After the Future

Edsall on White Unhappiness

Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found that “blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.”

Graham and Pinto write:

The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination — retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.

The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.

This discontent drew many disaffected Americans to Donald Trump, and Trump’s defeat in 2020 has produced millions of still more disaffected voters who support his claim that the election was stolen.

Michael Bang Petersen puts it this way:

We know that humans essentially have two routes to acquire status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is earned respect from having skills that are useful to others. Dominance is status gained from intimidation and fear. Individuals who are high in the pursuit of dominance play a central role in political destabilization. They are more likely to commit political violence, to engage in hateful online interactions and to be motivated to share misinformation.

If you read the rest of the article, the various researchers Edsall quotes talk about how 'trade shock' after NAFTA in 1993 and China entering the WTO in 2000 cut whatever vestigial ties working-class whites had to the Democratic Party. There's a lot of talk about status loss in the article, but I think the deeper issue is culture loss. I think the argument I make in the second half of Genealogy Part 1 about capitalism's destruction of customary culture goes to the heart of it.

This destruction has been a long-term, erosive process, but it was accelerated by these free trade policies that destroyed the economic infrastructure of so many rust-belt communities. Neoliberal Democrats like the Clintons supported free trade because they bought the Kool Aid that it benefits everyone in the long run economically. But they never took into consideration the destructive impact these policies have on local communities and their traditional cultures. Most Liberals couldn't care less about local communities and their local cultures because (1) they've never lived in one, or (2) if they have, they left them because they wanted to be free of the constraints that living in any kind of real community requires.

So Liberals understand that the trade policies they supported might be disruptive, but that living in a dynamic, innovative, future-oriented society requires that people adapt, that they should expect to have three careers, that they should come to love and embrace change, etc. But it's all self-justifying, capitalist b.s., And so it's understandable that those whose lives capitalism has disrupted resent having to uproot themselves, move from their homeland to where the work is, and be trained to assimilate into an economy that destroyed everything that they loved. And they particularly resent the smug Liberals who tell them that what they loved was stupid and that they should live like them: See how happy we are in the suburbs working in our cubbies!

Their situation is a lot like that of Native Americans who experienced a similar destruction of their customary culture when they were moved from their sacred homeland to places where traditional practices were not possible or not allowed and where they were pressured to assimilate into a culture that they despised. Black and Hispanic Americans are more resilient because they live in communities that have adapted to economic instability and have less reason to fear status loss because historically they have had more to gain in that regard and than to lose. 

So what's the solution? Well, maybe it would be good to start by not destroying local communities and cultures. Rather than assume that the economy and its mystical Invisible Hand always knows best, make the economy serve human needs. And most humans need stable community life and vibrant, local traditional cultures to live happy, productive lives. Stop letting utilitarian, economic logic be the only consideration as if good-paying jobs were the only thing that mattered no matter how disruptive the economy is in every other aspect of human life. Yes, it might be and probably is, too late to preserve what's vital, but recovery can't begin until you stop making a remedy impossible. 

Let's exercise some wisdom. But we can't do that, right, because our capacity for making wise collective decisions about what humans need to flourish was lost long ago. Instead, we've surrendered all our agency to the Invisible Hand. Our minds are so held captive by that propaganda, that no other possibility can be even entertained. 

The ironic thing is that far more people who identify as Democrats get this than do doctrinaire Libertarian Republicans. The Clinton Neoliberal wing of the party destroyed the Democratic brand with working class whites, but the Republicans couldn't care less about them. If we lived in a sane world, working class whites and people of color would take over the Democratic Party and force it to make the economy work in their interests, but the Democrats can no longer be a home for American working-class whites--the Dems are anti-gun, pro-abortion, et al.--and they're the party of the people of color who they fear seek to displace them.

And there you have it. There's good reason to believe that this will play out in the stupidest, most violent way possible because the best among us lack conviction, and they lack conviction because they lack wisdom, and they lack wisdom because they live within a metaphysical imaginary that discourages them from thinking such a thing exists. Expediency is all. 

A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I

[This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post]

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”

 --Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (pp. 2-3). 

And I confess that I’ve come to wonder if the tension between “America” and “conservatism” is just too great. Maybe it’s impossible to hold together a movement that is both backward-looking and forward-looking, both in love with stability and addicted to change, both go-go materialist and morally rooted. Maybe the postwar American conservatism we all knew—a collection of intellectuals, activists, politicians, journalists, and others aligned with the Republican Party—was just a parenthesis in history, a parenthesis that is now closing.          --David Brooks

David Brooks, qua America's spokesperson for a principled conservatism, looks himself in the mirror in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. It's a companion piece to Gellman's and Packer's essays about the coming demise of American democracy, about which I've written in the last few weeks. I started writing this post to parse Brooks's quote excerpted above about why I think of his American Conservatism is oxymoronic, as clearly he seems to recognize by his listing of all its antinomies.

But before coming to that, I wanted to reflect a bit on how the current crisis has pushed me to appreciate in a way I did not before how a society's dominant metaphysical imaginary unconsciously shapes its experience about what is most important, what is most deeply true, and what is worthy of its aspirations--no matter what the conscious individual beliefs of the people in it. For us that metaphysical imaginary derives from Rationalist Materialism. Whatever our individual beliefs, we live in a world whose basic assumptions about reality are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. 

I believed before, or rather my basic world view was shaped by the belief, that pluralism is a good thing, that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking, that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded by our being confronted by others who see things differently.

And so it follows that ideally a pluralistic society embraces a plurality of metaphysical imaginaries. There are realists and idealists, theists and atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, pagans and polytheists, materialists and transcendentalists. And various combinations of all the above. And ideally all should live together in a society where at the very least they tolerate one another and where at best they actually engage with one another in an honest, empathic attempt to understand the other, to walk in his or her shoes, to come to appreciate what's best rather than to demonize what's worst.

Of course, that idea of pluralism in the abstract I still value, but I think the hard truth is that in our particular historical/cultural context our differences keep us divided and conquered. Few of us actually engage in good faith with the differences others present to us; rather we at best tolerate others, but mostly we'd rather not deal with them. So the default is to think of the Other as quasi-barbarians, and to support whatever efforts are afoot to promote one's own group's interests and to suppress the interests of everyone else. And this natural tendency in human beings is exaggerated if they are acculturated into, as we are, the One Metaphysical Imaginary that Rules Us All, which is  Rationalist Materialism, its capitalist social-economic dynamics, its media, and with both of those a crude, Social-Darwinist ethos that shapes our bloodsport politics.

