February 26, 2012
A Type of Nostalgia
By William Pannapacker
Last month I threw away the tiny, ugly, complicated cordless phone that had occupied my desk for nearly a decade. My fingers were too big for the buttons, and the phone seemed too small for my head; I couldn't rest it on my shoulder, and I couldn't figure out most of its functions. It made me feel like a stupid, lazy giant. It took some searching, but I replaced it with the kind of basic black desk phone that was common 30 years ago.
The new "old" phone looks great, and it's easy to use: 12 single-function buttons—no codes to memorize—the handset rests nicely on my shoulder, the bell is pleasing (not a piercing shriek), and it works when the power goes out. The phone is lighter than I would have liked, causing the coiled cord to pull it around my desk, so I opened the case and filled it with five pounds of lead sinkers: Now it's as solid as an old manual typewriter.
I am not a Luddite—I write about digital technology, too—but sometimes I find that older things are better because they are simple, reliable, and easy to repair. I'm writing this essay on my beloved iMac, but, for the last few years, I've also resumed the practice of using a manual typewriter for tasks such as filling out forms and writing notes. Sometimes I use it just for the fun of it. I like old typewriters for the same reasons that I like old books, as aesthetic objects and containers of memory.
I was reminded of my apparently advancing age recently when a news article on Techspot felt the need to explain, "The typewriter is a mechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper." Maybe that's a hopeful sign: Typewriters have been gone long enough for them to acquire the aura of the authentically antique. They've become one of those bits of archaic technology that are status-enhancing rather than simply out of date.
Last December, for example, The Chronicle reported that a program called "Amherst After Dark" had drawn about 350 people eager to revisit the old-fashioned pleasures of writing on manual typewriters, along with quill pens and wax seals. You also may have noticed women wearing bracelets or earrings made of old typewriter keys: the little, round, black ones with old-fashioned letters. What do they signify, I wonder?
Typewriters—especially the black-and-chrome ones made before World War II—possess a retro-glamour unmatched by anything apart from the automobiles of that era. Back in those days, films capitalized on typewriters almost as supporting characters. In a crucial scene in Citizen Kane, for example, Orson Welles uses what appears to be an Underwood typewriter to punctuate a conversation. The final rejection of Kane's only true friend is reinforced by a sharp return of the typewriter's carriage, like the brutal slicing of a knife.
The manual typewriter makes similar appearances in more recent films. Moulin Rouge, for example, begins with Ewan McGregor weeping before his battered Underwood as he types with agonizing slowness: "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved in return." The scene dramatizes—somewhat comically and anachronistically, in postmodern quotation marks—the bohemian mystique of the American expatriate on the Left Bank (Hemingway, Pound, Eliot), struggling to type the words that will liberate us from the Victorian era and give birth to modernism.
And, after that struggle, we can envision all those fedora-wearing hardboiled writers of noir in the 1930s and 40s toiling away on their typewriters, followed in that procession by the Beats: Ginsberg and Kerouac, as seen in the recent film adaptation of Howl. The image of the artist and his typewriter explains the reverence accorded the typewritten scroll of On the Road. Tapping into that legacy, Don DeLillo writes his novels on an Olympia Deluxe, and the historian David McCullough is proud to have written all of his books on a Royal typewriter that he bought secondhand in 1965. (The Levenger Company, by the way, sells a seven-inch-high replica of McCullough's typewriter for use as a bookend—even though a real secondhand Royal might be cheaper.)
In that context, the typewriter is almost too much for the weak-willed man to confront: It terrifies the writer played by Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Instead of attacking the unravished white page in his machine, he loses himself in alcoholic procrastination. In the film's most memorable sequence, the writer plans to hock his typewriter to buy more booze; he limps up Third Avenue lugging his 15-pound Remington, block after block, unable to find an open pawnshop. Hours later, he learns that they are all closed, and his situation becomes desperate: He is reduced to begging for money. Ultimately we are led to believe that he is redeemed by the love of a good woman and finally empowered to write his novel, The Bottle.
Perhaps the most moving typewriter moment in the history of film is in Schindler's List, when the character played by Ben Kingsley compiles the names of some 850 Jews—who will thus be saved from imminent death—on a black-and-chrome manual typewriter, a machine whose clacking reminds us of the repeated firing of automatic weapons: "The list is life," he says, holding up the typed pages. The scene reminds us, too, that it was illegal for Jews in Nazi Germany—like many other people under oppressive regimes—to own typewriters. In all of those films, typing becomes a sacramental act: God is in the machine; to type is to go up to the mountain.
Notably, all of those examples involve men. The typewriter as instrument of creation is seldom wielded by a woman. Women who are assertive, literary professionals, such as the character played by Tallulah Bankhead in Hitchcock's Lifeboat, are often redeemed when they accept subordinate romantic roles. Bankhead's Remington Noiseless Portable—the one that's traveled with her all over the world—must fall into the sea before that transformation can be accomplished in the arms of the conventionally masculine, tattooed, patriotic John Hodiak, a kind of pseudo-Hemingway who says her name "like a sock in the jaw," with all that that implies. Perhaps readers will recall similar examples in other movies. An exception is His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, which concludes with the man saving the woman from a boring marriage and convincing her to keep working as the great reporter she is.
In such a context, the typewriter becomes a more complex symbol. The romance of the masculine author (c. 1900 to 1960), alienated from the dominant social order, who struggles with inner demons and strives to take dictation from God, stands in sharp contrast to the female secretary, once called a typewriter girl, who takes dictation from a male superior—as did Milton's daughters—in the context of a corporate or government office.
At the dawn of the typewriter era, most secretaries were men; by the 1930s, nearly all were women. Of course, women were working with dangerous machines before and during that era—in textile mills, for example—so the typewriter seemed to offer liberation from factory work, as well as a chance to live a more independent and adventurous life in the city, free from the patriarchal and religious demands of one's family.
But that change also made women subject to the predation of the men in the office: Sexual harassment was part of the job in many cases. Until quite recently, secretaries were generally depicted as the willing subjects of the sexual advances of their supervisors. Perhaps that complicated history—freedom and subjugation—may provide the frisson of the typewriter-key bracelet.
If typewriters represent masculine empowerment and self-transcendence, computers may dramatize the increasing impotence of everyone to master technology. We are never fully in control of computers; they are constantly evolving ahead of our ability to learn; they fill us with a sense of submission to surveillance, and we never lose the vague fear that our work—and perhaps years of family memories—will vanish for no reason that we can understand or anticipate.
Writing on a computer means resisting a thousand digital distractions. And if we manage to produce something, our public presentations become more stressful because of the possibility of insoluble technical failures: We are forced to admit our incompetence before large audiences on a frequent basis when the computer refuses to do what we want it to.
Meanwhile, back in our offices, amid the book-lined shelves, perhaps seated on an oak desk, the old typewriter continues to work, reliably, as it always has. It reassures us, like some kind of mechanical velveteen rabbit that we have rediscovered in the playroom of our professional lives. The sound of typing is comforting for a writer; it means work is being accomplished; some writers become addicted to the sound. Henry James asked that someone type on his Remington as he lay dying.
Every typewriter has a personality; they are said to be as unique as people. The typewriter seems more human, somehow, compared with the antiseptic, odorless, plastic, and mostly silent computer. It's easier to feel connected to something that requires so much tactile and sensory engagement; it makes appealing sounds when you touch it. And the smells of ink and oil are powerful memory triggers, especially for anyone my age or older who learned to write on a typewriter.
Nostalgia is an affliction of modern life that derives from the rapidity of change and forced displacement—when we have to move from our place of origin, when we lose parents, when we see our children growing up. I often hear that nostalgia is bad because it is inherently conservative; it wants to restore the past instead of moving toward a better future. According to Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), nostalgia "is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition."
For some, the typewriter can be about yearning for a simpler time, a younger self, a lost integrity, a relation to the text that seems as authentic as writing with pen and paper. One thinks more carefully, and one means what one writes on a typewriter in a way that one never does on a computer, in which the text is always subject to revision. On a typewriter, the thought is fixed forever. It makes one believe that the computer has magnified the pathologies of our culture in which everything solid melts away. Only the typewriter can make us whole again.
Isn't it pretty to think so.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Davy Jones
Word comes that Davy Jones, lead singer of the singing group The Monkeys, died today at the age of 66. I was never a Monkees fan, but Jones was an icon of the 60's.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Joseph J. Ellis - American Creation
Joseph Ellis – American Creation
The subtitle is "Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic"
There are at least three great American historians of the revolutionary period of which I am aware. They are Gordon Wood, Jack Rakove, and Joseph J. Ellis. This book is Ellis’s account of the major events in the founding of the country. This is a great book that is better than anything I’ve read by the other guys.
The subtitle is "Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic"
There are at least three great American historians of the revolutionary period of which I am aware. They are Gordon Wood, Jack Rakove, and Joseph J. Ellis. This book is Ellis’s account of the major events in the founding of the country. This is a great book that is better than anything I’ve read by the other guys.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Windows on the iPad
State of the Art
Windows on the iPad, and Speedy
By DAVID POGUE
Published: February 22, 2012
You’re probably paying something like $60 a month for high-speed Internet. I’m paying $5 a month, and my connection is 1,000 times faster.
OnLive Desktop Plus gives the iPad ultrafast Flash Web browsing and the full Microsoft Office suite.
Your iPad can’t play Flash videos on the Web. Mine can.
Your copy of Windows needs constant updating and patching and protection against viruses and spyware. Mine is always clean and always up-to-date.
No, I’m not some kind of smug techno-elitist; you can have all of that, too. All you have to do is sign up for a radical iPad service called OnLive Desktop Plus.
It’s a tiny app — about 5 megabytes. When you open it, you see a standard Windows 7 desktop, right there on your iPad. The full, latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader are set up and ready to use — no installation, no serial numbers, no pop-up balloons nagging you to update this or that. It may be the least annoying version of Windows you’ve ever used.
That’s pretty impressive — but not as impressive as what’s going on behind the scenes. The PC that’s driving your iPad Windows experience is, in fact, a “farm” of computers at one of three data centers thousands of miles away. Every time you tap the screen, scroll a list or type on the on-screen keyboard, you’re sending signals to those distant computers. The screen image is blasted back to your iPad with astonishingly little lag.
There’s an insane amount of technology behind this stunt — 10 years in the making, according to the company’s founder. (He’s a veteran of Apple’s original QuickTime team and Microsoft’s WebTV and Xbox teams.) OnLive Desktop builds on the company’s original business, a service that lets gamers play high-horsepower video games on Macs or low-powered Windows computers like netbooks.
The free version of the OnLive Desktop service arrived in January. It gives you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, a few basic Windows apps (like Paint, Media Player, Notepad and Calculator), and 2 gigabytes of storage.
Plenty of apps give you stripped-down versions of Office on the iPad. But OnLive Desktop gives you the complete Windows Office suite. In Word, you can do fancy stuff like tracking changes and high-end typography. In PowerPoint, you can make slide shows that the iPad projects with all of the cross fades, zooms and animations intact.
Thanks to Microsoft’s own Touch Pack add-on, all of this works with touch-screen gestures. You can pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in and out of your Office documents. You can use Windows’ impressive handwriting recognition to enter text (although a Bluetooth keyboard works better). You can flick to scroll through a list.
Instead of clicking the mouse on things, you can simply tap, although a stylus works better than a fingertip; many of the Windows controls are too tiny for a finger to tap precisely. (On a real Windows PC, you could open the Control Panel to enlarge the controls for touch use — but OnLive’s simulated PC is lacking the Control Panel, which is one of its few downsides.)
OnLive Desktop is seamless and fairly amazing. And fast; on what other PC does Word open in one second?
But the only way to get files onto and off OnLive Desktop is using a Documents folder on the desktop. To access it, you have to visit OnLive’s Web site on your actual PC.
The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It’s not free — it costs $5 a month — but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection.
That’s not a typo. And “1-gigabit Internet” means the fastest connection you’ve ever used in your life — on your iPad. It means speeds 500 or 1,000 times as fast as what you probably get at home. It means downloading a 20-megabyte file before your finger lifts from the glass.
You get the same speed in both directions. You can upload a 30-megabyte file in one second.
And remember, you’re using a state-of-the-art Windows computer, so you can play any kind of video you might encounter online. OnLive Desktop Plus turns the iPad from a tablet that can’t play Flash videos at all — into the smoothest Flash player you’ve ever used. And yes, that includes watching free TV at Hulu.com, which you can’t otherwise do on the iPad.
The Plus version’s Internet connection makes a world of difference. Now you can use DropBox to get files onto and off your iPad from other gadgets, like Macs and PCs. (That, the company says, is why the Plus service still offers only 2 gigabytes of storage for your files; it figures you’ve now got the whole Internet as your storage bin.) You can get to your Gmail, Yahoo mail, corporate Exchange mail and other online accounts — with ridiculously quick response.
Now, you might be wondering: What good is a 1-gigabit connection on OnLive’s end, if the far slower connection on my end is the bottleneck?
The secret is that OnLive isn’t sending you all of the data from your Web browsing session. It’s sending you only a video stream the size of your iPad screen. For example, if you’re playing a hi-def video, OnLive pares down the data to just what your iPad can show. If you scroll a video off the screen, OnLive doesn’t bother sending you its data. And so on.
OnLive (free) and OnLive Plus ($5 a month) are both brilliantly executed steps forward into the long-promised world of “thin client” computing, in which we can use cheap, low-powered computers to run programs that live online. But the company’s next plans are even more exciting.
For example, the company intends to develop a third service, called OnLive Pro ($10 a month), that will let you run any Windows programs you want. Photoshop, Firefox, Autodesk, games — whatever.
The company still isn’t sure how that will work; somehow, you’ll have to prove that you actually own the software you’re running on its servers. But what a day that will be, when you can run any Windows program on earth on your iPad.
And not just on your iPad. The company is also working on bringing OnLive to Android tablets, iPhones and iPod Touches, Macs and PCs, and even to TV sets. (That last trick would require a small set-top box.)
Suddenly Mac fans will have the full world of Windows and all of its programs — without the speed and memory penalties of programs like Parallels and VMWare. And nobody will have to worry about viruses, spyware or software updates; OnLive’s virtual PCs are always pristine.
This is all so crazy cool, it seems almost ungrateful to point out the flaws — but here goes.
The delay between finger touch and on-screen response is usually tiny. But when you paint or use the handwriting recognition, the lag is painful.
Since you’re actually viewing a video stream, you sometimes see typical video stream glitches like low-resolution text blocks that quickly clear up.
OnLive says that its service works great over 4G cellular connections (like the one provided by an LTE MiFi) — but 3G connections and feeble hotel Wi-Fi hot spots are too slow to be satisfying. OnLive wants at least a 2-megabits-a-second connection on your end.
Finally, you have to sign into OnLive every time you want to use it, even if you’ve just flicked away to another iPad app. (OnLive says it’ll fix that.)
Even so, if ever there were a poster child for the potential of cloud computing, OnLive is it. This is jaw-dropping, extremely polished technology. It opens up a universe of software and horsepower that live far beyond the iPad’s wildest dreams — with no more effort on your part than a few taps on glass.
Windows on the iPad, and Speedy
By DAVID POGUE
Published: February 22, 2012
You’re probably paying something like $60 a month for high-speed Internet. I’m paying $5 a month, and my connection is 1,000 times faster.
OnLive Desktop Plus gives the iPad ultrafast Flash Web browsing and the full Microsoft Office suite.
Your iPad can’t play Flash videos on the Web. Mine can.
