wealth,” which contrast male, stone-faced WASP bankers with attractive, far less formally—though far more expensively—clad women, quasi-hipsters, and assorted exotic ethnics. The women and hipsters may be white, but they’re not white—they’re members of the cool-looking pan-ethnic tribe, a tribe defined by economic and social status and by cultural and aesthetic preferences rather than by ethnicity. ...Here and elsewhere, accompanying the book’s mockery of the essentially innocuous solipsism of White People is what Lander, a man of the left, described to me as his exasperation with progressives’ “cultural righteousness” and “intolerance and groupthink”—a set of attitudes that enhances and is enhanced by a profoundly smug and incurious outlook...

[A] good deal of the progressives’ attitudes, preferences, and sense of identity are ingrained in an unlovely disdain for those outside their charmed circle. In Lander’s analysis, much of their self-satisfaction derives from consumption (the slack-sounding “stuff” in the title is deceptively apt)—and much of that consumption is motivated by a desire to differentiate themselves from the benighted. Sushi, for instance, is “everything [White People] want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the ‘uneducated.’” And whatever its goals, the ACLU is beloved by White People, Lander satirically but not wholly unjustifiably asserts, because it protects them “from having to look at things they don’t like. At the top of this list is anything that has to do with Christianity”—an aversion, Lander discerns, rooted not in religious enmity but in taste (Christianity is “a little trashy”), formed largely by class and education. To those of this mind-set, the problem with a great many Americans is that they don’t “care about the right things.” In fact...White People “really do hate a significant portion of the population.”

I hate that significant portion of the population too, but I'm overtly hostile rather than than covertly contemptuous. And I don't dislike them for their food preferences or fat, or because they "cling" to guns and religion: I don't like them because they're boring, unreflective, and incapable of making interesting conversation. However I find White People appalling. They don't care about the right things either. In fact, at bottom, all they really seem to care about is caring as such--about being fastidious and fussy.

They fetishize food. They congratulate themselves on their pickiness which they seem to regard as good taste, as if their preference for fresh veggies, exotic cheeses and whole grains, and their disdain for fatty burgers and fries, were a manifestation of some refined aesthetic sensibility. There can't be an aesthetics of food because, for humans at least, taste and smell aren't sufficiently developed to yield the complexity that distinguishes aesthetic experience from mere sensual pleasure. Dogs may have the equipment to appreciate the aesthetics of smell: they can perceive the complexity of scents and analyze them in the way that we can experience the separate lines in a piece of music and apreciate the complexity and structure. But for us, taste and smell are simple, unanalysable sensations. There's no more sophistication involved in preferring sushi to fries than there is in preferring yellow to blue.

Beyond that, it's hard to understand why likes, and even worse, dislikes should be sources of self-congratulation. I like fish and just had a bang-up champagne brunch with my family at the Southbay Fish and Grill. Well, great. I don't see how liking this reflects favorably or unfavorably on me. I like Haydn string quartets but I don't see why this should reflect favorably or unfavorably on me either. I could once play the violin part for these pieces and that certainly reflected favorably on me: it took hard work and skill. And if I could compose music like that it would reflect very favorably on me indeed. But I fail to see how consumption and enjoyment, much less distaste and disgust, can be understood as virtues.

Maybe at bottom what is most irritating about White People is that they congratulate themselves on what they consume rather than on what they produce. And what exactly is that supposed to show? First, I suppose, consuming the "correct" products shows that you are sufficiently en rapport with the community of elite taste-makers to know what sorts of stuff you're supposed to like. Secondly, it shows that you have the money to buy expensive stuff and the leisure to mess around. You have the money to shop at Whole Foods and the time to crap around cooking from scratch--unlike those fat trashy women who, fagged out after a day's work at Walmart, pick up McDonalds. You have the time, money and leisure to be fastidious, and to indulge yourself.

I don't like working class people but I suppose that when it boils down to it I like White People even less. If you can fix a car, knit a sweater or cut a dovetail joint that's worth something, just as it's worth something if you can write a paper, teach a class or do a proof in logic. Not having a TV is worth nothing. Visiting Machipichu, being massaged, doing yoga and eating arugula are worth nothing.

Even worse, as far as well-being goes, it is bizarre to imagine that fastidiousness makes one better off. Intuitively, the more you like, the better off you are. If you like Haydn quartets and country you're better off than if you just like one or the other. If you don't like McDonalds then, ceteris paribus, you're worse off than if you do. The disdain for "anything that has to do with Christianity" really eats me. Christianity is our cultural honey pot. I'm looking at pictures of St. Mark's, Venice, on my wall. I went there last January and spent 6 hours gaping at the mosaics. How can this be trashy? Christianity was the source of all high art until the Renaissance and much of it ever after. How can these idiots imagine that sushi is somehow better than the Bach B Minor Mass?

