Tucson shootings (11 Jan 2011)

Political violence is always sobering and alarming, and the attempted assassination of U.S. Congress member Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson is obviously no different. Mike Konczal rounds up some interesting links about the incident here. I don't have a whole lot to add but feel compelled to write about it, possibly because I lived in Tucson in the late 1990s, which makes it particularly upsetting to me -- easy for me to imagine vividly. I used to teach English courses to freshmen at the University of Arizona, (indeed, I taught the "rhetorical triangle" used in this post by SEK to attempt to define what violent rhetoric is) and certainly had students that remind me a little bit of Jared Loughner -- students who were incapable of expressing their complicated intuitions about what they felt they were up against in society and whose inarticulateness about complex subjects could make them sound a little bit insane if they chose to take on such subjects in writing. The garbled syntax and improper word usage in this statement of Loughner's was actually pretty typical of many student papers: "I can't trust the current government because of fabrications. The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar."

I even had students who bordered on being uncontrollably disruptive, incapable of allowing a discussion to take place in the classroom without interrupting it or trying to dominate it, invalidate it. When I read that one of Loughner's fellow students told a reporter, "He disrupted class frequently with nonsensical outbursts," I could immediately picture from experience the sort of presence Loughner must have been.

Back when I was teaching, I just wished those students were some other instructor's problem. But now those students seem emblematic of a broader darkness settling over the country, a mood that suffuses some unknown proportion of the population. These are people who are acutely conscious of injustice and are perpetually aggrieved but have no resources for constructively thinking it through, for respecting or even attacking critically the complexity of the world. When ostensibly teaching "critical thinking" in my classes, I often had this disposition laid bare before me, and it would fill me with limitless despair. It seemed like stubbornness. I couldn't figure out how to convey the necessity of deliberation, of patient consideration, of the need to drop one's reflexive defensiveness in order to arrange one's feelings and notions into actual thoughts, into ideas that others could understand and respond to. Often my students would tell me, with words or deeds, that they believed such dialogue was pointless. Even if they played along with me, they didn't see how those skills were more broadly relevant to ordinary life. For many of them, they weren't, and in my experience outside of the academic world, I can see how they were right to be so resistant. Critical thinking can single you out as a troublemaker, and it can diminish the pleasures of what society generally wants to placate us with. But what happens when people fail to be placated yet can't process their disgruntlement?

Politics presumes a recognition that negotiation and dialogue must occur, that what is "right" is simply a given but is a matter of resolving inescapable conflicts of interest. Trying to kill politicians is an extreme expression of the rejection of politics -- a puerile fantasy that has been cynically encouraged in some quarters. But to reject the very possibility of negotiation and compromise is ultimately to express a preference for chaos and anarchy. This yearning to be beyond politics, if not neutralized by general prosperity into apathy, will inevitably find its expression in violence, and political violence, precluding the possibility of nonviolent resolution of disputes, is inherently a wish for violence without end. That is why those who commit these acts are usually depicted as madmen. But this kind of madness may be what happens at the margins when society fails to facilitate critical engagement with the world and with one another's ideas. (I felt like I failed personally as a teacher to facilitate this, in Tucson no less, so I've been feeling vaguely but unshakably guilty about what Loughner did there.)

Head Stomping and the Road to Fascism (26 Oct 2010)

Fast-forward to 1984, and a boot stamping on a human face forever. Yesterday a protester outside the last debate in the Kentucky Senate race was thrown to the ground and had her head stomped on. It wasn't quite a curbing -- no teeth were broken -- but it seems sufficiently violent to wonder how far away we are from right-wing goon squads forming their own paramilitaries to serve as enforcers for their government takeover. With that in mind, these essays (via mefi) by Sara Robinson about the stages of fascism (which draw on this Journal of Modern History essay by Robert Paxton) are worth reading.

Paxton posits five stages on the road to fascism, and in Robinson's estimation, we are at the second, with this election promising to bring us into the third:

The second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.

Obviously the bullying has already begun in Kentucky. Can one reasonably call Tea Party thugs brownshirts? Would they even reject the label? Robinson writes:

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

Even if the idea-less Republicans have made common cause with the Tea Party fringe and they succeed in the upcoming elections, it still seems as though we are far from "the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies" that signify a Fascist nation in full flower. Plutocracy? Sure, seems like we've been there for years. But fascism? Still, I think part of the reason for that, and part of what is so scary about the situation, is the apparent leaderless nature of the Tea Party. With no cult of personality driving it, the Tea Party seems not the instrument of a madman but of an entire mad people, a networked multitude that can only think to prove the power of its elaborate connectivity through oppression, the end in itself that appears as the redemptive vision for the anomie that each member of the multitude had endured in isolation.

Conservative class warfare (12 July 2010)

It appears that NYT columnist Ross Douthat also has class war on his mind after reading that article about strategic defaults on jumbo mortgages mentioned in the previous post. He begins with the proposition that "The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system." Another way of putting that is that they know the system is set up for their benefit, so they need not concern themselves with its mores.

What to do about this? Douthat suggests we need "conservative class warfare" -- an oxymoron if ever there was one -- "which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out." Much of what he then proposes sounds pretty good to me, and it would be great of conservatives signed on to this sort of conservatism: eliminating the federal subsidy on mortgage-interest payments, which are tax deductible; eliminating corporate subsidies; "attacking Washington’s wasteful spending on the well-connected." (He also wants means-testing for Social Security, a supposed solution for a nonexistent problem with the system's solvency.) He urges conservatives "to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich."

Agreed. But being "well-connected" by definition means that Washington doesn't take away any of your favors. And the ethos of conservatism tends to regard well-connectedness as some sort of deserved state of exception worth preserving for the overall stability of society. If there must be corruption,the implication often seems to be, let's at least make sure only the right people can get away with being corrupt. And the right people are the ones who already have been getting away with it for longer than anyone can remember.

Integrity and Entitlement (28 May 2010)

Eventually I'll post about something other than Facebook. But here's one more.

It's impossible to take what Mark Zuckerberg says about publicity and serving Facebook users' needs at face value. His mea culpas have always seemed like disingenuous Nixonian exercises in posturing, damage control for various overreaches, transparent attempts to make what is good for Facebook seem like humble efforts to provide what the customers really want. In trying to decode what the company is really up to, my assumption has been that Facebook wants to trade trumped-up convenience in exchange for our data, which they then will sell to marketers in order to "enrich" our online experience of ourselves with appropriately targeted ads. The company has been pretty successful in selling friendship back to us as mediated online self-production, in part because we like the attention its service facilitates, and in part because it does engage us with a broader spectrum of people in a genuinely novel way.

But I hadn't considered that Zuckerberg might be in earnest, which is actually worse. Dara Lind makes an interesting point in this post that Zuckerberg may not be merely masking his greed in his public pronouncements but is instead pushing a conservative moral idea he genuinely believes in: that surveillance is good for us as a society, basically because it keeps people in their place.

I suspect that while Zuckerberg spins publicity as a social good, he actually believes it’s a moral one. It’s a theme that’s become pretty common among execs of data-collecting, data-publicizing companies: making it so that anything anyone does can be seen by anyone they know is a way of keeping them honest.

Lind offers the example of his already notorious claim that having more than one online identity shows "a lack of integrity."

This is a morality that few people actually seem to share, including the so-called digital natives -- as this Pew study that both Lind and Danah Boyd point to shows. Lots of people want to keep various aspects of their lives separate, if not altogether private. That's not a lack of integrity; that's generally basic conscientiousness.

But the Zuckerberg ideology is highly favorable to business, combining maximum accountability with maximum mediation, yielding a data trail that can reveal bad-apple workers and be strip-mined for useful marketing data and potential branding innovations and whatnot. The new connections between goods and the meanings for things people create can be expropriated while the individuals themselves can be monitored in terms of their overall economic performance.

Lind argues that Zuckerberg's ideas about integrity are, among other things, those of "someone who’s familiar with the world of white-collar 'networking' in which bosses are expected to have semi-social bonds with their employees rather than the world of enforced hierarchy in which bosses are on the lookout for off-the-job indiscretions to punish or exploit." Which is another way of saying he is boss talking to other bosses, comfortable with the entitlements that have moved them beyond the mundane concerns of identity, which has become the gladiatorial field of combat for the rest of us consumers/supplicants.

