After the Future

Sawant on Boeing

“If Boeing executives want to leave the state, they are welcome to do that,” she told a cheering crowd at Town Hall Seattle in 2012. “The fact is, the workers are here. The factories are here. ... We are therefore calling for the democratic, public ownership by workers and by the community of the workplaces of the big corporations.”

The Seattle Times does a nice profile of Sawant in todays' paper.

But why does her worker ownership idea seem so far fetched?

It comes down to what I was saying a few weeks ago in relation to the ACA about how we frame things. We are so inured to companies' being run for the benefit of stockholders and their executives that the idea of a worker-owned company just seems outlandish and subversive, no matter how much sense it makes. 

But if ours was a truly sane and decent society, it should make no sense to us--indeed, we should recoil in collective horror--that Boeing can just lay off thousands of well-paid, skilled workers and leave a city because it can improve its margins elsewhere. We're not talking about Boeing's survival--just its profitability. 

In other words, what's insane is the frame. The most insane, indecent things seem sane within an insane frame. And that insane frame is economic Liberalism, whether in its classic 19th century form or in its current Neoliberal form. It doesn't work, if by working we mean provisioning a sane, decent society. If you don't believe me, ask the Pope.

I'm ambivalent about socialism providing an adequeately sane counterframe, but we need somebody to push back, and if the socialists are the only ones willing to do it, I'm with them.

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 2

I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it:

See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs:

I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we could perceive, in fact, a pervasive historical commitment to the aspiration of republican self-government. Because humans in their social and political communities are various, it was understood by our Founders that the way that these educational purposes to be achieved would be various, and so the commitment to local control of education was not born of a resignation in the absence of a strong central government, but a positive embrace of variety and multiplicity. Because there is likely to be debate and disagreement in a pluralistic society over the nature of our civic ends and the nature of a good character, it was understood that only in more local circumstances could the highest aspirations of education be pursued, even if that would be various and multiple. In our modern insistence to standardize and equalize, we necessarily discard any higher aspiration of education’s end in an embrace of a widely-secured agreement about lower, debased ends: an education based upon a lowest common-denominator, “career-readiness.” Our civilization thus shows its ultimate commitments through how it educates its young—that we think them incapable of anything higher than being workers in a deracinated globalized economic system, neither citizens nor, in the fullest sense, humans.

At the same time, we condemn ourselves, betraying our ancient faith in our own ability to educate and cultivate our young, handing over our final and most basic liberty to a distant power. Contained in the very act of handing over the education of our young is the self-indictment of a decaying Republic, a future feared by, among others, Tocqueville, as a possible path that America might take, since it is one that all republics heretofore have taken, and is an inevitability once a people has lost the taste and the art of ruling themselves.

 

"...whether ... any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure."

We all know that yesterday was the 50th anniversary of JFK's death, but Tuesday was the sesquicentennial of the delivery of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We look at Lincoln now as St. Abraham. He was hardly that, and he was hardly perceived that way by his  contemporaries.

He was, however, the man of the hour, and as such someone who had a better sense for its meaning. He was the guy nobody expected anything of but always exceeded expectations. He was the unpolished bumpkin who throught shrewder, saw straighter, and understood better what the 'hour' required than those around him. That's what made him special, and as the war drew to a close those around him began to recognize it, and then he was gone. 

I like what Allen Guelzo had to say about the address in a NYT piece earlier this week:

The address is less like an oration, and more like that oldest of American genres, the Puritan jeremiad, the public sermon that warned our forebears of their sins but also offered them a path to redemption. The three-part, past-present-future movement in the address matches the same movement in the jeremiad, and like it, the address contains both a word of warning and a promise of blessing.

The warning Lincoln issues is his admission that the Civil War was testing whether or not democracies are inherently unstable — “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” Today, many take democracy for granted as the endpoint of political development. But it did not look that way in 1863. The French Revolution, which promised to be the American Revolution’s beachhead in Europe, swiftly circled downward in the Reign of Terror and then the tyranny of Bonaparte; democratic uprisings in Spain in 1820, in Russia in 1825, in France in 1830 and across Europe in 1848 were crushed by newly renascent monarchies or subverted by Romantic philosophers, glorying in regimes built on blood, soil and nationality rather than the Rights of Man.

