Some books are just for fun, and this is one of them: a memoir by the actor James Garner. I think that Jim Garner is my favorite actor of all time.
He grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Never a scholar, he ended getting his GED. He served honorably in Korea, earning a Purple Heart.
He got into acting accidentally from knowing someone from his home state who go into movie making. He was a long-time friend of the famous actor Henry Fonda.
He was under contract with Warner Studios when he got his big break playing the lead role in the TV show "Maverick." I knew him best in the long-running TV show "The Rockford Files."
This book is a lot of fun.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Corey Robin vs. Mark Lilla
by Corey Robin
Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it elides changes and cleavages on the right. It’s difficult to find my argument amid these claims, so let me restate it here.
My book argues that conservatism is a reaction against movements of the left—from the French Revolution to feminism. While this is a revisionist claim, it required no elaborate digging on my part to make it. I simply looked at what conservatives have said about themselves. Robert Peel, who practically invented Britain’s Conservative Party, defined its aim as opposition “to the restless spirit of revolutionary change.” Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual architects of the American conservative movement, described conservatism as a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men…in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation.” George Nash, court historian of that movement, identified conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary.” All this, and more, I cite in my book.
Lilla is correct that I believe conservatives oppose these movements because they threaten public and private hierarchies of power. Again, I provide ample evidence for this. But he seriously distorts my position when he says that I depict conservatives as “black-hatted villains” whose ultimate vision is “simply a defense of privilege.” As I write in the introduction:
No simple defense of one’s own place and privileges…the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. When [Edmund] Burke adds…that the “great Object” of the Revolution is “to root out that thing called an Aristocrat or Nobleman and Gentleman,” he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility; he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world. If the power goes, the distinction goes with it.
Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.
Lilla claims that I gather the oppressed “into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance” over and against which stand the oppressors. My book explicitly argues against any such romance of the oppressed. Citing everyone from John Adams (“common beggars in the streets…plume themselves on that superiority which they have, or fancy they have, over some others”) to Phyllis Schlafly, I show that the lower orders often join, and have good reason to join, the conservative cause: in fending off a democratic movement from below, conservatism gives them a taste of lordly power they otherwise would not enjoy.
Race, as John C. Calhoun discovered, turns all whites into a ruling class:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.
In the family and the factory, fathers and foremen get to play the part of a lord. Conservatives also court those talents that can be demonstrated on the battlefield and the barricades. That’s one of the reasons it attracts outsiders, from the Irish-born Burke to the immigrant neoconservative. Far from hiving off oppressor from oppressed, I argue that the right succeeds by turning paupers into princes and beggars into Bonapartes.
Lilla finally claims that I ignore differences on the right. “La destra è mobile,” he writes. “The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again.” I agree, which is why I wrote on page 36:
Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations—tactical and substantive—on a theme.
The fact that conservatism is reactionary doesn’t mean it is always the same. To the contrary, it changes across time and space, in response to the movements it opposes. That’s why there are eleven chapters following my introductory essay (upon which Lilla focuses nearly all of his attention).
Given the flimsiness of Lilla’s charges, his real beef seems to be that he does not like seeing today’s Republican seated next to yesterday’s Burke. But one can only keep them apart by pretending that Burke didn’t say much of what he said. If Burke simply believed, as Lilla writes, that society is an inheritance “best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action,” he would never have confessed that “our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut” or worried that the traditional features of a constitution “are the very things that make its weakness.” If he were unambiguously “hostile,” in Lilla’s words, “to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions,” he would never have howled that his comrades lacked a “relish for the principles of the manifestoes” and the “generous wildness of Quixotism.” Nor would he have declared that “acquiescence will not do; there must be zeal,” that “the madness of the wise…is better than the sobriety of fools,” and that “every little measure is a great errour.”
But the Burke who rallied Europe against the French Revolution did say these and many other such things, as have his descendants. This may be irritating or inconvenient for Lilla, but if he doesn’t like or believe the evidence I’ve presented, he should at least explain why it’s not relevant or how I’ve gotten it wrong.
Corey Robin
Brooklyn, New York
Mark Lilla replies:
Though, as I said in my review, Corey Robin can be insightful when he writes profiles of some individuals on the right, his letter confirms my main point: when it comes to thinking about “the right” he’s hopelessly confused. The main confusion is conceptual and arises because he has no clear idea of what he means by “conservatism.” He could argue that there are genuine conservative principles that provoke conservatives’ “reaction against movements of the left,” and then criticize those principles and the people who hold them. This he does not do. Instead he argues there are no such things as conservative principles, only ideological “improvisations” for defending hierarchy and privilege shared by a heterogeneous cast of characters running from Tocqueville and Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and Phyllis Schlafly. So his real claim can be reduced to this: “those who react against movements of the left” react against movements of the left—which is a tautology, not an argument.
The point of my review was to distinguish conceptually between conservatism, which is informed by a view of human nature; reaction, which is informed by a view of history; and the right, which is a shifting, engaged ideological family that, in this country, includes a few genuine conservatives, radical libertarians, neoconservatives, social issues reactionaries, evangelicals, foreign policy hawks, e tutti quanti, who have disagreements among themselves. (As for Burke, who was a genuine conservative but also an engaged politician, it’s not surprising that he sometimes disagreed with himself.)
Robin’s Manichaeanism distorts the historical reality of the conservative tradition, which includes the Disraeli who shepherded through the Reform Act of 1867, the Bismarck who laid the foundation for the German welfare state, and the Heritage Foundation, which first floated the idea of mandating that adult Americans all carry some form of health insurance. Though these proposals met challenges from the left, they were shaped by a recognizable conservative sensibility. Robin also ignores the liberal tradition, which gets no mention in his letter and barely a nod in his book. (The book’s index entry reads “liberalism, see left.”) There are good liberal reasons to resist “the restless spirit of revolutionary change,” too, since it can so often lead to despotism in the end (which is liberals’ great worry about the Arab Spring). Liberals stress the need for individual liberty, the rule of law, and stable constitutional structures, which are not revolutionary principles; does that make them reactionaries? In Robin’s eyes, perhaps it does.
He is correct, though, to note that I didn’t engage with his explanation of right-wing populism—for the simple reason that it was too weak and condescending to take seriously. Robin believes in false consciousness and in intellectuals’ ability to see through it; that’s why he can claim that a conservatism seeking to free the world from all that is “ugly, brutish, base, and dull” gives “the lower orders…a taste of lordly power” and gives arriviste Irishmen and Jews their Napoleonic moments in the sun. I, like most people, take the populists at their word. When figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (and now Newt Gingrich) demonize educated elites and praise the wisdom of “soccer moms” and plumbers, they mean it. And those on the bottom rung who cheer and vote for them know what they are cheering and voting for. Corey Robin’s commitment to old leftist clichés about “the lower orders” blinds him to the most important and disturbing development in our politics today, which is the apotheosis of ugliness, brutishness, baseness, and ignorance as political ideals on the American right. And if you can’t see that, what can you see?
Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it elides changes and cleavages on the right. It’s difficult to find my argument amid these claims, so let me restate it here.
My book argues that conservatism is a reaction against movements of the left—from the French Revolution to feminism. While this is a revisionist claim, it required no elaborate digging on my part to make it. I simply looked at what conservatives have said about themselves. Robert Peel, who practically invented Britain’s Conservative Party, defined its aim as opposition “to the restless spirit of revolutionary change.” Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual architects of the American conservative movement, described conservatism as a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men…in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation.” George Nash, court historian of that movement, identified conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary.” All this, and more, I cite in my book.
Lilla is correct that I believe conservatives oppose these movements because they threaten public and private hierarchies of power. Again, I provide ample evidence for this. But he seriously distorts my position when he says that I depict conservatives as “black-hatted villains” whose ultimate vision is “simply a defense of privilege.” As I write in the introduction:
No simple defense of one’s own place and privileges…the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. When [Edmund] Burke adds…that the “great Object” of the Revolution is “to root out that thing called an Aristocrat or Nobleman and Gentleman,” he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility; he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world. If the power goes, the distinction goes with it.
Conservatism is a moral vision in which excellence depends upon hierarchy. Inequality is the means, not the end—that is a belief, I show, shared by everyone from Burke to Ayn Rand, the slaveholders to Ludwig von Mises.
Lilla claims that I gather the oppressed “into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance” over and against which stand the oppressors. My book explicitly argues against any such romance of the oppressed. Citing everyone from John Adams (“common beggars in the streets…plume themselves on that superiority which they have, or fancy they have, over some others”) to Phyllis Schlafly, I show that the lower orders often join, and have good reason to join, the conservative cause: in fending off a democratic movement from below, conservatism gives them a taste of lordly power they otherwise would not enjoy.
Race, as John C. Calhoun discovered, turns all whites into a ruling class:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class.
In the family and the factory, fathers and foremen get to play the part of a lord. Conservatives also court those talents that can be demonstrated on the battlefield and the barricades. That’s one of the reasons it attracts outsiders, from the Irish-born Burke to the immigrant neoconservative. Far from hiving off oppressor from oppressed, I argue that the right succeeds by turning paupers into princes and beggars into Bonapartes.
Lilla finally claims that I ignore differences on the right. “La destra è mobile,” he writes. “The right used to be isolationist, then became internationalist, and to judge by recent Republican debates may be tiptoeing back to isolationism again.” I agree, which is why I wrote on page 36:
Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations—tactical and substantive—on a theme.
The fact that conservatism is reactionary doesn’t mean it is always the same. To the contrary, it changes across time and space, in response to the movements it opposes. That’s why there are eleven chapters following my introductory essay (upon which Lilla focuses nearly all of his attention).
Given the flimsiness of Lilla’s charges, his real beef seems to be that he does not like seeing today’s Republican seated next to yesterday’s Burke. But one can only keep them apart by pretending that Burke didn’t say much of what he said. If Burke simply believed, as Lilla writes, that society is an inheritance “best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action,” he would never have confessed that “our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut” or worried that the traditional features of a constitution “are the very things that make its weakness.” If he were unambiguously “hostile,” in Lilla’s words, “to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions,” he would never have howled that his comrades lacked a “relish for the principles of the manifestoes” and the “generous wildness of Quixotism.” Nor would he have declared that “acquiescence will not do; there must be zeal,” that “the madness of the wise…is better than the sobriety of fools,” and that “every little measure is a great errour.”
But the Burke who rallied Europe against the French Revolution did say these and many other such things, as have his descendants. This may be irritating or inconvenient for Lilla, but if he doesn’t like or believe the evidence I’ve presented, he should at least explain why it’s not relevant or how I’ve gotten it wrong.
Corey Robin
Brooklyn, New York
Mark Lilla replies:
Though, as I said in my review, Corey Robin can be insightful when he writes profiles of some individuals on the right, his letter confirms my main point: when it comes to thinking about “the right” he’s hopelessly confused. The main confusion is conceptual and arises because he has no clear idea of what he means by “conservatism.” He could argue that there are genuine conservative principles that provoke conservatives’ “reaction against movements of the left,” and then criticize those principles and the people who hold them. This he does not do. Instead he argues there are no such things as conservative principles, only ideological “improvisations” for defending hierarchy and privilege shared by a heterogeneous cast of characters running from Tocqueville and Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and Phyllis Schlafly. So his real claim can be reduced to this: “those who react against movements of the left” react against movements of the left—which is a tautology, not an argument.
The point of my review was to distinguish conceptually between conservatism, which is informed by a view of human nature; reaction, which is informed by a view of history; and the right, which is a shifting, engaged ideological family that, in this country, includes a few genuine conservatives, radical libertarians, neoconservatives, social issues reactionaries, evangelicals, foreign policy hawks, e tutti quanti, who have disagreements among themselves. (As for Burke, who was a genuine conservative but also an engaged politician, it’s not surprising that he sometimes disagreed with himself.)
Robin’s Manichaeanism distorts the historical reality of the conservative tradition, which includes the Disraeli who shepherded through the Reform Act of 1867, the Bismarck who laid the foundation for the German welfare state, and the Heritage Foundation, which first floated the idea of mandating that adult Americans all carry some form of health insurance. Though these proposals met challenges from the left, they were shaped by a recognizable conservative sensibility. Robin also ignores the liberal tradition, which gets no mention in his letter and barely a nod in his book. (The book’s index entry reads “liberalism, see left.”) There are good liberal reasons to resist “the restless spirit of revolutionary change,” too, since it can so often lead to despotism in the end (which is liberals’ great worry about the Arab Spring). Liberals stress the need for individual liberty, the rule of law, and stable constitutional structures, which are not revolutionary principles; does that make them reactionaries? In Robin’s eyes, perhaps it does.
He is correct, though, to note that I didn’t engage with his explanation of right-wing populism—for the simple reason that it was too weak and condescending to take seriously. Robin believes in false consciousness and in intellectuals’ ability to see through it; that’s why he can claim that a conservatism seeking to free the world from all that is “ugly, brutish, base, and dull” gives “the lower orders…a taste of lordly power” and gives arriviste Irishmen and Jews their Napoleonic moments in the sun. I, like most people, take the populists at their word. When figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (and now Newt Gingrich) demonize educated elites and praise the wisdom of “soccer moms” and plumbers, they mean it. And those on the bottom rung who cheer and vote for them know what they are cheering and voting for. Corey Robin’s commitment to old leftist clichés about “the lower orders” blinds him to the most important and disturbing development in our politics today, which is the apotheosis of ugliness, brutishness, baseness, and ignorance as political ideals on the American right. And if you can’t see that, what can you see?
