On my way to lunch at 11 in the breeze at the Pelham Diner I thought about my jeweler from my hometown of Winfield. Travis Webb, my dad's best friend, would eat lunch everyday at 11 at Wesley's Grill, a quick jaunt down the way from Webb's Jewelry. Travis would kill a Mountain Dew, turning it straight up and not putting it down till it was gone in one swig. He would usually eat the beef stew at the Grill. Them was good old days growing up in a small Alabama town in the 60's. I drink fountain Mt. Dew today in his honor. I still wear the wedding ring he sold me in 1980.
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Could there soon be an American counterpart to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, a right-wing populist who in 2018 declared, “We must demonstrate that there is an alternative to liberal democracy: It is called Christian democracy. And we must show that the liberal elite can be replaced with a Christian democratic elite”?
Liberal democracy, Orban continued,
is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. And we can specifically say this in connection with a few important issues — say, three great issues. Liberal democracy is in favor of multiculturalism, while Christian democracy gives priority to Christian culture; this is an illiberal concept. Liberal democracy is pro-immigration, while Christian democracy is anti-immigration; this is again a genuinely illiberal concept. And liberal democracy sides with adaptable family models, while Christian democracy rests on the foundations of the Christian family model; once more, this is an illiberal concept.
MAGA Racism
The connection between racism and the right-wing movement is apparent in a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute.
Robert P. Jones, who leads PRRI, tells me, “While this result may seem surprising or even shocking to many White Christians, it is because we do not know our own history. If we take a clear-eyed look at our history, we see a widespread, centuries-long Christian defense of white supremacy.” He adds, “For example, every major Protestant Christian denomination split over the issue of slavery in the Civil War, with Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists in the South all breaking fellowship with their Northern brethren.” Given that history, Jones says, “it’s hardly a surprise that a denial of systemic racism is a defining feature of White evangelicalism today.”
The PRRI poll shows the MAGA movement has done a solid job convincing the core of the GOP base that they are victims. And let’s be clear: An aggrieved electoral minority that believes it has been victimized and is ready to deploy violence is a serious threat to an inclusive democracy.
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Allen Barra - Rickwood Field - Notes
This book which I knew nothing about until I discovered it at the Hoover B & N is enchanting. All Birmingham people are enchanted with Rickwood Field. The complete story is here. Barra is a long-time sportswriter who grew up in Mountain Brook. He knows the history of Birmingham as well as the history of Rickwood Field.
The idea for Rickwood began with the construction of Shibe Park in Philadelphia in 1909, the first modern concrete and steel baseball park in the country, the inspiration for Rickwood Field, the second concrete and steel baseball field built in 1910. Shibe was the inspiration for Rickwood for the stadium's builder.
Shibe was built by Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy Sr. better known as Connie Mack, owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for decades.
Allen Harvey Woodward, known to his friends as "Rick," had taken the train from Birmingham to Philadelphia to witness the christening of the new marvel, the first concrete-and-steel sports structure in America. Woodward told Mack about his plans to build a similar baseball park in Alsbama. Mack was supportive and the two hit it off. Mack came to BHAM and advised Woodward on the design of Rickwood. He suggested the trajectory of the right field line, the deep fences especially the deep centerfield fence and the deep backstop space. I am not sure about the right field porch
Rick Woodward wanted to be a baseball man like Connie Mack.
In the 1880's mine owners were called "Coal Barons," which might also apply to Steel Barons. This is where the name "Barons" came from
Rickwood Field outlasted Shine Park, which was razed in 1970. It still stands today. All of the great baseball players played at Rickwood mostly coming thru BHAM from spring training head north to start a new MLB season. They list is amazing: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Dizzie Dean, Roberto Clemente, Rogers Hornsby, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, "Cool Papa" Bell, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Reggie Jackson, and Frank Thomas, just to name a few.
Rickwood survived the Great Depression, the decline of the industrial age, segregation, economic ups and downs, Bull Connor, and the decline of segregation.
Atlanta was incorporated in 1847, BHAM in 1871. The two cities were rivals from the beginning. P. 7
Native son journalist Paul Hemphill claimed that Birmingham was not a Southern city by his criteria in that BHAM is not part of the agrarian South like Mobile, Atlanta, and Memphis. Birmingham is Southern only by geography. I do not accept this. In his time MLK, Jr. called BHAM the most segregated city in the country. A city with Bull Connor, police dogs attaching innocent children, an infamous church bombing. If this isn't Southern, then what is?
Historians may argue about the true origin of baseball, but there is no doubt it started in the South with the Civil War. P. 11
In 1870 Mobile had over 49,000 people and Montgomery nearly 43,000, but there were only about 12,000 in all of Jefferson County. Birmingham was like a Wild West mining town like Tombstone, Arizona, or Deadwood in in the Dakota Territory. Local lawmen and Pinkerton Detectives hunted notorious outlaws like Rube Burrow.
