futurehead

Five factors behind the Town Hall Crazies

Everywhere I go everyone seems to be talking about the recent health care town hall meetings and how the country feels like it is going a little bit crazy right now.  My take is that there are five factors behind this:

1. We have a serious situation in this country: a pretty crazy right-wing media machine that pumps out lies and disinformation to a receptive slice of the population. For years a lot of people have talked about the fragmentation of media, and now it has come to pass.  The fact is, we must share our country with a lot of fellow citizens who get their information from liars and crazy people, and whose reality is defined by those broadcasters.  Many smart philosophers have concluded that reality is socially constructed; we all live in a complicated world - much more complicated than we can directly observe ourselves - and most of our understanding of our world comes not from direct observation but from imaginative construction based on the reporting of others.  However, as I have discussed before, this is a highly unreliable process, and when people hear that Obama was not born in the United States, or that he is threatening to take away everybody's health care, and do not access any sources of information that refute that claim, they in all earnestness believe it.  The anecdote cited by Paul Krugman just sums it all up: the guy who stood up at a meeting and demanded, "keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
2. The country has always had a foaming right wing fringe.  Before the Birthers, there were Birchers (members of the loony John Birch society) and other wild-eyed far-right conservatives driven crazy by civil rights and socialism.  And a history of "respectable" business interests making use of that fringe from time to time for political and/or economic purposes (such as in the McCarthy and civil rights periods). In many ways what we are seeing is not new, it is just more apparent because it is being pumped up and turned out by the right-wing media machine, as well as by certain for-profit organizing groups that are being paid by the health care lobby in order to turn out the crazies. 
3. It looks like there is a racist element here as well - that many of these people feel alienated from their government because someone who is irrevocably "other" to them has taken over leadership of the country.
4. The media is overdramatizing individual interactions because they make good television and making the lunatic fringe look like a significant political force.  (The reform forces need to make the media's inability to convey abstractions work in their own favor by finding and dramatizing individual victims of our barbaric health care system.)
5. The economic situation may, in some diffuse way, be creating a pool of free-floating angst and anger that is finding a (perverse and counter-productive) outlet in these incidents.  The Great Depression sparked grassroots movements and leaders such as the Townsendites, Huey Long, and Father Coughlin.  Whenever the nation experiences such turmoil, people will cast about for answers, and that process of defining blame and solutions is highly unreliable; it can lead to genuine reform that actually solves problems and makes people's lives better, as happened during the New Deal, or it can swing right and turn nasty, as happened for example in the 1930s in Germany, or in the U.S. South, where poor whites, oppressed by a wealthy aristocracy, occasionally banded together with poor blacks to push for unions and other economic reforms, but more often were led into lashing out against their black brethren in a long-term conflict that set poor man against poor man and increased misery and unhappiness for all instead of addressing its causes. 

All of this insanity raises an obvious question: if Obama's mild, gradualist health care proposals have sparked all of this right-wing gnashing and bashing, why shouldn't he have gone ahead and proposed a health-care fix more far-reaching and direct?  It's not as if the opposition could be any less vociferous. Then at least it would give progressives like me something to get excited about to counterbalance these misinformed loonies. 

So far Obama is looking like just another weak, spineless début du siècle Democrat - all reconciliation, no ferocity.  But reconciliation with crazy and utterly misinformed people does not make sense; there's no percentage in it, and people who are dying because of our health system deserve a little ferocity on their behalf for once.  This fight will test Obama's meddle; if he loses this round, will he cave and never bring up health care again, as Clinton did, or will he pick himself up, propose something even tougher, and get right back into the fight again?

This is the "hope" we all heard about, time to produce.

Blowing the Stimulus? Obama as Clinton or Reagan

So Obama is beginning to detail his recovery plan.  According to news summaries of a new  White House 4-page summary of Obama's stimulus proposal (which I can't find online yet), it looks like it contains a lot of good things -- HOWEVER, it is majorly disappointing that it does not appear to contain a significant investment in rail and public transportation, and generally includes "proposals designed to appeal to Republicans who have resisted the scale of federal spending."  This is enough to give any liberal who lived through the Clinton years a shudder. 

