Broccoli and Bad Faith
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 29, 2012
Nobody knows what the Supreme Court will decide with regard to the Affordable Care Act. But, after this week’s hearings, it seems quite possible that the court will strike down the “mandate” — the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance — and maybe the whole law. Removing the mandate would make the law much less workable, while striking down the whole thing would mean denying health coverage to 30 million or more Americans.
Given the stakes, one might have expected all the court’s members to be very careful in speaking about both health care realities and legal precedents. In reality, however, the second day of hearings suggested that the justices most hostile to the law don’t understand, or choose not to understand, how insurance works. And the third day was, in a way, even worse, as antireform justices appeared to embrace any argument, no matter how flimsy, that they could use to kill reform.
Let’s start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared the purchase of health insurance to the purchase of broccoli, with the implication that if the government can compel you to do the former, it can also compel you to do the latter. That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.
Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has.
There are at least two ways to address this reality — which is, by the way, very much an issue involving interstate commerce, and hence a valid federal concern. One is to tax everyone — healthy and sick alike — and use the money raised to provide health coverage. That’s what Medicare and Medicaid do. The other is to require that everyone buy insurance, while aiding those for whom this is a financial hardship.
Are these fundamentally different approaches? Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage O.K., while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why — and it’s not just those of us without legal training who find the distinction strange. Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”
Indeed, conservatives used to like the idea of required purchases as an alternative to taxes, which is why the idea for the mandate originally came not from liberals but from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. (By the way, another pet conservative project — private accounts to replace Social Security — relies on, yes, mandatory contributions from individuals.)
So has there been a real change in legal thinking here? Mr. Fried thinks that it’s just politics — and other discussions in the hearings strongly support that perception.
I was struck, in particular, by the argument over whether requiring that state governments participate in an expansion of Medicaid — an expansion, by the way, for which they would foot only a small fraction of the bill — constituted unacceptable “coercion.” One would have thought that this claim was self-evidently absurd. After all, states are free to opt out of Medicaid if they choose; Medicaid’s “coercive” power comes only from the fact that the federal government provides aid to states that are willing to follow the program’s guidelines. If you offer to give me a lot of money, but only if I perform certain tasks, is that servitude?
Yet several of the conservative justices seemed to defend the proposition that a federally funded expansion of a program in which states choose to participate because they receive federal aid represents an abuse of power, merely because states have become dependent on that aid. Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed boggled by this claim: “We’re going to say to the federal government, the bigger the problem, the less your powers are. Because once you give that much money, you can’t structure the program the way you want.” And she was right: It’s a claim that makes no sense — not unless your goal is to kill health reform using any argument at hand.
As I said, we don’t know how this will go. But it’s hard not to feel a sense of foreboding — and to worry that the nation’s already badly damaged faith in the Supreme Court’s ability to stand above politics is about to take another severe hit.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The Roots of the Health Care Scare
The Roots of the Court’s Obamacare Panic By Jonathan Chait
The origins of the Tea Party Court.
The last several days of Supreme Court arguments over health care have produced a kind of vertigo among legal analysts who are not associated with the conservative movement. The case against the Affordable Care Act rests upon stringing together selective use of precedent, wildly obtuse understanding of the facts of the issue, and bizarre hypotheticals. The Court has obviously not struck down the law, and it may well not do so, but the mere fact that the Supreme Court has so seriously entertained its convoluted premises itself suggests that something very weird and disturbing is going on.
The debate seems to have centered around a “limiting principle.” If you haven’t closely followed the arguments, here is what it means. The challengers have managed to wall off the health-care law from overwhelming precedent that would uphold it by defining the individual as something wholly different from other regulations — a regulation of “inactivity,” as opposed to “activity.” The distinction itself lacks any legal or even intellectual precedent. Having accepted a shaky series of premises, this has led the Court to settle on what it regards as the central issue of the case: If Congress can force you to purchase health insurance, why can’t it make you buy broccoli, or anything at all? (And since this would be bad, then obviously Congress can’t be allowed to make you buy health insurance.)
There are many possible ways to solve this objection, if a Justice were so inclined to look for them. Health insurance is inherently different from almost any other product, with inherent problems of cost-shifting and adverse selection. (The economics of this seem to be utterly eluding the conservative justices.) As former Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried argues, the absence of the mandate would have a major impact on already-existing interstate commerce, which cannot be said of broccoli consumption. Or, as Matt Steinglass offers, mandating the purchase of broccoli might be marginally helpful to the goal of containing health care costs — eating broccoli makes you slightly healthier — but it’s certainly not necessary, as an insurance mandate is.
But to even accept this as the central question at hand is to accept a very strange way of looking at the law. Certainly, the Court needs to be mindful of setting a dangerous precedent. But the Court does not habitually strike down any use of government power that could conceivably, when stretched to its maximal limit, have nasty results. As Akil Amar notes, if Congress can tax income it could tax income at 100% percent. If you can conscript 18-year-olds into the army, you can conscript them for 25-year terms like the Czars did. You could put them into the Army Corps of Engineers and turn them into a vast pool of government slave labor. But such hypothetical possibilities don’t normally dominate jurisprudence the way they have at the Court this week.
So why now, all of a sudden, is the Court so seized with the prospect that the government might fall into the hands of maniacs? Jonathan Bernstein has a pithy post noting that this is the triumph a completely ahistorical, Tea Party–driven analysis, which sees the Constitution as having been designed in large part to prevent regulation and the redistribution of wealth. A tiny handful of right-wing scholars have long argued for this, but it’s a minority conception. The interesting development is that it has quickly leapt from the fringe into the mainstream of conservative legal thought. Partially, this reflects simple partisan opportunism — conservative justices seizing an opportunity to use their power to intervene in a high-profile political battle.
But the deeper cause is that conservative elites — not just freaked out conservative activists listening to Glenn Beck — have been swept up in a broad economic panic. Ground Zero of this panic is Wall Street, whose unchecked sense of victimization has been well chronicled by Gabe Sherman and Alec MacGillis. David Frum noted a while ago that the leader of a conservative institution confided, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” To take an example closer at hand, Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers repeats a quote that I’ve seen floating around conservative circles for years, and repeating with increasing frequency in the Obama era:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”
They, the masses, are using their political power to gang up on us and seize our wealth. Conservatives have come to see the majority's threatening ability to shape economic policy not merely as an impediment but as a dire existential threat. Such a fear drove the Court to strike down the income tax more than a century ago, in the face of clear precedent. The current conservative legal obsession with strange dystopian hypotheticals has little to do with a straightforward reading of the law and a great deal to do with the conservative psychology of the moment.
The Obama era has unleashed deep-rooted conservative fears of economic democracy. If you pay close attention to the commentary of the conservative justices this week, their incredulity at the health-care law itself is everywhere. They are concerned with the possibility that mob rule could produce tyrannically intrusive regulations with no rational basis because this is what they think is happening already.
The origins of the Tea Party Court.
The last several days of Supreme Court arguments over health care have produced a kind of vertigo among legal analysts who are not associated with the conservative movement. The case against the Affordable Care Act rests upon stringing together selective use of precedent, wildly obtuse understanding of the facts of the issue, and bizarre hypotheticals. The Court has obviously not struck down the law, and it may well not do so, but the mere fact that the Supreme Court has so seriously entertained its convoluted premises itself suggests that something very weird and disturbing is going on.
The debate seems to have centered around a “limiting principle.” If you haven’t closely followed the arguments, here is what it means. The challengers have managed to wall off the health-care law from overwhelming precedent that would uphold it by defining the individual as something wholly different from other regulations — a regulation of “inactivity,” as opposed to “activity.” The distinction itself lacks any legal or even intellectual precedent. Having accepted a shaky series of premises, this has led the Court to settle on what it regards as the central issue of the case: If Congress can force you to purchase health insurance, why can’t it make you buy broccoli, or anything at all? (And since this would be bad, then obviously Congress can’t be allowed to make you buy health insurance.)
There are many possible ways to solve this objection, if a Justice were so inclined to look for them. Health insurance is inherently different from almost any other product, with inherent problems of cost-shifting and adverse selection. (The economics of this seem to be utterly eluding the conservative justices.) As former Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried argues, the absence of the mandate would have a major impact on already-existing interstate commerce, which cannot be said of broccoli consumption. Or, as Matt Steinglass offers, mandating the purchase of broccoli might be marginally helpful to the goal of containing health care costs — eating broccoli makes you slightly healthier — but it’s certainly not necessary, as an insurance mandate is.
But to even accept this as the central question at hand is to accept a very strange way of looking at the law. Certainly, the Court needs to be mindful of setting a dangerous precedent. But the Court does not habitually strike down any use of government power that could conceivably, when stretched to its maximal limit, have nasty results. As Akil Amar notes, if Congress can tax income it could tax income at 100% percent. If you can conscript 18-year-olds into the army, you can conscript them for 25-year terms like the Czars did. You could put them into the Army Corps of Engineers and turn them into a vast pool of government slave labor. But such hypothetical possibilities don’t normally dominate jurisprudence the way they have at the Court this week.
So why now, all of a sudden, is the Court so seized with the prospect that the government might fall into the hands of maniacs? Jonathan Bernstein has a pithy post noting that this is the triumph a completely ahistorical, Tea Party–driven analysis, which sees the Constitution as having been designed in large part to prevent regulation and the redistribution of wealth. A tiny handful of right-wing scholars have long argued for this, but it’s a minority conception. The interesting development is that it has quickly leapt from the fringe into the mainstream of conservative legal thought. Partially, this reflects simple partisan opportunism — conservative justices seizing an opportunity to use their power to intervene in a high-profile political battle.
But the deeper cause is that conservative elites — not just freaked out conservative activists listening to Glenn Beck — have been swept up in a broad economic panic. Ground Zero of this panic is Wall Street, whose unchecked sense of victimization has been well chronicled by Gabe Sherman and Alec MacGillis. David Frum noted a while ago that the leader of a conservative institution confided, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” To take an example closer at hand, Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers repeats a quote that I’ve seen floating around conservative circles for years, and repeating with increasing frequency in the Obama era:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”
They, the masses, are using their political power to gang up on us and seize our wealth. Conservatives have come to see the majority's threatening ability to shape economic policy not merely as an impediment but as a dire existential threat. Such a fear drove the Court to strike down the income tax more than a century ago, in the face of clear precedent. The current conservative legal obsession with strange dystopian hypotheticals has little to do with a straightforward reading of the law and a great deal to do with the conservative psychology of the moment.
The Obama era has unleashed deep-rooted conservative fears of economic democracy. If you pay close attention to the commentary of the conservative justices this week, their incredulity at the health-care law itself is everywhere. They are concerned with the possibility that mob rule could produce tyrannically intrusive regulations with no rational basis because this is what they think is happening already.
The ObamaCare Debate
The fate of the law is before the Supreme Court. The reports I have read so far are not encouraging for those of us hoping the law will be sustained. It will a legal and moral travesty if the 5 to 4 Republican Supreme Court strikes down this law.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Where Joyce Carol Oates Likes to Read
Joyce Carol Oates
GET UPDATES FROM Joyce Carol Oates
Where I Like to Read
Posted: 03/23/2012 1:07 pm
I read in a perfectly normal, conventional place-- curled up on a sofa in our living room, beneath a light, with my little gray cat Cherie purring & sleeping beside me, if I'm lucky. My husband, Charlie Gross, is usually sitting in a chair to my left, reading The Nation, the New York Review of Books, or the New Yorker. I am usually reading fiction, and often to review; the coffee table is filled with books, galleys, and magazines.
The last book I've read in this place was a biography of Woodrow Wilson; now I am reading Anne Tyler's new novel in galleys.
GET UPDATES FROM Joyce Carol Oates
Where I Like to Read
Posted: 03/23/2012 1:07 pm
I read in a perfectly normal, conventional place-- curled up on a sofa in our living room, beneath a light, with my little gray cat Cherie purring & sleeping beside me, if I'm lucky. My husband, Charlie Gross, is usually sitting in a chair to my left, reading The Nation, the New York Review of Books, or the New Yorker. I am usually reading fiction, and often to review; the coffee table is filled with books, galleys, and magazines.
The last book I've read in this place was a biography of Woodrow Wilson; now I am reading Anne Tyler's new novel in galleys.
Inventing the Next America
Mar 25, 2012 11:00 AM 11:49:31 CDT
All for none and none for all
Forty years of culture wars and racial battles wrecked the country and the GOP – but it's not too late to change By Joan Walsh
Topics:Republican Party, Democratic Party, 2012 Elections, Race
My March 4 post “What’s the matter with white people?” was Salon’s top story that week, and it got a lot of comments and online attention. I went on vacation a few days later, but I’ve wanted to address a few arguments, if belatedly.
I asked “What’s the matter with white people?” because my people are increasingly coming under fire from the right and the left. Republicans have begun to blame not the economy but “dependency” on government and rising rates of single parenthood for the economic troubles of the white working class. On the left, meanwhile, whites are dismissed as the backward base of the increasingly radical GOP, and working class whites, in particular, are derided as racists who won’t vote for Democrats because the party is now led by a black man (ignoring the fact that a larger share of working class whites voted for Barack Obama than for Caucasians John Kerry, Al Gore or Bill Clinton.)
The fact is, working and middle class whites have supported too many Republicans who’ve dismantled the opportunity structure that created the vast (white) middle class from the 1930s through the 1960s – but that’s at least partly because too many Democrats turned their backs on those policies, too. The larger point of the piece, if a 4,000-plus word article can be said to have a single point, was this:
The emerging multiracial Obama coalition has the potential to transform the way we all think about race and politics as we invent the next America — but only if we can all forgo petty racial score-setting and 20th century conceptions about identity. And only if more white people wake up to what they’ve let the Republican Party do to the country in the last 40 years, in the name of holding on to what they think they have.
I was making two related arguments: that whites must begin to face up to economic and political reality – that the party most of them support now stands for destroying not only the social programs they (incorrectly) believe benefit “other people,” but also programs they support, like Social Security and Medicare, food stamps and unemployment, as well as protections for workers who have jobs. My second point was just as important and less commonly heard: I asked that the multiracial left have more empathy for working class whites, and stop stereotyping them and dismissing their political choices, when we disagree, as merely “racist.” Interestingly, I got little or no push back on that point from anyone on the multiracial left, although I have been criticized for that argument many times, going back to the fractious 2008 Democratic primary. Maybe we’re making progress.
