After the Future

The ACA and the Technocratic Mentality (Updated)

 I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage – they like their plan and they value their relationship with their doctor. And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what. My view is that health care reform should be guided by a simple principle: fix what's broken and build on what works. Obama, June 2009

So, all these insurance cancellation notices are going out to people who already have insurance because their existing insurance doesn't meet ACA standards. This is such a symbolic gift to the Republicans, even if it is a statistically insignificant problem. It also shows the top-down technocratic mindset of policy types who have close to zero political acumen. 

I know; it will blow over, but still--this was an unforced error.

Here's the thing: If, as ACA apologists are arguing, there is such a small number of cancelled insureds whose rates will be going up, why was it necessary to insist that they give up their existing health care, even if it is inferior to what they can find on the exchanges? Why not let them keep what they have and let them shop for something better on their own? Why force them to give up what they have if they are happy with it? What's the down side of that compared to the down side of freaking people out by forcing them off their current insurance and onto exchanges that they cannot access? 

This is a problem because some policy technocrats think they know better what people need than the people do, and this is exactly what infuriates people about big-government programs. This policy is the product of the same patronizing mentality that  banned super-sized soft drinks in New York. Whatever public good might come of it, it feeds a big-brother/big mother stereotype that negates the benefits because it helps to delegitimize government in the mind of ordinary folks who rightly resent government making their choices for them. 

UPDATE: Maybe I'm wrong.  There's this (in comments):

Neither Obama or Sebelius lied, folks. The insurance companies did! They are the ones who cancelled the policies, not the Administration. They are the ones who between March 2010 and now altered their policies for high risk clients, so they could cancel them, under the terms of the ACA which they helped to draft. Do not think for one minute that the ACA was ever anything other than a gift to the insurance industry - one that they drew up the specifics of and made sure were included. Most of the policies that the insurance industry are canceling, because they changed them in the grace period by raising rates or co-pays or changing coverage, are being canceled to force the holders onto the exchanges where the insurance companies can get away with newer higher rates because they have to cover what the old policies did not, like pre-existing conditions, continuous care, and preventative care at no cost. So could someone please stop blaming the idiots in the Administration, and look at who is actually canceling policies because they gave themselves an escape clause with help from the Democrats in Congress.

If that's true, then I retract my the points made about the technocratic mentality above. Even if the plans in effect since 2010 have been grandfathered in, that doesn't mean that the insurance companies can't decide to cancel them. The fault lies with the market, not with the governent, except that the government has created a program that all along has given too much freedom to the insurance companies. 

Quote of the Day: Michael Lind

Commenting on the Konczal post I referred to yesterday:

Unlike conservatives, who are right-wingers first and Republicans second, all too many progressives put loyalty to the Democratic Party — most of whose politicians, including Obama, are not economic progressives — above fidelity to a consistent progressive economic philosophy.  These partisan Democratic spinmeisters are now treating Obamacare, not as an essentially conservative program that is better than nothing, but as something it is not — namely, a great victory of progressive public policy on the scale of Social Security and Medicare.

In doing so, progressive defenders of Obamacare may inadvertently be digging the graves of Social Security and Medicare.

If Obamacare — built on means-testing, privatizing and decentralization to the states — is treated by progressives as the greatest liberal public policy success in the last half-century, then how will progressives be able to argue against proposals by conservative Republicans and center-right neoliberal Democrats to means-test, privatize and decentralize Social Security and Medicare in the years ahead?

I predict that it is only a matter of time before conservatives and Wall Street-backed  “New Democrats” begin to argue that, with Obamacare in place, it makes no sense to have two separate healthcare systems for the middle class — Obamacare for working-age Americans, Medicare for retired Americans.  They will suggest, in a great bipartisan chorus:  Let’s get rid of Medicare, in favor of Lifelong Obamacare!  Let’s require the elderly to keep purchasing private insurance until they die!

I’m sure a number of token “centrist” Democrats will be found, in due time, to support the replacement of Medicare by Lifelong Obamacare.  And with neoliberal Democratic supporters of the proposal as cover, the overclass centrists of the corporate media will begin pushing for Lifelong Obamacare as the sober, responsible, “adult” policy in one unsigned editorial after another.

A very plausible scenario. I wonder, though, if Neoliberalism's days are numbered. Elite bipartisan opinion is still enamored of it, so it still has legs. But Neoliberal education reform, at least, seems to be buckling because parents and teachers are finally "getting it" and are fighting back locally. In the long run it's winning the local fights that will change things in D.C. The Right understands this in a way the Left doesn't yet.

I think economic progressives like me are forced to support Democrats and their awful Neoliberal programs like Obamacare, because the Right has been very successful in keeping progressives in a defensive posture. The Right is far more energized than the Left, and until that changes, the Democrats must be supported as the dike wall that holds back the flood. 

Quote of the Day: Mike Konczal

Talking about the ACA rollout:

Some of the more cartoony conservatives argue that this is a failure of liberalism because it is a failure of government planning, evidently confusing the concept of economic “central planning” with “the government makes a plan to do something.”