Immigration and Racism (17 May 2010)

While I was on vacation, I took a several-hour train trip from Vienna to Prague and spent the ride in a compartment with a genial group of elderly Australians who were in the midst of three-month European odyssey. They pleasantly taught us some basic geographic facts about Australia, some quirky expressions they use (e.g., "fair dinkum"), some vagaries about its political system, and the history of their country's participation in the World Wars and so on. And they also blithely dispensed some details about Australia's aboriginal people and the Muslim presence across Asia that seemed shockingly racist to our American ears. Apparently the aboriginals are a "stone-age" people who "can't be trusted no matter what" because they will "rob you every time". At some point during the trip, "political correctness" was obligatorily mentioned and laughed at as if it, rather than broad stereotyping, was a sign of blinkered pettiness and small-mindedness.

It had me wondering whether America should actually be proud of their accomplishments on the "political correctness" front. Americans are certainly no slouches when it comes to racism, but most of the Americans I spend any time with (not in any way a representative sample) are so acutely conscious and embarrassed about the legacy of slavery and the omnipresent inequalities between blacks and whites in the U.S. that they are typically circumspect about expressing racist views, even if they secretly believe them at some level. It is difficult for me to imagine white Americans casually telling total strangers on a train about how blacks are. But it's indicative of the general situation that I had to remember after the fact to insert the word "white" in the previous sentence to modify "Americans." I like to think an integral part of the American Dream is the idea that humans can overcome their tribalist instincts to form inclusive units of community, unified by ethical beliefs about respect and equality rather than by blood and tradition. But after the Arizona law, and the general public's indifference about it, I am starting to doubt that most Americans see it that way.

What's happening on the immigration front makes it clear that white America's sense of entitlement, its belief that only they are the "real Americans" (though in fact they are lapsed Europeans) hasn't gone away. Anti-immigration commentators may occasionally try to spin their resentment of brown-skinned non-English-speaking people as based on economic concerns ("Mexicans stealing our jobs") but as this Factcheck.org study (via Matt Yglesias) shows, legal and illegal immigration doesn't hurt American workers in general.

Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.

Kevin Drum, here, citing this story by Chris Hayes, points out that such explanations don't motivate political action. John Tanton, the immigration activist Hayes profiles, explains that appeals to "identity" turned out to work much better than rational arguments rooted in economics. Thus the respectable-sounding economic arguments end up serving as ideological cover for the real motive force behind anti-immigration sentiment, the fear among some white Americans that they will lose their ability to guarantee a better life for themselves and their offspring on the sheer basis of their skin color. In their near-explicit race hatred, the anti-immigrant zealots reveal what lurks behind the platitudes of democracy and equal opportunity that many Americans espouse as official ideology: the conviction that American society's institutions justify their existence by protecting white American privilege, by defining "authentic" American identity in specific terms as white and Christian. And if institutions begin to fail to promote and preserve such an identity, they lose their legitimacy in the eyes of certain whites (c.f., the Tea Party activists and "birthers" who question the legitimacy of the state that has "betrayed" the volk), who at that point would not hesitate to throw ideals of democracy and equality and opportunity on the bonfire. Hayes notes Tanton's repeated use an invasive species upsetting an ecosystem as a metaphor for immigration. It's very telling -- from such a view, humans are not free individuals able to travel and settle the world as they see fit, but are instead members of a species who should stay in their particular petri dish. It's of a piece with the conservative ideal of stable, immobile communities in which every person knows his or her immutable place in the hierarchy.

Australia, incidentally, long limited immigration to whites and had no qualms about such a policy until very recently. I wonder if that had anything to do with the attitudes my friends on the train were willing to espouse.

Conservative communitarianism (2 April 2010)

Will Wilkinson quotes himself being quoted in Newsweek. He is explaining the bright side of the atomistic society:

Will Wilkinson, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who has been analyzing the numbers, says the reason for it hinges on what we need to survive: “According to University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, the head of the World Values Survey, under conditions of relative scarcity and insecurity, individuals tend to develop values oriented toward survival,” he said. “In such conditions, the family is like a little mutual insurance society, and adherence to traditional family values is high. Respect for authority and conformity is also high. As economic prosperity advances, individuals naturally begin to worry less about how to simply get by and to worry more about making life meaningful. Wealth tends to produce a syndrome of ’self-expressive’ or ‘emancipative’ values that includes a stronger sense of individuality and greater tolerance for diversity.”

His use of the word syndrome introduces an appropriate modicum of tension in what might otherwise be read as a straightforward celebration of the progressive liberation of humankind in an affluent society. Clearly, not having to worry constantly about bare survival has its upsides; one can notice/invent a meaning deficit for oneself to create a new scarcity crisis to dictate behavior. (Alternatively, one can recognize an attention deficit brought on by a surplus of distractions.) We become preoccupied with self-fashioning, with curatorial consumption amidst the surfeit of goods; this can be understood as the freedom to be who we really are, or at least the freedom to always be int eh process of becoming more authentically ourselves, and more important, be recognized as such. This kind of narcissism seems to produce a kind of indifferent tolerance for what everyone else does. One's stake in another's behavior doesn't seem so high. We are free to ignore one another if we so choose.

That seems an awesome freedom. But then we realize that it means we are being ignored. The disintegrating tendencies of individualism thus yields anomie and an exhibitionism by which we try to secure the recognition that once came from serving a discrete, established social role and from following the rules, for better or worse. The circuit of meaning was that self-sacrifice yielded a more stable community, which yielded a nativist pride that went a long way toward validating the self, not as a unique flower necessarily, but as something with a clear, strong identification.

I don't endorse that nostalgic vision. It's more or less an account of the impression left on me by Phillip Blond's "Rise of the Red Tories" piece about communitarian conservatism in Prospect. Blond elaborates an attack on neoliberalism's deleterious effects of society and champions a return to Burke:

It was Edmund Burke who famously spoke of conservative radicalism being founded on the little platoons of family and civic association. “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

Leaving aside the strange oxymoron of "conservative radicalism," it's worth asking whether filial affections really work this way. Does it move beyond the little platoon to a love of mankind? Or does it become a society of little platoons in perpetual civil war?

In championing the tolerance that emerges from laissez-faire principles, Wilkinson is drawing from the liberal tradition that Blond denigrates. "This left-libertarianism repudiated all ties of kith and kin and, though it was utopian in aspiration, its true legacy has been the dystopia of divided families, unparented children and the lazy moral relativism of the liberal professional elite." (That's not fair. My moral relativism is rigorous!) Blond's argument is that there is no inherent self to liberate from social repression; the society constitutes the self.

The most extreme form of liberal autonomy requires the repudiation of society—for human community influences and shapes the individual before any sovereign capacity to choose has taken shape. The liberal idea of man is then, first of all, an idea of nothing: not family, not ethnicity, not society or nation. But real people are formed by the society of others. For liberals, autonomy must precede everything else, but such a “self” is a fiction. A society so constituted would be one that required a powerful central authority to manage the perpetual conflict between self-interested individuals.

The laissez-faire neoliberal society, Blond suggests, constitutes individuals as a void. So emptied, we must continue make those futile gestures at meaning, trying to consume our way to a sense of self. (I think this is Blond's most persuasive argument. In order to combat that line of thinking, usually a form of biologism or evolutionary psychology gets deployed to suggest that there is an inherent self that demands a specific form of society to allow for its full and proper expression.)

This leads then to a Hobbesean war of all against all because everyone will be out for themselves. (I'm less persuaded by that.) Since no one is obliged to share values and are arguably encouraged instead to invent unique ones for themselves to be distinctive, society disappears until the chaos calls forth a totalitarian state.

I am more inclined to think that a repressive state has become unnecessary because atomistic individuals have proved easier to control -- self-involvement is not a revolutionary frame of mind. Whether or not it is a positive development that dissent has been stifled by increased narcissism says a lot about one's politics.

Jeans on (17 April 2009)

Speaking of conservative critiques of hipsterism: George Will's column about the evils of wearing denim is one of the greatest things I think I have ever read. It seems as though it could have run in The Onion without a single word changed. It reads like some bizarre and awesome parody of Adorno -- "denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults" -- made all the more hysterical by the assumption we must make that he is serious. Presumably Daniel Akst wasn't also actually serious in the WSJ editorial that Will cites, in which Akst declares of denim that "despite its air of innocence, no fabric has ever been so insidiously effective at undermining national discipline."

