After the Future

Identity Economics

A threat Marx downplayed has accelerated the concentration of wealth among the very richest. As Michael Hudson has noted, Marx recognized the destructive potential of financial capitalism, but thought it was inconceivable that it would become dominant. He believed the industrialists would succeed in keeping the bankers in check. They have not.

As income disparity has widened enormously and class mobility has eroded, Marx's idea of class warfare seems particularly apt. But as long as there is a sufficiently large remnant of the American middle class, still socialized to identify with the established order, no matter how beleaguered they are, it's hard to see how any organized, large scale uprising could occur. (Source.)

I think this is right. Resistance in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution wasn't driven so much by people who were already desperate and immiserated--they were largely broken-spirited and complacent. Resistance was driven mainly by those who had something in the pre capitalist order to lose--the artisans, tradesman, home weavers and spinners. They saw rightly that the new industrial system was destroying what was for them a decent way of life.

Neoliberalism might be destroying the American middle class, but it's doing it slowly, and it's not been that disruptive of the older way of life. Not at least in a way that has come close to reaching a critical mass. And anyway, it doesn't feel like something new. If anything, as the Tea Party folks point out, I think rightly, it draws on a deeply entrenched American mythos and retrieves the spirit of classic 19th century liberalism and its self-reliance ethos. It's the familiarity and comfort so many people feel with it that makes it so hard to fight. It's what made America great, right?

People resist new things, not old, familiar things. The early 19th Century peasants and brigands in Italy fought against the liberal bourgeois republicans for King and Church despite their immiseration by the latter. In the old mythos, King and Pope were benevolent patrons who would succor them if only they could. (In fact there was more mercy in the old customary system than there would be in the new one ruled by a stark bourgeois utilitarianism, but they didn't know that yet.) 

I think for Americans now, there's a similar attitude toward free-market capitalism.  You stick with what you're used to, and central to the capitalist mythos is that opportunity and good fortune are there for everyone who works for it. I might be poor now, but with some hard work and a little luck, I don't have to be. And even if I fail, there's always hope for my kids. No matter how little factual support there is for this mythos, it feels right, it feels noble and morally sound, and in contrast abstract notions of fairness and equality seem like justifications for parasitism. That's not who we are.

It will take a generation or two before people lose faith in this mythos. 

The Tea Party types insist they aren't racists because at the heart of their criticism of black and brown people is I think the correct perception that many black and brown people do not believe this mythos--they've lived with it for more than a generation or two. They see its reality more clearly and understand that the game is rigged, but that's beside the point for people who still believe in it. If you don't embrace the get-ahead, capitalist American mythos, you remain unassimilated and un-American. Enoch Powell made the same argument in the sixties as Britain was absorbing some of its decolonized masses--it's not about skin color, but about culture. These people do not understand our ways; they threaten to undermine everything that has made us great. 

America as land of opportunity provides a very strong ethos frame that will resist facts to the contrary for a long time to come, and nothing changes until that frame gets crashed and another replaces it. I don't see that happening any time soon. In the meanwhile, it's interesting to note that important factions within this broad traditional ethos have always hated the banks and later Wall Street. Maybe that's the place to organize around. 

Related articles

Crashing the Frame

The Tea Party and the Mythos of 'Real' Americans

The Ethos of the Left

I found this interesting description in a comment left in a TAC article by cka2nd  talking about the ethos of the New Left:

For all of the criticism of far left “sects” and their follies, we represent a pretty small proportion of the U.S. Left. The majority of the left flies under the radar while its members:

a) Engage in short-term and largely ineffectual activism as performance or catharsis.

b) Use organizational methods that have grown out of a mix of 70′s radical feminism and anarchism (consensus instead of majority rule, facilitation instead of chairmanship, “none of us are leaders, all of us are leaders” but look behind the curtain and you can readily identify the leadership clique).

c) Delcare that every new reformist activist group is utterly new and unique, a never before seen protoype for a New New Left.

d) Eventually go to work for NGO’s funded mainly by the elite and pursuing advocacy approved by the establishment.

e) And finally, pimp for the Democratic Party.

I’ve worked in both mileaus and while the Old Left has many faults, the newer lefts could learn a lot from it, and not just what not to do.

Politics is at its root about power--about who has it and who doesn't. The Left ethos, insofar as it professes itself to be the party of equality, is not a political movement; it is a cultural sensibility. Its relationship to power derives mostly from its being a faction within the Democratic party that drafts behind those who have power, the wealthy Neoliberal elites, the freedom-for-the-wealthy-to-do-as-they-please faction. As such the cultural sensibility Left abets the foundational inequality problem rather than providing any hope for redressing power and wealth imbalances in this country.

Power draws upon two fundamental resources--money or people numbers. The tiny minority with money holds power over the majority because the majority remains divided along tribal lines. It's that simple. The wealthy minority with power understands this and exploits it by fanning the fires of tribal hostility. This is the rasion d'etre for FOX, which is quite different from the Left tribalism of MSNBC, which, while biased, is never such an egregious exercise in bad faith.

But there's a reason GE gives its lefty talking heads such a long leash. It doesn't matter what people say or think so long as it doesn't lead to organized action. 

 

Quote of the Day: Andrew O'Hehir

Beltway politics are dominated by passionate and often outrageous partisan rhetoric, which cannot quite conceal the fact that Congress has become a useless, paralytic institution that can’t get anything done. Power lies elsewhere, and remains inaccessible. In a similar fashion, angry wars of words between and among self-styled progressives on the Internet do not entirely camouflage the relative powerlessness of everyone involved. Getting into a comments-thread battle or a Twitter-lather about Colbert’s bad joke or Lena Dunham’s fashion-magazine shoot or whatever other outrage du jour conveys a temporary feeling of pseudo-power, much as watching MSNBC (or Fox News) crow about the idiocy of the other side is pseudo-participation in a pseudo-democracy.

