After the Future

"Inception", "Solaris", and the Unconscious

In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception.  Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies.

We all heard when we were children that that the human brain is underutilized, that we humans are using only a minuscule percentage of its potential. I remember when I first heard that as a kid I thought that if I could just figure out how to increase capacity a little I could get my math homework done more quickly--I thought about it in terms of IQ and mental agiliity. Later I wondered what it would mean to have !00% utilization, and I believe now that there is no 100%, that the brain has no content that can be measured in terms of whether it is being well or underused.

It is, rather,  a mirror-like tool developed for human use so that Nature might become self-aware. But a mirror has no capacity of its own; it's empty and its value lies in its being in good working order: clear and clean rather than cracked, dirty, and distorting. Its content is completely dependent on what comes into view. And what comes into view is potentially limitless because it emerges out of the human unconscious, and the human unconscious is a fathomless, limitless, transpersonal sea of possibility. There are dimensions of the Real of which we are unconscious, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist, only that our awareness of them lies outside the current "consensus reality" or social imaginary.

Carl Jung's understanding of the collective unconscious comes close to what I'm talking about here, but Jung suffered from what Owen Barfield called RUP--Residue of Unresolved Positivism. So when people talk about how we humans use only a small capacity of our brains, I think they really mean to say that we humans are only conscious of a small percentage of the Real, that most of reality is hidden from us--because it is unconscious. But the task is not to use more of the brain's capacity, but rather to find ways of bringing into awareness that which is now outside of it, because submerged in the limitless sea of unconsciousness. If we find ways to bring it out from where it is hidden, the brain as mirror will see it, remember it, and give the viewer something to think about and make sense of. "Making sense" means making it fit within the frame of  the existing social imaginary, or if it doesn't fit, expanding the social imaginary to accommodate the new 'data'. Science is certainly one area where this deepening of awareness is the task, but so is art and spiritual practice. 

It is one thing to look and see; it's another to remember and understand. The brain is the tool that allows us to see, to remember, to make connections, i.e., to be conscious. It is important to have a brain that is clean and in good working order, but more important is the scope and quality of the information available for it to work with. Neuroscience is mirror mechanics, not consciousness mechanics. Consciousness just is. The brain is a function of consciousness, not consciousness a function of the brain.  

 

The argument at this blog has been that moderns and postmoderns, insofar as the scope of our awareness is limited to the positivist frame, to what can be seen and touched, are working with only the surfaces or the husks of things. Far more interesting is what lies behind those surfaces or within those husks. That we are now incapable of experiencing that 'behind' and 'within' does not mean that they aren't there, only that we are unconscious of them, that the modern collective consciousness has forgotten about them. If we can accept that there are individual repressed memories, is it so hard to accept that there are also collective repressed memories? 

Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances says that all Nature is the human unconscious. In other words, it's wrong to think of the Unconscious as yours or mine--its ours; we are all swimming in it, and we are all connected in it. But in the same way that childhood memories are forgotten or repressed, in the same way we cannot bring those forgotten experiences into awareness at will, so too are we unable to bring into felt awareness our connection to the Real beyond the husks that is Natura.

We experience, if we are true moderns and postmoderns, mostly our being cut off from it. We think we are over here and that nature and other people are over there because we have forgotten how we all emerged out of this deep network of interconnection. Our embeddeness in that deep network is a repressed memory. And every once in a while we might have an experience, a moment of recall, so to speak, and we feel that we understand something we once took for granted, but because it is so out of tune with the way everyone thinks and behaves around us, we soon forget what we've remembered and reabsorb into the surrounding social imaginary.

Holding on to the memory is the main discipline in what I think of as 'faith'.  Having these moments of recall are moments of grace, and everything depends on whether they are taken seriously and remembered, whether they are seed moments that fall on fertile ground or fall on ground that is barren or where it is trampled under foot.