I hesitate to use a mechanistic metaphor, but it's perhaps never more appropriate for our current predicament: Rationalist Materialism and its capitalist utilitarian moral frame is the the developed world's metaphysical operating system--all other beliefs are programs that must run on it. We don't have any choice about that because whatever our individual beliefs, we have to live in a world whose fundamental presuppositions are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. The problem for people with religious commitments lies in that that most of the world's great religions originated in societies that ran quite different, premodern metaphysical operating systems that were compatible with them. And the way those religions have been patched in to work with our current, late-modern OS makes them very buggy, if not unusable.

Does the problem lie with these older religious "programs" or with the late-modern operating system on which they are forced to run? I rather think the latter, and I argue why in Part 2. But that's extremely hard to accept by anybody who has been acculturated into a society that runs a Rationalist-Materialist OS. We're all in the Matrix created by that system, and extricating yourself from it is not easy for those who want to--and impossible for people who don't feel a need to do it the first place because they're quite comfortably well adapted to life within it. 

And so people who are well-adapted to materialist metaphysical matrix naively believe that everybody is free to think or believe whatever they want. But in fact, you're not free if your personal beliefs are incompatible with the cultural OS. The cultural OS--not one's personal beliefs--plays the dominant role in shaping his experience of the world--even for people with religious commitments.

The idea of a sacrament, for instance, depends on an imagined participative ontology which supports and interprets the knower's experience of herself in a participative relationship with the mystery of Being. That's not how we think about or experience the world in a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Rather, we see and experience the world as just containing stuff to be used. Nothing sacred or sacramental about anything in it. Just so many atoms and empty spaces. Some environmentalists, like the ones celebrated by Richard Powers in Overstory, are trying to restore an animist sense of the sacred, but they are considered by the mainstream culture as flakey nuisances. 

But hardly anybody in the world--East, West, North, or South--experienced the world that way until about five hundred years ago. Some religious people today might believe in sacraments, but they cannot, with some rare exceptions, experience their power in the way our ancestors did. It feels forced, so much "hocus pocus", and it's understandable why people nowadays think it's nonsense. But it's not nonsense. It's that we've been culturally programmed to be insensible to their significance. The problem lies not with what's there but with our ability to see or experience it. 

So if one has non-materialist personal beliefs, they are circumscribed or cramped by the dominant materialist metaphysical imaginary--unless we live like the Amish or in monastic communities off the grid. To use a less mechanistic metaphor, we are dyed yellow in our acculturation into the rationalist materialist imaginary, and so most people see a yellow-colored world, but even if some entertain religious thoughts that were in their original form green, they come out looking blue. It might look ok, but it is a distortion. And so no matter what your individual beliefs might be, they are always yellow-tainted, if not yellow-dominant. It's possible, but it takes an extraordinary effort to cleanse that yellow taint. 

And I would argue that while not all cultural operating systems have this soul-deadening effect, our yellow one is killing us as a society, whether or not we as individuals have found a way to purge its taint. But the task isn't just an individual one, because our well being as individuals depends on the health of the whole society. We need an infusion of something that promises a different kind of life, a life that might actually help the best among us to transcend our differences and unite us at a level where we might actually have the strength to fight against what's coming.

Our fundamental metaphysical imaginary should be a colorless, radiant light that comprises the full color spectrum and allows for a range of possibilities that are all in their different ways aimed at the same goal, which is an imagined future possibility for human flourishing that simply is not possible within the current materialist imaginary.

So let there be pluralism, but let it run on a cultural OS that has a spiritual dimension. What that might look like, I don't know, but I can imagine a trans-cultural system of symbols that opens up such possibilities unavailable to us now. Otherwise our pluralism within our current spiritually impoverished metaphysical imaginary promotes divisions that will continue to keep the best of us preoccupied with clickbait--all the stupid, superficial stuff--and so distracts us from the real threat that is posed by techno-capitalism and the simulacra of culture that it is creating. 

***

So back to Brooks. I think he's grappling with a fundamental truth concerning American Conservatism that most American Conservatives don't understand, which is that it is oxymoronic. I want to explore this a little more deeply within the broader context outlined above. I see the primary historically positive function of Conservatism, whether here in America or in Europe, as its mission to 'conserve' the cultural ballast that customary culture, especially in its towns and rural areas, provided to the larger society. Liberals, generally speaking, see customary culture as oppressive, unless it's someone else's, which then they find charming. 

A healthy society needs that ballast, especially if it has healthy communities that pass from generation to generation a cultural vitality that works for most ordinary people. Local musical and dance traditions, oral histories, local heroes, local lore and legends, a vital communal religious life and reverence for things that are worthy of reverence. A healthy customary culture is rich with symbols and close to nature. A healthy conservatism cherishes these things, and seeks to push back against whatever works to undermine them. I think that Brooks would see himself as a defender of this kind of conservatism, and it would be worth defending--if in America it still existed.

I would argue American customary culture was rather weak to begin with since it was so deeply Calvinist in its origins. Calvinism was already a movement grounded in the rejection of old European symbolic customary culture, which it perceived as papishly exotic and paganly exuberant. Which it was. The old Christendom was an extravagant symbolic world that Calvinists wanted no truck with, and so they did what they could to strip out all that symbolism and exuberance and to remake society from scratch based on their stern, spare, rather colorless imagination of what was most important. Absolute Spirit might be colorless, but our life on earth cannot be. It needs to refract that light into its many colors. The problem with the Calvinists was they wanted to live in a pure colorlessness that is not meant for humans, and their attempt to do so created negative, unintended consequences I'll lay out in a future post. A few, rare individuals can live in thin, unshaded, mountaintop air, but not whole societies. 

And so frustrated in their inability to impose their spare, colorless vision in Geneva, they tried it in New England. This eventually failed. And as Ben Franklin notes in the quote excerpted above from Tribe, the descendants of those stern Puritans couldn't stand the society they created, and once they had a taste of truly rich customary culture in the Native American societies of their time, they had no desire to go back to the life of the English. Many Northern Europeans in the 19th Century had the same experience when they went to Italy: Yikes! What have I been missing all of my life?!

They found there what was still a vital customary culture in the old pre-Reformation European sense, something that had been all but purged in Protestant northern Europe, which had by then become quite smugly superior about its having traded cultural vitality for prosperity--at least for the few who prospered. Contemporary American Conservatism is ironically largely heir to the mentality that saw it as its mission to destroy the two principal customary cultures they encountered at the time--first, that of old Europe and then that of the Native Americans.