I would even take this a step farther and argue that the symbolic politics of the Obama presidency — the same factors that drive right-wingers crazy — are exactly what liberals and progressives like about it. I mean, what other explanation is there? Here we have an administration conducting a worldwide drone war that has killed unknown numbers of innocents, managing an ultra-secretive surveillance state beyond Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams, paying lip service to the existential crisis of climate change while doing nothing about it, and protecting and nurturing exactly the same cabal of bankers who brought us to the brink of financial apocalypse in 2008. For a candidate who ran as the populist embodiment of hope and change to wield such unprecedented and shrouded executive power is an irony that should keep historians of the future busy, providing we have historians or a future. But he personally seems like a cultured, funny, sharp-dressed guy who has gay friends and watches “Game of Thrones,” and the semiotics of his White House are awesome. So it’s all good.

But let’s back away from that, to the position that the mean Republicans won’t let Obama do anything, and so the politics of semiotic awesomeness are the best we can get. That too is demonstrative of our dilemma. We can’t do anything about worsening inequality or the poisoned planet or the total defeat of the labor movement or the broken immigration system or the incarceration of young black men. Our country is too “divided,” we can’t make up our minds about anything. The power to change those things, supposedly vouchsafed to us in the Constitution, has migrated somewhere else. But we can drive Gilbert Gottfried off Twitter for being such an enormous asshole. Change we can believe in. (Source)

Politics as cultural sensibility: impotent outrage.

 

The Hard Tyranny of Ridiculous Expectations

From Curmudgucation:

We've heard plenty about the "soft bigotry of low expectations." And Michael Gerson wasn't entirely wrong-- we have a history of all too often writing off students because of poverty or race or chaotic home life or not-so-brightness. Too often we really have held our most challenged students to no expectation at all.

But for the soft bigotry of low expectations, we have substituted the hard tyranny of ridiculous expectations. We have, for instance, substituted the expectation that every third grader will read at grade level no matter what. In some states (I'm looking at you, NY) we raised the standard for proficiency arbitrarily. And we have just generally pushed the idea that all students should be at grade level (as determined by anything from data averages to a politician's whim) all the time.

That seems like a swell expectation. It's not. It's stupid. Let's just apply that reasoning some more. Let's compute the average height for an eight-year-old and declare that all third graders must be that height. Let's require all children to be walking by their tenth month and potty trained by month thirteen. Let's require all seventeen-year-old males to be able to grow facial hair and all fifteen-year-old females to fill a B cup. And let's tell all young men and women that they must be engaged by age twenty-two.

Let's take every single human developmental milestone and set a point by which every human being must have achieved it. Because that is totally how human beings develop and learn and grow-- on exactly the same path, at exactly the same speed, at exactly the same time.

Ecraser la technocratie.

Deneen on Polanyi

Deneen is one of a handful of cultural conservatives that understands that "liberalism" is first and foremost about how culture adapts to the market economy:

Hobby Lobby—like every chain store of its kind—participates in an economy that is no longer “religious” or even “moral.” That is, it participates in an economy that arose based on the rejection of the subordination of markets embedded within, and subject to, social and moral structures. This “Great Transformation” was detailed and described with great acuity by Karl Polanyi in his masterful 1944 book of that title. He described a sea change of economic practice that took place especially beginning in the 19th-century, but whose theoretical groundwork had been laid already in the 17th- and 18th-centuries by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith. As he succinctly described this “transformation,” previous economic arrangements in which markets were “embedded” within moral and social structures, practices, and customs were replaced by ones in which markets were liberated from those contexts, and shorn of controlling moral and religious norms and ends. “Ultimately that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”

...

Polanyi describes how the replacement of this economy [embedded in traditional communities] required concerted and often violent reshaping of the existing life-world, most often by elite economic and State actors disrupting and displacing traditional communities and practices. It also required not only the separation of markets from social and religious contexts, and with that move the “individuation” of people, but their acceptance that their labor and nature were nothing more than commodities subject to price mechanisms, a transformative way of considering people and nature alike in newly utilitarian terms. Yet market liberalism required treating both people and natural resources as these “fictitious commodities,” as material for use in industrial processes, in order to disassociate markets from morals and “re-train” people to think of themselves first and foremost as individuals separate from nature and each other. As Polanyi pithily described this transformation, “laissez-faire was planned.” (Source)

While I almost always agree with Deneen and the others at TAC in their understanding about how we got here,  I depart from them because I am resigned that what was lost is lost, and it's pointless to keep whining about it. And I differ from them because I embrace the welfare state when they do not, not because it repairs the damage done to embedded communities, not because it's some approximation of utopia, but because human decency demands that  something be done to mitigate the damage wreaked by market capitalism, and no other means is capable.

I read somewhere, probably in TAC, that the one thing that all conservatives agree about is that something happenened in the past--a mistake was made--and now things are terribly wrong. They differ on how far back the mistake was made. For some it was the 1960s; in Deneen's case it traces back to mid to late 1600s and Hobbes and Locke. I wonder, though, if Deneen would agree with me that a mistake was made in 1979/80 when the Anglo-American world to the cheers of conservatives embraced Thatcher and Reagan.  By his own argument Neoliberalism is Hobbes and Locke updated and repackaged, and surely he can see that it takes a bad situation and has made and continues to make it worse. 

 

Mike Konczal on the History of the Welfare State

My argument in my overly long piece posted over the weekend is similar to the one Konczal is making here in this important, informative essay in The Atlantic. His point is that the development of the welfare state during the Progressive and New Deal eras was organic--that it was not the work of social engineers, but of pragmatists responding to the scale and complexity of life in a rapidly industrializing capitalist society.

If you have conservative friends who insist that progressives are social engineers who are destroying the fabric of traditional communities in a misguided utopian mission to create the good society, have them read this article. The Progressive left in this country did not destroy traditional society; for better and worse, capitalism and the industrial revolution did. Progressives are simply people who have sought practical ways to mitigate the suffering caused by its disruptions.

The Progressive tradition in this country is one that is pragmatic and realistically adapted to the economic and social realities people live. The conservative tradition in this country is populated largely by people living in a nostalgic fantasy about a time that, if it existed at all in America, existed before the Civil War. (Perhaps this mentality persists in the south, the rural midwest, and the mountain west because industrial capitalism was slower to come to those parts of the country. It's more complicated than that, but it's probably a factor.) 

Nevertheless, insofar as these arguments are broadly accepted as justification for the dismantlement or privatization of the social safety net programs developed over the last hundred years by Progressives, we are indeed regressing to the situation the Progressives confronted starting around the 1880s. My argument in the Burke v. Paine piece is that  Progressives are the more Burkean in their political approach, and that conservatives and Neoliberals are Tory reactionaries insofar as they are seeking to return the country to some impossible status quo ante of their imaginations. In doing so, they are forcing American society into unnecessary suffering that will simply require the development of solutions along the lines that we have already done. 

There are basically two arguments offered by Libertarians and Neoliberals that justify the dismantlement of entitlements. The first is the one that Konczal destroys in this article--it's better to let private charities handle it than faceless government bureaucracies. The second is that we can't afford it, and all the freaking out about the national debt, Social Security, and Medicare.

Is there some merit to the freak out? Yes and no.

Yes, because the Bush administration irresponsibly ran the country into the ground by lowering taxes at the same time that he began an enormously expensive and unnecessary war, and introduced Medicare Part D without cost constraints (e.g., allowing importation of prescription drugs from Canada) and raising taxes. That's Republican fiscal conservatism for you. 

Yes, because in the recent attempt to reform healthcare in the U.S., an attempt that was absurdly circumscribed by Neoliberal market ideology, we did little to nothing to address absurdly escalating costs in the healthcare system that people like Steven Brill have been exposing for their absurdity. 

No, because there's a difference between saying we can't afford it and we don't want to pay for it. The money is there, but it's in the pockets of people  who would rather spend it in buying politicians to make sure the poor and middle class get poorer than to support existing programs that mitigate their suffering or provide ways to deliver them from it.

The money is there, it's just a question of who gets to decide where it gets spent. That's a practical problem with a pragmantic solution, and that solution is impeded by, not driven by, ideologies divorced from reality. 

Burke v. Paine = Right v. Left?

In a review of Yuval Levn's book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Burke biographer Jesse Norman writes:

But one might wonder if these categories can really be mapped onto the left and right of American politics today. After all, it was Ronald Reagan, icon of American conservatives, who in declaring his candidacy for the presidency in 1979 repeated Paine’s words that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” a sentiment that taken literally should be utterly repugnant to any Burkean. Indeed, one way to read America’s own political development is as a progression from the Burkean conservatism of the Founding—which, as Michael Barone has shown, preserved so much of the British legal and constitutional settlement of 1688—steadily forward to the modern populist embrace of Paine.

Indeed, the irony is that as the federal government has grown, so has the number of self-professed Burkeans of the left seeking to preserve the status quo; while it is the Paineans of the right who seek to begin all over again. Needless to say, this misreads both Burke and Paine; indeed it makes one despair for the future of Burkeans in American politics. . . .

I am familiar with Corey Robin's mission to demythologize Edmund Burke and to paint him as little more than an apologist for free markets and oligarchic entrenched interests. But free markets were progressive in the anti-Tory, anti-landed gentry/aristocrat sense in the 1790s, and I wonder if Burke would have had the same opinion of free markets had he lived to see what was happening in Lancashire by the 1830s. His younger soul mate de Toqueville was revolted by it. Nevertheless, without getting into arguments about  who was the "real" Burke, I think we can talk about a Burkean temper of mind, and so a Burkean left and a Painean Left. As Norman points out, Burke was considered a man of the Left before 1789:

The French Revolution had been widely celebrated amongst intellectuals, radicals, and bien-pensants in Britain, and many people naturally assumed that Burke would join his protégé, the Whig leader Charles James Fox, in acclaiming it. It came as a profound shock for them to read not merely that he was bitterly opposed, but opposed in terms that combined soaring rhetoric with what was quickly recognized as a profound statement of political philosophy, including a devastating critique of revolution itself. As that critique came under fire—and the Reflections became a bestseller—Burke himself was denounced as a turncoat and traitor to the progressive cause. His reaction was to redouble his efforts, in a desperate bid to halt what he saw as the canker of Jacobinism from spreading to Britain.

To none was the shock of the Reflections greater than to Thomas Paine. He had made his name as the author of the revolutionary tract Common Sense in 1776, stiffening American popular resolve for war against the Crown. Returning to Britain, he stayed for several days in the summer of 1788 with Burke at the latter’s house near Beaconsfield. Now he saw that Burke’s book demanded a rapid and equally trenchant public response. The result was The Rights of Man, whose two parts were an even bigger popular success, if not quite as big as Paine claimed. There followed dozens of further pamphlets, as opinion divided over the issue, while the revolution in France descended—as Burke had predicted—into anarchy, terror, and war.

So before the French Revolution Burke was perceived as what might be anachronistically called a Progressive. Fox and Paine saw him as their ally and were shocked to learn that he opposed from the beginning what was happening in France. They thought that he was one of them, because on issues like slavery, the American Revolution, Ireland, and other issues he was with them, so why would he depart from them on this, the most fantastic eruption for human progress and liberaton from tyranny in the history of the world?

It is understandable from the perspective of 1789-1792 why honest thinkers alive then might embrace the Revolution in France--I'm sure I would have been among them. But can anyone on the left argue now in a post-1989 world that Burke was wrong and Paine and Fox were right? For clearly Burke was more prescient, and his fundamental insight explains also why the Jacobin principle of social change--to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch--while appealing to a certain kind of naive idealism--has proved itself over and over again to lead to even greater evils than those they were designed to eliminate. 

The essence of the French Revolution and the others inspired by it is radical discontinuity with what preceded it. The American Revolution was about continuity, about being left alone to govern themselves as they were wont to do before the encroachment of a meddling monarch (and parliament) after the French and Indian War. But the spirit of discontinuity inspired by 1789 defined for the rest of the world what it meant to be progressive, and those who were uncomfortable with the assumption that progressive social change equated with radical discontinuity were forced into the opposition and branded reactionaries.

This is, I think, the key to understanding why the temper and spirit of American progressivism is different from progressive movements inspired by the spirit of 1789--it is more evolutionary and experimental, more about continuity than discontinuity, and at its heart it is resistant to meddlesome centralizers and technocrats, be they monarchical or revolutionary. All progressives embrace freedom and equality, but in American culture freedom is primary, equality secondary. For societies inspired by the  the spirit of 1789, I'd argue that in most cases equality is primary, and freedom secondary.

For me the politics of a social social democracy is not about the dominance of one or the other, but it accepts that there is a dynamic tension between freedom and equality, and that continuous adjustments are necessary when there is too much freedom at the expense of equality or too much equality at the expense of freedom. Neither is absolute; both are defined in relation to the other. In America that means that progressives most often find themselves fighting to increase equality, because there is too little of it as the American temper is biased toward freedom.

Progressivism in the late 19th Century through the New Deal and Civil Rights, Women's Rights, and Gay Rights eras has been about fighting inequality. In the beginning it was about redressing inequalities in the economic sphere; toward the end it has been about redressing inequalities in the social sphere. And my argument here for some time has been that the American left's focus on social inequality has provided cover for economic elites to push for egregious inequalities in the economic sphere in the name of freedom.

So now we find ourselves back where we were in the early Progressive period. Elites in either party have little problem with the push for social equality, but they are very reluctant to embrace adjustments to inequality in the economic sphere. That's a much tougher adjustment, because it's one thing to fight against relatively powerless old white people who listen to FOX and quite another to fight Neoliberals in the think tanks and foundations, and on Wall Street. They are not powerless, and they pretty much own the Democratic Party. 

And so another question arises, and that is whether, especially now in a post-1989 world, the spirit 1789 provides an adequate frame for progressives now, and whether it can provide an adequate counterbalance to the Neoliberalism that has has emerged triumphant since 1989. My argument here for years is that the secular spirit of 1789 was never was indigenous to American progressivism, even though since the sixties it has become the spirit of the cultural and political left in this country. And I would argue that Main Streeters who otherwise want progressive change reject alliances with the left precisely because it is not home grown. Americans are allergic to Jacobinism in all its forms. Jacobins might win temporary victories, but if progressive change is to be framed in a way that can be embraced by the broad American public, it has to be framed in terms more consonant with 1776 than 1789. There is a difference. 

The American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution in Britain were Burkeish revolutions because they were about taking steps forward that were continuous with their pasts; the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions were Jacobin revolutions in that they emphasized discontinuity and the imposition of abstract social blueprints in ruthlessly top-down ways. It's the discontinuity that leads to anomic, social vacuums that too often lead to barbarism. Jacobin revolutions led to the Terror and to Napoleon's military dictatorship, to Stalin's purges and the holodomor in the Ukraine, to Mao's forced famine and his Cultural Revolution, and to Pol Pot's killing fields.

There are less dramatic examples, and I'd argue that technocracies everywhere run by earnest idealists, the best and the brightest, people who sincerely think they know better and have a plan to make it better. Such people are Jacobins in the temper of their minds. A toxic, elitist, puritanical paternalism shapes the Jacobin mind. Jacobins always think they are doing the right thing; they justify their atrocities because they were necessary to promote positive change, and they can do this because they have the temper of mind that characterized Tom Paine's--they see truth in a decontextualized, absolute, black and white way.  Norman quotes Paine here:

Time with respect to principles is an eternal NOW … what have we to do with a thousand years? Our lifetime is a short portion of time, and if we find the wrong in existence as soon as we begin to live, that is the point of time at which it begins to us; and our right to resist it is the same as if it had never existed before.

Is it any wonder that such a way of thinking is embraced by intelligent people of good will in every generation since. But can you also see how this temper of mind leads to and justifies  the paternalism of every technocrat from Robert McNamara to Arne Duncan and why both sincerely see themselves as progressives? Norman explains that

[Paine] is deaf to the rationality of existing arrangements and constantly prey to the idea that because humans ought to be able to decide on a given problem using abstract reason—itself an often rather questionable premise—they will do so. . . . He constantly calls for evidence, yet despises experience. His insistence on the power of reason becomes a recipe not for sober statesmanship, but for individual and generational arrogance. 

It's such rationalistic, abstracted and arrogant thinking about social change that leads to hubristic policies that lead to the deaths of millions in Russia or China or tens of thousands in Iraq or to the destruction of a localist K-12 educational system whose foundations are sound. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out some time ago:

If modern conservatism can be held to derive from Burke, it is not just because he appealed to property owners in behalf of stability but also because he appealed to an everyday interest in the preservation of the ancestral and the immemorial. And the abolition of memory, as we have come to know in our own time, is an aspect of the totalitarian that spares neither right nor left. In the cult of "now," just as in the making of Reason into an idol, the writhings of nihilism are to be detected.

There is no eternal now in which what is right must be imposed. Historical context is everything. Societies evolve, and so there are moments in every society where crises arise and present opportunities to move forward in a progressive way. And very often these moments require top-down interventions. But an intervention is not the same thing as trying to reengineer an entire society. There is a kairos for such interventions--the pregnant moments in the development of any society when adjustments are necessary.

The 1780s were deeply kairotic for the development of American society, but the kairos then was not to abolish slavery. That moment came in the 1850s. The 1930s were a moment when there was a possibility for the development of social democracy in the US, and the 1970s, alas, a moment when Neoliberals saw their opportunity to dismantle it. As I've argued before, 2008 presented a kairotic moment to push back against Neoliberalism, but the Obama administration failed to respond. But the point is this: How humans respond or fail to respond to these moments is critical, and the worst possible response follows when Jacobins or Fascists with big, radically discontinuous ideas get the upper hand. Better no response, which is essentially what we got from Obama, whose administration's mission was to return to the status quo ante. 

My argument here is that the temper of mind that promotes the best possible outcome is Burkean, not Painean. By this definition, despite Norman's discomfort with the idea, FDR was indeed a Burkean and Reagan a Painean. The social democratic system that developed in the 1930s was not Jacobin social engineering, but Rooseveltian pragmatism in responding to a massive, historical economic crisis. And, yes, I'm sure there were plenty of Jacobins in the Roosevelt administration pushing him harder to the left than it was possible or healthful to go, but FDR was no Jacobin. 

Reagan's and Thatcher's radical mission to dismantle social democracy after the crisis of the seventies was not at all conservative in the Burkean sense. But neither was it fascistic. Whatever might be repugnant in it, Reaganism/Thatcherism is not that. Its goal is free market anarchism. That anarchy eventually leads to inequalities of wealth and power is common sense, and with that too often a fascistic subjection of the weak to the powerful is the flaw that sincere, Neoliberals and Libertarians seem not to understand.

Social Democracy, if it can be developed in a subsidiarist, non-technocratic key is the only sane form of government possible in a complex, globalizing world. Robin's critique notwithstanding, I think that Burke would have been smart enough to understand how things look differently now than they did in the 1790s, but even if today he would align with the reactionary right, it's possible for others with his temper of mind to develop their own ideas about what the historical moment demands. I think of myself not as a Burkean--I concede that label to those on the right. But I do think of myself as Burkeish, especially if the alternative is the temper of mind that typifies Paine and the Jacobins. 

The Elite Center of Gravity in the Democratic Party

Michael Lind nails it this morning:

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers — groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century. Take away the farmer-labor wing of the center-left, and you are left with upper-middle-class do-gooders like Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt. A progressivism based among college-educated professionals is going to be much more elitist, and perhaps much less egalitarian and effective, than one dominated by union leaders, urban bosses and agrarian politics. True, nonwhite and low-income Americans are important in the Democratic electorate — but they are grossly underrepresented in the organized center-left.

If there were a real progressive movement in the U.S., its attitude toward the professional class would be more skeptical than celebratory. In order to fund a decent-size welfare state, genuine progressives would demand higher taxes on Americans making more than $100,000 — or maybe more than $50,000 or even $30,000. Why not? Polls show that Americans are willing to pay somewhat higher taxes as long as they get better benefits like expansions of Social Security or Medicare. The pressure to exempt professional households that make between $100,000 and $250,000 a year is not coming from Middle America.

Genuine progressives would side with producers, of all kinds, against rentiers, of all kinds — including credential-rentiers like the members of professional monopoly guilds. If software can replace pricey lawyers, if moderately paid instructors can replace highly paid professors, if skilled nurses were allowed to do some of the things that only M.D.s now do at a fraction of the salary, the working-class majority would benefit immensely.

The proletarianization of the professional class should be welcomed and encouraged by the progressive movement. Already independent physicians are being replaced by doctors who are salaried employees of hospitals. Let prole lawyers work for legal services corporations and prole professors work for educational service companies. Unable to set their own incomes by means of guilds, many downwardly mobile professionals might belatedly discover the benefits of unions and legislation protecting workers against exploitation by managers and investors.

The bad news, then, is that the self-serving minority of credentialed professionals, rather than the majority of wage earners, is increasingly important in setting the agenda of the center-left. The good news is that the contradiction between progressive reform and the self-interest of the professional elite may come to an end as technology and economic reorganization eliminate the professions altogether.

This, in part, explains why Neoliberalism is embraced by so many Democrats. It is an ideology whose purpose is to sustain the interests of elites, and elites now define the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Nothing changes until the center of gravity in the party shifts back to labor. 

I don't know if I can get up much enthusiasm for the proletarianization of anybody, but if that's what it takes to get a coherent, broad-based pushback against the way the top wealth percentiles have rigged the system in their favor, then so be it. Wage slavery is wage slavery whether your collar is blue or white.

What kind of society do I want? Might as well lay it out here in broad strokes.

In the long run, ownership of companies has to shift away from the rentier class to workers on the Mondragon model or other variations of it.

I support state ownership for a few enterprises that serve the common good, like healthcare, energy, and transportation.

There should always be room for innovative, small startups, and that requires capital, but there are ways of raising it and rewarding investors without their owning the company indefinitely. 

A few thoughts about the future of education and the professoriate:

I'm fine with the public-private mix in education. K-12 public schools should get state and federal funding, but should be governed locally.

Tenure as we know it should be abolished in post-secondary education, but there should be mechanisms in place to insure due process for faculty who are fired. But class distinctions between tenured and non-tenure faculty should be abolished. The criteria for accountability should be developed in faculty senates, and it should be possible for the faculty senate to overturn unjust firings.  

I don't know what's going to happen to the large state research universities regarding undergraduate education.They will not much longer be able to justify the large, impersonal lecture classes in the MOOC era. My guess is that they'll downscale and become heavily subsidized centers for graduate education for engineers, biotech, healthcare professionals, and other science/technical professions. 

While they are not going away any time soon, I think Law School and MBA programs are  credentialing scams. There are far less expensive and more practical ways to train lawyers and business people. Certificate programs in specialized areas make more sense, but a lot of that could be handled by MOOCs.

I would like to see a continued place for small, liberal arts colleges for undergraduates, but how that will work economically I don't know. Perhaps as an extension of the K-12 system. I suspect that the elite schools will survive because of their endowments and because there will always be an elite willing to pay the freight, but I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be just MOOC educated. Maybe people want to discuss that in comments. 

Ukraine and the West

The Beltway hawks want to defeat Putin, depicted as a new Hitler by Hillary Clinton, to punish the Russian leader who put a stop to the oligarch looting spree of the 1990s that had sent Russia into a death spiral. Their dream: humiliating Putin, setting off “freedom” demonstrations in Moscow, perhaps a civil war to bring Putin down.

Why, one must ask, is this an American interest? Why would we want chaos in a state which possesses 8,000 nuclear weapons? If the neocons and neoliberals got their way and Putin is defeated and falls, who then assumes power? Or does Russia break into warring fiefdoms with various warlords vying for control? And in this scenario, who, if anyone, commands Moscow’s nuclear arsenal? Is this really the future—with all its attendant uncertainty, desperation, and humiliation—Americans want to see? Truly it is hard to imagine anything more stupid or shortsighted.

I don't talk a lot about foreign policy because it doesn't interest me that much. Monitoring what's going on is about as interesting as reading the police blotter in the local newspaper. It's simply a matter of different gangs fighting with one another to improve their territory and market share. Nationalist sentiment is nothing more than wearing gang colors. It's primitive and uninteresting, but unfortunately, you have to deal with it if you live in a neighborhood controlled by gangs, and we all do. 

So when it comes to foreign policy, we shouldn't look at our own US policy as motivated by anything differently than defending its market share. I honestly believe that at this time in our national development we are collectively incapable of anything better than enlightened self interest. I doubt we are even capable of the enlightened part. Whenever the US gets idealistic about foreign policy, it almost always makes things far worse, especially for the people we insist we want to help. We are collectively incapable of doing the right thing, even if it's clear what the right thing is to do, and usually it's not. Never trust anyone who professes to be an idealist in foreign policy; he is either a charlatan or a dangerous fool. The bottom line is that our shrewder gang leaders realize that they don't have any market share in this part of the world to protect, and that they should leave it alone. It's not noble, but it's sane, and when genuine nobility is not a possibility, sanity should be embraced.

So I am all for the Ukraine getting a higher level of self-determination than it had under the Russian puppet Yanukovych, but maybe the price for getting it is the Ukraine's giving up the Crimea--and, though possible, less likely--some of its eastern borderlands occupied mostly by Russian gangsters. It's a decent tradeoff--give up territory inhabited mostly by people who don't wear your colors in exchange for control over your own still extensive territory.

That's what the terms of the negotiations should be about now, but I doubt that's how the Ukrainians see it. Too bad. Regardless, it's, first, the Ukraine's business, and, second, the European Union's, and the US role should be simply to stand on the sidelines and support any decision these parties come up with that promises sanity, stability, and as much self determination for the concerned parties as seems practicable given the political realities. 

We're approaching the centenary of the beginning of WWI. It started because a Serbian gangster took out a rival Austrian capo. The Austrian gang moved to retaliate, and the Russians mobilized to protect its market share in the Balkans, and this started the chain reaction that led to thirty years that were among the most horrific in European if not world history. It should have stayed between Austria and Russia without everyone else getting in the act. It may have led to disaster for one or the other, but it would have been a limited disaster. The same goes here. 

Putin is a silly, strutting gamecock, but while he's a threat to his immediate neighbors, he's not a threat to world order. Not even remotely in the way that a major military conflict in this region would be. That's why it's important for the West not to listen to our own strutting gamecocks like McCain, Graham, NRO, and the gangsters on FOX. These fools are nuisances that need to be prudently managed and contained, but not to be taken more seriously than they deserve. 

Quote of the Day: Noah Millman

But there is no Left and no Right. Those are abstractions according to which we choose to divide individuals.

Here’s how I would describe things:

- Economic elites really care about preserving their privileges.
- Elected officials really care about reducing the risk of losing office.
- The culture war – for both nominal Left and Right, is an extremely effective     way of serving the interests of both economic elites and elected officials.

Why? Because the culture war turns politics into a question of identity, of tribalism, and hence narrows the effective choice in elections. We no longer vote for the person who better represents our interests, but for the person who talks our talk, sees the world the way we do, is one of us. That contest is a cheap and easy one for politicians of any stripe to enter – and, usually, an easy one to win. It sorts the overwhelming majority of the population into easy-to-count-on camps who will not demand that politicians do anything for them, because they’re too afraid the hated “other team” might get into power.

And it’s a good basis for politics from the perspective of economic elites. If the battle between Left and Right is fundamentally over social questions like abortion and gay marriage, then it is not fundamentally over questions like who is making a killing off of government policies and who is getting screwed. Economic elites may lean to one or the other side on any cultural question (they can be found on both sides), but they can maintain their privileges no matter which side wins any particular battle. So whoever they want to win, that’s the ground on which they want the battle to be fought. (Read on.)

Exactly. Maybe I shouldn't be so schocked to read it; it might be more a sign of my being out of touch with what's being written about in other circles, but this is a drum I've been beating now for years, and I've been unaware that anyone else is beating on it.  

Recently I wrote:

The "New Left", which is largely this identity-politics cultural sensibility, is the best thing that ever happened to the ressentiment-soaked, fringe right. The New Left's sensibility in its essence is opposed to the cultural sensibilities of poor and working class ethnic and racial minorities, whose rank and file tend to be culturally conservative. The New Left created the Reagan Democrat because New Left types essentially look down on anybody who doesn't share its politically more "evolved" and therefore "correct" views. So when the New Left sensibility came to dominate the Democratic Party in the 1970s, it drove people out who no longer felt at home there. And the sad thing is that while these Reagan Democrat types are not at all Tea Party types, they still too often will vote for the Tea Party candidate because what she says "feels" right to them in a way that the politically correct Democrat does not.

And so, as Adolph Reed points out, left (really liberal) politics becomes more about whether already affluent meritocrats who are gays, women, and people of color are hitting the glass ceiling in corporate America rather than whether working women of color have enough money to feed their kids. It's not that liberals don't care about they second; it's just that the first is more important, and they will elect Democrats who are good on the first even if they are non-committal or just bad on the second because they are so-called fiscally conservative Democrats, which is code for their being Neoliberal. 

Millman again:

The evidence is overwhelming that winning this or that election doesn’t determine the shape of the culture – and in a healthy political culture the parties are going to take turns holding power fairly regularly anyway. A strategy to change the culture by always voting Republican or always voting Democrat is guaranteed not only not to change the culture, but to throw away the chance of your vote affecting anything else. Which is one reason why I am not primarily motivated by social issues, as compared with issues of war and peace, the general welfare, and good governance.

I don't agree completely here, because this kind of moderate good sense is inadequate to the enormity of what we are dealing with now. The problem lies in that voting for either Democrats or Republicans makes no difference regarding issues of war and peace, the general welfare and good governance, because our elected officials are tools of the Deep State. And that doesn't change until there's a real ground-up movement to put people in office who will put their cultural differences aside to push back against that hidden, deep power, which is a threat to us all no matter what our cultural values.

 

Race to the Top

This is the Obama Administration's name for its program to reform American education. Really. The Democrats' program suggests a Social Darwinian competition in which there will be winners and losers, and you better be a winner. At least the Republican program, entitled No Child Left Behind, suggested ithat we need to stretch out a hand to those who are losing. 

But I think the name can be given to a Democratic program because so many Democrats who make up its policy elite have become so unselfconsciously Neoliberal. 'Race to the Top' just sounds right to them. Don't we all love sports? Doesn't every poor kid want to be a star in the NBA or NFL? Race to the Top--it's supposed to inspire a desire for excellence. But there's a problem in that there's only so much room at the top, and very few of us have the talent to make it there. The top by definition exists because it sits on what lies below it. There is no getting to the top unless you climb over and leave behind those who remain on the bottom and the middle.  And who cares about the losers anyway? They had their chance. They deserve what they get, just as I deserve what I got because I'm more talented and work hard at it. 

Anyway, I was thinking of this when I read Tom Frank's piece this norming in which he talks about Democrats and Inequality reflecting on Obama's SOTU in which he deflected attention from inequality by focusing instead on "opportunity":

If you’re in the right mood, you might well agree with him. In the distant past, “opportunity” used to be something of a liberal buzzword, a way of selling welfare-state inventions of every description. The reason was simple: true equality of opportunity is not possible without achieving, well, greater equality, period. If we’re really serious about opportunity—if we’re going to ensure that every poor kid has a chance in life that is the equal of every rich kid—it’s going to require a gigantic investment in public schools, in housing, in food stamps, in infrastructure, in public projects of every description. It will necessarily mean taking on the broader problem of the One Percent along the way.

But that was what the word meant long ago. It’s different today. When people talk about opportunity nowadays, they’re often not trying to refine the debate over inequality, they’re trying to negate it. The social function of mobility-talk is usually to excuse inequality, not to change it; to persuade us that the system we have now is fair and even natural—or that it can be made so with a few more charter schools or student loans or something. Because everyone has a chance at making it into the One Percent, this version of “opportunity” tells us, there’s nothing wrong with letting the One Percent hog every dish at the banquet.

The well-known libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, for example, writes in his new book “Average is Over” that we increasingly inhabit a “hyper-meritocracy” in which “top earners” take home more than ever before because, duh, they’ve got the right skills and hence they deserve to take home more than top earners ever have before. The future might look bleak for less-than-top people like you, but if you fall off the ladder of opportunity there’s only one answer: Get used to it.

We're all in a race to the top'. It starts in preschool now. That's our new/old reality. Get used to it.

Neoliberalism and Public Education 3

This chart lays it out pretty well:

Neoliberalism and Public Education 2

It's interesting to me that whenever I do a post on public education, the pageviews go  down. My guess is that it seems like such a niche issue, and when people read me squawking about Charter Schools or the Common Core, they think that's my problem, but not theirs. But if anything I've been saying about Neoliberalism and its toxic effect on American society, then you need to understand how Neoliberal education reform is reshaping and reinforcing the dark, Social Darwinist angels of our nature. What's happening in our public schools right now is a perfect laboratory for understanding how Neoliberalism is reshaping American society in its image. 

Charter Schools are a perfect example. They seem innocent enough. I thought they were a great idea when I first heard about them. Why not give parents choices? Why not open up different possibilities for families? Why not fight the education bureaucracy? In theory nothing is wrong with that, and there may be a few school districts where charter schools actually perform that function. But it's not New Orleans, it's not New York, and apparently it's not Hoboken.

I'm glad Josh Eidelson at Salon is taking Neoliberal education reform on as part of his beat. The interview this morning can be very helpful in showing how Charters are a tool that seem innocent enough, but which create bigger problems than they were created to solve. The whole thing should be read, but this excerpt will give you a taste:

Supporters of charter schools have sometimes argued that offering a charter is a way to keep parents within the public school system who would otherwise just go to private school – or as some of the HoLa parents have suggested, leave the city entirely.

. . . I believe that the initial charter schools in Hoboken shook a lot of people up, and I personally had no problem with it. They have just reached a critical mass now, that they’re fostering white flight, and they’re bankrupting us …

The private school parents are great. They’re paying taxes, and they’re taking responsibility for themselves … But the fact is, when you want … local funds to subsidize what in some cases is essentially a private school, it just goes against, I think, the intent of public education.

When you say “essentially” in some [cases] is “a private school” – how so?

When you have massive fundraising drives where you can raise $100,000 … I wish the public school system had as much money to devote toward our children as at least one of the charter schools does …

They have tutoring … These parents are wonderful — they’re the best of the best. So in fact, I view them as a private school that puts [a] significant amount of their own money into it, while getting funds from the city …

They have the best of both worlds: They have some very, very active parents, involved parents, motivated parents …  And they have these incredible fundraisers. And they’re also able to get money from us …

Their demographic mix is certainly interesting, and their class – if I could use the word — classist mix, is certainly interesting.

How would you characterize that mix?

Some of the best and the brightest of Hoboken choose to send their kids there. And it’s a loss for us — both in terms of our demographic mix, and it’s frankly a loss in terms of the students …

They’ve created an alternative school system …

Exactly. In Seattle, we have alterantive or option schools within the public school system. There are ways to innovate and offer options to families that don't penalize those who stay in normal neighborhood schools. But the charter system creates ways for clever people to game the system, and for "winners" to take public dollars away from the "losers" to feather the already well-appointed nests. It only makes sense if you think that winners deserve everything they can manipulate the system to get, and that losers deserve to be losers. The intent of public education is to provide equity of educational opportunity to everybody. Charters undermine that intent whether intentionally or not. 

Neoliberalism and Public Education 1

I recently posted that the Democrats will be useless in supporting economic justice issues until being called a Neoliberal has the same stigma as being called a homophobe. Neoliberal ideology is just repackaged late 19th Century Social Darwinism, which is an ideological justification for social stratification that rewards winners and punishes losers, where the winners and their retainers compose the top economic quartile, and everybody else is a loser.

It's a system where the winners write the rules, and they write them in such a way to make sure that this pyramid stabilizes into a class system in which a small elite dominates, a somewhat larger retainer class benefits by enacting  and enforcing the elite will, and social mobility is granted to a few prodigies who come from the loser classes. There is nothing unusual about this. It's the way most societies have stratified into class and caste systems throughout history. It's just that as recently as forty or fifty years ago, the idea would have been shocking to most Americans that America could become that kind of society.

While this winner-take-all mentality is blatantly extolled among Republicans, it is abetted by Democratic elite policymakers as well, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Obama administration's education policies. Even the name they give it--Race to the Top--is Social Darwinist.

While I realize that readers without kids in public schools see this as rather abstract and irrelevant to their concerns, it's a perfect example of the way the bipartisan elite opinion is captured by Neoliberal thinking, and if you are concerned as I am about saying No to Neoliberalism, then one place you can fight back is by learning about what's going on in your local public schools and supporting efforts of community activists there to push back against Neoliberal reform. It's one place where local efforts can make a difference in fighting a toxic national trend. We need to protect our local public schools from Neoliberal dismantlement.

If you would like to get some quick background on the issue, this interview this morning with Diane Ravitch is a good place to start, and my pieces here on Technocratic vs. Humanistic Public Education here and here is another--or just click on the education tag below.

I think that the hardest thing for concerned but uninformed people to deal with is the  spin given by Neoliberal reformers who make their efforts appear to be all about helping to overcome the achievement gap, to introduce reforms that provide innovation and choice, that hold teachers accountable, and that raise standards. Who could be against these things? And what kind of monster is Bill DeBlasio that he wants to close down a few charters in NYC? DeBlasio understands what's going on, but people of good will are confused because fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo, a Neoliberal through and through, opposes him and stands with the pro-charter groups. Oh dear, Oh dear, the typical  liberal Democrat doesn't know what to think. DeBlasio has just gone too far.

But they were ok when Bloomberg closed down dozens of neighborhood schools, because they were loser schools. Charters are for winners. That's right, and they kick out any kid who looks like he's going to be a loser, when being a loser is measured by poor performance on standardized tests. Neoliberals don't care about losers; they want to redirect all resources to support winners, and charters are their tool of choice in the K-12 educational sphere.

I daresay there are  many advocates of Neoliberal education reform who sincerely believe their own propaganda. But charter schools, standardized testing, and teacher evaluations based on student performance are all tools being used to create a new system shaped on Neoliberal values, a system that is meant to privilege some and cast everyone else overboard. Ravitch does not use the term Neoliberal, but this is what's she's describing here:

And the move in Chicago, as well as elsewhere, to boycott standardized tests — where do you see that going?

The test that they’re boycotting — right now there’s just a couple different schools that are doing it — is a test that’s being phased out. So it doesn’t really have a lot of huge impact — and yet the Chicago public schools are reacting in a very punitive fashion.

In reading stories from the Chicago press, about how they keep sending out directives saying isolate the kids, tell the kids they have to sit and make an affirmative statement — it’s a hysterical response, about “oh my God, some child, somewhere, might not take a standardized test.” And you have to kind of step back and say, “When did Pearson and McGraw-Hill become the arbiters of privilege in American education?”

…It just goes on and on with the multibillion-dollar corporations determining who are the winners and who are the losers in American society. In effect, we have the standardized testing companies now as the arbiters of our meritocracy…

We’re doing to standardized testing what was done in “Brave New World.” And in “Brave New World,” the meritocracy was determined at conception. We use standardized tests as our means of sorting out kids, and saying “you’re at the top, and you’re at the bottom.” The problem with that is that suggests an end to social mobility. Because the one thing we know about standardized testing is that no matter what standardized test it is, those who have are at the top and those who have not are at the bottom…

There are a few kids who rise to the top despite all obstacles. And kids from really wealthy circumstances who fall to the bottom. But on the whole and consistently, the standardized test is a reflection of socioeconomic status. So in effect the standardized test then becomes a giving to those who have, and… certifying the have-nots as have-nots.

Neoliberals will protest that they are doing no such thing. But don't listen to what they say, watch what they do, and think for yourself. See how what's happening now leads to what Ravitch is talking about later. 

 

Deconstructing God

I was amused this morning to read this interview in the NYT Stone in which the stolid Gary Guting tries to pin down the slithery John Caputo regarding Derrida's religionless religion. The Deconstructionist project is simply one of radical hermeneutic openness that is suspicious of any limiting interpretation, and so that's the game Caputo plays with Guting every time Guting tries to 'interpret' what Caputo means. "No, no...that's not it, that's too limiting." I get it, but there are limits to how much of this open endedness any sane person can take. 

While I, like Derrida, am attracted to the Augustinian idea of "doing truth", there is a self-defeating open-endedness to Deconstruction that is the opposite of the incarnationalism that is the essence of Christianity. Freedom cannot mean for Christians keeping your options--even your hermeneutic options--open. Freedom is there to be used, and you use it when you make commitments, and when you make a commitment--among them a faith commitment--it has limiting consequences. But to refuse to choose leaves you forever on the outside shut off from another kind of possibility. 

In Christianity radical open-ended freedom is--must be--crucified. In Christianity choices are--must be--made that lead to very concrete limiiting of one's possibilities. In Christianity it is through the narrow gate that one passes into another level of freedom or liberation that simply isn't possible if one remains entranced by this dance of differences.

The path through that narrow gate is not one of peace and security, but of taking up burdens and sooner or later embracing anguish of the Dark Night through which we must all pass.  It's not supposed to be easy. Such an exercise of freedom that results in such a commitment is for grownups who know what they are getting into and are willing to pay a price. 

One of the commenters said that Caputo should read more Kierkegaard and less Derrida, and I couln't agree more.

 

See also Il n'y a pas de hors-texte