However, the smarter conservatives who are thinking several moves ahead (e.g. Ross Douthat) understand that this failed rollout is a significant problem for conservatives. Because if all the problems are driven by means-testing, state-level decisions and privatization of social insurance, the fact that the core conservative plan for social insurance is focused like a laser beam on means-testing, block-granting and privatization is a rather large problem. As Ezra Klein notes, “Paul Ryan's health-care plan -- and his Medicare plan -- would also require the government to run online insurance marketplaces.” Additionally, the Medicaid expansion is working well where it is being implemented, and the ACA is perhaps even bending the cost curve of Medicare, the two paths forward that conservatives don’t want to take.

The Rube Goldberg complexity of the ACA is driven by neoliberal ideology, not by what makes any practcial sense. Read Konczal's whole post to see why this mess was inevitable and didn't have to be. 

 

Krauthammer on The Daily Show

I don't know what happened to Charles Krauthammer. I read him in The New Republic back in the 80s, and he was a run of the mill foreign policy realist. And then The New Republic went all neoconservative and crazy pro-Israel, and I stopped reading The New Republic, and the next thing I know Krauthammer is a right-wing bastion and a regular on Fox News. 

Well it was interesting to see him on The Daily Show earlier this week. He was charming and reasonable. I don't know if he is sincere, or whether he just saw this as an opportunity to get people like me to read his book, because I haven't read him in over a decade precisely because I thought he had become a right-wing loon. Nevertheless, the discussion between Stewart and him was refreshing because they were using real ideas rather than talking points, or so it seemed. 

Krauthammer says he respects Ted Cruz's passions and views, but dissociatates himslef from his tactics. He argued that Social Security and Medicare are among the great accomplishments of the liberal state, but that the welfare state is at a crossroads, and the question is whether we can continue to afford them. And then that Obamacare is a disaster because with a 17 trillion dollar national debt we cannot afford another expensive entitlement. He said that while he shares Stewart's passion to find ways to insure the uninsured, it was absurd for the government to create a program like Obamacare that would be so disruptive to a sector of the economy that contributes 16% to GDP. Unless I misunderstood him, he said that he and Stewart agree that extending Medicare would have been preferrable. (See part 3.) 

So that's kind of how it went--not a disagreement about goals but about how to achieve them, and when Stewart pointed out that no conservative in office agrees with Krauthammer, Krauthammer allied himself with Paul Ryan. And this is where it started getting incoherent--at least to me. And it just struck me as interesting but irrelevant. 

As I said, I haven't read him in years, and I have no idea whether Krauthammer is an honest man, or whether he's just a shill trying to make a reasonable case for ideas he knows don't matter.  Part of the conservative playbook is to deploy conservative intellectuals to keep liberals distracted debating ideas that seem to have some validity while their rich friends rob everything in sight. 

I don't know, and it doesn't matter. The power game is not about who has the best ideas; it's about which interests have the most clout. Obamcare debate was never about ideas or about what was best for the country; it was always first and foremost about what was politically possible. And the possible was determined by the power of the insurance and healthcare industries to shape the healthcare reform agenda to meet their needs first. They are the pigs feeding at the trough; the uninsured get the slop that splashes on the ground. 

I question Krauthammer's sincerity because surely he knows that the richest economy in the world can afford this 'entitlement' if it had the political will to change the tax structure to do it. He knows that it was the Republicans during the Bush administration that ran up the debt by cutting taxes while starting an expensive war. By passing Medicare D without any plan to pay for it. By supporting financial deregulation trends that led to the financial crisis and the bailout in 2008. He must know that the Republicans are playing a cynical game that is all about running up huge debts so that they can prevent the Democrats from doing anything because the country can't afford it after GOP recklessness.

Political conservatism in America, whether naively or cynically, embraces doctrines that serve the interests of the already rich and powerful. Those interests will seize on any ideas that give them cover, and Krauthammer's ideas serve those interests' purposes whether he intends them to or not. 

 

 

The Obamacare Mess

So why is it that the technology available to Mr. Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all but ensure that the companies that win government contracts, like the ones put out to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can navigate the regulations best, but not necessarily do the best job. That’s evidenced by yesterday’s Congressional testimony by the largest of the vendors, CGI Federal, which blamed everyone but itself when asked to explain the botched rollout of the new Web site. (Source)

I think this kind of problem is inherent to government, including state and local governments. It's very difficult to find the best vendors because because of interest politics and graft, and the regulations developed to prevent graft, which when worked around spawn more regulations, and so on. It's an ecosystem of red-tape complexity that breeds more complexity and with it turgid inefficiency. The expectation that this would be anything other than a mess was always silly. So what? Sooner or later they'll work it out. A year from now, no one will care.  

The political process almost always makes the optimal solution an impossibility. There would have been no problem, of course, had Obamacare simply used the Medicare infrastructure in a single-payer system that the uninsured could opt into. But that would never happen because conservatives fear it would be too successful. And so the silly politics led us to adopt this unnecessarily complex system that becomes a parody of government inefficiency that would be a challenge for the meanest, cleanest tech company to coordinate effectively. 