He states that denim is "a powerful force for evil" and urges that we tax jeans to discourage their being worn. I assumed that Akst was parodying " 'soft paternalism' " (double scare-quoted here for extra terror) the nannyish imposition of sin taxes, but who knows? It's sort of hilarious to imagine Will reading Akst's column, nodding his head furiously, and thinking to himself, "Yes! I need to take this grievance and air it to a wider audience! This fiendish spread of denim is nothing short of a national-security matter." After all, as Akst says, denim is a "sad disguise" that functions like "Mao jackets" -- rendering us into servile socialistic pseudo-rebels. Will goes so far to suggest that Akst should be given the "Presidential Medal of Freedom" for his "constructive conniption." (With diction like that, who can tell if he's joking? The ambiguity is sublime.)

Will, glossing Akst, writes that the "ubiquitous fabric... is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche" and calls it "the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling." Since everyone wears denim now, apparently, it's harder for Will to identify who the important people in society are so that he can lick their boots: "The appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves." In other words: "Waah, I want sumptuary laws!" After all, "it is a straight line from the fall of the Bastille to the rise of denim." Better implement those aristocratic codes for sartorial conduct before all of our betters end up garrotted.

I'm glad Will had the courage to speak up against this Lucky Brand reign of terror. The dangerous leveling effects of denim has apparently led some rogues to derive the "universal appropriateness of everything." That simply will not do -- sounds supiciously like the Universal Rights of Man. Next thing you know, there will be women in slacks, and men will be spotted wearing their tennis shoes, their "sneakers," to board meetings. When the man in the gray flannel suit shakes hands with the man in the denim overalls, won't both their heads explode into flames?

By all means, let's put aside our "jeans," unless, that is, we are fortunate enough to get to go to Jack Danforth's birthday party. (Definitely read Will's column to the end, the concluding parenthetical, in its titanic lameness, is the best punch line imaginable.)

Kitsch as dehistorisized aesthetics (9 March 2009)

At 3 Quarks Daily, Asad Raza responds to philosophy professor Dennis Dutton's The Art Instinct, a book that attempts to explain the existence of art in terms of evolutionary psychology. This thesis is probably important to argue if you have some stake in evolutionary psychology, less so if you are interested in art. Without having read the book, I can't see how it can be useful for anything other than attempting to derive a depoliticized and faux-universal aesthetic. Art serves political functions; the sexual selection it may help facilitate is political as well -- the signaling occurs within a given class structure and serve to reproduce it or react against it. Attention to the evolutionary aspect of artmaking (which ultimately strip the history out of art history; i.e. the stuff about art that is actually interesting beyond the sensual pleasure it gives) seems likely to divert attention away from the political aspects of aesthetics, which ideology about the supremacy and autonomy of individual taste already makes it difficult to perceive.

Raza points out some of the inherent problems of attempting to deduce the evolutionary significance of some supposedly universal tastes in art, focusing particularly on Dutton's assertion that landscape painting derives from early humankind's predilection for savannahs:

Your first chapter cites a survey finding that human beings are attracted to a certain type of landscape, which you point out resembles the most habitable savanna landscapes of the Pleistocene: "a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals." You hypothesize that people are attracted to such landscapes innately, and that is why calendars tend to feature them. When we are pleased by such a landscape, you conclude magisterially, "we confront remnants of our species' ancient past."

Raza points out that this is an extremely short-sighted account of the variety of landscape painting the world has produced.

Obviously, some landscape painting is meant to be beautiful and thus pleasurable, especially in European painting between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. But just because this particular genre of painting (lasting only ten generations or so) has some analogues in Eastern painting does not establish, to my satisfaction at least, that humans innately take pleasure in such pictures. To the contrary, most forms of painting, including that which decorates the caves in Lascaux, do not depict perspectival landscapes. Also, much landscape painting does not produce pleasure but fear and awe (think of Friedrich, or Turner). Isn't it just as likely that landscapes with a certain prospective view, from high ground, with sublime natural features such as high mountains at a safe distance, but with an enticingly serpentine river or path winding from foreground to background, producing a sense of exploration and travel, became popular when they did for historical reasons? And, having become popular, were later spread around the world, after technologies for the mass reproduction of images were invented, in the lowbrow form of calendars? Finally, even if you had a strong scientific case as to why humans take pleasure in looking at certain kinds of landscapes, that doesn't explain why paintings of such landscapes have at some times in some places been considered art, which does not mean simply pleasurable things--what you are arguing for (a love of calendar landscapes) might be better called "The Kitsch Instinct."

Regardless of the alleged science behind the pursuit of universal taste, one ends up with an effort to reject the plurality and particularity of actual aesthetics in action, and what purposes they serve and effects they have in a given sociohistorical moment, in favor of generalizations that efface history. Such critics have to generalize and universalize their own sentimentality under a series of scientific veils and recondite justifications. But that generalization inevitably results in kitsch, which is dehistorisized aesthetics. Kitsch is perhaps the only "universal" taste out there -- it is what one is inevitably left with when one is prone to generalizing about what pleases everybody.

Where are the young Republicans? (6 Nov 2008)

Andrew Gelman's rundown of what happened in the 2008 U.S. presidential election has attracted a lot of attention, much of it directed at his finding that Republicans lost voters among the young and the very rich. This seems to be the fruits of running a jingoistic, anti-intellectual campaign that appealed to base forces of ignorance, race hatred and xenophobia. Will Wilkinson characterizes the cause of this as "secularization":

Rich people who don’t go to church are especially socially liberal. The richer they get, the less they prioritize economic issues over social issues, as Inglehart’s “post-materialism” theory predicts. And, if I recall from recent surveys, there has been a big decline in religiosity among the young, which tends to go along with an increasingly socially liberal cast of mind. The overall effect is that the Republican Party has become too socially conservative for increasingly secular wealthy people and increasingly secular twenty-somethings. The GOP is now pretty clearly the party of the religious, white, middle-aged and elderly middle class–not a group with a shining political future.

An interesting assertion, since we so often hear that America is an extremely religious country and growing more so all the time. Candidates who reject evolution are not immediately laughed out their attempts to run for national office. Much political energy is expended debating the role of the words "under God" in the U.S. pledge of allegiance to the flag that many public-school students are basically forced to recite. Politicians who plainly reject church-state separation and seek to build their base by using the church as the basic building block are rife. Megachurches are presumed to be growing more and more mega, and prosperity gospel seems poised to become even more appealing as what will likely prove to be a long recession takes hold. But I hope Wilkinson is right, and that the same forces that encourage the exploitation of religion politically have also been at work in the media, prompted various outlets to trump up its omnipresence to cater to what is in fact a dwindling niche.

This fits in with my sincere hope that a stronger Republican party (or some new center-right third party) emerges from this election. Already there are signs of civil war in the G.O.P. with the proudly ignorant wing of the party trying to root out the "lepers" who gave "aid and comfort to the enemy" in questioning Sarah Palin's qualifications. For those who dread the influence of religious bigotry on politics, nothing can be better than this rupture between those on the right who wish to engage in serious debate and the overgrown children who are excited by loyalty oaths, enemies lists, demagoguery and mass manipulation in the name of imposing their simplistic world view. (For another sampling of this mentality, read this WSJ op-ed, which Steve Benen suggests might be the most foolish editorial every printed in a national newspaper.)

So I agree with Greg Mankiw when he worries about the disappearing Young Republicans (as if such inquisitional campaigns as "Operation Leper" weren't enough to permanently alienate young people still making the effort to think). "So what does the Republican Party need to do to get the youth vote back? If these Harvard students are typical (and perhaps they are not, as Harvard students are hardly a random sample), the party needs to scale back its social conservatism. Put simply, it needs to become a party for moderate and mainstream libertarians." I wouldn't join that party personally, but it would sharpen the public debate over meaningful issues that actually admit discussion. After all, when a party's politics are basically religious tenets, as they have become for the G.O.P., there is no room for discussion at all.