The outbreak of the American Civil War only gave the monarchs further reason to rejoice. The survival of the American democracy had been a thorn in their royal sides, unsettling their downtrodden peoples with dreams of self-government. That this same troublesome democracy would, in 1861, obligingly proceed to blow its own political brains out — and do it in defense of the virtues of human slavery — gave the monarchs no end of delight.

Lincoln’s task at Gettysburg was to persuade his hearers, on the evidence offered by three days of battle, that democracy’s sun had not set after all. Gettysburg was not only a victory, but a victory won with the Union Army’s back to the wall, and its news came, appropriately, on July 4. . . .

Looking out over the semicircular rows of graves, Lincoln saw in them a transcendence that few people, then or now, have been willing to concede to liberal democracy. And he saw something all could borrow, a renewed dedication to popular self-government, “that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion.” Like the jeremiad, it would point toward a renewal, a new birth, not of freedom from sin, but political freedom.

The genius of the address thus lay not in its language or in its brevity (virtues though these were), but in the new birth it gave to those who had become discouraged and wearied by democracy’s follies, and in the reminder that democracy’s survival rested ultimately in the hands of citizens who saw something in democracy worth dying for. We could use that reminder again today.

 

Seattle's Two Most Interesting Elections

Washington State has 100% mail-in ballots, so it takes a while to find out who wins in close elections. Sue Peters and Kshama Sawant were in such close elections, and both won. Neither ran as Democrats in a Democrats-dominated town--they ran to the left of the Dem establishment and won despite all the money that establishment poured into the establishment candidates' campaigns. It gives one hope that money isn't everything, at least on the local level where opinions are formed by actually seeing and hearing the candidates in person. 

Peters ran as an independent for school board on an anti-corporate education reform platform, and Sawant ran as a socialist on a raise the minimum wage to $15/hr platform. Both are super smart, articulate women, and they really deserved to win, but who'd a thought they would. Both were long shots even in September. Seattle is a well-informed, progressive town by American standards, especially on cultural issues, but it's bit by the Neoliberal bug when it comes to economic issues. That comes from the techy and entrepreneurial types, the Microsoft millionaires, the Jeff Bezoses and Howard Schultz's who lean pro-business libertarian. No need to put the neanderthals in Boeing even in that group. 

Salon did an interview piece with Sawant here, and in a way it's unfortunate that she's calling herself a socialist because she's just talking common sense, and regardless of her success here, I doubt the socialist party is going to get much traction. But maybe I'm wrong. She's not anti business. She just recognizes that as productive as capitalism is, it has a very serious distribution problem. If it takes a socialist in office to do something about that, more power to her.

And here's a HuffPo piece Peters wrote a few years ago that represents where she's coming from, which is where I'm coming from on education issues, and it's why I ran for school board (and lost) in another district two years ago. 

I don't want to make too much of this, but both these elections make me hopeful that rank-and-file Democrats are beginning to make distinctions  between corporate Democrats (liberal on cultural issues, but pro 1% on economic issues) and candidates who represent rank-and-file interests.

 

Evangelicals and Progressivism

Ira Chernus has an interesting article this morning in Salon on the necessity of Progressives finding way to ally themselves with evangelical Christians. Here are his closing paragraphs:

It’s the religious right, long the progressive left’s favorite target, that is now the richest target of opportunity. Because politically progressive evangelical Christianity is not merely a relic of the 19th century. It’s making a comeback.

That presents left progressives with a challenge. In your struggle for justice, would you ally with people who share your commitment to greater economic equality but would like to see government ban abortion and gay marriage? Today the question may seem abstract and hypothetical. Soon enough it may become a very real issue of debate for progressive strategists, and there are bound to be good arguments on both sides.