In the U.S. today, if there are American Conservatives who have anything interesting to say, they are mostly Catholics and Jews, people who draw on intellectual traditions that have deep premodern roots. WASP America hated both when they started arriving in droves starting in the mid-19th Century because they represented a worldview, a metaphysical imaginary, that they saw as deeply incompatible with theirs. They were seen as unassimilable. Well, in the decades after WWII, consumer capitalism and its media has bleached out most Catholics and Jews so that they left behind the old customs to become nice, upstanding work-a-holic Calvinists. Now, if we are mainstream Americans, we're all Calvinists whether we realize it or not--either the Woke kind on the Left or the gun-and-bible-toting kind on the Right. 

American Calvinism has always been more interested in vilifying what was not compatible with its tight-assed vision rather than understanding or preserving what was vital in anything that did not fit within it. And so after the founding, most of New England's intellectuals couldn't stand Calvinism either, so they became Unitarians and Transcendentalists, the latter basically an import from German Romanticism and idealism. I know this is oversimplifying Calvinism in this pejorative sense, and in future posts I'll add some nuance. There is a positive side to Calvinism (despite itself). MLK came out of it, after all. There are many good, decent, spiritually vital Calvinists. But Calvinism as an idea system and cultural movement has done more harm than good overall. 

So American conservatism, insofar as it had a "tradition" to conserve, had a tradition that was symbolically weak to begin with in its rejection of the old Catholic, sacramental religion and with it the old European folkways, festivals, and quasi-heathen customs. And yet there was a customary culture in Yankee America, symbolically spare though it might have been, which before the Civil War retained a basic decency and public spiritedness that Toqueville writes about.

And then there was the South, which also had a vital customary culture, but its society was dominated by thugs living out a poor-man's fantasy about what it would be like to be an aristocrat. And so they made a society based on chattel slavery that was rotten at its core, and so whatever was vital in Southern customary culture was the warp to the chattel slavery woof that wove the Southern social fabric. We're still suffering from that rot--not just in the South now but everywhere. And whatever little was healthful in either Yankee and Southern customary cultures is gone now because post-war consumer capitalism and its information technologies has hollowed out whatever was vital and humanizing in them. The old customs have become museum pieces preserved by cultural societies of different sorts. 

In future posts I want to lay out the genealogy of the death of culture, if by culture we mean a vibrant symbolic system that mediates the Living Real for a civilization. I'll draw on both Jean Baudrillard and Iain McGilchrist who in their different ways make a compelling argument that we are living now in the aforementioned simulacra of culture, i.e, a parody of culture, and we're suffocating because of it. Baudrillard is pessimistic that there's any way out, but McGilchrist sees one. Whether we'll find a way to choose it remains to be seen. More on that in a future post. But what we're living together as Americans now is insane, and we need to understand its genealogy if we are to find a cure. 

Anyway, this is why Brooks's American Conservatism was always oxymoronic because it wanted simultaneously to preserve customary culture while embracing the capitalist dynamics that have been most responsible for destroying it. American Conservatism was never a movement to preserve what was vital, but rather only a movement to slow down the inevitable decay of a pre-Industrial way of life.

But the upshot is that America never had a richly vital tradition to preserve. Ask the "English" who went native in Franklin's account quoted in the epigraph. And for that reason it never had the spiritual or cultural resources to push back against the materialist flood that industrial capitalism brought to it in the decades following the American founding. The desire to preserve local community values and their customary cultures while at the same time celebrating the disruptive, creative-destructive energies of capitalism was at best a naive fantasy and always intellectually incoherent. 

American society was founded on some important ideals, but those ideals were never rooted in a metaphysical imaginary in which they might have been cultivated and sustained. Certainly the contemporary American cultural Left, the primary defender of those ideals now, does so with an unattractive moralistic priggishness that lacks the metaphysical heft to sustain them. These ideals were doomed from the start to be smothered by far more powerful cultural energies that accompanied the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie as a dominant social class.

The new imaginary legitimated greed and the will to power and came to see it as the engine that drove material progress, and indeed it did. Nevertheless, while people have always lusted for power and wealth, no civilized society had before embraced these vices as admirable. That we live in such a society is in large part what makes us so crazy, and no such society has a vital human future.

Materialist capitalism's negative effects are not primarily about the inevitable gross social inequities it produces, but about the way it impoverishes the human spirit of everyone it taints. It creates the conditions that make it extraordinarily difficult to deal humanely with its excesses. BTW, American socialism suffers from the same metaphysical imaginal limitations. I lean socialist in my politics because the system needs some constituency to mitigate the worst excesses of the private-sector sociopaths American society lionizes. But in the long run, socialism does not solve the deeper problem. 

So that's why 'American Conservatism' is oxymoronic. You can't have both vital local communities and their customary cultures in a larger society shaped by the unchecked energies of a capitalist economy. The flourishing of the latter leads invevitably to the destruction of the former. 

I want to take some time over the next year or so to reflect on how the 'death or disappearance of culture' presents some opportunities as well as dangers, but I want to state as clearly as I can now my conviction that our current collective metaphysical imaginary is no longer sustainable if we want to secure a positive future for humanity. And so long as we are culturally divided and conquered, culture-killing energies will remain unchecked, and with the death of culture inevitably comes the death of the human.

A respect for and celebration of pluralism is a good thing, but there needs to be an overarching commitment to which all the parties in a pluralistic society submit, and the argument that I want to make is that this commitment needs to be grounded in an imagined future, a cultural OS if you will, of positive human flourishing. Such a future is simply beyond the resources of our current Rationalist Materialist OS, and so people for want of something better turn to toxic fantasies of a lost past. 

See also "Dying Traditions"and "Tthe Baymen and Farmers of New York before World War II".

+++++++++++

This is the first in a series that is still in process. The parts posted so far are summarized below with links to each: 

Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West argues that the prestige of science and the material benefits of capitalism and its technological advancements has led to the development of metaphysical imaginary that is unique in the history of the world for its lacking a wisdom dimension, and that this accounts for the ontological dizziness that is at the heart of our current collective insanity. And I argue that because  technocapitalism and its rationalist, materialist, utilitarian imaginary reigns unopposed by any coherent wisdom tradition, the human project is at risk to be dragged off the cliff. For this reason, the only way to prevent disaster in the long term is to find a way not just as individuals but as a society to restore the vertical dimension to our metaphysical imaginary. 

Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus argues why some recovery of the vertical or wisdom dimension is necessary for us as a society, not just on an individual level. I try to make, at least in a preliminary way, the case for Axial verticality, and I defend Socrates as an essential model for us now--the opposite of what Nietzsche and Heidegger thought of him. Socrates should be for us now a model of both acquiring and teaching wisdom. All of us should be in a continuous process of clearing away what we think in order to create a space for what is true to emerge. This is true especially for Christians who think they know what Christianity is but really don't.

Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries points to the work of John Vervaeke and others who are trying to establish a cognitive-science basis for understanding and legitimating knowledge on the vertical dimension since the Axial Revolution. I see their work as supporting and enriching my argument. Vervaeke's presentation of a "salience landscape" and how cognitive development as the growth in wisdom is really about the transformation of one's salience landscape is a key for understanding how I think the metaphysical imaginary might eventually flip in such a way that the vertical dimension could be restored.

Part 4B takes Vervaeke's 'salience landscape' concept further in arguing that it provides a model for how people and societies make real progress, which requires not just progress on the horizontal axis, but on the vertical as well. I talk about how some salience landscapes can be evaluated as better or worse according to three criteria--coherency, scope, and richness. I talk about how Kohlberg's six stages of moral development are examples of how children through adulthood self-transcend in their moral development by having moral insights at progressively higher levels of coherency, scope, and richness. The "moral" is one dimension of self-transcendence on the vertical axis that does not get enough attention in a lot of New Age spirituality, which is more interested in developing cognitive scope rather than moral richness. 

Part 5: Salience Landscapes and Salience Bubbles explores the distinction between the two. It draws upon the Adam McKay film Don't Look Up as a case study in how salience bubbles work. It argues that the goal is not to be unbiased because that is impossible, but rather to always be open to have our biases challenged by new information. That's possible for people who live in a flexible salience landscape, not possible for those who live in saliency bubbles. It argues that real science proceeds from within evolving salience landscapes on the horizontal level which deserves the legitimacy that it enjoys, but the problem for the rest of us is the way that the criteria for what makes knowledge legitimate on the horizontal dimension is used to evaluate the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension. Hopefully sooner, but probably later, we will develop a metaphysical imaginary that restores the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension in such a way that it can be integrated with knowledge on the horizontal dimension. 

Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series discusses how what this series is trying to achieve supplements Vervaeke's Awakening series. If his goal is to do a genealogy that explains why his psychotechnologies are a needed solution for our contemporary meaning crisis as it affects individual in crisis, my series runs on a parallel track that focuses more on the need for a broader societal solution insofar as it is the root cause of the experience of crisis on the individual level. 

Part 7: The Bigger Picture lays out, in a sense, the map for where this Genealogy series is heading. The goal is to make plausible--not to prove; proof is impossible--a Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary that integrates an evolution of consciousness mythopoesis with developments in science and a progressive politics. The heavy lifting to establish plausibility lies in the future after retracing the evolutionary pattern from the past. I think that while there is much overlap with the claims that I want to make with other religious traditions and with contemporary science, there are two things that Christianity emphasizes that are less important in these other traditions: One, history has meaning because it has a telos. This has practical implications because no progressive politics is possible without an eschatology. Marxism was an eschatological cult, and MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" assumes a deep eschatology. The second thing Christianity emphasizes is the importance of the individual person who is destined for communion, for deep connectedness with God, with other humans, with the cosmos. 

Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic is the first post to begin at the beginning of this Genealogy. The goal now, with some digressions here and there is to understand the origin and evolution of Christian Neoplatonism, the premodern Western metaphysical imaginary. The focus of this post is to demonstrate that Plato's philosophy was based on visionary experience from contemplation of the Divine One. This experience of transcendence is not common, but it's hardly exceptional. The whole post-Axial tradition is essentially the attempts of various societies to make sense of the world in the light of such experiences of transcendence. I further argue, following Pierre Hadot, that you can't understand either Plato or Aristotle if you don't see their philosophies as practices in their schools as promoting a habitus that orients its students toward this experience of the transcendent One.  

Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism makes the case that early Christian thinking was open and fluid in its development and took from Judaism, Greek philosophy, and mystery religions what fit within a framework of criteria that were shaped by the Christian revelation. While Christianity after Constantine became more obsessed with correct doctrine for political and social reasons, this earlier sifting process needs to be understood as an honest attempt to understand what was valuable from non-Christian sources and to integrate them into a broad "catholic" synthesis.

Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation surveys the importance of late Second Temple Jewish literary forms that arose from the cross-fertilization of Jewish belief and practice with Hellenic philosophy and practice. Relying heavily on Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Christian Mysticism, I focus particularly on the significance of the Apocalypses and the Song of Songs. And then we spend quite a bit of time understanding the significant contribution of the great Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria. I also make some distinctions between the Mysticism of the Heath and the Mysticism of Transcendence. This Genealogy series is mostly concerned with the second, but it's important to understand how it co-existed in a cultural milieu in which the first played a significant if not dominant role in the broader society. I emphasize the role of Love in both Greek and Jewish itineraries of spiritual ascent and the importance of the personalist dimension that Jewish thinking added to Greek ideas. 

Part 11: The Christian Synthesis 

Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project.   

Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West  

 

Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath

But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life — and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that they’d been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

Kurt Anderson, "How Liberals Opened the Door to [Crank] Libertarian Economics"

Milton Friedman was a crank, a fanatic Libertarian, whose views through much of his early career were relegated to the fringes. The Friedman Doctrine did not cause the problems we are dealing with now--Trumpism, huge economic inequality, intensified racial conflict--but legitimated the worst human impulses that led to their becoming as bad as they are now. Milton Friedman's ideas did not make men greedy; he legitimated greed. He removed the constraints and social norms that impeded people in business from giving their inner Scrooge or Mr. Potter free rein.

There's a direct line from Friedman to the corporate ethos that led to the 2008 meltdown and to the kind of mentality among many business types, especially on Wall Street, that leads them to embrace Trump. Like Friedman, Trump legitimates the worst human impulses. He brazenly acts out what normal people would feel ashamed to do, and so that makes people think he's honest or un-hypocritical. People see the president of the U.S. acting out their own secret, dark fantasies, and admire his "courage". But he's not courageous; he's a sociopath. 

The curious thing about Friedman is that he's an idealist about something that legitimates the worst impulses in human beings. That is a kind of sociopathy that he shares with most religious fanatics. His is a personal psychopathy that justifies Capitalist sociopathy. 

Libertarianism attracts a lot of smart people who are uncomfortable with complexity, who feel insecure at a deep ontological level, and so gravitate toward simplistic solutions that appear smart or edgy. It's the kind of thing that nerdy, emotionally stunted high schoolers get into, like reading Ayn Rand, as if she's really, really, you know, profound. But it's the kind of thing that if you don't outgrow it by your early twenties, you easily meld into the kind of sociopathic ethos that rules on Wall Street and shaped the ethos of Enron.  