Under "infrastructure," the Washington Post reports that the plan would "repair and modernize thousands of miles of roadways," yet apparently Obama and the Democrats are shafting mass transit in favor of GOP-favored tax cuts.  

This is insane.  It's crazy on two levels: policy and politics. 

On policy, Obama has rightly been making a big fuss about combatting global climate change, which is perhaps not causing people to freak out with fear and alarm only because the problem is so big and frightening that people can't deal.  He's proposing weatherizing homes and increasing renewable energy -- but he's not going to use this one-in-a-generation opportunity to begin resetting the transportation landscape of America, which has gone so disastrously off course and which is responsible for so much of the global warming problem?  (In addition to our disastrous auto-centered transportation policy for moving people, see this fascinating article on the disastrous path that US policy on the moving of freight has taken. Our highways (which cost $32 million per mile to build and more to maintain) are choked with high-emission (and often dangerous) trucks, while trains are capable of delivering the same friend far more efficiently.  With a few hundred billion of stimulus dollars, author Phillip Longman argues, we could not only get 83% of long-haul trucks off our roads, but also create capacity for high-speed passenger rail.

On politics, Obama's strategy is downright alarming. It is heightening my worst fears that we have yet another weak Democratic president who does not know how to play offense and has no interest in aggressive attempts to move our nation forward into a more rational and humane future.  He is trying to please the Republicans?  Doesn't he realize that no matter what he does, the Republicans will attack him?  (sure enough, despite his GOP-friendly proposal, GOP leaders are attacking it).  He is putting forward crimped, inadequate proposals, tilted toward tax cuts instead of vigorous public investments that will pay dividents for years to come?  Doesn't he realize he can propose anything he wants right now?  If the Republicans attack him, he has an easy answer:  "We've tried the Republican economic philosophy for the last 8 years -- some would say the last 28 years -- and look where that's gotten us.  The great middle class economic boom that America experienced from the 1940s through the 1960s was the result of Democratic economic policy, and we could use some more of that right now.  Your economic philosophy has proven that it's a failure -- it's time to go back to what works."  etc., etc. 

For good measure, he could easily add, "The Republican economic ideology has already ruined our economy -- let's not let it now ruin our economic recovery plan, lest we end up in a deep prolonged recession."  In short, he should both threaten the Republicans with being blamed for the economy if it does not turn around, and set himself up to do so if it does not.  

Obama defenders say to me, "c'mon, give the guy a chance, it's only his first week on the job."  Yes, but this stimulus proposal is a once-every-50-year chance to begin reorienting the country, and he's got to move quickly, and it would be such a shame and a waste not to make the most of it.  It could be the biggest thing that Obama does in his entire presidency.  His first week on the job?  Tough. Things move fast when you're president.  He will be judged on this by history, first week or not.  More road projects?  Cutting taxes instead of shifting them upward?  Ug.

Might he have to compromise with conservatives (GOP or Democratic) eventually?  Sure.  But don't pre-compromise!  Don't do what Clinton habitually did, and bake the compromises into the proposal, because then you only end up compromising further.  Any child with a brother or sister knows that if you want 5 cookies, you ask for 7.  If you ask for 5, you'll end up with 3. And Obama has so much popularity and credibility right now, and the Republicans so little on the economy, that he probably could get 6.

The only good direction I can imagine this going is if Obama does a Reagan.  Apparently, in the early 1980s, Reagan proposed tax cuts that were rejected by the Democratic Congress.  So he went back to them with another proposal -- for even bigger tax cuts!  Reagan was a bad influence on the world -- but that's leadership!  Best case scenario is that Obama will let the GOP make a lot of noise, declare that he's tried to compromise and reason with them but finds he can't and is determined not to let them ruin our future, and then propose a new stimulus proposal that is even bolder than the current one.