Your copy of Windows needs constant updating and patching and protection against viruses and spyware. Mine is always clean and always up-to-date.
No, I’m not some kind of smug techno-elitist; you can have all of that, too. All you have to do is sign up for a radical iPad service called OnLive Desktop Plus.
It’s a tiny app — about 5 megabytes. When you open it, you see a standard Windows 7 desktop, right there on your iPad. The full, latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader are set up and ready to use — no installation, no serial numbers, no pop-up balloons nagging you to update this or that. It may be the least annoying version of Windows you’ve ever used.
That’s pretty impressive — but not as impressive as what’s going on behind the scenes. The PC that’s driving your iPad Windows experience is, in fact, a “farm” of computers at one of three data centers thousands of miles away. Every time you tap the screen, scroll a list or type on the on-screen keyboard, you’re sending signals to those distant computers. The screen image is blasted back to your iPad with astonishingly little lag.
There’s an insane amount of technology behind this stunt — 10 years in the making, according to the company’s founder. (He’s a veteran of Apple’s original QuickTime team and Microsoft’s WebTV and Xbox teams.) OnLive Desktop builds on the company’s original business, a service that lets gamers play high-horsepower video games on Macs or low-powered Windows computers like netbooks.
The free version of the OnLive Desktop service arrived in January. It gives you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, a few basic Windows apps (like Paint, Media Player, Notepad and Calculator), and 2 gigabytes of storage.
Plenty of apps give you stripped-down versions of Office on the iPad. But OnLive Desktop gives you the complete Windows Office suite. In Word, you can do fancy stuff like tracking changes and high-end typography. In PowerPoint, you can make slide shows that the iPad projects with all of the cross fades, zooms and animations intact.
Thanks to Microsoft’s own Touch Pack add-on, all of this works with touch-screen gestures. You can pinch and spread two fingers to zoom in and out of your Office documents. You can use Windows’ impressive handwriting recognition to enter text (although a Bluetooth keyboard works better). You can flick to scroll through a list.
Instead of clicking the mouse on things, you can simply tap, although a stylus works better than a fingertip; many of the Windows controls are too tiny for a finger to tap precisely. (On a real Windows PC, you could open the Control Panel to enlarge the controls for touch use — but OnLive’s simulated PC is lacking the Control Panel, which is one of its few downsides.)
OnLive Desktop is seamless and fairly amazing. And fast; on what other PC does Word open in one second?
But the only way to get files onto and off OnLive Desktop is using a Documents folder on the desktop. To access it, you have to visit OnLive’s Web site on your actual PC.
The news today is the new service, called OnLive Desktop Plus. It’s not free — it costs $5 a month — but it adds Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer and a 1-gigabit-a-second Internet connection.
That’s not a typo. And “1-gigabit Internet” means the fastest connection you’ve ever used in your life — on your iPad. It means speeds 500 or 1,000 times as fast as what you probably get at home. It means downloading a 20-megabyte file before your finger lifts from the glass.
You get the same speed in both directions. You can upload a 30-megabyte file in one second.
And remember, you’re using a state-of-the-art Windows computer, so you can play any kind of video you might encounter online. OnLive Desktop Plus turns the iPad from a tablet that can’t play Flash videos at all — into the smoothest Flash player you’ve ever used. And yes, that includes watching free TV at Hulu.com, which you can’t otherwise do on the iPad.
The Plus version’s Internet connection makes a world of difference. Now you can use DropBox to get files onto and off your iPad from other gadgets, like Macs and PCs. (That, the company says, is why the Plus service still offers only 2 gigabytes of storage for your files; it figures you’ve now got the whole Internet as your storage bin.) You can get to your Gmail, Yahoo mail, corporate Exchange mail and other online accounts — with ridiculously quick response.
Now, you might be wondering: What good is a 1-gigabit connection on OnLive’s end, if the far slower connection on my end is the bottleneck?
The secret is that OnLive isn’t sending you all of the data from your Web browsing session. It’s sending you only a video stream the size of your iPad screen. For example, if you’re playing a hi-def video, OnLive pares down the data to just what your iPad can show. If you scroll a video off the screen, OnLive doesn’t bother sending you its data. And so on.
OnLive (free) and OnLive Plus ($5 a month) are both brilliantly executed steps forward into the long-promised world of “thin client” computing, in which we can use cheap, low-powered computers to run programs that live online. But the company’s next plans are even more exciting.
For example, the company intends to develop a third service, called OnLive Pro ($10 a month), that will let you run any Windows programs you want. Photoshop, Firefox, Autodesk, games — whatever.
The company still isn’t sure how that will work; somehow, you’ll have to prove that you actually own the software you’re running on its servers. But what a day that will be, when you can run any Windows program on earth on your iPad.
And not just on your iPad. The company is also working on bringing OnLive to Android tablets, iPhones and iPod Touches, Macs and PCs, and even to TV sets. (That last trick would require a small set-top box.)
Suddenly Mac fans will have the full world of Windows and all of its programs — without the speed and memory penalties of programs like Parallels and VMWare. And nobody will have to worry about viruses, spyware or software updates; OnLive’s virtual PCs are always pristine.
This is all so crazy cool, it seems almost ungrateful to point out the flaws — but here goes.
The delay between finger touch and on-screen response is usually tiny. But when you paint or use the handwriting recognition, the lag is painful.
Since you’re actually viewing a video stream, you sometimes see typical video stream glitches like low-resolution text blocks that quickly clear up.
OnLive says that its service works great over 4G cellular connections (like the one provided by an LTE MiFi) — but 3G connections and feeble hotel Wi-Fi hot spots are too slow to be satisfying. OnLive wants at least a 2-megabits-a-second connection on your end.
Finally, you have to sign into OnLive every time you want to use it, even if you’ve just flicked away to another iPad app. (OnLive says it’ll fix that.)
Even so, if ever there were a poster child for the potential of cloud computing, OnLive is it. This is jaw-dropping, extremely polished technology. It opens up a universe of software and horsepower that live far beyond the iPad’s wildest dreams — with no more effort on your part than a few taps on glass.
Friday, February 24, 2012
An Economic Lesson
by Paul Krugman
The beginning of any understanding of macroeconomics is the realization that what’s good from a micro point of view can often be irrelevant or even harmful from a macro point of view when the economy is depressed. But that hard-won insight has now been willfully forgotten.
Hopeless.
The beginning of any understanding of macroeconomics is the realization that what’s good from a micro point of view can often be irrelevant or even harmful from a macro point of view when the economy is depressed. But that hard-won insight has now been willfully forgotten.
Hopeless.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Technology in Teaching
Share February 12, 2012
A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn't Working
Kansas State U.
Professor Michael Wesch speaks to a group of Coffman Leadership Institute attendees at Kansas State University in 2011.
By Jeffrey R. Young
Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year. But now Mr. Wesch finds himself rethinking the fundamentals of teaching—and questioning his own advice.
The professor's popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of the chalk-and-talk lecture as outmoded. To get a sense of his teaching style, check out a video he made about one of his anthropology courses. In it, some 200 students designed their own imaginary cultures and ran a world-history simulation by sending updates via Twitter and a voice-to-text application called Jott.
To be fair, Mr. Wesch always pointed to the downsides of technology (it can be a classroom distraction, for instance). But he saw tech-infused methods as a way to upgrade teaching.
Then a frustrated colleague approached him after one of his talks: "I implemented your idea, and it just didn't work," Mr. Wesch was told. "The students thought it was chaos."
It was not an isolated incident. As other professors he met described their plans to follow his example, he suspected their classes would also flop. "They would just be inspired to use blogs and Twitter and technology, but the No. 1 thing that was missing from it was a sense of purpose."
Mr. Wesch is not swearing off technology—he still believes you can teach well with YouTube and Twitter. But at a time when using more interactive tools to replace the lecture appears to be gaining widespread acceptance, he has a new message. It doesn't matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student.
Learning From an 'Old Fogy'
Christopher Sorensen also teaches at Kansas State University, and he too has been named a national teacher of the year. But Mr. Sorensen, a physics professor, is decidedly old-school in his methods.
"You could say I'm an old fogy," he tells me sheepishly. "I worry about that a little bit."
He has avoided "clickers," those remote-control-like gadgets that let students ring in answers, out of concern that they would take up too much class time and limit the amount of material he could cover. And Mr. Sorensen has a hunch that PowerPoint—which he finds valuable at professional conferences—would get in the way of his teaching. "PowerPoint takes away, I think, from a true engagement," is how he put it.
Exactly how he connects with a roomful of students is unclear to him, but he senses that it happens. "I walk into the classroom, and I get into a fifth gear, you might say. My voice goes up and down. It's almost like being an actor. But don't get me wrong, I've never been an actor or anything."
Even though he has been teaching for some 34 years, he still spends the morning before each class preparing—rehearsing the material in his mind. When I spoke with him one morning last week, he was reading over his notes before teaching a lesson on Copernicus for an astronomy course. "It's sort of like running laps before you compete in a true race. You have to get warmed up," he says.
Mr. Sorensen has heard increasing questions about whether the lecture—his preferred method—is an effective way to teach. One study he saw found that students in after-class interviews remember only 20 percent of the material. Yet he still champions the approach.
"The way I look at it is, I've plowed the ground," he says. "Now they're susceptible the next time they see the material. And you'll give them an assignment, and that forces them to look at the material in a new way."
As he sees it, his job is less about being an expert imparting facts and figures, and more about being a salesman convincing students that his material is worth their attention. "The messenger, ironically enough, is more important than the message," he says. "If the messenger is excited and passionate about what they have to say, it leaves a good impression. It stimulates students to see what all this excitement is about."
The things that make a good teacher are difficult—if not impossible—to teach, he thinks. Which is why technology may be so attractive to some teaching reformers. Blogging, Twitter, and other digital tools involve step-by-step processes that can be taught.
Meanwhile, when Mr. Sorensen recently met a job candidate who appeared warm and friendly, he felt immediately that he would be a good teacher. "I said, you seem like a good guy—you'll make a great teacher," he remembers saying. "Be a good guy with your students, and you'll be a great professor."
Searching for 'Wonder'
As Mr. Wesch began to rethink his teaching, he visited Mr. Sorensen's class and was impressed by how the low-tech professor connected with students: "He's a lecturer. He's not breaking them up into small groups or having them make videos. That's my thing, right? But he's totally in tune with where they are and the struggle it takes to understand physics concepts. He is right there by their side, walking them through the forest of physics."
At its best, Mr. Wesch believes that interactive technology—and other methods to create more active experiences in the classroom—can be used to forge that kind of relationship between teachers and students where professors nurture rather than talk down to students.
In one of his courses, he teamed up with students to produce an ethnography of YouTube users. The project helped the students feel more like collaborators because the technology allowed them to immediately publish their work online.
But Mr. Wesch has also found that a high-tech method like asking students to write blogs can actually reinforce what he sees as an "authoritarian" tendency of lectures.
One example he has seen: a professor whose first comment on a student's blog is, "Hey, great ideas here, but just so you know, there are a few typos there in your first line." To Mr. Wesch, that sends the message that the blog is just another spot watched by the grammar police, rather than a new arena to explore. "Students can all sniff out an inauthentic place of learning," the professor argues. "They think, If it's a game, fine, I'll play it for the grade, but I'm not going to learn anything."
Technology rarely plays more than a passing role in the work of teacher-of-the-year winners, says Mary Huber, a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who has overseen the judging process since 1991. "We see people making interesting use of technology without it being the star player," she told me.
She said it is not too surprising that others have had trouble replicating what Mr. Wesch did. "None of this work is off-the-shelf," she said, noting that the group promotes a "scholarly approach" to teaching. "That means you aren't just picking something and plopping it in there, but you're really thinking through what its value is and what you would have to do to change it."
This semester Mr. Wesch is on sabbatical, working on a book about teaching that will sum up his latest thinking.
He is still giving talks, and the titles now all include the word "wonder." Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive.
"Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other," he concludes. "Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community."
A Tech-Happy Professor Reboots After Hearing His Teaching Advice Isn't Working
Kansas State U.
Professor Michael Wesch speaks to a group of Coffman Leadership Institute attendees at Kansas State University in 2011.
By Jeffrey R. Young
Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. Wired magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor of the year. But now Mr. Wesch finds himself rethinking the fundamentals of teaching—and questioning his own advice.
The professor's popular talks have detailed his experiments teaching with Twitter, YouTube videos, collaborative Google Docs—and they present a general critique of the chalk-and-talk lecture as outmoded. To get a sense of his teaching style, check out a video he made about one of his anthropology courses. In it, some 200 students designed their own imaginary cultures and ran a world-history simulation by sending updates via Twitter and a voice-to-text application called Jott.
To be fair, Mr. Wesch always pointed to the downsides of technology (it can be a classroom distraction, for instance). But he saw tech-infused methods as a way to upgrade teaching.
Then a frustrated colleague approached him after one of his talks: "I implemented your idea, and it just didn't work," Mr. Wesch was told. "The students thought it was chaos."
It was not an isolated incident. As other professors he met described their plans to follow his example, he suspected their classes would also flop. "They would just be inspired to use blogs and Twitter and technology, but the No. 1 thing that was missing from it was a sense of purpose."
Mr. Wesch is not swearing off technology—he still believes you can teach well with YouTube and Twitter. But at a time when using more interactive tools to replace the lecture appears to be gaining widespread acceptance, he has a new message. It doesn't matter what method you use if you do not first focus on one intangible factor: the bond between professor and student.
Learning From an 'Old Fogy'
Christopher Sorensen also teaches at Kansas State University, and he too has been named a national teacher of the year. But Mr. Sorensen, a physics professor, is decidedly old-school in his methods.
"You could say I'm an old fogy," he tells me sheepishly. "I worry about that a little bit."
He has avoided "clickers," those remote-control-like gadgets that let students ring in answers, out of concern that they would take up too much class time and limit the amount of material he could cover. And Mr. Sorensen has a hunch that PowerPoint—which he finds valuable at professional conferences—would get in the way of his teaching. "PowerPoint takes away, I think, from a true engagement," is how he put it.
Exactly how he connects with a roomful of students is unclear to him, but he senses that it happens. "I walk into the classroom, and I get into a fifth gear, you might say. My voice goes up and down. It's almost like being an actor. But don't get me wrong, I've never been an actor or anything."
Even though he has been teaching for some 34 years, he still spends the morning before each class preparing—rehearsing the material in his mind. When I spoke with him one morning last week, he was reading over his notes before teaching a lesson on Copernicus for an astronomy course. "It's sort of like running laps before you compete in a true race. You have to get warmed up," he says.
Mr. Sorensen has heard increasing questions about whether the lecture—his preferred method—is an effective way to teach. One study he saw found that students in after-class interviews remember only 20 percent of the material. Yet he still champions the approach.
"The way I look at it is, I've plowed the ground," he says. "Now they're susceptible the next time they see the material. And you'll give them an assignment, and that forces them to look at the material in a new way."
As he sees it, his job is less about being an expert imparting facts and figures, and more about being a salesman convincing students that his material is worth their attention. "The messenger, ironically enough, is more important than the message," he says. "If the messenger is excited and passionate about what they have to say, it leaves a good impression. It stimulates students to see what all this excitement is about."
The things that make a good teacher are difficult—if not impossible—to teach, he thinks. Which is why technology may be so attractive to some teaching reformers. Blogging, Twitter, and other digital tools involve step-by-step processes that can be taught.
Meanwhile, when Mr. Sorensen recently met a job candidate who appeared warm and friendly, he felt immediately that he would be a good teacher. "I said, you seem like a good guy—you'll make a great teacher," he remembers saying. "Be a good guy with your students, and you'll be a great professor."