It seems almost intuitively clear that nothing about the Republican platform has much appeal for the young: the essence of social conservatism is to legislatively constrict choice for the preservation of society as it has already been crystalized by an earlier generation and passed down through religious institutions. Historically, it's an ideology that has been imposed on youth only by force. The high-profile young Republicans of the 1980s seemed to be overrepresented in media presentations, but these P.J. O'Rourke types seemed to be attracted not by the social agenda so much as the freedom from political correctness (that bogus specter so dear to right-leaning demagogues -- complaining about political correctness is tantamount to whining, "Oh, come on, let me be a bigot. It's funny!") and the Republican championship of greed -- the freedom to say whatever you want and hoard as much as you want. Considering the manner in which tax cuts have been at the heart of every Republican campaign since Reagan, greed has really been the essence of the Republican appeal across the board. Can the young be inspired to be greedy rather than idealistic once again? Will there be an uplift fatigue, a weariness with the sort of earnest crusading that is already becoming trendy and found dramatic expression in the righteous street celebrations of Obama's victory?

No one was happier than me that Obama won; I felt an enormous sense of relief. But I wonder about the people who would have felt uninvited to those street celebrations, and fear their hardening into a silent reactionary majority. Republicanism may rise again out of sheer contrarianism, a weird inversion of identity politics that has individuals choosing party allegiance out of novelty and the need for distinction rather than any ideological sympathy. No doubt much of the youth vote is earnestly liberal, but the profusion of Obama T-shirts and buttons reminded me of being in Philadelphia, seeing all the Phillies regalia people were wearing. Obama's triumph among the young seems less a triumph of ideology than a triumph of an excellent, stylish youth marketing campaign. (McArdle makes a related observation, that Obama became a rooting interest, and his "fans" are now gloating.) Clearly there is a bandwagon effect with Obama, and he appeals to voters at a vicarious level. He enhances people's sense of themselves without securing a single political accomplishment. If the ideology of youth is ultimately consumerism, Obama has proven a very attractive lifestyle good. But he will lose this appeal as he becomes a familiar, oversold brand.

"The 'Nothing But Flowers' fallacy" (23 Oct 2008)

Megan McArdle links to this post at The American Scene by Matt Frost about what Frost calls the Nothing But Flowers fallacy: "the tendency to count on economic disruption to bring about salutary social change." ("Nothing But Flowers," if you don't know it, is structured a little like Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" in reverse: Instead of paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, David Byrne sings about modern society falling apart and parking lots devolving into paradise as we get back to the natural way of things.) He finds Joel Kotkin committing this fallacy in a Washington Post article (reposted here) in which Kotkin celebrates the possiblities for a "new localism" in the breakdown of the financial system and the coming recession. He is not afraid to cheer for the possibility that the complacent, isolating consumerism we all know and love may be involuntarily displaced at last by hardship. And presumably he assumes that the fact we will no longer having to bowl alone will compensate for no longer being able to afford to go bowling.

Preaching the silver lining of austerity is the inevitable result of mistaking nostalgia for possible progress; or rather it is the result of failing to recognize the complications that troubled the past golden ages. (McArdle quoted Frost's best comment: "according to Kotkin, our anomic communities will also be knit back together by high energy and food prices. A good pandemic flu, presumably, is all we need to complete the rebirth of American localities.") Obviously you don't have to read Studs Terkel's Hard Times to know that the Great Depression was no one's idea of a good fun. And suddenly changes in our standard of living is probably going to introduce more anxiety and friction into everyday life as opposed to open a space for us to be more involved with the community. For better or worse, when given the opportunity to detach from the community, our parents seized it. It's not clear why we would feel any better about being forced to reverse that choice. As Frost succinctly puts it,

If we arrange our families and our living spaces poorly when affluence gives us choices, we are unlikely to suddenly flourish when those decisions are forced upon us. Hard times won’t compel Americans into becoming their better selves, and if we are heading into some bleak days, it’s best that we all understand that in advance.

As consumers began cutting back on spending, I wondered if they might not embrace the Aldi alternative -- stripped-down shopping that makes the activity a humdrum chore again rather than an entertainment experience. But it's as likely that luxury shopping will be remystified and reglamorized by its sudden impracticality and remoteness from ordinary people's lives-- after the democratization of luxury was threatening to totally extinguish the mystique of Tiffanys, et. al. Prosperity is not the problem with consumerist societies; prosperity doesn't necessarily lead to consumerism, because consumerism, at least how I'm thinking of it, is not automatically synonymous with a lot of consumption. The problem with consumerism is the infrastructure of persuasion shaping our values and curtailing our freedom by narrowing the scope of experience and channeling us into certain kinds of consumption. Consumerism is an ideology, a destructive one that leads to environmental abuse, intensified stress, political inertia and, yes, isolated individuals who are perpetually unsatisfied. But these problems won't be cured by our all being denied the potential to consume.

Commercial paper (8 Oct 2008)

With the federal government announcing that it will intervene in the commercial-paper market -- the realm of short-term financing for businesses to maintain operations -- Justin Fox links to NYT's Floyd Norris fretting about all this rampant socialism. He makes a few logical leaps forward and concludes:

So we may soon have the government deciding which companies deserve short-term loans, and at what interest rates. Does this remind anyone else of central planning systems?

This would seem a legitimate fear, except that the government plays favorites with business sectors all the time. That's how the housing crisis became so acute in the first place, because of the federal support for widespread homeownership that created a fertile field for financial shenanigans.

Central planning isn't a matter of the commissars in the Politboro issuing five-year plans; it's a matter of regulatory capture, of skewing the playing field with tax and trade policies and creating a system of crony capitalism. Dean Baker details some of the many recent ways conservatives advanced crony capitalism here; Jamie Galbraith's The Predator State also looks at how free-market dogma masks the way plutocrats use government to loot the economy. Thomas Frank's new book explores the theme as well.

But the government's move to buy commercial paper remains problematic. The ultimate purpose seems to be to prevent credit from drying up for businesses that are otherwise creditworthy but can't get funds from banks whose capital is tied up in cleaning up its other messes. It used to be that money markets would buy the paper, get a better yield than Treasurys, and pass along the better rate to mutual fund investors. But the chaos in the markets have made this too risky, particularly since the "buck was broken" by a prominent money-market fund last week -- investors lost prinicpal in a money market fund. (Money market accounts seem like bank accounts, but they are not; when the buck is broke, in effect it's as though someone else is withdrawing funds from your savings account.)

The banks themselves can't get funding, because investors are frightened by the losses creditors suffered in the big-time failures we've already witnessed. Justin Fox explains:

What's been causing the various bank scares and failures of recent weeks has been an increasing unwillingness of anybody to extend these kinds of loans to banks. An at least partially rational unwillingness, given that senior unsecured creditors took big hits in both the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the seizure of Washington Mutual by the FDIC. Now you might argue that this is a healthy capitalistic development, one that will make providers of such credit more discerning in the future. But there's no way that a creditor could have discerned by looking at the balance sheets of the respective institutions that his money was in dramatically more danger at Lehman and Wamu than at Bear Stearns and Wachovia, where the government acted to protect creditors. It was purely a question of guessing what regulators would do, not weighing the risks of the financial institution.

That's the problem caused by haphazard bailouts, but America has too many banks to for the government to secure them all, so the sense that lending to American banks in a guessing game will apparently continue, despite the $700 billion Treasury plan to suck up loser mortgage-related assets.

The NYT article about the Fed's move notes the inevitable conflicts of interest -- the Fed basically becomes an investor in markets rather than a market referee dictating the rules of the game. But without moves such as this, the Fed and the Treasury Department seem to fear there would be no game at all.

Joe Six-Pack goes to Washington (1 Oct 2008)

3 Quarks Daily linked to an interview with Sarah Palin conducted by conservative Hugh Hewitt. I don't advise reading the whole thing, unless you want to vomit, but the bit highlighted by 3QD is fairly illustrative of where democracy in America is at:

HH: Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?

SP: Oh, I think they’re just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying you know what? It’s time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that’s kind of taken some people off guard, and they’re out of sorts, and they’re ticked off about it, but it’s motivation for John McCain and I to work that much harder to make sure that our ticket is victorious, and we put government back on the side of the people of Joe six-pack like me, and we start doing those things that are expected of our government, and we get rid of corruption, and we commit to the reform that is not only desired, but is deserved by Americans.