There ARE Differencies Between Liberals and Conservatives
Conservatives vs. Liberals: More Than Politics
Posted: 02/ 8/2012 9:11 am
by Thomas Edsall
The contest for power between Democrats and Republicans pits two antithetical value systems against each other; two conflicting concepts of freedom, liberty, fairness, right, and wrong; two mutually exclusive notions of the state, the individual, and the collective good.
A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.
Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in "us" versus "them" terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are "more prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues;" 1 are "motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders." 2
Some of these conservative values can be discerned in public opinion data.
In one September 2010 survey question, The Pew Research Center asked voters, "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin. Conversely, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This is an ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats of 57 points among white men and 49 points among white women. 3
Along similar lines, Pew asked voters to choose between "Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard" and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people." White Republican men and women both picked "hard work" by decisive margins of 78-21 and 73-24, respectively. White Democratic men and women, in contrast, were far more equivocal, supporting hard work by modest margins of 52-44 and 53-43. 4
These Pew findings demonstrate that the differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are far greater than the differences in opinion between men and women commonly referred to as the gender gap.
* * *
The Pew questions are designed to test opinion on public policy issues. The strength of the Pew surveys and other comparable, well-designed polls is that the sample is carefully selected to be representative of either the general public or of all voters. The limitation of such surveys is that they are not designed to reveal more subtle distinctions that can be equally or more significant.
This less easily answered question has been explored by a team of academic researchers collaborating at a website -- www.YourMorals.org -- designed to test a variety of theories about the connection between views on morality and politics. Jonathan Haidt and Nicholas Winter of the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California, have collected and systematized very large numbers of responses to questions designed to elicit new information about political values orientation. Haidt et al. have ranked responses to a set of online public opinion surveys to show where self-described liberal/moderates differ most sharply from conservative/moderates. The strength of the YourMorals.org surveys lies in the large number of respondents; the weakness grows out of the fact that the participants are self-selected, and represent well-educated elites on the left, right, and center, with little representation of the poor, working class, or lower-middle class. 5
The findings published by Haidt et al. powerfully reinforce the paradigm of two roughly equivalent political coalitions: the first, a socially and economically dominant coalition on the right; the second, a coalition on the left composed of relatively disadvantaged (subdominant) voters in alliance with relatively well-educated, well-off, culturally liberal professionals ('information workers,' 'symbol analysts,' 'creatives,' 'knowledge workers,' etc.). 6 The Haidt et. al. data sheds new light on what it means, across a gamut of issues, when someone says he or she is a liberal or a conservative. 7
What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas: 8
1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD:
On key questions and statements in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe peace is extremely important"; "Understanding, appreciation, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature"; "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal"; "How close do you feel to people all over the world?"
On other key questions in this area, conservatives scored high, and liberals low: "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict"; "There is nothing wrong in getting back at someone who has hurt you."
2) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MORAL ELASTICITY; AUTHORITY:
Again, on some questions in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe that offenders should be provided with counseling to aid in their rehabilitation"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
On other questions, conservatives scored high and liberals low: "People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed"; "Respect for authority is something all children need to learn"; "I believe that 'an eye for an eye' is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders"; "The 'old-fashioned ways' and 'old-fashioned values' still show the best way to live"; "It feels wrong when...a person commits a crime and goes unpunished."
3) THE POOR, REDISTRIBUTION, FAIRNESS:
Liberal high, conservative low: "It feels wrong when . . . an employee who needs their job, is fired"; "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing"; "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."
Conservative high, liberal low: "[I place a high value on] safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self"; "[It's desirable when] employees [who] contribute more to the success of the company receive a larger share"; "[I value] social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources."
4) MORALS, HEDONISM, SELF-FULFILLMENT, HIERARCHY:
Liberals high, conservatives low: "I see myself as someone who . . . is original, comes up with new ideas"; "Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
Conservative high, liberal low: "If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems;" "People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong;" "Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs that traditional culture provide"; "[I favor] restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms."
Their findings show how profound the chasm is on values questions between liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, not only do liberals place high importance on peace, mutual understanding, and empathy for those who have difficulty prevailing in competition, they demonstrate concern for equality of outcome, while conservatives place pointedly low or negative importance on such values. 9 On the other side, conservatives believe that the use of force is a legitimate method of conflict resolution across a range of domains, from war to law enforcement to the discipline of children. 10 Conservatives are more likely to believe in an "eye for an eye," are more likely to respect received tradition, and are overwhelmingly committed to the proposition that individuals are responsible for their own economic condition -- all views rejected by liberals. 11
From a different vantage point -- taking data from American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys conducted between 1972 and 2004, the University of Virginia's Nicholas Winter analyzed the words respondents used to describe the two political parties. In "Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties," Winter categorized words respondents volunteered as stereotypically "male" or "female:"
[M]asculine men are thought to be active, independent, and decisive; feminine women are thought to be compassionate, devoted to others, emotional, and kind. These core traits are linked with a range of other features, including other traits (masculine men are aggressive, practical, tough, hardworking, and hierarchical; feminine women are gentle, submissive, soft, ladylike, and egalitarian); physical characteristics (masculine men are big, strong, and muscular; feminine women are small, weak, and soft-spoken). 12
Posted: 02/ 8/2012 9:11 am
by Thomas Edsall
The contest for power between Democrats and Republicans pits two antithetical value systems against each other; two conflicting concepts of freedom, liberty, fairness, right, and wrong; two mutually exclusive notions of the state, the individual, and the collective good.
A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.
Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in "us" versus "them" terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are "more prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues;" 1 are "motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders." 2
Some of these conservative values can be discerned in public opinion data.
In one September 2010 survey question, The Pew Research Center asked voters, "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin. Conversely, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This is an ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats of 57 points among white men and 49 points among white women. 3
Along similar lines, Pew asked voters to choose between "Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard" and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people." White Republican men and women both picked "hard work" by decisive margins of 78-21 and 73-24, respectively. White Democratic men and women, in contrast, were far more equivocal, supporting hard work by modest margins of 52-44 and 53-43. 4
These Pew findings demonstrate that the differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are far greater than the differences in opinion between men and women commonly referred to as the gender gap.