This mess is business as usual, and so one of the things I find rather annoying is the way Liberal media types are so upset about this. It's as if they feel they must show their moral superiority to conservatives by criticizing someone on their team. Conservatives who would never criticize their own. But of course in doing so Liberals reinforce the distorting conservative narrative that government can do nothing right: Even Liberals think that Obamacare is a mess."

Government can do a lot right, but it can only do it rather messily. The price paid is worth it for the benefits received. I'm with Joan Walsh here. Liberals should get off their high horse and recognize that they are belaboring the obvious and that their outrage is misplaced. 

 

Rawls v. Nozick

I am by no means a Rawlsian, but I can find some common ground with those who claim to be. I cannot fathom the mind of the Nozickian when it claims as it does to be "moral", and this piece in the NYT Stone lays out why. Closing graf:

Rejecting the Nozickian worldview requires us to reflect on what justice really demands, rather than accepting the conventional wisdom that the market can take care of morality for us. If you remain a steadfast Nozickian, you have the option of biting the bullet (as philosophers like to say) and embracing the counterintuitive implications of your view. This would be at least more consistent than what we have today: an ideology that parades as moral common sense.

I think the problem in this debate is that it seems always to be posed in either/or terms--that it's either the market or the state. And it's not; it's both. The political challenge is to find the right balance between them. That's what the principle of subsidiarity is all about. 

If there is anybody out there reading here who leans libertarian, please tell me why a single-payer system in health care, like Medicare, is immoral or an abrogation of your liberty rather than the most effective way to provide for a basic human need. Do you really believe that the only motivation for talented people to go into healthcare is to get rich? Do you think most people are only extrinsically motivated by financial rewards? Or is it possible that most people who are attracted to the healthcare professions are motivated intrinsically, by the desire to help and to make a difference in people's lives, by the intellectual and creative challenges posed by sickness and disease? If you think it's the first, what does that say about the culture's moral imagination. 

I'm not interested in arguments against single payer that we can't afford it--we can if we want to. I'm interested in moral arguments. If we can come to some agreement on a moral values level, we can work out the practicalities relatively easily. 

Whither the GOP?

The only weekend talking head show worth watching is Up with Steve Kornacki. Here's the embed of a segment from yesterday's show that I think is worth watching: The discussion frames the question well. Will the business elites be able to take back control of the Republican party? Soto thinks they will, but Wilentz and the unfortunately named Krystal Ball don't. They think that in the short run the Tea Party will continue to dominate the GOP completely and that the GOP will have to have a "64 moment" before it will learn to play nice again. Let's hope that '14 is the new '64. Bernard thinks it's possible because of what I've been saying, which is that there's a realignment in the works here in which moderate Republicans are just moving out of the party and becoming Independents or conservative Democrats. 

I can live with the Democrats who are conservative on cultural issues, so long as they make sense on economic ones. They represent ethnic blue collars both in terms of their values and economic interests. They are in that sense old-school, pre-1970s Democrats. But a couple of years ago I would have said, kick the corporate DLC Democrats out--the ones that are liberal on cultural issues but conservative on ecnomic issues. They are the old-school, pre-1970s, moderate Republicans. But the guerrilla tactics of the Tea Party have persuaded me that the only important thing now is that the GOP be prevented from having majorities in either the House or the Senate.

I don't like the "American system", but I don't think chaos will produce anything better. I'm in full support of a muddle-through scenario, and let the real creative problem solving happen locally, in the states and cities. 

Quote of the Day: Seth Ackerman

However disastrous or ridiculous the outcome of this crisis ultimately proves to be, the sub-democratic structure of American politics will guarantee that the consequences will be non-existent for those who initiated it: the regime of repressed competition will ensure no consequences for the individual legislators, while its separation of powers will probably ensure no consequences for their party either.

In the last debt ceiling crisis, two years ago, the public expressed overwhelming revulsion and blamed the GOP by a wide margin; the next year, Republicans won the House again, and ended up with three-fifths of the governors and state legislatures. Most likely the same or worse will happen again in 2014.

After two centuries laboring under a Constitution crafted by principled opponents of democracy, who saw as one of their central goals the suppression of any chance that concerted majorities might ever use the state for positive ends, how can anyone be surprised that this country is hospitable to anti-government extremists?

Roll over James Madison. 

This whole piece is worth reading. Its main thrust is to argue that the Tea Party as a movement has nothing inherently to do with the South or the Neoconfederacy. The Neoconfederate types are joining this tea party, but they are not throwing it. 

Its driving force has an intellectual pedigree that is related more to the anti-government ideology of Northeastern economic elites who never got over the New Deal. The South by and large supported New Deal policies. 