***

Of the two movies, Solaris interests me more. And there is more to be said about it than I have the energy to write about it right now--I think I need also to watch it again. But it was developed by Tarkovsky as a response to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think the biggest difference in their respective mythic imaginations lies in that for Tarkovsky reality, the part of it that we have "forgotten", is at its root interpersonal. The Kubrick vision of the Star Child and of Bowman's Odyssesy is suffocatingly disconnected and isolating. They mythic grandeur and ambitions of Kubrick's film are admirable, but it is still very much the product of an imagination that is circumscribed by RUP. Tarkovsky was working in another, very different neighborhood. I'll leave it there for now, but someday I want to come back to that. Or in comments if anybody wants to explore that angle.

And Inception interests me more about what it has to say about our conscious world than what it says about our unconscious. This film isn't about exploring an unconscious dream world; it depicts more an imperial colonization of the unconscious by the conscious. It's not about discovering and entering into a relationship with what's there, but rather a pushing back, as the white man pushed back the Indian, and imposing its old-world structures and habits of thinking in this strange and unfamiliar new world.

And that's fine for the purposes of the movie. Because isn't the real point that what we think of as the real world is pretty much the same kind of construct as the dream worlds?  Isn't the ending with the top spinning meant to suggest that it's not clear whether Cobb is still in a dream world even though he thinks he's in the real world? And isn't the point then that what we take for real, really isn't, that it's just as much a construct and just as much a prison as the so-called Limbos? This story tells us nothing about the unconscious and its mysteries, only about the ephemeral, fundamentally unstable nature of what we take to be conscious reality, or the so-called "real world". 

But I find Nolan's fascination with the role of memory in this movie--as well in his earlier Memento--as interesting and important, and explored in ways that need more exposition than I can do now and here. But the takeaway for now is that remembering, correct memory, is one of the most important things we can do that connects us to the Real, and that improving our capacity for remembering is a critically important spiritual discipline. We are our memories, and the quality of who we are in large part depends on the quality of what we remember.

 

How Far We've Come since 1940

In greed and meanness, that is. This speech might be full of cliches, but it envisions  a cliche world I wouldn't mind to live in. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator

We're All Pottervilleans; We Always Were

I'm up early this Christmas morning waiting for my sleep-deprived family to wake up and came across this article by Rich Cohen in Salon. He has a  somewhat different but I think intriguing angle on Capra's famous Christmas film. The idea that It's a Wonderful Life is sentimental swill is nonsense according to Cohen--the real story is about Dark America.

I do not think the hidden message vanishes when the movie goes Hollywood and happy. I believe the resolution of the darker movie is, in fact, still there, wrapped around the happy ending of the classic. Look again at the closing frames -- shots of Jimmy Stewart staring at his friends. In most, he's joyful. But in a few, he's terrified. As I said, this is a terrifying movie. An hour earlier George was ready to kill himself. He has now returned from a death experience. He was among the unborn, had crossed over like Dante's hero, had seen this world from beyond the veil. In those frames -- "The Night Journey of George Bailey" -- I don't think he's seeing the world that would exist had he never been born. I think he's seeing the world as it does exist, in his time and also in our own.

George had been living in Pottersville all along. He just didn't know it. Because he was seeing the world through his eyes -- not as it was, but as he was: honest and fair. But on "The Night Journey," George is nothing and nobody. When the angel took him out of his life, he took him out of his consciousness, out from behind his eyes. It was only then that he saw America. Bedford Falls was the fantasy. Pottersville is where we live. If you don't believe me, examine the dystopia of the Capra movie -- the nighttime world of neon bars and drunks and showgirl floozies. Does Bedford Falls feel more like the place you live, or does Pottersville? I live in a place that looks very much like Bedford Falls, but after 10 minutes in line at the bank or in the locker room where the squirts are changing for hockey I know I'm in Pottersville.