The criticism of my “White People” argument came almost exclusively from the right, and there were at least a few points worth engaging.
Of course, more than a few people reacted to the headline without thinking (or reading the piece), and I heard a lot of what I predicted I would in the article: I am a racist! How dare I generalize about white people? I would never talk about black people that way!
The best response along those lines came from Newsbusters, the fan club Brent Bozell runs especially to promote me. It featured a typically outraged harangue from Noel Sheppard: “Actual Joan Walsh Salon Headline: ‘What’s the Matter with White People?” and included this: “Maybe Walsh should check her own racist leanings given her hatred of white people.” Noel, I love white people! Some of my best friends are white. As I even revealed in the piece, that includes some of my own family. You can do better, Noel. Try again.
The reply from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was a little bit more substantive – although he kicked it off on Twitter by shrieking at Charles Murray that I’d accused Murray of “attacking white people!”
I didn’t accuse Murray of “attacking” all white people. I’d made the point that Murray now blames poor and working class whites for their economic struggles, much the way he has always blamed the black poor. Their poverty rate is climbing while their wages and family incomes are falling not because of huge shifts in the economy that favor the wealthy, but because they’re lazy and promiscuous and not terribly bright, and they just don’t follow the rules the way the poor are supposed to. This is the oldest argument around, of course, when it comes to explaining away social inequity and defending the economic status quo. You can find it in the Gospels, in clashes between that bleeding heart liberal Jesus Christ, and those who believed poverty was God’s punishment. In every age, the struggle for justice turns on how successfully the privileged can justify their wealth as the natural result of their hard work and superior talent and/or the innate shortcomings of their lessers.
In my lifetime, that argument has been racialized. As the nation struggled to right the wrongs of racism, some people began to argue that the problems of poor African Americans had more to do with their own personal and cultural shortcomings than society’s, and that our efforts to use government to help made the problem worse. But I was raised knowing that virtually every awful thing said about black people had once been said about Irish Catholics, and so I’ve spent a lot of my life refuting that racialized scapegoating, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Lately, though, I’ve felt that we’re getting some help with that task from Republicans, as they scapegoat working class whites in terms they used to only use against blacks — their economic problems are due to the fact that they’re lazy, too many don’t get married and they want government to take care of them (Charles Murray’s argument). Taranto misunderstands the point I’m making about the new GOP line:
When Walsh accuses Murray of “attacking white people,” she seems to be hoping that persons of pallor will be open to a similar appeal–that they will finally wake up and start voting what the left considers to be their “interests.” Essentially that means embracing government dependency: “Today, many white folks who are voting Republican don’t seem to know one important fact: they are, in fact, the ‘takers.’ ” Once they figure that out, Walsh thinks, they’ll join the blacks and the Hispanics and the professional elite, and the Democratic hold on the electorate will be secure.
That’s not what I was saying, at all. I’m not someone who makes the simplistic case that the working class is voting against its interests by backing Republicans. This is a debate in which I think the right has the better side. Claiming that working class Republicans – or black and Latino Republicans, for that matter — are “voting against their interests” is hugely condescending, a vestigial Marxism that assumes the only thing that matters is material conditions. It can also sound like we’re saying: “How dare you presume you have anything in common with the wealthy, peon?”
The Republican allegiance of some working class people may well be aspirational, as conservatives argue. Liberals like John Rawls’ famous theory of justice, which held that most people would want to design a society in which, should they find themselves at the bottom, they would be protected. It turns out that a lot of people prefer social policies that would protect them if they make it to the top, however unlikely that kind of economic mobility is turning out to be in the U.S. today. Voting Republican may also reflect genuine cultural and religious values. Growing up Irish Catholic, I can’t pretend that my relatives who vote Republican over the issue of abortion are dupes suffering from some kind of “false consciousness.” They care about that issue passionately. We can disagree with conservative working class white people, we can wish they had different priorities, but when we “assume” they’re voting against their own interests, as though we, not they, know their interests, our condescension shows.
….
On the other hand, I do not mean to disrespect working class whites, but I have to say: it would be great if their politics reckoned with reality. As I pointed out in the piece, red-state Republican areas enjoy the highest levels of federal spending. That’s an inconsistency that can’t be totally explained by culture war politics. White working class Republicans are simply wrong about the way government has worked, in their own lives and in the lives of others, and Democrats need to talk about that, respectfully.
Taranto hints at the case other Republicans make more forcefully – that the more Americans become dependent on government, the more they’ll vote Democratic, and that’s Barack Obama’s not-so-secret plan. “Republican supporters will continue to decrease every year as more Americans become dependent on the government,” Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint wrote in his last book. “Dependent voters will naturally elect even big-government progressives who will continue to smother economic growth and spend America deeper into debt.” I think DeMint’s notion is alarmist GOP propaganda. But I’d be happy to have a political debate about the role of government in our lives – one that’s untainted by racism, fears of a lazy, parasitic “other” or charges that Democrats are “socialists” seeking to impose some Soviet-style or lefty-European system on America. I think it should be clear that Democrats love capitalism, because twice in the last 75 years, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then under President Obama, we saved capitalism from itself.
Finally, Taranto (and a lot of letter writers who didn’t seem to read my piece), claimed that the “demographic doomsday” scenario, in which a declining white population leads to the gradual extinction of the GOP, is “overblown.” I agree – and I said so in the article. I regularly quarrel with liberals who insist that a magical “people of color” alliance is going to move the country to the left, permanently. It’s not going to happen. In the 80s and 90s, it was easy to imagine that Latinos and Asians might be receptive to Republican messaging around family, small business, religion, as well as hostility to big government, given that immigrants often came from countries ruled by oppressive governments (whether of the left or the right). Certainly Karl Rove once believed that. Republicans chased many Latinos, Asians and even conservative African Americans into the arms of Democrats by allowing racism and xenophobia to flourish in their party unchecked. As the GOP gets beaten in coming election cycles, it’s going to have to figure out a way to appeal to more than just white people — or perish as a party.
Also: most scenarios in which the white majority “disappears” in the next couple of decades ignore the fact that about 50 percent of the fastest-growing “minority” – Hispanics or Latinos – consider themselves white. (That’s why the Census has a category for “non-Hispanic whites.”) So do most mixed-race Americans in many studies. Besides, the definition of “whiteness” has regularly shifted throughout American history – Irish, Italians, Jews and other non-Nordic, Anglo immigrants all took turns in the “non-white” category in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s quite possible that our notion of whiteness – or let’s just say “the American mainstream” or “real Americans,” in Sarah Palin’s language – will expand to include some categories of Latinos, Asians and mixed-race folks, not to mention Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain and Condoleezza Rice.
To build a better, more inclusive country – to invent the next America – both parties are going to have to forgo identity politics and appeal to voters around principle and policy, not fear and contempt. Democrats are getting there; Republicans still have a ways to go before facing up to the fact that the identity politics practiced by the Tea Party represents a divisive dead end.
All for none and none for all
Forty years of culture wars and racial battles wrecked the country and the GOP – but it's not too late to change By Joan Walsh
Topics:Republican Party, Democratic Party, 2012 Elections, Race
My March 4 post “What’s the matter with white people?” was Salon’s top story that week, and it got a lot of comments and online attention. I went on vacation a few days later, but I’ve wanted to address a few arguments, if belatedly.
I asked “What’s the matter with white people?” because my people are increasingly coming under fire from the right and the left. Republicans have begun to blame not the economy but “dependency” on government and rising rates of single parenthood for the economic troubles of the white working class. On the left, meanwhile, whites are dismissed as the backward base of the increasingly radical GOP, and working class whites, in particular, are derided as racists who won’t vote for Democrats because the party is now led by a black man (ignoring the fact that a larger share of working class whites voted for Barack Obama than for Caucasians John Kerry, Al Gore or Bill Clinton.)
The fact is, working and middle class whites have supported too many Republicans who’ve dismantled the opportunity structure that created the vast (white) middle class from the 1930s through the 1960s – but that’s at least partly because too many Democrats turned their backs on those policies, too. The larger point of the piece, if a 4,000-plus word article can be said to have a single point, was this:
The emerging multiracial Obama coalition has the potential to transform the way we all think about race and politics as we invent the next America — but only if we can all forgo petty racial score-setting and 20th century conceptions about identity. And only if more white people wake up to what they’ve let the Republican Party do to the country in the last 40 years, in the name of holding on to what they think they have.
I was making two related arguments: that whites must begin to face up to economic and political reality – that the party most of them support now stands for destroying not only the social programs they (incorrectly) believe benefit “other people,” but also programs they support, like Social Security and Medicare, food stamps and unemployment, as well as protections for workers who have jobs. My second point was just as important and less commonly heard: I asked that the multiracial left have more empathy for working class whites, and stop stereotyping them and dismissing their political choices, when we disagree, as merely “racist.” Interestingly, I got little or no push back on that point from anyone on the multiracial left, although I have been criticized for that argument many times, going back to the fractious 2008 Democratic primary. Maybe we’re making progress.
The criticism of my “White People” argument came almost exclusively from the right, and there were at least a few points worth engaging.
Of course, more than a few people reacted to the headline without thinking (or reading the piece), and I heard a lot of what I predicted I would in the article: I am a racist! How dare I generalize about white people? I would never talk about black people that way!
The best response along those lines came from Newsbusters, the fan club Brent Bozell runs especially to promote me. It featured a typically outraged harangue from Noel Sheppard: “Actual Joan Walsh Salon Headline: ‘What’s the Matter with White People?” and included this: “Maybe Walsh should check her own racist leanings given her hatred of white people.” Noel, I love white people! Some of my best friends are white. As I even revealed in the piece, that includes some of my own family. You can do better, Noel. Try again.
The reply from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was a little bit more substantive – although he kicked it off on Twitter by shrieking at Charles Murray that I’d accused Murray of “attacking white people!”
I didn’t accuse Murray of “attacking” all white people. I’d made the point that Murray now blames poor and working class whites for their economic struggles, much the way he has always blamed the black poor. Their poverty rate is climbing while their wages and family incomes are falling not because of huge shifts in the economy that favor the wealthy, but because they’re lazy and promiscuous and not terribly bright, and they just don’t follow the rules the way the poor are supposed to. This is the oldest argument around, of course, when it comes to explaining away social inequity and defending the economic status quo. You can find it in the Gospels, in clashes between that bleeding heart liberal Jesus Christ, and those who believed poverty was God’s punishment. In every age, the struggle for justice turns on how successfully the privileged can justify their wealth as the natural result of their hard work and superior talent and/or the innate shortcomings of their lessers.
In my lifetime, that argument has been racialized. As the nation struggled to right the wrongs of racism, some people began to argue that the problems of poor African Americans had more to do with their own personal and cultural shortcomings than society’s, and that our efforts to use government to help made the problem worse. But I was raised knowing that virtually every awful thing said about black people had once been said about Irish Catholics, and so I’ve spent a lot of my life refuting that racialized scapegoating, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Lately, though, I’ve felt that we’re getting some help with that task from Republicans, as they scapegoat working class whites in terms they used to only use against blacks — their economic problems are due to the fact that they’re lazy, too many don’t get married and they want government to take care of them (Charles Murray’s argument). Taranto misunderstands the point I’m making about the new GOP line:
When Walsh accuses Murray of “attacking white people,” she seems to be hoping that persons of pallor will be open to a similar appeal–that they will finally wake up and start voting what the left considers to be their “interests.” Essentially that means embracing government dependency: “Today, many white folks who are voting Republican don’t seem to know one important fact: they are, in fact, the ‘takers.’ ” Once they figure that out, Walsh thinks, they’ll join the blacks and the Hispanics and the professional elite, and the Democratic hold on the electorate will be secure.
That’s not what I was saying, at all. I’m not someone who makes the simplistic case that the working class is voting against its interests by backing Republicans. This is a debate in which I think the right has the better side. Claiming that working class Republicans – or black and Latino Republicans, for that matter — are “voting against their interests” is hugely condescending, a vestigial Marxism that assumes the only thing that matters is material conditions. It can also sound like we’re saying: “How dare you presume you have anything in common with the wealthy, peon?”
The Republican allegiance of some working class people may well be aspirational, as conservatives argue. Liberals like John Rawls’ famous theory of justice, which held that most people would want to design a society in which, should they find themselves at the bottom, they would be protected. It turns out that a lot of people prefer social policies that would protect them if they make it to the top, however unlikely that kind of economic mobility is turning out to be in the U.S. today. Voting Republican may also reflect genuine cultural and religious values. Growing up Irish Catholic, I can’t pretend that my relatives who vote Republican over the issue of abortion are dupes suffering from some kind of “false consciousness.” They care about that issue passionately. We can disagree with conservative working class white people, we can wish they had different priorities, but when we “assume” they’re voting against their own interests, as though we, not they, know their interests, our condescension shows.
….
On the other hand, I do not mean to disrespect working class whites, but I have to say: it would be great if their politics reckoned with reality. As I pointed out in the piece, red-state Republican areas enjoy the highest levels of federal spending. That’s an inconsistency that can’t be totally explained by culture war politics. White working class Republicans are simply wrong about the way government has worked, in their own lives and in the lives of others, and Democrats need to talk about that, respectfully.
Taranto hints at the case other Republicans make more forcefully – that the more Americans become dependent on government, the more they’ll vote Democratic, and that’s Barack Obama’s not-so-secret plan. “Republican supporters will continue to decrease every year as more Americans become dependent on the government,” Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint wrote in his last book. “Dependent voters will naturally elect even big-government progressives who will continue to smother economic growth and spend America deeper into debt.” I think DeMint’s notion is alarmist GOP propaganda. But I’d be happy to have a political debate about the role of government in our lives – one that’s untainted by racism, fears of a lazy, parasitic “other” or charges that Democrats are “socialists” seeking to impose some Soviet-style or lefty-European system on America. I think it should be clear that Democrats love capitalism, because twice in the last 75 years, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then under President Obama, we saved capitalism from itself.