Thoughts on the economy

I'm not surprised by the economic disasters we've been witnessing the last several months.  As I wrote in February, I have long felt this kind of thing was coming. In fact, in early March I put all my 401(k) into the safest category, cash or something close to it, with the result that my account sunk around 5% in 2008 instead of 40% or more like most people.  (You have to wonder if I could see the writing on the wall, why couldn't all these financial geniuses on Wall St. and at so many other large institutions around the world? )

In a rational world, any holdout deadenders who still think markets work well when left alone, would abandon that article of faith and embrace the real world we live in. Undoubtedly libertarian academics and think tankers are busy trying to construct a narrative in which regulation is to blame for this fiasco, but it seems pretty clear that what we're seeing, on the broadest level, is that, beginning in 1929:

1. The unregulated markets imploded
2. The government set up regulatory mechanisms to protect people from the unacceptable costs of such implosions by insuring against them
3. Since the government had to regulate the banks that it insured (to make sure that the banks wouldn't take wild risks with the taxpayers' money), when boom times came, and institutions were competing for capital, the money flowed around the regulated institutions and sought out deregulated ones where it could earn much higher returns (by taking much higher risks).  Thus the rise of the "shadow banking system."
4. Go to step 1 and repeat

As this formulation suggests, it may not be sufficient to simply plug the new holes by extending government regulation from the old banking system, to the new (shadow) banking system.  The next time boom times hit, money will again seek out high-risk, high-return, unregulated investments.  It will probably once again end up being more money than can be allowed to fail. 

So, in an ideal world, our policymakers would not just extend New Deal-style regulation to the shadow banking system, but fashion some kind of meta-solution to this problem.  In a less ideal world, our policymakers would simply extend regulation.

But, incredibly, in the real world, policymakers voted through a huge $700 billion bailout, with no attempt whatsoever to actually fix the problems that led to the fiasco.  We'll see what happens now that Obama is president. 

Other thoughts:

Stir the pot.  Aside from the financial shenanigans, there may well be a systematic problem with our economy.  I suspect that when things are left to themselves, money tends to rise to the top and concentrate there, until there isn't enough circulating down below to keep the economy healthy.  This is the old liberal interpretation of the Great Depression: the productive capacity of the economy exceeded the ability of people to buy what was being produced.  After WW II, the New Dealers who were still in power went about constructing an artificial, unnatural, man-made economy in which individuals got government subsidies for going to college, and buying a home, in which the government created vast industries such as defense and aerospace, and money was aggressively redistributed (as I mentioned last week, the top marginal tax rate was 95% between 1951 and 1963 and 70% until 1980). The result was the greatest middle class society and sustained period of prosperity in US history. 

International reverberation. I wonder if there isn't a serious danger that all the globalization that has been taking place in recent decades won't greatly worsen the economic downturn.  That would be based on the intuition that economic interconnectivity will intensify the feedback cycles at work.  When you see a gas tanker driving down the highway, the liquid is not stored in one big tank.  That would be far too unstable -- if the tanker began to tilt to one side, all the liquid would slosh in that direction, further driving the tanker that direction, until it tipped over.  Instead, the liquid is stored in numerous separate cells.  Globalization may have had the effect of breaking apart those cells so that we are positioned for some serious negative feedback effects.  Put another way, the economic downturn may resonate like like the famous bridge that shook itself to pieces, apparently because the frequency of its vibration matched the length of its span, with the result that instead of dampening each other, the vibrations that the wind created in the bridge were in phase and reinforced each other, building the intensity of the bridge's shaking until it shook apart.