Searching for 'Wonder'
As Mr. Wesch began to rethink his teaching, he visited Mr. Sorensen's class and was impressed by how the low-tech professor connected with students: "He's a lecturer. He's not breaking them up into small groups or having them make videos. That's my thing, right? But he's totally in tune with where they are and the struggle it takes to understand physics concepts. He is right there by their side, walking them through the forest of physics."
At its best, Mr. Wesch believes that interactive technology—and other methods to create more active experiences in the classroom—can be used to forge that kind of relationship between teachers and students where professors nurture rather than talk down to students.
In one of his courses, he teamed up with students to produce an ethnography of YouTube users. The project helped the students feel more like collaborators because the technology allowed them to immediately publish their work online.
But Mr. Wesch has also found that a high-tech method like asking students to write blogs can actually reinforce what he sees as an "authoritarian" tendency of lectures.
One example he has seen: a professor whose first comment on a student's blog is, "Hey, great ideas here, but just so you know, there are a few typos there in your first line." To Mr. Wesch, that sends the message that the blog is just another spot watched by the grammar police, rather than a new arena to explore. "Students can all sniff out an inauthentic place of learning," the professor argues. "They think, If it's a game, fine, I'll play it for the grade, but I'm not going to learn anything."
Technology rarely plays more than a passing role in the work of teacher-of-the-year winners, says Mary Huber, a consulting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching who has overseen the judging process since 1991. "We see people making interesting use of technology without it being the star player," she told me.
She said it is not too surprising that others have had trouble replicating what Mr. Wesch did. "None of this work is off-the-shelf," she said, noting that the group promotes a "scholarly approach" to teaching. "That means you aren't just picking something and plopping it in there, but you're really thinking through what its value is and what you would have to do to change it."
This semester Mr. Wesch is on sabbatical, working on a book about teaching that will sum up his latest thinking.
He is still giving talks, and the titles now all include the word "wonder." Whatever tool professors can find to conjure that—curiosity and a sense of amazing possibilities—is what they should use, he says. Like any good lecture, his point may be more inspirational than instructive.
"Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other," he concludes. "Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community."
Monday, February 20, 2012
The Producers
The Producers
A new rhetoric of income inequality.
by Michael Kazin
Every significant political movement creates, or inherits, a compelling image of the people it vows to liberate and serve. The contemporary American right, for instance, idealizes the self-reliant, nuclear family in its modest home, with Bible verses on the wall and a flagpole in the yard. But what image comes to mind when progressives think about the Americans who would benefit from a more egalitarian society? None of the images or phrases currently in vogue are all that inspiring. “Middle class” merely describes a bland, imprecise economic status. “The 99 percent,” the slogan of Occupy Wall Street, is certainly majoritarian and inclusive; but it begs the question of what, besides wealth, distinguishes that vast throng from the tiny, super-rich minority. Bill Clinton’s praise, two decades ago, of those who “work hard and play by the rules” certainly had the ring of virtue; but it never stuck politically.
Liberals and radicals did not always have such trouble describing the group for whom they were fighting. Throughout much of U.S. history, activists and politicians on the left spoke glowingly about “the producers”—those Americans who used their bodies and their minds to grow, manufacture, or transport goods that everyone needed or who, through medicine, education, or some other professional field, provided important services.
The “producer ethic” had its origins in the eighteenth century. The Jeffersonian farmer William Manning saw the new nation divided “between those that Labour for a living and those that git a Living without Bodily Labour.” A century later, Ignatius Donnelly, in his bravura address to the first convention of the People’s Party, argued that “wealth belongs to him who creates it.” Then, for support, he quoted St. Paul: “If any will not work neither shall he eat.” In 1909, the magazine of the American Federation of Labor ran a long, anonymously authored poem in praise of “the average man” who “is the man of the mill/The man of the valley, or man of the hill/The man at the throttle, the man at the plow— ... There is not a purpose, a project, or plan/But rests on the strength of the average man.”
Though producerist rhetoric could sometimes assume an angry tone, it was not an Americanized version of the class consciousness Karl Marx believed to be the inevitable result of the industrial revolution. While many producers were wage-earners, producerism as a concept cast a broad moral net over society instead of dissecting it with a scalpel. A producer could be a craftsman, a teacher, a small merchant, a farmer with hired hands, a homemaker. To qualify for the honor, one simply had to do something useful for society and not prosper from the labor or weaknesses of others. During the Gilded Age, the Knights of Labor, America’s first national labor federation, barred from membership just five occupational groups, who were considered to be social parasites: financiers, speculators, liquor dealers, gamblers, and lawyers. (They made an exception for attorneys like Clarence Darrow who represented unionists.)
The producer theory of value helped advance the aims of egalitarian reformers through the first half of the twentieth century. It united a remarkably diverse constituency—immigrant socialists, native-born dirt farmers, Social Gospel ministers, chain-store opponents, settlement-house workers like Jane Addams, progressive lawmakers like Robert La Follette and Robert Wagner—behind a common platform of taxing the rich, organizing unions, and regulating big business. By the end of World War II, the income gap between the rich and the wage-earners had narrowed considerably, and liberals were confident that “the people” were on their side.
But, in reality, the concept of the producing classes had never been as inclusive as the rhetoric implied. Chinese and Japanese immigrants could never qualify for membership; they were maligned as belonging to a servile race considered unable and unwilling to challenge the power of the big bosses. Black wage-earners were welcome in some unions and sharecroppers in the People’s Party, as long as they didn’t challenge Jim Crow customs—and as long as they let white activists take the lead in their common endeavors. And, of course, most women who worked outside of the home did so only until they got married and so were viewed more as reproducers than as equal partners in the quest for justice in the public sphere.
By the 1960s, the civil rights struggle and the variety of ethnicity- and gender-conscious movements it spawned had made praise of the traditional producer sound archaic, if not downright bigoted. Stokely Carmichael, Mark Rudd, and Robin Morgan had little but scorn for white working-class men whose militant patriotism, race-baiting, and patriarchal behavior they took for granted. America’s “average man” no longer lived at the edge of poverty. According to the New Left, he therefore needed to face up to his flaws and join the masses around the world who were revolting against the rulers and culture of his arrogant, bullying nation.
Most progressives avoided such condescending charges, but they had no positive image of the American majority to replace it. Organized labor, which had long carried the burden of left-populist hopes, now seemed unwilling and, as its numbers declined, increasingly unable to challenge the legitimacy of large corporations. As president, Lyndon Johnson longed to emulate Franklin Roosevelt, but his landmark speeches on domestic matters dwelled on the plight of African Americans and the poor of all races. By any name, the old-time producer had become the left’s forgotten man.
A resurgent right was quite happy to take up his cause. The cultural and political fault lines that split open in the ’60s had yielded a jagged, racially defined landscape, which gave conservatives an opportunity to claim that they, not “the liberal elite,” were the true representatives of the hard-working (read: white) majority. In the mid-’70s, a Boston columnist beloved by anti-busing forces complained, “We’re the poor sunavabees who pay our taxes and sweat tuitions, sweat mortgages and car payments, ... get no handouts, give our blood, ... and work two jobs, sometimes three.” Around the same time, Pat Buchanan called for the Republican Party “to be the party of the working class, not the welfare class, ... to champion the cause of producers and taxpayers, ... of the millions who carry most of the cost of government and share least in its beneficence.” Ronald Reagan crafted these sentiments into a governing ideology. Thirty years later, Tea Partiers still strain to keep its legacy alive. Of course, they seldom acknowledge that the Koch brothers and other billionaires are bankrolling their campaigns.
The Great Recession that most Americans blame on Wall Street and its political enablers gave the left a chance to once again focus the country’s attention on inequality—and the Occupy movement took full advantage of this opportunity. Still, the protesters, for all their energy, have not found a way to visualize “the 99 percent” with any image more specific than a clenched fist. To solve this problem, progressives might consider reviving the old idea of the producer. After all, while much has changed in the U.S. economy in recent years, it is hard to think of a persuasive concept of the virtuous majority that does not spring from the daily grind; and that majority is less defined by race or ethnicity than ever before in U.S. history. If Republicans, as expected, nominate a financier who lacks a common touch, progressives may find that a genuine affinity for producers is once again a winning political argument.
A new rhetoric of income inequality.
by Michael Kazin
Every significant political movement creates, or inherits, a compelling image of the people it vows to liberate and serve. The contemporary American right, for instance, idealizes the self-reliant, nuclear family in its modest home, with Bible verses on the wall and a flagpole in the yard. But what image comes to mind when progressives think about the Americans who would benefit from a more egalitarian society? None of the images or phrases currently in vogue are all that inspiring. “Middle class” merely describes a bland, imprecise economic status. “The 99 percent,” the slogan of Occupy Wall Street, is certainly majoritarian and inclusive; but it begs the question of what, besides wealth, distinguishes that vast throng from the tiny, super-rich minority. Bill Clinton’s praise, two decades ago, of those who “work hard and play by the rules” certainly had the ring of virtue; but it never stuck politically.
Liberals and radicals did not always have such trouble describing the group for whom they were fighting. Throughout much of U.S. history, activists and politicians on the left spoke glowingly about “the producers”—those Americans who used their bodies and their minds to grow, manufacture, or transport goods that everyone needed or who, through medicine, education, or some other professional field, provided important services.
The “producer ethic” had its origins in the eighteenth century. The Jeffersonian farmer William Manning saw the new nation divided “between those that Labour for a living and those that git a Living without Bodily Labour.” A century later, Ignatius Donnelly, in his bravura address to the first convention of the People’s Party, argued that “wealth belongs to him who creates it.” Then, for support, he quoted St. Paul: “If any will not work neither shall he eat.” In 1909, the magazine of the American Federation of Labor ran a long, anonymously authored poem in praise of “the average man” who “is the man of the mill/The man of the valley, or man of the hill/The man at the throttle, the man at the plow— ... There is not a purpose, a project, or plan/But rests on the strength of the average man.”
Though producerist rhetoric could sometimes assume an angry tone, it was not an Americanized version of the class consciousness Karl Marx believed to be the inevitable result of the industrial revolution. While many producers were wage-earners, producerism as a concept cast a broad moral net over society instead of dissecting it with a scalpel. A producer could be a craftsman, a teacher, a small merchant, a farmer with hired hands, a homemaker. To qualify for the honor, one simply had to do something useful for society and not prosper from the labor or weaknesses of others. During the Gilded Age, the Knights of Labor, America’s first national labor federation, barred from membership just five occupational groups, who were considered to be social parasites: financiers, speculators, liquor dealers, gamblers, and lawyers. (They made an exception for attorneys like Clarence Darrow who represented unionists.)
The producer theory of value helped advance the aims of egalitarian reformers through the first half of the twentieth century. It united a remarkably diverse constituency—immigrant socialists, native-born dirt farmers, Social Gospel ministers, chain-store opponents, settlement-house workers like Jane Addams, progressive lawmakers like Robert La Follette and Robert Wagner—behind a common platform of taxing the rich, organizing unions, and regulating big business. By the end of World War II, the income gap between the rich and the wage-earners had narrowed considerably, and liberals were confident that “the people” were on their side.
But, in reality, the concept of the producing classes had never been as inclusive as the rhetoric implied. Chinese and Japanese immigrants could never qualify for membership; they were maligned as belonging to a servile race considered unable and unwilling to challenge the power of the big bosses. Black wage-earners were welcome in some unions and sharecroppers in the People’s Party, as long as they didn’t challenge Jim Crow customs—and as long as they let white activists take the lead in their common endeavors. And, of course, most women who worked outside of the home did so only until they got married and so were viewed more as reproducers than as equal partners in the quest for justice in the public sphere.
By the 1960s, the civil rights struggle and the variety of ethnicity- and gender-conscious movements it spawned had made praise of the traditional producer sound archaic, if not downright bigoted. Stokely Carmichael, Mark Rudd, and Robin Morgan had little but scorn for white working-class men whose militant patriotism, race-baiting, and patriarchal behavior they took for granted. America’s “average man” no longer lived at the edge of poverty. According to the New Left, he therefore needed to face up to his flaws and join the masses around the world who were revolting against the rulers and culture of his arrogant, bullying nation.
Most progressives avoided such condescending charges, but they had no positive image of the American majority to replace it. Organized labor, which had long carried the burden of left-populist hopes, now seemed unwilling and, as its numbers declined, increasingly unable to challenge the legitimacy of large corporations. As president, Lyndon Johnson longed to emulate Franklin Roosevelt, but his landmark speeches on domestic matters dwelled on the plight of African Americans and the poor of all races. By any name, the old-time producer had become the left’s forgotten man.
A resurgent right was quite happy to take up his cause. The cultural and political fault lines that split open in the ’60s had yielded a jagged, racially defined landscape, which gave conservatives an opportunity to claim that they, not “the liberal elite,” were the true representatives of the hard-working (read: white) majority. In the mid-’70s, a Boston columnist beloved by anti-busing forces complained, “We’re the poor sunavabees who pay our taxes and sweat tuitions, sweat mortgages and car payments, ... get no handouts, give our blood, ... and work two jobs, sometimes three.” Around the same time, Pat Buchanan called for the Republican Party “to be the party of the working class, not the welfare class, ... to champion the cause of producers and taxpayers, ... of the millions who carry most of the cost of government and share least in its beneficence.” Ronald Reagan crafted these sentiments into a governing ideology. Thirty years later, Tea Partiers still strain to keep its legacy alive. Of course, they seldom acknowledge that the Koch brothers and other billionaires are bankrolling their campaigns.
The Great Recession that most Americans blame on Wall Street and its political enablers gave the left a chance to once again focus the country’s attention on inequality—and the Occupy movement took full advantage of this opportunity. Still, the protesters, for all their energy, have not found a way to visualize “the 99 percent” with any image more specific than a clenched fist. To solve this problem, progressives might consider reviving the old idea of the producer. After all, while much has changed in the U.S. economy in recent years, it is hard to think of a persuasive concept of the virtuous majority that does not spring from the daily grind; and that majority is less defined by race or ethnicity than ever before in U.S. history. If Republicans, as expected, nominate a financier who lacks a common touch, progressives may find that a genuine affinity for producers is once again a winning political argument.
Scary Santorum
by Jonathan Chait
Republican money men have always tolerated social conservatism as a part of building the party coalition and attracting votes. But the understanding has always been that the social issues must be subordinate: They don’t want a president who cares about those issues as much as he cares about the financial stuff. Santorum’s social issue platform is not meaningfully more conservative than Gingrich’s, or even Romney's, but Republican elites perceive that he actually cares about this stuff, and it scares them.
Republican money men have always tolerated social conservatism as a part of building the party coalition and attracting votes. But the understanding has always been that the social issues must be subordinate: They don’t want a president who cares about those issues as much as he cares about the financial stuff. Santorum’s social issue platform is not meaningfully more conservative than Gingrich’s, or even Romney's, but Republican elites perceive that he actually cares about this stuff, and it scares them.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
James Garner - The Garner Files (4)
James Garner's view on current movies mirrors my own.
"It's gotten much worse. Now we have formula pictures that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Everybody's wrong and nobody cares enough to point out what's right. These movies are all about special effects without much story content. They don't deal with people and their problems. The characters have no redeeming qualities. It's violence for its own sake."
P. 180
"It's gotten much worse. Now we have formula pictures that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Everybody's wrong and nobody cares enough to point out what's right. These movies are all about special effects without much story content. They don't deal with people and their problems. The characters have no redeeming qualities. It's violence for its own sake."
P. 180
Friday, February 17, 2012
Why Do Poor People Vote Republican?