* * *
The Pew questions are designed to test opinion on public policy issues. The strength of the Pew surveys and other comparable, well-designed polls is that the sample is carefully selected to be representative of either the general public or of all voters. The limitation of such surveys is that they are not designed to reveal more subtle distinctions that can be equally or more significant.
This less easily answered question has been explored by a team of academic researchers collaborating at a website -- www.YourMorals.org -- designed to test a variety of theories about the connection between views on morality and politics. Jonathan Haidt and Nicholas Winter of the University of Virginia, and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California, have collected and systematized very large numbers of responses to questions designed to elicit new information about political values orientation. Haidt et al. have ranked responses to a set of online public opinion surveys to show where self-described liberal/moderates differ most sharply from conservative/moderates. The strength of the YourMorals.org surveys lies in the large number of respondents; the weakness grows out of the fact that the participants are self-selected, and represent well-educated elites on the left, right, and center, with little representation of the poor, working class, or lower-middle class. 5
The findings published by Haidt et al. powerfully reinforce the paradigm of two roughly equivalent political coalitions: the first, a socially and economically dominant coalition on the right; the second, a coalition on the left composed of relatively disadvantaged (subdominant) voters in alliance with relatively well-educated, well-off, culturally liberal professionals ('information workers,' 'symbol analysts,' 'creatives,' 'knowledge workers,' etc.). 6 The Haidt et. al. data sheds new light on what it means, across a gamut of issues, when someone says he or she is a liberal or a conservative. 7
What kinds of questions and values statements provoke the sharpest divide between left and right? The team looked at responses to 107 questions and found that the most divisive questions included those in the following areas: 8
1) WAR, PEACE, VIOLENCE, EMPATHY WITH THE WORLD:
On key questions and statements in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe peace is extremely important"; "Understanding, appreciation, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature"; "One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal"; "How close do you feel to people all over the world?"
On other key questions in this area, conservatives scored high, and liberals low: "War is sometimes the best way to solve a conflict"; "There is nothing wrong in getting back at someone who has hurt you."
2) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; MORAL ELASTICITY; AUTHORITY:
Again, on some questions in this category, liberals scored high, conservatives low: "I believe that offenders should be provided with counseling to aid in their rehabilitation"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
On other questions, conservatives scored high and liberals low: "People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed"; "Respect for authority is something all children need to learn"; "I believe that 'an eye for an eye' is the correct philosophy behind punishing offenders"; "The 'old-fashioned ways' and 'old-fashioned values' still show the best way to live"; "It feels wrong when...a person commits a crime and goes unpunished."
3) THE POOR, REDISTRIBUTION, FAIRNESS:
Liberal high, conservative low: "It feels wrong when . . . an employee who needs their job, is fired"; "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing"; "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me."
Conservative high, liberal low: "[I place a high value on] safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self"; "[It's desirable when] employees [who] contribute more to the success of the company receive a larger share"; "[I value] social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources."
4) MORALS, HEDONISM, SELF-FULFILLMENT, HIERARCHY:
Liberals high, conservatives low: "I see myself as someone who . . . is original, comes up with new ideas"; "Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself"; "What is ethical varies from one situation and society to another."
Conservative high, liberal low: "If certain groups stayed in their place, we would have fewer problems;" "People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong;" "Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs that traditional culture provide"; "[I favor] restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms."
Their findings show how profound the chasm is on values questions between liberals and conservatives. Generally speaking, not only do liberals place high importance on peace, mutual understanding, and empathy for those who have difficulty prevailing in competition, they demonstrate concern for equality of outcome, while conservatives place pointedly low or negative importance on such values. 9 On the other side, conservatives believe that the use of force is a legitimate method of conflict resolution across a range of domains, from war to law enforcement to the discipline of children. 10 Conservatives are more likely to believe in an "eye for an eye," are more likely to respect received tradition, and are overwhelmingly committed to the proposition that individuals are responsible for their own economic condition -- all views rejected by liberals. 11
From a different vantage point -- taking data from American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys conducted between 1972 and 2004, the University of Virginia's Nicholas Winter analyzed the words respondents used to describe the two political parties. In "Masculine Republicans and Feminine Democrats: Gender and Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties," Winter categorized words respondents volunteered as stereotypically "male" or "female:"
[M]asculine men are thought to be active, independent, and decisive; feminine women are thought to be compassionate, devoted to others, emotional, and kind. These core traits are linked with a range of other features, including other traits (masculine men are aggressive, practical, tough, hardworking, and hierarchical; feminine women are gentle, submissive, soft, ladylike, and egalitarian); physical characteristics (masculine men are big, strong, and muscular; feminine women are small, weak, and soft-spoken). 12
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Tinker Tailor Solider Spy
I saw the movie. It was intriguing. I do not mind slower movies, although I heard fellow moviegoers afterwards murmuring about its pace. I figured the spy may be who it is, simply because the actor is the only other recognizable name (Colin Firth) I knew, besides Gary Oldman as George Smiley. I prefer intricate plots, and this movie delivers on that.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
The Privatization Trap
Feb 5, 2012 8:00 AM 09:23:04 CST
by Mike Konczal
The privatization trap
From schools to prisons, outsourcing government's works typically ends with cronyism, waste and unaccountability.
Privatizing the government is one of the most active projects of the early 21st century.
Everything we once expected the government to do — from education to regulatory rule-writing to military operations to healthcare services to prison management — it now does less of, preferring to support markets in which these services are done through independent, profit-maximizing agents. Tools such as contracting out, vouchering and the selling-off of state assets have been used to remake the government during our market-worshipping era.
Privatization is one of the few political projects that enjoys bipartisan support: Conservatives cheer the rollback of the state, and liberals like to claim that the virtues of the free market are being used towards the egalitarian ends of public policy. The fraud and waste that often come with outsourcing these services has been well-documented. The private management in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the lobbying efforts of corporate prisons have all provided horror stories of what happens when cronyism guides decision-making on behalf of the state. But privatization as standard government practice has problems that go far beyond the abuses of any single incident.
Rather than solving problems with government, privatization often amplifies those issues to new extremes. Instead of unleashing market innovation, it often introduces new parasitic partners into the decision-making process. Instead of providing a check on the power of the government, it allows the state to circumvent constitutional and democratic accountability measures by merging with the private sector. And ultimately, the practice replaces the set of choices and constraints found in democracy, with another set found in the marketplace. Today’s political conversation is blind to these problems out of a mistaken faith in the efficiency and fundamental equality of markets, contrasted to the ineffectiveness and corruptibility of the state.
What advocates miss is that the logic of markets creates private-sector coalitions capable of extracting just as much from taxpayers as the state. Corporations, lobbyists and other market actors can have just as much political agency as the government, and privatization can mobilize businesses to rewrite market practices.