This strikes me as total insanity. I am not sure what it would mean for "normal Joe Six-Pack" to be "represented" in the vice presidency, but I assume it means putting a "regular" person (as opposed to a "career politican") in the position to illustrate some reality TV-like premise that anyone can be considered fit for governing and that being an executive in charge of one of the largest and most intricate bureaucracies the world has ever seen is just a matter of common sense and Christian values. It is the very essence of the problem with the Bush administration: the idea that competence is a fiction and any Joe Six-Pack can be put in charge and everything will be just fine. Basically, the implication is that the vice presidency, as well as every other leadership position in government, serves an entirely symbolic function. The figureheads in these slots don't have to have any expertise; they simply need to represent some idea that appeals to some aspect of the electorate. Palin doesn't even bother to deny that this is so. The whole point of her inclusion on the Republican ticket is to be average, to be the antithesis of capable, and to encourage voters to express their contempt for politics by electing a truly incompetent politician -- someone who is just like us.

In the LRB, Jonathan Raban connects Palin's glorification of Joe Six-Pack with Poujadism, the anti-intellectual movement inspired by French demagogue Pierre Poujade.

Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man.

To placate this bloc of voters, it's most effective to persuade them that government can be made to disappear, and they can all then be happy kulaks in their peasant paradise.

Given these dynamics, it's futile to criticize Palin from any East Coast elitist like me would consider a rational viewpoint. Raban takes a shot anyway, highlighting what seems most threatening about her -- her smug contempt for intellectual curiosity:

What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness.

But any attempt to highlight Palin's failure to grasp the complexity of any issue facing America can be spun as being part of the "conspiracy" against ordinary people, but in this case the conspiracy is simply an acknowledgment of consensus politics as it must be exercised in a democratic government of any scale. Professional politicians are necessary to make government work, and the nature of the job -- its ambiguities and compromises and negotiations; the stuff that requires actual deliberation and judgment -- doesn't lend itself well to glamorous portrayal in simplified stories about heroes and individual greatness. But when we vote -- for most of us, the one great heroic act of civic participation we manage to muster the energy for every few years -- we don't want to waste it on a compromised character. Thus, we are better off knowing very little about the actual careers or evolving positions of the people we vote for; for the vicarious function of voting, an iconic nobody like Palin is perfect.

The subtext of "Drill baby drill" (4 Sept. 2008)

This happens every time I make the mistake of tuning into the Republican convention: I end up extremely frightened for America. The glee with which the Republican party repeats its new slogan "Drill baby drill" is extremely unsettling, as it shines a light on the nihilistic, end-times animus that fuels it. The underlying belief behind the slogan is that there is no hope for innovation when it comes to energy resources, and restraint in the form of environmentalism or conservation is an expression of weakness in the coming war of all against all for what's left on the planet. Government only serves to impede this anarchic struggle, which is why the Republican party apparently believes the preservative restrictions the state places on despoiling economic behavior must be lifted. It's another indication at how reactionary the party is, how it seems utterly unable to grasp the notion of future consequences. The slogan, rendered more accurately, would read: "Suck the world dry, there is no future!"

Writing in 1982, historians Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen noted in Channels of Desire the peculiar American fixation on despoiling as a perverse form of patriotism. "The adversarial interpretation of the relationship between people and the natural world is prominent in commercial ideology and production. Waste and throw-away are signatures of what is often termed 'the American way of life.' " They then quote this astounding remark from Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who demonstrates how this contemptuous attitude can be reconciled with a certain strain of end-times Christianity. Asked whether he favored preserving the land for future generations, Watt replied, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns." So in light of the Rapture's imminence, we should drill, baby, drill.

Fitting for an eschatological view of the universe, we are supposed to believe that such contempt for the future will somehow assure that the past will return. But the small-town USA of the 1950s is gone for good, thanks in part to Republican economic policy. If anything, last night seemed like 1992 all over again, with conservatives vilifying cosmopolitanism and diversity and trying to bait the country into a needlessly destructive cultural civil war, as if we don't all share the same needs for things like better health care, a job-generating economy, and a sense that the country won't be destroyed by environmental catastrophe. Tuning into the RNC, you'd think such problems don't exist, and that the real problem is elitist overlords from the Demonic Northeast threatening to dismantle families and extinguish Christianity. As Douglas Rushkoff notes, the Republican Party is eagerly transforming itself into the "hate party."

Megan McArdle's analysis here seems apt. With nothing substantive to say about any issue, the Republicans are out to launch an "all-out cultural war." (McArdle's awesome line about Romney's speech perfectly captures the occasional arbitrarity of conservative contempt: "Mitt Romney seems to use the word liberal in a randomly perjorative fashion. I half expect him to say 'I was eating breakfast this morning, and my hash browns were all liberal. I sent them back and told the waitress to bring me some good, conservative hash browns.' ") Of this war, Sarah Palin is the harbinger. Ingeniously, the Republican party would like to make the election a referendum on her, as a person, and they are expecting that on that personal level, many American approve of the values she claims to represent. But at the level of ideas, she is a far-right conservative crusader, far outside of the mainstream, and the ideas she represents will probably prove abhorrent to Democrats and independents alike if they (or the press) bother to ferret them out and reinforce them clearly.

The roots of kleptocracy (4 Sept. 2008)

At his blog, economist Lane Kenworthy posted a compelling look at growing income inequality in America, illustrating with graphs how median income has fallen away from per-capita GDP -- meaning that as the economy has grown, less of the benefits of that growth have been spread across the entire class distribution of the population. Kenworthy points to this as a source of strain on the middle class and sees it as a fundamental subtext for the upcoming presidential election.

Generally speaking, Democrats regard this inequality as a matter of those at the top leveraging their advantages to seize more and more of the pie. The solution to this, typically, is a progressive tax regime that takes away some of those financial advantages, redistributing the wealth created to those below. The rich resent this, as they tend to misconstrue the gains derive from passive investment as their just deserts for risk taking. (Whereas Marx describes capital as "dead labor that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the laborer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him.") But the middle class potentially has their tax burden lightened while getting improved government services financed by the new tax revenue.

Republicans obviously don't see it this way. They instead evoke the past, when inequality was not so stark (thanks to policies they rejected at the time) and try to paint a picture of progress as failure and disruption, as individuals being crushed by a distant federal government that is essentially their enemy. The solution to the problems the middle class faces, from this point of view, is a recommitment to individualistic values of self-reliance and a church-based, small-town-size community (while scorning community organizers, the existence of whom signal a localized disharmony that conservatives are loath to acknowledge), and a repudiation of the idea that a federal government has any meaningful role in most people's lives. This seemed to be the subtext of Sarah Palin's angry, demagogic speech at the Republican convention last night -- that small town people should be wary of those purporting to have expertise. At the Washington Monthly site, Steve Benen articulated the theme of the RNC this way:

Seriously, what's the message of the week in St. Paul? That Republican governing works? No. That Republicans have a legitimate policy agenda? No. That the next four years should be different from the last eight? No. It's simple: "Your house may be on fire, but don't trust that man standing outside with a hose, because he doesn't share your values."

The Republicans offer voters an opportunity to live in a fantasy world in which they really are self-reliant and government is unnecessary; where "values" really are so uniform -- perhaps because they are mandated by a God whom everyone must worship -- that there aren't any meaningful conflicts among groups that the state would have to mediate. All you need is a military to protect the homogeneous group from outside infiltration. (This is why conservatives are so quick to ridicule "political correctness" -- because the existence of diversity, competing interests, fundamentally threatens their ideology of government. The only competing interest, from the conservative point of view, are those that the marketplace sorts out.)

Meanwhile, when voters abandon the idea that the atheistic federal government should work for them, it becomes captured instead by professional politicians and the corporate interests they serve -- it becomes a machine of plunder, as Jamie Galbraith details in The Predator State. Ideologues like Palin ultimately provide the cover for kleptocrats like Duke Cunningham and his ilk.