It's rather that elites in the New South, as they became more integrated into the national economy, found their thinking aligning with this already existing social Darwinist Yankee economic ideology. This fits with the analysis by Michael Lind I posted about a few weeks ago. I think that Lind adds a dimension not covered in the Ackerman post, though, which is that we see in the Tea Party a combination of Northern economic elite rightist ideology combined with Southern political tactics--voter suppression, nullification, obstruction, and using every parliamentary trick in the book to effect these. There's a racial aspect to this, but it has more to do with local poobahs hanging on to power. And these tactics are effective precisely because the Constitution is set up to make it so easy.

And so one has to wonder whether the Republic with this particular constitution will last for another hundred years. Let's face it, it's not that great. I have said in the pat that we have a ceremonial democracy, but I think "sub-democratic" is a better adjective to describe it. One could argue that democracy is working for the conservative movement, which has used legal means to dominate the state legislatures and to send enough of their representatives to Washington to obstruct policies they don't want. Even so, the will of the majority is thwarted because this minority is forced to use guerrilla tactics rather than normal procedure, and that these tactics are bringing the old girl to her knees..

There's a reason any new democracy whose founders had any sense have not imitated ours. If we've learned anything since 2010 midterms, it's that this old girl is more fragile than it is venerable. We may continue muddle through with it, but I don't need much convincing that we are a major crisis just waiting to happen. 

As California Goes . . .

So goes the nation. Not always a good thing, but it would be now:

In the past month, California has been the stage for a series of celebrations of unlikely legislative success — a parade of bill signings that offered a contrast between the shutdown in Washington and an acrimony-free California Legislature that enacted laws dealing with subjects including school financing, immigration, gun control and abortion.

The turnaround from just 10 years ago — striking in tone, productivity and, at least on fiscal issues, moderation — is certainly a lesson in the power of one-party rule. Democrats hold an overwhelming majority in the Assembly and Senate and the governor, Jerry Brown, is a Democrat. The Republican Party, which just three years ago held the governor’s seat and a feisty minority in both houses, has diminished to the point of near irrelevance.

But the new atmosphere in Sacramento also offers the first evidence that three major changes in California’s governance system intended to leach some of the partisanship out of politics — championed by reform advocates — may also be having their desired effect in a state that has long offered itself as the legislative laboratory for the nation. (Yesterday's NYT)

And then there's Texas. But let us not dwell on collective delusion, but rather on sane people grappling with reality. From the philosopher prince Jerry Brown's State of the State address in January:

In the right order of things, education—the early fashioning of character and the formation of conscience—comes before legislation. Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children. If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify. 

In California’s public schools, there are six million students, 300,000 teachers—all subject to tens of thousands of laws and regulations. In addition to the teacher in the classroom, we have a principal in every school, a superintendent and governing board for each school district. Then we have the State Superintendent and the State Board of Education, which makes rules and approves endless waivers—often of laws which you just passed. Then there is the Congress which passes laws like “No Child Left Behind,” and finally the Federal Department of Education, whose rules, audits and fines reach into every classroom in America, where sixty million children study, not six million. 

Add to this the fact that three million California school age children speak a language at home other than English and more than two million children live in poverty. And we have a funding system that is overly complex, bureaucratically driven and deeply inequitable. That is the state of affairs today. 

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child. 

We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” 

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students. 

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds. 

I know there are some on the left who are critical of Brown. But let's face it, in our current predicament, it's not about left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. It's about sanity, decency, and common sense on one hand and delusion and ideological rigidity on the other.

I hated Obamacare--I was sorely disappointed regarding so many of its compromises with healthcare special interests. I thought the individual mandate was going to create a lot of political blowback. I was outraged that the public option never had a chance, and that a Medicare-for-everyone-single-payer option was never a possibility. And I thought it failed to do what was necessary to get the absurd levels of healthcare inflation under control. But I will admit now what I would not admit back in 2010--it really was the only thing possible, and it is remarkable achievement that it got through. It was the best that sanity and decency could manage in a political environment where both are in short supply. 

***

Stephen Colbert famously said that Reality has a liberal bias, and it's true not because the Liberal thought framework is philosophically superior to others--it isn't--but because Liberalism is best adapted to the world we currently find ourselves in: the modern world and liberal thought go hand in hand. America is an amalgam of Enlightenment and Calvinist/Whig thinking, but both are through and through modern projects.

I've argued here for years that because we are no longer moderns reality's bias toward liberalism is loosening, and the modern mind in all its forms is anemic and moribund. But sickly though it may be, it is still the framework that provides the backstory out of which a new story better suited to the needs of a no-longer-modern world will emerge. Its decay enriches the soil out of which something new will grow.

I believe that in 500 years (or sooner) people will look back at this period--from 1650 to 2050--and see the secularist/materialist narrative that developed during that time as a bizarre aberration. But from that future perspective people will also see that there were good reasons for intelligent, decent, honest people to reject the traditional narratives and seek a better one in which Reason was the central protagonist.