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.

Feminism:
What Went Wrong?

I don't think Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President of the United States and, given her views on a range of issues, I wouldn't support her for any elected office. But I'd much rather have a beer with her than with any of he other candidates.

Palin is the beneficiary of the left-wing politics that she despises, and of Second Wave feminism which was part of that package. If she had been born 20 years earlier, and gotten her BA in 1967 instead of 1987, she would never have gotten a job as a sportscaster when she graduated. If she had been running for high political office in 1988 instead of 2008, her socially conservative, religious right constituency would have been horrified at the idea of the mother of a 4 month old baby working outside the home in any capacity, much less running for the vice presidency of the United States. And in 1988, she wouldn't have been running because there wouldn't have been an affirmative action pick on the Republican ticket.

Palin is the living symbol of what I took to be the goal of the feminist movement: to fix things so that women could be like guys. That was it. Very simple. To see to it that women had could get guy jobs and hunt moose--if, of course, that is what they wanted to do. The purpose of feminism as I understood it was to eliminate sex roles so that both men and women could do the jobs and live the lives traditionally reserved for men only or for women only--so that no one's options would be constrained by an accident of birth.

That's what I thought it was all about. But then strange doctrines started creeping in. First and foremost, there was the idea that feminism was inextricably linked to every other edifying sort of -ism. Gay rights, and the rights of every oppressed or marginalized group was supposed to be intrinsic to feminism. Peace was a feminist issue because, rather than freeing women, and men, from the constraints of sex roles, a significant vocal minority of feminists held that the aim was rather to valorize traditional femininity.

Finally, abortion took center stage as the defining feminist issue. To make matters worse the very rationale for making it the central issue was sexist. The working assumption was that if a woman had a baby then she must inevitably raise it, that women "bonded" with their babies through pregnancy as so that giving them up for adoption was unthinkable. Of course, the idea that a woman could simply dump the baby on its dad never crossed anyone's mind. That's what I'd do if I had a baby I didn't want: first stop out of hospital--dad's place. "Here's your baby. I'll come by from time to time to see how he's coming along, and send you a little money every once and a while if I remember. Bye."

Now Democrats are being skewered on the abortion issue because they will not compromise. And compromising would skewer Palin because most Americans wouldn't want to see the kind of draconian anti-abortion legislation she wants--with no exceptions for rape or incest, whatever the stage of pregnancy. Suppose some miserable 14 year old girl is abused and raped by her father. No morning-after pill for her. And then there there are those sweet, cuddley stem cells. Those atheistic pro-abortionists may trot out that actor who has Parkenson's and scientists may whine, but all human life is sacred (exceptions: capital punishment and war).

Even on the worst case scenario, if Roe v. Wade went down in flames, and a significant number of women did not have access to abortion, parenthood is a matter of choice--as fathers know. Work for most women is not a matter of choice and for the 2/3 of American women who are not college graduates, the labor market is thoroughly sex-segregated and sex discrimination is the norm. Feminist activists, members of the unisex elite, don't seem to notice and the Democratic party taking abortion to be the central feminist issue has not made workplace issues a priority.

Right now the Walmart class action sex discrimination lawsuit, involving over 1.5 million current and former Walmart employees, is chugging its way through the courts. Hundreds of women have told their stories--stories with which most working class women can empathize. Abortion is controversial but it is uncontroversial that women should get equal pay for equal work and, more fundamentally, that they should have equal access to on-the-job training, promotion, and a fair opportunity to get equal work.

Sarah Palin got to be a guy--to shoot moose, work as a sportscaster and, through the Republican Party's one-off affirmative action program, run for the vice presidency of the United States. Most women don't get the chance. If Democrats want to recapture the working class vote it might be helpful to do something for the millions of working class women who are stuck in boring, poorly-paid, deadend, pink-collar jobs.

Raging Rajas of Resentment

Op-Ed Columnist - The Resentment Strategy - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

[T]he Republican Party, now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier than its counterpart on the other side. What’s the source of all that anger? Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict: fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v. Wade and evolution in the curriculum. What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that Democrats look down their noses at regular people...What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you.

Krugman is always right, and usually entirely right. Here he's dead on about the politics of resentment but has made one minor mistake: there is plenty of evidence that Democrats--not all or most, but a minority of visible Culture-Democrats--do look down their noses at regular people.

Last Sunday morning I picked up one of my kids from a friend's house in an expensive coastal suburb. It was 10 am and the cyclists were out in force on the coast highway, all dressed in spandex cycling gear with matching helmets, most middle-aged but well-preserved. My son remarked (alluding to Stuff White People Like http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/) "White People are healthy."