This political process plays out in the quality of the services provided and the structure of the companies providing them. Privatization has sometimes meant that the most lucrative and easiest parts of these government obligations go into private hands, creating private profit, while the most difficult and dangerous parts remain with the public. This can range from the “privatizing the gains, socializing the losses” of various parts of the financial sector to the “cream-skimming” that goes on in many other industries.
If privatization is meant to put a check on the size and power of the state it often backfires, as the practice can be used to circumvent normal mechanisms that exist to hold the state accountable. A whole array of transparency laws and constitutional checks don’t carry over when the government outsources its responsibilities and activities to independent businesses.
Privatization as a way of avoiding constraints and accountability measures has two particularly troubling consequences. First, the government can use independent agents to do things that they themselves cannot do, betraying the whole point of keeping government in check. Especially in the world of surveillance, this practice can act as a way to get around constitutional protections enjoyed by citizens.
Second, accountability measures that have evolved through decades of public law are jettisoned when a service leaves the public sector, allowing companies to do the government’s work in a network of secrecy. Ways the public keeps a check on the government, from the Freedom of Information Act to the Administrative Procedure Act to whole regimes of other transparency laws, do not bind outside businesses.
The Constitution prohibits the delegation of significant state powers, but the Supreme Court currently puts few constraints on the government to outsource many of its important duties. What today’s discourse ignores is an understanding of the liberal conception of what public and democracy itself is good for — as a way to check private and government power, and promote accountability and responsiveness.
These blur into dark scenarios where private-public relationships give public agents maximum discretion in exchange for giving private agents advantages over their competition. For example, after FedEx’s CEO announced that his company would be cooperating with the government following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the firm received a number of rewards. Ranging from special access to security databases, to a prize seat on a regional terrorism task force (the only private company represented) and special state licenses, these benefits amplified the firm’s power in the marketplace over noncooperative competitors like UPS, all in exchange for amplifying the power and reach of the state.
Defenders of privatization also argue that the marketplace creates innovation. Competition, the profit motive and the “creative destruction” of the market system can be deployed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. But what this outsourcing really does is move constraints from one space to another. It transforms the strengths and weaknesses, the limits and the constraints, from government to the market.
Privatization replaces the democratic role of citizens finding solutions to collective problems and transforms it into consumers trucking and bargaining in a marketplace. Finding solutions in a public space emphasizes accountability, voice, transparency, rules and claims through reasoning that goes beyond the self. The market emphasizes cost-benefit thinking, profit-seeking strategies, bargaining and the satiation of individuals’ wants; good things in many circumstances, but not necessarily when it comes to the powers of the state.
A regime of privatization shifts the debate away from the functions of government towards the allocation of those functions. For all the talk about innovation by outside contractors, what privatization largely does is preserve the scope of government services while looking for efficiency gains. And since the scope of what the government does is held constant, the real gains come from minimizing costs.
Take prisons, for example. With the addition of privately run prisons, the debate narrowly focuses on how much to spend on prisoners. Minimizing costs here will often be the result of simply providing less of a good at a worse quality, and the debate will focus on the optimal extent of these privatization contracts. Meanwhile, the greater question of when the state should imprison people fades to the background.
What’s actually public about these responsibilities disappears from the conversation. Privatization assumes that cost quantifying solutions are more fundamental to government than any discussion of ethics or values. The move away from democratic accountability is particularly worrisome because in many of these fields, the ultimate motivator of private markets, the profit motive, is in direct conflict with the public administration. The basic values, concepts and institutions of liberal democracy — political participation, elections, equal distribution of individual liberties, checks on concentrated power — do not work towards economic competitiveness.
The ideology that the government is just one among many providers of goods and services is a seductive one in this age of markets. But the government isn’t simply just another agent in the market, and firms that are empowered to carry out the role of the state can be as abusive as the worst bureaucracy.
We need new arguments for the government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, to be allowed to do its jobs knowing that it won’t always be perfect. The alternative is government by cronyism, delegated marketplace winners exploiting what works about markets with none of the normal checks we expect on a functioning democracy. There are no doubt weaknesses in the current functions of government, but for those who resist privatization, that is a call to political reform rather than one of abandoning the public arena altogether.
by Mike Konczal
The privatization trap
From schools to prisons, outsourcing government's works typically ends with cronyism, waste and unaccountability.
Privatizing the government is one of the most active projects of the early 21st century.
Everything we once expected the government to do — from education to regulatory rule-writing to military operations to healthcare services to prison management — it now does less of, preferring to support markets in which these services are done through independent, profit-maximizing agents. Tools such as contracting out, vouchering and the selling-off of state assets have been used to remake the government during our market-worshipping era.
Privatization is one of the few political projects that enjoys bipartisan support: Conservatives cheer the rollback of the state, and liberals like to claim that the virtues of the free market are being used towards the egalitarian ends of public policy. The fraud and waste that often come with outsourcing these services has been well-documented. The private management in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the lobbying efforts of corporate prisons have all provided horror stories of what happens when cronyism guides decision-making on behalf of the state. But privatization as standard government practice has problems that go far beyond the abuses of any single incident.
Rather than solving problems with government, privatization often amplifies those issues to new extremes. Instead of unleashing market innovation, it often introduces new parasitic partners into the decision-making process. Instead of providing a check on the power of the government, it allows the state to circumvent constitutional and democratic accountability measures by merging with the private sector. And ultimately, the practice replaces the set of choices and constraints found in democracy, with another set found in the marketplace. Today’s political conversation is blind to these problems out of a mistaken faith in the efficiency and fundamental equality of markets, contrasted to the ineffectiveness and corruptibility of the state.
What advocates miss is that the logic of markets creates private-sector coalitions capable of extracting just as much from taxpayers as the state. Corporations, lobbyists and other market actors can have just as much political agency as the government, and privatization can mobilize businesses to rewrite market practices.
This political process plays out in the quality of the services provided and the structure of the companies providing them. Privatization has sometimes meant that the most lucrative and easiest parts of these government obligations go into private hands, creating private profit, while the most difficult and dangerous parts remain with the public. This can range from the “privatizing the gains, socializing the losses” of various parts of the financial sector to the “cream-skimming” that goes on in many other industries.
If privatization is meant to put a check on the size and power of the state it often backfires, as the practice can be used to circumvent normal mechanisms that exist to hold the state accountable. A whole array of transparency laws and constitutional checks don’t carry over when the government outsources its responsibilities and activities to independent businesses.