Op-Ed Columnist
Moochers Against Welfare
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 16, 2012
Modern Republicans are very, very conservative; you might even (if you were Mitt Romney) say, severely conservative. Political scientists who use Congressional votes to measure such things find that the current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as their estimates go.
And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs. Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.
Many readers of The Times were, therefore, surprised to learn, from an excellent article published last weekend, that the regions of America most hooked on Mr. Santorum’s narcotic — the regions in which government programs account for the largest share of personal income — are precisely the regions electing those severe conservatives. Wasn’t Red America supposed to be the land of traditional values, where people don’t eat Thai food and don’t rely on handouts?
The article made its case with maps showing the distribution of dependency, but you get the same story from a more formal comparison. Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states Gallup ranks as “most conservative” received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the 10 most liberal states was only 17.1 percent.
Now, there’s no mystery about red-state reliance on government programs. These states are relatively poor, which means both that people have fewer sources of income other than safety-net programs and that more of them qualify for “means-tested” programs such as Medicaid.
By the way, the same logic explains why there has been a jump in dependency since 2008. Contrary to what Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney suggest, Mr. Obama has not radically expanded the safety net. Rather, the dire state of the economy has reduced incomes and made more people eligible for benefits, especially unemployment benefits. Basically, the safety net is the same, but more people are falling into it.
But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations.
First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.
Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.
Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”
Presumably, then, voters imagine that pledges to slash government spending mean cutting programs for the idle poor, not things they themselves count on. And this is a confusion politicians deliberately encourage. For example, when Mr. Romney responded to the new Obama budget, he condemned Mr. Obama for not taking on entitlement spending — and, in the very next breath, attacked him for cutting Medicare.
The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government program.
The message I take from all this is that pundits who describe America as a fundamentally conservative country are wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to Washington. But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda.
Moochers Against Welfare
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 16, 2012
Modern Republicans are very, very conservative; you might even (if you were Mitt Romney) say, severely conservative. Political scientists who use Congressional votes to measure such things find that the current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as their estimates go.
And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs. Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.
Many readers of The Times were, therefore, surprised to learn, from an excellent article published last weekend, that the regions of America most hooked on Mr. Santorum’s narcotic — the regions in which government programs account for the largest share of personal income — are precisely the regions electing those severe conservatives. Wasn’t Red America supposed to be the land of traditional values, where people don’t eat Thai food and don’t rely on handouts?
The article made its case with maps showing the distribution of dependency, but you get the same story from a more formal comparison. Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states Gallup ranks as “most conservative” received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the 10 most liberal states was only 17.1 percent.
Now, there’s no mystery about red-state reliance on government programs. These states are relatively poor, which means both that people have fewer sources of income other than safety-net programs and that more of them qualify for “means-tested” programs such as Medicaid.
By the way, the same logic explains why there has been a jump in dependency since 2008. Contrary to what Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney suggest, Mr. Obama has not radically expanded the safety net. Rather, the dire state of the economy has reduced incomes and made more people eligible for benefits, especially unemployment benefits. Basically, the safety net is the same, but more people are falling into it.
But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations.
First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.
Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.
Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”
Presumably, then, voters imagine that pledges to slash government spending mean cutting programs for the idle poor, not things they themselves count on. And this is a confusion politicians deliberately encourage. For example, when Mr. Romney responded to the new Obama budget, he condemned Mr. Obama for not taking on entitlement spending — and, in the very next breath, attacked him for cutting Medicare.
The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government program.
The message I take from all this is that pundits who describe America as a fundamentally conservative country are wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to Washington. But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Conservative Hokum Comes Home to Roost
Op-Ed Columnist
Severe Conservative Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 12, 2012
As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.
That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.
Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15 points ahead of Mr. Romney. Anyone with an Internet connection is aware that Mr. Santorum is best known for 2003 remarks about homosexuality, incest and bestiality. But his strangeness runs deeper than that.
For example, last year Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign?
Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.” You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.
Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.
Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone. The truth, of course, is that he was not a “severely conservative” governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement.
But Mr. Romney is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and whatever his personal beliefs may really be — if, indeed, he believes anything other than that he should be president — he needs to win over primary voters who really are severely conservative in both his intended and unintended senses.
So he can’t run on his record in office. Nor was he trying very hard to run on his business career even before people began asking hard (and appropriate) questions about the nature of that career.
Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney campaign.
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.
Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.
The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.
Severe Conservative Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 12, 2012
As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.
That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.
Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15 points ahead of Mr. Romney. Anyone with an Internet connection is aware that Mr. Santorum is best known for 2003 remarks about homosexuality, incest and bestiality. But his strangeness runs deeper than that.
For example, last year Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign?
Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.” You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory.
Then there’s Ron Paul, who came in a strong second in Maine’s caucuses despite widespread publicity over such matters as the racist (and conspiracy-minded) newsletters published under his name in the 1990s and his declarations that both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act were mistakes. Clearly, a large segment of his party’s base is comfortable with views one might have thought were on the extreme fringe.
Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone. The truth, of course, is that he was not a “severely conservative” governor. His signature achievement was a health reform identical in all important respects to the national reform signed into law by President Obama four years later. And in a rational political world, his campaign would be centered on that achievement.
But Mr. Romney is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and whatever his personal beliefs may really be — if, indeed, he believes anything other than that he should be president — he needs to win over primary voters who really are severely conservative in both his intended and unintended senses.
So he can’t run on his record in office. Nor was he trying very hard to run on his business career even before people began asking hard (and appropriate) questions about the nature of that career.
Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney campaign.
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!
My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.
Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.
The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.
James Garner - The Garner Files (3)
"Everybody I knew in Oklahoma was a Democrat, but for the first time I voted, in 1952, it was for Eisenhower. I felt we needed a strong military man in there because the world was in turmoil. I learned my lesson. Never voted Republican again. I don't understand the convervative way of thinking. The next time I voted it was for Stevenson. I think he's still the most intelligent presidential candidate we've ever had. I think Obama runs a close second."
P. 97
P. 97
Sunday, February 12, 2012
The Politics of Freedom
Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom
Corey Robin April 6, 2011 | This article appeared in the April 25, 2011 edition of The Nation.
Conservatives often complain that they’ve been exiled from power, whether in the corridors of the Capitol or the pages of the New York Times. Yet conservative ideas have dominated American politics for thirty years. The centerpiece of that dominance is the notion that the market equals freedom and government is the threat to freedom. Despite the Great Recession and election of Barack Obama, the most progressive candidate to win the presidency since 1964, that idea retains its hold. The ideological realignment we have been waiting for, in which that idea is repudiated, has yet to come.
Garbage and Gravitas (Books and Ideas, Biography, Cultural Criticism and Analysis)
Ayn Rand was a melodramatist of the moral life: the battle is between the producer and the moochers, and it must end in life or death.
Entertainment Hospitality Social Issues businessman One reason for the dominance of this idea is that since the ’70s, liberals and leftists have misidentified the source of conservatism’s appeal. Confident that no one short of a millionaire could endorse the right’s economic ideology, everyone from Clintonite centrists to radical populists has treated conservatism as essentially a politics of distraction and delusion. Conservatives, it’s said, are just good salespeople, wrapping their ugly wares in the pretty paper of the culture wars. The way to combat them is not to challenge their ideas or defend ours but to use prettier wrapping paper.
Instead of confronting the allure of the free market, as conservatives understand it, liberals have tried to co-opt the discourse of traditional values. Painting themselves as the new Victorians, they’ve claimed, We stand for thrift and family, God and country. We put people to work rather than on welfare. We don’t spend recklessly; we reduce the deficit. We provide security: not just the physical security of cops on the street, crooks behind bars and troops in Afghanistan but the economic security of shared risk and protection from risk. We stand for responsibilities over rights, safety over freedom, constraint rather than counterculture.
This strategy might have something to recommend it if it worked. But it hasn’t. When right-wing ideas dominate, we get right-wing policies. After the midterm elections in November, it seemed the most natural thing in the world—to the right, the media, Obama and parts of the Democratic Party—to freeze the pay of federal workers and extend the Bush tax cuts for two years. Incoherent as policy—the first presumes that the deficit is the greatest threat to the economy; the second, the lack of consumer spending—it makes sense as ideology. The best (and only) thing the government can do for you and the economy is to get out of your way.
There’s a second reason conservative ideas are still dominant. Many liberals have failed to overcome their sense that however much they might question the bona fides of the other side, they lack the intellectual wherewithal to manage the economy. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust had a self-confidence born of the widespread belief that the business class had discredited itself, and a conviction that it had the answers where the businessman did not. That will to power, rooted in ideas, is hard to find on the left today. When it comes to the economy, too many liberals agree in their heart of hearts with conservatives: let the men of money decide.
If there is to be a true realignment—not just of parties but of principles, not just of policy preferences or cognitive frames but of deep beliefs and ideas—we must confront conservatism’s political philosophy. That philosophy reflects more than a bloodless economics or narrow self-interest; it draws from and drives forward a distinctly moral vision of freedom, with deep roots in American political thought.
* * *
From Emerson and Douglass to Reagan and Goldwater, freedom has been the keyword of American politics. Every successful movement—abolition, feminism, civil rights, the New Deal—has claimed it. A freewheeling mix of elements—the willful assertion and reinvention of the self, the breaking of traditional bonds and constraints, the toppling of old orders and creation of new forms—freedom in the American vein combines what political theorists call negative liberty (the absence of external interference) and positive liberty (the ability to act). Where theorists dwell on these distinctions as incommensurable values, statesmen and activists unite them in a vision of emancipation that identifies freedom with the act of knocking down or hurtling past barriers.
The secret of conservatism’s success—as any reading of Reagan’s speeches and writings will attest—has been to locate this notion of freedom in the market. Conservative political economy envisions freedom as something more than a simple “don’t tread on me”; it celebrates the everyman entrepreneur, making his own destiny, imagining a world and then creating it. Speaking before Congress in April 1981, Reagan sold his package of tax and spending cuts with a line from Carl Sandburg, that emblematic voice of the Popular Front: “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” The entrepreneur is the scion of freedom, the reincarnation of Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln; the welfare state, its most potent enemy, the successor to King George and the slaveholder.
We must confront this ideology head-on: not by temporizing about the riskiness or instability of the free market or by demonstrating that it (or its Republican stewards) cannot deliver growth but by mobilizing the most potent resource of the American vernacular against it. We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job.
We must, in other words, change the argument from the abstractions of the free market to the very real power of the businessman. More than posing an impersonal threat to the deliberations of a democratic polity—as the progressive opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision would have it, or as liberals like Paul Krugman and Hendrik Hertzberg have suggested about the unionbusting in Wisconsin—the businessman imposes concrete and personal constraints on the freedom of individual citizens. What conservatives fear above all else—more than higher taxes or lower profits—is any challenge to that power, any inversion of the obligations of deference and command, any extension of freedom that would curtail their own. FDR understood that. In his 1936 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he was careful to take aim not simply at the rich but at “economic royalists,” lordly men who take “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.”
Mounting this kind of argument requires more than a strategic shift of frames; it calls for deep immersion in a wellspring of American political thought: the language of opposition to personal dominion and rule. Americans are notoriously uninterested in systemic notions of domination, but the struggle against slavery has left them with an abiding appreciation of—and visceral hostility to—individual forms of domination. And that is what the businessman, uncurbed and unchecked, portends: personal domination.
We must also change the argument about government. Government need not be a source of constraint, as conservatives claim. Nor is it designed to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market, as many liberals claim—a formulation that depicts citizens as needy and passive and opens liberals to the charge of paternalism and condescension. When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating herself from her rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy.
* * *
In forging his realignment, Roosevelt was careful to identify the enemy not as a political party but an economic aristocracy. Throughout the 1936 campaign, he barely mentioned Alf Landon. Instead, he denounced the Liberty League and the businessmen it represented. Realignments in America are like that: Jackson railed against the Bank; the Republicans ran against the slaveocracy; Reagan campaigned against the liberal elite. Part of this is strategic: it’s easier to peel away voters from the opposition if you can show that it is not their party you oppose but the interests it represents, which are not theirs. But part of it is substantive, reflecting a conviction that the task at hand is not simply to defeat a party or win an election but to free men and women from a malignant social form. If we hope to forge a comparable realignment, we must stop talking about the Tea Party or even the Republicans and start talking about the business class that stands behind them.
Some of us might be tempted to frame the fight against business in terms other than freedom: as a campaign for security, perhaps, or for equality. In defense of the former, people could point to Social Security, the third and fourth of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (freedom from want and from fear), and the general idea of a safety net. Lurking around such arguments, inevitably, is 9/11 and the desire to reclaim the meaning of security from the right. In defense of the latter, people could point to the new breed of superrich, galloping away with their billions while everyone from the pauper to the millionaire—suddenly thrown together in that great crucible of the middle class—gets left behind. Lurking around these arguments is the age-old suspicion on the left that freedom is either hopelessly bourgeois or inherently antagonistic to equality. One must opt for equality over freedom—happily, says the radical; regretfully, sighs the liberal.
The problem with defending government as the guardian of security and equality is that it endorses a passive conception of politics and people in which the citizen is a recipient of the state’s benevolence rather than an agent in her own right. The government doles out protection or largesse, and she takes it in. In neither case does—or need—she do anything. Security and equality are also static ideals. How do you know if men and women are secure or equal? If each is fixed and fastened to a certain place or position? When men and women are boxed in like that, movement, the most basic form of freedom, can seem threatening.
Security and equality are critical values, but they are means to an end. The reason we value security is that it enables us to act freely, without fear. The reason we value equality is that inequality is the throughway of domination: someone with vastly more resources than I—an employer, for example—can coerce and control me, abridge my freedom. By emphasizing security and equality, we focus on the means and lose sight of the end.
The politics of freedom does not dismiss the value or importance of state resources. But rather than conceiving of them as protections against the hazards of the market or indices of public compassion, it sees them as sources of power, as the tools and instruments of personal and collective advance. Armed with universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, public pensions and the like, I am less vulnerable to the coercions and castigations of an employer or partner. Not only do I have the option of leaving an oppressive situation; I can confront and change it—for and by myself, for and with others. I am emboldened not to avoid risks but to take risks: to talk back and walk out, to engage in what John Stuart Mill called, in one of his lovelier phrases, “experiments in living.”
* * *
The politics of freedom is a politics of individual and collective emancipation. Frederick Douglass discovered his freedom, negative and positive, when he raised his hand against his overseer. After that, he realized, though he might remain a “slave in form,” he would never again be a “slave in fact.” The politics of freedom similarly understands liberty as, above all, a claim against—and a movement to overcome—oppressive forms of power, particularly in the private spheres of the workplace and the family.
That is why the politics of freedom refuses to view the state as the conservative does: as a constraint. Or as the welfare-state liberal does: as a distributive machine. Instead, it views the state the way the abolitionist, the trade unionist, the civil rights activist and the feminist do: as an instrument for disrupting the private life of power. The state, in other words, is the right hand to the left hand of social movement.
The question for the left today is twofold. First, how do we formulate this argument in an age when capitalism goes unquestioned? At previous moments of liberal ascendancy, revolution was a potent threat and social democracy a viable alternative, if not in the United States, then at least elsewhere. For all its repressive effects, the cold war helped spur domestic reform. Today the United States is the global hegemon; China, its only potential competitor, offers no ideological threat to its economic system. Whether it is possible to mount a challenge to current economic arrangements without that threat remains to be seen.