However, everyone should be able to agree that at least progressives outside the evangelical community should begin talking to folks inside that circle who are open to hearing the progressive message. Evangelicals will have to filter the message through their own beliefs, which means phrasing it in a somewhat different language.

Smart progressives will start learning that language, figuring out how to communicate with evangelicals and discover common ground. Smart progressives will also learn how to remind evangelicals, gently but persuasively, of their own radical political history, which many may not know.

The main goal here should be to make the progressive tent wide enough to make room for evangelicals. Though we are far from the 19th century, evangelicals can now, as then, bring a unique kind of energy into progressive movements that can pay off. As a side benefit, moving evangelicals to the left will also widen the cracks in the shaky conservative alliance and hasten the day when it can no longer hold itself together.

I've been preaching this for years, but I am less optimistic than Chernus that such an alliance between the progressive left and the religious right can be forged. Economic issues are abstract and tribal identity issues are deeply felt. The cultural left and the cultural right, despite what should be common ground for them on critical ecnomic issues, really don't like or trust each other; it's hard to see how they would ever get together in common cause. It's too easy for them to get distracted in a fight about abortion or gay rights, which is where their passions really lie. 

I'd also argue that there was a progressive side to evangelical Christianity when most Protestants felt that America was "their country"; it gave them a sense of noblesse oblige. After the Scopes trial, they've been on the defensive. They really believe that the modern world is out to destroy everything they cherish and that they are an embattled minority threatened with extinction. That's not a mindset that supports a more generous, idealistic politics.

Why Broad Consensus Is a Phantom

An article in Salon this morning about polling that shows how most Americans are to the left even of positions taken by the mainstream Democrats:

With such a profoundly self-contradictory practice, it should not surprise us that the poll was even more misleading than Pareene described. Polarization in some sense is real — and yet also partial, misleading and embedded in consensus as well. Tea Partyers ranting “Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare!” may seem comical — but they also show just how broad a true consensus can be.  In fact, they reflect two central (but routinely ignored) facts of American public opinion that have remained remarkably stable since the 1960s, despite all that’s changed since then:

1.  It’s not just the center vs. the extremes; there is broad consensus across the boards on the basic contours of government spending priorities — the historically most important dimension of political opinion.
2. It’s just that the center is not where it’s supposed to be: It’s not somewhere in between the two parties, it’s well to the left of the Democrats in D.C.

These two facts are both in full force with respect to the ongoing post-shutdown budget battle. In fact, a sophisticated poll covering 31 budget items as well as revenue sources conducted around the 2010 elections found that, even then, Republican, Democratic and independent voters all agreed on much higher taxes and much deeper defense cuts as the most striking elements of how the budget should be crafted. But before we examine that poll, we need to put these two key facts into long-term context.

The first clear picture of this situation came from two pioneers of public opinion research, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, in their 1967 book, “The Political Beliefs of Americans,”based on surveys conducted in 1964. Their most striking finding was profoundly paradoxical: While half the population qualified as ideological conservatives, based on questions about government interference and individual initiative, two-thirds of the population were operationally liberal, supporting an activist federal government when asked about specific programs or responsibilities — stable or increased federal government spending on education, housing and urban renewal, adoption of Johnson’s Medicare proposal, and government responsibility to fight poverty.

In short, the American people were in some sense schizoid — opposed to big government in principle, but even more supportive  of it in practice. Most strikingly, almost one-quarter of the population — 23 percent — were both ideological conservatives and operational liberals, and this figure skyrocketed to 46 percent in the Deep South states that Goldwater carried in the 1964 election.

Three points: First, a public opinion consensus about any issue doesn't matter if it isn't organized into a party that actually elects majorities that represent it.

Second, the problem for economic progressives is that they don't have a party that represents them. The Neoliberals running the national Democratic Party are not economic progressives. They are cultural liberals, but otherwise in the pocket of the 1%.