Privatization as a way of avoiding constraints and accountability measures has two particularly troubling consequences. First, the government can use independent agents to do things that they themselves cannot do, betraying the whole point of keeping government in check. Especially in the world of surveillance, this practice can act as a way to get around constitutional protections enjoyed by citizens.
Second, accountability measures that have evolved through decades of public law are jettisoned when a service leaves the public sector, allowing companies to do the government’s work in a network of secrecy. Ways the public keeps a check on the government, from the Freedom of Information Act to the Administrative Procedure Act to whole regimes of other transparency laws, do not bind outside businesses.
The Constitution prohibits the delegation of significant state powers, but the Supreme Court currently puts few constraints on the government to outsource many of its important duties. What today’s discourse ignores is an understanding of the liberal conception of what public and democracy itself is good for — as a way to check private and government power, and promote accountability and responsiveness.
These blur into dark scenarios where private-public relationships give public agents maximum discretion in exchange for giving private agents advantages over their competition. For example, after FedEx’s CEO announced that his company would be cooperating with the government following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the firm received a number of rewards. Ranging from special access to security databases, to a prize seat on a regional terrorism task force (the only private company represented) and special state licenses, these benefits amplified the firm’s power in the marketplace over noncooperative competitors like UPS, all in exchange for amplifying the power and reach of the state.
Defenders of privatization also argue that the marketplace creates innovation. Competition, the profit motive and the “creative destruction” of the market system can be deployed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government services. But what this outsourcing really does is move constraints from one space to another. It transforms the strengths and weaknesses, the limits and the constraints, from government to the market.
Privatization replaces the democratic role of citizens finding solutions to collective problems and transforms it into consumers trucking and bargaining in a marketplace. Finding solutions in a public space emphasizes accountability, voice, transparency, rules and claims through reasoning that goes beyond the self. The market emphasizes cost-benefit thinking, profit-seeking strategies, bargaining and the satiation of individuals’ wants; good things in many circumstances, but not necessarily when it comes to the powers of the state.
A regime of privatization shifts the debate away from the functions of government towards the allocation of those functions. For all the talk about innovation by outside contractors, what privatization largely does is preserve the scope of government services while looking for efficiency gains. And since the scope of what the government does is held constant, the real gains come from minimizing costs.
Take prisons, for example. With the addition of privately run prisons, the debate narrowly focuses on how much to spend on prisoners. Minimizing costs here will often be the result of simply providing less of a good at a worse quality, and the debate will focus on the optimal extent of these privatization contracts. Meanwhile, the greater question of when the state should imprison people fades to the background.
What’s actually public about these responsibilities disappears from the conversation. Privatization assumes that cost quantifying solutions are more fundamental to government than any discussion of ethics or values. The move away from democratic accountability is particularly worrisome because in many of these fields, the ultimate motivator of private markets, the profit motive, is in direct conflict with the public administration. The basic values, concepts and institutions of liberal democracy — political participation, elections, equal distribution of individual liberties, checks on concentrated power — do not work towards economic competitiveness.
The ideology that the government is just one among many providers of goods and services is a seductive one in this age of markets. But the government isn’t simply just another agent in the market, and firms that are empowered to carry out the role of the state can be as abusive as the worst bureaucracy.
We need new arguments for the government, with all its strengths and weaknesses, to be allowed to do its jobs knowing that it won’t always be perfect. The alternative is government by cronyism, delegated marketplace winners exploiting what works about markets with none of the normal checks we expect on a functioning democracy. There are no doubt weaknesses in the current functions of government, but for those who resist privatization, that is a call to political reform rather than one of abandoning the public arena altogether.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
About Browsing
Going to Melody
Leon Wieseltier
January 11, 2012 |
In a country as injured as ours, there is something unseemly about all this sagacious talk of creative destruction. A concept that was designed to suggest the ironic cruelty of innovation has been twisted into an extenuation of economic misery—into capitalism’s theodicy. Where there are winners, there are losers: praise the Lord and pass the Kindle. I have always believed that the losers know more about life than the winners, though I wish affluence upon us all; but it does not romanticize the poor to demythologize the rich, and to propose that sometimes creative destruction is not very creative but very destructive. The brutality of large businesses toward small businesses, for example, is neither brilliant nor heroic. They do it because they can. Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.
WHEN MY FRIEND at Melody Records told me about the death of his store, I was bereft. This was in part because he is my friend—after my father died, I received a letter from the Holocaust Museum informing me that he had made a donation in my father’s memory—and now he must fend for himself and his family and his staff in the American wreckage. But my dejection was owed also to the fact that this store was one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. “Going to Melody” was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather. The people who worked there had knowledge and taste: they apprised me of obscure pressings of Frank Martin’s chamber music, and warned me about the sound quality of certain reissues of Lucky Thompson and Don Byas, and turned me on to old salsa and new fado. They even teased me about my insane affection for Rihanna. When they added DVDs to the store, my pleasures multiplied. (Also my amusements. Not long ago Marcel Ophuls’ great film arrived in the shop, and the box declared: “Woody Allen presents The Sorrow and The Pity.” Beat that.) Of course all these discs can be found online. But the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing.
IT IS A MATTER OF some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.
MY FATHER HAD furniture stores. I grew up with the pathos of retail: you throw all your money into a location and an inventory, you hang out a sign, you trick out a window, you unlock a door, and (if you lack the resources to advertise formidably) you wait. If they come in, you use your skill; but they have to come in. When my father was ill, I would quit the library and mind the store. One day I set a house record for sofas sold because the store was located in a neighborhood where many U.N. people lived, and I knew more than most furniture salesmen about the crises in Iran and Cyprus. Eventually the store failed. But the failure of some stores is more repercussive than the failure of other stores. The commerce of culture is a trade in ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth. A hunger for profit exploits a hunger for meaning. If the one gets too ravenous, the other may find it harder to subsist. The disappearance of our bookstores and our record stores constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.
Leon Wieseltier
January 11, 2012 |
In a country as injured as ours, there is something unseemly about all this sagacious talk of creative destruction. A concept that was designed to suggest the ironic cruelty of innovation has been twisted into an extenuation of economic misery—into capitalism’s theodicy. Where there are winners, there are losers: praise the Lord and pass the Kindle. I have always believed that the losers know more about life than the winners, though I wish affluence upon us all; but it does not romanticize the poor to demythologize the rich, and to propose that sometimes creative destruction is not very creative but very destructive. The brutality of large businesses toward small businesses, for example, is neither brilliant nor heroic. They do it because they can. Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.