Second, and perhaps more important, can we formulate this argument at all? During the Great Recession, much has been written about reviving the policies of the New Deal. Though well-intentioned, this focus on policy suggests that thirty years of conservative control has left us ill-equipped to counter the power of the businessman with first principles. It’s long past time for us to start talking and arguing about those first principles, especially the principle of freedom.
Corey Robin April 6, 2011 | This article appeared in the April 25, 2011 edition of The Nation.
Conservatives often complain that they’ve been exiled from power, whether in the corridors of the Capitol or the pages of the New York Times. Yet conservative ideas have dominated American politics for thirty years. The centerpiece of that dominance is the notion that the market equals freedom and government is the threat to freedom. Despite the Great Recession and election of Barack Obama, the most progressive candidate to win the presidency since 1964, that idea retains its hold. The ideological realignment we have been waiting for, in which that idea is repudiated, has yet to come.
Garbage and Gravitas (Books and Ideas, Biography, Cultural Criticism and Analysis)
Ayn Rand was a melodramatist of the moral life: the battle is between the producer and the moochers, and it must end in life or death.
Entertainment Hospitality Social Issues businessman One reason for the dominance of this idea is that since the ’70s, liberals and leftists have misidentified the source of conservatism’s appeal. Confident that no one short of a millionaire could endorse the right’s economic ideology, everyone from Clintonite centrists to radical populists has treated conservatism as essentially a politics of distraction and delusion. Conservatives, it’s said, are just good salespeople, wrapping their ugly wares in the pretty paper of the culture wars. The way to combat them is not to challenge their ideas or defend ours but to use prettier wrapping paper.
Instead of confronting the allure of the free market, as conservatives understand it, liberals have tried to co-opt the discourse of traditional values. Painting themselves as the new Victorians, they’ve claimed, We stand for thrift and family, God and country. We put people to work rather than on welfare. We don’t spend recklessly; we reduce the deficit. We provide security: not just the physical security of cops on the street, crooks behind bars and troops in Afghanistan but the economic security of shared risk and protection from risk. We stand for responsibilities over rights, safety over freedom, constraint rather than counterculture.
This strategy might have something to recommend it if it worked. But it hasn’t. When right-wing ideas dominate, we get right-wing policies. After the midterm elections in November, it seemed the most natural thing in the world—to the right, the media, Obama and parts of the Democratic Party—to freeze the pay of federal workers and extend the Bush tax cuts for two years. Incoherent as policy—the first presumes that the deficit is the greatest threat to the economy; the second, the lack of consumer spending—it makes sense as ideology. The best (and only) thing the government can do for you and the economy is to get out of your way.
There’s a second reason conservative ideas are still dominant. Many liberals have failed to overcome their sense that however much they might question the bona fides of the other side, they lack the intellectual wherewithal to manage the economy. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust had a self-confidence born of the widespread belief that the business class had discredited itself, and a conviction that it had the answers where the businessman did not. That will to power, rooted in ideas, is hard to find on the left today. When it comes to the economy, too many liberals agree in their heart of hearts with conservatives: let the men of money decide.
If there is to be a true realignment—not just of parties but of principles, not just of policy preferences or cognitive frames but of deep beliefs and ideas—we must confront conservatism’s political philosophy. That philosophy reflects more than a bloodless economics or narrow self-interest; it draws from and drives forward a distinctly moral vision of freedom, with deep roots in American political thought.
* * *
From Emerson and Douglass to Reagan and Goldwater, freedom has been the keyword of American politics. Every successful movement—abolition, feminism, civil rights, the New Deal—has claimed it. A freewheeling mix of elements—the willful assertion and reinvention of the self, the breaking of traditional bonds and constraints, the toppling of old orders and creation of new forms—freedom in the American vein combines what political theorists call negative liberty (the absence of external interference) and positive liberty (the ability to act). Where theorists dwell on these distinctions as incommensurable values, statesmen and activists unite them in a vision of emancipation that identifies freedom with the act of knocking down or hurtling past barriers.
The secret of conservatism’s success—as any reading of Reagan’s speeches and writings will attest—has been to locate this notion of freedom in the market. Conservative political economy envisions freedom as something more than a simple “don’t tread on me”; it celebrates the everyman entrepreneur, making his own destiny, imagining a world and then creating it. Speaking before Congress in April 1981, Reagan sold his package of tax and spending cuts with a line from Carl Sandburg, that emblematic voice of the Popular Front: “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” The entrepreneur is the scion of freedom, the reincarnation of Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln; the welfare state, its most potent enemy, the successor to King George and the slaveholder.
We must confront this ideology head-on: not by temporizing about the riskiness or instability of the free market or by demonstrating that it (or its Republican stewards) cannot deliver growth but by mobilizing the most potent resource of the American vernacular against it. We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job.
We must, in other words, change the argument from the abstractions of the free market to the very real power of the businessman. More than posing an impersonal threat to the deliberations of a democratic polity—as the progressive opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision would have it, or as liberals like Paul Krugman and Hendrik Hertzberg have suggested about the unionbusting in Wisconsin—the businessman imposes concrete and personal constraints on the freedom of individual citizens. What conservatives fear above all else—more than higher taxes or lower profits—is any challenge to that power, any inversion of the obligations of deference and command, any extension of freedom that would curtail their own. FDR understood that. In his 1936 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he was careful to take aim not simply at the rich but at “economic royalists,” lordly men who take “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.”
Mounting this kind of argument requires more than a strategic shift of frames; it calls for deep immersion in a wellspring of American political thought: the language of opposition to personal dominion and rule. Americans are notoriously uninterested in systemic notions of domination, but the struggle against slavery has left them with an abiding appreciation of—and visceral hostility to—individual forms of domination. And that is what the businessman, uncurbed and unchecked, portends: personal domination.
We must also change the argument about government. Government need not be a source of constraint, as conservatives claim. Nor is it designed to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market, as many liberals claim—a formulation that depicts citizens as needy and passive and opens liberals to the charge of paternalism and condescension. When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating herself from her rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy.
* * *
In forging his realignment, Roosevelt was careful to identify the enemy not as a political party but an economic aristocracy. Throughout the 1936 campaign, he barely mentioned Alf Landon. Instead, he denounced the Liberty League and the businessmen it represented. Realignments in America are like that: Jackson railed against the Bank; the Republicans ran against the slaveocracy; Reagan campaigned against the liberal elite. Part of this is strategic: it’s easier to peel away voters from the opposition if you can show that it is not their party you oppose but the interests it represents, which are not theirs. But part of it is substantive, reflecting a conviction that the task at hand is not simply to defeat a party or win an election but to free men and women from a malignant social form. If we hope to forge a comparable realignment, we must stop talking about the Tea Party or even the Republicans and start talking about the business class that stands behind them.
Some of us might be tempted to frame the fight against business in terms other than freedom: as a campaign for security, perhaps, or for equality. In defense of the former, people could point to Social Security, the third and fourth of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (freedom from want and from fear), and the general idea of a safety net. Lurking around such arguments, inevitably, is 9/11 and the desire to reclaim the meaning of security from the right. In defense of the latter, people could point to the new breed of superrich, galloping away with their billions while everyone from the pauper to the millionaire—suddenly thrown together in that great crucible of the middle class—gets left behind. Lurking around these arguments is the age-old suspicion on the left that freedom is either hopelessly bourgeois or inherently antagonistic to equality. One must opt for equality over freedom—happily, says the radical; regretfully, sighs the liberal.
The problem with defending government as the guardian of security and equality is that it endorses a passive conception of politics and people in which the citizen is a recipient of the state’s benevolence rather than an agent in her own right. The government doles out protection or largesse, and she takes it in. In neither case does—or need—she do anything. Security and equality are also static ideals. How do you know if men and women are secure or equal? If each is fixed and fastened to a certain place or position? When men and women are boxed in like that, movement, the most basic form of freedom, can seem threatening.
Security and equality are critical values, but they are means to an end. The reason we value security is that it enables us to act freely, without fear. The reason we value equality is that inequality is the throughway of domination: someone with vastly more resources than I—an employer, for example—can coerce and control me, abridge my freedom. By emphasizing security and equality, we focus on the means and lose sight of the end.
The politics of freedom does not dismiss the value or importance of state resources. But rather than conceiving of them as protections against the hazards of the market or indices of public compassion, it sees them as sources of power, as the tools and instruments of personal and collective advance. Armed with universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, public pensions and the like, I am less vulnerable to the coercions and castigations of an employer or partner. Not only do I have the option of leaving an oppressive situation; I can confront and change it—for and by myself, for and with others. I am emboldened not to avoid risks but to take risks: to talk back and walk out, to engage in what John Stuart Mill called, in one of his lovelier phrases, “experiments in living.”
* * *
The politics of freedom is a politics of individual and collective emancipation. Frederick Douglass discovered his freedom, negative and positive, when he raised his hand against his overseer. After that, he realized, though he might remain a “slave in form,” he would never again be a “slave in fact.” The politics of freedom similarly understands liberty as, above all, a claim against—and a movement to overcome—oppressive forms of power, particularly in the private spheres of the workplace and the family.
That is why the politics of freedom refuses to view the state as the conservative does: as a constraint. Or as the welfare-state liberal does: as a distributive machine. Instead, it views the state the way the abolitionist, the trade unionist, the civil rights activist and the feminist do: as an instrument for disrupting the private life of power. The state, in other words, is the right hand to the left hand of social movement.
The question for the left today is twofold. First, how do we formulate this argument in an age when capitalism goes unquestioned? At previous moments of liberal ascendancy, revolution was a potent threat and social democracy a viable alternative, if not in the United States, then at least elsewhere. For all its repressive effects, the cold war helped spur domestic reform. Today the United States is the global hegemon; China, its only potential competitor, offers no ideological threat to its economic system. Whether it is possible to mount a challenge to current economic arrangements without that threat remains to be seen.
Second, and perhaps more important, can we formulate this argument at all? During the Great Recession, much has been written about reviving the policies of the New Deal. Though well-intentioned, this focus on policy suggests that thirty years of conservative control has left us ill-equipped to counter the power of the businessman with first principles. It’s long past time for us to start talking and arguing about those first principles, especially the principle of freedom.
James Garner - The Garner Files (2)
James Garner is an outspoken Democrat. I did not know this before reading this book. No wonder I like him!
He was present at the famous March on Washington in 1963.
"The March on Washington was, as Dr. King called it, 'the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,' and a resounding victory for the cause of civil rights in America, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it wasn't the end of the struggle: Two weeks later a bomb exploded in the basement of a church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. Three months later, President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas. Five years later, on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was struck down in Memphis."
P. 97
He was present at the famous March on Washington in 1963.
"The March on Washington was, as Dr. King called it, 'the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,' and a resounding victory for the cause of civil rights in America, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it wasn't the end of the struggle: Two weeks later a bomb exploded in the basement of a church in Birmingham, killing four young girls. Three months later, President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas. Five years later, on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was struck down in Memphis."
P. 97
Saturday, February 11, 2012
James Garner - The Garner Files
Some books are just for fun, and this is one of them: a memoir by the actor James Garner. I think that Jim Garner is my favorite actor of all time.
He grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Never a scholar, he ended getting his GED. He served honorably in Korea, earning a Purple Heart.
He got into acting accidentally from knowing someone from his home state who go into movie making. He was a long-time friend of the famous actor Henry Fonda.
He was under contract with Warner Studios when he got his big break playing the lead role in the TV show "Maverick." I knew him best in the long-running TV show "The Rockford Files."
This book is a lot of fun.
He grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Never a scholar, he ended getting his GED. He served honorably in Korea, earning a Purple Heart.
He got into acting accidentally from knowing someone from his home state who go into movie making. He was a long-time friend of the famous actor Henry Fonda.
He was under contract with Warner Studios when he got his big break playing the lead role in the TV show "Maverick." I knew him best in the long-running TV show "The Rockford Files."
This book is a lot of fun.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Corey Robin vs. Mark Lilla
by Corey Robin
Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it elides changes and cleavages on the right. It’s difficult to find my argument amid these claims, so let me restate it here.
My book argues that conservatism is a reaction against movements of the left—from the French Revolution to feminism. While this is a revisionist claim, it required no elaborate digging on my part to make it. I simply looked at what conservatives have said about themselves. Robert Peel, who practically invented Britain’s Conservative Party, defined its aim as opposition “to the restless spirit of revolutionary change.” Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual architects of the American conservative movement, described conservatism as a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men…in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation.” George Nash, court historian of that movement, identified conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary.” All this, and more, I cite in my book.
Lilla is correct that I believe conservatives oppose these movements because they threaten public and private hierarchies of power. Again, I provide ample evidence for this. But he seriously distorts my position when he says that I depict conservatives as “black-hatted villains” whose ultimate vision is “simply a defense of privilege.” As I write in the introduction:
No simple defense of one’s own place and privileges…the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. When [Edmund] Burke adds…that the “great Object” of the Revolution is “to root out that thing called an Aristocrat or Nobleman and Gentleman,” he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility; he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world. If the power goes, the distinction goes with it.
Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.
Lilla claims that I gather the oppressed “into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance” over and against which stand the oppressors. My book explicitly argues against any such romance of the oppressed. Citing everyone from John Adams (“common beggars in the streets…plume themselves on that superiority which they have, or fancy they have, over some others”) to Phyllis Schlafly, I show that the lower orders often join, and have good reason to join, the conservative cause: in fending off a democratic movement from below, conservatism gives them a taste of lordly power they otherwise would not enjoy.
Race, as John C. Calhoun discovered, turns all whites into a ruling class:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.
In the family and the factory, fathers and foremen get to play the part of a lord. Conservatives also court those talents that can be demonstrated on the battlefield and the barricades. That’s one of the reasons it attracts outsiders, from the Irish-born Burke to the immigrant neoconservative. Far from hiving off oppressor from oppressed, I argue that the right succeeds by turning paupers into princes and beggars into Bonapartes.
Lilla finally claims that I ignore differences on the right. “La destra è mobile,” he writes. “The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again.” I agree, which is why I wrote on page 36:
Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations—tactical and substantive—on a theme.
The fact that conservatism is reactionary doesn’t mean it is always the same. To the contrary, it changes across time and space, in response to the movements it opposes. That’s why there are eleven chapters following my introductory essay (upon which Lilla focuses nearly all of his attention).
Given the flimsiness of Lilla’s charges, his real beef seems to be that he does not like seeing today’s Republican seated next to yesterday’s Burke. But one can only keep them apart by pretending that Burke didn’t say much of what he said. If Burke simply believed, as Lilla writes, that society is an inheritance “best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action,” he would never have confessed that “our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut” or worried that the traditional features of a constitution “are the very things that make its weakness.” If he were unambiguously “hostile,” in Lilla’s words, “to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions,” he would never have howled that his comrades lacked a “relish for the principles of the manifestoes” and the “generous wildness of Quixotism.” Nor would he have declared that “acquiescence will not do; there must be zeal,” that “the madness of the wise…is better than the sobriety of fools,” and that “every little measure is a great errour.”
But the Burke who rallied Europe against the French Revolution did say these and many other such things, as have his descendants. This may be irritating or inconvenient for Lilla, but if he doesn’t like or believe the evidence I’ve presented, he should at least explain why it’s not relevant or how I’ve gotten it wrong.
Corey Robin
Brooklyn, New York
Mark Lilla replies:
Though, as I said in my review, Corey Robin can be insightful when he writes profiles of some individuals on the right, his letter confirms my main point: when it comes to thinking about “the right” he’s hopelessly confused. The main confusion is conceptual and arises because he has no clear idea of what he means by “conservatism.” He could argue that there are genuine conservative principles that provoke conservatives’ “reaction against movements of the left,” and then criticize those principles and the people who hold them. This he does not do. Instead he argues there are no such things as conservative principles, only ideological “improvisations” for defending hierarchy and privilege shared by a heterogeneous cast of characters running from Tocqueville and Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and Phyllis Schlafly. So his real claim can be reduced to this: “those who react against movements of the left” react against movements of the left—which is a tautology, not an argument.