The challenge now in this liminal time is not to bitch and moan and dig one's heels in, but to develop a more robust narrative--one that accepts the contemporary culture world as the frail, fallible thing that it is, but also understands that all culture worlds are plastic constructions that can be replaced (gradually) with better ones. There's a reason that Christianity emerged out of the ruins of classical antiquity as the dominant narrative of the West, and there was a reason that Reason emerged out of the ruins of post Reformation Christendom. And there will have to be a reason why whatever comes next will emerge out of the ruins of late Modernity.

We just don't know it yet, but it's astonishing to me how little faith and hope conservative Christians have. They are not defending the faith but rather something else,something inessential and as such something that draws them away from what is essential. Christianity in its essence is not at all about clinging to the past, but about looking toward the future expecting the fulfillment of impossible promises. It's the story that began with Abraham leaving Ur and the Israelites leaving Egypt. It's the story of the early Desert Fathers, and the wandering Irish monks. It's the story of loss of something lesser in order to gain something greater; it's the story of death and resurrection. 

 

 

Will the Cruz Coalition Feel Chastened? II

In the Senate, there were already signs that an emergent group of 14 centrist senators from both parties was looking to make an impact on the fiscal battles ahead. The group, led by Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, has already planned to meet in the coming weeks. Mr. McCain, also a member, said Wednesday, “We are not going to let this kind of partisanship cripple this body and injure the American people.” (From this Morning's NYT)

Really? How are they going to stop it? The Times article goes on:

Speaker John A. Boehner’s strategy always involved a gamble that his members would come away from this clash chastened. He intentionally allowed his most conservative members to sit in the driver’s seat as they tried in vain to get the Senate to accept one failed measure after another — first to defund the health care law, then to delay it, then to chip away at it. His hope was that they would realize the fight was not worth having again.

The worry among many Republicans is that the Tea Party flank will not get the message, mainly because their gerrymandered districts are so conservative they do not have to listen. 

Theda Skocpol in a Salon interview this morning thinks they and the rest of us should be worried:

A decade ago, you observed a long-term decline in American civic participation and the groups that used to foster it. What does the Tea Party mean for that?

 At the grassroots, it’s a return to some traditional methods. The grassroots Tea Party actually formed, at their height, about 900 local groups – genuinely new groups. I wrote in Diminished Democracy that the Right has been more effective at either sustaining or recreating federated action, which is the key to American politics – to be able to organize across many districts, many states, and still be part of something national. The Tea Party is a different kind of manifestation of that.

They’ve actually destroyed the organizational integrity of the Republican Party right now. That’s why the situation is so scary for the United States. The Washington press corps wants to write again and again that both sides should compromise. The fact of the matter is that Obama doesn’t have anybody to compromise with. He can’t make a deal, because the Tea Party forces have discombobulated the Republican leadership. John Boehner can’t make a deal with anybody. He can’t deliver even on what he wants for breakfast.

“Destroyed the organizational integrity of the Republican Party” how so?

Republican Party committees can’t necessarily keep themselves at all levels from being taken over or end-run-ed by Tea Party forces. The leadership in the Senate, [and] especially in the House, can’t control their various actions, can’t use a combination of carrots and sticks to put things together. It means even that in elections, Republicans can’t control the message they’re sending out. You can declare that you’re going to have outreach to women and minorities, and the next day Rush Limbaugh can say god-knows-what. People can show up at the U.S. Capitol with a confederate flag in front of the White House. Things are kind of out of control.

So the answer is No. They won't feel chastened, and if McCain, Graham et al. have a plan to chasten them, I'd be interested to hear about it. The only real solution is to make sure that after 2014 the Republicans remain the minority party until the Tea Party dissipates. 

What strikes me in the media accounts of this is the narrative that the Tea Party is stupid because they don't know how to play the game, and this gambit was doomed to fail. What they don't take into consieration is that they could care less about the Beltway establishment and that they are on a mission to destroy it. There's a part of me that wants to cheer them on, but I have no reason to believe that something better would emerge from the rubble if they succeeded. There are plenty of good reasons to believe it would be a lot worse. 

Will the Cruz Coalition Feel Chastened?

From Grover Norquist:

“They hurt the conservative movement, they hurt people’s health care, they hurt the country’s economic situation and they hurt the Republican party,” he says. “And a lot of congressmen and senators are not going to win because we spent three months chasing our own tail — or at least, parts of the conservative movement spent three months chasing their own tail.”

He also compared the Defunders’ strategy to that of the Iraq invasion.

“These are the people who said, ‘Plan: Step One, Invade Iraq. Step Two, It turns into Kansas,’” Norquist says. “Could I ask if there’s anything in between Step One and Step Two? ‘Oh ye of little faith.’”

The Cruz Coalition has the serpent-dove balance backwards. The idea is to advance the goals and ideals of the dove using the tactical shrewdness of the serpent. The Cruz Coalition instead advances the goals of the serpent using the guileless tactics of the dove. A dangerous reversal.

Even if these foolish people in Congress have learned their lesson, the angry people who put them there have not. Politicians have to compromise and make deals; it's just the way it works. That will never play for these members back home.