Jesus said that the poor we shall have always with us. He forgot to mention that the sociopaths we shall have always with us, too. Unfortunately they're the ones who run things because normal, healthy people don't have their ruthlessness, monomania, and need to dominate. And most decent people tend to give even the worst people, if they're white and rich, the benefit of the doubt until it's too late. Any grifter or con artist understands this tendency among normal, decent human beings, and they know how to take advantage of it. 

The problem with America right now is that a grifter sociopath like Trump has shown other grifter sociopaths that there is a huge swath of the American public--40%+--who are ripe to be massively conned. Certainly more than I thought before Trump got elected--I would have guessed the number closer to 25%. There is nothing to hold back the next grifter sociopath to come along because Trump completed what Friedman began in destroying the decency norms that used to play a role in restraining what's worst in human nature. 

I assume that unless Trump stooges and the Russians are successful somehow in creating enough chaos and confusion to allow Trump to steal the election (a real possibility), Biden will win in November. But unless something even more unexpected happens, it's pretty clear that Biden and the Democrats haven't the imagination or strength of mind to fix what ails us. If 40%+ of the country prefers someone as comically crackpot as Trump now, 50%+ will prefer some future grifter selling the same snake oil but with more sophistication.

They'll find all kinds of crazy ways to justify their support for him or her, but it comes down to the con man's ability to persuade people that what they feel shameful about is really ok. As Gordon Gecko said echoing Friedman, "Greed is good... it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind." It's a great con because it makes you feel good about acting out what's worst. 

12/27/23 Update: I still think that the basic thrust of what I wrote here stands, but maybe softened somewhat by the more complex picture presented in Jennifer Burn's new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Read it and judge for yourself. Friedman, as were many other economists in the neoclassical school that became so influential in the late 20th century, was a true believer in the Cult of the Invisible Hand. He seemed to suffer from whatever the pathology is that leads people to join cults, and that cult produced beliefs and policies that, imo, are sociopathic. And is there any question that he was a fervent evangelist in the spreading of those beliefs and practices? Maybe that's too harsh. To what degree he is morally culpable is not for me to say. He started out as a New Dealer, but in later years he seemed oblivious of how his ideas had such negative impacts on the lives of ordinary people. He was in many ways just a man of his times, and when the times normalize sociopathy everybody shares in it some extent, me included. 

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. 

***

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. 

Making Meaning vs. Making Money

Must there be an inverse correlation?

In this Sunday's Tom Frank piece at Salon, he interviews David Graeber, one of the "organizers" [those are ironic air quotes] of Occupy Wall street, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years and a  piece last summer entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." I think the interview raises more question than it answers, but I thought this particular exchange was woth excerpting and discussing if anyone is inclined:

[Frank] I wonder about the political ramifications of this. You’re talking about a situation that obviously requires labor unions, but it could also go the other way. I am reminded of a passage in your book, “The Democracy Project,” where you attribute the well-known working-class enmity against the “liberal elite” to the fact that the liberal elite have good jobs, rewarding jobs, jobs that by definition lots of average people will never be able to get. I wonder if you could expand on that.

[Graeber] Well, here we go back to the question of unpaid internships again. Some years ago I wrote a piece for Harpers called “Army of Altruists” where I tried to grapple with the power of right-wing populism, especially with the way that “we hate the liberal elite” and “support the troops” seemed to have a very similar, deep resonance, even to be a way of saying the same thing. What I ended up concluding is that working class people hate the cultural elite more than they do the economic elite—and mind you, they don’t like the economic elite very much. But they hate the cultural elite because they see them as a group of people who have grabbed all the jobs where one gets paid to do good in the world. If you want a career pursuing any form of value other than monetary value—if you want to work in journalism, and pursue truth, or in the arts, and pursue beauty, or in some charity or international NGO or the UN, and pursue social justice—well, even assuming you can acquire the requisite degrees, for the first few years they won’t even pay you. So you’re supposed to live in New York or some other expensive city on no money for a few years after graduation. Who else can do that except children of the elite? So if you’re a fork-lift operator or even a florist, you know your kid is unlikely to ever become a CEO, but you also know there’s no way in a million years they’ll ever become drama critic for the New Yorker or an international human rights lawyer. The only way they could get paid a decent salary to do something noble, something that’s not just for the money, is to join the army. So saying “support the troops” is a way of saying “fuck you” to the cultural elite who think you’re a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, but who also make sure your kid would never be able to join their club of rich do-gooders even if he or she was twice as smart as any of them.

So the right wing manipulates the resentment of the bulk of the working class from being able to dedicate their lives to anything purely noble or altruistic. But at the same time—and here’s the real evil genius of right-wing populism—they also manipulate the resentment of that portion of the middle classes trapped in bullshit jobs against the bulk of the working classes, who at least get to do productive work of obvious social benefit. Think about all the popular uproar about school teachers. There’s this endless campaign of vilification against teachers, who they say are overpaid, coddled, and are blamed for everything wrong with our education system. In fact, grade school teachers undergo really grueling conditions for much less money than they’d be paid if they’d gone into almost any other profession requiring the same level of education, and almost all the problems the right-wingers are referring to aren’t created by the teachers or teachers’ unions at all but by school administrators—the ones who are paid much more, and mostly have classic bullshit jobs that seem to multiply endlessly even as the teachers themselves are squeezed and downsized. So why does no one complain about those guys? Actually I saw something telling written by a right-wing activist on some blog—he said, well the funny thing is, when we first started our school reform campaigns, we tried to focus on the administrators. But it didn’t take. Then we shifted to the teachers and suddenly the whole thing exploded. It’s hard to explain that in any other way than to say: a lot of people resent the teachers for having genuine, meaningful jobs. You get to shape young lives. You get to make a real difference for other people. And the logic seems to be: shouldn’t that be enough for them? They want that, and middle-class salaries, and job security, and vacations, and benefits, too? You even see that with auto workers. “But you get to make cars! That’s a real job! And you also want $30 an hour?”

It’s an imperfect strategy. The anti-intellectualism for instance works on many sections of the white working class, but it doesn’t work nearly so well on immigrants or African-Americans. The resentment against those who get to do meaningful labor exists alongside a resentment for having to do meaningless labor to begin with. It’s an unstable mix. But we have to recognize that in countries like the US, it’s been pretty effective.

[Frank] What can be done about all this?