Rube Burrow and his brother Jim were the most famous local and bank robbers this period, the Frank and Jesse James of Alabama. Rube and Jim wee pursued by Pinkerton through Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi and even through Birmingham up to Blount County. Rube was finally killed a shootout in Linden, Alabama in 1890. On the way to burial, his body was shipped through Birmingham, where it was phographed in a coffin Old West style with his Winchester and Colt revolvers.
Birmingham was incorporated June 1, 1871. P.14
The city was named after the British city of Birmingham and nicknamed The Magic City.
The Spanish-mission style entrance was added in 1928. P. 72
The Golden Age of Birmingham baseball was the second half of the 1920’s. Steel was king, industry boomed, and unemployment was rare. These were the most prosperous years in Birmingham’s history. But devastation would come that no one could have anticipated. Blacks and whites were separate though not equal.But most whites and blacks were better off than their parents. Baseball was Birmingham’s game, this before college football took off. P. 73
Eugene “Bull” Connor was the Baron baseball announcer. P. 74
The manual drop-in scoreboard may be Rickwood’s most enduring symbol. P. 77
Homewood’s first name was Hollywood. The Spanish architecture which was popular in the 20’a is still in evidence in Homewood today.
Satchel Paige and the Barons. P. 79-88
The author concludes with some remembrances of Rickwood from prominent people. One of them is Don Keith who was a part-time stadium announcer at Rickwood. There is Paul Hemphill, the prominent late Birmingham-born journalist, who is mentioned a number of times in this book.
We will always remember being at Rickwood for the filming of a scene in the Cobb movie with Tommy Lee Jones playing Ty Cobb spring break of 1994.
Sunday, September 25, 2022
The man in front of me at lunch to get his lunch plate like me was talking to the lady he was with about Franklin Roosevelt's second White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, how the warm springs would ease FDR's leg pain from his polio.
At first I was thrilled that this man who seemed to know what he was talking about might be an historian but my hope never happened when I realized he was not an historian but had just visited recently and was just thrilled to see Warm Springs.
I wanted to chime in, "Yeah, he died there and with his girlfriend Lucy Rutherfurd which Eleanor found out about later and he would drive around with his totally manually operated car and his last words were I have a terrific headache." But I refrained myself from butting into their conversation.
Why have I never been to Warm Springs, Georgia?
Thursday, September 22, 2022
We print natives still have a good time. We still know to fondle a newspaper. We can walk around with a paperback in our back pocket. Better than having to fumble for an e-reader. Pretty pictures are prettier in print than on a screen. We don't need to be online. People can see us reading War and Peace. Holding a book with a finger in the book preserving your place is a sensual pleasure not known to many of you. Speaking of sensual pleasure, there is the smell of print. We print natives still go by/buy the book.
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Nicholas A. Basbanes - Every Book It's Reader - Notes
This book was published in 2006. I am reading it for the second time. The subtitle is The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World.
I am happy to see that the author is still alive at age 79.
Chapter 1 The Magic Door
In the early years of the twentieth century a woman named May Lamberton Becker enjoyed enormous popularity for the "Reader's Guide" columns she wrote for the New York Evening Post and later the Saturday Review of Literature. She highlighted the best books in every field of knowledge. She dedicated her work to librarians.
A. David Schwartz owned a famous independent bookstore in Milwaukee. As he was dying, he spent his last days rereading War and Peace. What better way to go out.
Terry Waite, the Anglican churchman, spent 1,763 days in captivity in Beirut, speneding his time reading Including Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Anne Frank found her readership when her diary was accidentally discovered when her Nazi arrestors failed to notice the scattered papers on the floor in her hideaway. She called her diary Kitty. While working on her diary she was reading every book available to her.
Azar Nafisi wrote about an Iranian bookclub in Reading Lolita in Tehran released in 2003. The ladies in the reading faced reprisals and jail time for what they were doing.
Langston Hughes was the Poet Laurette of the Harlem Renaissance and discovered books as a lonely second-grader in Lawrence, Kansas, living with his grandmother. Books were his world as he read about people who did not always talk in monosyllables..
Literature is fundamental to our cultural heritage. The Greeks have their Iliad and Odyssey. The Chinese have their Tao de Ching, the Italians their Divine Comedy, and the Spanish their Don Quixote.
Chapter 2 One Out of Many
This chapter talks about books, rare books, books that made a difference, and bibliophiles
Ian Fleming had an awesome personal library.
Book exhibitions like London in 1963
Emerson was our first public intellectual.
Lists of the best English and American novels change and fluctuate over time.
"The soul selects her own society---Then---shuts the door."
Sooner or later the life of our times is summarized in its books. Malcolm Cowly, 1939. Still true?
Henry Addams never intended Education for public consumption.
Henry with a pedigree like no other was an intellectual's intellectual.