Finally, Taranto (and a lot of letter writers who didn’t seem to read my piece), claimed that the “demographic doomsday” scenario, in which a declining white population leads to the gradual extinction of the GOP, is “overblown.” I agree – and I said so in the article. I regularly quarrel with liberals who insist that a magical “people of color” alliance is going to move the country to the left, permanently. It’s not going to happen. In the 80s and 90s, it was easy to imagine that Latinos and Asians might be receptive to Republican messaging around family, small business, religion, as well as hostility to big government, given that immigrants often came from countries ruled by oppressive governments (whether of the left or the right). Certainly Karl Rove once believed that. Republicans chased many Latinos, Asians and even conservative African Americans into the arms of Democrats by allowing racism and xenophobia to flourish in their party unchecked. As the GOP gets beaten in coming election cycles, it’s going to have to figure out a way to appeal to more than just white people — or perish as a party.
Also: most scenarios in which the white majority “disappears” in the next couple of decades ignore the fact that about 50 percent of the fastest-growing “minority” – Hispanics or Latinos – consider themselves white. (That’s why the Census has a category for “non-Hispanic whites.”) So do most mixed-race Americans in many studies. Besides, the definition of “whiteness” has regularly shifted throughout American history – Irish, Italians, Jews and other non-Nordic, Anglo immigrants all took turns in the “non-white” category in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s quite possible that our notion of whiteness – or let’s just say “the American mainstream” or “real Americans,” in Sarah Palin’s language – will expand to include some categories of Latinos, Asians and mixed-race folks, not to mention Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain and Condoleezza Rice.
To build a better, more inclusive country – to invent the next America – both parties are going to have to forgo identity politics and appeal to voters around principle and policy, not fear and contempt. Democrats are getting there; Republicans still have a ways to go before facing up to the fact that the identity politics practiced by the Tea Party represents a divisive dead end.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
A Universe from Nothing?
On the Origin of Everything
‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss
By DAVID ALBERT
Published: March 23, 2012
Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”
A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING
Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
By Lawrence M. Krauss
Illustrated. 202 pp. Free Press. $24.99.
Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?
Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electromagnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.
And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.
‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss
By DAVID ALBERT
Published: March 23, 2012
Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”
A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING
Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
By Lawrence M. Krauss
Illustrated. 202 pp. Free Press. $24.99.
Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.
Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?
Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electromagnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.
The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.
What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.
But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.
Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.
And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Barbarism of the Right
by Jonathan Chait
On the second anniversary of the signing of Affordable Care Act, the bitterness of the health-care fight remains a core fissure in American politics, and the nature of the fissure is clear. The two parties are fighting over whether access to regular medical care ought to be a right or an earned privilege.
To me, and essentially everybody on the liberal side, the answer to that question is obvious. I’m comfortable with the market creating vastly unequal rewards of many kinds. But to make health insurance an earned privilege is to condemn people to physical suffering or even death because they failed to secure a job that gives them health insurance, or they don’t earn enough, or they happened to contract an expensive illness, or a member of their family did. (If you think I am overstating, you ought to read my friend Jonathan Cohn’s book, Sick, which, in addition to explaining the dysfunctionality of the health care system, offers a gut-wrenching portrait of many Americans who saw their lives destroyed by lack of access to decent medical care.) The principle strikes me as nothing short of barbaric.
Yet the health-care fight increasingly brought that principle to the fore. If you want to see this idea expressed in its rawest (and, I think, most honest) form, here is a rally of protestors against the health-care bill disparaging a man who has Parkinson’s disease:
Their language is instructive. They decry the bill for requiring “handouts,” and insist, “you have to work for everything you get.” Which is to say, they consider universal health care exactly like welfare — a giveaway of something that people rightly ought to earn on their own.
Republican politicians have increasingly come to endorse this same principle, though in less openly cruel ways. They describe the health-care fight as a question of “personal responsibility” — the language of welfare superimposed onto health care.
The root of the problem is that the conservative movement has organized itself around opposition to the redistribution of wealth, and universal health care requires redistribution. Some people will be unable to provide for their own health care, either because they earn unusually low incomes, or because they pose an unusually high actuarial health risk. There are many possible ways to redress this. All of them require, at the most basic level, the provision of resources to the poor and the sick.
And that is something the conservative movement refuses to do. The House Republican budget, which has become the lodestar of conservative public policy, is instructive. It repeals the Affordable Care Act and leaves nothing in its place to cover the uninsured. It further imposes enormous cuts to Medicaid, increasing the uninsured population even further still. It offers no plan to fill the void it creates. This is not because such a plan lies too far outside its breadth — it is a sweeping statement, including such disparate objectives as deregulating the financial industry, and laying out a vision that would stretch decades into the future. It’s a statement of how the Republican Party would allocate resources, and the crystal clear answer is, Republicans oppose allocating resources to cover the uninsured.
The party’s goal could not be any more clear. Oh yes, there have been times concurrent with Democratic efforts to pass health-care reform that Republicans have proposed their own, alternative plans. During the 1994 health-care debate, Republicans in the Senate offered a “free market” alternative to Bill Clinton’s plan. As Clinton’s plan sank and Democrats turned their eyes to the Republican plan, its sponsors abandoned it in droves. Newt Gingrich matter-of-factly conceded, during a recent presidential debate, that he had endorsed an alternative plan during this time merely to stop the Clinton plan.
The same dynamic occurred during the most recent health-care debate, with numerous Republicans “endorsing” an alternative bipartisan plan, but signaling they opposed most of its actual provisions. The Republican plan to cover the uninsured, when it does appear, is always a mirage hovering just beyond reach, dissolving when approached.
But that sort of open advocacy of mass lack of insurance remains the exception. More frequently, conservatives sublimate their belief in the bloodless language of budgets. Charles Krauthammer’s column offers a helpful example. On its face, Krauthammer is merely complaining about the budgetary impact of the Affordable Care Act:
Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt.
Krauthammer is pulling a subtle and revealing sleight of hand here. In his first sentence, he complains about the gross cost of the health care law — how much total money it expends to cover the uninsured. In the next sentence, he complains about the deficit. The implication is that high gross costs of the bill will worsen the deficit.
But that is false. The Affordable Care Act offsets the cost of expanding coverage by reducing ineffective Medicare spending and raising new revenue. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the law will reduce the deficit. In its new update, which Krauthammer cites, it predicts that the law will reduce the deficit by slightly more than it had in its original forecast. It is the gross cost he objects to — the choice to spend $250 billion a year to provide medical care to some 30 million Americans.
Also today, Mitt Romney authors an op-ed about health care. In it, he claims to favor making health insurance available to one and all. He frames his difference with Obama like so:
The reforms I propose for the country could not be more different from Barack Obama's. They entail no new taxes, no massive diversions of funds away from Medicare, no tax discrimination, and no new bureaucracies.
This has been Romney’s line — he favors the goal of universal coverage, but opposes any methods (taxes, diverting funds from Medicare) to pay for it. He praises his Massachusetts reform as a model, but of course, he managed to design his plan in Massachusetts because the state received a large federal windfall grant. He does not propose to make such a funding stream available to other states. He proposes nothing at all to provide the resources that would allow the poor and sick to obtain coverage.
What Romney does promise, explicitly and forcefully, is to “repeal Obamacare.” Here he is in keeping with what has become almost a blood oath among Republicans. The conservative movement’s fanatical determination to achieve this goal — through the courts, through the election, through sabotage of its implementation by denying funds and refusing to confirm administrators — reveals an even higher level of commitment to the principle of denying health insurance to the undeserving. It is one thing to simply ignore the problem of the uninsured, by failing to act on it when you have power. But to actively crusade to throw vulnerable people off their newly-won health insurance is a higher sin, a sin of commission rather than omission.
In every other advanced country, the provision of universal access to medical care is a public responsibility. In every other advanced country, this principle has been accepted by the mainstream conservative party. Only in the United States does the conservative party uphold the operating principle that regular access to doctors and medicine should be denied to large chunks of the population. This sort of barbarism is unique to the American right.
On the second anniversary of the signing of Affordable Care Act, the bitterness of the health-care fight remains a core fissure in American politics, and the nature of the fissure is clear. The two parties are fighting over whether access to regular medical care ought to be a right or an earned privilege.
To me, and essentially everybody on the liberal side, the answer to that question is obvious. I’m comfortable with the market creating vastly unequal rewards of many kinds. But to make health insurance an earned privilege is to condemn people to physical suffering or even death because they failed to secure a job that gives them health insurance, or they don’t earn enough, or they happened to contract an expensive illness, or a member of their family did. (If you think I am overstating, you ought to read my friend Jonathan Cohn’s book, Sick, which, in addition to explaining the dysfunctionality of the health care system, offers a gut-wrenching portrait of many Americans who saw their lives destroyed by lack of access to decent medical care.) The principle strikes me as nothing short of barbaric.
Yet the health-care fight increasingly brought that principle to the fore. If you want to see this idea expressed in its rawest (and, I think, most honest) form, here is a rally of protestors against the health-care bill disparaging a man who has Parkinson’s disease:
Their language is instructive. They decry the bill for requiring “handouts,” and insist, “you have to work for everything you get.” Which is to say, they consider universal health care exactly like welfare — a giveaway of something that people rightly ought to earn on their own.
Republican politicians have increasingly come to endorse this same principle, though in less openly cruel ways. They describe the health-care fight as a question of “personal responsibility” — the language of welfare superimposed onto health care.
The root of the problem is that the conservative movement has organized itself around opposition to the redistribution of wealth, and universal health care requires redistribution. Some people will be unable to provide for their own health care, either because they earn unusually low incomes, or because they pose an unusually high actuarial health risk. There are many possible ways to redress this. All of them require, at the most basic level, the provision of resources to the poor and the sick.
And that is something the conservative movement refuses to do. The House Republican budget, which has become the lodestar of conservative public policy, is instructive. It repeals the Affordable Care Act and leaves nothing in its place to cover the uninsured. It further imposes enormous cuts to Medicaid, increasing the uninsured population even further still. It offers no plan to fill the void it creates. This is not because such a plan lies too far outside its breadth — it is a sweeping statement, including such disparate objectives as deregulating the financial industry, and laying out a vision that would stretch decades into the future. It’s a statement of how the Republican Party would allocate resources, and the crystal clear answer is, Republicans oppose allocating resources to cover the uninsured.
The party’s goal could not be any more clear. Oh yes, there have been times concurrent with Democratic efforts to pass health-care reform that Republicans have proposed their own, alternative plans. During the 1994 health-care debate, Republicans in the Senate offered a “free market” alternative to Bill Clinton’s plan. As Clinton’s plan sank and Democrats turned their eyes to the Republican plan, its sponsors abandoned it in droves. Newt Gingrich matter-of-factly conceded, during a recent presidential debate, that he had endorsed an alternative plan during this time merely to stop the Clinton plan.
The same dynamic occurred during the most recent health-care debate, with numerous Republicans “endorsing” an alternative bipartisan plan, but signaling they opposed most of its actual provisions. The Republican plan to cover the uninsured, when it does appear, is always a mirage hovering just beyond reach, dissolving when approached.
But that sort of open advocacy of mass lack of insurance remains the exception. More frequently, conservatives sublimate their belief in the bloodless language of budgets. Charles Krauthammer’s column offers a helpful example. On its face, Krauthammer is merely complaining about the budgetary impact of the Affordable Care Act:
Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt.
Krauthammer is pulling a subtle and revealing sleight of hand here. In his first sentence, he complains about the gross cost of the health care law — how much total money it expends to cover the uninsured. In the next sentence, he complains about the deficit. The implication is that high gross costs of the bill will worsen the deficit.
But that is false. The Affordable Care Act offsets the cost of expanding coverage by reducing ineffective Medicare spending and raising new revenue. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the law will reduce the deficit. In its new update, which Krauthammer cites, it predicts that the law will reduce the deficit by slightly more than it had in its original forecast. It is the gross cost he objects to — the choice to spend $250 billion a year to provide medical care to some 30 million Americans.
Also today, Mitt Romney authors an op-ed about health care. In it, he claims to favor making health insurance available to one and all. He frames his difference with Obama like so:
The reforms I propose for the country could not be more different from Barack Obama's. They entail no new taxes, no massive diversions of funds away from Medicare, no tax discrimination, and no new bureaucracies.
This has been Romney’s line — he favors the goal of universal coverage, but opposes any methods (taxes, diverting funds from Medicare) to pay for it. He praises his Massachusetts reform as a model, but of course, he managed to design his plan in Massachusetts because the state received a large federal windfall grant. He does not propose to make such a funding stream available to other states. He proposes nothing at all to provide the resources that would allow the poor and sick to obtain coverage.
What Romney does promise, explicitly and forcefully, is to “repeal Obamacare.” Here he is in keeping with what has become almost a blood oath among Republicans. The conservative movement’s fanatical determination to achieve this goal — through the courts, through the election, through sabotage of its implementation by denying funds and refusing to confirm administrators — reveals an even higher level of commitment to the principle of denying health insurance to the undeserving. It is one thing to simply ignore the problem of the uninsured, by failing to act on it when you have power. But to actively crusade to throw vulnerable people off their newly-won health insurance is a higher sin, a sin of commission rather than omission.
In every other advanced country, the provision of universal access to medical care is a public responsibility. In every other advanced country, this principle has been accepted by the mainstream conservative party. Only in the United States does the conservative party uphold the operating principle that regular access to doctors and medicine should be denied to large chunks of the population. This sort of barbarism is unique to the American right.
Flim-Flam Ryan
by Paul Krugman----I Was Wrong About Paul Ryan
No, I haven’t lost my mind. He’s still the same flim-flamming fiscal phony he always was.
Where I was at least somewhat wrong was in my expectations about how the Very Serious People would treat his latest outing. I thought they would still treat him as a heroic deficit hawk, never mind the fact that his plan is really about transferring money from the poor to the rich, with no credible deficit reduction at all. That, after all, is what they did last year — he even received an award for fiscal responsibility.
But I’m not seeing that this time. Overall, the response seems muted, maybe out of embarrassment. But leaving aside the predictable right-wing cheerleaders, it looks as if the emperor’s nakedness is now common knowledge.