Management vs. Ownership.  There's been a lot of analysis of the problems with Wall Street leading up to the economic crisis.  The problem was not just stupidity, it was the gap between ownership and management.  That is a structural problem: managers of many, many companies in corporate America are looking out for themselves, not for the owners of their companies as is supposed to be their job.  All the gnashing of teeth about the "short term thinking" of so many companies, about their greed, and about their supposed "stupidity," is a waste of energy.  It all makes much more sense when you realize that the corporate managers were acting in their own narrow self-interest.  If you view companies and the economy through the lens of economics, this problem will be somewhat obscured for you.  If you look at it in sociological terms, it is clear that CEOs and Boards of Directors have not been acting for the good of the owners they are supposedly working for, and there is nothing to make sure they do so. This is why corporate salaries have skyrocketed, and why CEOs do well even when they don't.  This seems to be the real scandal behind the scandal -- the entire structure of our capitalism has a bug or a contradiction, and it just got ripped open.

Security taxes.  Economists always spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about taxes, which the field regards as a drain on the economy.  What about the raft of security measures that have been imposed in the last 8 years?  Most security measures I would think must behave economically the way that taxes are supposed to behave:  they act as a drag on other activities, they reduce the efficiency of transactions and other key ingredients of an economy, and they suck up funds without providing any tangible benefit in return the way an infrastructure investment does.  Perhaps security expenditures (especially the inefficiencies they impose) are far more difficult to measure than taxes, but that does not mean they are necessarily less important dollar for dollar).  Could it be that the explosion in security measures that we have seen in the past 8 years bears some relationship to the weakness of the decades's economic recovery and the strength of its downturn?

It's time to stop mincing words: our president is a torturer

In honor of today's Supreme Court decision (refusing to review case of CIA "rendition") as well as this past weekend's fascinating New York Times revelation of further Bush Administration perfidy on the torture issue, I finally was inspired to make this bumper sticker I've had in my head for a number of years now:

Our president is a torturer: but hey, at least he's not a serial killer!

Who lost the arctic?

Yesterday I wrote about the possibility of climate changes that are even more sudden and catastrophic than anyone is expecting.  You might think that this would be a national security issue of the first order.  You might think that conservatives and Republicans, who have made national security their top issue, who have yelled and screamed about various threats posed to our nation, who have insisted that absurd sums be spent on the national (military) defense, and who have attacked Democrats without restraint – often by calling them traitors implicitly or explicitly – you might think they would be pushing for immediate action. 

Yeah, right.

The same conservatives who have been cowering in fright at every potential shoe bomber, pushing for expanded defense budgets since 1947 just in case we have to fight two and a half wars simultaneously (which – at least before Iraq – has been our defense preparedness doctrine) and just in case the Soviets took the extremely unlikely step of rolling their tanks across Europe toward Paris – want nothing but more studies when it comes to this particular threat.

Now why would that be?  The obvious conclusion is that we shouldn’t take conservatives seriously when they prattle on about the security of the nation, stability, the need to avoid radical change, etc.; that as I discussed previously they’re just not serious and not sincere.

To flesh this out a little more, I think there are several factors at work:

1. Politically, conservatives are not honest when they pump up the threats to our nation.  They are doing it for partisan purposes, and to distract people from the fact that while they wave the flag with one hand, they are stealing money from the poor to give to the rich with the other.
2. Financially, certain sectors of the wealthy, whom conservatives and Republicans ultimately represent, have been benefiting enormously from the military-industrial complex for many years, and the inflation of perceived military threats helps them, while taking action against global warming would hurt business by leading to regulation.
3. Ideologically, conservative fair-weather anti-statists are permitted to accept an enormous defense and security establishment (even though nothing exemplifies the raw power of the state than these).  But regulations of the kind needed to deal with global warming do not jibe with their ideology.  Why would their ideology be shaped in this particular way?  See #2.
4. Psychologically, conservatives need an enemy to hate, so they can easily get themselves worked up over Reds (1848-1991), the Japanese (early 1990s), Chinese (mid-1990s-2001), “Islamo-Fascists” (2001-?), the French (2003-2004), or other human antagonists – but global warming just doesn’t push their buttons; the enemy is us.
5. Existentially, conservatives are frightened of the possibility that we, human beings, might be stuck here on a planet in space, in charge of our own destiny, with no adult supervision, and no God or other absolute around which to orient ourselves.  They prefer to rest upon absolute foundations, can’t deal with the possibility that the future could be so open-ended, and are frightened of confronting the responsibility implied by the lack of foundation and fixity of our situation.

