After the Future

Worst-Case; Best Case

I've started several posts in the last couple of weeks, but I've not finished them.  They didn't really seem to add much, or they seem to be my repeating things I've written about so often.

In any event, I'm swearing off getting frustrated with Obama or the Democrats. They are what they are, and regardless of their limitations and their myopia, their inability to see the big picture or to understand the significance of the moment, they're the best we're going to get until we have our "clarifying moment".

In the meanwhile, the "system" has a mind and will of its own, and it gets what it wants no matter who's in office. At the moment, there is no mind or will that comes even close to being able to resist or counterbalance it. So things will play out the way they play out. Until we have our clarifying moment, I think that we have to accept that the underlying structure of American society is reverted to the historical oligarchical norm, and life goes on. There's not much that can be done except to do what we can to mitigate the negative effects.

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Will Dems Learn to Change the Game?

Krugman this morning has an interesting piece on the difference between getting results and being perceived to get results. The former matters to the electorate; the latter to the Beltway courtiers whose thinking is muddled because captured by what he calls the "pundit delusion."  His point is that "winning the news cycle" is an insider's game that only insiders care about because most people aren't paying attention or just think it silly:

Suppose, for example, that you believed claims that voters are more concerned about the budget deficit than they are about jobs. (That’s not actually true, but never mind.) Even so, how much credit would you expect Democrats to get for reducing the deficit?

None. In 1996 voters were asked whether the deficit had gone up or down under Bill Clinton. It had, in fact, plunged — but a plurality of voters, and a majority of Republicans, said that it had risen. . . .

At the Movies with Spencer Tracy

I love TCM.  In the past week they've had some Spencer Tracy movies, and the two I watched were Judgment at Nurmeberg and Pat & Mike. There's something about Tracy, a kind of magnetism that he has that has hardly anything to do with his lumpy looks.  He's a mensch. He's the Walter Cronkite of film stars--the trustworthy, down-to-earth uncle to whom you turn when nobody else will give you a break. The guy who understands human frailty, and how everyone plays the angles, and is looking out for number one, but who also stands for a decency that the pressures of life might bend but can never break. 

Pat & Mike--the seventh of the nine movies Tracy and Hepburn made together--was Hepburn's favorite of the nine, and I can see why. While the plot is silly, the dialog, particularly for Tracy's part, was cleverly written and the chemistry between them is just so comfortable. You can see why the high-strung Hepburn would find a "home" with Tracy. He's the kind of guy that is so at home with himself he creates a home for everyone who is around him.  He's like a big tree in which all kinds of birds make their nests.

Commonplace Thinking

In classical rhetoric the terms 'commonplace' and 'ethos' are essential factors that if well understood and handled shape the construction and delivery of any message that is persuasive. It's never enough to be just right, you have to communicate what is right in your thinking in terms that "feel" right to the audience. Rhetoric is the art of being persuasive, and persuasion is most challenging when you have an audience that sees you as someone whose character is suspect--as someone who does not belong to your tribe. An audience, unconsciously immersed in commonplaces is very difficult to speak to about issues that are incommensurate with its commonplaces. Unless you work within the context of the basic assumptions that shape its ethos, they're not likely to afford you an ounce of credibility.

Western philosophy is the work of getting beyond the commonplaces to understand what makes them true or untrue, and this task is always resisted by the conservatives, for whom the commonplaces of one's society are its organizing principles. Once you start questioning these pieties, the whole fabric is vulnerable to be unraveled--and that must be resisted at all costs. This exercise in critical thinking is a terrible source of anxiety for this kind of commonplace-defending conservative, because he doesn't really believe there is anything beyond the commonplaces, no truth that undergirds them.  There is the accepted formula, and there is nothing, really, behind it. 