There will, of course, be no admission of past naivete; nor will I personally be forgiven for taking Ryan’s measure too soon. But better than I feared.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. He’s still the same flim-flamming fiscal phony he always was.
Where I was at least somewhat wrong was in my expectations about how the Very Serious People would treat his latest outing. I thought they would still treat him as a heroic deficit hawk, never mind the fact that his plan is really about transferring money from the poor to the rich, with no credible deficit reduction at all. That, after all, is what they did last year — he even received an award for fiscal responsibility.
But I’m not seeing that this time. Overall, the response seems muted, maybe out of embarrassment. But leaving aside the predictable right-wing cheerleaders, it looks as if the emperor’s nakedness is now common knowledge.
There will, of course, be no admission of past naivete; nor will I personally be forgiven for taking Ryan’s measure too soon. But better than I feared.
In the Midst of Right-Wing Fantasies
Op-Ed Columnist
Paranoia Strikes Deeper
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 22, 2012
Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot.
This claim isn’t just nuts; it’s a sort of craziness triple play — a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you used to hear only from people who also believed that fluoridated water was a Communist plot. But now the gas-price conspiracy theory has been formally endorsed by the likely Republican presidential nominee.
Before we get to the larger implications of this endorsement, let’s get the facts on gas prices straight.
First, the lie: No, President Obama did not say, as many Republicans now claim, that he wanted higher gasoline prices. He did once say that a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would cause electricity prices to “skyrocket” — an unfortunate word choice. But saying that such a system would raise energy prices was just a factual statement, not a declaration of intent to punish American consumers. The claim that Mr. Obama wanted higher prices is a lie, pure and simple.
And it’s a lie wrapped in an absurdity, because the president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.
Finally, there’s the paranoia, the belief that liberals in general, and Obama administration officials in particular, are trying to make driving unaffordable as part of a nefarious plot against the American way of life. And, no, I’m not exaggerating. This is what you hear even from thoroughly mainstream conservatives.
For example, last year George Will declared that the Obama administration’s support for train travel had nothing to do with relieving congestion and reducing environmental impacts. No, he insisted, “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” Who knew that Dagny Taggart, the railroad executive heroine of “Atlas Shrugged,” was a Commie?
O.K., this is all kind of funny. But it’s also deeply scary.
As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod.
And it’s not just gas prices, of course. In fact, the conspiracy theories are proliferating so fast it’s hard to keep up. Thus, large numbers of Republicans — and we’re talking about important political figures, not random supporters — firmly believe that global warming is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a global conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, not one of whom has broken the code of omertà . Meanwhile, others are attributing the recent improvement in economic news to a dastardly plot to withhold stimulus funds, releasing them just before the 2012 election. And let’s not even get into health reform.
Why is this happening? At least part of the answer must lie in the way right-wing media create an alternate reality. For example, did you hear about how the cost of Obamacare just doubled? It didn’t, but millions of Fox-viewers and Rush-listeners believe that it did. Naturally, people who constantly hear about the evil that liberals do are ready and willing to believe that everything bad is the result of a dastardly liberal plot. And these are the people who vote in Republican primaries.
But what about the broader electorate?
If and when he wins the nomination, Mr. Romney will try, as a hapless adviser put it, to shake his Etch A Sketch — that is, to erase the record of his pandering to the crazy right and convince voters that he’s actually a moderate. And maybe he can pull it off.
But let’s hope that he can’t, because the kind of pandering he has engaged in during his quest for the nomination matters. Whatever Mr. Romney may personally believe, the fact is that by endorsing the right’s paranoid fantasies, he is helping to further a dangerous trend in America’s political life. And he should be held accountable for his actions.
Paranoia Strikes Deeper
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 22, 2012
Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Actually, it’s the noise a great political party makes when it loses what’s left of its mind. And it happened — where else? — on Fox News on Sunday, when Mitt Romney bought fully into the claim that gas prices are high thanks to an Obama administration plot.
This claim isn’t just nuts; it’s a sort of craziness triple play — a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you used to hear only from people who also believed that fluoridated water was a Communist plot. But now the gas-price conspiracy theory has been formally endorsed by the likely Republican presidential nominee.
Before we get to the larger implications of this endorsement, let’s get the facts on gas prices straight.
First, the lie: No, President Obama did not say, as many Republicans now claim, that he wanted higher gasoline prices. He did once say that a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would cause electricity prices to “skyrocket” — an unfortunate word choice. But saying that such a system would raise energy prices was just a factual statement, not a declaration of intent to punish American consumers. The claim that Mr. Obama wanted higher prices is a lie, pure and simple.
And it’s a lie wrapped in an absurdity, because the president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.
Finally, there’s the paranoia, the belief that liberals in general, and Obama administration officials in particular, are trying to make driving unaffordable as part of a nefarious plot against the American way of life. And, no, I’m not exaggerating. This is what you hear even from thoroughly mainstream conservatives.
For example, last year George Will declared that the Obama administration’s support for train travel had nothing to do with relieving congestion and reducing environmental impacts. No, he insisted, “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.” Who knew that Dagny Taggart, the railroad executive heroine of “Atlas Shrugged,” was a Commie?
O.K., this is all kind of funny. But it’s also deeply scary.
As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod.
And it’s not just gas prices, of course. In fact, the conspiracy theories are proliferating so fast it’s hard to keep up. Thus, large numbers of Republicans — and we’re talking about important political figures, not random supporters — firmly believe that global warming is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a global conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, not one of whom has broken the code of omertà . Meanwhile, others are attributing the recent improvement in economic news to a dastardly plot to withhold stimulus funds, releasing them just before the 2012 election. And let’s not even get into health reform.
Why is this happening? At least part of the answer must lie in the way right-wing media create an alternate reality. For example, did you hear about how the cost of Obamacare just doubled? It didn’t, but millions of Fox-viewers and Rush-listeners believe that it did. Naturally, people who constantly hear about the evil that liberals do are ready and willing to believe that everything bad is the result of a dastardly liberal plot. And these are the people who vote in Republican primaries.
But what about the broader electorate?
If and when he wins the nomination, Mr. Romney will try, as a hapless adviser put it, to shake his Etch A Sketch — that is, to erase the record of his pandering to the crazy right and convince voters that he’s actually a moderate. And maybe he can pull it off.
But let’s hope that he can’t, because the kind of pandering he has engaged in during his quest for the nomination matters. Whatever Mr. Romney may personally believe, the fact is that by endorsing the right’s paranoid fantasies, he is helping to further a dangerous trend in America’s political life. And he should be held accountable for his actions.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
The Freud Wars
John Gray
Dangerous Minds
The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis
By Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen & Sonu Shamdasani (Cambridge University Press 404pp £16.99)
The Freud wars are a bit like the current clamour that surrounds religion. Rancorous and obsessive in their pursuit of one another, the protagonists have no interest in securing agreement on the issues by which they claim to be divided. Though each side incessantly repeats that it is dedicated to rational inquiry, there is no argument that could conceivably settle what is humorously described as the debate. The nasty and occasionally sordid exchanges - which in the case of the Freud wars have at times involved legal action - serve interests other than those that are avowed by the participants, though what these interests may be is often unclear.
A feature of both disputations is that the same issues are tirelessly replayed, generation after generation. The battle lines of the Freud wars were drawn early in the twentieth century, with Karl Popper formulating his argument, sometime around 1919, that psychoanalytical interpretations cannot be scientific because they cannot be falsified; he later attacked psychoanalysis in these same terms in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963). The pattern of accusation against Freud has not changed much over the years: he claimed to be founding a science but presided over an authoritarian cult; he exaggerated the originality of his ideas; he suppressed or distorted evidence in order to insulate his theories from criticism, or else revised his theories without properly explaining why he did so. Written by two academics - Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington and Sonu Shamdasani is Philemon Professor of Jung History at the UCL Centre for the History of Medicine - The Freud Files is, in large part, a compilation of these charges. Reading at times like a doctoral thesis and at others like a police report, the book collects together all the main claims that have been levelled over the years against psychoanalysis and, more particularly, its founder.
Some useful points are made along the way. It is true that Freud did not acknowledge all his intellectual debts. His pivotal claim that much of the life of the mind goes on unconsciously can be found in Schopenhauer and in the writings of the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, among others. In this regard Freud was not unlike his contemporary Wittgenstein, who also deployed ideas from Schopenhauer and other writers widely read in fin-de-siècle Vienna. It is less clear that using ideas in this way amounts to any kind of intellectual sin. Many of the ideas in question were in the air at the time, entering into the thinking of every educated person. The authors dismiss Freud's claims to originality, describing them as a legend of the 'immaculate conception' of psychoanalysis. Yet what matters is not whether Freud's ideas were original, but whether he made something new and worthwhile from notions that were common intellectual property at the time.
It is also true that psychoanalysis never became the science Freud wanted it to be. As Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani note, Freud's thinking was partly shaped by the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, one of the principal minds behind what would later be called logical positivism, which held that the rigorous application of empirically grounded scientific method is the only means of acquiring knowledge. Here again Freud was not unusual. In the intellectual milieu of central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century Mach's ideas had a pervasive influence, which extended to the economist F A Hayek (later an unsparing critic of positivist philosophies of social science). Partly as a side-effect of Mach's formative influence, the authority of science was as great then as it is now, if not greater. It was only to be expected that Freud would want the seal of scientific respectability for psychoanalysis.
Where Freud is distinctive is in the way that his thinking departed from the scientific model he thought psychoanalysis should emulate. Partly because human interactions are not repeatable in the way experiments in the natural sciences can be repeated, the practice of psychoanalysis is hard to square with standard versions of scientific method. Rather than being a disability peculiar to psychoanalysis this difficulty is a feature of the social studies in general, and invites the question of whether all branches of knowledge are to be judged by the standards that apply in natural science. The question is all the more pertinent when it is recognised that there is no agreement as to what these standards may be. Popper's sublimely simple criterion of falsification is rejected by many philosophers, including many who insist on repeatability. It is also at odds with much that is known of the history of science. If Freud's thinking deviates from narrow standards of scientific rectitude, it has this failing in common with much of the science that has been done over the centuries.
Clearly there are unresolved issues about the nature of knowledge at work in Freud's thought, but Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani show little interest in pursuing them. How did Freud try to reconcile the scientific claims of psychoanalysis with the special difficulties of biographical knowledge, for example? Rather than exploring questions of this kind, the authors adopt a version of the technique of cross-examination that is used in law courts, which involves confronting witnesses with inconsistencies both within their statements and between their statements and those that others have made on their behalf. So, discussing the suggestion of some of Freud's defenders that psychoanalytic interpretation may have more in common with the hermeneutic practices of literary theory than with science, the authors note severely that 'on the occasion of his seventieth birthday', Freud wrote that 'the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.' They go on to say that Freud's 'rejection of literariness' is 'in no way anecdotal', since it is 'directly related to the "will to science" ... which has historically defined psychoanalysis'.
Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are right that Freud never ceased hoping that the discipline he founded would be accepted as a science. They omit to explore the ways in which Freud's own thinking undermined this hope. The hard and fast distinction between science and other modes of thinking he insisted on became blurred and ambiguous when, in some of his later writings, he considered how aspects of Jewish religion, such as the insistence on the invisibility of God (which Freud believed promoted the insight that parts of the mind are inaccessible to conscious awareness), may have made psychoanalysis possible. This readiness to break out of the box of his own aspirations and assumptions is one reason why Freud remains such an interesting thinker. It is also a reason for not being too quick to hold the founder of psychoanalysis responsible for the discipline's later development. Referring to the attempts Freud made to control how the history of psychoanalysis would be written, the authors write: 'The aim of Freud's history [of psychoanalysis] was to establish this autocratic political authority.' But whether or not Freud harboured these autocratic tendencies, he was not all of one piece. Some of the dogmatism of Freudian orthodoxies may be a genuine intellectual inheritance. Equally, so are the many divergent lines of inquiry that Freud's thought has inspired.
There are numerous accounts of how Freud's work became the focus of a cult. To my mind the most vividly illuminating are Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984), both by Janet Malcolm. Of course Malcolm deals mainly with contemporary practice, while Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are concerned mostly with psychoanalysis's early years. But the difference in style is telling. Malcolm's is terse and graceful, while the tone of the present volume is illustrated in a comment the authors make on some gaps they detect in an edition of Freud's letters: 'The result of this omission', they tell us, 'obscured the connections between these scatological hypotheses on the ontogenic recapitulation by the individual of the erotogenic zones abandoned in the course of phylogenesis and the theory of infantile sexuality put forward in the Three Essays in 1905.' Ugly, coagulated sentences of this kind - of which there are many - may be no more than instances of the professional inability to write, which has become a requirement of academic life. But I think the objection to this kind of language is not simply aesthetic. Such clogged, periphrastic discourse testifies to an obscurity of thinking and purpose that runs right through the book, and through the Freud wars that the authors laboriously rehearse. In contrast, Freud is the most lucid and direct of writers - not least when what he is saying departs from what he has said in the past. Could this persistent clarity help explain why Freud's writings continue to be so troubling, and why his detractors cannot let him go?
Dangerous Minds
The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis
By Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen & Sonu Shamdasani (Cambridge University Press 404pp £16.99)
The Freud wars are a bit like the current clamour that surrounds religion. Rancorous and obsessive in their pursuit of one another, the protagonists have no interest in securing agreement on the issues by which they claim to be divided. Though each side incessantly repeats that it is dedicated to rational inquiry, there is no argument that could conceivably settle what is humorously described as the debate. The nasty and occasionally sordid exchanges - which in the case of the Freud wars have at times involved legal action - serve interests other than those that are avowed by the participants, though what these interests may be is often unclear.
A feature of both disputations is that the same issues are tirelessly replayed, generation after generation. The battle lines of the Freud wars were drawn early in the twentieth century, with Karl Popper formulating his argument, sometime around 1919, that psychoanalytical interpretations cannot be scientific because they cannot be falsified; he later attacked psychoanalysis in these same terms in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963). The pattern of accusation against Freud has not changed much over the years: he claimed to be founding a science but presided over an authoritarian cult; he exaggerated the originality of his ideas; he suppressed or distorted evidence in order to insulate his theories from criticism, or else revised his theories without properly explaining why he did so. Written by two academics - Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington and Sonu Shamdasani is Philemon Professor of Jung History at the UCL Centre for the History of Medicine - The Freud Files is, in large part, a compilation of these charges. Reading at times like a doctoral thesis and at others like a police report, the book collects together all the main claims that have been levelled over the years against psychoanalysis and, more particularly, its founder.