His book changed people's minds for sure but how I do not know.
Charles Beard was more talked about than popular and read.
By 1967 some 720 million copies of the quotations of Chairman Mao were in print.
The book will last forever. The book is such a wonderful thing, and it has so much to it beyond the text itself, the physical artifact, the book will absolutely last for hundreds of years.
Chapter 4 Silent Witnesses
To help my treacherous and defective memory a little--and it is so extremely bad thatI have more than once happened
Henry James's library was eventually broken up and dispersed.
His library seemed to have no discernible plan or order the way the books we're mixed.
James's biographer Leon Edel calls the notes that James scribbled in his books "silent witnesses."
Literature not only comes from life but from other literature as Henry James would attest. So would Bob Dylan.
Chapter 5 IN THE MARGINS
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a voracious reader, kept notes on everything he read. You tend to think in reading about these great 16th, 17th, and 18th century geniuses that reading was all they ever did.
Denis Diderot had a personal librarian.
Hitler's favorite book was Thomas Carlyle's Life of Frederick the Great. Dr. Goebbels wass reading it to him in the bunker with Hitler tearing up because he identified with Frederick who had many enemies
The history of reading is a fairly recent endeavor. The basic premise is that readers give meaning to texts so histories of reading interpretations are scholarly.
Darwin would have his wife Emma read fiction and light history to him out loud but he would read scientific content himself.
Of the books written in the Romantic Era Mary Shelley's Frankenstein commands the greatest attention. The first printing of 500 copies was ignored and indeed the book was ignored for the next 40 years. The first 500 were to pricey for most people. Only when inexpensive copies started being produced in 1880 start surge in popularity. Thomas Carlyle initially called the book "foul.
Was the French Revolution in the late 18th Century a product of the printing press? Apparently a historical case can be made.
Chapter 6 PAVING THE WAY
The David McCullough chapter.
The author greatly admires David McCullough.
McCullough speaks of the enormous influence of Common Sense. The revolution still would have happened but probably starting sometime after 1776. Paine was an uneducated corset maker. McCullough says that Paine's influence simply cannot be overstated.
McCullough tells the author that in the 18th Century the world of the mind was to be found in books and ideas were to be found in books and there was nothing a person could not learn from them.
In 2022 I cannot imagine a book having the popular influence of a Common Sense.
In the DOI Jefferson admitted that he was not expressing anything that had not bee said before.
We are what we read to a great degree says David McCullough particularly the founding generation. Adams was a deeper and more passionate reader than Jefferson.
Adams was the most assiduous reader of his generation, and his reading was deeper and broader than Jefferson's.
There is a letter from Abigail Adams to her son, John Quincy Adams, written in 1816, in which the following observation is made: "Your father's zeal for books will be one of the last desires that will quit him"
At about age 75 Adams undertook reading a 16-volume French history---in French.
Would John Adams be tweeting today? I would hope not. Would he be on Facebook? The internet? I would think so. TikTok? I think not.
Adams never stopped reading, never stopped growing intellectually. In his 80's he could work in his fields during and read Thucydides at lunch.
"Let us dare to read, think, speak, write. Let every sluice of knowledge be open and set flowing." John Adams at age 29
"You may not be able to insure success, but you can deserve it." John Adams
People who are fluent in multiple languages like Elizabeth I (fluent in six) utterly amaze me.
Chapter 7 A TERRIBLE TRUTH
John Keats "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816)
Chapter 8 GOSPEL TRUTH
I am reminded that in Beyond Belief Elaine Pagels believes that the Gospel of John was written to counter the Gospel of Thomas. P. 176
Chapter 9 HARVEST OF RICHES
The Broccoli Chapter
"I am a bookman," Matthew Broccoli says simply. "Everything I do, everything I write, everything I collect, has to do with the book in American culture and the profession of authorship." P. 194
Born: August 21, 1931, The Bronx, New York, NY
Died: June 4, 2008, Columbia, SC
Education: University of Virginia (1960), Yale University (1953), The Bronx High School of Science(1949)
So F. Scott Fitzgerald did NOT graduate from Princeton says Broccoli because he couldn't handle chemistry? Because he couldn't handle the required courses. Fitzgerald was not a Renaissance fellow. P. 198
Broccoli's Fitzgerald material housed at the Univ. of South Carolina is unbelievable including multiple copies of the various printings of The Great Gatsby. Someone said he would fly to Australia just to quickly acquire some books and immediately fly back. I do not believe I could have said ever devoted such passion to one subject. P. 199
Books beget books. Matthew Brucolli P. 203
Reading was my education. Daniel Aaron P. 217
Aaron went into teaching because it seemed like an agreeable way to make a living from reading. P. 218
Throughout his life Aaron kept commonplace books that recorded his reading. P. 219
Chapter 10 BORN TO GRAPPLE
T.S. Eliot: The difference between poetry is that they are different systems of punctuation. P. 247
I am not sure about Dylan and Christopher Ricks. What did Ricks think about Dylan's Nobel? P. 248
Ricks doesn't do anything for me. I do not know what he means by a "close reading." P. 254
Chapter 11 THE HEALING ART
Psychiatrist Robert Coles talks about "character." P. 255
Character is higher than intellect. (Ralph Waldo Emerson) Quoted by Dr. Robert Coles. P. 256
From his mother Coles believed in the power of stories in people's lives. P. 256
Dr. Coles is a physician, educator, social commentator, activist, and author. P. 256
His parents read aloud to each other. A psychoanalytic thing of course. P. 257
Coles was a friend of Walker Percy; hence, this book gets into Walker Percy, who learned from Soren Kierkegaard.