I'm betting this was as much the case in Capra's time as it is in our own. He loved America but was watching the triumph of Pottersville. That's why, in the last scene, George looks at his friends with terror. He's happy to be alive, but he's disillusioned, wised up in just the worst way. He finally knows the world as it really is, what his friends are capable of, the dark potential coiled in each of them. His wife is a spinster in Pottersville because, if she's not with George, she cannot be anything. She's just one of two characters who are, in fact, the same in both worlds, the other being Mr. Potter. Everyone else is two-faced, masked. Simply put, George has been cursed with knowledge, shown the truth of the world -- seen hidden things. It's the sort of vision that makes a person go insane.

I've written frequently about Capra's America, and my point has been that he sees the dark side of the country with very clear eyes.  But Capra understood and loved the idealistic American narrative, and he wrote stories, I think very powerful stories, designed to remind us about and to affirm that narrative. The dark side is never the whole story, no matter how dark it gets.

The ending works for me. It has a power that cannot be dismissed as sentimental. It works not because it's a realistic depiction about what would have likely happened. There's nothing realistic about this story from beginning to end. It's a symbolic story, a  parable. It's like the biblical stories of Abraham's barren, old wife giving birth to a son, to the woman of Zareptha whose jar of flour never empties, or the story of the Loaves and Fishes--and to the story of Christmas. They all point to this superabundance, this plenitude that doesn't exist in the ordinary world, but seeks to burst into it if it were only given a chance. The ending points us not to the world as it exists but to hidden truths and to hidden possibilities. But I think you need a measure of "second naivete" to see how the story works on this level. People who don't have it must see it as sentimental because it seems exaggerated and impossible.  

So Cohen is right; the people of Bedford Falls are two faced in the sense that there are two possibilities open to them, either to be mean or to be generous and decent. As with all things human, it's never one or the other--it's both.  So yes we all live in Pottersville--we always have, but tha't not the only possibility.  The story's imaginative depiction of the possibility for collective goodness and decency is also there, and it resonates with whatever in us longs for it. If we are so jaded that we cannot believe in the possibility of it, then we can never do the work to realize it. As the blog's Niebuhr epigraph above says, "for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible."

And isn't George's story precisely the story of his longing for that decent world, his working for it, and ultimately his recognizing that in so many ways it had been "approximated" without his knowing it. The story manifests what otherwise lies hidden--not just for George, but for all of us. In real life we don't get to see what George sees in the story; we need a second naivete to keep working for the possible while everything around us tells us it's impossible.

This movie is more about such impossible possibilities than it is about what we are in fact. We must never think that we are incapable of becoming a society as ugly and mean as any in history--there is no American exceptionalism in that regard.  But neither should we forget that we are capable of the decency and generosity that we see in George's "two-faced" neighbors at the end of the film.

Peter Maurin, with Dorothy Day the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, said that he didn't want a socialist utopia; he just wanted a society in which it was easier for people to be good. I think this was Capra's vision of America as well. It's certainly mine.

Merry Christmas.

 

 

Lieberman & DADT (Updated)

I'm glad DADT was repealed. It was moronic. But after listening to Dennis Kucinich on the O'Donnell show last night praise Lieberman for his role in pushing it, I wanted to vomit.

This is a classic case in which a member in good standing of the the corporate power elite, someone who is owned by the insurance industry and what's not owned by insurance is owned by the defense industry, builds up his liberal creds by grandstanding on a cultural issue that costs him nothing. 

And now all the clueless Liberals like Kucinich see him as a good guy who shouldn't be judged too harshly.

We see here in operation the same dynamic on the left as it works on the right. Voters in red states keep voting in people who screw them--but so do voters in blue states when they elect a guy like Lieberman,  and blue or red these guys get elected not because of their stands on economic issues that impact them the most, but because they have the right cultural values. It's a classic con, and the left is as gullible in biting on it as the right.

UPDATE: From TPM--

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) says he will meet with freshly-minted DSCC chair Patty Murray, likely early next year, about his re-election options for 2012.