Some useful points are made along the way. It is true that Freud did not acknowledge all his intellectual debts. His pivotal claim that much of the life of the mind goes on unconsciously can be found in Schopenhauer and in the writings of the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, among others. In this regard Freud was not unlike his contemporary Wittgenstein, who also deployed ideas from Schopenhauer and other writers widely read in fin-de-siècle Vienna. It is less clear that using ideas in this way amounts to any kind of intellectual sin. Many of the ideas in question were in the air at the time, entering into the thinking of every educated person. The authors dismiss Freud's claims to originality, describing them as a legend of the 'immaculate conception' of psychoanalysis. Yet what matters is not whether Freud's ideas were original, but whether he made something new and worthwhile from notions that were common intellectual property at the time.
It is also true that psychoanalysis never became the science Freud wanted it to be. As Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani note, Freud's thinking was partly shaped by the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, one of the principal minds behind what would later be called logical positivism, which held that the rigorous application of empirically grounded scientific method is the only means of acquiring knowledge. Here again Freud was not unusual. In the intellectual milieu of central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century Mach's ideas had a pervasive influence, which extended to the economist F A Hayek (later an unsparing critic of positivist philosophies of social science). Partly as a side-effect of Mach's formative influence, the authority of science was as great then as it is now, if not greater. It was only to be expected that Freud would want the seal of scientific respectability for psychoanalysis.
Where Freud is distinctive is in the way that his thinking departed from the scientific model he thought psychoanalysis should emulate. Partly because human interactions are not repeatable in the way experiments in the natural sciences can be repeated, the practice of psychoanalysis is hard to square with standard versions of scientific method. Rather than being a disability peculiar to psychoanalysis this difficulty is a feature of the social studies in general, and invites the question of whether all branches of knowledge are to be judged by the standards that apply in natural science. The question is all the more pertinent when it is recognised that there is no agreement as to what these standards may be. Popper's sublimely simple criterion of falsification is rejected by many philosophers, including many who insist on repeatability. It is also at odds with much that is known of the history of science. If Freud's thinking deviates from narrow standards of scientific rectitude, it has this failing in common with much of the science that has been done over the centuries.
Clearly there are unresolved issues about the nature of knowledge at work in Freud's thought, but Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani show little interest in pursuing them. How did Freud try to reconcile the scientific claims of psychoanalysis with the special difficulties of biographical knowledge, for example? Rather than exploring questions of this kind, the authors adopt a version of the technique of cross-examination that is used in law courts, which involves confronting witnesses with inconsistencies both within their statements and between their statements and those that others have made on their behalf. So, discussing the suggestion of some of Freud's defenders that psychoanalytic interpretation may have more in common with the hermeneutic practices of literary theory than with science, the authors note severely that 'on the occasion of his seventieth birthday', Freud wrote that 'the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.' They go on to say that Freud's 'rejection of literariness' is 'in no way anecdotal', since it is 'directly related to the "will to science" ... which has historically defined psychoanalysis'.
Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are right that Freud never ceased hoping that the discipline he founded would be accepted as a science. They omit to explore the ways in which Freud's own thinking undermined this hope. The hard and fast distinction between science and other modes of thinking he insisted on became blurred and ambiguous when, in some of his later writings, he considered how aspects of Jewish religion, such as the insistence on the invisibility of God (which Freud believed promoted the insight that parts of the mind are inaccessible to conscious awareness), may have made psychoanalysis possible. This readiness to break out of the box of his own aspirations and assumptions is one reason why Freud remains such an interesting thinker. It is also a reason for not being too quick to hold the founder of psychoanalysis responsible for the discipline's later development. Referring to the attempts Freud made to control how the history of psychoanalysis would be written, the authors write: 'The aim of Freud's history [of psychoanalysis] was to establish this autocratic political authority.' But whether or not Freud harboured these autocratic tendencies, he was not all of one piece. Some of the dogmatism of Freudian orthodoxies may be a genuine intellectual inheritance. Equally, so are the many divergent lines of inquiry that Freud's thought has inspired.
There are numerous accounts of how Freud's work became the focus of a cult. To my mind the most vividly illuminating are Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984), both by Janet Malcolm. Of course Malcolm deals mainly with contemporary practice, while Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are concerned mostly with psychoanalysis's early years. But the difference in style is telling. Malcolm's is terse and graceful, while the tone of the present volume is illustrated in a comment the authors make on some gaps they detect in an edition of Freud's letters: 'The result of this omission', they tell us, 'obscured the connections between these scatological hypotheses on the ontogenic recapitulation by the individual of the erotogenic zones abandoned in the course of phylogenesis and the theory of infantile sexuality put forward in the Three Essays in 1905.' Ugly, coagulated sentences of this kind - of which there are many - may be no more than instances of the professional inability to write, which has become a requirement of academic life. But I think the objection to this kind of language is not simply aesthetic. Such clogged, periphrastic discourse testifies to an obscurity of thinking and purpose that runs right through the book, and through the Freud wars that the authors laboriously rehearse. In contrast, Freud is the most lucid and direct of writers - not least when what he is saying departs from what he has said in the past. Could this persistent clarity help explain why Freud's writings continue to be so troubling, and why his detractors cannot let him go?
The Ryan/Republican Budget
GET UPDATES FROM Robert Reich
The Republican's Social-Darwinist Budget Plan
Posted: 03/21/2012 8:36 am
In announcing the Republicans' new budget and tax plan Tuesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said "We are sharpening the contrast between the path that we're proposing and the path of debt and decline the president has placed us upon."
Ryan is right about sharpening the contrast. But the plan doesn't do much to reduce the debt. Even by its own estimate the deficit would drop to $166 billion in 2018 and then begin growing again.
The real contrast is over what the plan does for the rich and what it does to everyone else. It reduces the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25 percent. This would give the wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of at least $150,000 a year.
The money would come out of programs for the elderly, lower-middle families, and the poor.
Seniors would get subsidies to buy private health insurance or Medicare -- but the subsidies would be capped. So as medical costs increased, seniors would fall further and further behind.
Other cuts would come out of food stamps, Pell grants to offset the college tuition of kids from poor families, and scores of other programs that now help middle-income and the poor.
The plan also calls for repealing Obama's health care overhaul, thereby eliminating healthcare for 30 million Americans and allowing insurers to discriminate against (and drop from coverage) people with preexisting conditions.
The plan would carve an additional $19 billion out of next year's "discretionary" spending over and above what Democrats agreed to last year. Needless to say, discretionary spending includes most of programs for lower-income families.
Not surprisingly, the Pentagon would be spared.
So what's the guiding principle here? Pure Social Darwinism. Reward the rich and cut off the help to anyone who needs it.
Ryan says too many Americans rely on government benefits. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency."
Well, I have news for Paul Ryan. Almost 23 million able-bodied people still can't find work. They're not being lulled into dependency. They and their families could use some help. Even if the economy continues to generate new jobs at the rate it's been going the last three months, we wouldn't see normal rates of unemployment until 2017.
And most Americans who do have jobs continue to lose ground. New research by professors Emmanual Saez and Thomas Pikkety show that the average adjusted gross income of the bottom 90 percent was $29,840 in 2010 -- down $127 from 2009 and down $4,842 from 2000 -- and just slightly higher than it was forty-six years ago in 1966 (all figures adjusted for inflation).
They could use better schools, access to higher education, lower-cost health care, improved public transportation, and lots of other things Ryan and his colleagues are intent on removing.
Meanwhile, America's rich continue to grow richer -- and many of them (and their heirs) are being lulled into lives whose hardest task is summoning the help.
Anyone who thought the Great Recession might reduce America's wild lurch toward wild inequality should think again. The most recent data show that just 15,600 super-rich households -- the top 1 tenth of 1 percent -- pocketed 37 percent of all the economic gains in 2010. The rest of the gains went to others in the top 10 percent.
Republican Social Darwinists are determined that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 be made permanent. Those cuts saved the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (roughly 1.4 million people) more money on their taxes last year than the rest of America's 141 million taxpayers received in total income.
Thank you, House Republicans, for "sharpening the contrast" between your radical Social Darwinism and those of us who still cling to the belief that the most fortunate have a responsibility to the rest.
The Republican's Social-Darwinist Budget Plan
Posted: 03/21/2012 8:36 am
In announcing the Republicans' new budget and tax plan Tuesday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said "We are sharpening the contrast between the path that we're proposing and the path of debt and decline the president has placed us upon."
Ryan is right about sharpening the contrast. But the plan doesn't do much to reduce the debt. Even by its own estimate the deficit would drop to $166 billion in 2018 and then begin growing again.
The real contrast is over what the plan does for the rich and what it does to everyone else. It reduces the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25 percent. This would give the wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of at least $150,000 a year.
The money would come out of programs for the elderly, lower-middle families, and the poor.
Seniors would get subsidies to buy private health insurance or Medicare -- but the subsidies would be capped. So as medical costs increased, seniors would fall further and further behind.
Other cuts would come out of food stamps, Pell grants to offset the college tuition of kids from poor families, and scores of other programs that now help middle-income and the poor.
The plan also calls for repealing Obama's health care overhaul, thereby eliminating healthcare for 30 million Americans and allowing insurers to discriminate against (and drop from coverage) people with preexisting conditions.
The plan would carve an additional $19 billion out of next year's "discretionary" spending over and above what Democrats agreed to last year. Needless to say, discretionary spending includes most of programs for lower-income families.
Not surprisingly, the Pentagon would be spared.
So what's the guiding principle here? Pure Social Darwinism. Reward the rich and cut off the help to anyone who needs it.
Ryan says too many Americans rely on government benefits. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency."
Well, I have news for Paul Ryan. Almost 23 million able-bodied people still can't find work. They're not being lulled into dependency. They and their families could use some help. Even if the economy continues to generate new jobs at the rate it's been going the last three months, we wouldn't see normal rates of unemployment until 2017.
And most Americans who do have jobs continue to lose ground. New research by professors Emmanual Saez and Thomas Pikkety show that the average adjusted gross income of the bottom 90 percent was $29,840 in 2010 -- down $127 from 2009 and down $4,842 from 2000 -- and just slightly higher than it was forty-six years ago in 1966 (all figures adjusted for inflation).
They could use better schools, access to higher education, lower-cost health care, improved public transportation, and lots of other things Ryan and his colleagues are intent on removing.
Meanwhile, America's rich continue to grow richer -- and many of them (and their heirs) are being lulled into lives whose hardest task is summoning the help.
Anyone who thought the Great Recession might reduce America's wild lurch toward wild inequality should think again. The most recent data show that just 15,600 super-rich households -- the top 1 tenth of 1 percent -- pocketed 37 percent of all the economic gains in 2010. The rest of the gains went to others in the top 10 percent.
Republican Social Darwinists are determined that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 be made permanent. Those cuts saved the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (roughly 1.4 million people) more money on their taxes last year than the rest of America's 141 million taxpayers received in total income.
Thank you, House Republicans, for "sharpening the contrast" between your radical Social Darwinism and those of us who still cling to the belief that the most fortunate have a responsibility to the rest.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
About Constitutional Interpretation
Against Interpretation
‘Cosmic Constitutional Theory,’ by J. Harvie Wilkinson III
By JEFFREY ROSEN
Published: March 16, 2012
In courts and law schools across America, the most intense legal battles are fought over theories of constitutional interpretation. From the originalists on the right to the living constitutionalists on the left, each of the warring camps claims that it has discovered the true faith and accuses its opponents of hypocrisy. Now comes Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III with a bracingly clear and bipartisan message: All the theories are bunk! According to Wilkinson’s “Cosmic Constitutional Theory,” “the theories have given rise to nothing less than competing schools of liberal and conservative judicial activism, schools that have little in common other than a desire to seek theoretical cover for prescribed and often partisan results.” As a result of their cosmic theorizing, Wilkinson concludes, liberal and conservative judges and justices are too quick to second-guess the choices of legislatures, and the casualty is “our inalienable right of self-governance.”
COSMIC CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance
By J. Harvie Wilkinson III
161 pp. Oxford University Press. $21.95.
Wilkinson, who was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit by Ronald Reagan, is one of the most respected appellate judges in the country; he was on President George W. Bush’s shortlist for the Supreme Court. It’s not surprising that he indicts liberal justices like William Brennan for embracing a theory of living constitutionalism that “led the courts deep into the thickets of abortion, capital punishment and habeas corpus” by encouraging them to update the Constitution in light of contemporary values. While praising the living constitutionalists for “giving the elected branches leeway to craft fruitfully modern definitions of terms like ‘equality’ and ‘commerce,’” Wilkinson sharply criticizes Roe v. Wade, which he says “flunked simultaneously the three most basic interpretive tests” — it was unsupported by constitutional text, history or structure.
More surprisingly, however, Wilkinson is just as critical of the jurisprudence of original understanding, embraced by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Calling originalism a form of “activism masquerading as restraint,” he says that the methodology “fails to constrain judicial choices” when the historical evidence is ambiguous, which it is in every hard case.
Wilkinson is withering about the Supreme Court’s recent decisions striking down gun control laws under the Second Amendment, which he compares to Roe v. Wade in their tendency to impose “judicial value judgments based on thin and shaky grounds.” He warns that a Supreme Court decision overturning health care reform would be just as activist as one legalizing gay marriage, although he approves of gay marriage, but not President Obama’s health care reform (“seems misconceived in many ways”), on policy grounds. And he has no patience for Bush v. Gore, which he calls “no friend of self-governance.”
Wilkinson also extensively criticizes Judge Richard Posner and his methodology of constitutional pragmatism, which endorses the idea that judges should be policy makers. “Arming judges with reams of data and telling them to go about doing empirical good encourages aggressive review and substitutes judicial fiat for representative policy making,” he writes.