WHEN MY FRIEND at Melody Records told me about the death of his store, I was bereft. This was in part because he is my friend—after my father died, I received a letter from the Holocaust Museum informing me that he had made a donation in my father’s memory—and now he must fend for himself and his family and his staff in the American wreckage. But my dejection was owed also to the fact that this store was one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. “Going to Melody” was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather. The people who worked there had knowledge and taste: they apprised me of obscure pressings of Frank Martin’s chamber music, and warned me about the sound quality of certain reissues of Lucky Thompson and Don Byas, and turned me on to old salsa and new fado. They even teased me about my insane affection for Rihanna. When they added DVDs to the store, my pleasures multiplied. (Also my amusements. Not long ago Marcel Ophuls’ great film arrived in the shop, and the box declared: “Woody Allen presents The Sorrow and The Pity.” Beat that.) Of course all these discs can be found online. But the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing.
IT IS A MATTER OF some importance that the nature of browsing be properly understood. Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon what flaneurie is to Google Earth. It is an immediate encounter with the actual object of curiosity. The browser (no, not that one) is the flaneur in a room. Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents. It takes you to where you have already been—to what you have already bought or thought of buying, and to similar things. It sells similarities. After all, serendipity is a poor business model. But serendipity is how the spirit is renewed; and a record store, like a bookstore, is nothing less than an institution of spiritual renewal.
MY FATHER HAD furniture stores. I grew up with the pathos of retail: you throw all your money into a location and an inventory, you hang out a sign, you trick out a window, you unlock a door, and (if you lack the resources to advertise formidably) you wait. If they come in, you use your skill; but they have to come in. When my father was ill, I would quit the library and mind the store. One day I set a house record for sofas sold because the store was located in a neighborhood where many U.N. people lived, and I knew more than most furniture salesmen about the crises in Iran and Cyprus. Eventually the store failed. But the failure of some stores is more repercussive than the failure of other stores. The commerce of culture is a trade in ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth. A hunger for profit exploits a hunger for meaning. If the one gets too ravenous, the other may find it harder to subsist. The disappearance of our bookstores and our record stores constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.
The Dishonestty of the Inequality Deniers
by Jonathan Chait
Since the presidential campaign is revolving in large part around the question of whether or not it’s fair to increase taxes on the richest Americans, the right is circulating its cherished pseudo-facts to press its case that the rich are already uniquely overburdened with taxation. Ubiquitous right-wing misinformation-recirculator Veronique de Rugy, in the Washington Examiner, hauls out the classic standby of citing the amount of total taxes paid by the rich and pretending this represents the tax rate paid by the rich:
Contrary to common belief, the United States already has a more progressive tax system than do the most industrialized democracies worldwide. The nearby chart uses data from a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the share of taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) paid by the richest 10 percent of households in 24 industrialized countries. The bars represent the share of the total taxes collected that are paid by top earners in these 24 countries.
The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.
Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.
The flaw here, of course, is that de Rugy’s statistic has nothing to do with the point she attempts to make on its behalf. She claims the U.S. has a more progressive tax system than other countries. “Progressive” means the degree to which a tax system increases tax rates on higher-income earners. But her figure only shows that our rich people pay a larger share of the tax burden than the rich of other countries. But the fact that rich Americans pay a larger chunk of the total tax burden than rich people in other countries doesn’t mean rich Americans are paying a higher rate. They may be paying a higher share of the taxes because they have a higher share of the income to begin with. Which, in fact, they do.
I could not find a comprehensive comparison of the tax rate paid by the richest Americans against all other industrialized democracies. I did find a paper comparing the U.S. to the United Kingdom and France, and the U.S. tax rate for the top one percent (and the whole top 10 percent) is considerably lower.) Our rich people pay a bigger share of total taxes because, despite their low rate, they earn so much more of the income pie.
If we actually try to take de Rugy’s argument at face value, she is insisting that we can’t ask the rich to pay any more taxes because they earn so much money to begin with. It would follow, I suppose, that if something were to reverse the trend toward rising inequality, and the rich started earning a lower share of the income pie and paying a lower share of the taxes, that de Rugy’s claim would imply that we should necessarily increase their tax rate. After all, if the proper measure of a tax burden is what proportion of the total taxes a group pays, and a high proportion means they already pay too much, than a lower proportion would mean they don’t pay enough. Obviously de Rugy doesn’t believe that. Just as obviously, the role data plays in her argument is purely decorative. Of course, de Rugy is merely repeating a canard that has been floating around the right-wing misinformation chamber for years and years. I continue to be dumbfounded at the low intellectual standards of a movement which allows obvious nonsense like this to play such a major role in its intellectual case.
While we’re on the topic, the inequality denial community is up in arms over my post the other day about the Charles Murray dodge. Murray has a book arguing that declining social norms have caused working-class white people to fall behind educated elites. Inequality deniers are very excited about this argument, because it allows them to change the subject from the question of the skyrocketing share of income held by the top one percent to the smaller but also growing gap between the top 20 percent and those below.
The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, who considers “rising income inequality” the greatest fraud since global warming, has roused himself into a fit of uncomprehending wrath:
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait doesn’t much like Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. In particular, he doesn’t like that Murray links the increasing social polarization of America to the abandonment by poor and working-class whites of the”Founding Virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. ... But that’s not what Chait wants Murray to write about. Chait doesn’t want Murray to write about culture. Chait wants Murray to write about rising income inequality as the driving force behind pretty much all of America’s troubles.
Sorry, no, that’s not what I wrote, at all. Charles Murray can write about the indolence of the white working class all he’d like. My point is that other pundits should stop pretending that an analysis of the gap between the bottom 80 percent and the top 20 percent is the same thing as an analysis of the gap between the top one percent and the bottom 99 percent. As I wrote, “Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, all the claims being made on Murray’s behalf, the basic point is that it is not a plausible response to the problem of income inequality.”
Likewise, the blog Political Calculations — whose work Pethokoukis has cited as refuting the “myth” of income inequality — is unhappy as well. My post pointed out that its supposed refutation of rising inequality is erroneous, because it relies on census data. The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich. Lane Kenworthy, an actual expert in this topic, helpfully explained the folly of the Political Calculations chart. I thought his explanation was too detailed to be of interest to readers here, but since they’re complaining, I’ll reprint a longer excerpt of his e-mail to me:
Over the period since 1994 the Census Bureau's standard Ginis for households and for families, which are the ones used in the Political Calculations chart, suggest little or no change in income inequality. So too do Ginis for earnings inequality among full-time year-round employed individuals (see IE-2 at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/inequality/index.html).
But it's well-known that the Census Bureau data miss what's going on at the top, because they "top code" very high earnings and incomes. What the Census data tell us, and what the Political Calculations post in effect simply reiterates, is that within the bottom 99% there has been little change in income inequality since 1994, whether we're looking at households, families, or individuals.
We can ask "Why begin in 1994?" But the bigger problem is ignoring what happened at the top of the distribution.