White People, that is Culture-Democrats since Obama and some other people of color qualify while most Caucasians don't, are very healthy and proud of it. They exercise, eat their veggies, and are serious about health, wellness and healing. And they have nothing but contempt the Great Unhealthy, who eat junk food, veg out in front of the TV and get fat. And the Great Unhealthy know it.

They don't resent Culture-Democrats for their intellectual pretensions: they value intelligence, education and expertise as much as anyone else. They resent Culture-Democrats valorization of tastes, habits and hobbies that have little or no intrinsic value--their food fetishes, fastidiousness and other preoccupations that are nothing more than class markers--and their moralistic, self-satisfied complacency. Here are people with the unshakable conviction that they are superior because they drink microbrews instead of Bud--or brew their own.

Until Democrats not only recognize the character of that resentment, as Krugman has, but realize that it is not baseless and address its source, they will not win the white working class.

God is on our side!

So, with Hurricane Gustav surging toward the Gulf Coast and Mayor Ray "Chocolate City" Nagin calling for an evacuation of New Orleans, Republicans have decided to tamp down the festivities at their convention. What else can they do? Imagine the alternative: a split screen of the hurricane blowing down houses, with people on the rooftops and dogs drowning while Republicans party. And millions of Americans thinking: Katrina, Katrina, Katrina.

My husband thinks that Republicans will get credit for "being responsible." Mebbe. But any credit they get will be outweighed by the loss of momentum they would have gained from a blowout convention with all the stops pulled out. These extravaganzas shouldn't have any effect on voters, but they do. The crowd scenes, color schemes and branding the Democrats displayed in Denver shouldn't influence voters but they did and so will downsizing the Republican convention. So the Republicans are damned if they do and would have been doubly damned if they didn't. Instead of upstaging the Democrats, the Republican convention will be an anti-climax because God has rained on their parade, and instead of following the convention, Americans will be following Hurricane Gustav and thinking: Katrina, Katrina, Katrina.

Republicans timed the announcement of McCain's pick for VP wonderfully, but God's timing was even better. Gustav is due to touch down tomorrow. Let the congregation respond: Katrina, Katrina, Katrina.

Sarah Palin

Unity Deferred - Can You Cross Out ‘Hillary’ and Write ‘Sarah’? - NYTimes.com

The Palin nomination complicates the gender question in many ways. [W]hat will happen if the misogyny extends to Ms. Palin? There were hints of that on Friday, with Web sites showing photographs of her bare-shouldered in the days when she was runner-up for Miss Alaska, or as one caption read, “showing off her legs.” “Sarah Palin — Alaska Gov., McCain’s V.P. Pick, Kind of a Babe,” read one Internet headline.

Sarah Palin is not going to impress feminists, not because of her views on abortion, but because McCain's selection of her as his running mate is, ironically, is sexism in it's starkest form. What does a woman have to do to achieve success? Be young, be beautiful, be available, and play second-banana to a powerful male.

That is what being a "sex object" is all about--not being "objectified," not being an object rather than the subject, not being a consumer product. We're all of us consumer products--goods that are "consumed" in the neutral economic sense for our conversation, for the jobs we do or simply as warm bodies, and there's nothing wrong with that. Women are "sex objects" to the extent that women are consumed primarily for characteristics that make them sexually attractive--not because consumers want to have sex with them, but because women are deemed valuable for other purposes to the extent that they are sexually attractive. Receptionists in high-gloss firms aren't hired to have sex with customers: they're hired to serve as posh furnishings in the outer office, to symbolize the firm's prestige. And what makes a woman prestige-producing is sexual attractiveness.

Some Republicans may imagine that that by featuring a woman on the ticket they're upstaging Democrats: Democrats rejected Hillary but Republicans have done better by women, putting a woman on the ticket. But I don't think that that's the message most women will get. The message it sends is rather that the political system, reflecting the perceived will of the American public, is that women are not wanted for the sort of qualifications that are valued in men but only for the characteristics that make them sexually attractive: youth, beauty, availability and willingness to support and serve powerful males. That's hardly a crack in the glass ceiling: it's just the same old story.

McCain has in effect married a second trophy wife. The bipartisan political system has dumped Hillary, after trashing and humiliating her, and taken up with a pretty young chickie. Even Clinton supporters who are still angry at Democrats for dumping Hillary are not going to be grateful to Republicans for taking on Sarah Palin as her replacement.

There's nothing misogynistic about featuring featuring Palin "showing off her legs." There's nothing wrong with valuing women for their appearance any more than there is in valuing women, or men, for anything else: singing voice, sense of humor, athletic ability, scholarship or whatever. What is sexist is taking those qualities that contribute to sexual attractiveness as a necessary condition for valuing women at all and dumping on those who fail to meet that standard.