Having expressed dissatisfaction with the leading cosmic constitutional theories for “abetting judicial hubris,” Wilkinson confesses that he has no theory to offer as a substitute. Instead, he points to those great judges in the past “who took the habit of deference seriously,” including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, John Marshall Harlan and Lewis Powell Jr. These justices rarely struck down laws passed by Congress or the states, unless the constitutional arguments for invalidation were so clear that both liberals and conservatives could readily embrace them.
Why is it that not a single justice exemplifies this tradition of bipartisan judicial deference today? Now that the left and the right rely on the Supreme Court to reverse their defeats in the political arena, presidents of both parties are unlikely to pick nominees who believe the court should strike down very few laws. Instead, the liberal and conservative bases demand ideologically reliable nominees who are not very likely to disappoint them. The day has passed when a thoughtful conservative like Wilkinson, who refuses to toe the party line on guns or Bush v. Gore, could be appointed.
Is there any possibility of resurrecting the tradition of judicial restraint that Wilkinson exalts? Probably not on the current polarized Supreme Court, where neither side is willing to uphold the laws it dislikes the most, since it doesn’t trust the other side to do the same. As Wilkinson warns, for conservatives, restraint would mean that “gun rights and property rights not ride so high in the saddle. . . . For liberals, it means that unenumerated rights of choice not reign free of the need to accommodate conflicting moral and communal values.”
Nevertheless, this modest book is an invaluable reminder of the lost virtues of bipartisan judicial restraint. For law students and citizens who are frustrated with the way that all the constitutional methodologies fail, in practice, to deliver on their promise of helping judges separate their political views and judicial decisions, Wilkinson’s primer offers a diagnosis of the problem and a self-effacing solution. As he suggests, the great proponents of restraint in the past, like Holmes and Brandeis, embodied a spirit of humility rather than a grand theory; they displayed “modesty” about their own views “and respect for the opinions and judgments of others.” For embodying the same sensibility, Wilkinson’s book is both unusual and inspiring.
‘Cosmic Constitutional Theory,’ by J. Harvie Wilkinson III
By JEFFREY ROSEN
Published: March 16, 2012
In courts and law schools across America, the most intense legal battles are fought over theories of constitutional interpretation. From the originalists on the right to the living constitutionalists on the left, each of the warring camps claims that it has discovered the true faith and accuses its opponents of hypocrisy. Now comes Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III with a bracingly clear and bipartisan message: All the theories are bunk! According to Wilkinson’s “Cosmic Constitutional Theory,” “the theories have given rise to nothing less than competing schools of liberal and conservative judicial activism, schools that have little in common other than a desire to seek theoretical cover for prescribed and often partisan results.” As a result of their cosmic theorizing, Wilkinson concludes, liberal and conservative judges and justices are too quick to second-guess the choices of legislatures, and the casualty is “our inalienable right of self-governance.”
COSMIC CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance
By J. Harvie Wilkinson III
161 pp. Oxford University Press. $21.95.
Wilkinson, who was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit by Ronald Reagan, is one of the most respected appellate judges in the country; he was on President George W. Bush’s shortlist for the Supreme Court. It’s not surprising that he indicts liberal justices like William Brennan for embracing a theory of living constitutionalism that “led the courts deep into the thickets of abortion, capital punishment and habeas corpus” by encouraging them to update the Constitution in light of contemporary values. While praising the living constitutionalists for “giving the elected branches leeway to craft fruitfully modern definitions of terms like ‘equality’ and ‘commerce,’” Wilkinson sharply criticizes Roe v. Wade, which he says “flunked simultaneously the three most basic interpretive tests” — it was unsupported by constitutional text, history or structure.
More surprisingly, however, Wilkinson is just as critical of the jurisprudence of original understanding, embraced by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Calling originalism a form of “activism masquerading as restraint,” he says that the methodology “fails to constrain judicial choices” when the historical evidence is ambiguous, which it is in every hard case.
Wilkinson is withering about the Supreme Court’s recent decisions striking down gun control laws under the Second Amendment, which he compares to Roe v. Wade in their tendency to impose “judicial value judgments based on thin and shaky grounds.” He warns that a Supreme Court decision overturning health care reform would be just as activist as one legalizing gay marriage, although he approves of gay marriage, but not President Obama’s health care reform (“seems misconceived in many ways”), on policy grounds. And he has no patience for Bush v. Gore, which he calls “no friend of self-governance.”
Wilkinson also extensively criticizes Judge Richard Posner and his methodology of constitutional pragmatism, which endorses the idea that judges should be policy makers. “Arming judges with reams of data and telling them to go about doing empirical good encourages aggressive review and substitutes judicial fiat for representative policy making,” he writes.
Having expressed dissatisfaction with the leading cosmic constitutional theories for “abetting judicial hubris,” Wilkinson confesses that he has no theory to offer as a substitute. Instead, he points to those great judges in the past “who took the habit of deference seriously,” including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, John Marshall Harlan and Lewis Powell Jr. These justices rarely struck down laws passed by Congress or the states, unless the constitutional arguments for invalidation were so clear that both liberals and conservatives could readily embrace them.
Why is it that not a single justice exemplifies this tradition of bipartisan judicial deference today? Now that the left and the right rely on the Supreme Court to reverse their defeats in the political arena, presidents of both parties are unlikely to pick nominees who believe the court should strike down very few laws. Instead, the liberal and conservative bases demand ideologically reliable nominees who are not very likely to disappoint them. The day has passed when a thoughtful conservative like Wilkinson, who refuses to toe the party line on guns or Bush v. Gore, could be appointed.
Is there any possibility of resurrecting the tradition of judicial restraint that Wilkinson exalts? Probably not on the current polarized Supreme Court, where neither side is willing to uphold the laws it dislikes the most, since it doesn’t trust the other side to do the same. As Wilkinson warns, for conservatives, restraint would mean that “gun rights and property rights not ride so high in the saddle. . . . For liberals, it means that unenumerated rights of choice not reign free of the need to accommodate conflicting moral and communal values.”
Nevertheless, this modest book is an invaluable reminder of the lost virtues of bipartisan judicial restraint. For law students and citizens who are frustrated with the way that all the constitutional methodologies fail, in practice, to deliver on their promise of helping judges separate their political views and judicial decisions, Wilkinson’s primer offers a diagnosis of the problem and a self-effacing solution. As he suggests, the great proponents of restraint in the past, like Holmes and Brandeis, embodied a spirit of humility rather than a grand theory; they displayed “modesty” about their own views “and respect for the opinions and judgments of others.” For embodying the same sensibility, Wilkinson’s book is both unusual and inspiring.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Same as They Ever Were
by Paul Krugman
SAME AS THEY EVER WERE
Rick Perlstein takes on the perception that conservatives have gotten crazier, and argues that they haven’t — they were always like this. It’s an excellent read, and you should go read it.
I’d just like to add a couple of further data points. Rick says, rightly, that Ronald Reagan was very much into crazy conspiracy theories, but learned to hide it. The thing is, it wasn’t just the Bircher stuff: remember, Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom:
And as Rick also says, the idea of William F. Buckley as a cuddly, reasonable conservative should make anyone who has looked at the actual record gag. In the “good old days”, National Review was fiercely opposed to equal rights for African-Americans, and hailed Generalissimo Francisco Franco — a brutal dictator, no matter how you try to spin it by saying that the other side was nasty too — as a hero.
All that has happened to conservatism is the moral collapse of “moderate” Republicans, who are now afraid to criticize the extreme wing that has been there all along.
SAME AS THEY EVER WERE
Rick Perlstein takes on the perception that conservatives have gotten crazier, and argues that they haven’t — they were always like this. It’s an excellent read, and you should go read it.
I’d just like to add a couple of further data points. Rick says, rightly, that Ronald Reagan was very much into crazy conspiracy theories, but learned to hide it. The thing is, it wasn’t just the Bircher stuff: remember, Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom:
And as Rick also says, the idea of William F. Buckley as a cuddly, reasonable conservative should make anyone who has looked at the actual record gag. In the “good old days”, National Review was fiercely opposed to equal rights for African-Americans, and hailed Generalissimo Francisco Franco — a brutal dictator, no matter how you try to spin it by saying that the other side was nasty too — as a hero.
All that has happened to conservatism is the moral collapse of “moderate” Republicans, who are now afraid to criticize the extreme wing that has been there all along.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Conservatives Haven't Changed
There are those who say that conservatives are getting nuttier and nuttier, that today's wacko conservatives are worse than their predecessors. Not so, say Corey Robin and Rick Perlstein, and they are absolutely correct. Conservatives have always been crazy.
Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years
POSTED: March 16, 11:55 AM ET | By Rick Perlstein
Republican debate audiences cheer executions and boo an active-duty soldier because he is gay. Politicians pledge allegiance to Rush Limbaugh, a pill-popping lunatic who recently offered "feminazis" a deal: "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." Thousands of "Oath Keepers" — "Police & Military Against the New World Order"— swear to disobey the illegal orders certain to come down the pike once Barack Obama institutes martial law. One major Republican presidential candidate talks up indentured servitude — and another proposes turning schoolchildren into janitors. Only 12 percent of Mississippi Republicans believe Barack Obama is a Christian. Arizona Republicans push a bill to allow bosses to fire female employees for using birth control.
And so on and so forth, unto whatever wacky new wingnuttism just flashed over the wires today.
But are right-wingers scarier now than in the past? They certainly seem stranger and fiercer. I'd argue, however, that they’ve been this crazy for a long time. Over the last sixty years or so, I see far more continuities than discontinuities in what the rightward twenty or thirty percent of Americans believe about the world. The crazy things they believed and wanted were obscured by their lack of power, but they were always there – if you knew where to look. What's changed is that loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP.
I'm in a unique position to judge. A sixties obsessive since childhood, I misspent my teenage years prowling a ramshackle five-story used-book warehouse that somehow managed, until last October, to stay one step ahead of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's building inspectors. There, I collected volumes from a decade gone mad: texts by Black Panthers decrying "AmeriKKKa"; by New Leftists proclaiming that "the future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets"; and by right-wingers like preacher David Noebel, who exposed the "Communist subversion of music" by which Russian spymasters deployed Pavlov's techniques to rot the minds of America's youth via their bought-and-paid-for agents, the Beatles. People who thought like Black Panthers and New Leftists, of course, proved a historical flash in the pan. People like Noebel, however, have proved a constant in American history. In fact, Noebel himself is still with us. In the 1970s, he was a favorite source for James Dobson, the still enormously popular Christian Right radio pschologist and Republican power broker. Most recently, Noebel's reputation got a boost from an admiring Glenn Beck on Fox News, and now he’s a Tea Party favorite.
Over fifteen years of studying the American right professionally — especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s — I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right "thought." Right-wing radio hosts fingering liberal billionaires like George Soros, who use their gigantic fortunes – built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution – out to "socialize" the United States? 1954: Here's a right-wing radio host fingering "gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution ... being used to 'socialize' the United States." Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, "fed up with elitist judges" arrogantly imposing their "radically un-American views" — including judges on the Supreme Court, whose rulings he's pledged to defy? 1958: Nine Men Against America: The Supreme Court and its Attack on American Liberties, still on sale at sovereignstates.org.
Only the names of the ogres have changed — although sometimes they haven't. Dr. Noebel's latest project is to republish a volume he apparently finds freshly relevant, Dr. Fred Schwarz's You Can Trust the Communists: To be Communists. Schwarz, an Australian physician who died three years ago, had his heyday in the early 1960s, when he would fill municipal auditoriums preaching his favorite gospel: that the Kremlin dominated its subjects by deploying "the techniques of animal husbandry," and harbored "plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973." The new version, updated by Noebel – it comes with raves from grateful Amazon.com reviews, like this: "Just as important as it was 50 years ago"; and this: "Should be required reading for every American," and "This book made me a conservative" – is titled You Can Still Trust the Communists: To be Communists, Socialists, Statists, and Progressives Too.
Why does this matter? Because the notion that conservatism has taken a new, and nuttier, turn has influential adherents whose distortions derail our ability to understand and contain it. In a recent New York Review of Books review of Corey Robin's ground-breaking book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which traces continuities in right-wing thought all the back to the seventeenth century, the distinguished political theorist Mark Lilla pronounced that "most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley." So what did a "reality-based conservative" like Buckley make of Fred Schwarz? Reader, he blurbed him, praising the good doctor for "instructing the people in what their leaders so clearly don’t know." So, in fact, did Ronald Reagan, who in 1990 praised the quack's "tireless dedication in trying to ensure the protection of freedom and human rights." And here's the late GOP heavyweight Jack Kemp, who wrote in praise of Schwarz's 1996 memoir (Reagan is pictured with Schwarz on the flap): "How much I appreciate the fact that as much as anybody, including President Reagan, President Bush, and Pope John Paul … [Dr. Schwarz] has had the opportunity to educate literally thousands of young men and women all over the world in the struggle for democracy and freedom and the struggle against the tyranny of Communism." The "establishment conservatives," Reagan and Kemp, and the "nut," Dr. Fred Schwarz, were never so far apart after all.
You hear a lot about Ronald Reagan from the conservatives-are-nuttier-than-ever-before crowd: They praise him as a compromiser and point out, correctly, that he raised taxes seven of his eight years as president, in stark contrast to today's Republicans, who refuse to raise them at all. Here's the thing, as I wrote amid the hosannas after he died in 2004, during the awful reign of Bush: "It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater."
And so it goes: Reagan is now deemed one of those reality-based conservatives whose disappearance we now lament. Wrong. Deeply informed by the whackadoodle far-right, Reagan at earlier points in his career loved to quote its nostrums: that according to Communists blueprints "by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free"; that, as he said in a 1975 interview – rehabilitating a quote supposedly from Vladimir Lenin but in fact made up by the founder of the John Birch Society – once Lenin and his comrades had organized the "hordes of Asia," then conquered Latin America, "the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, [would] fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit." But he was also a good politician, and as such he learned to avoid saying things that disadvantaged him politically. The reason he didn't effectively fight tax increases was because, with a Democratic Congress, he didn't have the power to do so. Every time he actually had to sign one he made his preferences perfectly clear, blaming wicked liberals for forcing his hand and adding that this was why liberalism had to be defeated — so that he wouldn't have to sign one again.