Quote of the Day: Chris Hayes

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity—about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it. (Source)

Eric Alterman & the Progressive Future

The American political system is nothing if not complicated and so too are the reasons for its myriad points of democratic dysfunction. Some are endemic to our constitutional regime and all but impossible to address save by the extremely cumbersome (and profoundly unlikely) prospect of amending the Constitution. Others are the result of a corrupt capital culture that likes it that way and has little incentive to change. Many are the result of the peculiar commercial and ideological structure of our media, which not only frame our political debate but also determine which issues will be addressed. A few are purely functions of the politics of the moment or just serendipitous bad luck. And if we really mean to change things, instead of just complaining about them, it would behoove us to figure out which of these choke points can be opened up and which cannot. For if our politicians cannot keep the promises they make as candidates, then our commitment to political democracy becomes a kind of Kabuki exercise; it resembles a democratic process at great distance but mocks its genuine intentions in substance. (Eric Altterman)

Read the entire article if you want a pretty good summing up of the scope of the crisis that underlies almost everything I write here. But while it's a lucid exposition of the nature of the illness, It's weak in the classically liberal sense when it comes to ideas for a cure.  It boils down to this:

Good and Bad Arguments

To argue with myself for a moment, this is one of the difficulties with analysis. Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren't. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world. So Alesina's paper gets a lot of conservative pickup, but if it had found the opposite, it would've been ignored by conservatives, or maybe torn apart by experts sympathetic to the conservative approach to austerity, even as liberals championed its findings.

I like Ezra Klein. I think he's an honest guy who really wants to get to the bottom of things. But Ezra seems to labor under the assumption that the truth matters and that there are good arguments and bad arguments based on whether the evidence supports them. Partisans never ever advance arguments because they are true; they advance them only to justify their pre-existing agenda. They are good arguments to the extent that they effectively do it; and bad arguments to the extent they don't.  Some make these arguments naively; some make them cynically. Same result.

It's not about who's right; it's about who has the power to shape the public agenda and the conventional groupthink justification for it.  People who care about uncovering the truth are people nobody listens to. So why would anybody with any ambition speak the truth? If you have any hope of being a player, you have to prove that you're "serious", and that means making it clear to everyone that you've drunk the Kool-Aid.

Quote of the Day: Robert Kuttner (Updated)

We in the progressive community have projected our own visions onto Barack Obama ever since we first noticed him as a remarkable political novice. It was clear from the 2008 campaign that he was a basically a centrist and seeker of common ground. But sometimes a crisis makes a presidency. And history has seldom delivered a more graphic, teachable crisis than the one that Obama inherited. So we voted our hopes that events could compel Obama to govern as a progressive.

We are still waiting, and we are a cheap date. . . .

Some Thoughts on the Fourth of July 2010

Readers here know that I have a Whiggish view of history.  It's not the cool position to take because it could be characterized as a celebration of mostly dead, rich, white guys, so historians like the Beards and Howard Zinn would tell me I have it all wrong. Nor is it a particularly intellectually respectable position since Herbert Butterfield's taking the  Whig historians out to the woodshed in 1931.

But I stand by my Whiggishness because I take the long view, and because I do believe that there is meaning in history, that it is an unfolding drama, and that it has a point. And that while the 19th Century Whig historians got in wrong in the details, they got it basically right in the broad strokes. For Whig is a name we give to what I see as the particular Anglo-American manifestation of a transcultural, trans-historical archetypal impulse. Professional historians aren't allowed to talk like that.

For the archetypal Whig impulse in history is found wherever there is a movement forward effected by flawed humans in historically ambiguous circumstances usually against intense opposition of the archetypal Tories. It is driven by those spirits who, while they are men and women of their times, still in some small part transcend their times, and in doing so move everyone else forward, whether they want to move forward or not.

Whig history is about Moses vs. the Egyptians, Socrates vs. the pious burghers of Athens, the early Christians vs. the Romans, Luther and later Galileo vs. the Roman Church, the Puritans vs. the Stuarts, the American founders vs. King George, the abolitionists vs. the slaveholders, the turn-of-the-century progressives vs. concentrated corporate power. It's the story of human growth in individuality and freedom. It's the story of science and critical thinking, and all the ways in which human beings have moved the ball forward against the opposition posed by entrenched power and entrenched thinking.

More Post-Secularist Thoughts

Modernity is, among other things, the story of the collapse of meaning that is related to the gradual shriveling up of a taken-for-granted sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The word 'sacred' is still in our vocabulary, but we moderns have hardly any sense of the awe and often terror that typified the experience of it for our premodern ancestors. In any event, the common name used to describe this story of the shriveling of meaning is 'secularization', but that word only scratches the surface of the significance of what has happened to us in the last five hundred years. My goal here is not to lament what we have lost. The social conservatives are naive if they think we can find a way to go back to an earlier form of consciousness just by reintroducing sacred talk into our public practice.  I will make an argument elsewhere that we are moving into a post-secular era, and this movement into the future will require the retrieval of much from the premodern era that was jettisoned during the Modern Age. Retrieval and nostalgia are not the same thing. 