Obama, we hardly knew ye

[W]ith Barack Hussein Obama officially becoming the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday night, some of the same qualities that have brought him just one election away from the White House — his virtuosity, his seriousness, his ability to inspire, his seeming immunity from the strains that afflict others — may be among his biggest obstacles to getting there. There is little about him that feels spontaneous or unpolished, and even after two books, thousands of campaign events and countless hours on television, many Americans say they do not feel they know him. The charges of elusiveness puzzle those closest to the candidate. Far more than most politicians, they say, he is the same in public as he is in private.

I prepared for California, where I had gotten a tenure-track position and so would likely spend the rest of my life, by re-reading Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. A tale of the Hollywood funeral industry, an enterprise devoted to denial, it features Miss Thanatopolos, a junior embalmer whose toilette Waugh describes in excruciating detail. Every morning, Miss Thanatopolos depilatates and deoderizes herself. She showers, emulsifies, shaves, tweezes, colognes, brushes, polishes and makes up until she is the perfectly standardized, sanitized American virgin.

Americans must want this since firms spend millions training staff to be polished, pleasant and bland--from uniformed convention-hotel clerks and flight attendants to salesmen, trainers and facilitators in business casual. I've been to innumerable workshops and training sessions run by these facilitators on topics ranging from cultural sensitivity to alcohol awareness. "Training" is supposed to be the efficient, scientific alternative to education. Trainers organize topics into modular skill-sets which they inculcate by means of recipes, relating games and drill in an atmosphere of cheerful boosterism.

Everyone knows it's crap. Last spring, at a workshop on student advising, faculty who taught Friday classes were advised to dismiss their students with the formula, "Have a safe and sober weekend." None of us will. The functionary who offered this piece of advice knew that none of us would and all of us knew that even if we did it would have no effect whatsoever on student behavior. Academics are untrainable.

But even when training is successful we don't always like the results. Last night at the convention, Americans were charmed again by Bill Clinton. Bubba could never even be trained to keep his pants up but Americans forgave him seventy time seventy. Everyone loved Bill. But most cannot connect with Obama--perfectly trained, perfectly polished and flawless.

It isn't that we think he's an empty suit: we know he's smart--probably a lot smarter than we are. And it isn't the perception of elitism. All presidents and presidential aspirants are moneyed and educated. But even Poppy Bush, the uber-WASP and most overtly patrician president in office during my lifetime, didn't make Americans uneasy in the same way. I always warmed to Poppy in the way I, and everyone else, warmed to Bubba.

But I don't think anyone really warms to Obama. I'd love a beer with Bubba or a martini with Poppy Bush but I would not want to sip white wine with Obama. Bush Sr. and Bill have private lives and characters behind their public personae that occasionally extrude through their political facades, and inform their public personae. Obama is perfectly trained, completely disciplined and, we sense, the same in private as he is in public, his entire personality subsumed into his political persona. I imagine that a social conversation with Obama would be like drill at a training session.

But even if they would not want to have a glass of wine with him, Obama has a wildly enthusiastic following and he will be elected. Training works. We deplore the homogenization of the American landscape, the shopping malls, franchise restaurants and McMansions, and see the superficial slickness of trained personnel for exactly what it is. But we buy it anyway. We want airports to be antiseptic and glitzy, with mildly interesting displays of semi-art, Tie-Rack and Wilson's Leather, and flight attendants to be bland and polite. Above all, we want presidents to look presidential.

I confess that I'm actually not one of the "we" who wants this. I find shopping malls unpleasant and avoid them. I hate it when employees at my local supermarket interfere with me to ask whether I'm "finding everything ok." All that cleanliness, slickness and glitz is not only wasted on me--it makes me uncomfortable because it sets standards that I don't want to make the effort to meet. All the stylized little interactions that employees in stores, banks and public facilities have been trained to perform--"how are you today?", "have a nice day," and the like--are 1000 little paper-cuts to me. I want either real conversation or no contact at all. Contact is stressful: it has a cost. But one is willing to pay the price if it leads to interesting conversation. These little contacts are, for me, pure cost with no benefit because I am shy.

But most people it seems aren't. Walmart, which cuts costs to the bone wherever it can to maximize profits, hires greeters, presumably because they've determined that most people want to be greeted and my local Vons, which just upgraded its establishment, has trained personnel to ask shoppers whether they're finding everything ok because someone in management has ascertained that most like it. Shy people, like me, put up with it because we have no choice and usually play along politely because we're ashamed of being shy. But most people, it seems, want little interactions as they go about their daily lives and want to conduct their business in settings that are clean, bland, unobtrusive and predictable, so firms train employees to play the part consumers want them to play in casual contact and maintain the bland, sanitized facilities that make them comfortable--muzak for the soul.