The point of my review was to distinguish conceptually between conservatism, which is informed by a view of human nature; reaction, which is informed by a view of history; and the right, which is a shifting, engaged ideological family that, in this country, includes a few genuine conservatives, radical libertarians, neoconservatives, social issues reactionaries, evangelicals, foreign policy hawks, e tutti quanti, who have disagreements among themselves. (As for Burke, who was a genuine conservative but also an engaged politician, it’s not surprising that he sometimes disagreed with himself.)
Robin’s Manichaeanism distorts the historical reality of the conservative tradition, which includes the Disraeli who shepherded through the Reform Act of 1867, the Bismarck who laid the foundation for the German welfare state, and the Heritage Foundation, which first floated the idea of mandating that adult Americans all carry some form of health insurance. Though these proposals met challenges from the left, they were shaped by a recognizable conservative sensibility. Robin also ignores the liberal tradition, which gets no mention in his letter and barely a nod in his book. (The book’s index entry reads “liberalism, see left.”) There are good liberal reasons to resist “the restless spirit of revolutionary change,” too, since it can so often lead to despotism in the end (which is liberals’ great worry about the Arab Spring). Liberals stress the need for individual liberty, the rule of law, and stable constitutional structures, which are not revolutionary principles; does that make them reactionaries? In Robin’s eyes, perhaps it does.
He is correct, though, to note that I didn’t engage with his explanation of right-wing populism—for the simple reason that it was too weak and condescending to take seriously. Robin believes in false consciousness and in intellectuals’ ability to see through it; that’s why he can claim that a conservatism seeking to free the world from all that is “ugly, brutish, base, and dull” gives “the lower orders…a taste of lordly power” and gives arriviste Irishmen and Jews their Napoleonic moments in the sun. I, like most people, take the populists at their word. When figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (and now Newt Gingrich) demonize educated elites and praise the wisdom of “soccer moms” and plumbers, they mean it. And those on the bottom rung who cheer and vote for them know what they are cheering and voting for. Corey Robin’s commitment to old leftist clichés about “the lower orders” blinds him to the most important and disturbing development in our politics today, which is the apotheosis of ugliness, brutishness, baseness, and ignorance as political ideals on the American right. And if you can’t see that, what can you see?
Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it elides changes and cleavages on the right. It’s difficult to find my argument amid these claims, so let me restate it here.
My book argues that conservatism is a reaction against movements of the left—from the French Revolution to feminism. While this is a revisionist claim, it required no elaborate digging on my part to make it. I simply looked at what conservatives have said about themselves. Robert Peel, who practically invented Britain’s Conservative Party, defined its aim as opposition “to the restless spirit of revolutionary change.” Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual architects of the American conservative movement, described conservatism as a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men…in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation.” George Nash, court historian of that movement, identified conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary.” All this, and more, I cite in my book.
Lilla is correct that I believe conservatives oppose these movements because they threaten public and private hierarchies of power. Again, I provide ample evidence for this. But he seriously distorts my position when he says that I depict conservatives as “black-hatted villains” whose ultimate vision is “simply a defense of privilege.” As I write in the introduction:
No simple defense of one’s own place and privileges…the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. When [Edmund] Burke adds…that the “great Object” of the Revolution is “to root out that thing called an Aristocrat or Nobleman and Gentleman,” he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility; he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world. If the power goes, the distinction goes with it.
Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.
Lilla claims that I gather the oppressed “into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance” over and against which stand the oppressors. My book explicitly argues against any such romance of the oppressed. Citing everyone from John Adams (“common beggars in the streets…plume themselves on that superiority which they have, or fancy they have, over some others”) to Phyllis Schlafly, I show that the lower orders often join, and have good reason to join, the conservative cause: in fending off a democratic movement from below, conservatism gives them a taste of lordly power they otherwise would not enjoy.
Race, as John C. Calhoun discovered, turns all whites into a ruling class:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.
In the family and the factory, fathers and foremen get to play the part of a lord. Conservatives also court those talents that can be demonstrated on the battlefield and the barricades. That’s one of the reasons it attracts outsiders, from the Irish-born Burke to the immigrant neoconservative. Far from hiving off oppressor from oppressed, I argue that the right succeeds by turning paupers into princes and beggars into Bonapartes.
Lilla finally claims that I ignore differences on the right. “La destra è mobile,” he writes. “The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again.” I agree, which is why I wrote on page 36:
Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations—tactical and substantive—on a theme.
The fact that conservatism is reactionary doesn’t mean it is always the same. To the contrary, it changes across time and space, in response to the movements it opposes. That’s why there are eleven chapters following my introductory essay (upon which Lilla focuses nearly all of his attention).
Given the flimsiness of Lilla’s charges, his real beef seems to be that he does not like seeing today’s Republican seated next to yesterday’s Burke. But one can only keep them apart by pretending that Burke didn’t say much of what he said. If Burke simply believed, as Lilla writes, that society is an inheritance “best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action,” he would never have confessed that “our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut” or worried that the traditional features of a constitution “are the very things that make its weakness.” If he were unambiguously “hostile,” in Lilla’s words, “to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions,” he would never have howled that his comrades lacked a “relish for the principles of the manifestoes” and the “generous wildness of Quixotism.” Nor would he have declared that “acquiescence will not do; there must be zeal,” that “the madness of the wise…is better than the sobriety of fools,” and that “every little measure is a great errour.”
But the Burke who rallied Europe against the French Revolution did say these and many other such things, as have his descendants. This may be irritating or inconvenient for Lilla, but if he doesn’t like or believe the evidence I’ve presented, he should at least explain why it’s not relevant or how I’ve gotten it wrong.
Corey Robin
Brooklyn, New York
Mark Lilla replies:
Though, as I said in my review, Corey Robin can be insightful when he writes profiles of some individuals on the right, his letter confirms my main point: when it comes to thinking about “the right” he’s hopelessly confused. The main confusion is conceptual and arises because he has no clear idea of what he means by “conservatism.” He could argue that there are genuine conservative principles that provoke conservatives’ “reaction against movements of the left,” and then criticize those principles and the people who hold them. This he does not do. Instead he argues there are no such things as conservative principles, only ideological “improvisations” for defending hierarchy and privilege shared by a heterogeneous cast of characters running from Tocqueville and Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and Phyllis Schlafly. So his real claim can be reduced to this: “those who react against movements of the left” react against movements of the left—which is a tautology, not an argument.
The point of my review was to distinguish conceptually between conservatism, which is informed by a view of human nature; reaction, which is informed by a view of history; and the right, which is a shifting, engaged ideological family that, in this country, includes a few genuine conservatives, radical libertarians, neoconservatives, social issues reactionaries, evangelicals, foreign policy hawks, e tutti quanti, who have disagreements among themselves. (As for Burke, who was a genuine conservative but also an engaged politician, it’s not surprising that he sometimes disagreed with himself.)
Robin’s Manichaeanism distorts the historical reality of the conservative tradition, which includes the Disraeli who shepherded through the Reform Act of 1867, the Bismarck who laid the foundation for the German welfare state, and the Heritage Foundation, which first floated the idea of mandating that adult Americans all carry some form of health insurance. Though these proposals met challenges from the left, they were shaped by a recognizable conservative sensibility. Robin also ignores the liberal tradition, which gets no mention in his letter and barely a nod in his book. (The book’s index entry reads “liberalism, see left.”) There are good liberal reasons to resist “the restless spirit of revolutionary change,” too, since it can so often lead to despotism in the end (which is liberals’ great worry about the Arab Spring). Liberals stress the need for individual liberty, the rule of law, and stable constitutional structures, which are not revolutionary principles; does that make them reactionaries? In Robin’s eyes, perhaps it does.
He is correct, though, to note that I didn’t engage with his explanation of right-wing populism—for the simple reason that it was too weak and condescending to take seriously. Robin believes in false consciousness and in intellectuals’ ability to see through it; that’s why he can claim that a conservatism seeking to free the world from all that is “ugly, brutish, base, and dull” gives “the lower orders…a taste of lordly power” and gives arriviste Irishmen and Jews their Napoleonic moments in the sun. I, like most people, take the populists at their word. When figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (and now Newt Gingrich) demonize educated elites and praise the wisdom of “soccer moms” and plumbers, they mean it. And those on the bottom rung who cheer and vote for them know what they are cheering and voting for. Corey Robin’s commitment to old leftist clichés about “the lower orders” blinds him to the most important and disturbing development in our politics today, which is the apotheosis of ugliness, brutishness, baseness, and ignorance as political ideals on the American right. And if you can’t see that, what can you see?
There ARE Differencies Between Liberals and Conservatives
Conservatives vs. Liberals: More Than Politics
Posted: 02/ 8/2012 9:11 am
by Thomas Edsall
The contest for power between Democrats and Republicans pits two antithetical value systems against each other; two conflicting concepts of freedom, liberty, fairness, right, and wrong; two mutually exclusive notions of the state, the individual, and the collective good.
A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.
Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in "us" versus "them" terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are "more prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues;" 1 are "motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders." 2
Some of these conservative values can be discerned in public opinion data.
In one September 2010 survey question, The Pew Research Center asked voters, "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin. Conversely, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This is an ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats of 57 points among white men and 49 points among white women. 3
Along similar lines, Pew asked voters to choose between "Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard" and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people." White Republican men and women both picked "hard work" by decisive margins of 78-21 and 73-24, respectively. White Democratic men and women, in contrast, were far more equivocal, supporting hard work by modest margins of 52-44 and 53-43. 4
These Pew findings demonstrate that the differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are far greater than the differences in opinion between men and women commonly referred to as the gender gap.
* * *
The Pew questions are designed to test opinion on public policy issues. The strength of the Pew surveys and other comparable, well-designed polls is that the sample is carefully selected to be representative of either the general public or of all voters. The limitation of such surveys is that they are not designed to reveal more subtle distinctions that can be equally or more significant.
This less easily answered question has been explored by a team of academic researchers collaborating at a website -- www.YourMorals.org -- designed to test a variety of theories about the connection between views on morality and politics. Jonathan Haidt and Nicholas Winter of the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California, have collected and systematized very large numbers of responses to questions designed to elicit new information about political values orientation. Haidt et al. have ranked responses to a set of online public opinion surveys to show where self-described liberal/moderates differ most sharply from conservative/moderates. The strength of the YourMorals.org surveys lies in the large number of respondents; the weakness grows out of the fact that the participants are self-selected, and represent well-educated elites on the left, right, and center, with little representation of the poor, working class, or lower-middle class. 5
The findings published by Haidt et al. powerfully reinforce the paradigm of two roughly equivalent political coalitions: the first, a socially and economically dominant coalition on the right; the second, a coalition on the left composed of relatively disadvantaged (subdominant) voters in alliance with relatively well-educated, well-off, culturally liberal professionals ('information workers,' 'symbol analysts,' 'creatives,' 'knowledge workers,' etc.). 6 The Haidt et. al. data sheds new light on what it means, across a gamut of issues, when someone says he or she is a liberal or a conservative. 7
What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas: 8
1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD:
On key questions and statements in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe peace is extremely important"; "Understanding, appreciation, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature"; "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal"; "How close do you feel to people all over the world?"
On other key questions in this area, conservatives scored high, and liberals low: "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict"; "There is nothing wrong in getting back at someone who has hurt you."
2) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MORAL ELASTICITY; AUTHORITY:
Again, on some questions in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe that offenders should be provided with counseling to aid in their rehabilitation"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
On other questions, conservatives scored high and liberals low: "People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed"; "Respect for authority is something all children need to learn"; "I believe that 'an eye for an eye' is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders"; "The 'old-fashioned ways' and 'old-fashioned values' still show the best way to live"; "It feels wrong when...a person commits a crime and goes unpunished."
3) THE POOR, REDISTRIBUTION, FAIRNESS:
Liberal high, conservative low: "It feels wrong when . . . an employee who needs their job, is fired"; "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing"; "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."
Conservative high, liberal low: "[I place a high value on] safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self"; "[It's desirable when] employees [who] contribute more to the success of the company receive a larger share"; "[I value] social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources."
4) MORALS, HEDONISM, SELF-FULFILLMENT, HIERARCHY:
Liberals high, conservatives low: "I see myself as someone who . . . is original, comes up with new ideas"; "Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
Conservative high, liberal low: "If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems;" "People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong;" "Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs that traditional culture provide"; "[I favor] restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms."
Their findings show how profound the chasm is on values questions between liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, not only do liberals place high importance on peace, mutual understanding, and empathy for those who have difficulty prevailing in competition, they demonstrate concern for equality of outcome, while conservatives place pointedly low or negative importance on such values. 9 On the other side, conservatives believe that the use of force is a legitimate method of conflict resolution across a range of domains, from war to law enforcement to the discipline of children. 10 Conservatives are more likely to believe in an "eye for an eye," are more likely to respect received tradition, and are overwhelmingly committed to the proposition that individuals are responsible for their own economic condition -- all views rejected by liberals. 11
From a different vantage point -- taking data from American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys conducted between 1972 and 2004, the University of Virginia's Nicholas Winter analyzed the words respondents used to describe the two political parties. In "Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties," Winter categorized words respondents volunteered as stereotypically "male" or "female:"
[M]asculine men are thought to be active, independent, and decisive; feminine women are thought to be compassionate, devoted to others, emotional, and kind. These core traits are linked with a range of other features, including other traits (masculine men are aggressive, practical, tough, hardworking, and hierarchical; feminine women are gentle, submissive, soft, ladylike, and egalitarian); physical characteristics (masculine men are big, strong, and muscular; feminine women are small, weak, and soft-spoken). 12
Posted: 02/ 8/2012 9:11 am
by Thomas Edsall
The contest for power between Democrats and Republicans pits two antithetical value systems against each other; two conflicting concepts of freedom, liberty, fairness, right, and wrong; two mutually exclusive notions of the state, the individual, and the collective good.
A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.
Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in "us" versus "them" terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are "more prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues;" 1 are "motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders." 2
Some of these conservative values can be discerned in public opinion data.
In one September 2010 survey question, The Pew Research Center asked voters, "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin. Conversely, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This is an ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats of 57 points among white men and 49 points among white women. 3
Along similar lines, Pew asked voters to choose between "Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard" and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people." White Republican men and women both picked "hard work" by decisive margins of 78-21 and 73-24, respectively. White Democratic men and women, in contrast, were far more equivocal, supporting hard work by modest margins of 52-44 and 53-43. 4
These Pew findings demonstrate that the differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are far greater than the differences in opinion between men and women commonly referred to as the gender gap.
* * *
The Pew questions are designed to test opinion on public policy issues. The strength of the Pew surveys and other comparable, well-designed polls is that the sample is carefully selected to be representative of either the general public or of all voters. The limitation of such surveys is that they are not designed to reveal more subtle distinctions that can be equally or more significant.