"You know what my old friend Kierkegaard said: Consciousness of despair is the beginning of hope. The only real despair is the despair which is not conscious of itself." P. 264
We see pictures in our dreams and we verbalize about them the next day. What did you SEE last night? (Erik Erickson) P. 266
Chapter 12 REACHING OUT
Thomas Edison had three libraries and was a reader. For some reason I am dubious. P. 288
Being taught to read at a young age started Frederick Douglass on his way. P. 292
Malcolm X taught himself to read during the six years he was a prison inmate. P. 304
When asked his alma mater, Malcolm would respond, "Books." P. 306
Literature can change lives. P. 312
FINAL CIRCLE A FINAL STROKE
Books are about people.
Tuesday, September 20, 2022
Libra has concluded that to "keep on keeping on" is much more difficult than "just starting out." In his salad days Libra would hang his trousers on a nail at night and run jump into them in the morning. Nowadays he has to put them on one stiff leg at a time. Back in those days he could use the facilities, shower, and eat breakfast (if, in fact, he had his poptarts and Tang) and be out of the house in 20 minutes. Nowadays when the game is to "keep on keeping on" he is lucky to be done with the facilities in 20 minutes, and if he is out of the house in an HOUR and 20 mintes it's a good start to the day. True, back then the future was open and largely unknown, and today the future is more closed and known, but what is known now is not much to get excited about, if you know what I mean. Just "keep on keeping on." That's the ticket. Yeah, right on.
Monday, September 19, 2022
Greg Sargent in Salon.com
Sunday, September 18, 2022
States under right-wing control have been passing laws restricting what may be taught in their schools, especially about racism. The Republican-controlled Texas state legislature enacted a law in 2021 specifying what should — and should not — be taught to students about their nation's and state's past. Excluded were the 15th Amendment, which prohibits the federal government and states from denying or abridging the right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," the 1965 Voting Rights Act, "the history of Native Americans" and documents on the separation of church and state and the women's, Chicano and labor movements. Existing standards calling for teaching about the ways in which white supremacy, slavery, eugenics and the Ku Klux Klan are "morally wrong" were removed. The law is unmistakably a formula for again making Texas, where non-Hispanic whites are already a minority, what it was before 1964: a white man's state.
ROBERT S. MCELVAINE in Salon.com
Saturday, September 17, 2022
Constitution Day 2022
First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Thursday, September 15, 2022
So what's left in my life? I am beyond my mid-life crisis, my first psychotic break, and my fight with eczema. Mother Nature is still beyond my reckoning and I've given up on making a major impact on Western Civilization. I'm reading Willa Cather along with Exodus and Deuteronomy with plans to move on to the sayings of Chairman Mao for balance. At least I know where I'm coming from. I think so anyway.
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Jennifer Rubin in the WaPost
Monday, September 12, 2022
Michael Tomasky - The Middle Out - Notes
Michael Tomasky is a liberal's liberal, He is the editor of The New Republic, a long-time liberal political maagazine and now web site. His theme is to refute trickle down economics in favor of the middle out, meaning economic success for ALL Americans by building up the middle class.
Labor strife/strikes after World War II led to health insurance being tied to employment as a nontaxable form of income. P. 29
From 1950 to 1973 the average GDP increase per year was 4.06% P. 30
In 1950 there were 24 income tax brackets as opposed to 7 today. P. 32
Higher marginal tax rates brought in more revue to the government and it was mostly spent well. The Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe cost 15 billion (180 billion in today's money). The Federal Highway Act of 1956 which started our interstate highways spent 100 billion over ten years which would translate to about 1 trillion today. (On the initial basis of military emergency). Military spending was high. P. 33
In the 50's the ethos of corporate was not to first enhance shareholder value to conduct business for the good of society, the public interest, and the country. In other words, responsible capitalism. What a difference compared to today. P. 34
"I am reminded of four definitions: A radical is a person with both feet firmly planted---in the air. A conservative is a person with perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest---at the command of his head."