During this particular period, income inequality increased due to the top pulling away from the rest. According to the Census Bureau's calculations for households, there was essentially no change in inequality from 1994 (Gini .456) to 2007 (Gini .463). (Again, these are the data for households used in the Political Calculations chart.) The best source of income data for households is the CBO, which merges the Census household survey data with IRS tax record data. According to the report the CBO put out a few weeks ago, household income inequality including the top 1% actually increased sharply between 1994 and 2007. The CBO report is at http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485; see Figure 11 on p. 20; the closest CBO counterpart to the Census income measure is "market income plus transfers". Eyeballing the CBO chart, it looks to me like the Gini goes from .45 in 1994 to about .52 in 2007. That's a large increase.
Pethokoukis triumphantly concludes, “Chait’s theory of the case has come apart.” In fact, “Chait’s theory of the case” also happens to be the consensus view of every expert who actually studied the issue and knows which data to examine.
Since the presidential campaign is revolving in large part around the question of whether or not it’s fair to increase taxes on the richest Americans, the right is circulating its cherished pseudo-facts to press its case that the rich are already uniquely overburdened with taxation. Ubiquitous right-wing misinformation-recirculator Veronique de Rugy, in the Washington Examiner, hauls out the classic standby of citing the amount of total taxes paid by the rich and pretending this represents the tax rate paid by the rich:
Contrary to common belief, the United States already has a more progressive tax system than do the most industrialized democracies worldwide. The nearby chart uses data from a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the share of taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) paid by the richest 10 percent of households in 24 industrialized countries. The bars represent the share of the total taxes collected that are paid by top earners in these 24 countries.
The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.
Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.
The flaw here, of course, is that de Rugy’s statistic has nothing to do with the point she attempts to make on its behalf. She claims the U.S. has a more progressive tax system than other countries. “Progressive” means the degree to which a tax system increases tax rates on higher-income earners. But her figure only shows that our rich people pay a larger share of the tax burden than the rich of other countries. But the fact that rich Americans pay a larger chunk of the total tax burden than rich people in other countries doesn’t mean rich Americans are paying a higher rate. They may be paying a higher share of the taxes because they have a higher share of the income to begin with. Which, in fact, they do.
I could not find a comprehensive comparison of the tax rate paid by the richest Americans against all other industrialized democracies. I did find a paper comparing the U.S. to the United Kingdom and France, and the U.S. tax rate for the top one percent (and the whole top 10 percent) is considerably lower.) Our rich people pay a bigger share of total taxes because, despite their low rate, they earn so much more of the income pie.
If we actually try to take de Rugy’s argument at face value, she is insisting that we can’t ask the rich to pay any more taxes because they earn so much money to begin with. It would follow, I suppose, that if something were to reverse the trend toward rising inequality, and the rich started earning a lower share of the income pie and paying a lower share of the taxes, that de Rugy’s claim would imply that we should necessarily increase their tax rate. After all, if the proper measure of a tax burden is what proportion of the total taxes a group pays, and a high proportion means they already pay too much, than a lower proportion would mean they don’t pay enough. Obviously de Rugy doesn’t believe that. Just as obviously, the role data plays in her argument is purely decorative. Of course, de Rugy is merely repeating a canard that has been floating around the right-wing misinformation chamber for years and years. I continue to be dumbfounded at the low intellectual standards of a movement which allows obvious nonsense like this to play such a major role in its intellectual case.
While we’re on the topic, the inequality denial community is up in arms over my post the other day about the Charles Murray dodge. Murray has a book arguing that declining social norms have caused working-class white people to fall behind educated elites. Inequality deniers are very excited about this argument, because it allows them to change the subject from the question of the skyrocketing share of income held by the top one percent to the smaller but also growing gap between the top 20 percent and those below.
The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, who considers “rising income inequality” the greatest fraud since global warming, has roused himself into a fit of uncomprehending wrath:
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait doesn’t much like Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. In particular, he doesn’t like that Murray links the increasing social polarization of America to the abandonment by poor and working-class whites of the”Founding Virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. ... But that’s not what Chait wants Murray to write about. Chait doesn’t want Murray to write about culture. Chait wants Murray to write about rising income inequality as the driving force behind pretty much all of America’s troubles.
Sorry, no, that’s not what I wrote, at all. Charles Murray can write about the indolence of the white working class all he’d like. My point is that other pundits should stop pretending that an analysis of the gap between the bottom 80 percent and the top 20 percent is the same thing as an analysis of the gap between the top one percent and the bottom 99 percent. As I wrote, “Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, all the claims being made on Murray’s behalf, the basic point is that it is not a plausible response to the problem of income inequality.”
Likewise, the blog Political Calculations — whose work Pethokoukis has cited as refuting the “myth” of income inequality — is unhappy as well. My post pointed out that its supposed refutation of rising inequality is erroneous, because it relies on census data. The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich. Lane Kenworthy, an actual expert in this topic, helpfully explained the folly of the Political Calculations chart. I thought his explanation was too detailed to be of interest to readers here, but since they’re complaining, I’ll reprint a longer excerpt of his e-mail to me:
Over the period since 1994 the Census Bureau's standard Ginis for households and for families, which are the ones used in the Political Calculations chart, suggest little or no change in income inequality. So too do Ginis for earnings inequality among full-time year-round employed individuals (see IE-2 at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/inequality/index.html).
But it's well-known that the Census Bureau data miss what's going on at the top, because they "top code" very high earnings and incomes. What the Census data tell us, and what the Political Calculations post in effect simply reiterates, is that within the bottom 99% there has been little change in income inequality since 1994, whether we're looking at households, families, or individuals.
We can ask "Why begin in 1994?" But the bigger problem is ignoring what happened at the top of the distribution.
During this particular period, income inequality increased due to the top pulling away from the rest. According to the Census Bureau's calculations for households, there was essentially no change in inequality from 1994 (Gini .456) to 2007 (Gini .463). (Again, these are the data for households used in the Political Calculations chart.) The best source of income data for households is the CBO, which merges the Census household survey data with IRS tax record data. According to the report the CBO put out a few weeks ago, household income inequality including the top 1% actually increased sharply between 1994 and 2007. The CBO report is at http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485; see Figure 11 on p. 20; the closest CBO counterpart to the Census income measure is "market income plus transfers". Eyeballing the CBO chart, it looks to me like the Gini goes from .45 in 1994 to about .52 in 2007. That's a large increase.
Pethokoukis triumphantly concludes, “Chait’s theory of the case has come apart.” In fact, “Chait’s theory of the case” also happens to be the consensus view of every expert who actually studied the issue and knows which data to examine.
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