No discussions have taken place yet, but he said that some Senate Democrats are rooting for him.

"Some of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus have been very gracious and kind saying they hope I run as a Democrat," he told TPM in an interview Wednesday. "Patty and I said we'd talk sometime early in the New Year."

Don't expect any imminent announcements. Lieberman says for now he's just flattered that "people are raising the question."

Watch for the coming rehabilitation of Joe Lieberman. There is no political sin too great that it cannot be forgiven by these compass-less Dems. Or is it just that about .5% of people remember anything?

 

Greed Makes a Mess of Things

Always has, and always will.

The superwealthy always seem to win in the short run, but they and all the rest of us lose in the long run. The rich do what they do with a predictablility that is driven by the logic of greed, but the rest of us let them because deep down we want to be them because they are life's winners. They are successful, and everybody wants to be successful. People who  care about more important things or define success in other terms, well that's their choice. But it's probably because they don't have the drive, the ambition, and the intelligence to get rich. They're really losers who don't want to admit it.

Americans glorify the greedy by calling them ambitious and spunky, and they perceive anyone who isn't as shiftless, lazy, and deserving whatever misfortune is his lot. And so these Americans, most of whom are not rich, cannot bring themselves to fight the rich because by some bizarre collective Stockholm syndrome they identify with those who hold them hostage. The rich are the winners, the successful ones. They, as hostages, are the losers. And so these Americans come to accept the viciousness of the rich as the virtue that they lack. No decent American would say it, but deep down, whether they consciously recognize it or not, they believe that "Greed is good."

And that perception of the nobility rather than the viciousness of the wealthy--these 'aristos', these 'optimates', these 'best people'--will continue until we devolve into the inevitable cycle of violent unrest and violent suppression that is the consequence of allowing logic of greed to drive our politics and define success.

Zimbardo on Time

I'm an old McLuhanite who believes that our technology is reprogramming us in ways that we have not even begun to understand--certainly our orientation to time is one of those ways. (h/t Daily Dish and A. Dix)

 

 

Dems vs. the GOP

I assume you know which is which

What Do Dems Stand For?

Fineman says something interesting in his Huffpost piece entitled "'Democrat' Is No Longer A Brand".  Some excerpts:

As the lame duck tax debate slogs towards its inevitable conclusion -- nearly $1 trillion worth of extended and new tax cuts over two years -- I'm wondering: what does the brand "Democrat" mean?

If anything.

The Republicans don't have a cool logo but their economic brand is vivid. They're the folks who worship the market, or at least claim to. They always want to cut taxes. They pile up deficits while decrying them. They favor pat-a-cake business regulation. . . .

So Obama's brand now is: I'm a non-ideological, deal-doing, practical, adult in a sea of extremes and I will somehow get us on that sunny road. Now he's Barry the Cable Guy. He'll "git-r-done."

At least that's the pitch.

But that leaves Democrats trying to figure out who or what they are. It leaves them looking for leaders, ideas and symbols with which to sell their brand, whatever it now is, in the political marketplace.

Isn't a nearly $1 trillion bill full of tax cuts and industry giveaways what Republicans do? Isn't a bill with an absurdly generous inheritance tax break what Republicans write? Aren't Democrats the "party of the people?" Aren't they the party that believes government programs and policies have a role to play in leveling the playing field, or at least giving everyone a fair chance? Aren't the Democrats worried that all of this tax cutting now will starve the social programs they supposedly cherish? Do they know that they won't be able to push through a change in taxes in 2012 over GOP objections if the economy in fact improves?

Maybe the answer to all of these questions is "no," because it looks now as if most Democrats are going to vote for the bill in the end.