Third, the "schizoid" thing comes from tribal/identity political allegiances, which are more primal than any thinking about particular policies. So some kind of coalition between cultural conservatives and cultural liberals around economic issues is unlikely even if they would discover, after actually talking to one another, that they agree on most economic issues. Liberals just don't like conservatives and vice versa, so they could never work together as long as media and neoliberal elites keep making abortion, gay rights, or whatever becomes the next cultural wedge issue, the litmus test of political allegiance. This is exactly how elites want Main Street--divided and conquered. 

Until somebody figures out how to outplay the one percenters in the rigged game they have devised with the help of their bought friends,  they keeping taking all the chips. I understand the temptation to stop playing, to flip the table and send all the chips flying. Isn't that what a default would have accomplished? I just think that what would replace our rigged game would be even worse. 

Crashing the Frame

I've thought a lot over the years about persuasion and why it's so difficult, especially when it comes to political values and opinions, and the best conceptual tool that helps me to understand the difficulty is 'frames'. There are individual and group mindframes, and more often than not you can predict the individual's thinking if you know his group allegiances. Independent thinking is rare. Arguments are about mindframes butting against one another, and mostly the mindframes of the individuals engaged in argument are determined by their conflicting group mindframes.

It's refreshing when you find an independent thinker. You have a chance, then, to engage in an honest conversation, but most people are not. Most people's thinking is derivative, they are mouthing what other, smarter people on their team have said. And even when they seem to have lost an argument, they console themselves in thinking that if Rush or Rachel were here, he or she would have set that guy straight. It's not the ideas that matter; it's the team you're playing for that matters. 

So to even have a conversation with such people you have to make arguments that accept as normative that person's frame, and in doing so you are usually doomed to failure when the interior logical architecture of the frame more often than not excludes the logic or facts you muster. You can argue about how much practical sense a single payer health care system makes, but the only response you're going to get from a Neoliberal is "That's socialistic; let's find a market solution."

So then your only option is to crash the other's frame and to introduce yours as a more adequate or desirable replacement. But that is extraordinarily hard to do--too much is personally invested in a frame, especially "ethos frames" (see below) because so much of one's sense of self and identity is invested in it, and with it one's sense of what is right and just. Let me explain.

The rhetorical tradition leans heavily on three foundational concepts: logos, pathos, and ethos, and I think it's helpful to think about logos frames, pathos frames, and ethos frames. A logos frame is defined by facts, analytical prowess, competency, practicality, getting things done--it's the frame that wonks work in and take most seriously. An ethos frame is defined by a group's beliefs, its sense of virtue and rightness, its values. It's the frame that most politicians operate in, whether they are influenced by the Tea Party Right's ethos, or the politically correct ethos of the cultural left.  A pathos frame is defined by a person's or group's desires and fears: What do we really want? What do we want to avoid? The Frank Underwoods are primarily driven by the pathos of power or greed, and logos and ethos arguments are irrelevant for them except as they can use them to further their own interests. 

Remember rock, scissors,paper? Well, logos, pathos, ethos works similarly. Pathos/emotion beats ethos/beliefs, ethos beats logos, but here's the difference--logos doesn't beat anything. Logos wonkery works only within established  ethos or pathos frames. All logos arguments work within frames that have prerational (ethos or pathos) foundations. You don't want to deal with facts and details until you've been sold, and you get sold because an idea, a product purchase, an opportunity 'fits' with your existing sense of what's right. (Tea Party) Or because it serves your self interest. (Frank Underwood)

Or if it conflicts with your values, you can get sold because you really, really want it or really, really fear it. We might feel guilty, but advertizers understand that pathos beats ethos for most people most of the time. Facts, reason, competency come into play only once you've established your pathos or ethos frame, and the argument moves to a more deliberative discussion of strategy and tactics about how to accomplish the goals that we want or align with our beliefs. The most powerful arguments are those that work with a confluence of ethos and pathos, when your hopes and fears align with what you most deeply believe. And when you get that going on a collective level, then you have a very powerful social movement. Once again, the Tea Party is a good example. The political left? I don't know? What does it believe? What is it willing to put its neck on the line for? Where is its pathos?