Crime and the Law of Large Numbers

Take a poor kid who has committed a crime.  How do we evaluate that ethically as human beings?  Conservatives will say throw the book at 'em.  The liberal attitude (though since Clinton few liberals appear strong enough to ever admit it) is to look at the kid's background and be more forgiving.  I would argue that ethically, we must approach this kind of situation with two minds simultaneously: as a judge, and as a ruler (there's also as a priest, who looks at the sin, and seeks to understand and forgive it, but let's put that aside for now). 

• Judge.  As a judge we look at an individual's actions, and judge them according to our notions of right and wrong.  End of story.
• Ruler.  As a ruler (policymaker) interested in the public good (let's imagine), your goal is to achieve social stability and justice.  From that point of view, you have to recognize that environment leads to crime. 

In other words, faced with an individual who mugged somebody we must be judgmental and censorious (as well as appropriately merciful).  But facing a city full of muggers, we must recognize that, through the law of large numbers, there are environmental factors that CAUSE bad behavior. 

As social policy, we cannot but punish bad behavior in individuals, as if each has complete free will.  (After all, whatever happened to the guy in front of you, there are probably other people with the same history who have NOT become muggers.)  But in making policy that applies to groups, we must act as if each is nothing but a complete product of circumstance.

The law of large numbers says that the larger one's sample, the closer to chance expectation the distribution will be.  If you flip a coin four times and get three heads, or 75% of the time, it is unsurprising.  If, however, you flip a coin 10,000 times, and the rate remains 75%, you can be certain the coin is weighted. 

It's safe to assume that in any human society, a certain percentage of citizens will go bad -- become anti-social, criminals, evil.  Perhaps this is an inevitable product of life; perhaps the multitudinous stresses of daily living, getting along with other people, dealing with injustices large and small, reigning in the ego, absorbing the many small assaults on our self-worth with which each person is confronted, and the contours of each person's inborn personality -- perhaps these factors are, like nodes of sound waves in a concert hall, bound to concatenate in certain places, ensuring that a certain percentage of the population slips into behavior that the society cannot accept. 

Let us say that the estimated percentage of citizens over age 10 who will commit a crime in a given year in the United States is N.  Therefore, according to the law of large numbers, if N% of your town's residents are arrested this year, you can feel as though things are in reasonably good order.  However, if the rate is 3N% or 4N%, and your town or city has more than a few individuals, you must conclude that something systematic is wrong.  It is unlikely to be coincidence that so many bad people have happened to land in your town.  There must be some distinct CAUSE for this unfortunate conglomeration of malevolence.  The racist may ascribe it to the number of blacks or latinos in the city or whatever, and conclude nothing can be done.  But an enlightened person realizes that it must be a result of circumstances, and seeks to change the circumstances.  The fact that so many conservatives argue that nothing can or should be done except bear down with ever-harsher punishments, may be a reflection of a racism implicit in their worldview.  Or just an inability to see things with two minds. 

Virginia's $3,500 Speeding Tickets

While I was on vacation this August, there was a controversy here in Virginia over a new program to impose Draconian (named after Draco, the first man to write a constitution in ancient Athens - I guess it was kind of harsh) fines of up to $3,500 for speeding tickets.  Some have argued that the fines are too severe, while others have pointed out that the tickets are only given to those who drive more than 20 MPH over the speed limit, which legally constitutes “reckless driving.” 