But even if most people want slick blandness in casual contacts, all want something more. Beyond those staged interactions and business dealings, they want real conversation, real individuality, real emotion, oomph, unpredictability, soul and heart. And that is what Obama has not got, because he is trained to the core.

Looking every inch the ideal flight attendant in his perfectly tailored blazer, Obama steps off the plane. We want flight attendants to be well-trained but we're not so sure we want that in a president.

Hillary's Speech

Can someone please shut up these Hillary-haters who just can't let go before they do serious damage to Obama's candidacy? There probably aren't any more of them than there are Hillary-diehards who intend to stay home or vote for McCain, but it's they, and their friends in the media--not Obama, or the Clintons, or anyone seriously involved in the political process--who are driving away Clinton's supporters and jeopardizing a Democratic win in November.

Hillary gave a fine speech and most recognized that. It was the best she could do for Obama given the circumstances and given the followers she needed to impress. If she were fawning or exhibited the contrition and self-agnegation her critics wanted she would have been less likely to win their hearts and minds and that speech wouldn't have done the job it was supposed to do.

The subtexts in the hostile comments I've read are infuriating:

"Hillary should have made this speech in February--and dropped out." Women shouldn't apply for jobs when there are men around who can do them. Back in February we saw that Obama was a viable candidate so Hillary should have dropped out. Women are a reserve army: we want them doing what would otherwise be men's jobs in wartime or in other circumstances when there aren't men around to do these jobs, but when there are men who can do the job women should bow out gracefully.

"Hillary was egotistical and self-referential: her speech was all me, me, me." One "me" from a woman in one "me" too many. Women should be altruistic, supportive and always put others ahead of themselves. Competing with Obama was in and of itself a violation of the code. It doesn't matter why Hillary ran: she should have apologized for trying to get the nomination for herself instead of supporting Obama--or some other viable male candidate.

"Hillary's still scheming: her speech in fact subtlely undermined Obama." Women are always scheming. They're manipuplative and you can never take what they say at face value. They're always looking to entrap or undermine men."

"I'm sick of the Clintons' psychodrama. We want pretty, plastic Barbie and Ken dolls--not people who've seen life and have the scars to prove it. We want a perfect, smiling, updated Ozzie and Harriet family.

"Hillary is really a conservative, on board with the Republican agenda, who wants McCain to win." Conservative = Old; Progressive = Young, pretty and cool. We want the old people out and the young people in.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to find these subtexts and, more importantly, I think these are the subtexts that Clinton supporters are reading. If Obama's groupies don't shut up, he's going to lose support in what is, incredibly, looking like a tight race. The media are continually reproducing the meme of angry Hillary supporters throwing a monkey wrench into the works--which is itself starting to look like a self-fulfilling prophecy--but haven't paid any attention to the damage these disruptive Obama groupies are doing.

And there's yet another offensive subtext in that: "Boys will be boys, and the young can be indulged. It's those hysterical old harridans that are being obstructive, disruptive and spoiling everyone's fun. Shut up, get back to the kitchen and bake cookies--and stop bothering us."

Shove Over, Sam

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/hillary-clinton-speaks-about-moving-on/

# 16. August 25th, 2008, 3:48 pm

The way Hillary acted in the primary was and is inexcusable. She and Bill obviously can’t handle the fact they are has-beens. It’s now time for them to get out of the way and let younger politicians have their day.

— Posted by Sam

So, you want to know why more than half of Clinton backers are still not sold on Obama? I suspect it's at least in part because of Sam, and other Obama supporters in the media, in the blogosphere and on the ground who manifestly share his views, even if most have been too polite to say so in such stark terms.

Sam's comments remind me of a sermon I heard while I was in college. The Rev. Martin Turner, a curate who was keen to be in all things relevant, told a moral tale about a feeble old lady who insisted on shuffling down the middle of the center aisle going for Communion, blocking everyone else's way. "Isn't life like that," said Fr. Turner, a Brit hired for his accent back in those days when every Episcopal Church worth it's salt had to have a priest with real or phony RP on staff. Old people, he said, needed to step aside and let the Younger Generation have their day in the sun.

I was 19 I think and as far as I could see there wasn't anyone else in that church under 50. I wondered what they made of it. I didn't like it one bit. I hoped to be an old lady one day, and didn't look forward to being told, "Shove over, granny, you're getting in the way."

I sometimes wonder whether Obama supporters who obsess about Hillary and whine endlessly about the obstructive shuffling of her supporters, those "low-information voters," old ladies and angry feminists, are as interested in getting Obama elected as they are in playing She's Fat. Most women remember the game of She's Fat from Middle School days. The idea was that calling someone else fat proved that you were not fat: if you were fat, you wouldn't dare to call anyone else fat for fear of being called fat yourself.