This less easily answered question has been explored by a team of academic researchers collaborating at a website -- www.YourMorals.org -- designed to test a variety of theories about the connection between views on morality and politics. Jonathan Haidt and Nicholas Winter of the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California, have collected and systematized very large numbers of responses to questions designed to elicit new information about political values orientation. Haidt et al. have ranked responses to a set of online public opinion surveys to show where self-described liberal/moderates differ most sharply from conservative/moderates. The strength of the YourMorals.org surveys lies in the large number of respondents; the weakness grows out of the fact that the participants are self-selected, and represent well-educated elites on the left, right, and center, with little representation of the poor, working class, or lower-middle class. 5
The findings published by Haidt et al. powerfully reinforce the paradigm of two roughly equivalent political coalitions: the first, a socially and economically dominant coalition on the right; the second, a coalition on the left composed of relatively disadvantaged (subdominant) voters in alliance with relatively well-educated, well-off, culturally liberal professionals ('information workers,' 'symbol analysts,' 'creatives,' 'knowledge workers,' etc.). 6 The Haidt et. al. data sheds new light on what it means, across a gamut of issues, when someone says he or she is a liberal or a conservative. 7
What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas: 8
1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD:
On key questions and statements in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe peace is extremely important"; "Understanding, appreciation, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature"; "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal"; "How close do you feel to people all over the world?"
On other key questions in this area, conservatives scored high, and liberals low: "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict"; "There is nothing wrong in getting back at someone who has hurt you."
2) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MORAL ELASTICITY; AUTHORITY:
Again, on some questions in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe that offenders should be provided with counseling to aid in their rehabilitation"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
On other questions, conservatives scored high and liberals low: "People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed"; "Respect for authority is something all children need to learn"; "I believe that 'an eye for an eye' is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders"; "The 'old-fashioned ways' and 'old-fashioned values' still show the best way to live"; "It feels wrong when...a person commits a crime and goes unpunished."
3) THE POOR, REDISTRIBUTION, FAIRNESS:
Liberal high, conservative low: "It feels wrong when . . . an employee who needs their job, is fired"; "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing"; "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."
Conservative high, liberal low: "[I place a high value on] safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self"; "[It's desirable when] employees [who] contribute more to the success of the company receive a larger share"; "[I value] social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources."
4) MORALS, HEDONISM, SELF-FULFILLMENT, HIERARCHY:
Liberals high, conservatives low: "I see myself as someone who . . . is original, comes up with new ideas"; "Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
Conservative high, liberal low: "If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems;" "People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong;" "Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs that traditional culture provide"; "[I favor] restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms."
Their findings show how profound the chasm is on values questions between liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, not only do liberals place high importance on peace, mutual understanding, and empathy for those who have difficulty prevailing in competition, they demonstrate concern for equality of outcome, while conservatives place pointedly low or negative importance on such values. 9 On the other side, conservatives believe that the use of force is a legitimate method of conflict resolution across a range of domains, from war to law enforcement to the discipline of children. 10 Conservatives are more likely to believe in an "eye for an eye," are more likely to respect received tradition, and are overwhelmingly committed to the proposition that individuals are responsible for their own economic condition -- all views rejected by liberals. 11
From a different vantage point -- taking data from American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys conducted between 1972 and 2004, the University of Virginia's Nicholas Winter analyzed the words respondents used to describe the two political parties. In "Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties," Winter categorized words respondents volunteered as stereotypically "male" or "female:"
[M]asculine men are thought to be active, independent, and decisive; feminine women are thought to be compassionate, devoted to others, emotional, and kind. These core traits are linked with a range of other features, including other traits (masculine men are aggressive, practical, tough, hardworking, and hierarchical; feminine women are gentle, submissive, soft, ladylike, and egalitarian); physical characteristics (masculine men are big, strong, and muscular; feminine women are small, weak, and soft-spoken). 12
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Tinker Tailor Solider Spy
I saw the movie. It was intriguing. I do not mind slower movies, although I heard fellow moviegoers afterwards murmuring about its pace. I figured the spy may be who it is, simply because the actor is the only other recognizable name (Colin Firth) I knew, besides Gary Oldman as George Smiley. I prefer intricate plots, and this movie delivers on that.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
The Privatization Trap
Feb 5, 2012 8:00 AM 09:23:04 CST
by Mike Konczal
The privatization trap
From schools to prisons, outsourcing government's works typically ends with cronyism, waste and unaccountability.
Privatizing the government is one of the most active projects of the early 21st century.
Everything we once expected the government to do — from education to regulatory rule-writing to military operations to healthcare services to prison management — it now does less of, preferring to support markets in which these services are done through independent, profit-maximizing agents. Tools such as contracting out, vouchering and the selling-off of state assets have been used to remake the government during our market-worshipping era.
Privatization is one of the few political projects that enjoys bipartisan support: Conservatives cheer the rollback of the state, and liberals like to claim that the virtues of the free market are being used towards the egalitarian ends of public policy. The fraud and waste that often come with outsourcing these services has been well-documented. The private management in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the lobbying efforts of corporate prisons have all provided horror stories of what happens when cronyism guides decision-making on behalf of the state. But privatization as standard government practice has problems that go far beyond the abuses of any single incident.
Rather than solving problems with government, privatization often amplifies those issues to new extremes. Instead of unleashing market innovation, it often introduces new parasitic partners into the decision-making process. Instead of providing a check on the power of the government, it allows the state to circumvent constitutional and democratic accountability measures by merging with the private sector. And ultimately, the practice replaces the set of choices and constraints found in democracy, with another set found in the marketplace. Today’s political conversation is blind to these problems out of a mistaken faith in the efficiency and fundamental equality of markets, contrasted to the ineffectiveness and corruptibility of the state.
What advocates miss is that the logic of markets creates private-sector coalitions capable of extracting just as much from taxpayers as the state. Corporations, lobbyists and other market actors can have just as much political agency as the government, and privatization can mobilize businesses to rewrite market practices.
This political process plays out in the quality of the services provided and the structure of the companies providing them. Privatization has sometimes meant that the most lucrative and easiest parts of these government obligations go into private hands, creating private profit, while the most difficult and dangerous parts remain with the public. This can range from the “privatizing the gains, socializing the losses” of various parts of the financial sector to the “cream-skimming” that goes on in many other industries.
If privatization is meant to put a check on the size and power of the state it often backfires, as the practice can be used to circumvent normal mechanisms that exist to hold the state accountable. A whole array of transparency laws and constitutional checks don’t carry over when the government outsources its responsibilities and activities to independent businesses.
Privatization as a way of avoiding constraints and accountability measures has two particularly troubling consequences. First, the government can use independent agents to do things that they themselves cannot do, betraying the whole point of keeping government in check. Especially in the world of surveillance, this practice can act as a way to get around constitutional protections enjoyed by citizens.
Second, accountability measures that have evolved through decades of public law are jettisoned when a service leaves the public sector, allowing companies to do the government’s work in a network of secrecy. Ways the public keeps a check on the government, from the Freedom of Information Act to the Administrative Procedure Act to whole regimes of other transparency laws, do not bind outside businesses.
The Constitution prohibits the delegation of significant state powers, but the Supreme Court currently puts few constraints on the government to outsource many of its important duties. What today’s discourse ignores is an understanding of the liberal conception of what public and democracy itself is good for — as a way to check private and government power, and promote accountability and responsiveness.
These blur into dark scenarios where private-public relationships give public agents maximum discretion in exchange for giving private agents advantages over their competition. For example, after FedEx’s CEO announced that his company would be cooperating with the government following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the firm received a number of rewards. Ranging from special access to security databases, to a prize seat on a regional terrorism task force (the only private company represented) and special state licenses, these benefits amplified the firm’s power in the marketplace over noncooperative competitors like UPS, all in exchange for amplifying the power and reach of the state.
Defenders of privatization also argue that the marketplace creates innovation. Competition, the profit motive and the “creative destruction” of the market system can be deployed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. But what this outsourcing really does is move constraints from one space to another. It transforms the strengths and weaknesses, the limits and the constraints, from government to the market.
Privatization replaces the democratic role of citizens finding solutions to collective problems and transforms it into consumers trucking and bargaining in a marketplace. Finding solutions in a public space emphasizes accountability, voice, transparency, rules and claims through reasoning that goes beyond the self. The market emphasizes cost-benefit thinking, profit-seeking strategies, bargaining and the satiation of individuals’ wants; good things in many circumstances, but not necessarily when it comes to the powers of the state.
A regime of privatization shifts the debate away from the functions of government towards the allocation of those functions. For all the talk about innovation by outside contractors, what privatization largely does is preserve the scope of government services while looking for efficiency gains. And since the scope of what the government does is held constant, the real gains come from minimizing costs.
Take prisons, for example. With the addition of privately run prisons, the debate narrowly focuses on how much to spend on prisoners. Minimizing costs here will often be the result of simply providing less of a good at a worse quality, and the debate will focus on the optimal extent of these privatization contracts. Meanwhile, the greater question of when the state should imprison people fades to the background.
What’s actually public about these responsibilities disappears from the conversation. Privatization assumes that cost quantifying solutions are more fundamental to government than any discussion of ethics or values. The move away from democratic accountability is particularly worrisome because in many of these fields, the ultimate motivator of private markets, the profit motive, is in direct conflict with the public administration. The basic values, concepts and institutions of liberal democracy — political participation, elections, equal distribution of individual liberties, checks on concentrated power — do not work towards economic competitiveness.
The ideology that the government is just one among many providers of goods and services is a seductive one in this age of markets. But the government isn’t simply just another agent in the market, and firms that are empowered to carry out the role of the state can be as abusive as the worst bureaucracy.
We need new arguments for the government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, to be allowed to do its jobs knowing that it won’t always be perfect. The alternative is government by cronyism, delegated marketplace winners exploiting what works about markets with none of the normal checks we expect on a functioning democracy. There are no doubt weaknesses in the current functions of government, but for those who resist privatization, that is a call to political reform rather than one of abandoning the public arena altogether.
by Mike Konczal
The privatization trap
From schools to prisons, outsourcing government's works typically ends with cronyism, waste and unaccountability.
Privatizing the government is one of the most active projects of the early 21st century.
Everything we once expected the government to do — from education to regulatory rule-writing to military operations to healthcare services to prison management — it now does less of, preferring to support markets in which these services are done through independent, profit-maximizing agents. Tools such as contracting out, vouchering and the selling-off of state assets have been used to remake the government during our market-worshipping era.
Privatization is one of the few political projects that enjoys bipartisan support: Conservatives cheer the rollback of the state, and liberals like to claim that the virtues of the free market are being used towards the egalitarian ends of public policy. The fraud and waste that often come with outsourcing these services has been well-documented. The private management in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the lobbying efforts of corporate prisons have all provided horror stories of what happens when cronyism guides decision-making on behalf of the state. But privatization as standard government practice has problems that go far beyond the abuses of any single incident.
Rather than solving problems with government, privatization often amplifies those issues to new extremes. Instead of unleashing market innovation, it often introduces new parasitic partners into the decision-making process. Instead of providing a check on the power of the government, it allows the state to circumvent constitutional and democratic accountability measures by merging with the private sector. And ultimately, the practice replaces the set of choices and constraints found in democracy, with another set found in the marketplace. Today’s political conversation is blind to these problems out of a mistaken faith in the efficiency and fundamental equality of markets, contrasted to the ineffectiveness and corruptibility of the state.
What advocates miss is that the logic of markets creates private-sector coalitions capable of extracting just as much from taxpayers as the state. Corporations, lobbyists and other market actors can have just as much political agency as the government, and privatization can mobilize businesses to rewrite market practices.
This political process plays out in the quality of the services provided and the structure of the companies providing them. Privatization has sometimes meant that the most lucrative and easiest parts of these government obligations go into private hands, creating private profit, while the most difficult and dangerous parts remain with the public. This can range from the “privatizing the gains, socializing the losses” of various parts of the financial sector to the “cream-skimming” that goes on in many other industries.
If privatization is meant to put a check on the size and power of the state it often backfires, as the practice can be used to circumvent normal mechanisms that exist to hold the state accountable. A whole array of transparency laws and constitutional checks don’t carry over when the government outsources its responsibilities and activities to independent businesses.
Privatization as a way of avoiding constraints and accountability measures has two particularly troubling consequences. First, the government can use independent agents to do things that they themselves cannot do, betraying the whole point of keeping government in check. Especially in the world of surveillance, this practice can act as a way to get around constitutional protections enjoyed by citizens.
Second, accountability measures that have evolved through decades of public law are jettisoned when a service leaves the public sector, allowing companies to do the government’s work in a network of secrecy. Ways the public keeps a check on the government, from the Freedom of Information Act to the Administrative Procedure Act to whole regimes of other transparency laws, do not bind outside businesses.
The Constitution prohibits the delegation of significant state powers, but the Supreme Court currently puts few constraints on the government to outsource many of its important duties. What today’s discourse ignores is an understanding of the liberal conception of what public and democracy itself is good for — as a way to check private and government power, and promote accountability and responsiveness.
These blur into dark scenarios where private-public relationships give public agents maximum discretion in exchange for giving private agents advantages over their competition. For example, after FedEx’s CEO announced that his company would be cooperating with the government following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the firm received a number of rewards. Ranging from special access to security databases, to a prize seat on a regional terrorism task force (the only private company represented) and special state licenses, these benefits amplified the firm’s power in the marketplace over noncooperative competitors like UPS, all in exchange for amplifying the power and reach of the state.
Defenders of privatization also argue that the marketplace creates innovation. Competition, the profit motive and the “creative destruction” of the market system can be deployed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. But what this outsourcing really does is move constraints from one space to another. It transforms the strengths and weaknesses, the limits and the constraints, from government to the market.
Privatization replaces the democratic role of citizens finding solutions to collective problems and transforms it into consumers trucking and bargaining in a marketplace. Finding solutions in a public space emphasizes accountability, voice, transparency, rules and claims through reasoning that goes beyond the self. The market emphasizes cost-benefit thinking, profit-seeking strategies, bargaining and the satiation of individuals’ wants; good things in many circumstances, but not necessarily when it comes to the powers of the state.
A regime of privatization shifts the debate away from the functions of government towards the allocation of those functions. For all the talk about innovation by outside contractors, what privatization largely does is preserve the scope of government services while looking for efficiency gains. And since the scope of what the government does is held constant, the real gains come from minimizing costs.
Take prisons, for example. With the addition of privately run prisons, the debate narrowly focuses on how much to spend on prisoners. Minimizing costs here will often be the result of simply providing less of a good at a worse quality, and the debate will focus on the optimal extent of these privatization contracts. Meanwhile, the greater question of when the state should imprison people fades to the background.
What’s actually public about these responsibilities disappears from the conversation. Privatization assumes that cost quantifying solutions are more fundamental to government than any discussion of ethics or values. The move away from democratic accountability is particularly worrisome because in many of these fields, the ultimate motivator of private markets, the profit motive, is in direct conflict with the public administration. The basic values, concepts and institutions of liberal democracy — political participation, elections, equal distribution of individual liberties, checks on concentrated power — do not work towards economic competitiveness.
The ideology that the government is just one among many providers of goods and services is a seductive one in this age of markets. But the government isn’t simply just another agent in the market, and firms that are empowered to carry out the role of the state can be as abusive as the worst bureaucracy.
We need new arguments for the government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, to be allowed to do its jobs knowing that it won’t always be perfect. The alternative is government by cronyism, delegated marketplace winners exploiting what works about markets with none of the normal checks we expect on a functioning democracy. There are no doubt weaknesses in the current functions of government, but for those who resist privatization, that is a call to political reform rather than one of abandoning the public arena altogether.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
About Browsing
Going to Melody
Leon Wieseltier
January 11, 2012 |
In a country as injured as ours, there is something unseemly about all this sagacious talk of creative destruction. A concept that was designed to suggest the ironic cruelty of innovation has been twisted into an extenuation of economic misery—into capitalism’s theodicy. Where there are winners, there are losers: praise the Lord and pass the Kindle. I have always believed that the losers know more about life than the winners, though I wish affluence upon us all; but it does not romanticize the poor to demythologize the rich, and to propose that sometimes creative destruction is not very creative but very destructive. The brutality of large businesses toward small businesses, for example, is neither brilliant nor heroic. They do it because they can. Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.