This law is crazy.  It’s the latest example of Republican willingness to do anything – anything – to avoid raising taxes.  So, in order that their rich constituents won’t have to pay more for the public good, or their ideological simpletons won’t have to re-think their stupid anti-government philosophy, they have instituted a grossly unfair system for raising money that the state needs. Here’s why they’re unfair:

• The writing of speeding tickets is random and capricious.  It’s one thing to impose high penalties on wrongdoing if people have some assurance that the punishment will be meted out relatively consistently, it’s another when that punishment is meted out so seldom and so inconsistently, as is the case with speeding, that it becomes effectively random. Why should a budget gap be filled by random losers in what amounts to a reverse lottery, rather than by everyone evenly through taxes?
• Speed limits have an inconsistent relationship to genuine safety.  It is entirely possible for a person to be driving along a road at a speed that is perfectly safe for the conditions – and yet be in violation of the speed limit, even by more than 20 MPH. Americans, especially in the suburbs, are fond of building overly massive, super-wide, straight, four-lane roads, which look and feel as if they're built like an autobahn -- and then slapping a 35 MPH speed limit on it.  Missed the sign that the limit just dropped 20 MPH?  That'll be 20% of the value of your car, please.
• It gives too much power to individual police officers.  Be REALLY nice to that cop who's pulled you over.  Certainly don't dare to intimate he did anything unfair or unprofessional.  Police already have wide discretion in how they treat civilians.  (Many are fair and professional. Some are not.) Now they will have the power to impose or refrain from imposing fines that for many citizens will be literally ruinous.
  
• The tough-punishment approach doesn’t work.  There’s nothing worse than some jerk driving recklessly fast or just recklessly, endangering the lives of children and everyone else on the roads.  I certainly want people like that punished when I see them.  But this punishment is too loosely related to genuinely bad behavior, and the "tough" punishments that conservatives always love so much never work -- especially if they're not scrupulously fair. What we need are police that use good judgement to catch people who are genuinely posing a threat to others, not capricious revenue-collection agents, making up the Republicans' budgetary gaps through this unjust anti-lottery. 

Several of these points can be illustrated by something that happened to me in 1998.  I was driving along Route 29 through central Virginia from Charlottesville to DC when I was pulled over at a spot in the road where I hadn't noticed that the speed limit suddenly dipped.  I had been driving at a speed that was perfectly safe for the long, straight, empty road I was on.  Later I mentioned to my graduate advisor that I’d gotten a speeding ticket, and he said “let me guess, you were clocked at 59 MPH.”  He was right!  How did he know that?  “They’re always for 59,” he explained, because if the cop had written me up for 60, it would have been wreckless driving, and I (and the officer) would have had to go to court, etc.  Instead, it seemed, Fauquier County preferred to just take my money & run. 

Neocons on a Cruise

Check out this excellent -- entertaining, hair-raising -- piece of reporting:

Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren't Listening

This may shed a lot of light about what was going on in the heads of the simpletons who started this Iraq war. A lot of the attitudes this guy reports I would have expected in 1910; it's amazing that, if what this fellow encountered is anything resembling a reliable sample (it may not be), a significant number of people still think this way.

Humiliated in Iraq so we don't have to be humiliated at home?

If you're going to read anything about the Iraq war, read the periodic pieces by Peter Galbraith.  He's been writing about Iraq for a while in the NY Review of Books and if you want what Bush and his people lack -- an accurate mental map of the world (or that part of it) -- he will provide it.  Now Salon appears to have wisely caught on to him and published an excellent piece by him about the coming U.S. loss in Iraq -- acually the loss that has already happened, as he points out.

One strand of thinking about western relations with the Arab world is that the Arab world (which once was far more advanced than Europe) is burning with resentment over its weak position from colonial times onward.  In some versions of this, it is an irrational hatred that has driven them to counterproductive and unreasonable positions vis a vis Israel and the United States. In other versions, it is a perfectly rational and understandable reaction to past & current Western exploitation, support for dictatorships, and the harming of innocent people through the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I don't speak Arabic, don't know the culture, and don't pretend to know what is true.  (In general, though, I am suspicious when foreigners are cast as implacably irrational.)

But if this view is correct in some measure, it raises the supremely ironic possibility that a United States "loss" in the Iraq war would do as much good as anything to lower the risk of terrorism. If the Arab world feels humiliated, then perhaps our own humiliation could paradoxically start a process of healing.