Fashionable apathy and the power elite (3 August 2008)

Wright Mills's The Power Elite is pretty dated now, especially the first 200 pages of so, which elucidate the specifics of the nascent 1950s military-industrial complex in mind-numbing detail. But it's worth plodding through all that to get to the thundering denunciations of American complacency that follows, which have lost none of their sting over the years. He laments the loss of a Habermasian public sphere (though the degree to which this ever existed is debatable) and blames a media-sponsored celebrity cult for keeping the public, disintegrated into a mass of alienated individuals capable of thinking only of their own limited self-referential interests, stupified and distracted from the workings of the true "power elite" -- the Ivy League-educated managerial class who come from the established rich families. The media fosters a "psychological illiteracy" that encourages stereotyping over thinking, making it harder for us to perceive the totality of society in its functioning (as Lukacs laments about in History and Class Consciousness). "The man in the mass does not gain a transcending view from these media; instead he gets his experience stereotyped, and then he gets sunk further by that experience." This in turn makes us more vulnerable to media manipulation, since we lack the basis to critique its representations.

The media provide much information and news about what is happening in the world, but they do not often enable the listener or the viewer truly to connect his daily life with these larger realities. They do not connect the information they provide on public issues with the troubles felt by the individual. They do not increase rational insight into tensions, either those in the individual or those of the society which are reflected in the individual. On the contrary, they distract him and obscure his chance to understand himself or his world, by fastening his attention upon artificial frenzies that are resolved within the program framework, usually by violent action or by what is called humor. In short, for the viewer they are not really resolved at all.... There is almost always the general tone of animated distraction, of suspended agitation, but it is going nowhere and it has nowhere to go.

This leaves people in a state of semi-helplessness, incapable of complex thought. "Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, he is accompanied through his life experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue. He has no projects of his own: he fulfills the routines that exist. He does not transcend whatever he is at any moment, because he does not, he cannot, transcend his daily milieux. He is not truly aware of his own daily experience and of its actual standards: he drifts, he fulfills habits, his behavior a result of a planless mixture of the confused standards and the uncriticized expectations that he has taken over from others whom he no longer really knows or trusts, if indeed he ever really did." And since the media is controlled by the elite, its effectiveness enriches them further.

As a consequence of the degraded citizenship, democracy is a hollow illusion, an ideological alibi for the status quo. Voting is a mere expression of nationalism as opposed to a true political choice. And a "conservative mood" overtakes intellectuals who are disillusioned by the failure of liberalism to preserve a thinking public. At the heart of this mood "there is a knowledge of powerlessness without poignancy, and a feeling of pseudo-power based on mere smugness. By its softening of political will, this mood enables men to accept public depravity without any private sense of outrage, and to give up the central goal of western humanism -- the presumptuous control by reason of man's fate." The word smugness serves as a trigger for me, and it makes me want to link this conservative mood with today's hipsters, as per the previous post. The problem with hipsters is not their fashion-following phoniness; it's their smug abdication of responsibility in favor of an egocentric apathy. Hipsters are conservatives posturing as progressives, often professing to be liberals while their practice refutes the claim. Mills's description of the 1950s conservative mood suits hipsterism to a tee:

it is not a snobbery linked with nostalgia, but on the contrary, with what is just one-step-ahead-of-the-very-latest-thing, which is to say that it is a snobbery based not on tradition but on fashion and fad. Those involved are not thinking for a nation, or even about a nation; they are thinking of and for themselves. In self-selected coteries, they confirm one another's mood, which thus becomes snobbishly closed -- and quite out of the main stream of the practice of decision and the reality of power.

(This reminds me of my own indifference to the business world when I was a graduate student, and thought I was well informed on everything important -- you know, semiotic theories of gender and decentered subjectivities in 18th century novels and that sort of thing. My arguments about these subjects with my peers were so vital. Mills saw the conservative mood as facilitating "historical development without benefit of idea." This is the sense, perhaps, in which hipsterism is the dead end of Western civilization. Mills's book is useful for linking hipsters to the larger problem of the meaningless political sphere, which seems to have spawned them. But it doesn't shed much light on how to reinvigorate political involvement, how to make the basic acts of citizenship in a democracy not seem trivial or merely self-referential. Could "youth" culture -- in reality the culture of grown adults who can affect the structures of society in a meaningful way -- form for itself a politically literate, unified, and efficacious sphere of action? Is there anything else to do but resist what is currently dominant, or does any positive action stand only to be co-opted and reassimilated by the forces of conservative "smugness"?

The relation between hipsterism and conservatism-in-effect apathy makes it almost ironic that McCain's campaign is trying to paint Obama as a kind of king of the hipsters. Andrew Sullivan makes the obvious point that this is no substitute for actually crafting policy positions (the Republicans are the dead end of Western Civilization). But this of course makes them the natural allies of hipsters, who also stand for nothing. These attacks are just another feat of projection, as when McCain plays the race card by accusing Obama of playing it.

The great bourgeois virtues (12 June 2008)

David Brooks has written a fair share of conservative party-line nonsense, so it pays to be skeptical even when on the surface he seems to be making sense, as in this recent column about the explosion of American household debt in recent decades. Brooks begins with a paean to American's frugal Puritanical tradition and then laments at the "financial decadence" that has driven up credit-card debt to record levels.

Over the past 30 years...the social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened.

That seems accurate enough: the greatly expanded reach of media and the advertising that media carries, as well as the infiltration of marketing into virtually every aspect of social being, has made spending seem like the mode of participation in our culture. Activities that have no commercial adjunct -- things that require no branded products or have no associated stores connected with them or can't be reduced to a collection of the appropriate goods -- seem vaguely illegitimate. Among most ordinary citizens, political power has given way to purchasing power, which is meaningless when merely potential. We need to spend and collect stuff to make that power (the chief kind of power that is socially recognized) manifest.

Citing a recent think-tank report, "For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture" (unlinkable, alas, as Felix Salmon notes), Brooks explains that America has been divided into the "investor class" -- people who save and are well-informed about money management and can hire advisors -- and the "lottery class," basically everyone else. These are the rubes, in Brooks estimation, who are vulnerable to predatory lenders and revolving debt and other tactics by which the ignorant poor are exploited.

Brooks blames "the loosening of financial inhibition" for this class's indebtedness, which, as Richard Serlin explains in a comment at Mark Thoma's blog, is somewhat dubious. Serlin cites Elizabeth Warren, who argued that debt is not driven by irresponsible splurging (which would encourage us to have no sympathy for them) but by increasing insecurity and the absence of a social safety net. Medical bills and housing-bubble-bloated mortgages, not flat-screen TVs explain much of the debt.

That's not to say that Brooks doesn't have a point about the manifold forces aligned to discourage saving.

Payday lenders have also played a role. They seductively offer fast cash — at absurd interest rates — to 15 million people every month.
Credit card companies have played a role. Instead of targeting the financially astute, who pay off their debts, they’ve found that they can make money off the young and vulnerable. Fifty-six percent of students in their final year of college carry four or more credit cards.
Congress and the White House have played a role. The nation’s leaders have always had an incentive to shove costs for current promises onto the backs of future generations. It’s only now become respectable to do so.
Wall Street has played a role. Bill Gates built a socially useful product to make his fortune. But what message do the compensation packages that hedge fund managers get send across the country?

But I'm not sure fixing the anemic savings rate is a matter of "raising public consciousness" about debt to generate a scold campaign against falling for predatory tactics. How about we dispense with that and head straight for some state laws prohibiting it, with a reinstitution of some aspects of the safety net that leads to the borrowing?

And it's not very helpful to reduce the issue to this: "There are dozens of things that could be done. But the most important is to shift values. Franklin made it prestigious to embrace certain bourgeois virtues. Now it’s socially acceptable to undermine those virtues. It’s considered normal to play the debt game and imagine that decisions made today will have no consequences for the future." If people can't imagine the future consequences, it's often because poverty has reduced their horizons to surviving in the here and now. They don't have the luxury of subscribing to bourgeois values of saving and voluntary thrift. And how would one shift values anyway? They are deeply embedded in our culture's discourse about itself. What to do? Get the business press to stop obsessing over consumer confidence and retail spending figures? Public service announcements about the importance of retirement savings (which could double as a trojan horse tactic for preparing the way for ending Social Security)? Remedial reading courses in Max Weber? Ban advertising that makes spending money on goods seem fun and advantageous? Raise interest rates back to 1981 levels?