So when you are in an argument, you have either to work within the frame of your opponent, or you have to crash it. Eisenhower and Nixon were considered conservatives in their day, but since they felt constrained to operate within the New Deal ethos frame, they are perceived as way to the left of conservatives today. Barry Goldwater tried to crash the New Deal frame and failed miserably. Ronald Reagan tried again 16 years later and succeeded. We have lived since then within a Neoliberal  frame, and now so-called Liberals like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama seem conservative when contrasted with Nixon and Eisenhower. A single payer healthcare system never had a chance in the 2010 healthcare debate because it makes no sense--it just doesn't feel right to anyone who inhabits a Neoliberal frame, and that's the frame that dominates the thinking of Washington policymakers. If you are unable to crash the Neoliberal frame, the ACA was the best possibility.

I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008 because with Hillary I knew I was getting a Neoliberal and because Obama talked as if he wanted to crash the Neoliberal frame. I wasn't certain that he would do it, but there was a chance he would. And I believed, and still do, that Obama at his worst would be no worse than Clinton at her best. As it turns out we got Obama at his worst, not because he's weak or bad but because he never attempted to crash the Neoliberal frame. It would be ironic if Hillary runs for the Democratic nomination again and loses to Elizabeth Warren. If she does, it's because Warren is someone who represents herself as a frame crasher, and that's deep down what all of us want. Whether she would do any better than Obama I have no idea. 

Obama's hands, as a result, were tied from the beginning. He adapted to the Neoliberal ethos frame as Eisenhower and Nixon adapted to the New Deal frame. The results were  predictable as soon as he hired his economic team, and considering the over-the-top vehemence of his GOP antagonists, his results aren't terrible--he avoided complete collapse so we could return to the status quo ante of the Bush years. The problem isn't primarily his competency or lack of it; the problem is the frame. The ACA as perceived from within any ethos-neutral Logos frame was an unnecessarily complex patchwork, and as such a disaster waiting to happen. But Logos only works within an existing Ethos frame in politics--and the disaster was always very likely. If this whole fiasco says anything about Obama's competency, it's because he seems not to have anticipated it.

Did Obama miss an opportunity in 2009-10? Well, going back to my rock, scissors, paper analogy, the only thing that beats an ethos frame is a pathos frame, and there was a lot of fear to work with after the financial crisis of 2008. He chose not to work with that fear, but rather to suppress it and get things back to the status quo ante, and in doing so he aligned himself with the Neoliberals on Wall Street, and if there was ever a chance of his breaking the Neoliberal frame, it was unlikely after making those alliances so central to his presidency. 

But the fear that was released by the 2008 crisis didn't just evaporate after the bailouts and the calming of the markets; it was absorbed into the the Tea Party, and the tragedy is that the rank and file in the Tea Party fear the right things, but don't have a constructive ethos frame to channel their pathos productively. 

Whatever else you may think about the Tea Party, the people in it are right to fear the Beltway cronyist mindframe. They want to crash that frame, and so should the rest of us want to. The problem, of course, is that the Tea Party doesn't seem to care if crashing it also crashes the world economy, as the sans culottes didn't care about anything except expressing their resentment, rage, and fear. 

And the irony, or course, lies in that the populist rage that drives the rank and file in the Tea Party has been coopted precisely by the cronyists who are using them to reinforce their own bunkers of entrenched privilege. They coopted Obama by constraining him in a Neoliberal straitjacket, and then they coopted the Tea Party by channeling its anger at the spendthrift, big government with Obama at its head. They are deftly playing the one off the other. They shore up their entrenched positions by setting up a very powerful pathos frame for the Tea Party and a constraining ethos frame for Obama, who, like many Liberals, prides himself as operating within a Logos frame, which doesn't beat anything. So anybody who understands this watches in frustration (or glee) as the he tries to reason and talk sense with people whose ethos frame makes it impossible for them to trust him, and whose pathos has been aroused to destroy him.