WHEN MY FRIEND at Melody Records told me about the death of his store, I was bereft. This was in part because he is my friend—after my father died, I received a letter from the Holocaust Museum informing me that he had made a donation in my father’s memory—and now he must fend for himself and his family and his staff in the American wreckage. But my dejection was owed also to the fact that this store was one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. “Going to Melody” was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather. The people who worked there had knowledge and taste: they apprised me of obscure pressings of Frank Martin’s chamber music, and warned me about the sound quality of certain reissues of Lucky Thompson and Don Byas, and turned me on to old salsa and new fado. They even teased me about my insane affection for Rihanna. When they added DVDs to the store, my pleasures multiplied. (Also my amusements. Not long ago Marcel Ophuls’ great film arrived in the shop, and the box declared: “Woody Allen presents The Sorrow and The Pity.” Beat that.) Of course all these discs can be found online. But the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing.
IT IS A MATTER OF some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.
MY FATHER HAD furniture stores. I grew up with the pathos of retail: you throw all your money into a location and an inventory, you hang out a sign, you trick out a window, you unlock a door, and (if you lack the resources to advertise formidably) you wait. If they come in, you use your skill; but they have to come in. When my father was ill, I would quit the library and mind the store. One day I set a house record for sofas sold because the store was located in a neighborhood where many U.N. people lived, and I knew more than most furniture salesmen about the crises in Iran and Cyprus. Eventually the store failed. But the failure of some stores is more repercussive than the failure of other stores. The commerce of culture is a trade in ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth. A hunger for profit exploits a hunger for meaning. If the one gets too ravenous, the other may find it harder to subsist. The disappearance of our bookstores and our record stores constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.
Leon Wieseltier
January 11, 2012 |
In a country as injured as ours, there is something unseemly about all this sagacious talk of creative destruction. A concept that was designed to suggest the ironic cruelty of innovation has been twisted into an extenuation of economic misery—into capitalism’s theodicy. Where there are winners, there are losers: praise the Lord and pass the Kindle. I have always believed that the losers know more about life than the winners, though I wish affluence upon us all; but it does not romanticize the poor to demythologize the rich, and to propose that sometimes creative destruction is not very creative but very destructive. The brutality of large businesses toward small businesses, for example, is neither brilliant nor heroic. They do it because they can. Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.
WHEN MY FRIEND at Melody Records told me about the death of his store, I was bereft. This was in part because he is my friend—after my father died, I received a letter from the Holocaust Museum informing me that he had made a donation in my father’s memory—and now he must fend for himself and his family and his staff in the American wreckage. But my dejection was owed also to the fact that this store was one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. “Going to Melody” was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather. The people who worked there had knowledge and taste: they apprised me of obscure pressings of Frank Martin’s chamber music, and warned me about the sound quality of certain reissues of Lucky Thompson and Don Byas, and turned me on to old salsa and new fado. They even teased me about my insane affection for Rihanna. When they added DVDs to the store, my pleasures multiplied. (Also my amusements. Not long ago Marcel Ophuls’ great film arrived in the shop, and the box declared: “Woody Allen presents The Sorrow and The Pity.” Beat that.) Of course all these discs can be found online. But the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing.
IT IS A MATTER OF some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.
MY FATHER HAD furniture stores. I grew up with the pathos of retail: you throw all your money into a location and an inventory, you hang out a sign, you trick out a window, you unlock a door, and (if you lack the resources to advertise formidably) you wait. If they come in, you use your skill; but they have to come in. When my father was ill, I would quit the library and mind the store. One day I set a house record for sofas sold because the store was located in a neighborhood where many U.N. people lived, and I knew more than most furniture salesmen about the crises in Iran and Cyprus. Eventually the store failed. But the failure of some stores is more repercussive than the failure of other stores. The commerce of culture is a trade in ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth. A hunger for profit exploits a hunger for meaning. If the one gets too ravenous, the other may find it harder to subsist. The disappearance of our bookstores and our record stores constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.
The Dishonestty of the Inequality Deniers
by Jonathan Chait
Since the presidential campaign is revolving in large part around the question of whether or not it’s fair to increase taxes on the richest Americans, the right is circulating its cherished pseudo-facts to press its case that the rich are already uniquely overburdened with taxation. Ubiquitous right-wing misinformation-recirculator Veronique de Rugy, in the Washington Examiner, hauls out the classic standby of citing the amount of total taxes paid by the rich and pretending this represents the tax rate paid by the rich:
Contrary to common belief, the United States already has a more progressive tax system than do the most industrialized democracies worldwide. The nearby chart uses data from a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the share of taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) paid by the richest 10 percent of households in 24 industrialized countries. The bars represent the share of the total taxes collected that are paid by top earners in these 24 countries.
The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.
Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.
The flaw here, of course, is that de Rugy’s statistic has nothing to do with the point she attempts to make on its behalf. She claims the U.S. has a more progressive tax system than other countries. “Progressive” means the degree to which a tax system increases tax rates on higher-income earners. But her figure only shows that our rich people pay a larger share of the tax burden than the rich of other countries. But the fact that rich Americans pay a larger chunk of the total tax burden than rich people in other countries doesn’t mean rich Americans are paying a higher rate. They may be paying a higher share of the taxes because they have a higher share of the income to begin with. Which, in fact, they do.
I could not find a comprehensive comparison of the tax rate paid by the richest Americans against all other industrialized democracies. I did find a paper comparing the U.S. to the United Kingdom and France, and the U.S. tax rate for the top one percent (and the whole top 10 percent) is considerably lower.) Our rich people pay a bigger share of total taxes because, despite their low rate, they earn so much more of the income pie.
If we actually try to take de Rugy’s argument at face value, she is insisting that we can’t ask the rich to pay any more taxes because they earn so much money to begin with. It would follow, I suppose, that if something were to reverse the trend toward rising inequality, and the rich started earning a lower share of the income pie and paying a lower share of the taxes, that de Rugy’s claim would imply that we should necessarily increase their tax rate. After all, if the proper measure of a tax burden is what proportion of the total taxes a group pays, and a high proportion means they already pay too much, than a lower proportion would mean they don’t pay enough. Obviously de Rugy doesn’t believe that. Just as obviously, the role data plays in her argument is purely decorative. Of course, de Rugy is merely repeating a canard that has been floating around the right-wing misinformation chamber for years and years. I continue to be dumbfounded at the low intellectual standards of a movement which allows obvious nonsense like this to play such a major role in its intellectual case.
While we’re on the topic, the inequality denial community is up in arms over my post the other day about the Charles Murray dodge. Murray has a book arguing that declining social norms have caused working-class white people to fall behind educated elites. Inequality deniers are very excited about this argument, because it allows them to change the subject from the question of the skyrocketing share of income held by the top one percent to the smaller but also growing gap between the top 20 percent and those below.
The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, who considers “rising income inequality” the greatest fraud since global warming, has roused himself into a fit of uncomprehending wrath:
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait doesn’t much like Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. In particular, he doesn’t like that Murray links the increasing social polarization of America to the abandonment by poor and working-class whites of the”Founding Virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. ... But that’s not what Chait wants Murray to write about. Chait doesn’t want Murray to write about culture. Chait wants Murray to write about rising income inequality as the driving force behind pretty much all of America’s troubles.
Sorry, no, that’s not what I wrote, at all. Charles Murray can write about the indolence of the white working class all he’d like. My point is that other pundits should stop pretending that an analysis of the gap between the bottom 80 percent and the top 20 percent is the same thing as an analysis of the gap between the top one percent and the bottom 99 percent. As I wrote, “Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, all the claims being made on Murray’s behalf, the basic point is that it is not a plausible response to the problem of income inequality.”
Likewise, the blog Political Calculations — whose work Pethokoukis has cited as refuting the “myth” of income inequality — is unhappy as well. My post pointed out that its supposed refutation of rising inequality is erroneous, because it relies on census data. The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich. Lane Kenworthy, an actual expert in this topic, helpfully explained the folly of the Political Calculations chart. I thought his explanation was too detailed to be of interest to readers here, but since they’re complaining, I’ll reprint a longer excerpt of his e-mail to me:
Over the period since 1994 the Census Bureau's standard Ginis for households and for families, which are the ones used in the Political Calculations chart, suggest little or no change in income inequality. So too do Ginis for earnings inequality among full-time year-round employed individuals (see IE-2 at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/inequality/index.html).
But it's well-known that the Census Bureau data miss what's going on at the top, because they "top code" very high earnings and incomes. What the Census data tell us, and what the Political Calculations post in effect simply reiterates, is that within the bottom 99% there has been little change in income inequality since 1994, whether we're looking at households, families, or individuals.
We can ask "Why begin in 1994?" But the bigger problem is ignoring what happened at the top of the distribution.
During this particular period, income inequality increased due to the top pulling away from the rest. According to the Census Bureau's calculations for households, there was essentially no change in inequality from 1994 (Gini .456) to 2007 (Gini .463). (Again, these are the data for households used in the Political Calculations chart.) The best source of income data for households is the CBO, which merges the Census household survey data with IRS tax record data. According to the report the CBO put out a few weeks ago, household income inequality including the top 1% actually increased sharply between 1994 and 2007. The CBO report is at http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485; see Figure 11 on p. 20; the closest CBO counterpart to the Census income measure is "market income plus transfers". Eyeballing the CBO chart, it looks to me like the Gini goes from .45 in 1994 to about .52 in 2007. That's a large increase.
Pethokoukis triumphantly concludes, “Chait’s theory of the case has come apart.” In fact, “Chait’s theory of the case” also happens to be the consensus view of every expert who actually studied the issue and knows which data to examine.
Since the presidential campaign is revolving in large part around the question of whether or not it’s fair to increase taxes on the richest Americans, the right is circulating its cherished pseudo-facts to press its case that the rich are already uniquely overburdened with taxation. Ubiquitous right-wing misinformation-recirculator Veronique de Rugy, in the Washington Examiner, hauls out the classic standby of citing the amount of total taxes paid by the rich and pretending this represents the tax rate paid by the rich:
Contrary to common belief, the United States already has a more progressive tax system than do the most industrialized democracies worldwide. The nearby chart uses data from a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the share of taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) paid by the richest 10 percent of households in 24 industrialized countries. The bars represent the share of the total taxes collected that are paid by top earners in these 24 countries.
The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.
Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.
The flaw here, of course, is that de Rugy’s statistic has nothing to do with the point she attempts to make on its behalf. She claims the U.S. has a more progressive tax system than other countries. “Progressive” means the degree to which a tax system increases tax rates on higher-income earners. But her figure only shows that our rich people pay a larger share of the tax burden than the rich of other countries. But the fact that rich Americans pay a larger chunk of the total tax burden than rich people in other countries doesn’t mean rich Americans are paying a higher rate. They may be paying a higher share of the taxes because they have a higher share of the income to begin with. Which, in fact, they do.
I could not find a comprehensive comparison of the tax rate paid by the richest Americans against all other industrialized democracies. I did find a paper comparing the U.S. to the United Kingdom and France, and the U.S. tax rate for the top one percent (and the whole top 10 percent) is considerably lower.) Our rich people pay a bigger share of total taxes because, despite their low rate, they earn so much more of the income pie.
If we actually try to take de Rugy’s argument at face value, she is insisting that we can’t ask the rich to pay any more taxes because they earn so much money to begin with. It would follow, I suppose, that if something were to reverse the trend toward rising inequality, and the rich started earning a lower share of the income pie and paying a lower share of the taxes, that de Rugy’s claim would imply that we should necessarily increase their tax rate. After all, if the proper measure of a tax burden is what proportion of the total taxes a group pays, and a high proportion means they already pay too much, than a lower proportion would mean they don’t pay enough. Obviously de Rugy doesn’t believe that. Just as obviously, the role data plays in her argument is purely decorative. Of course, de Rugy is merely repeating a canard that has been floating around the right-wing misinformation chamber for years and years. I continue to be dumbfounded at the low intellectual standards of a movement which allows obvious nonsense like this to play such a major role in its intellectual case.
While we’re on the topic, the inequality denial community is up in arms over my post the other day about the Charles Murray dodge. Murray has a book arguing that declining social norms have caused working-class white people to fall behind educated elites. Inequality deniers are very excited about this argument, because it allows them to change the subject from the question of the skyrocketing share of income held by the top one percent to the smaller but also growing gap between the top 20 percent and those below.
The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, who considers “rising income inequality” the greatest fraud since global warming, has roused himself into a fit of uncomprehending wrath:
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait doesn’t much like Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. In particular, he doesn’t like that Murray links the increasing social polarization of America to the abandonment by poor and working-class whites of the”Founding Virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. ... But that’s not what Chait wants Murray to write about. Chait doesn’t want Murray to write about culture. Chait wants Murray to write about rising income inequality as the driving force behind pretty much all of America’s troubles.
Sorry, no, that’s not what I wrote, at all. Charles Murray can write about the indolence of the white working class all he’d like. My point is that other pundits should stop pretending that an analysis of the gap between the bottom 80 percent and the top 20 percent is the same thing as an analysis of the gap between the top one percent and the bottom 99 percent. As I wrote, “Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, all the claims being made on Murray’s behalf, the basic point is that it is not a plausible response to the problem of income inequality.”
Likewise, the blog Political Calculations — whose work Pethokoukis has cited as refuting the “myth” of income inequality — is unhappy as well. My post pointed out that its supposed refutation of rising inequality is erroneous, because it relies on census data. The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich. Lane Kenworthy, an actual expert in this topic, helpfully explained the folly of the Political Calculations chart. I thought his explanation was too detailed to be of interest to readers here, but since they’re complaining, I’ll reprint a longer excerpt of his e-mail to me:
Over the period since 1994 the Census Bureau's standard Ginis for households and for families, which are the ones used in the Political Calculations chart, suggest little or no change in income inequality. So too do Ginis for earnings inequality among full-time year-round employed individuals (see IE-2 at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/inequality/index.html).
But it's well-known that the Census Bureau data miss what's going on at the top, because they "top code" very high earnings and incomes. What the Census data tell us, and what the Political Calculations post in effect simply reiterates, is that within the bottom 99% there has been little change in income inequality since 1994, whether we're looking at households, families, or individuals.
We can ask "Why begin in 1994?" But the bigger problem is ignoring what happened at the top of the distribution.
During this particular period, income inequality increased due to the top pulling away from the rest. According to the Census Bureau's calculations for households, there was essentially no change in inequality from 1994 (Gini .456) to 2007 (Gini .463). (Again, these are the data for households used in the Political Calculations chart.) The best source of income data for households is the CBO, which merges the Census household survey data with IRS tax record data. According to the report the CBO put out a few weeks ago, household income inequality including the top 1% actually increased sharply between 1994 and 2007. The CBO report is at http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485; see Figure 11 on p. 20; the closest CBO counterpart to the Census income measure is "market income plus transfers". Eyeballing the CBO chart, it looks to me like the Gini goes from .45 in 1994 to about .52 in 2007. That's a large increase.
Pethokoukis triumphantly concludes, “Chait’s theory of the case has come apart.” In fact, “Chait’s theory of the case” also happens to be the consensus view of every expert who actually studied the issue and knows which data to examine.
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