You can't have it both ways. You can't cheerlead for the benefits of ownership, as a means for supplying a stake in society, and for purchasing power as a kind of empowering democratization of society's benefits, and then also argue for the "bourgeois virtue" of frugality and saving, of waiting until the time is appropriate for consumerism. Brooks, who seems to be coarsening Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, expects us to believe that we can systematically drill into people's heads that we live in an ownership society and then tell them they should not do whatever it takes to own things so that they can belong. Thus the ownership society is revealed to be yet another disguise for oligarchy, conserving power in the hands in that investor class and closing its ranks to aspirants. Is it Brooks's hope that being a second-class citizen in the lottery class should be a spur for them to try harder to save enough to buy a stake on terms endorsed by the already entitled? What's to keep the overclass from then changing the rules to keep others excluded?

The implicit promise of the consumer society is that money, no matter what its source (inheritance, cheap credit, payday loan kiosk) can be a social leveller via its ability to buy the goods the connote inclusion in the mainstream. We could all belong to the same middle class shopping at the same big-box stores and enjoying the same branded products. Maybe Brooks, like Bell, has a problem with the consumer society as a whole -- the sociological positions he hints at in his 2004 book On Paradise Drive occasionally suggest as much. But in that book he is just as eager to celebrate consumption as a mark of prosperity.

Bell, who was railing primarily against 1960s hippies ("the youthful japes of Greenwich Village bohemia") rather than spendthrift subprimers, solved this particular contradiction of capitalism by urging a return to religious values. So does Brooks, in his own way: "Foundations and churches could issue short-term loans to cut into the payday lenders’ business," he advises. But it's not hard to see where this leads -- rely on private charity to make up for the social safety net's failures and keep government out of the business of fixing that net. This column is basically compassionate conservatism cleverly disguised as more palatable complaints about greedy lenders and evil bankers.

Enduring social-conservative theory (6 March 2008)

I've wondered for a while now whether conservative theory could ever experience a vogue in the soft humanities (literature, cultural studies), not because of any intrinsic merit in the material but because it would supply a new niche for graduate students to exploit, fresh territory on which to stake a claim. Maybe this is already happening, or already happened: First, a tentative survey of the literature from a critical perspective: an examination of the tropes of conservative discourse, say, and how they have evolved -- something like Hofstedter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Then, a deconstruction that shows conservative thought (something like Hayek's The Road to Serfdom or Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) is actually liberal thought. Then, an actual embrace of the reimagined or rehabilitated conservative works, and their use to explicate the raw material of humanities courses -- Bronte novels and the like. I want to see the Hayekian reading of Jane Eyre, dammit!

Anyway, relevant to this fantasy, there's been some discussion in the econoblogosphere, prompted by this Tyler Cowen post, about the dearth of conservative works of theory that stand the test of time. Cowen's central claim about 20th century conservative political theory books seems right to me: "I opined that none have held up particularly well, mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be." In other words, social conservatism is purely reactionary and history (the modern world's robust ability to encourage tolerance) leaves such people behind.

Jacob Levy restates the problem this way: "there's no modern work to teach alongside Theory of Justice and Anarchy, State, and Utopia that really gets at what's interesting about Burkean or social conservatism.... The problem isn't... that the conservative temperament isn't easily reduced to programmatic philosophical works.... One of the problems is that history keeps right on going--and so any book plucked from the past that was concerned with yelling 'stop!' tends to date badly to any modern reader who does not think he's already living in hell-in-a-handbasket."

Brad DeLong sees no problem in this. He thinks we need to stop kidding ourselves that social conservatism has any theoretical component: "I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!" He then uses Burke as an example to illustrate that "conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical weapon, not a set of principles." There's no point pursuing some kind of equal time for conservative theory to teach alongside libertarian or liberal theory because there isn't any.

Polarization and media (8 Feb 2008)

At Crooked Timber, John Quiggin takes on the oft-repeated notion (he singles out law professor Cass Sunstein) that the internet is exacerbating polarization by allowing people to only read opinions they agree with and to get all their news through a soothing interpretive filter. Sunstein wants to promote an ideal of diversity and can sometimes sound a little Habermasian in his implicit celebration of some sort of town square where people respect one another's views and debate them openly and in good faith. And we all want that. But the internet is probably helping promote that vision, rather than undermining it.

Sunstein argues that the echo chamber effect tends to reinforce existing views and produce a poisonous partisan divide.
It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true. The partisan divide in the US is being reinforced because people are more exposed to the other side than before.
Before the Internet, the average liberal or social democrat was largely insulated, on a day-to-day basis, from the kinds of views represented by Free Republic or Little Green Footballs. Similarly, unless we sought out right-wing magazines we were insulated to a large extent from commentators like Goldberg, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter. Now we can see them minute-to-minute and it’s obvious that the idea of treating them as part of a legitimate discussion is absurd.

As far as my political leanings go, the phenomenon Quiggin describes seems more accurate -- I never would have taken right-wing views as seriously without seeing the vehemence with which they are expressed. I tended to assume that those espousing them were simply in bad faith, trying to dupe bigots, xenophobes, and religious zealots in order to trojan horse in oligarchic policies of plunder. Now I have the scary impression that they are serious and in earnest, and it has made me more invested in politics, even though I am even more aware of the futility of ever changing anyone's mind about anything. It seems more like an endless struggle to keep the forces of reaction and atavism at bay, whereas I used to idly dream of the days when a real politician would wash through the system with irresistible compromises that would persuade everyone and make everyone content -- the fallacious bipartisan/third way fantasy sometimes dismissively dubbed Broderism.

Quiggin goes on to say the echo chamber effect only applies to the right-wing zealots themselves, whose arguments aren't founded in conversational discourse and admit no revision or compromise or "relativism."

Having established a self-sustaining ideology, immune to any form of empirical refutation, US Republicans have indeed created an echo chamber. But this process works across all media (Fox News, the Washington Times, talk radio and so on) and beyond, to the replacement of scientific research by the products of think tanks. Moreover, it does not rely on the exclusion of alternative views so much as on the availability of a distorting filter in which any opposition can be ridiculed out of existence.

Reactionary conservatives, who have nothing left to learn as the full truth has already been revealed to them, see no benefit to dialogue or the open discussion of ideas, so they would never participate in a public forum of discussion of any kind no matter what the configuration, and they will always use available technology to further circle the wagons. Meanwhile the rest of us are reveling how much wider a range of opinions we can sample and shade our own ideas with.

Pseudoconservativism (12 March 2007)

Having just finished Richard Hofstadter's essays about Goldwater and pseudo-conservatism in The Paranoid Style in American Politics I feel as though I understand our own political moment much better. The essays are a bit depressing in that they assume a far-right-winger like Barry Goldwater could never be elected, let alone be allowed to actually govern; Hofstatder seemed to have believed that the fact Goldwater was nominated at all was the high water mark for the American forces of reaction. He felt they ran to lose on purpose and become martyrs to their extreme causes and keep them in the public forum. But George W. Bush's presidency has proven otherwise. The essays provide a litany of descriptions of pseudoconservatism that remind us how little of the Bush agenda is new: "Only in the pseudoconservative movement that man have begun to hint that disobedience to the Court is not merely legitimate but is the essence of conservatism." "The two=party system ... hangs on the common recognition of loyal opposition: each side accepts the good intentions of the other... But an essential point in the pseudoconservative world view is that our recent Presidents, being men of wholly evil intent, have conspired against the public good." (This is why the shrill, spasmodic accusation of Bush hatred conservatives often cast at liberals seems pure projection.) Hofstadter quotes Goldwater, who wrote this in Why Not Victory? (which could serve as a motto for Iraq surge supporters): "A craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness, so much so that many recently felt that honoring the chief despot himself was the price to pay to avoid nuclear destruction." That horrifying logic is the main thing that kept Goldwater far from the White House. But a similar line is often evoked by right-wing reactionaries when talking about the spread of "islamofascism" -- we must have the conviction to stop at nothing to eliminate the terrorist threat. The end of the Cold War removed the deterrent threat of nuclear war, allowing Bush to enact psudoconservative/neoconservative fantasies in the Middle East, starting wars of choice without threat of drastic reprisal international enemies.