President Franklin Roosevelt, 1938
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Tomasky Summary
ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICOLAS ORTEGA
Conservatives have convinced most Americans that the free market means personal freedom. And it does, for those with the means to eat at high-end locavore restaurants or purchase the right to skip the lines at Disney World. But that isn’t most people. Most people live with a constant, low-level anxiety about potential job loss or unexpected bills. An ongoing Economic Anxiety survey sponsored by American Public Media’s Marketplace found in October 2020 that more than half of all Americans were fearful of losing their jobs, and nearly half couldn’t cover an unexpected $250 expense. Yes, this was during the pandemic, when economic anxiety was certainly nudged higher, but anxiety has been a fixture for many Americans since the survey began in 2015. Millions of Americans live in towns where the free market has produced for them the career options of working at the Dollar Store or selling a little Oxy.
What sort of freedom is that?
Democrats need to change that—to change, as Joe Biden was fond of saying when he unveiled his ambitious economic plans in the spring of 2021, the “economic paradigm.” The Biden administration has made some commendable progress in altering the economic circumstances of Americans, even if inflation understandably dulled the luster of the biggest GDP increase in almost 40 years and record employment gains (6.6 million jobs). But the immense difficulty the administration has faced, even within the Democratic Party, in passing the legislation it has passed—having to downsize the (originally) $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill to the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests a little more than one-tenth of that amount—showed that the battle of ideas will be a long one.
The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity
Here is a truism of our political discourse that is not widely enough recognized: The right thinks in terms of morals, while the left tends to see matters through an economic lens. That is, ask someone on the right what ails the United States, and he or she will almost certainly begin with a discussion of moral decay: We’ve lost our way, left God, abandoned the old values of thrift and hard work that made America great. Ask someone on the left the same question, and she or he will much more likely start by citing statistics on wage stagnation and the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich over the last 50 years.
It’s not hard to see why, to your average person, the right-wing argument is more compelling. It’s emotional. It resonates. Everyone in the world thinks things were better when they were young. Nearly everyone is patriotic in a basic, uncomplicated way. Most people are religious to one degree or other. So the right’s rhetoric along these lines hits home. And the hypocrisy argument doesn’t work. No matter how many evangelical preachers are caught in love nests, no matter how much un-Jesus-like hatred some of them spew from their pulpits—this perception will never be dislodged.
So the broad left, by which I mean everyone from the House members who make up the Squad to more centrist senators, can’t win a morals argument. True, Joe Biden’s deeply held Catholicism has helped bulletproof him against charges of radicalism. Nonetheless, religious morality is not the terrain on which the left will win political arguments. We can win, though, on economics.
Here’s why. People have two lives: material and spiritual. Modern liberalism is ill-equipped to make people’s lives spiritually better. But it can make people’s lives materially better—with better wages and health care, less fear of financial crisis, better roads, a faster internet, and more. If liberalism can deliver those things, I believe it can cobble together an electoral coalition that can win most of the time. But we can’t do it solely by citing statistics. We—more precisely, elected Democrats, because they’re the ones who have the megaphone—can win by tying economic policies to the larger ideas that Americans care most deeply about: democracy and freedom.
Democrats tend to see these as separate fights. Their view reflects to a considerable extent the way the progressive infrastructure is organized: Some people and organizations work on economic issues; other people and other organizations take on democracy issues; and as for freedom issues, well, pretty much no one works on those. The concept of freedom, as I’ll explain, is one the left has almost completely ceded to the right. What Democrats and progressives have to understand is that, today, they cannot afford to abandon it, and these aren’t separate fights. It’s all one argument: Economic inequality and concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the few weaken democracy and limit freedom. Conservatism has tended to recognize these connections and to fuse them into one argument, and it has done so to considerable success. It’s time for Democrats to seize that high ground. Recognizing these connections and arguing that strengthening the working and middle classes also strengthens democracy and expands freedom are the surest ways to advance all three goals.
Before we get to our current times, let’s examine how the concept of freedom became so wholly owned by the right. It goes back to the 1930s, and it was through an effort led by free-market economists who fretted that individual liberty was threatened in the modern world possibly to the point of extinction. Remember, this was a time, the mid-1930s, when Stalin and Hitler had consolidated their holds on power. So the concern about individual freedom, with respect to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, had a lot of merit to it. More controversially and dubiously, the free-market economists extended the critique to New Deal liberalism. Ludwig von Mises, for example, generally the most uncompromising libertarian of the bunch, acknowledged that the New Deal was small-ddemocratic, in the narrowly electoral sense, according to the author Daniel Stedman Jones, but he emphasized that “it is obvious that delegation of power can be used as a quasi-constitutional disguise for dictatorship.” Henry Simons of the University of Chicago “firmly believed,” writes the historian Angus Burgin, “that the main direction of New Deal policies was toward authoritarian collectivism.”