This was "reality based." But so, politically at least, is the obstructionism of today's supposedly non-reality-based conservatives: They block all tax increases because they can. And it's worked, hasn't it? That's because as conservative power has steadily increased since the 1960s, more and more of what conservatives actually believe — and have always actually believed —has come to shape American society and its institutions.
That dynamic has ever been accompanied by another: As more and more of the sub-rosa conservative extremism – think: women who use birth control are sluts, taxation is theft, all public goods should be privatized – finds its way into high-level debates in the halls of Congress, into the decisions of an increasingly right-leaning federal judiciary, into presidential campaigns and the A sections of major metropolitan newspapers, mainstream pundits declare that conservatism is on its way out, since, like a vampire, it cannot survive in the light of day. When Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election by a landslide, the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker proclaimed that "with tragic inevitability" conservatism had "cracked like a pane of glass." Yet somehow conservatives managed to survive and thrive — electing Ronald Reagan for two terms as California governor, starting in 1966. After Reagan's handpicked successor lost the Republican nomination in 1974, Joseph Kraft of the Washington Post pronounced that "the rout of Reaganism in this state announces what seems to be a national possibility, the possibility of closing the parenthesis on the era of backlash politics which has been so strong in the country since Ronald Reagan rode out of the TV movies back in 1966." In similar vein, in her book on the generation of activists behind Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution of 1994, Nina Easton argued that the insistence by leaders like Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed that liberalism was "a slippery slope to socialism and to Communism" would destroy "the public support he needed if he was to achieve his vision of a mass movement."
It didn't. And yet, like clockwork, today's prophet of conservative doom, the journalist Jonathan Chait, finds conservatism cracking like a pane of glass now that, in the face of the demographic time bomb of an increasingly younger and browner electorate that he says makes the triumph of enlightenment liberalism all but inevitable, its latent extremism is finally surfacing — breaking "new ground in the realm of foolhardiness," as he puts it.
Here's the problem: To this way of thinking, the triumph of enlightenment liberalism is always inevitable. Now it’s demographics that's the inexorable force (I debunk that argument here); in the 1960s, it was the certainty that Americans would never consent to give up their big-government perks. And yet, somehow, alongside the ordinary tacking of American political preference between Democrats and Republicans, conservatism continues to thrive. That's because power begets power: Democrats can be counted on to compromise with conservative nuttiness, and the media can be counted on to normalize it. And it's because there will always be millions of Americans who are terrified of social progress and of dispossession from whatever slight purchase on psychological security they've been able to maintain in a frightening world. And because there will always be powerful economic actors for whom exploiting such fear, uncertainty and doubt pays (and pays, and pays).
Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it's not going away, either. It's just getting more powerful. That's a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.
Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. He writes a weekly column for RollingStone.com.
Also by Rick Perlstein
• Romney and Son: What Mitt Learned from his Dad
• Why Newt Gingrich's Greatest Triumph Was Founded on a Scam
• Why Mitt Romney's Mormonism Doesn't Matter
• Ronald Reagan: Welfare Queen of Montana (or: Tax Tips for Mitt Romney)"
• Obama at Halftime: How He Fumbled, Why He's Recovering
• What Obama Needs to Change to Win
• Why Democrats Have a Problem With Young Voters
• Rick Santorum Was Wrong About Obama and College - But Not Completely Wrong
Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years
POSTED: March 16, 11:55 AM ET | By Rick Perlstein
Republican debate audiences cheer executions and boo an active-duty soldier because he is gay. Politicians pledge allegiance to Rush Limbaugh, a pill-popping lunatic who recently offered "feminazis" a deal: "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." Thousands of "Oath Keepers" — "Police & Military Against the New World Order"— swear to disobey the illegal orders certain to come down the pike once Barack Obama institutes martial law. One major Republican presidential candidate talks up indentured servitude — and another proposes turning schoolchildren into janitors. Only 12 percent of Mississippi Republicans believe Barack Obama is a Christian. Arizona Republicans push a bill to allow bosses to fire female employees for using birth control.
And so on and so forth, unto whatever wacky new wingnuttism just flashed over the wires today.
But are right-wingers scarier now than in the past? They certainly seem stranger and fiercer. I'd argue, however, that they’ve been this crazy for a long time. Over the last sixty years or so, I see far more continuities than discontinuities in what the rightward twenty or thirty percent of Americans believe about the world. The crazy things they believed and wanted were obscured by their lack of power, but they were always there – if you knew where to look. What's changed is that loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP.
I'm in a unique position to judge. A sixties obsessive since childhood, I misspent my teenage years prowling a ramshackle five-story used-book warehouse that somehow managed, until last October, to stay one step ahead of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's building inspectors. There, I collected volumes from a decade gone mad: texts by Black Panthers decrying "AmeriKKKa"; by New Leftists proclaiming that "the future of our struggle is the future of crime in the streets"; and by right-wingers like preacher David Noebel, who exposed the "Communist subversion of music" by which Russian spymasters deployed Pavlov's techniques to rot the minds of America's youth via their bought-and-paid-for agents, the Beatles. People who thought like Black Panthers and New Leftists, of course, proved a historical flash in the pan. People like Noebel, however, have proved a constant in American history. In fact, Noebel himself is still with us. In the 1970s, he was a favorite source for James Dobson, the still enormously popular Christian Right radio pschologist and Republican power broker. Most recently, Noebel's reputation got a boost from an admiring Glenn Beck on Fox News, and now he’s a Tea Party favorite.
Over fifteen years of studying the American right professionally — especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s — I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right "thought." Right-wing radio hosts fingering liberal billionaires like George Soros, who use their gigantic fortunes – built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution – out to "socialize" the United States? 1954: Here's a right-wing radio host fingering "gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution ... being used to 'socialize' the United States." Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, "fed up with elitist judges" arrogantly imposing their "radically un-American views" — including judges on the Supreme Court, whose rulings he's pledged to defy? 1958: Nine Men Against America: The Supreme Court and its Attack on American Liberties, still on sale at sovereignstates.org.
Only the names of the ogres have changed — although sometimes they haven't. Dr. Noebel's latest project is to republish a volume he apparently finds freshly relevant, Dr. Fred Schwarz's You Can Trust the Communists: To be Communists. Schwarz, an Australian physician who died three years ago, had his heyday in the early 1960s, when he would fill municipal auditoriums preaching his favorite gospel: that the Kremlin dominated its subjects by deploying "the techniques of animal husbandry," and harbored "plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973." The new version, updated by Noebel – it comes with raves from grateful Amazon.com reviews, like this: "Just as important as it was 50 years ago"; and this: "Should be required reading for every American," and "This book made me a conservative" – is titled You Can Still Trust the Communists: To be Communists, Socialists, Statists, and Progressives Too.
Why does this matter? Because the notion that conservatism has taken a new, and nuttier, turn has influential adherents whose distortions derail our ability to understand and contain it. In a recent New York Review of Books review of Corey Robin's ground-breaking book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which traces continuities in right-wing thought all the back to the seventeenth century, the distinguished political theorist Mark Lilla pronounced that "most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley." So what did a "reality-based conservative" like Buckley make of Fred Schwarz? Reader, he blurbed him, praising the good doctor for "instructing the people in what their leaders so clearly don’t know." So, in fact, did Ronald Reagan, who in 1990 praised the quack's "tireless dedication in trying to ensure the protection of freedom and human rights." And here's the late GOP heavyweight Jack Kemp, who wrote in praise of Schwarz's 1996 memoir (Reagan is pictured with Schwarz on the flap): "How much I appreciate the fact that as much as anybody, including President Reagan, President Bush, and Pope John Paul … [Dr. Schwarz] has had the opportunity to educate literally thousands of young men and women all over the world in the struggle for democracy and freedom and the struggle against the tyranny of Communism." The "establishment conservatives," Reagan and Kemp, and the "nut," Dr. Fred Schwarz, were never so far apart after all.
You hear a lot about Ronald Reagan from the conservatives-are-nuttier-than-ever-before crowd: They praise him as a compromiser and point out, correctly, that he raised taxes seven of his eight years as president, in stark contrast to today's Republicans, who refuse to raise them at all. Here's the thing, as I wrote amid the hosannas after he died in 2004, during the awful reign of Bush: "It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater."
And so it goes: Reagan is now deemed one of those reality-based conservatives whose disappearance we now lament. Wrong. Deeply informed by the whackadoodle far-right, Reagan at earlier points in his career loved to quote its nostrums: that according to Communists blueprints "by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free"; that, as he said in a 1975 interview – rehabilitating a quote supposedly from Vladimir Lenin but in fact made up by the founder of the John Birch Society – once Lenin and his comrades had organized the "hordes of Asia," then conquered Latin America, "the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, [would] fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit." But he was also a good politician, and as such he learned to avoid saying things that disadvantaged him politically. The reason he didn't effectively fight tax increases was because, with a Democratic Congress, he didn't have the power to do so. Every time he actually had to sign one he made his preferences perfectly clear, blaming wicked liberals for forcing his hand and adding that this was why liberalism had to be defeated — so that he wouldn't have to sign one again.
This was "reality based." But so, politically at least, is the obstructionism of today's supposedly non-reality-based conservatives: They block all tax increases because they can. And it's worked, hasn't it? That's because as conservative power has steadily increased since the 1960s, more and more of what conservatives actually believe — and have always actually believed —has come to shape American society and its institutions.
That dynamic has ever been accompanied by another: As more and more of the sub-rosa conservative extremism – think: women who use birth control are sluts, taxation is theft, all public goods should be privatized – finds its way into high-level debates in the halls of Congress, into the decisions of an increasingly right-leaning federal judiciary, into presidential campaigns and the A sections of major metropolitan newspapers, mainstream pundits declare that conservatism is on its way out, since, like a vampire, it cannot survive in the light of day. When Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election by a landslide, the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker proclaimed that "with tragic inevitability" conservatism had "cracked like a pane of glass." Yet somehow conservatives managed to survive and thrive — electing Ronald Reagan for two terms as California governor, starting in 1966. After Reagan's handpicked successor lost the Republican nomination in 1974, Joseph Kraft of the Washington Post pronounced that "the rout of Reaganism in this state announces what seems to be a national possibility, the possibility of closing the parenthesis on the era of backlash politics which has been so strong in the country since Ronald Reagan rode out of the TV movies back in 1966." In similar vein, in her book on the generation of activists behind Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution of 1994, Nina Easton argued that the insistence by leaders like Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed that liberalism was "a slippery slope to socialism and to Communism" would destroy "the public support he needed if he was to achieve his vision of a mass movement."
It didn't. And yet, like clockwork, today's prophet of conservative doom, the journalist Jonathan Chait, finds conservatism cracking like a pane of glass now that, in the face of the demographic time bomb of an increasingly younger and browner electorate that he says makes the triumph of enlightenment liberalism all but inevitable, its latent extremism is finally surfacing — breaking "new ground in the realm of foolhardiness," as he puts it.
Here's the problem: To this way of thinking, the triumph of enlightenment liberalism is always inevitable. Now it’s demographics that's the inexorable force (I debunk that argument here); in the 1960s, it was the certainty that Americans would never consent to give up their big-government perks. And yet, somehow, alongside the ordinary tacking of American political preference between Democrats and Republicans, conservatism continues to thrive. That's because power begets power: Democrats can be counted on to compromise with conservative nuttiness, and the media can be counted on to normalize it. And it's because there will always be millions of Americans who are terrified of social progress and of dispossession from whatever slight purchase on psychological security they've been able to maintain in a frightening world. And because there will always be powerful economic actors for whom exploiting such fear, uncertainty and doubt pays (and pays, and pays).
Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it's not going away, either. It's just getting more powerful. That's a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.
Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. He writes a weekly column for RollingStone.com.
Also by Rick Perlstein
• Romney and Son: What Mitt Learned from his Dad
• Why Newt Gingrich's Greatest Triumph Was Founded on a Scam
• Why Mitt Romney's Mormonism Doesn't Matter
• Ronald Reagan: Welfare Queen of Montana (or: Tax Tips for Mitt Romney)"
• Obama at Halftime: How He Fumbled, Why He's Recovering
• What Obama Needs to Change to Win
• Why Democrats Have a Problem With Young Voters
• Rick Santorum Was Wrong About Obama and College - But Not Completely Wrong
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Everything Has a Price (for those able to pay)
What Isn’t for Sale?
From The Atlantic March 15, 2012
Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.
By Michael J. Sandel
There are some things money can’t buy—but these days, not many. Almost everything is up for sale. For example:
• A prison-cell upgrade: $90 a night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to disturb them.
• Access to the carpool lane while driving solo: $8. Minneapolis, San Diego, Houston, Seattle, and other cities have sought to ease traffic congestion by letting solo drivers pay to drive in carpool lanes, at rates that vary according to traffic.
• The services of an Indian surrogate mother: $8,000. Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly outsource the job to India, and the price is less than one-third the going rate in the United States.
• The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000. South Africa has begun letting some ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered species.
• Your doctor’s cellphone number: $1,500 and up per year. A growing number of “concierge” doctors offer cellphone access and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual fees ranging from $1,500 to $25,000.
• The right to emit a metric ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: $10.50. The European Union runs a carbon-dioxide-emissions market that enables companies to buy and sell the right to pollute.
• The right to immigrate to the United States: $500,000. Foreigners who invest $500,000 and create at least 10 full-time jobs in an area of high unemployment are eligible for a green card that entitles them to permanent residency.
Not everyone can afford to buy these things. But today there are lots of new ways to make money. If you need to earn some extra cash, here are some novel possibilities:
• Sell space on your forehead to display commercial advertising: $10,000. A single mother in Utah who needed money for her son’s education was paid $10,000 by an online casino to install a permanent tattoo of the casino’s Web address on her forehead. Temporary tattoo ads earn less.
• Serve as a human guinea pig in a drug-safety trial for a pharmaceutical company: $7,500. The pay can be higher or lower, depending on the invasiveness of the procedure used to test the drug’s effect and the discomfort involved.
• Fight in Somalia or Afghanistan for a private military contractor: up to $1,000 a day. The pay varies according to qualifications, experience, and nationality.
• Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a place for a lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing: $15–$20 an hour. Lobbyists pay line-standing companies, who hire homeless people and others to queue up.