I think that's a pretty cogent explanation for part of the reason why the Dems are perceived as such feckless losers who don't stand for anything. It's also why I believe that realignment now means breaking the two-party system up.  There is essentially one party now that represents first and foremost the interests of the superwealthy, and it comprises a right wing and a moderate wing. Obama represents the moderate wing. It's better to have a moderate in power than someone from the right wing, but there's just no party representing the substantive interests of ordinary Americans

The Democrats as they exist now seem very like the Whigs of the 19th Century. Those Whigs had lost their focus and any real sense about what they stood for, and a new party was formed out of abolitionist Whigs and anti-secessionist Democrats. Something has to give with the Dems. I don't know how long it will take to happen, or how exactly it will be configured, but it's the only solution.

Krauthammer's Coy Boy Ploy

Krauthammer is touting this tax deal as a great win for Obama and the Dems. "Golly", he's saying, "We right wingers really lost one in this round. That Obama--he's a fox."

How magnanimous. That's just the kind of guy Krauthammer is--willing to give credit where credit is due--a sincere, fair-minded, independent thinker. And to think all along I misjudged him as a cynical, right-wing propagandist.

Individual Mandate in Trouble? [Updated]

I think it probably is. I wrote this last spring:

The individual mandate is a fundamental element in the flawed architecture of this HCR bill, and the best thing about it is its not going into effect for another four years. I think there's a good chance that by the time 2014 rolls around it won't be part of the new HCR system.  Already people are talking about court challenges to it, and I'd be surprised if it survives.

I don't care what the wonks say about it, the idea of the government forcing Americans to buy health insurance from hated, profit-driven companies is bad politics, and it's tossing a lazy softball to the political right to hit out of the park, and I, for one, will not come to the administration's defense.

It will go to the supremes now, and what do you think its chances will be in the Robert's court? This was ill-conceived from the beginning. It's typical of obtuse, wonkish, top-down thinking. It's anathema to what I've described as the structural Progressive approach. The Medicare buy in would have been so much simpler and easier to sell, but it was never about what's best for the country or the American people; it was about what was best for the insurance industry.

UPDATE: Klein talks about the impacts on HCR if the individual mandate is ultimately ruled unconstitutional:

-Repeal of the requirement to buy insurance would mean more people would wait until they get sick to buy insurance in the new nongroup exchanges, which would increase the average premium by 27 percent in 2019.

-Retaining the law’s insurance reforms, but repealing the subsidies as well as the requirement to purchase insurance, would further discourage people from buying insurance when they’re healthy. Premiums in 2019 would cost twice as much as projected under the law as a result.

-Retaining the law but repealing the mandate would newly cover fewer than 7 million people in 2019 rather than the 32 million projected to be newly covered by the law. Federal spending, however, would decline by only about a quarter under this scenario since the sickest and most costly uninsured are the ones most likely to gain coverage.

I have not doubt all this is true, but that's why it was so ill-conceived. Is there any hope that this might force reconsideration of a public option?  Probably not likely with the new congress, but if the supremes kill the individual mandate, it would appear that whole thing will fail to deliver what were its promised ameliorative effects, namely reducing premiums and reducing the numbers of uninsured.

I have to say that I'm ambivalent. I have from the beginning rejected the fundamental architecture of this deal, but accepted that it was better for the people to have some crumbs rather than nothing. So preserving the individual mandate is the only way to preserve the delivery of those crumbs, it would appear.  So maybe it would be better to scrap the whole thing rather than let it become the entrenched HC system.

How Change Will Happen

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that nothing changes on the economic justice front until there's significant pressure that comes from the bottom up, and that's not going to happen until the culture-war issues that divide us are put to the side.

I'd go farther and say that the upward pressure has to come from a coalition of blue collars for it to have any credibility. It's not something that organized labor can effect anymore; it has to come from a more spontaneous movement of blacks, rural whites, Catholic and Jewish urban ethnics, and Hispanics--people who on the whole tend to be culturally conservative. They have to be at the center of such a movement, and then get support from sympathetic, educated, liberal cosmopolitans.