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek, one of the most famous of this cohort, produced The Road to Serfdom, his broadside against state interventionism. In 1947, these men and other colleagues formed the Mont Pelerin Society, an international group of economists committed to free-market principles. They called themselves “neoliberals,” which is a confusing label today, because in our parlance, we’d call them conservatives; they were referring back to an older meaning of the word “liberal.” Like any group of intellectuals, they argued about this and that, including whether they should even attempt to influence public events in the first place, but they agreed on four core principles: rejection of collectivism; defense of markets; insistence on a link between economic and political freedom; and “an acknowledgment of the importance of moral absolutes.”
These thinkers were building on a very old idea, one that went back to John Locke politically and Adam Smith economically: that “freedom” meant freedom from—freedom from undue interference in one’s political or economic life by the state (usually the king, in those days). There’s another meaning of freedom, which is freedom to—the freedom to live up to one’s full human potential. This is a newer and more liberal definition of freedom (more liberal because it presumes that a vehicle is needed to best help people achieve this particular freedom, by offering them free community college and a safe place to stash their children while they attend class, and more; and that that vehicle is necessarily the state). But the conservative definition is older and, as is usually the case with conservative notions, a lot easier to explain.
In the United States, the most celebrated champion of these ideas was Milton Friedman. His famous 1962 book, which had sold half a million copies by the time the fortieth anniversary edition was published in 2002, was called Capitalism and Freedom. That is, Friedman didn’t merely extol a set of economic principles. He tied them to an idea Americans cherish. Not just Capitalism. Or Capitalism and Growth. Or Capitalism and Sound Monetary Policy. Capitalism and Freedom. The title announced, in other words, that the book wasn’t really about economics at all. It was about politics. It was about life. And the title of the book’s first chapter, which cuts right to the heart of things, is “The Relation Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom.” That chapter’s very first paragraph gets right to the point; it’s a punch in Keynesian liberalism’s nose:
It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic arrangements…. The thesis of this chapter is that such a view is a delusion, that there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain combinations of political and economic arrangements are possible, and that in particular, a society which is socialist cannot be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.
I disagree with every single word of that thesis, including the “and”s and “the”s, and believe it to be—know it to be—demonstrably wrong. To take but one of many available examples from recent human history, look at the U.K. in the mid-1960s: arguably at its dour socialistic nadir under the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (he “nationalised” 90 percent of the British steel industry), but undergoing one of the most gobsmacking explosions of personal freedom in human history (rock and roll, loud amps, long hair, fashion, homosexuality decriminalized, and so on). Friedman’s argument is balderdash. While Wilson was crushing market freedom under the state’s remorseless jackboot, the young people of Swinging London were shagging their brains out. There are so many other examples. If Friedman were correct, the Scandinavian countries—liberal social democracies, and as such economic nightmares by Friedman’s lights—would all be gulags. But personal freedom is doing just fine in those nations. In fact, in the World Population Review’s Personal Freedom Index for 2021, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden all have higher personal freedom rankings than the United States. Friedman was either a liar or a fool, or both (yes, brilliant people can be fools).
Friedman’s idea of freedom, by the way, very much included freedom of school choice for Southern whites who fought tooth and nail to resist school integration after the Brown v. Board decision. He endorsed in Capitalism and Freedom Virginia’s diabolical “freedom of choice” plan to skirt Brown; elsewhere, he referred to “forced nonsegregation” and “forced segregation” as “evils,” allowing that, if forced to choose between them, he “would choose the former as the lesser” evil.
He was a malignant force in many ways. But I admit that he came up with a great way to open a book. Friedman is no cagey welterweight feeling the opponent out in round one. He’s a heavyweight who comes out swinging right at the opening bell. This is not about economics, he wrote. It’s about freedom. Your freedom, citizen. And by the way, how contemporary it still feels, with that reference to democratic socialism, made back when Bernie Sanders was still in college, probably just starting to dig into his Marcuse. And Friedman had a skill most economists, in my experience, do not: He could write, and speak, plain English. No wonder he won so many converts—along with the fact that his message was exactly what rich people wanted to hear!
So free-market economics took over. And liberals have never really had an answer. Joe Biden, of all improbable people, has tried to provide one. Never a crusading liberal, Biden always found the center lane of where his party was as a whole. If Ted Kennedy was over here to his left, and Sam Nunn was over there to his right, Biden would usually land in a place equidistant between them. But now the party had moved left overall, after the Great Recession and the torrent of activism unleashed in its wake (Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for $15 minimum-wage effort), so Biden did, too. In fact, he did something very unusual as a presidential candidate. The conventional wisdom is that candidates tack to left or right during the primaries but sidle toward the center in the general. But Biden, once he secured the nomination, moved left. And he won. And that’s why so many of us thought Build Back Better would pass—pared back, sure, but more or less intact, changing the economic paradigm and people’s assumptions about the free market.