I do so wish we had succeeded in carrying out our professed democratizing mission in Iraq.  But I shudder to think about all the human carnage that is taking place in Iraq now and in the past 5 years and how much hatred is being inflamed against our once and future great nation (though it now be on a bender of bloody blundering stupidity), and how that hatred could come back to hurt us later.

Of course this kind of idea drives conservatives into frothy madness, humiliation being the worst thing that can happen to our country in their view (worse than 60,000 American or 3 million foreign deaths, if Vietnam is any measure).  But a stiff does of humility may begin to erode at least a bit of the mountain of ill-will the Bushiz have spread around the world this decade.

The point when we were most "humiliated" -- right after 9/11 -- was the point when the world was most sympathetic to us, including the peoples of countries like Iran.  But of course that could not stand.

If our national security establishment and terror-alarmist conservative politicians were truly interested in minimizing the chance of terrorism, they would embrace humility.  But of course they are more interested in cheap hate-driven revenge (masquerading as 'necessary toughness') than in truly fighting the problem.

Manly, naive & gullible

One of the amazing things that’s happened in the past few years is the way that the conservatives, having (more or less) lost the racial and communist cards as a way of separating fools from their votes, have succeeded in exploiting gender issues.  The GOP has successfully convinced large swatchs of America that it’s not quite manly to vote Democratic.

That is why I’ve always said that the critical moment, the turning point of the Bush Administration was during Katrina, when Bush flew over the disaster, looking down lamely from his airplane window, while his adminsitration impotently failed to rise to the occasion of dealing with the crisis. 

Bush and his handlers had succeeded in cultivating a carefully crafted illusion that he was genuinely manly – a take-charge, straight-talking, effective, no-holds-barred guy.  But the Administration’s reaction to Katrina (which resembled the flighty lady in distress more than her strong cowboy rescuer) and the Window Tour in particular, shattered that image.  A gestault switch took place among a certain significant chunk of macho (but naïve and gullible) Americans, and it’s been all downhill for the Bushies ever since. 

Some political scientist, if they haven’t already, oughta test these speculations about the primacy of gender consciousness in GOP voting against the GSS (General Social Survey, a huge biennial survey of Americans on a wide variety of subjects). 

How to Spot a Real Conservative

Once upon a time, it was easy to spot a conservative.  In the long ideological battle over the role of government in this country, conservatives were the ones who supported fiscal restraint and opposed a greater role for government.  And behind that position was a fairly well articulated philosophy that stretches back to Edmund Burke and beyond. 

That philosophy centered on a recognition of the sinfulness and lack of perfectability of mankind, and a resultant reluctance to embrace too much change too quickly.  If a liberal is a person who says “this is all there is?  We can do a lot better, let’s push to improve our society,” the conservative is one who says, “whoa, we’ve come a long way, civilization is delicate, let’s not screw the whole thing up by forcing things.” 

• Even if you conclude, as liberals have, that the conservatives push stability, fear of government, and fiscal restraint too far, you have to admit that those are important values and at some point they must kick in and become operative principles. 
• Even if you think Keynesian pump-priming and government borrowing to invest in the future are the way to go, you recognize that the government cannot engage in deficit spending forever. 
• Even if you advocate great change to our institutions, you recognize that it can be dangerous to sweepingly rewire our institutions overnight. 
• Even if you are a firm supporter of a big-government welfare state, you realize that individual freedom must be preserved, that bureaucrats given too much power will abuse it, and the government must be subject to checks and balances at all levels. 
• Even if you think that human beings are highly maleable, educatable, and capable of improvement, you recognize that such improvement takes place only slowly, over the course of generations, and cannot be imposed overnight via revolutionary fiat.

In short, a core of true conservative values are important values;  the dispute is over when those values should kick in and how they match up against other values – whether freedom for the individual and fear of big government should prevent us, for example, from providing aid to the poor, or protecting the environment. 