Obama might have seized the opportunity presented to him to channel all the anger that was directed toward Wall Street when he first assumed the presidency, but he felt he had to rely on precisely the people he should have been fighting. Maybe nothing else was possible even for a shrewder, stronger man, but that was the moment when something could have changed because there was all this pathos up for grabs, and it just needed an effective ethos frame to channel it constructively. Maybe next time.

What's the solution? I don't think there is one. Pathos--fear/anger, and desire/hope--are the only things that have the power to crash an ethos frame and inspire the erection of a new one. We had our opportunity in 2009, and we missed it. We just have to ride it out now and contain the damage as best we can until a new opportunity presents itself.

 

Francis Spufford on Lennon's 'Imagine'

Or for a piece of famous fluffiness that doesn’t just pretend about what real lives can be like, but moves on into one of the world’s least convincing pretenses about what people themselves are like, consider the teased and coiffed nylon monument that is “Imagine”: surely the My Little Pony of philosophical statements. John and Yoko all in white, John at the white piano, John drifting through the white rooms of a white mansion, and all the while the sweet drivel flowing. Imagine there’s no heaven. Imagine there’s no hell. Imagine all the people, living life in—hello?

Excuse me? Take religion out of the picture, and everybody spontaneously starts living life in peace? I don’t know about you, but in my experience peace is not the default state of human beings, any more than having an apartment the size of Joey and Chandler’s is. Peace is not the state of being we return to, like water running downhill, whenever there’s nothing external to perturb us. Peace between people is an achievement, a state of affairs we put together effortfully in the face of competing interests, and primate dominance dynamics, and our evolved tendency to cease our sympathies at the boundaries of our tribe. Peace within people is made difficult to say the least by the way that we tend to have an actual, you know, emotional life going on, rather than an empty space between our ears with a shaft of dusty sunlight in it, and a lone moth flittering round and round. Peace is not the norm; peace is rare, and where we do manage to institutionalize it in a human society, it’s usually because we’ve been intelligently pessimistic about human proclivities, and found a way to work with the grain of them in a system of intense mutual suspicion like the U.S. Constitution, a document which assumes that absolutely everybody will be corrupt and power-hungry given half a chance. As for the inner version, I’m not at peace all that often, and I doubt you are either. I’m absolutely bloody certain that John Lennon wasn’t. The mouthy Scouse git he was as well as the songwriter of genius, the leatherboy who allegedly kicked his best friend in the head in Hamburg, didn’t go away just because he put on the white suit. What seems to be at work in “Imagine” is the idea—always beloved by those who are frightened of themselves—that we’re good underneath, good by nature, and only do bad things because we’ve been forced out of shape by some external force, some malevolent aspect of this world’s power structures. In this case, I suppose, by the education the Christian Brothers were dishing out in 1950s Liverpool, which was strong on kicks and curses, and loving descriptions of the tortures of the damned. It’s a theory that isn’t falsifiable, because there always are power structures there to be blamed when people behave badly. Like the theory that markets left to themselves would produce perfectly just outcomes (when markets never are left to themselves) it’s immune to disproof. But, and let me put this as gently as I can, it doesn’t seem terribly likely. We long to believe it because it’s what we lack. We dream of the peace we haven’t got, and to make ourselves look as if we do have it, we dress ourselves up in the iconography of the heaven we just announced we were ditching. White robes, the celestial glare of over-exposed film: “Imagine” looks like one part A Matter of Life and Death to one part Hymns Ancient and Modern. Only sillier. (Source)

Last spring I read Spufford's Unapologetic, his eccentric "apologia" for Christian belief, and I can't remember if I posted on it, but it's the kind of thing you need to give the "Imagine" lovers and new atheists in your life. It's not just his witty rejection of the spurious arguments made by religion's cultured despisers; it's worth reading because it is also an eloquent, painfully honest statement about faith, the real faith that is born from an encounter with the spirit that turns your life upside down.