The Jane Hamshers, Arianna Huffingtons, and Ralph Naders are not going to be the leaders of such a movement. They will have their roles to play, but they'll be support roles, not leadership roles. Leadership has to emerge from the ranks of the Blue Collars, and if influential Liberal elites serious about progressive structural change had any sense, they'd be looking for ways to identify and promote such blue-collar leadership while keeping themselves and their egos out of the limelight. 

It's the same as the civil rights movement in that regard. It has to be driven by the people who are feeling the injustice most, not by the rich and educated who, regardless of their progressive opinions, with a few exceptions are not willing to risk anything when push comes to shove.

 

The Battle for the Commonplace Center

When democratic political leaders go to college they tend to study things like political science, economics, law, and public policy. These fields tend to use a scientifically false theory of human reason -- Enlightenment reason. It posits that reason is conscious, that it can fit the world directly, that it is logical (in the sense of mathematical logic), that emotion gets in the way of reason, that reason is there to serve self-interest, and that language is neutral and applies directly to the world.

The brain and cognitive sciences have shown that every part of this is false. . . .

Conservatives who are savvy about marketing their ideas are closer to the way people really think than Democrats are, because people who teach marketing tend to be up on how the brain and language work. And over the past three decades they have not just built an effective message machine, but they repeated messages that have changed the brains of a great many Americans. . . .

Many people are "bi-conceptual," this is, they have both conservative and progressive moral systems and apply them in different issue areas. These are sometimes called "independents," "swing voters," moderates," "the center," etc. They are the crucial segment of the electorate to address. Each moral system is represented by a circuit in their brains. The more one circuit is activated and strengthened the more the other is weakened. Conservatives have moved them to the right by repeating conservative moral messages 24/7. The Democrats need to activate and strengthen the progressive moral circuitry in their brains. That means using only progressive language and progressive arguments, and not moving to the right or using the right's language. This is the opposite of "moving to the center." There is no ideology of the center, just combinations of progressive and conservative views.  (George Lakoff: "Untellable Truths")

In classical rhetoric, the name for verbal representation that correlates with this brain circuitry is  the "commonplace".  The commonplace is part of a system of cliches and commonly accepted moral truths that a particular group accepts uncritically as describing the way things are or ought to be. A typical conservative commonplace is that people need to be independent, to stand on their own two feet, and should never take charity, much less government handouts, because governments in their essence are tyrannical, corrupt, and corrupting. The bigger they are, the more tyrannical, corrupt, and corrupting.

A typical liberal commonplace is that we're all in this together, and that we have a responsibility to promote the common good, and good government and the political process are tools to accomplish that. For someone like Glenn Beck, the phrase "social justice" is code for socialism and dependency; for liberals it means making sure that the non-rich and and non-powerful get a fair shake. There was a time when the New Deal dominated Main Street American commonplace thinking; since the eighties Libertarian Social Darwinism with a Reaganite smile does.

How has this come to pass? Lakoff argues, and I agree, that sophisticated messaging by GOP communications strategists has changed the brain circuitry of many Americans. These Americans have come to accept as "commonplace" what Americans forty years ago rejected as extremist and nuts.

Tea Party Patriots Reject Tax Cut Deal, Call For It To Be Destroyed

From TPM:

In an email dispatched just minutes ago, the national office of Tea Party Patriots -- the largest umbrella for grassroots tea party groups in the country -- is calling on its millions of members to bombard Republicans on Capitol Hill with pleas to shut down the tax cut deal which House Democrats rejected earlier today.S

Strange bedfellows? In some ways yes, in others no. The teaparty is at least consistent on principle and not necessarily alwyas the tool of the GOP. 