But the question for liberals has always been whether conservatives are citizens of good will who in good faith balance legitimate values differently, or are merely representatives of the powerful, out to protect their interests against incursions by those who seek to continue improving our civilization through the equalization of money and other forms of power. 

In the past few years, the question seems to have been settled pretty definitively.  At least for the conservatives who hold power, and the majority in the GOP who marched with them in lockstep through the first Bush Adminsitration and beyond.

In recent years, one development after another has stripped clear the fig leaf of supposed philosophical conservative concern over big government, fiscal laxity, and radical change, and exposed the Republic party as a naked instrument of power, fighting to expand the privileges of the powerful and reduce the power of average people.

Why was slavery bad?

Everyone in today’s America agrees on certain core moral truths.  Including, that slavery was bad and racial prejudice wrong. 

But historians have found zero examples of individuals questioning the morality of slavery before the Quakers began trumpeting bizarre objections to what was a universal practice – it had always been part of human life going back to the ancient Romans and Greeks and, as far as anyone could tell, always would be part of human life.  Historians have scoured the record but just haven’t found anyone before the Quakers thinking, “this is just wrong.”  The people who lived in that climate can't really be blamed for supporting slavery, they were purely a product of their times.  But it’s a different matter entirely once the Enlightenment came along, and radical new notions of individual equality, and the British abolished slavery, and the northern US – and yet Southern plantation owners were still arguing for the practice. 

So just what were the mental or moral errors that supporters of slavery or of racial discrimination (or the culture as a whole if you prefer) made? 

Seems to me there were 3 fundamental errors:

• Selfishness.  The most fundamental error was one of selfishness.  Not a lot to say about that:  You suffer, I benefit, too bad.  Violation of Golden Rule, understandable by 5-year-olds.   Perhaps a better word than error is “sin.” 
• Dehumanization.  Viewing slaves as inferior.  The mistake here is one of looking at people who occupy an inferior, degraded social position, and figuring that that position is a “natural” outgrowth of their essential nature rather than a historical accident.  (Interestingly, the Romans never felt a need to see their slaves as biologically inferior – that racialist ideology only grew up as a defensive reaction to the rise of Enlightenment individualism and the idea that “all men are created equal.” )
• Acceptance of hierarchy.  Most people do not think about the world they inherit, they just accept it as The Way Things Are.  Insofar as they were born into a world where blacks were lower down on the social ladder than themselves, any assertion of rights or equality by blacks was perceived as a outrageous assertion of position that violated the Order of Things.  This is hard to recapture for us liberal atomistic individualists, but think of the anger that you might feel if a brand new young intern in your office tried to boss you around in your area of expertise.  For all you know, the intern is a genius, and is better at what you do than you.  But you don’t keep an open mind to that possibility, you just get angry, “where does he get off telling me what to do?” Chances are you're right – but you're also reacting to a violation of hierarchy and a challenge to your place and your status in it.  That’s how a white Southerner saw assertions of equality by blacks.

Some historians have written of the “wages of whiteness” – how whites benefitted psychically from the sense of superiority these racist systems conferred – and how they paid, dearly, through the exploitation that elites made of those attitudes among whites.

So here’s the really interesting question: who is making these same errors today? 

More anon . . .

The 75-year war over America

It always surprises me how many people do not “get” the ideological war that is taking place in the US, and has been since at least the New Deal. They don’t understand the differences between Repubilcans and Democrats. As a result they are baffled and annoyed by “partisanship,” and see it as just small-minded bickering and jockeying for power and television time. In fact it is a grand struggle over the direction of our country, and especially the role of government: more or less welfare and social programs; more or less government regulation to protect the environment, interfere in relationships between the strong and the weak, and ameliorate the bad effects of human stupidity.

If I were head of the Democratic Party, I would launch a “party branding” ad campaign to stress those very real differences. We’re for the ordinary person, they’re for the rich. So many people are just plumb confused over the differences between the parties – and if they understood a little more clearly, the Democrats would have the advantage.  I’ve never understood why the Dems don’t do that. Perhaps it’s all those fat-cat donors they must suck up to.