Maybe this thing just runs out of steam. It's unlikely, but it's possible. We'll see in January. 

Is This an Historic Moment?

As this week’s deadline neared, the investor Warren Buffett, among others, likened threatening default to a kind of economic nuclear warfare. The White House approached the confrontation with the gravity of those October days a half-century ago when President John F. Kennedy stared down Nikita Khrushchev over the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles in Cuba. If Mr. Obama blinked this time, he and his advisers believed, he would invite more showdowns and threaten his already limited leverage to enact the rest of his second-term agenda. (From this monring's NYT)

***

The word many Mexicans now use to describe Washington reflects a familiar mix of outrage and exasperation: berrinche. Technically defined as a tantrum, berrinches are also spoiled little rich kids, blind to their privilege and the effects of their misbehavior.

“It’s a display of American arrogance,” said Raúl Silva, 40, an entrepreneur grabbing coffee at an upscale cafe here. “It’s a problem, and it’s going to affect us.”

Faced with Washington’s march toward a default, the world has reacted mostly with disbelief that the reigning superpower could fall into such dysfunction, worry over global suffering to come and frustration that American lawmakers could let the problem reach this point. (From this morning's NYT)

I don't know how many Americans have been paying attention to what has been going on in Washington the last few weeks, or how many care. I was talking to a neighbor--a retired lawyer who used to work for the govt--and he hadn't a clue. We're all the time living through things and missing the meaning of them, even if we're paying attention. So I've been paying attention, but have little confidence I understand the meaning. But it strikes me that, while this moment is not likel go down in the history books as the political economic equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it is, nevertheless, a significant historical moment.

I'm not talking about the specific economic impacts of what's happening this week so much as what this move by the Tea Party symbolizes. Al Qaeda's destruction of the World Trade Center was also primarily symbolic, but in Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams. he could never do as much damage to the system he hates as these Tea Party Yahoos are threatening to do. (Or just maybe they're not yahoos. Maybe they are really covert Al-Qaeda operatives, and Ted Cruz is their Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Hmmm.) 

Whoever they are, I don't expect them to succeed in imploding the world financial system--this week, anyway. But we have learned that the "system" is a lot more vulnerable to this kind of political takedown than I, at least, thought it was. We've learned that a group of 50 zealots following means that are perfectly legal can bring the government to its knees by threatening a financial meltdown. We've learned that it comes down to one guy--the Speaker of the House--to make a decision to call a vote or not to. And while it's almost certain that John Boehner will call a vote even if he has to break the Hastert Rule, he might lose his speakership if he does, and what if he's replaced by a Tea Party zealot? Will the new speaker break the Hastert rule when all this happens again in January or Februrary?  

This group of fifty is going to keep pounding, and if they are given enough time, the wall will be breached. The only way I see to stop them is to reduce the Republicans in the House to a minority, and how likely is that? Well, what if moderate Republicans in purple districts find they must either defect to the Democrats or get Christine O'Donnelled? Why not make an Arlen Specter move before getting primaried? Leave a party that is dominated by zealots you despise or lose your job? Seems like a no-brainer. The 2014 midterms are going to be pretty interesting. If there is a historical moment here, it might be because an historic realignment regarding the party system is in the works. We'll see about a year from now.

And this is at the very least a benchmark in another historical shift, which is the world sees it can no longer rely on the U.S. or the dollar as the anchor of financial stability. This will have consequences.

Tom Frank on the Creative Class

I like Frank, but I don't know quite what to make of this piece about recognizing creativity. It might be described as post that fits into the bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you genre. He protesteth too much. But it raises some interesting questions about how creativity gets recognized:

And what was the true object of this superstitious stuff? A final clue came from “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” (1996), in which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.” Innovation, that is, exists only when the correctly credentialed hivemind agrees that it does. And “without such a response,” the author continues, “van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.” What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise.

Really??? The larger argument that Frank seems to be making is that his creative friends back in Chicago still laboring inn obscure penury are being done an injustice. They should be broadly recognized for their brilliance; they should, therefore, be "successful". They are not. It's not fair. It's the fault of the hivemind of established expertise. People who find success, like Jonah Lehrer, find it because they meet the expectations of the hivemind. 

So when in the history of civilization was that ever not true? Sure, established expertise didn't recognize van Gogh, but then it did. It recognized Shakespeare, then it didn't, then it did. It never didn't recognize Michelangelo, Mozart, Beethoven. So I doubt Frank is arguing that the hivemind of established expertise never recognizes creative excellence or that broad popular acceptance is always mark of selling out. If that were true, then Beethoven would be to music what Dan Brown is to literature.

Broad recognition for creative work depends on two things: first, it has to be very good; second, it has to resonate with the zeitgeist, a non-pejorative term I prefer to 'hivemind'. Establishment experts are the tastemakers who are most attuned to the zeitgeist. Frank is complaining that he doesn't like the zeitgeist. Lots of people don't, me included. But then again, the zeitgeist has given Tom Frank ample recognition.