[Graeber] Right after my original bullshit jobs piece came out, I used to think that if I wanted, I could start a whole career in job counseling – because so many people were writing to me saying “I realize my job is pointless, but how can I support a family doing something that’s actually worthwhile?” A lot of people who worked the information desk at Zuccotti Park, and other occupations, told me the same thing: young Wall Street types would come up to them and say “I mean, I know you’re right, we’re not doing the world any good doing what we’re doing. But I don’t know how to live on less than a six figure income. I’d have to learn everything over. Could you teach me?”

But I don’t think we can solve the problem by mass individual defection. Or some kind of spiritual awakening. That’s what a lot of people tried in the ‘60s and the result was a savage counter-offensive which made the situation even worse. I think we need to attack the core of the problem, which is that we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better.

I'm not sure if this holds up under closer scrutiny. It seems hyperbolic, but perhaps in the service of an unnoticed truth. I think Graeber is pointing to something real, but I'm not sure if his explanation of it makes sense. But I don't have a ready alternative explanation.

This aspect of right-wing populism he ponts to makes sense, but how do you account for the phenomenon of 'bullshit jobs'? Bullshit jobs don't make economic sense--why pay people big salaries to do nothing? So what kind of sense do they make? Is it all about cooptation--nobody's a worker anymore--everybody's a manager--in the service of social control?  Maybe, but I find it hard to believe because the bottom line is too important for these big corporations to care much about being in the social control business. 

Lapham and Frank

A must read article, crackling with interesting ideas--too much to excerpt for a quote here, but I'll put this one up since it relates to something that came up here last week. A questioner in the audience asks:

A Russian scholar drew a map of the United States where it sort of dissolved into four or five regions, with the Northeast kind of drifting toward Canada because of shared interests. The idea of an empire collapsing under its own weight, is any version of that a plausible scenario to you?

Lapham answers:

To me that is an entirely plausible scenario. Actually, Kevin Phillips, the historian mentioned earlier by Tom, published an article in Harper’s Magazine in the ’70s called “The Balkanization of America.” He actually had the map and he had the way it would divide and why, and I see that as entirely possible. I do. Because Washington can’t govern the United States. They’re trapped inside the Beltway. They’re dysfunctional. Again, to answer the question, there’s a wonderful book that I just read which is influencing me because I’m very impressionable and I’m apt to parrot the last thing I read. This book is called “Immoderate Greatness.” And it’s short. It’s a hundred pages but it’s extremely persuasive as to what happens to civilizations when they become so big that they in fact must fail. The author goes into the laws of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics and the exponential growth and the environment. It brings all the angles to bear.

One more excerpt. Lapham says:

No, capitalism is a machinery. It’s neutral. It’s not an idea. It’s a mechanism.

Audience question: So we are up against an idea?

Well, no. We’re up against heavily entrenched interests.

Audience question: Which is the idea…

Well, I don’t think they even put it to themselves that way. The only idea that I can ever see in the minds of the moneyed interests is that money is good for rich people and bad for poor people. That’s about the beginning and end of their idea, I think.

Yes, and the long and the short of it. All the b.s. on Fox or being spouted by Paul Ryan and the Koch brothers is a smokescreen to obscure this central truth. It just shouldn't be that hard to build consensus around something that is this simple to understand.

Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage

From the NYT (I boycott quoting from the Seattle Times):

Mayor Ed Murray presented on Thursday what he described as an imperfect but workable plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage and one of the highest anywhere in the nation, through a series of complex and phased-in stages. Just as crucially, he said, the plan has broad political support, with a coalition of labor and business groups ready to push hard for it at the City Council, starting with the first hearings next week.

But the plan, which in many other cities might be seen as a liberal Democratic agenda at the frontier of social and economic engineering, was immediately attacked not from the mayor’s right, but from his left.

Kshama Sawant, a Socialist Alternative Party member who was elected to the Seattle City Council last year on a single-minded drive to raise wages, said the plan had been “watered down” by business interests on the mayor’s 24-member committee on income inequality, of which she was also a member.

It's not a done deal yet, but it probably will go forward. I worry about unintended consequences, but I endorse this  primitive, but at least politically possible, strategy to help the working poor. Sawant doesn't like it, but she's done her job by pressuring from the left. She's a catalyst, not a policymaker. Such a catalyst is what's missing on the national level.

I think it's impressive that a fairly broad consensus within the  business and labor community here in Seattle was developed. Hat tip to Ed Murray, for whom I did not vote.

Local is where it's at, if for no other reason than you have a better chance to know the people you are dealing with. When we send a representatives to Washington, she or he is an avatar, a virtual presence, playing a role in a political game whose rules have nothing to do with reality as people live it in the real, local world. Unfortunately the policies, or the lack of them, that flow from that national game have impacts on us in the real world--so the game must be played. But real life is lived on the local level. 

I am wondering if we aren't evolving into, or have already become, a society in which the only meaningful kind of democracy is on the local level. I've argued that our democracy has become ceremonial on the national level, but it would actually be more highly functioning if that were true. Our democracy has become dysfunctional precisely because certain regions in the country can send deeply foolish and ignorant people to the national capital who insure that no consensus on practical ways to manage issues like climate change and even the immiseration of the working poor can be developed. It's hard to believe that this level of paralysis and dysfunction can continue indefinitely. We're talking 1850s levels of dysfunction here, and we all know how that turned out.

Perhaps it would be better if the country became a confederation of autonomous  regional jurisdictions--the Deep South, the Pacific Coast, The Heartland, the Great Lakes, the Northeast, the Mountain West. Let each of these regions develop their own tax, healthcare, energy, economic, and regulation, etc. policies. Maybe Mark's ideas about social credit would have a shot in The Pacific Coast, if not in the Northeast. If it worked there, maybe other regions would follow.

Let Washington, D.C., become more like the U.N.--mainly about international relations--and let real decision making power devolve to regions that have a greater capacity for developing consensus and leadership on issues that most of its citizens can get behind. Let the Deep South and the other current Red States live with the consequences of its 19th century mentality without getting bailed out by the economic power of the Pacific Coast, the Northeast, and the Great Lakes. Twenty-first century reality will in due course force them to adjust because they'll have nobody to blame but themselves when that reality smashes them in the face. 

Ok. Now you can tell me all the reasons why this wouldn't work.

 

Rising Inequality and Rising Temperatures

Interesting article by Paul Rosenberg this monring at Salon talking about Thomas Piketty and Elizabeth Warren. The question that's in the back of my head as I read this, though, is what difference does it make if even a three quarters of the country understands what's happening if there isn't the will to overcome the resistance of the other entrenched 25%--the top 1% and their delusional wannabes--that likes things just the way they are.