• If you are a second-grader in an underachieving Dallas school, read a book: $2. To encourage reading, schools pay kids for each book they read.
We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.
As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.
The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation—an era of market triumphalism. The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it continued into the 1990s with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.
Today, that faith is in question. The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals, and that we need to somehow reconnect the two. But it’s not obvious what this would mean, or how we should go about it.
Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed, which led to irresponsible risk-taking. The solution, according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on greater integrity and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives, and enact sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.
This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger was and is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t.
Consider, for example, the proliferation of for-profit schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the outsourcing of war to private military contractors. (In Iraq and Afghanistan, private contractors have actually outnumbered U.S. military troops.) Consider the eclipse of public police forces by private security firms—especially in the U.S. and the U.K., where the number of private guards is almost twice the number of public police officers.
Or consider the pharmaceutical companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice now prevalent in the U.S. but prohibited in most other countries. (If you’ve ever seen the television commercials on the evening news, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest health crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness but an epidemic of erectile dysfunction.)
Consider too the reach of commercial advertising into public schools, from buses to corridors to cafeterias; the sale of “naming rights” to parks and civic spaces; the blurred boundaries, within journalism, between news and advertising, likely to blur further as newspapers and magazines struggle to survive; the marketing of “designer” eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction; the buying and selling, by companies and countries, of the right to pollute; a system of campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to permitting the buying and selling of elections.
These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods were for the most part unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.
Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?
For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.
The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.
Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.
When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use.
Something similar can be said of other cherished goods and practices. We don’t allow children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be or how willing impatient prospective parents might be. Even if the prospective buyers would treat the child responsibly, we worry that a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them. Children are properly regarded not as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love and care. Or consider the rights and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty, you can’t hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow citizens to sell their votes, even though others might be eager to buy them. Why not? Because we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way.
These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.
This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.
The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?
Even if you agree that we need to grapple with big questions about the morality of markets, you might doubt that our public discourse is up to the task. It’s a legitimate worry. At a time when political argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable television, partisan vitriol on talk radio, and ideological food fights on the floor of Congress, it’s hard to imagine a reasoned public debate about such controversial moral questions as the right way to value procreation, children, education, health, the environment, citizenship, and other goods. I believe such a debate is possible, but only if we are willing to broaden the terms of our public discourse and grapple more explicitly with competing notions of the good life.
In hopes of avoiding sectarian strife, we often insist that citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions behind when they enter the public square. But the reluctance to admit arguments about the good life into politics has had an unanticipated consequence. It has helped prepare the way for market triumphalism, and for the continuing hold of market reasoning.
In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is “How much?” Markets don’t wag fingers. They don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones. Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged.
This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.
A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong. Thinking through the appropriate place of markets requires that we reason together, in public, about the right way to value the social goods we prize. It would be folly to expect that a more morally robust public discourse, even at its best, would lead to agreement on every contested question. But it would make for a healthier public life. And it would make us more aware of the price we pay for living in a society where everything is up for sale.
From The Atlantic March 15, 2012
Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.
By Michael J. Sandel
There are some things money can’t buy—but these days, not many. Almost everything is up for sale. For example:
• A prison-cell upgrade: $90 a night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to disturb them.
• Access to the carpool lane while driving solo: $8. Minneapolis, San Diego, Houston, Seattle, and other cities have sought to ease traffic congestion by letting solo drivers pay to drive in carpool lanes, at rates that vary according to traffic.
• The services of an Indian surrogate mother: $8,000. Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly outsource the job to India, and the price is less than one-third the going rate in the United States.
• The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000. South Africa has begun letting some ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered species.
• Your doctor’s cellphone number: $1,500 and up per year. A growing number of “concierge” doctors offer cellphone access and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual fees ranging from $1,500 to $25,000.
• The right to emit a metric ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: $10.50. The European Union runs a carbon-dioxide-emissions market that enables companies to buy and sell the right to pollute.
• The right to immigrate to the United States: $500,000. Foreigners who invest $500,000 and create at least 10 full-time jobs in an area of high unemployment are eligible for a green card that entitles them to permanent residency.
Not everyone can afford to buy these things. But today there are lots of new ways to make money. If you need to earn some extra cash, here are some novel possibilities:
• Sell space on your forehead to display commercial advertising: $10,000. A single mother in Utah who needed money for her son’s education was paid $10,000 by an online casino to install a permanent tattoo of the casino’s Web address on her forehead. Temporary tattoo ads earn less.
• Serve as a human guinea pig in a drug-safety trial for a pharmaceutical company: $7,500. The pay can be higher or lower, depending on the invasiveness of the procedure used to test the drug’s effect and the discomfort involved.
• Fight in Somalia or Afghanistan for a private military contractor: up to $1,000 a day. The pay varies according to qualifications, experience, and nationality.
• Stand in line overnight on Capitol Hill to hold a place for a lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing: $15–$20 an hour. Lobbyists pay line-standing companies, who hire homeless people and others to queue up.
• If you are a second-grader in an underachieving Dallas school, read a book: $2. To encourage reading, schools pay kids for each book they read.
We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.
As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.
The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation—an era of market triumphalism. The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom. And it continued into the 1990s with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.
Today, that faith is in question. The financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets have become detached from morals, and that we need to somehow reconnect the two. But it’s not obvious what this would mean, or how we should go about it.
Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed, which led to irresponsible risk-taking. The solution, according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on greater integrity and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives, and enact sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.
This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger was and is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t.
Consider, for example, the proliferation of for-profit schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the outsourcing of war to private military contractors. (In Iraq and Afghanistan, private contractors have actually outnumbered U.S. military troops.) Consider the eclipse of public police forces by private security firms—especially in the U.S. and the U.K., where the number of private guards is almost twice the number of public police officers.
Or consider the pharmaceutical companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice now prevalent in the U.S. but prohibited in most other countries. (If you’ve ever seen the television commercials on the evening news, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest health crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness but an epidemic of erectile dysfunction.)
Consider too the reach of commercial advertising into public schools, from buses to corridors to cafeterias; the sale of “naming rights” to parks and civic spaces; the blurred boundaries, within journalism, between news and advertising, likely to blur further as newspapers and magazines struggle to survive; the marketing of “designer” eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction; the buying and selling, by companies and countries, of the right to pollute; a system of campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to permitting the buying and selling of elections.
These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods were for the most part unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.
Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?
For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.
The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.
Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.
When we decide that certain goods may be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is appropriate to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. But not all goods are properly valued in this way. The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings as persons, worthy of dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of use.
Something similar can be said of other cherished goods and practices. We don’t allow children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be or how willing impatient prospective parents might be. Even if the prospective buyers would treat the child responsibly, we worry that a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them. Children are properly regarded not as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love and care. Or consider the rights and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty, you can’t hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow citizens to sell their votes, even though others might be eager to buy them. Why not? Because we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way.
These examples illustrate a broader point: some of the good things in life are degraded if turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods in question—health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To resolve them, we have to debate, case by case, the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them.
This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.
The difference is this: A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.
The great missing debate in contemporary politics is about the role and reach of markets. Do we want a market economy, or a market society? What role should markets play in public life and personal relations? How can we decide which goods should be bought and sold, and which should be governed by nonmarket values? Where should money’s writ not run?
Even if you agree that we need to grapple with big questions about the morality of markets, you might doubt that our public discourse is up to the task. It’s a legitimate worry. At a time when political argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable television, partisan vitriol on talk radio, and ideological food fights on the floor of Congress, it’s hard to imagine a reasoned public debate about such controversial moral questions as the right way to value procreation, children, education, health, the environment, citizenship, and other goods. I believe such a debate is possible, but only if we are willing to broaden the terms of our public discourse and grapple more explicitly with competing notions of the good life.
In hopes of avoiding sectarian strife, we often insist that citizens leave their moral and spiritual convictions behind when they enter the public square. But the reluctance to admit arguments about the good life into politics has had an unanticipated consequence. It has helped prepare the way for market triumphalism, and for the continuing hold of market reasoning.
In its own way, market reasoning also empties public life of moral argument. Part of the appeal of markets is that they don’t pass judgment on the preferences they satisfy. They don’t ask whether some ways of valuing goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay for sex, or a kidney, and a consenting adult is willing to sell, the only question the economist asks is “How much?” Markets don’t wag fingers. They don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and unworthy ones. Each party to a deal decides for him- or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged.
This nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning, and explains much of its appeal. But our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has exacted a heavy price: it has drained public discourse of moral and civic energy, and contributed to the technocratic, managerial politics afflicting many societies today.
A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong. Thinking through the appropriate place of markets requires that we reason together, in public, about the right way to value the social goods we prize. It would be folly to expect that a more morally robust public discourse, even at its best, would lead to agreement on every contested question. But it would make for a healthier public life. And it would make us more aware of the price we pay for living in a society where everything is up for sale.
The Truth about the Rise in Gas Prices
PricesThursday, Mar 15, 2012 4:38 PM 17:21:40 CDT
Blame the GOP for $4 gas
An under-regulated Wall Street -- not the president's energy policy -- is what's driving prices upBy Robert Reich
Gas prices continue to rise, which is finally giving
Republicans an issue. Mitt Romney is demanding the president open up more domestic drilling; the super PAC behind Rick Santorum just released a new ad in Louisiana blasting the president on gas prices; and the GOP is attacking the White House on the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But the rise in gas prices has almost nothing to do with energy policy. It has everything to do with America’s continuing failure to adequately regulate Wall Street. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Republicans to tell the truth.
As I’ve noted before, oil supplies aren’t being squeezed. Over 80 percent of America’s energy needs are now being satisfied by domestic supplies. In fact, we’re starting to become an energy exporter. Demand for oil isn’t rising in any event. Demand is down in the U.S. compared to last year at this time, and global demand is still moderate given the economic slowdowns in Europe and China.
But Wall Street is betting on higher oil prices in the future — and that betting is causing prices to rise. The Street is laying odds that unrest in Syria will spill over into other countries or that tensions with Iran will affect the Persian Gulf, and that global demand will pick up as American consumers bounce back to life.
These bets are pushing up oil prices because Wall Street firms and other big financial players now dominate oil trading.
Financial speculators historically accounted for about 30 percent of oil contracts, producers and end users for about 70 percent. But today speculators account for 64 percent of all contracts.
Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the federal agency that regulates trading in oil futures, among other commodities — warns that too few financial players control too much of the oil market. This allows them to push oil prices higher and higher — not only on the basis of their expectations about the future but also expectations about how high other speculators will drive the price.
In other words, a relatively few players with very deep pockets are placing huge bets on oil — and you’re paying.
Chilton estimates that drivers of small cars like Honda Civics are paying an extra $7.30 every time they fill up — and that money is going into the pockets of Wall Street speculators. Drivers of larger vehicles like the Ford Explorer are paying speculators $10.41 when they fill up.
Funny, but I don’t hear Republicans rail against Wall Street speculators. Could this have anything to do with the fact that hedge funds and money managers are bankrolling the GOP as never before?
Wall Street isn’t bankrolling Democrats nearly as much this time around because the Street is still smarting from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law pushed by the Democrats, and from the president’s offhand remark in 2010 calling the denizens of the Street “fat cats.”
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is trying to limit how much speculators can bet in oil futures — a power it was given by Dodd-Frank. It issued a rule in October, but it won’t take effect for another year.
Meanwhile, Wall Street has gone to court to stop the rule. It’s already won a stay.
As rising gas prices start wagging the election-year dog, the president should let America know what’s really causing prices to rise.
Blame the GOP for $4 gas
An under-regulated Wall Street -- not the president's energy policy -- is what's driving prices upBy Robert Reich
Gas prices continue to rise, which is finally giving
Republicans an issue. Mitt Romney is demanding the president open up more domestic drilling; the super PAC behind Rick Santorum just released a new ad in Louisiana blasting the president on gas prices; and the GOP is attacking the White House on the Keystone XL Pipeline.
But the rise in gas prices has almost nothing to do with energy policy. It has everything to do with America’s continuing failure to adequately regulate Wall Street. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Republicans to tell the truth.
As I’ve noted before, oil supplies aren’t being squeezed. Over 80 percent of America’s energy needs are now being satisfied by domestic supplies. In fact, we’re starting to become an energy exporter. Demand for oil isn’t rising in any event. Demand is down in the U.S. compared to last year at this time, and global demand is still moderate given the economic slowdowns in Europe and China.
But Wall Street is betting on higher oil prices in the future — and that betting is causing prices to rise. The Street is laying odds that unrest in Syria will spill over into other countries or that tensions with Iran will affect the Persian Gulf, and that global demand will pick up as American consumers bounce back to life.
These bets are pushing up oil prices because Wall Street firms and other big financial players now dominate oil trading.
Financial speculators historically accounted for about 30 percent of oil contracts, producers and end users for about 70 percent. But today speculators account for 64 percent of all contracts.
Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the federal agency that regulates trading in oil futures, among other commodities — warns that too few financial players control too much of the oil market. This allows them to push oil prices higher and higher — not only on the basis of their expectations about the future but also expectations about how high other speculators will drive the price.
In other words, a relatively few players with very deep pockets are placing huge bets on oil — and you’re paying.
Chilton estimates that drivers of small cars like Honda Civics are paying an extra $7.30 every time they fill up — and that money is going into the pockets of Wall Street speculators. Drivers of larger vehicles like the Ford Explorer are paying speculators $10.41 when they fill up.
Funny, but I don’t hear Republicans rail against Wall Street speculators. Could this have anything to do with the fact that hedge funds and money managers are bankrolling the GOP as never before?
Wall Street isn’t bankrolling Democrats nearly as much this time around because the Street is still smarting from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law pushed by the Democrats, and from the president’s offhand remark in 2010 calling the denizens of the Street “fat cats.”
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is trying to limit how much speculators can bet in oil futures — a power it was given by Dodd-Frank. It issued a rule in October, but it won’t take effect for another year.
Meanwhile, Wall Street has gone to court to stop the rule. It’s already won a stay.
As rising gas prices start wagging the election-year dog, the president should let America know what’s really causing prices to rise.
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