And yet the roadblocks the administration hit—including within its own party—show how heavy a lift it will be to change those assumptions. Recall Senator Joe Manchin’s words, from late September 2021, when budget negotiations were grinding their way through the sausage machine: “I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality. That you’re entitled. I’m more of a rewarding, because I can help those that really need help.” The sentiments expressed here tell us a lot about Manchin’s assumptions about the proper role of the public sector in an economy. From a neoliberal point of view, they are perfectly reasonable sentiments. If the government’s role should be limited to ameliorating market failure, then what Manchin says is right; one could hardly, in fact, expect him to say anything else. But if one sees a different and larger role for the public sector in providing supports for working people—supports that aren’t tied to employment in an era when far fewer people are working at the same factory for 45 years than when Manchin was growing up—then one would not talk the way he talked there. The intra-Democratic debate in the fall of 2021, excruciating as it could be to watch, showed that most congressional Democrats have embraced new economic thought to one degree or another. But not all have. And the public hasn’t; yes, the particular elements of the bill, universal pre-K and so on, poll very well, but there is little evidence so far that the broader public has been persuaded that what they have been taught for the last 40 years about the merits of the free market and limited government and the evil of deficits is wrong.
The individual elements of Build Back Better all polled well, as noted above. And arguably, if there had been just one more Democratic senator, or certainly two, a major bill would have passed. For those given to despairing about the Democrats—the default position of people on the broad left—I say take heart in at least this: The party has moveddramatically to the left on economic questions in the last decade (to some extent on cultural ones, too, which is more complicated politically). All House Democrats but one voted in favor of a $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill, and 48 or maybe 49 out of 50 senators were prepared to vote yes as well. That’s a sea change from a decade ago.
It’s good that all that has happened. What hasn’t happened, however, is that, while Democrats propose generally good policies, they make no attempt to change people’s economic thinking; they haven’t really made a concerted effort to convince the broader electorate that the economic presumptions that have prevailed these last 40-plus years have failed them. It can be hard to make that case; the market these days produces an endless stream of bright, shiny objects for us to marvel over, to make us think we’re living in good times. We are living in a time of amazing innovation; but we are not living in a time of broadly shared prosperity. The central political-economic fact of the last 40 years in the United States is the massive transfer of wealth from the middle to the top. A Rand Corporation study in 2020 concluded that from 1975 to 2018, nearly $50 trillion in income had been moved from the middle class to the top 1 percent. Put another way, using numbers people can grasp: If all this money had not been shifted away from the middle class, the median individual income in 2018 would have been not the $36,000 it was, but about $57,000. That’s what neoliberal economics has done to the middle class. And while Republicans are far more responsible for this than Democrats, Democratic administrations bought into many neoliberal precepts, too; Bill Clinton privileged deficit reduction early in his term to reassure the bond market, pushed for free trade, and deregulated banks; Barack Obama proceeded cautiously out of the meltdown and pivoted toward deficit reduction during his first term. Both also made some bold Keynesian moves, but during both their terms, inequality rampaged and monopoly power intensified.
The statistics in the above paragraph are alarming, or should be; but this fight won’t be won with facts and figures. People don’t respond to those. What they respond to, even though many politicians tend not to believe this, are broad philosophical and moral arguments that connect specific policies to a vision of society as a place where a certain set of values obtains. In the 1970s, after the OPEC crisis and stagflation made Keynesianism vulnerable to attack, conservatives kicked the door down with exactly that: policy arguments (lower taxes, less government) made in service of a broader point about the kind of society they wanted to build (greater dynamism and freedom, as they defined it). Democrats have to do the same today. Here are three core arguments they need to make.
HOW DEMOCRATS CAN BE SUCCESSFUL
1. Destroy the myth of Homo economicus and replace it with a human being.
Economic debates in our political discourse proceed from the old assumption of neoclassical economics that individuals are rational actors who have perfect information and always act in their own self-interest and make choices that optimize their gain. There is a name for this rational actor: Homo economicus, or “economic man.” It assumes that we are all self-interested, and that acting selfishly promotes the common good. Adam Smith argued this; John Maynard Keynes disputed it. It is inherently right-wing, because it tells people this: Just fend for yourself, and your family. That is your only commitment to society. This idea is pernicious. Besides, it doesn’t reflect most people’s lived reality. Most of us spend part of our lives being dependent on others: when we are children, when we are sick, when we are old. Most of us also understand and accept that we are members of a broader society, and that membership carries certain obligations. We accept the idea that there is such a thing as the common good. People often act not out of self-interest but out of generosity. We are social creatures who crave not just material comfort and more stuff, but friendships and love and the approval of those around us.