We seem long ago to have passed the point of having honest arguments about what's in the best interest of the country. We have devolved into a society in which it's everyone out for himself and his short-term interests, and if that means that the earth becomes a huge crock pot fifty to a hundred years from now or if the world's population becomes increasingly immiserated, who cares so long as I'm ok now? So thinks the entrenched top 25%. 

As the article points out, the two central issues that face our country and the world are growing inequality and climate change. All other issues, particularly the tribal ones, pale in comparison. Will a tipping point ever come? Will a point come when a sane consensus about the hugely negative consequences of not confronting these problems coalesce with the will to do something about them? Although it's very difficult for me to imagine how, I must believe that it will. 

The Spirit of Classical Liberalism

In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimze his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others, and 'naturally' recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges. In other words, each man was 'naturally' possessed of life, liberty and the pursit of happiness, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, though the most logical liberal thinkers preferred not to put this in the language of 'natural rights'. In the course of pursuing this self-interest, each individual in this anarchy of equal competitors, found it advantageous or unavoidable to enter into certain relations with other individuals, and this complex of useful arrangements--which were often expressed in the frankly commercial terminology of 'contract'--constituted society and social or poltical groups. Of course such arrangements and associations implied some diminution of man's naturally unlimited liberty to do what he liked, one of the tasks of politics being to reduce such interference to the practicable minimum. . . . Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 235-36)

When seen in this stark description of its primitiveness, I don't think it's hard to understand why not only reactionaries have resisted the the spirit of the new age. Hobbes through Bentham and the whole tradition of classical economics and Neoliberal politics and political economy accepts this narrative or variations of it as the most accurate description of the human condition. From a Christian perspective it is a description of Hell, a nightmare world to be saved from. 

While a good part of me is revolted by the spirit of Liberalism, there's another part of me that accepts it as the inevitable--a kind of Noah's flood to wash away the inequities and corruptions of an ancien regime that lived past its usefulness. It would have been nice if another way could have been found, but humans being who they are, that was never likely.

If modernity can be likened to a flood, we can acknowledge its cleansing and fertilizing 'utility', but it does not have within it the resources for constructing something new. That something new will arise--I am certain of it--but it will come from Logos bearers and people who carry seeds of things that grew before the flood worth preserving and cultivating in a brave new, no-longer-modern, that is, no-longer-flooded world. The flood waters have not quite receded, but when they do, it will be time for planting. 

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. 

Socialism v. Neoliberalism

Corey Robin recently in a post entitled " Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years"

In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. That, in fact, is the openly declared goal: once we are made more cognizant of our money, where it comes from and where it goes, neoliberals believe we’ll be more responsible in spending and investing it. Of course, rich people have accountants, lawyers, personal assistants, and others to do this for them, so the argument doesn’t apply to them, but that’s another story for another day.

The dream is that we’d all have our gazillion individual accounts—one for retirement, one for sickness, one for unemployment, one for the kids, and so on, each connected to our employment, so that we understand that everything good in life depends upon our boss (and not the government)—and every day we’d check in to see how they’re doing, what needs attending to, what can be better invested elsewhere. It’s as if, in the neoliberal dream, we’re all retirees in Boca, with nothing better to do than to check in with our broker, except of course that we’re not. Indeed, if Republicans (and some Democrats) had their way, we’d never retire at all.

In real (or at least our preferred) life, we do have other, better things to do. We have books to read, children to raise, friends to meet, loved ones to care for, amusements to enjoy, drinks to drink, walks to take, webs to surf, couches to lie on, games to play, movies to see, protests to make, movements to build, marches to march, and more. Most days, we don’t have time to do any of that. We’re working way too many hours for too little pay, and in the remaining few hours (minutes) we have, after the kids are asleep, the dishes are washed, and the laundry is done, we have to haggle with insurance companies about doctor’s bills, deal with school officials needing forms signed, and more.

It took until the late 19th Century, early 20th century before even the most progressive minds in the Anglo American world figured out that poverty for most people is not a sign of their moral turpitude. The famine in Ireland? It was ordained by God, and the Irish heathens deserved it. Debtors prisons, work houses, the concept of moral hazard: these are all products of a social imagination dominated Victorian economic moralism. The old Catholic idea that the poor were closest to God gave way in the modern period in the capitalist countries to the Calvinist idea that your wealth was an indicator of your favor with God. At least in the first model, the rich had a sense of their moral responsibility for the poor. In the Calvinist model, the immiseration of the poor was their getting what they deserved because the poor were responsible for their own immiseration. 

So it was something of a breakthrough when the English sociologist Seebohm Rowntree made the distinction between primary and secondary poverty in a 1901 study entitled Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Primary Poverty affected those people who simply hadn't enough money to meet the basic necessities of life. Secondary Poverty was the condition of those who had enough money, but wasted it on "non-necessities". For Rowntree a non-necessity was meat if poor families could be taught to subsist on a vegetarian diet, but secondary poverty was really just a hangover from the Victorian Calvinist idea that people are poor because they blow their money on alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes. 

But the very idea of Primary Poverty, that a huge number of people were poor because they were unemployed or paid too little for the work they could find was actually a Victorian ethos frame crasher, so to say. Of course Marxists on the continent were saying this for about a half century already, but Marxism never found a congenial home in the Anglo-American ethos dominated by the Calvinist Liberal moralistic frame. 

The fact is that the difference between conservatives and progressives even today lies in that conservatives still work within that Victorian frame. They really believe that the poor are responsible for their own plight. That government handouts make them passive and dependent. They focus on the few who abuse government programs, the welfare queens, etc., and assume that they are the rule rather than the exception. And they would deny help to those who really need it if that's the only way to prevent the few undeserving from getting what they don't deserve.

Charles Blow did a piece in the NYT the other day about this zombie Victorian idea that poor people are passive and dependent:

We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the charge.

They paint the poor as takers, work averse, in need of motivation and incentive. 

Well, that is simply not my experience with poverty. I have been poor, and both my parents worked. I grew up among poor people, and almost all of them worked. The problem wasn’t lack of effort, but low pay. Folks simply couldn’t make enough to shake the specter of need....

To buy into this destructive lie about the character of the poor means you’ve either had no experience being poor, or have no capacity to empathize with their plight.

Being poor is a job unto itself. The daily juggle of supplying the most basic needs — food, shelter, medicine — and the stress of knowing that you are always just one twist of fate away from calamity.

We moderns and late moderns live in a world where money means too much. It's bizarre that it has become a signifier of moral worth. Money is important--we all need enough of it that we shouldn't be in a continuous state of anxiety about it, but there are so many other better things to do than to manage it and worry about it.