Short-term vs. Long-Term Gains 2

Andrew Sabl lays out the progressive fracture points using three different polarities  that amplify the point that I was making in my earlier post on this subject. The first is idealist vs. pragmatist. the second two relate more to the point that I was trying to make about short-term and long-term:

2. Civic republicans vs. non-republican liberals. Civic republicanism (small “r,” of course) is an awkward label for a common position: that the fundamental issue of our time is the ability of the rich, and corporations, to game the political system and prevent the rest of us from exerting true self-governance.  (Roger Hodge’s The Mendacity of Hope, which I haven’t read yet, sounds from what I’ve heard like a pure instance of this view.  Richard Trumka’s angry statement opposing the deal, with its stress on income inequality and “moneyed interests,” is, perhaps surprisingly, another instance.)  In contrast, a non-republican liberal position is that giving material sustenance to the poor is more important than whether the rich get paid off, however regrettable and undeserved that is.  Randi Rhoads has been pushing this position hard on her show and her blog.  And Obama has explicitly taken it as well.

3. Immediate results people vs. repeated game players. Many of the deal’s supporters (Steve Benen, Ed Kilgore) have started to ask opponents what they propose as the next move if it’s voted down.  We opponents, frankly, don’t have a great answer so much as a different question: how can we change baseline expectations so as to achieve progressive outcomes in future negotiations?  Everybody, of course, thinks that both the short and the long term are important to some degree.  But the deal’s supporters largely rely on the argument that results now are very important, either because in a recession those who lose benefits will face great and immediate hardship (see James), or because stimulus now will crucially boost Democratic prospects in 2012 (which is, to fill in the minor premise, an unusually important election because of the Affordable Care Act).  Most of the policy wonks, by the way, are lining up behind the deal because their professional deformation is to solve the immediate problem rather than looking at the future negotiating situation it sets up.  As professional biases go, this one’s honorable and functional—but still a bias.

I'm not sure what "non-republican liberal" means (in an update he renames this type "welfarist liberals"), but it and the "immediate results people" are the the essence of what I described as the short-term, small picture 'pragmatic progressives' in my first post on this subject, and it clearly describes what Obama is. And I think that it's at the heart of his confusion and why he doesn't understand why what I call 'structuralist progressives' are giving him a hard time. He thinks he's fighting the good fight on behalf of the poor and the middle class, and in a way he is. The problem lies in that his efforts are killing us long-term because they are ceding too much poltical infrastructure to the superwealthy, and that's not something they are going to give back without a fight.

Sabl's point, however, is to remind us that we are all on the same side:

BUT we have to remember something. Both sides of these debates have immeasurably more in common with each other than with the Republicans—who want to sabotage Democrats tactically and also destroy them ideologically; dislike the welfare state passionately and on principle while wanting as a matter of principle and practice to give the rich and corporations more money and power, not less; and are excellent players, on the oligarchical side, of both one-shot and repeated games.

As a progressive subsidiarist, I'm not crazy about Obama's top-down "welfarist pragmatism", but I'd feel a lot better about it if I thought he had a long-term game plan. Because he doesn't, I see him as unwittingly colluding with the long-term destruction of the broader progressive cause. And if he doesn't see that as a problem, somebody better educate him, because while six more years of him is better than the alternative, it will be six more years of steady erosion.

Quote of the Day: James K. Galbraith

. . . in the long run we need to recognize that the fate of the entire country is at stake. Its governance can't be entrusted indefinitely to incompetents, hacks, and lobbyists. Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in services, in living standards, in life expectancies, huge increases in social tension, in repression, and in violence. These are the consequences of following through with crackpot ideas such as those embodied in the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, as Jeff Madrick again outlined, such notions as putting arbitrary limits on the scale of government, or arbitrary limits on the top tax rate affecting the wealthiest Americans.

This isn't a parlor game. The outcome isn't destined to be alright. It will not necessarily end in progress whatever happens. What we do, how we proceed, and how we effectively resist what is plainly about to happen, matters very greatly for the future of our country, of our children, and of another generation to come. We need to lose our fear, our hesitation, and our unwillingness to face the facts. If we thereby lose some of our hopes, let's remember the dictum of William of Orange that "it is not necessary to hope in order to persevere." (Source)

Galbraith is a structural progressive.