For the Record

. . . about the paper of record

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that "I think this Kennedy School study -- by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories -- is somewhat misleading and tendentious."

Greenwald's response:

I'm not one who wishes for the death of newspapers, as they still perform valuable functions and employ some good journalists.  But I confess that episodes like this one tempt me towards that sentiment.  This isn't a case where the NYT failed to rebut destructive government propaganda; it's one where they affirmatively amplified and bolstered it, and are now demonizing their critics by invoking the most deranged rationale to justify what they did:  political correctness?  And whatever else is true, there is no doubt the NYT played an active and vital role in enabling the two greatest American crimes of the last decade:  the attack on Iraq and the institutionalizing of a torture regime.  As usual, those who pompously prance around as watchdogs over political elites are their most devoted and useful servants.

Perusal of the New York Times was once one of life's daily little pleasures. It's not something I ever do anymore. It's just another media source among so many others. I've come to feel similarly about NPR's Morning Edition or All Things Considered.  I find myself hitting the NPR button in my car from time to time, but then switching to the local sports talk radio because I just can't stand listening to these NPR types. The very tone of their voices irks me. Better to listen to the jocks. Not as painful. I can't quite put my finger on the feeling I have as I read or listen to the non-jocks. It's as if their reporting assumes an imagination of the world that is now a world I would ever want to live in. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing. There are plenty of people I like with whom I disagree. It's more a matter of "Are you for real? You can say that and still take yourself so seriously?"

I didn't always feel that way.  And now I'm not sure I feel this way because they've changed or because I have.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I found this comment #7 at Balloon Juice on another matter, which nevertheless amplifies what I was trying to say:

The problem is that we have no truly serious people in this country. We have one group of hacks, clowns, idiots, and sociopaths, and another group that is afraid of the hacks, clowns, idiots, and sociopaths. Our country may not yet be comatose, but it is certainly paralyzed. The DNC cannot say this because it is the truth, and the truth has been relegated to those people whom no one listens to.

It's the truly un-serious people in the media who seem to take themselves most seriously in their taking seriously that hacks, clowns, idiots and sociopaths. They seem to think that's what journalistic integrity requires. That's what I think irks me about them so--their blithe acceptance of the insanity as if it were normalcy. Their refusal to take seriously the truth tellers, well, because they're not "serious"; they're the ones nobody listens to.

Waiting for That Moment of Clarity

What's the cause of that sick feeling you probably have in your stomach? Josh Marshall attempts to answer:

What's particularly chilling is that the elite and popular policy debates are moving in the same direction. The professional economists, international financial agency types, etc are pushing for retrenchment. They seem to have won the argument at the G20 meeting. And at the same time, Republicans are pushing the argument that the stimulus spending which probably forestalled a Depression actually didn't do anything or even caused the problem. And the public seems open enough to that interpretation of events that Democrats have written off any new stimulus spending because they're scared off by the mid-term election. And because the Democrats have, Obama has.

None of this is anything that Krugman and Yglesias and a million other people haven't been saying for months. And hopefully everybody making this argument is wrong and the economic recovery is more robust than they think; it's certainly possible. But the economic and political repercussions seem both vast and perverse -- perverse because the people pushing the policies that could kill the economy seem most likely to gain from the damage politically.

It all has the look of watching a car head off the edge of a cliff in slow motion. (Josh Marshall)

I guess we won't have anything like a moment of clarity until the car explodes in a fireball.

We're dealing here with neo-Hooverism. Not Hooverism regarding the specific policies, but in the same fundamental lack of imagination. People don't ordinarily think of Hoover as a Progressive, but he was. He was a smart, decent guy. His problem was his failure to really comprehend the enormity of what he was dealing with. It seems as though that's what we have with Obama--a decent guy who doesn't seem to be able to grasp the significance of the moment.

In the meanwhile those lazy, unemployed folks need to be taught a lesson.