That's the difference between those who celebrate free market capitalism and those who lean toward social democracy. The former thinks that the economic sphere in our lives is the most important, and that happiness and meaning in our lives depends on being effective economic players. It's for them as if economic activity is an end in itself, the way you prove your worth as a human being. And really, how bizarre is that? It's such an impoverished concept of what it means to be human. It takes an idea that has a little bit of truth in it and makes an idol of it. 

People in the second group think that, yes, the economic sphere provides a foundation, but that it is not an end in itself. Each of us needs a stable economic foundation upon which to build a meaningful life, but that meaning is not built through economic activity, but in the sphere of culture--of friends, family, music and the arts, religious practice, learning, sports, hobbies, and other entertainments. That's where the meaning is. Happiness is not guaranteed for anyone, but the prospect of immiseration for anyone is never a worry. The focus for your moral responsibilty lies in whether you have made a life, not just in whether you have made a llving.

There is at its heart something deeply dehumanizing about the Liberal and Neoliberal ethos, and so whatever might be said about socialism and its limitations, it has a human heart, at least until the technocrats get hold of it. That's the danger of socialism--not the moral hazards associated with redistribution, but its proclivity toward a toxic top-downism dominated by another kind of moralistic elite, the Jacobin who becomes a commissar.

No solution is ideal, but this is where the Rawls's veil of ignorance thought experiment is useful. If you were told before birth that you would be born black and poor, with average intelligence and talent, would you choose to be born in Cuba or in the U.S.? 

Douthat on the Leftist Pope

But the church’s social teaching is no less an official teaching for allowing room for disagreement on its policy implications. And for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions.

That explanation rests, I think, on three ideas. First, that when it comes to lifting the poor out of poverty, global capitalism, faults and all, has a better track record by far than any other system or approach.

Second, that Catholic social teaching, properly understood, emphasizes both solidarity and subsidiarity — that is, a small-c conservative preference for local efforts over national ones, voluntarism over bureaucracy.

Third, that on recent evidence, the most expansive welfare states can crowd out what Christianity considers the most basic human goods — by lowering birthrates, discouraging private charity and restricting the church’s freedom to minister in subtle but increasingly consequential ways. (Source)

This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.

Regarding number one: Capitalism has never had a productivity or innovation problem, but it has always had a very serious distribution problem. Its productivity has made some people very rich, its innovation disruptive to traditional societies, their values, and ways of life often immerserating them. GDP per capita is a poor way to measure wealth. Free-market capitalism as it has evolved, especially since the last half of the 19th century, has created new kinds of poverty and slavishness that simply did not exist before.

Regarding number two: I mostly agree; there should always be a bias for the local and voluntary. But subisidiarity also recognizes that the Feds have a responsibility to intervene when the locals are incompetent, incapable, or unwilling to deal with problems that negatively affect its citizens on the local level. The Feds did the right thing when Eisenhower sent the troops into Little Rock, and they should have done a better job when Katrina hit New Orleans. If the Feds were serious about improving educational achievement, they wouldn't be pushing on local communities ridiculous top down policies like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core. They would be finding ways to intervene to mitigate the toxic effects of poverty in the lives of children who grow up in it.

And this brings us to the last of his points, so regarding number three: Does Douthat really think that the U.S. is any in danger of becoming one of the most expansive of welfare states? As for crowding out, please. I understand the point, but we're not living in stable ante-bellum communities where everyone knows who you are and when a stranger arrives in town it's a big event.

Conservatives get all nostalgic in their complaining about how bureaucracies have replaced face-to-face relationships, but that's the price of number one: the disruptive, innovative power of capitalism. I don't like bureacracies either, and as I suggest in my response to number two, there are places I think the Feds should keep their noses out of. But the scale of the social and economic disruptions that follow from number one is not "subtle". It requires by the logic of number two that it intervene to do the mitigating welfare work of number three. And the huge scale of the problems, alas, requires bureacracies whose scale is equal to the suffering. There's still plenty of room for the churches and other local voluntary organizations so that they need not feel subtly or grossly crowded out. But they are not competent alone to deal with the huge scale of the problems modern market capitalism has created. 

The pope gets this, and Douthat, good Catholic that he is, won't go all Rush Limbaugh on him. He wants to find the middle ground, and good for him. And he's right that there isn't anything substantively different in what Francis is teaching that contrasts with his predecessors. His is, rather, a matter of emphasis. And it is a matter of a pope  embracing a prophetic role, his papal bully pulpit, but this time as one who speaks as the first pope from the southern hemisphere, and who knows concretely the kind of suffering that follows from Douthat's abstract neoliberalism. 

 

Sawant on Boeing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is This an Historic Moment?

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watching Brazil

From "The Social Awakening in Brazil" in the NYT today:

For all of Brazil’s achievements over the past few decades — a stronger economy, democratic elections, more money and attention directed toward the needs of the poor — there is still a huge gap between the promises of Brazil’s ruling leftist politicians and the harsh realities of day-to-day life outside the political and business elite.

The World Bank lists Brazil as the world’s seventh-largest economy, but puts it in the bottom 10 percent on income equality. Its 15-year-olds rank near the bottom in global rankings of reading and math skills. A succession of its top politicians have been implicated in flagrant payoff schemes and other misuse of public funds.

Brazil is interesting, because along with India, China, and Indonesia, it's among the big four emerging economies that will be changing the game in the next century. The situation in Brazil is interesting because everybody was so surprized by it. Protests were triggered by bus fare hikes in Sao Paulo, but they spread throughout the country in ways that no one, including the organizers, expected. Brazil has a center-left government, but seems just as clueless and out of touch as the center-right government in the U.S.

The U.S., too, is among the worst in income inequality. So why aren't we out in the streets? This from an article in the Washington Post in May:

Income inequality in the United States and Latin America — particularly Chile and Mexico — has tended higher than in Europe. This trend continued into 2010. The top five most unequal countries (in descending order) were Chile, Mexico, Turkey, the United States and Israel. Portugal, the European nation with the highest income inequality, was ranked sixth:

 

 Source

Interesting that Turkey is in the top five there, too. Americans aren't out in the streets becase the GDP per capita is around $48K (World Bank rank 16), while in Brazil it's around $12K (rank 56) and Turkey $10K (rank 64), so Americans still have more of a cushion. But the question that will determine whether there is future unrest in the US has more to do with the direction things are going. There are no market mechanisms that will solve growing income inequality, so the longer American elites cling to their Neoliberal ideology, the worse things will get. Something has to give sooner or later.