By the same token, there is no better way to prove that you are not a has-been or whiner, a redneck, old lady, angry feminist or other species of loser, and establishing your cool, than calling others uncool. Cool and uncool, like fat, are are states of mind. All 14-year-old girls, from the morbidly obese to the anorexic, believe that they are fat so the only way to establish that they are not fat is by bluffing. Even a plump adolescent girl can establish herself as non-fat if no one calls her bluff and so it is with cool. Support Obama and, even more importantly, trash Hillary and her supporters: if no one calls your bluff you establish yourself as cool. Middle-aged women and even elderly gents like Teddy Kennedy can become honorary members of the Younger Generation by supporting Obama, without surgical intervention.

Maybe that is what was in the heads of the 50- to 90-somethings who heard Fr. Turner's sermon--as background noise while reading the announcements in the bulletin, exploring the liturgy for the Churching of Women or mulling over the 39 Articles: if we agree with his remarks about obstructive old ladies blocking the aisle, then we can't be obstructive old ladies. He certainly didn't make much headway with the students at the college whom he was at pains to impress: I was the only one who ever went to church and I detested him. I don't think the townies were impressed either since Turner soon left for a job somewhere in an especially soggy part of East Anglia which couldn't have paid nearly as well.

Shove over, Sam, and give the Democrats a chance on this round.

Paleo-Liberalism

The Newer Deal: The path to a Democratic supermajority | Salon

What happened beginning in 1968 was that one two-party system -- let us call it the Roosevelt Party versus the Hoover Party -- gave way to the present two-party system, which pits the Nixon Party versus the McGovern Party...The Roosevelt Party ran on economic issues, and didn't care whether voters were in favor of sex or against it on principle as long as they supported the New Deal. The McGovern Party, by contrast, has made social issues its litmus test. Economic conservatives have had a home in the McGovern Party, as long as they support abortion rights and affirmative action, but social democrats and populists who are pro-life or anti-affirmative action are not made nearly as welcome...

Unfortunately the upper-middle-class left, with its unerring instinct for political suicide, is probably incapable of seizing the moment and bringing more Baptists and Catholics into the Democratic Party, because it has developed an almost superstitious distaste for religious conservatives. This might make sense if the religious right were still a menace, as it was a generation ago. But with the exception of state referenda and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, religious conservatives have lost one battle after another, from failed attempts to promote creationism on school boards to the doomed effort to repeal Roe v. Wade...

Social conservatives, having lost the culture war, should be offered not only a truce but also an opportunity to join a broad economic campaign for a middle-class America, as many of them did between 1932 and 1968. When pro-choicers and pro-lifers unite in cheering the public investment and living wage planks at the convention of the neo-Roosevelt party, we will know that the political era that began in 1968 is truly and finally over.

Exactly so. Or rather almost exactly so. The Roosevelt Party's issues were money and work, the issues that have the most bearing on quality of life. However affirmative action is precisely about money and work. Without affirmative action I might be scanning groceries or, more likely, doing boring, routine clerical work that would drive me nuts.

Still, with that qualification, this article is dead on. Money and work are important and organizing things to that people can avoid poverty and drudgery is difficult, costly and a hard political sell. "Lifestyle issues" are issues are trivial and tractable, or maybe to give neo-liberal McGovernites credit, they occupy a more elevated position on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you're financially secure and have a decent job, then you can worry about relationships and lifestyles.

It should be obvious to Democrats why the old base, the white working class, has deserted. Since the McGovernites have come to dominate the party, the message has been "Let them eat cake." Let them eat whole foods, solar panels and relationships.

Adding insult to injury, elite neo-liberals, who can afford to eat whole foods, solar panels and relationships, construe working class resentment as a manifestation of ignorance and bigotry. They worry about the stability of families and clamor for "family values"--we know what that means: fathers brutalizing their children and women barefoot and pregnant. They worry about the crime--of course that's just plain racism. They want their kids to get a "back to basics" education, with lots of discipline and drill--obviously because they don't understand the importance of critical thinking and creativity.

It's appalling that the latte-drinking elite are so provincial and have so little imagination that they don't get it. Working class people have to worry about family stability because their families are less stable. They have to be concerned about discipline because they've seen kids run amok, and because if their kids don't perform they haven't got the means to bail them out. They worry about crime because they live in or near bad neighborhoods, or because they've fled to remote exurbs but remember what the alternative was like. We don't see crime, social disintegration or failure as real and present dangers for ourselves or our families. We don't press for discipline and drill in the 3 Rs because we take it as a given that our kids will of course learn them, go to good colleges and get good jobs; they don't. We can afford what they see as frills and distractions; they can't.