So is this particular post by Frank motivated by guilt about selling out to a zeitgeist he finds contemptible? Maybe. He's become a success widely recognized by the tastemakers of the cultural and political Left establishment. He even had a contrarian weekly op-ed column at the Wall Street Journal for a while. So clearly this post cannot be a complaint about his own creative efforts not being recognized. So what's the problem? Is he afraid that he's slowly forgetting where he came from and morphing into Jonah Lehrer?

Thoughtful Conservatives Hate . . .

"Individualism". Why? Because it creates a deracinated, anomic, atomized mass that looks to the State to solve its problems. Statism is the enemy, and individualism paves the road over which we will inevitably travel to get there. Here's Big Think's and PoMoCon's Peter Lawler on the subject:

Modern individualism is the cause of modern statism. The inability to keep Locke in the Locke box–and the resulting withering away all the various “intermediary institutions”–leave the lonely, shivering individual with no choice but to cling to dependency on an omnicompetent state. And it’s individualism (that “heart disease” that makes us apathetically indifferent to the fate of our fellow citizens), Tocqueville says, that makes us all easy prey for despots.

Tocqueville might be interpreted to talk up the ways American combat individualism–from local political institutions to free associations to religion to even the family–as existing in fact but not in principle in America.

I think this is a legitimate concern. Putnam makes the same point in Bowling Alone. Conservatives dread Statism--the Stalinist State or the Orwellian State of 1984. Who doesn't? But is it accurate to say that individualism is the cause of modern statism? Is individualism, in other words, some kind of mistake? 

Locke and those who followed him didn't invent individualism; they simply expressed what was already in the ether, so to say. More people began to experience themselves as individuals starting in the 1400s. It's what happens when you start to read, and after Gutenberg more and more people where reading. They read the Bible for themselves rather than only hearing it read in the assembly. And an interior life started to be more commonly experienced, and it became possible to have ideas that were not the same as the community groupthink. And the wonder of the individual human being--his reason, his conscience, his being the measure of all things--was at the heart of Renaissance humanism and then further emphasized by the Reformation in matters of faith.

People started thinking for themselves of seeing themselves as autonomous agents. In other words, they were growing up, and in growing up they had to leave the nest and make mistakes from which they would learn. Yes, it led to the fragmentation of Christendom, but I'd argue that it was necessary to allow more people to come into possession of Freedom, which I'd argue is our deepest identity as spiritual beings. That this freedom was abused--and continues to be--is a necessary cost. Nevertheless, the robust emergence of individualism during the Renaissance/Reformation era was an advancement. It meant the loss of a naive traditional community life, but creates the conditions for the possibility of a more mature free individual living in communion with other free individuals. 

And yes the mistakes that followed the crack up of Christendom were often horrific. In the next century the atrocities associated with wars of religion--the Thirty Years War on the continent and the Civll War in England--largely delegitimated the churches, or it at least sent thoughtful people scurrying for a more humane alternative than that presented by people who claimed to be Christians. Human reason seemed to offer a robust alternative, and it was embraced by the culture's leading lights. And at the same time emergent capitalism and the new class of people driven by commercial passions wanted the constraints of the mercantilist State removed to give them more freedom to pursue their economic interests, and thus was unleashed the creative destructive forces of market capitalism. The spirit of the age destroyed the old ways, and the State is simply a manifiestation of that spirit.

And in this context Locke arises, and then later Bentham and Mill. Are they mistaken? Yes and no. Yes in that they see the world only very partially; No in that they accurately reflect in their thinking the spirit of the age, which is this ferverish embrace of Freedom. Freedom from, freedom for, freedom exalted, freedom abused--it is the preoccupation of the age, and culminates in Nietzsche, and later Sartre, and the whole fissiparous, quasi-nihilist thing we call the postmodern. And this spirit and the forces unleashed by it, not the State, were the principal destroyers of the traditional social fabric conservatives lament the loss of. 

Conservatives like Lawler, Deneen, Larison understand that economic forces have played a huge role in the destruction of traditional intermediary associations and institutions and with it the creation of the deracinated individual that restlessly wanders the contemporary American culturescape. Are they right, though, to blame Progressive thinkers for abetting a movement toward the inevitable Statism that they fear will be the only thing to contain this entropic social chaos? Do they see a problem that Progressives don't in the latter's more sanguine embrace of the State to provide solutions for pressing social and economic problems? Are they right to think that the Progressive embrace of State to find solutions in an age of massive social upheaval will have consequences they do not intend?

For surely almost everybody I know who thinks himself a progressive doesn't want the Stalinist or Orwellian State. But conservatives like Lawler and Deneen would counter that these Progressives may say they don't want it, but they don't realize how it follows inevitably from their own assumptions regarding the sacrosanct individual and his rootless rights. But are all Progressives really such rabid individualists? Some are, but I'd argue most are not. They just don't embrace the traditional forms of community and intermediate association that their parents and grandparents did. Not because they are against them in principle but because they lack any real cultural vitality. These traditional forms no longer hold the life that shaped them in the first place, and so they are simply adapting to the world as they find it, a world defined by market capitalism. 