Even most businesses—that is to say, even market capitalism—are governed not by relentless self-maximizing but by reciprocity and cooperation. Think of the chain of cooperation required to deliver, say, a television from a factory in China to your family room. That takes a series of actors working together—yes, all behaving in their self-interest, but all also working cooperatively to ensure that they get their share of the profit. In their 2012 book, The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley, the venture capitalists Victor W. Hwang and Greg Horowitt write that cooperation is more important to successful capitalism than competition. “Rainforests” is their metaphor for successfully innovative firms and ecosystems. And rainforests, they write, “depend on people notbehaving like rational actors” (my italics). They continue:
Extra-rational motivations—those that transcend the classical divide between rational and irrational—are not normally considered critical drivers of economic value-creation.… These motivations include the thrill of competition, human altruism, a thirst for adventure, a joy of discovery and creativity, a concern for future generations, and a desire for meaning in one’s life, among many others. Our work over the years has led us to conclude that these types of motivations are not just “nice to have.” They are, in fact, “must have” building blocks of the Rainforest.
So yes, motivations “include” competition, but they include those other factors as well
Democrats need to talk expressly and directly about how capitalism isn’t simply about competition and how most human beings are not solely relentless self-maximizers. Today’s economic discourse in the realm of politics proceeds entirely from the old neoclassical, neoliberal, and Friedmanesque assumptions. Democrats have to insert new assumptions into that discourse.
Here’s why this is so crucial. If we proceed from the neoliberal presumption that we all should stick to pursuing our self-interest, then the only policy solutions that make sense are Republican ones. If people need only to advance their self-interest, then the state should mainly just get out of their way and let them pursue away. But if we proceed from a different set of assumptions built around the ideas that we are both self-interested and other-directed, and that our motivations for our economic decisions are multifaceted, then the policy solutions that make sense are more liberal.
This means Democrats need to talk not just about policies but about the ideas behind them. After all, it’s ideas, not lower prescription drug prices, that change the world. History’s greatest leaders have found ways to boil high-flung ideas down into language that most people could understand, and that is what Democrats have to do here: “My Republican friends believe that all we need to do is selfishly pursue our own interests, and everything will work out fine. We Democrats have a different view. We think people are more generous than that. We think people thrive on competition, yes, but we believe they value cooperation, trust, and the esteem in which they are held by others. And we think that the way we shape economic policy should reflect this more complex view of what motivates our behavior in the marketplace.” I promise you—the right would freak out if Democrats began aggressively talking like this. They would freak out because they would know deep down that most people feel this way about themselves and do not see themselves as simply self-interested creatures. If Democrats can put a fuller view of human nature back into economics—and into politics—they can put the right on the defensive and change the starting point from which debates about economics proceed..
2. Tie economics to democracy.
In the early days of the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg was asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd: “Are you a capitalist?” His answer was pretty brilliant, I thought: “Sure. Yeah. Look, America is a capitalist society. But: It’s got to be democratic capitalism. And that part’s really important, and it’s slipping away from us. In other words, when capitalism comes into tension with democracy, which is more important to you? I believe democracy is more important. And when you have capitalism capturing democracy, when you have the kind of regulatory capture where powerful corporations are able to arrange the rules for their benefit, that’s not real capitalism. If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia. It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into oligarchy.” In a little more than 100 words there, Buttigieg expressed a profound point. Economics and democracy are not the separate issues they are taken to be in the media. They are the same issue. The Mont Pelerin Society argued that once economic freedom was threatened (by a tax, or a new government program), political freedom was by definition under threat, and that as long as economic freedom—which they defined as a minimal state with low taxation—was maintained, political freedom would be safe. They were wrong. As we look around the world, from Hong Kong to Hungary, Georgia to Guatemala, we see that it is quite possible, indeed not uncommon, for countries to have economies that are essentially market-based even while they clamp down on political freedoms. Buttigieg invokes Russia above, and it, along with China, are perhaps the most obvious examples of countries with basically capitalist economies (state-capitalist, in China’s case) where political freedoms are severely curtailed. But there are many other such countries.
Recent experience right here in the United States is also on point. Donald Trump’s idea of capitalism is rapacious and almost completely unchecked by state intervention. Yet his idea of political freedom, as we have seen, is one of total disdain for concern about the rights of those who don’t support him politically. Trump has decoupled the ideas of economic freedom and political freedom more aggressively by far than any president in the history of the United States. This just makes it all the more urgent that Democrats re-couple economics and democracy.
Democratic elected officials need to explain to Americans, as Buttigieg said, that if the economic and political systems become too controlled by the wealthy; if inequality continues unchecked; if we don’t build a robust middle class; if we can’t deliver to middle- and working-class people the kinds of policies on offer in every other developed democracy, and on a permanent basis; if we can’t properly tax wealth; if we can’t create an ethos wherein businesses understand that their long-term interests are better served by a healthy democracy to which they contribute their share than by a corrupted and out-of-kilter one that asks little of them, then the impacts on democracy will be severe, and it will fail. This is a connection few politicians make. It’s of vital importance that they do.
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