Would accommodating social conservatives be selling out? Most people I know think it would. 1984 was our parents' nightmare--the nightmare vision of an authoritarian Stalinist super-state. The Handmaid's Tale is ours. They imagine that any compromise on "wedge issues" will enable Fundamentalists to take over and establish a puritanical theocracy. The first Cold War is over (though another may be brewing) but the Cold War template is still firmly in place: we've just substituted religious fundamentalism for Communism. The worry is the same: fanatic ideologues out to establish a puritanical, authoritarian regime. In the old days anti-communist books sold and there was a whole genre describing the activities of spies and double-agents. Now New Atheist books are best sellers and the media pumps out scare stories about a Fundamentalist fifth column pushing Creationism and Abstinence-only sex education, collaborating with right-wing politicians to take away our freedom, undermine our way of life and ruin our fun.

I'm not worried. Social conservatives have in fact lost the culture war, as the article notes. But even more importantly, calling a truce and working with social conservatives to promote paleo-liberal policies seems to me the most effective way to insure that what's left of social conservativism will wither away. Strong religion and social conservatism are bi-products of poverty, insecurity and social disorder because they serve the interests of the poor. If you're a working class striver and want to improve your life the best you can do for yourself is to join a conservative church or join the military. If you're on the edge, hanging on by your fingernails, you need puritanism and iron discipline to keep from falling off.

If you live in a social democratic welfare state where you're financially secure, have access to decent public education and other social services, and can avoid poverty and drudgery, you don't need puritanism and iron discipline, you won't sign on with the Fundamentalist agenda and you will be able to afford the finer things higher up on Maslow's scale. This seems to be borne out by empirical facts: Euro-socialism secularized Old Europe and established the lifestyle McGovernites want.

Progressives by and large don't seem to have figured this out, but Conservatives have. Want to promote God, guns and guts, and keep the masses scared so that they'll keep voting for you? Keep them financially insecure, keep them in debt, perpetuate the existence of a criminal underclass to threaten them, and make sure that they're brain-dead by locking them into boring, mind-numbing work so that they will keep voting for you.

Anglican Tooth-Aching

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER . Lambeth Preview . July 18, 2008 | PBS

Anglicans have been a contentious crowd since the tradition was founded under King Henry VIII nearly 500 years ago. Anglicanism has long stressed unity in the midst of diversity. But now, diversity may be stretching the Anglican Communion to a breaking point. At one end of the spectrum is All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, which has been at the forefront of advocacy for more inclusion of gays and lesbians...But at St. Peter's Anglican Church in Tallahassee, Florida, Reverend Eric Dudley reads the Bible very differently. Dudley had been rector at nearby St. John's Episcopal Church for 10 years, but was upset at what he saw as the increasingly liberal theological direction of the national denomination, especially on gay issues.

In Danville, Virginia, leaders at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany say they've been trying hard not to let church battles interfere with their local ministry.

Rev. COLLEY-TOOTHAKER: My personal opinions about the theological matters which are currently plaguing the Episcopal Church really are not so much of import if I keep my eye on the ball, which is to lead this congregation in the work that Christ is calling us to...Mission is actually doing the work that Christ gives us to do.

Funny how these clerical tooth-achers think that anyone other than their coterie of disgusting old ladies take them seriously or regard them as competent to exercise "leadership."

These priests imagined that they could exercise a prophetic mission, persuading their congregations and the public at large, to accept enlightened upper middle class liberal notions about sexual ethics. But the striking thing is that throughout the dispute NOBODY CHANGED THEIR MIND! Not a single member of a liberal congregation said, "Well, I used to think that homosexuals were perverts and that same-sex marriage was ridiculous, but Father has persuaded me otherwise." Not a single member of a conservative congregation said, "Well I didn't used to see any harm in same-sex unions but now I see that homosexuality is wicked and contrary to Scripture so I'm glad that my congregation has affiliated with the Diocese of Timbuktu." Liberal or conservative, these priests haven't persuaded anyone of anything because no one takes them seriously--or should take them seriously.

Clergy imagine that we look to them for moral guidance, but in fact what laypeople want out of the Church is cheerleading, flattery and social control. They want cheerleading, just as they want cheerleading from facilitators, life-coaches and self-help books. People don't read self-help literature to learn anything they don't already believe: they read it to be gingered up, jollied along, encouraged to do what they believe, on independent grounds they should do. And that's the reason people listen to sermons and read devotional literature. They also want to be flattered, and the Church tells its "base" that they're the right sort of people, that they're virtuous because they're smarmy and sentimental, because they're "people persons." It flatters worthless old ladies by telling them that the woman-shit they do is virtuous and important. Finally they look to the Church as an instrument of social control, to keep their kids in line and, more broadly, to promote good behavior generally. That is what the Church supplies, but these arrogant priests imagine otherwise--they think we take them seriously, that we pay attention to their silly notions.