Just about everything Hofstadter writes about Goldwater's core constituency holds true for Bush: it's a fusion of those with ultraconservative economic views (the sort who believe a social safety net breeds weakness) and an aggrieved lower-middle class who see politics as an arena to reclaim lost status (via moral crusading and culture wars) rather than protect their material interests. (The opposition of status and interest politics seems to foreshadow Thomas Frank's debunking of the red state/blue state myth in What's the Matter with Kansas?) But whereas Goldwater was regarded skeptically in his time and effectively framed as far outside the mainstream, a complacent media in 2000, intent on lambasting Gore, allowed Bush to pass for a moderate, "compassionate" conservative. Once he won and gained political capital from the events of September 11, he enacted the Goldwater agenda of 1964: heedless economic individualism and impulsively belligerent foreign policy derived from simplistic absolute principles and pursued with religious conviction. (In Goldwater's famous words: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and .., moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.")

This analysis helps make obvious the tenuousness of the pseudo-conservative coalition: radical free-marketeers and moral prescriptivists have in common a belief that privation is a useful social tool, whether it be culling the herd of its weak members or punishing sinful wastrels. Beyond this is a belief in individual's ultimate ability to overcome circumstances, which are always in some way deserved -- your responsibility. But moral crusaders, in taking a hard-line ascetic view that is uncompromising with respect to the opinions a majority of Americans actually profess, believe their politics rise above greedy selfishness, and that their views are legitimized to the degree that they are impractical and thus apolitical. Their disregard for public opinion seeks to destroy democracy in a fundamentally different way than those with radical economic views, who would prefer that the government atrophy and cease to function (the shrink-government-until-drownable-in-bathtub philosophy). Moral crusaders, instead, want to empower government to the degree where it can legislate and enforce the stringent value system they have placed above politics as non-debatable truths. (Neither want to do the hard work of coalition building in order to arbitrate between the inevitable competing interests in a pluralistic society.) This contradiction, exacerbated by the erosion of civil liberties brought on by fears of terrorism, has led to discussions of a rapprochement between libertarians and liberals. Hofstatder points out that Goldwater did little to forward conservative causes; rather he broke the back of practical conservatism in the Eisenhower mold and enabled Johnson to push through the Great Society reforms. That's hope the revulsion Bush has inspired in American voters has done the same, and we can look forward to a coming decade of progress on universal health care, the strengthening of unions, and the amelioration of income inequality.

Cold war nostalgia (24 Feb 2007)

A while ago in a thrift store in Vancouver (sad how vividly I remember the provenance of these things) I bought a beat-up paperback copy of Journey into Russia by Laurens Van der Post. It's an account of his tour of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and it's well worth the penny it's selling for if you are at all touched with Russophilia or have any interest in what image the Soviet Union tried to project of itself. The book is suffused with a sense of the Soviet regime's permanence, which inspires now a sort of awe at how history overtakes us. I haven't read the book straight through; I pick it up now and then and read paragraphs at random -- a conversation at an airport, a description of mosque minarets at Tashkent, train travel across Siberia, his admiration for scientists at Lake Baikal, drinking out of politeness with Georgians in Tbilisi, an account of a May Day parade. Van der Post records all his encounters with ordinary citizens, trying to feel out how deep state propaganda has sunk into their consciousness, and you come away with the impression that every Russian is an able and complex critical thinker, having been forced by the absurdity of totalitarianism to develop multiple levels of ironic expression as well as a thorough understanding of a wide range of perverse incentives. The socialist state seems to have made people's thinking more dialectical, though by a method no one preferred: the state was so awful and intrusive that Soviet citizens were required to be in a perpetual condition of private opposition and interior doubleness -- the lived a continual critique of everyday life by necessity. We bourgeois in America have the luxury of far less cognitive dissonance and hence an underdeveloped critical apparatus.

Growing up in the 1980s I always thought it was bizarre to consider the Soviets as enemies; it seemed like we should feel sorry for them since so much of our indoctrination involved demonstrating to us how good we had it in America, how much freedom we could take for granted. As a 14-year-old I didn't find their state tools of oppression very intimidating, as was exemplified by a skit about the KGB I wrote and performed with my friend John as a World Cultures class project -- we made KGB spies out to be bumbling Keystone cops with an Abbott and Costelloesque interrogation style. And I wasn't upset by Marxist ideology, which actually seemed pretty appealing as I understood it then -- a welcome respite from any need to be ambitious. Ignorance was bliss for me, I guess. The Chevy Chase film Spies Like Us pretty well captures the attitude I had toward the cold war -- basically that it was not a tenuous balance of world power in the face of the threat of nuclear apocalypse but a sloppily constructed comedy. To have to wonder whether the Russians loved their children too seemed really ridiculous.

But that many Americans took the threat very seriously indeed is made painfully obvious by reading the essays in Hofstadter's Paranoid Style in American Politics -- Hofstatder has an unusually strong stomach for right-wing demagoguery, and he illustrates the role the communist threat played in allowing for the development of what he calls "pseudo-conservatism", a ultrareactionary pose that regards the chosen enemy as all-powerful and insidious, capable of infiltration and threatening the homeland from within and thus calling for the systematic rooting out of all sorts of internal enemies and the rigorous enforcement of conformity. (Essentially it is the mirror image of Stalinism.) Of course, Islamic terrorism has replaced communism as the all-powerful threat, and this is an even more dangerous form of pseudo-conservatism: no longer must we fight to preserve American values so much as the Christian supremacy that right-wing ideologues believe to be synonymous with America. (This makes it easy to imagine Jews and atheists eventually being classified as internal enemies, along with every variety of brown-skinned people.) Hofstadter attributes this intolerant tendency in a small segment of Americans to a perverted form of status seeking in a society where social aspirations outstrip the actual rags-to-riches possibilities.

He also provides the appropriate Tocqueville quote: "Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy." Perhaps it's a universal human tendency to conflate the people we specifically envy with a widely accepted set of enemies, always a way to interpret our jealousy as their elitism or immorality. Reactionary politics become another one of the hidden injuries of class in America -- is that too patronizing to say? Communists, terrorists: they become inexact proxies for a shadowy power elite who are making value systems intolerably pluralistic.

Passing through the offices of the magazine I work for was a DVD set called Animated Soviet Propaganda. It's a conflicted package; despite campy design drawing on 1930s Russian poster style, it wants to dignify its subject and escape accusations of kitsch, so it features an essay by Igor Kokarev, a Russian sociologist, on how the films played into the Soviet oppression. Kokarev likens Soviet society to a religious cult (as does Van der Post on a few occasions) and enumerates how the people were kept down: "We were kept apart"; "We were forced to conform"; "We were ruled by fear"; "We were hemmed in by secrecy and censorship" etc. It sounded a little like a rundown of conditions in suburbanized War on Terror America. Kokarev describes how "language was stilted" in the Soviet Union, perverted by Leninist ideological discourse. Americans are no less immune to stilted language, though, it's only ours takes the form of capitalist dogma: the marketing rhetoric and trendy neologisms that n+1 was complaining about taking over the blogosphere. We don't always recognize that as propaganda or take it very seriously or attribute much efficacy to it; it seems more like nuisance, probably how state propaganda struck Soviets, even as they began to talk like Ninotchka.



But this passage from Kokarev's essay struck me:

Personal modesty was a prized virtue in Soviet society as was a lack of pretentiousness in one's home and a certain disdain for comfort and fanciness. The natural human desire for better conditions, more consumer goods, and a higher standard of living was delayed, put off until the future. Monotonous gray clothing ... was the normal conditions of life for everyone. Young people who tried to dress stylishly were derisively nicknamed "stilyagi" and were publicly insulted in the street.

This is the vision of the USSR I tend to romanticize -- a world without fashion. But I should count my blessings: fashionability probably meant much more in a society that regarded it as a threat to stability rather than wasteful diversion. My suspicion of fashion would have no meaning in a Soviet culture; here I can construe it into a political position (one that requires nothing more from me but to dress badly). Maybe I need to adopt the attitude of Gavin McInnes, editor of Vice magazine: "I hate looking at metrosexuals wearing flip-flops with a suit but I usually get over it when they walk out of view. It's only annoying for a very short time. The truth is fashion is boring and only stupid people genuinely care about it." Sometimes I worry that my preoccupation with criticizing "style" consumerism makes me into one of those stupid people.