So if I were challenged by Lawler or Deneen to justify why I think my progressivism is not paving the road to Statism, I would say that I'm not at all at home in the sterile thought world of Locke, Bentham, and Mill. And I would argue, also, that Republicans and Democrats are equally comfortable in that world because they're both Liberals in the Locke-Mill tradition. Classical Liberalism is the moribund thought world of a dying historical cultural era. From it we will move on, and this blog is all about trying to think about what a non-Liberal Progressivism might mean. 

I lean Democrat in my politics not because I feel particularly at home there, but because, while it accepts Liberal assumptions, it has at least tried to mitigate the free market's more destructive effects on ordinary people. The ethos of the Republican Party is for me astonishingly cold-hearted at worst, oblivious at best of the suffering that the modern market economy causes. This freak-out about Obamcare is over-the-top, and the idea that it's some foreshadowing of the Stalinist state cannot be taken seriously--not even a little bit. The Democrats, at least the best of them, recognize that in late modernity the state must play a critical role to mitigate the massive damage the market economy inflicts on people, and which overwhelm the coping capacity of the intermediary institutions. If you want to have free markets, you have to have some institutions large enough to clean up the messes it makes. Anybody with a shred of commons sense and common decency recognizes this. 

I'd then tell them that I embrace the principle of subsidiarity, and that, yes, subsidiarity requires culturally vital, flourishing, intermediary associations and institutions, but it also needs the State to step in when those intermediary institutions are overwhelmed. And I'd argue that it's precisely because most of the traditional associations have been weakened or destroyed by market capitalism, that there's no use crying over spilt milk. Rather the task is to adapt the old insititutions that have stayng power and create new ones better suited to a world with 10 billion people in it, all of them rubbing up against one another in ways that make the old tribal identity mentality utterly inadequate.

Conservatives' complaining about what was lost is a waste of energy. Create something new, something that has vitality and that will attract people because it's good. Retrieve the the treasures that have been lost and re-present them to the world. Seduce the broader culture with quality--with truth and beauty. And stop worrying so much about the State. It's not the enemy. The corporate takeover of the State is. That's the nightmare scenario that both progressives and thoughtful conservatives ought to be able to join forces to resist.

And you do that not by sending crazy people to congress who want to destroy the State, but by preaching subsidiarity and sending people who understand that the State has a vital role to play in promoting a flourishing society, but also that it's not everything. And it's certainly not the most important thing.

We need an electorate and their political representatives who understand that at the end of the day the most important thing is free, well-informed, critical thinking, self-reliant citizenry living and working together with others like them in intermediary associations--families, churches, unions, small businesses, bowling leagues, whatever. That's where the life is--not in the State. But there is nothing structurally inherent in the State that prevents these associations from flourishing. That cannot be said about what is structurally inherent in our economic life. 

Francis's Church

Timothy Egan in this morning's Times:

The Jesuits have always tried to get people to think for themselves, to arrive at belief through an arduous process. When bishops started telling parishioners that their gay and lesbian siblings were sinners, and that family planning was a grievous wrong, people stopped listening to them — for good reason.

“In terms of people in the pews, the Catholic Church lost roughly one-fourth of its strength over the last 35 years,” wrote the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their book “American Grace.” They argue that when the religious right politicized faith, they put a “not welcome” sign on the door for millions of people of faith. This was compounded by the hypocrisy of these same moral authorities protecting pedophile priests while ignoring the lifelong anguish of the victims. For much of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in places was essentially organized crime in clerical garb.

The spirituality of Pope Francis, like his namesake from Assisi, is by example. Shedding the glam trappings of power and the aura of invincibility, he lives in a spartan guesthouse, mixes with the folks and tries to give voice to the sick, the poor, the immigrant living in the shadows. He washes the feet of prisoners, and Muslim ones at that. He laments that worshiping “the god called money” makes for bankrupt human beings.

The church he envisions would be a “home for all,” not “a nest protecting our mediocrity.” It’s strong stuff, long overdue and as refreshing as a brisk wind blowing down from the Dolomites.

Sure. This is a welcome change. I think the world wants the Catholic Church to present its best self--a self that represents the spirit of the gospels rather than the spirit of moralistic fussiness and institutional self-protection. But nothing really changes until the Catholic Church moves out of Rome.

I know. It's not going to happen. Petrine ministry and all that. It's too bad because the "Roman" part of the Roman Catholic Church is its biggest burden. So long as the ghosts of the empire inhabit the Vatican hallways, there will be something fundamentally unchristian about the Roman Church. Popes like John XXIII and Francis come and go, but the ghosts remain. 

The Roman Church in the coming century faces the choice whether it wants to be a Church that appeals primarily to fear-and-order-obsessed, right-wing personality types or to all people of good will, and if the latter it needs a clean break with its history of abuses of power. The ghosts in the hallways are all about power--getting more of it and abusing it. Those ghosts are the spirit of Rome; they have nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels.