After the Future

Freddie de Boer on Class-First Politics (Updated)

I myself am a class-first leftist, and indeed the penultimate chapter of my new book is titled “Why is Class First?” And the answer is that class comes first because class approaches to politics are the best approach to combating injustice, including racial injustice. Being class-first is an instrumental position, not a moral one; it’s an approach to means and not a definition of ends. My basic gloss on racial inequality has been the same for forever: it’s futile to try and get everyone to not be interpersonally racist, but we can economically empower Black people and other people of color such that interpersonal racism no longer has the power to hurt them. A lot of people hate rich people, hate them reflexively and passionately. It doesn’t matter because rich people have money and money gives them power, which means the hate that’s directed towards them is impotent. Interpersonal racism, the state of some people hating other people because of their race, is unlike any other form of human hatred. But the same basic logic applies - if we dismantled Black people’s economic disadvantage, the structures that make up structural inequality, then the interpersonal hatred just won’t matter to anything like the degree it matters today. Of course I want people not to walk around with personal racial animus, but politics is about what can be achieved materially, not about manipulating people’s emotional attitudes.

You could contrast this with, say, Robin Diangelo and her obsession with ending micro-aggressions. Even if you could eliminate all of those little vestiges of social racism (you can’t), doing so would not put a dent in the Black-white wealth gap or eliminate mass incarceration of Black men or anything of that nature. That kind of focus does, however, fit comfortably with the social expectations of the kind of educated white liberals who buy her books. (

--Freddie De Boer

De Boer is a curiosity--a throwback, class-first Leftist. Not many of those around today. Too bad because he's mostly right. But his Left is not what passes for the Left these days. Class analysis and organizing requires real work and comes off as dry and abstract, while woke cultural politics costs little and is emotionally energizing--no matter how stupid, politically ineffectual, and downright counterproductive it is.

Woke Politics just feels so morally right, right? And that's what matters, feeling good about yourself and then everybody you know feeling god about you too, no matter how self-delusional in any deeply true moral sense such feelings are. This is not a Left that grownups can or ought to take seriously.

And then these members of the establishment Left in the universities and media wonder why so many young intellectuals are attracted to the Right. Why? Because it's what's you do these days if you want to be a rebel bad boy. It's not that hard to understand why some spirited young people feel a need to say No to a suffocating Niceness that passes these days for moral seriousness. That they do so is reactive, delusional, and predictable. 

I want to live in a world where people are kinder to one another, but most grownups resist being treated like kindergartners who must learn to play nice by the unctuously patronizing politically correct. Maybe this explains why DEI trainings don't work. I understand the good intentions, but this is a counterproductive strategy that gives Liberals a feeling that they are doing something constructive. But isn't such a program only asking people to behave with kindness to other human beings? Do people who have a good measure of kindness in them need to be taught to act? Can such a program work with people who are bigoted? Or Can mandating a DEI training create kindness where there's little of it to work with? And isn't such a mandate more likely to make the bigoted more angry and resentful when they are forced to take such trainings? 

8/16/ Update: From Edsall's column quoting former AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer:

The idea that the Democrat Party is a pro-business party, Podhorzer wrote, “is hardly a bulletin. It’s been pro-business since Carter. Deregulation (including Glass-Steagall, holding companies, communications, etc.) as well as trade agreements (NAFTA, China WTO, proposed TPP, etc.) are all Democratic Party ‘accomplishments.’”

Podhorzer, however, took sharp issue with Hersh, Shah and Teixeira. “I find Teixeira’s constant harping on Democratic ‘elites,’ as well as Hersh’s and others’ use of the term to be playing with fire at this moment,” he told me.

The focus on cultural elitism, in Podhorzer’s view, masks billionaires’ collective influence over the political process or the ways in which their success is responsible for immiseration and what we call “inequality.” This enables fascist politicians to shift the blame to intellectual and cultural “elites,” like liberals or people with college degrees, redirecting the inevitable resentments of the losers in the winner-take-all economy.

For that reason, Podhorzer continued, "Centrist commentators and Democratic strategists who have aggressively and continuously diagnosed the party’s capture by a woke 'elite' unwittingly — and without justification — affirm the fascist worldview in which 'cultural,' rather than economic or political, elites are the source of their disappointments."

I don't understand Podhorzer's problem with what Teixeira is saying. Doe he not think that the Democratic Party's capture by cosmopolitan elites and their values is a problem? Does he not understand that if they don't shift their branding strategy along the lines Teixera is suggesting that they will lose not just white blue collar voters, but black and and brown blue collars as well? These working class folks don't need Teixera to tell them that Democrat elites don't share their cultural values. They just need to watch the Dems who show up on mainstream media or to attend a typical local Democratic district meeting.

The educated White, Black, and Brown elites who are running the Democratic Party do not, of course, think of themselves as serving billionaires' interests, but they do serve their interests to the degree that they (1) promote Neoliberal policies, and (2) promote extreme woke cultural values that drive culturally conservative blue collars into the party of Trump and DeSantis.

They do less of the first thanks to the influence of Bernie, but they are doing more of the second. Does Podhorzer not get that what Teixera calls Brahmins are making the Democratic Party a hard place for non-college-educated, culturally conservative working class people of any skin color to feel at home? 

BTW, this is what Teixera says to Edsall--

Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curriculums and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party — making it more working class oriented and less Brahmin — is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism.

[Edsall] asked Teixeira whether the changing Democratic Party has reached a point of no return on this front, and he emailed back:

A good and big question. In the short run it looks very difficult for them to shed much of their cultural radicalism and generally make the party more attractive to normal working class voters. Over the medium to long term, though, I certainly think it’s possible, if there’s an internal movement and external pressures/market signals consistent with the need for a broader coalition. That is, if enough of the party becomes convinced their coalition is too narrow and therefore some compromises and different approaches are necessary. That may take some time.

That just seems to be common sense. Nobody's talking about restoring a politics of Meanness toward historically marginalized constituencies. The GOP has a monopoly on that. Rather it's a question of pushing a class-first strategy that is designed to support the welfare of everyday American working families. Who's not for that?

A sane politics is not a moral crusade to force everybody to think and behave and you do, but rather a very practical project to find common ground with people who have shared interests. Everybody, except GOP Libertarian cranks, wants to support working families, and that should be the Democratic Party's brand. Warren, Sanders, and even Biden seem to get this. It's not that others Dems are against it; it's just that other identitarian issues are for them more salient. The Robin DiAngelos should be listened to and treated with respect, but they should not be allowed in any way to become the face of the party.  

It's more complicated than that, of course. The  meaning crisis that flows from the slow-motion crackup of the Liberal Order still looms in the background. For there to be genuine relief, there has to be a shift in the zeitgeist that addresses these deep meaning needs. But in the meanwhile, we need to support a politics that mitigates the most negative consequences of the Neoliberal social order on the lives of ordinary working Americans. 

Douthat on Democracy

To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.

But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called "undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process. (Source)

Douthat is doing his job as the designated cultural conservative at the Times to 'splain conservatism to blinkered liberals. This column on first reading seems kind of silly because the technocratic state isn't a Liberal or Conservative thing; it's a capitalist-elite thing. Capitalist elites don't care about what ordinary people think--except when it's in their interests to manipulate them into believing that what's good for capitalist elites is good for ordinary people. 

When I was actively involved in education politics in Seattle a decade ago, the enemy wasn't Liberals because everybody is Liberal--it was corporate education reform, the kind of reform that wanted to impose its top-down, we-business-elites-know-best, Neoliberal ideology on local educational communities. Neoliberal programs like like Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' and Obama's 'Race to the Top' were equally bad because equally "elite" in their provenance, and equally oppressive in their top-down-ness.

The battle lines were between parents and teachers deciding what was best for their kids rather than the folks "downtown" or the bureaucrats in Olympia. Control ought to lie as close as possible to the people who are affected by decisions--and that should be the rule broken only in egregious situations.

If that means that local schools make minor, stupid decisions, that's a price worth paying. In the Virginia gubernatorial, Liberals should be smart enough not to take the culture-war bait. McAuliffe put his foot in his mouth when he made himself too easy to identify with the top-down, centralized education policy that all engaged parents--Liberals and Conservatives--hate. He should have simply pointed that out that critical race theory isn't taught in the public schools and then moved on. Let the locals remove the thing that doesn't exist.

And if the issue is whether to remove a book or two from the library, let the locals fight it out among themselves. If books are banned, they can easily be found elsewhere and will be all the more attractive to the kids who wound'n't have been motivated to read them otherwise.  

If the Republican Youngkin was running against the Democrat Arne Duncan (Obama's Education Secretary), I'd hold my nose and vote for Duncan because I think that Republicans need to be completely delegitimated until the Cheney/Kinziger wing of the party restores it to sanity. But I understand why so many people have come to despise Democrats of the Duncan ilk. They're what I call Aspen-Institute Democrats. Completely clueless in their Neoliberal arrogance. This is the kind of Liberalism that Anand Giridharadas skewers in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. They are Liberal in their cultural values, but just as invested in elite control of the system to protect their elite interests as Mitch McConnell. (See Note 1)

I wonder how many Liberal, urban, educated elites in the media and business who watched The Hunger Games and rooted for Katniss and the others from the outer districts realized that everybody in Main Street America sees them as the Capitol elite. The people on Main Street see more of the Stanley Tucci character in establishment Democrats than they see FDR. That's why the ridiculous child-molesting stories stick. And Liberal public intellectuals and policymakers should learn to let people alone in their local communities unless they are doing something that is an egregious abuse of minority rights there. They don't have to impose their prissy, being-right-about-everything on everyone every time.

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Note 1: See Molly Ball's 2017 "On Safari in Trump's America" where she accompanies squishily clueless Neoliberal Third Way Democrats trying to make sense of Trump's America. The naivete and smugness of this "type" of Liberal is something you came up against time and again in the Education Reform wars. There was always this pretense of listening without showing the least aptitude for hearing.  They just know better because they're rich and all the rich people they know thinks as they do. Their epistemological bubble isn't quite as thick as the one that enshrouds the cultural Right, but it's pretty thick. 

Stephanie Kelton, Big Gummint, Central Banks, and the American Future

An MMT view of the monetary system changes the way we think about what it means for currency-issuing nations to “live within their means.” It asks us to think in terms of real resource constraints—inflation—rather than perceived financial constraints. It teaches us to ask not “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you resource it?” It shows us that if we have the technological know-how and the available resources—the people, the factories, the equipment, and the raw materials—to put a man on the moon or embark on a Green New Deal to tackle climate change, then funding to carry out those missions can always be made available. Coming up with the money is the easy part. Managing the inflation risk is the critical challenge. More than any other economic approach, MMT places inflation at the center of the debate over spending limits. It also offers a more sophisticated array of techniques for managing inflationary pressures than what we have today.

Kelton The Deficit Myth (pp. 234-35). 

I've been reading Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth, and it's one of the best things out there to clarify why Bernie was right and why the Clinton/Obama/Biden/Pelosi wing of the party was wrong--not to mention all Republicans of the Paul Ryan ilk. The federal deficit isn't really a deficit, and anybody who uses the term "deficit spending" pejoratively to justify cutting entitlements or to resist spending on programs like Medicare for All is either ignorant or cynical.

Every time some smart-ass journalist asks a Sanders or a Warren how they are going to "pay for it", they are asking a political, not an economic question. It's political because most Americans think that the federal budget is essentially the same as a business or family budget where expenses have to be covered by revenues. It's just not how it really works. But politicians need  to justify their programs in terms that economically unsophisticated Americans can feel comfortable with. So they feel compelled to come up with some pretext to justify their program by analogy to the household budget. 

The Republicans might come up with some ridiculous pretext to justify their tax cuts by saying that they will stimulate the economy, which in turn will increase tax revenues that will pay for them. But it's been proven time and again with Reagan, Bush, and now Trump that these cuts only increase the so-called deficit. But each time the Republicans want their tax cut, they bring out their demonstrably false trickle down argument. But even so, the problem with the Republican tax cuts is not that they increase the deficit, but that they aggravate egregious concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of so relatively few.

But even Democrats buy into the 'deficit myth'. Bill Clinton did when he worked so diligently to balance the budget by cutting entitlements, and even now we see the influence of this myth when Nancy Pelosi insists on  "PAYGO". The U.S. is not in debt to the Bank of China, as Obama once said. The U.S. is not Greece or Venezuela or Bangladesh. As long as the U.S. has a vibrant productive economy and it has what Kelton calls monetary sovereignty, the government cannot run out of money or default--unless it chooses to, by for instance not raising the debt limit. Everybody--Democrats included-- who thinks that we have a defecit problem or that we are burdening future generations with debt is buying into an ideology that makes no sense after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971.

Since then, the U.S. and other countries with fiat currencies can print as much money as they want, and the only limiting factor is inflation. That's a real limiting factor, but running "deficits" is not inflationary if managed competently. China isn't going to call in its chits, and the government isn't going to default so long as the U.S economy remains vibrant and productive. There are no economic reasons for Social Security to run out of money or for not funding universal healthcare or a robust program to renew the national infrastructure. The obstacles for achieving all these things and more are political not economic. The challenge is not lack of money, but lack of imagination and political will. 

For many Fiscal Puritans, the phrase "fiat currency" connotes an immoral profligacy. You can't just create money out of thin air, right? Money has to be grounded in something, like gold. Just letting it be whatever a government wants it to be is just wrong. This kind of Fiscal Puritanism runs strong in the American collective psyche, but it is the primary cause of the aforementioned lack of imagination that insists on focusing on delusional moralistic problems rather than real ones. Running the federal government like a business is a false analogy; it simply does not reflect how the economy works in countries with strong economies like the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, the U.K. and others that have monetary sovereignty. 

I am not going to rehearse all Kelton's arguments here, but there is no more withering, easily understood critique than hers to be found of the Neoliberalism that has dominated the elite thinking of the Washington Consensus whose destructive ideology has played a major role in creating the conditions that allowed for the rise of Donald Trump.

I have some hope that in the post-Trump reconstruction of American political institutions that we will find a way to reset to pre-Reagan when there was actually a consensus built around the legitimacy of the New Deal. We actually had a social democracy there for a while, but after 1980 the Neoliberals came to dominate elite thinking, and everything went badly wrong. It is astonishing how many smart people who should have known better--and who I think wanted to act in good faith--could be taken in by the Neoliberal con. Hopefully books like Kelton's and the emergence of the Sanders/Warren/AOC wing of the party will change that permanently. 

The challenge for them is rhetorical rather than technical: how to persuade most Americans that deficit spending is ok. That's a heavy lift because it just seems wrong. It's counter-intuitive, and it goes against everybody's common sense and experience about how money works in their personal lives. If we as individual households, businesses, and even state and local governments have to balance our expenditures with revenues, why shouldn't the federal government? If it doesn't, it should. . .  right? That's one point of resistance. The other is Americans' mistrust of big government and their discomfort with giving it too much power. This is a legitimate concern, but big gummint--bigness in general--is here to stay. The question is whether in the future ordinary Americans can make bigness work in their interests rather than in the interests of the oligarchs. 

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Anybody who has read this blog over the years knows that I like to frame issues in loosely dialectical terms, as presenting polarities and then seeking to reconcile them. The fundamental polarity at work in the American political psyche pertaining here is Jefferson vs. Hamilton. The Jeffersonian impulse was carried mainly by Democrats through the 19th century, and the Hamiltonian impulse was carried by the Federalists, then the Whigs, and finally by the Republicans. None of us is completely Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, but we lean one way or the other with recessive traits of the other manifesting from time to time. Yankees lean toward Hamilton; Southerners toward Jefferson.

Jeffersonians define freedom primarily in terms of freedom from big government and big concentrations of wealth and power in institutions like central banks. Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be a world economic and military power, and he saw a strong central government and a central bank as playing a critical role in effecting this rise to power. Hamilton won early on, but the Jeffersonians dominated the decades in the early 19th Century running up to the Civil War--although among Southerners Hamiltonian recessive traits emerged with their support for the war with Mexico and their fantasies of imperial expansion into the rest of Latin America. The Hamiltonian legacy was developed by his Whig heirs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

I think of Lincoln, a Whig-turned-Republican, as a Hamilton-dominant politico with recessive Jeffersonian traits. His greatness lies in his efforts to reconcile both, as so beautifully articulated at Gettysburg, but after him, the Republican Party became the vehicle for Hamilton-dominant thinking between the Civil War and WWI. Equality ideals were forgotten as Social Darwinism took hold in the North and Jim Crowe in the South.

By the second decade of the 20th Century, the heretofore Jeffersonian southern Democrats like Woodrow Wilson morphed into Hamiltonians in supporting the WWI and in bringing back the one thing truly anathema to Jeffersonians--the central bank. The Federal Reserve was created on his watch in 1913. By the time FDR took office, the only members of the Democratic party interested in invoking Jefferson were southern segregationists who looked for any pretext to stymie the federal government from interfering with their post-reconstruction apartheid system. In the late 19th Century Republican phase, the U.S. became a world economic power; in the post-Wilson Democratic phase, it became both a world economic and military power. The Party of Jefferson had become assimilated into the Party of Hamilton. 

There were, of course, the cranks like those in the John Birch society who were ok with the big business part of the Hamiltonian legacy, but were appalled that big gummint accompanied it. They were Jeffersonians of convenience like the Southern oligarchs. They hated a big government that would restrict them with regulations and anti-trust laws from doing as they please. They were the country-club Hamiltonians who saw FDR as a traitor to his class. But nobody in the power establishment took those cranks seriously until Ronald Reagan made it ok to be a Neoliberal. And we came to see that crankiness normalized through the efforts of the Koch Brothers and others who fund right-wing think tanks whose sole goal is to give a kind of intellectual legitimacy to ideas that are crudely designed to justify the dominance of the 1%.

Jefferson's vision for America was obsoletized by the Industrial Revolution and by the emergence of the U.S. as a world military power after WWI, and yet his influence lingers in positive and negative ways. We are Jeffersonians when we feel inspired by the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. We are Jeffersonians when we feel uncomfortable not just with how the central U.S. government has grown into this massive surveillance state with hundreds of military bases throughout the world, but also with the way Wall Street and huge concentrations of corporate power and wealth have come to dominate the economic sphere. And we are Jeffersonians when we are appalled at how huge concentrations of corporate power meld with political power.

But we are Jeffersonians in the negative sense when we think naively that our freedoms only thrive to the degree that big government stays out of our lives. Bigness in the private and public sectors is a real problem, but you deal with it by making it accountable, and big government is the only means to keep huge, amoral corporate powers in check. And that requires a vigilant citizenry, not the morally complacent citizenry that lets a quasi-authoritarian crackpot like Trump get elected. 

We need to keep those positive aspects of the Jeffersonian imagination of America alive, but we need to realize that we live in a world that is shaped primarily by forces that Hamilton celebrated and are now out of balance. The question before us now is how to effect a political coincidentia oppositorum, i.e., to achieve Jeffersonian ideals using Hamiltonian means. In other words bigness is here to stay, and to wish it away is delusional, and to the degree that bigness leads to greater levels of inequality and unfreedom, it must be resisted by harnessing it. For me the question is whether a new leadership can emerge from the Trump chaos that has an imagination of an American future that embodies what is best about both the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian legacies. 

The challenge is to manage bigness in such a way that the huge concentrations of wealth and political power don't accrue to the 1%--or the 20% for that matter. The challenge before us is to harness American economic power to enact policies that solve the problems of inequality and concentrations of wealth and power--not just in this country, but throughout the world. Going forward, the only real solutions are global solutions.

That might seem kind of unrealistic because it seems to require a mentality and an imagination of future possibility that is so not  who we are now. But if we live in this Hamilton-dominant imagination of America at the moment, I believe that our recessive Jeffersonianism--the most positive aspects of it articulated in the Declaration--can emerge as a balancing, integrating factor. Right now we are in chaos; we are anything but integrated and balanced. The thing to be feared is that we will embrace any kind illiberal order as an alternative to the chaos, but that just creates other imbalances that kick the basic problem down the road.  

If there is not an aggressive assertion of political will from progressives, the illiberal Right will win by default. Obama was a decent president, but he was a timid technocrat, and his timidity and his acquiescence to the Washington Consensus aggravated the conditions that promoted Trump's emergence. If Biden is another Obama, expect someone to emerge on the Right who will have learned from Trump. He willl have learned how easy it is to do egregiously illegal, unconstitutional things that can be tied up in the courts for years while he bends government institutions to his authoritarian will. If the courts finally decide against him, he will ignore them as Andrew Jackson did. It doesn't matter what the courts decide if the executive branch won't enforce it. But there's a good chance courts will support a post-Trump authoritarianism because Mitch McConnell has been stacking the federal courts with right-wing ideologues. 

For now at least I'm going to allow myself to embrace the more optimistic possibilities for an American future, and hope that Trump's absurd, chaotic presidency has created a sense of urgency that make something new possible, and that out of his chaos something new and better can be born. I believe something better is possible even if such a possibly poses an enormous challenge to our collective political imagination.

As Kelton's book points out, we have the resources, the Hamiltonian means, to do very good things. The only question is whether we will be hamstrung by, on the one hand, a tight-assed Fiscal Puritanism, the kind we see on display with Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who just hate the idea of extending unemployment benefits during a pandemic; and on the other hand, by a widespread moral lassitude and ignorance among ordinary Americans that allowed a ridiculous figure like Trump to take the White House in the first place. 

State of the Race 3

It's looking more and more like it's going to be Bernie, and it's looking more and more like the establishment types are in full freak out. I think it's fine to go after him with all guns firing between now and Super Tuesday, but I hope that the establishment types are savvy enough to get behind him if he emerges after Super Tuesday with a significant lead. 

I don't know what's going to happen if Bernie goes up against Trump. Nobody does. Whatever matrix we've had to explain how things usually work no longer has any validity. The "experts" who are predicting that Bernie will lose don't really know. It's just more prudent to say it's 50/50. Conventional wisdom is worthless in our current situation. People want a return to normalcy, but normalcy is no longer a possibility. The best antidote to Trumpism is something like Bernie-ism. It's certainly not back-to-normal-ism.

And so if there's one generalization I think it's safe to maintain, it's that the more establishment the candidate, the more clueless, and the more clueless, the less likely to win. That's the most positive thing that can be said about Bernie. He's the most anti-establishment candidate in the Dem field. And so if establishment Dems in the Hillary/Biden wing of the party hate Sanders, that's just a sign about how out of touch they are.

So that's why if after Super Tuesday Bernie has a significant lead, they better get on the Bernie train and make the best possible case for his candidacy rather than prolong the civil war. Do I think they'll do it? No. And that's what makes me most pessimistic about Bernie's candidacy. It's not about him; it's about them.

Bernie probably understands that it's a liability for him to be called a socialist, but it's worse for him if he backs away from it. Bernie's task--and the task of all Democrats--should be to define Democratic Socialism on their terms and not accept how it will be characterized by the Libertarians in the Business Class. A Democratic Socialist is for social democracy, and social democracy is what we had in this country until Libertarians in the GOP and Neoliberals (like Clinton) in the Democratic party dismantled it. Democratic Socialism is the New Deal. It's Denmark, not Cuba. 

And please, media types, stop thinking you're so smart by asking how Bernie is going to pay for it all. Nobody with any sense believes that he's going to get what he is running on, even Medicare for All. This is not an election about being practical; it's about laying out a vision for the future of the country. And that future is mostly about what young people want, and they don't want more of the same. And for good reason. 

And Bernie is right when he questions why it's ok to build huge deficits to benefit the wealthiest as Reagan, Bush, and Trump have done, but not for programs that actually benefit real people. It's not about what's practical; it's about what there's the political will to do. So it's first about getting the right people in office, and then it's about the hard work of building a consensus and the political will to solve real problems, chief among them the ridiculous inequity in our wealth distribution. This gross injustice is the responsibility of both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats who effected it by dismantling the New Deal, i.e., the social democratic, framework that kept things more equitable during our trente glorieuses.

Sorry Pete and Amy. The old people and editorial boards love you, but the old people and establishment media aren't the future. I don't know if Bernie is the answer or whether he'll succeed, but he has a better chance of it than either of you do. 

BTW--Check out this post I wrote some years ago: Socialism vs. Neoliberalism

Realigning the Colors

What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true. (Thomas Edsall in the NYT)

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“It’s not what I’m going to do, but I’m scared that the country is going to go into a riot,” said Roger Pillath, 75, a retired teacher from Coleman, Wis. “I’ve never seen the country so divided, just black and white — there’s no compromise whatsoever. The Clinton campaign says together we are stronger, but there’s no together. The country has never been so divided. I’m looking at revolution right now.” (NYT)

***

“I think Trump is speaking to a certain population in our country that hasn’t had a place to belong for a long time,” he said. “I think it’s the depressed population that focusses on Trump, because it gives them a sense of purpose. But what happens when this purpose is in the White House?” The young veteran said that, originally, he had planned to support Trump, until the comments about women became public, and now he didn’t plan to vote at all.

He declined to give his name, because he didn’t want to be publicly attached to this election. He felt that most of his classmates would vote for Trump, but their commitment was shallow, in his opinion. After his time in the Middle East, he had concluded that Americans don’t really understand what an uprising is. “They’re talking about a revolution,” he said, of Trump supporters. “But they’re too lazy. Americans are too lazy. They’re fine with a rally. But they’re not up for a real revolution.”(Peter Hessler in The New Yorker)

Back in 2009, a month after Obama's first inaugural, I wrote what I thought then was a parodic treatment for a first episode in a bad TV miniseries entitled The Second Civil War. It imagined a Seven Days in May scenario where rogue military units in concert with militias all around the country take over federal buildings in the hopes of triggering a broad insurrection. I don't believe anything like that will happen; it was meant as a kind of spoof, but at the time I was surprised that the post got some play in the right-wing blogosphere. 

The guy quoted in the Hessler excerpt above who said Americans are too lazy to actually foment an insurrection is probably right--at least in the short term. But it's hard to imagine that the current red/blue impasse can just continue indefinitely. If it isn't resolved through political compromise, something more violent will increasingly become a possibility. HRC seems the least likely person to find a way to break this impasse. I do truly hope she will surprise us. But I don't think elite Dems feel any urgency. They seem to believe that time is on their side, that browning demographics favor Democrats in the long run, that the angry, white male at the center of Trumpism or the Tea Party is going to die out or exhaust himself in the next decade or so. Even if that happens, and I don't think it will, can we afford to wait before things spin out of control? Maybe we'll find a way to muddle through. Maybe there are forces at work that are invisible to us now that will change the game in unanticipated ways. But I just don't see how an HRC victory is going to change the game at all. 

I think there are two things at work that make me pessimistic about a muddling-through scenario: the first is tribal, and the second is structural. First is the tribal cosmopolitian vs. rural component. We're all familiar with the image below:

This isn't going away because it plays to a basic archetype in the American psyche explained colorfully here: 

There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes. In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy ...while the bad guys live in a shiny space station. In Braveheart, the main character (Dennis Braveheart) is a simple farmer ... and the dastardly Prince Shithead lives in a luxurious castle and wears fancy, foppish clothes. The theme expresses itself in several ways -- primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn't exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.

We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump. I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn't moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I'd be voting for him. I know I would. (Source)

Whose side do you want to be on--the side of the aggrieved simple fold or the side of the decadent elites? In tribal terms, the Democrats have become the party of the cosmopolitan, urban, coastal elites, i.e., the decadent movie bad guys. Tom Frank has already already made the historical case that the blues don't represent ordinary, non-college educated folks anymore, and the Edsall article quoted above ratifies it. Black and Brown Americans, for the time being, align with these elites now because at least don't say awful, racist things about them, but in the long run the real interests of black, brown, and white non-elites do not align with the interests of Democratic elites--be they white, black or brown. This is where the structural factors come into play, and I believe that it will force a realignment of colors over the next decades . 

The Blues in this cycle can justify to themselves that they are the good guys only because the Reds don't care that they have put up such a bizarrely unattractive bad guy. There are lots of sensible Trump supporters who have no illusions about Trump's inadequacies, but they don't care about anything except throwing a grenade into a system they see as profoundly corrupt, and they see "candidate chaos" as their grenade. Dem elites don't understand how justifiably they are perceived as the corrupt bad guys, that they are more Caesar Flickerman than Katniss Everdeen. That's why the Democrats' smugness about demographics being on their side is largely illusory. While the political divide now is largely along tribal (i.e., cultrual values) lines, in the future it will start forming along structural lines.

There's a color realignment coming. Red has always been out of place as the color of upper case "R" convenntional, country-club Republicans. In epic movie terms, Blue has become the color of a morally decadent, anything-goes, cosmopolitan elite, and red is becoming the color of the down-to-earth, aggrieved, simple folk, be they white, black, or brown. It's the color of populist insurrection. Red is the color around which mostly whites rally now, but in the future, as the old racists die out, more blacks and browns will rally to it.  

As race- and ethnic-based tribal lines become less important in coming decades, structural lines will become more important. In every action movie we see, especially the futuristic ones, the good guys are a band of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, band of brothers and sisters. This is a normative social imaginary for most millennials. So as the old racists die out, that will makeroom for Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, and aggrieved Whites to find common cause together. Theirs will be the coalition of the virtuous simple folk against the corrupt elites. That, I would argue, is the real demographic future. The flag they fly will be red not blue. 

IMO, the Blues missed their chance for redemption when they rejected Bernie's bid. The underlying structural forces are against Blue redemption in the future. Bernie understood better than anybody that in the long run it's the structural issues, not the cultural (including racial) issues, that matter most. Again, HRC might surprise us, but she is the embodiment of elite Blue tribal values. The structural issues are simply not central to her understanding of the crisis we face. Even if she has seen the Bernie light to some extent, she is still perceived by the Reds to be someone they cannot trust and cannot work with. Better her than Trump, but if Trump would make things worse, it's hard to see how a Clinton will make things better. Some kind of re-alignment seems inevitable, if not in the next ten years, then soon after. 

Quote of the Day: David Graeber

What the 1% are is, effectively, a ruling class, they represent the point where concentrated wealth can be turned into political power. National politics in the US has been reduced to battles between different factions of that 1%. This is not just a traditional Marxist bourgeoisie though—and this is where I think it dovetails with the argument in debt—it represents the effects of financialization whereby more and more, economic value is not extracted indirectly, through the wage, but directly, through rents and more generally by what they used to call “political-jural extraction,” which I think was Perry Anderson’s term for feudalism. I’m not saying we’re reverting to feudalism quite, but something else in some ways analogous.

Whenever a surplus is extracted directly rather than indirectly, ideology also changes, since it’s much harder to disguise what’s really going on. Hence the neoliberal obsession, noted in the book, in preemptive attacks on anything that even looks like it’s an alternative. They’re barely even trying to convince anyone capitalism is a good system any more; just arguing that no other system is conceivable. (Source)

I am preparing a post, or perhaps a series of posts, on Neoliberalism, and I will lean heavily on David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years and David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. The goal is to understand how we let Neoliberalism and its financialization of reality become "normal". How we have come to accept market mechanisms in the economic sphere as normative, but have come more and more to accept that we live in a market society, as well, in which so many social, non-familial transactions are about interest rather than about mutual aid and support of one another's flourishing.

I have spent a lot of time talking here about the ongoing destructive effect of Neoliberal ideas in public education, but while acute there, the negative effects are more pervasive and broadly dehumanizing.  Of course, lots of people resist the Neoliberal world view and find it repugnant, but they're not the people running things. And the ambitious do not rise in this political economy unless they embrace it as normative.

Neoliberals and those who accept the Neoliberal order tend to think of what has happened to the political economy, especially in the last thirty years since the toppling of Keynes, as a reversion to the natural order, or that it's the inevitable consequence of globalization, that we must let 'nature' take its course, that there's no fighting it, and that all other alternatives are either naive or harmful. 

Then, if I have the time and energy, I want to spend some time reflecting on the Hayek/Polanyi polarity. The goal is not to polemicize but to understand the underlying assumptions, the metaphysics, so to say, of each thinker's world view. And also to bring into the discussion other thinkers who explore either side of this polarity. 

Quote of the Day: Louis Menand

Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else. (Source)

Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined

Neoliberalism is a philosophy which construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship. It also provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social, economic, and political life in order to maximize their personal profit. Neoliberalism is marked by a shift from the manufacturing to the service sector, the rise of temporary and part-time work, growth of the financial sphere and speculative activity, the spread of mass consumerism, the commodification of practically everything.

Neoliberalism combines free market ideology with the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of the social state and social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity. Core narratives of neoliberalism are: privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the selling off of state functions.  Neoliberalism advocates lifting the government oversight of free enterprise/trade thereby not providing checks and balances to prevent or mitigate social damage that might occur as a result of the policy of “no governmental interference”; eliminating public funding of social services; deregulating governmental involvement in anything that could cut into the profits of private enterprise; privatizing such enterprises as schools, hospitals, community-based organizations, and other entities traditionally held in the public trust; and eradicating the concept of “the public good” or “community” in favor of “individual responsibility.”

It is a form of terrorism because it abstracts economics from ethics and social costs, makes a mockery of democracy, works to dismantle the welfare state, thrives on militarization, undermines any public sphere not governed by market values, and transforms people into commodities. Neoliberalism’s rigid emphasis on unfettered individualism, competitiveness and flexibility displaces compassion, sharing and a concern for the welfare of others. In doing so, it dissolves crucial social bonds and undermines the profound nature of social responsibility and its ensuing concern for others.  In removing individuals from broader social obligations, it not only tears up social solidarities, it also promotes a kind of individualism that is almost pathological in its disdain for public goods, community, social provisions, and public values.  Given its tendency to instrumentalize knowledge, it exhibits mistrust for thoughtfulness, complexity, and critical dialogue and in doing so contributes to a culture of stupidity and cruelty in which the dominant ethic is organized around the discourse of war and a survival of the fittest mentality. Neoliberalism is the antithesis of democracy. (Source)

Yes. Our idea of political freedom has devolved into an idea of consumerist choice. It should be rather rooted in an older republican tradition which stipulates that free men and women rule themselves. We've have allowed ourselves to become serfs in a world dominated by corporate warlords who have convinced us we are free because we have the choice to shop at Wal-Mart or Target or Costco. 

 

Traditional White America

I don't know if the real Bill O'Reilly is more of a sendup on himself than his mocking imitator:

The Colbert Report
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Does Money Matter?

Of course it does. It's not that it favors Dems or Republicans, Liberals or Conservatives; it's about how narrow moneyed interest are allowed to step all over the broader good of the Republic.

In part it's about the outside game--how money shapes elections and who gets to run in them (both locally and nationally), but more importantly it's about the way money shapes the inside game, what happens even to decent, idealistic elected representatives once the K-Street gang gets them cornered in a D.C. alley. 

Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law professor and author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress and How to Stop It, summarizes succinctly the argument of his book in the video below. This is well worth the 28 minutes it takes to watch, and it's well worth sharing with both sensible conservative and liberal friends. This is an issue that transcends party loyalties, especially the party loyalty of "ordinary people."

  

The Great Divide

What is it that really separates Democrats from Republicans? Is it a disagreement about the size of the government or of its deficits? In the last twenty-three years the Democrats have demonstrably been better at shrinking government than the Republicans have been. Does that mean that the Republicans are really the liberal spenders and the Democrats the flinty fiscal conservatives? It doesn't matter what they say. Look at what they've done.

Is the real difference about values? Is it that the conservative Republicans are for traditional American values whereas the Democrats are libertarians? But aren't principled conservatives against governmental social engineering projects? Don't they want to keep government uninvolved with what should be the proper domain of the churches and other institutions in the private sector? But how else should the moralistic, quasi-theocratic program of the religious-right Republicans be characterized if it is not governmental social engineering?

Does the difference lie in foreign policy? When Clinton went into the Balkans, the Republicans objected. When the Republicans went into Iraq, the Democrats objected. It's almost as if the difference between the two parties has more to do with the way one roots for the Yankees or the Red Sox. It's not what one does or thinks; it's that one just hates what the other does because, well, they're the Yankees. Whatever they do is just wrong.

Is it about the economy? What did the Republicans really object to about Clinton's economic policies in principle? Was it NAFTA? Was it his support of free trade and the WTO? Just what was it? Or was it just that Clinton was on the other team?

The truth is that principle or philosophy has very little to do with it. It has to do with interests. The Republicans have traditionally supported the interests of big money and the Democrats the interests of labor, minorities, and the environment. It used to be that big money wanted small government because the smaller the government the less powerful any potential opposition to prevent it from doing what it pleased. But if big money can control big government and make it do what it wants, there's nothing wrong with big government anymore.

It used to be that the Democrats represented the interests of ordinary working people, but since the gradual diminution of the power of unions since the eighties, the Democrats have slowly drifted into the orbit of big money. Clinton supported NAFTA despite intense union opposition. Even business-minded independents like Ross Perot were further to the left on that than were the DLC Democrats.

For this reason a lot of people have come to see that there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. There is no longer any counterweight to the influence wielded by big money. And the bottom line has been since Reagan, that if big money isn't for it, it won't happen. If big money is for it, it will.

The central issue of our time is not the divide between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives--it's the divide between power wielded by a relatively small, relatively unified group of people with enormous wealth versus a second, far broader range of people divided by all of the numberless things that fragment American society.

I don't, of course, think that the first group has purposefully engineered the social fragmentation that afflicts the second group, but social fragmentation clearly serves its interests. The political leader that will be the greatest threat to the interests of big money is the one that can unify the second group.

That's not going to happen soon; there are just too many obstacles in the short run. But the best that can be hoped for in the next presidential election is to buy some time, to slow down this inexorable shift toward plutocracy until more people in the second group catch on to what's happening. And then, it is to be hoped, a popular movement will arise to redress the balance.

[This post was written in December 2003--plus ca change . . ]

Endless War

This is a war universe.  War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war. . . .  --William S. Burroughs

***

We didn't come this far because we're made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. So it goes with most great nation-states, which--feeling guilty about their savage pasts--eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.  Paul Harvey, 5/23/05 Commentary

That we live in a war universe seems to be axiomatic and yet it is also rather disconnected from the rather buffered lives of most educated, liberal bourgeois. This disconnect, this delusional sense that the relatively peaceable life that they live is normative and that violent conflict is aberrant, is precisely what allows the bad guys to win.

Who are the bad guys? The people throughout history who lie, murder, assassinate, liquidate, purge, cleanse, avenge, or do whatever it takes to make sure their interest group--be it family, tribe, race, party, class--nation stays on top. It's the compulsion to stay on top and to use any means necessary to achieve it that is at the root of the problem. It's called the will to power. It's what makes the world go 'round. Who are the good guys?  Those who refuse to submit to the logic of the will to power.

Wisconsin II

He [Feingold] wouldn't be the first defeated senator to stage a quick comeback as a gubernatorial candidate. Lincoln Chafee, ousted by Rhode Islanders in 2006, just won that state's governorship as an independent last fall. Lowell Weicker, vanquished by Joe Lieberman in 1988, pulled off the same feat in Connecticut two years later. Feingold shares a quirky maverick streak with both of those men. It's not that hard to see him following in their footsteps.

But will he get a chance next year? That's harder to see, mainly because Wisconsin appears to have one of the more onerous recall procedures when it comes to governors: Petitioners would need to gather signatures equivalent to 25 percent of the total number of votes cast in the previous statewide election, and they'd have only 60 days to do it. By contrast, California (where Gov. Gray Davis was successfully recalled in 2003) requires signatures equivalent to only 12 percent of the votes cast in the previous election, with a 160-day window. (Source)

I hope all those who are saying now that Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans overreached are right, but next January is far away, and public opinion is a fickle bird.  There's a good chance all this will have settled down, and, given our recent history, a good chance that there just won't be the political will to do anything about it, just as there was not the will to push back all the encroachments on civil liberties effected by Cheney/Bush. The Right has consistently proved it has the will to get it done; the Left has yet to prove it. It should be clear to anybody now that public opinion doesn't matter; political will is the only thing that matters.

But Feingold is a serious, principled guy, and he would be the ideal standard bearer for this push back, and maybe this time it will be different.  Maybe there's a will in Wisconsin that we haven't seen on the national stage. It will be an interesting test case. The important thing is that the issue not be allowed to fade in Wisconsinites' memories. That's why these senatorial recall campaigns are important. They will keep the issue alive.  A lot depends on having some successes there. This will be a fight that the Right will pull out all the stops to win.  It remains to be seen whether the Left can match the Right's intensity. (See Wisconsin I)

Quote of the Day: Mark Erlich

A generation ago, non-union workers often welcomed news of improved wages and benefits for unionized employees, recognizing that a rising tide lifts all boats. But ... at a time of sacrifice and insecurity, many would prefer to sink their neighbor's slightly bigger boat while wistfully hoping for a glance at a yacht in a gated marina. (Source)

There are people who romanticize unions and the labor movement. I don't--there's a lot about the empirical performance of organized labor that really stinks.  But we're involved in a power game, and all the power is with Big Money, and they realize that the only organized force that still has the financial resources to oppose them is the unions.

It's one thing to oppose certain policies that unions support; it's another thing to seek to destroy them. And it should be clear that the Republicans and their backers are out to destroy them. They start with the public service unions, because they're more vulnerable with regard to public opinion, and if they succeed there, they'll come after every other union.

We're in a class war, and many Americans just don't want to believe it because it sounds so "leftist" or "extremist", but it's being waged by Big Money, and Big Money is quite happy to do so without any organized opposition, and the longer most Americans think there's no war going on, the longer they'll stay unorganized.  And in the meanwhile the unions are the only organized opposition it has to deal with.

There's room for legitimate debate about particular policies that unions support, but at the same time we cannot lose sight of the larger picture.  We're involved in a war here; the time for splitting hairs is behind us, and so at a very crude level it's coming down to a fundamental question: Whose side are you on?

 

Quote of the Day: John Cole

One thing that even the dim bulbs in the media should understand by now is that there is in fact a class war going on, and it is the rich and powerful who are waging it. Anyone who does anything that empowers the little people or that threatens the wealth and power of the plutocracy must be destroyed. . . .

You have to understand the mindset--they are playing for keeps. The vast majority of the wealth isn’t enough. They want it all. Anything that gets in their way must be destroyed. . . .

And they are well financed, have a strong infrastructure, a sympathetic media, and entire organizations dedicated to running cover for them. They’ve even created their own mythical ideology in which they are superhero Galtian overlords, and this lets a few rubes who babble ignorantly about the free market get to feel like they are playing along, when they are really just being played. It’s these guys versus all of us, yet half the people being rogered (Republicans and glibertarians and hell, half the Democrats) have been convinced the other side is a bigger threat to their well being than the people with all the power, money, and resources. (Source)

When John Cole, the moderate voice of reason, says it, then maybe this class-war narrative is really almost ready for prime time, even if not in the MSM. But will a movement arise to vigorously push back rather than just whine about it?  That's the question.