It will be a long time before the Episcopal Church in the US collapses because there's plenty of bucks in endowment, at the national, diocesan and, in some places, parish level. And because a shrinking minority is still contributing, and because some of those disgusting old ladies will remember the Church in their wills. So, within my lifetime there will be plenty of money for litigation, for fighting the good fight against homophobic congregations who want to affiliate with the Southern Cone or Nigeria and take their real estate and silverware with them

I'm sure glad I dropped out because this isn't what I was in the game for.

As a Worldwide Schism Lurks, the Church of England Endorses Women as Bishops - NYTimes.com

The governing body of the Anglican Church in Britain voted on Monday to approve the appointment of women as bishops, a step that appeared to risk a schism in the church in its historic homeland as the Anglican church worldwide faces one of the most serious threats to its unity in its history, over the ordination of gay clergy members.

Why is this man tearing his hair?

This is the Most Rev. John Sentamu, Archbishop of York and Primate of England, Second Among Equals, exhibiting existential angst about the proposal to ordain women to the episcopate of the CofE. Less reverend (and of course flat-out irreverent) folk will wonder why he and his fellow conservatives are so upset. After all, women are now political leaders, military officers and dentists--whatever is the problem?

Part of it is the failure of the less reverend to recognize that, from the theological point of view, there is a problem--in particular that priesthood is not simply a job, which women or anyone with the appropriate skills and credentials can do, or that conservatives' refusal to recognize women's ordination is more than resistance to admitting women to an Old Boys' Club. The NYTimes doesn't quite get it:

[T]raditionalists unreconciled to the end of the male monopoly within the clergy revived the battle over the issue of approving women as bishops, warning that it could lead to a breakup of the church in Britain.

Some conservatives are offended by the failure of almost everyone but themselves to recognize that secular competence and qualifications are just not what is at issue. The question is whether women can be a vehicle for the supernatural charismata constitutive of priesthood: whether they have the appropriate metaphysical status and can do the spooky stuff.

I used to think that this was the whole of it, but now see that it's only the smallest part because most conservatives in the Church, like their liberal opponents, identify religion with social arrangements and "values," and are not very interested in metaphysics or mysticism at all. For them, women's ordination is a symbol and symptom of a world gone to the dogs: the breakdown of the family, the rejection of objective moral standards, sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, political correctness and social chaos. Personally, I am firmly committed to objective moral standards, detest political correctness and think social chaos would be a bad thing but am otherwise on the side of the dogs. I don't know any beings short of the angels who do better on objective moral standards than retrievers, like my chocolate lab, Ducati: herein is love.

The root problem is that after the Enlightenment the Church lost its nerve. Kant persuaded most educated people, for a time, that metaphysics was not intellectually respectable. What was the Church, the West's chief purveyor of metaphysics, to do? Presumably, get into another line of business--or make a minor sideline, the ethics business, its major enterprise. And that is what happened. By the 18th century the empirical sciences, mathematics and logic had been captured as secular enterprises; the social sciences and much of philosophy would soon follow. Ethics was still up for grabs so the Church made a play to capture it because, unlike metaphysics, in the wake of Kant's First Critique, it was respectable. Like Hope in Pandora's box, it was all that was left.

But not for long, because ethics soon became a secular enterprise and the Church soon enough became embroiled in the same losing battles it had fought over cosmology, astronomy, biology and history.

So now we see the Church digging in its heels to fight the Last Battle--which it will inevitably lose. Conservative clergy represent themselves as champions of objective ethics and decency pump out the doctrine that the only alternative to the code of conduct they promote is no code of conduct at all but self-destructive confusion, chaos and violence leading to social meltdown. On the ground, their followers conceive of religion is little more than an instrument of social control, ironically, very much like my mother who despised religious belief but hand that it was a good thing because it "kept uneducated people in line."

So now we see the likes of Archbishop Sentamu pissing in their purple knickers because they're convinced that the ordination of women symbolizes the rejection of all objective moral standards and means the end of civilization as we know it, while conservative Christians in the US and abroad are convinced that only the Old Time Religion will keep violence and chaos at bay. They are of course dead wrong--and that is an empirical fact. But there's a point to their worry that progressives don't recognize: for the lower classes, their best shot at living decent lives, given the gross defects of our current social arrangement, is to get strong religion or join the military. For them, this is the royal road to social mobility and the Good Life.

As to the Church, it will certainly collapse, though not in my lifetime, because both liberals and conservatives have given up on religion, which is its only legitimate business.

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.