What Alan Grayson says (about Social Security and the Catfood Commission)

Florida Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson defends Social Security against the deficit hawks in Stop the Plot Against Seniors Huffington Post 08/14/2010:

My father's middle name was Franklin. He was named after Franklin Roosevelt [the President who proposed and signed Social Security into law]. ...

Without Social Security, seniors would be forced to work into their seventies, eighties and nineties. When they would become too sick or frail to work, they would have to beg. And then they would die.

That's the way it was in America when my father was growing up. Before Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security. No wonder my grandparents named him Franklin.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of Social Security. Without it, many of our seniors would be so poor that they'd have to eat cat food just to survive.

That's why many are calling the Deficit Commission, run by extremist right-winger Alan Simpson, the "Catfood Commission." It's the culmination of decades of plotting by right-wingers to destroy Social Security.

Tags: social security

The Democratic Party, liberals and white racism (2 of 2)

The specter of the Willie Horton ad haunted Democrats in 1992

In my Part 1 post under this title, I talked about the advice many Democrats prior to the 1992 elections were giving their Party to distance themselves from anything that smacked of racial or "social issue" liberalism. It was at best a dubious idea then, and it's wildly out-of-touch now. But it has more than a lingering appeal, as witnessed by the addition of an anti-abortion provision to the Affordable Care Act of 2010 at the insistence of Democratic Blue Dogs.

The 20th anniversary issue of The American Prospect (June 2010) contains several articles providing retrospectives to the discussions over the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party that were current when the magazine debuted in 1992. It had become conventional wisdom after the 1988 Presidential campaign, in which Old Man Bush used the infamous Willie Horton ad and the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag to tar Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis as un-American, soft on crime and blacks, and generally weak and unreliable. Some campaign consultants and Democratic officials, particularly those associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), advocated that the Party take a more conservative stance. Different advocates of that course favored varying degrees of conservatism on the Party's part. The fact that Dukakis prior to the general election campaign seemed to be a model of a pragmatic, non-ideological Governor and yet the Republicans still tarred him as a wild leftist didn't seem to make a great impression on the hardline DLCers.

Mark Schmitt recalls those arguments in Reading Progressive History Through the Prospect 08/02/2010:

The Prospect brought a distinct viewpoint to that debate, one in which lines were clearly defined: The most notable alternative came from the Democratic Leadership Council. These moderate-to-conservative "New Democrats" had launched the Progressive Policy Institute in 1989 with a long essay called "The Politics of Evasion," by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck. They argued that the party had not come to terms with the electorate's deep conservatism, especially with worries about crime and welfare, and that neither "liberal fundamentalism" nor more effective mobilization of minorities and low-income voters would overcome that reality.

As I mentioned in Part 1, the Presidential electoral arithmetic prior to 1992 gave surface plausibility to such DLC argument: California, the most populous state with the most electoral votes, was considered to be a safe Republican state in Presidential elections and therefore the Democrats had to win some Southern states to gain an Electoral College majority.

Regardless of how much sense or how little it made circa 1990, those arguments still echo in the chronic defensiveness of the Democrats in Congress and in the Obama White House that we've seen the last year and a half. For many base voters and surely for many swing voters, it often looks inexplicable. But many Democrats are haunted still by the specter of Willie Horton.

Ann Friedman also recalls some later versions of those appeals in All Politics is Identity Politics 08/10/2010:

Kathleen M. Sullivan, writing in the Prospect in 1998, summarized Nancy Rosenblum's book, Membership and Morals: "Rather than socializing members for democracy, groups are likely to be exclusionary, snobbish, and competitive vis-a-vis others. The internal cooperation they foster in no way guarantees that they will be ... civic, virtuous, or deliberative in relation to the larger polity." In 2004, Michael Lind argued in these pages that, in order to regain the majority, the Democratic Party should attempt to dissociate itself from "identity-politics groups -- blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays, and lesbians -- and economic-interest groups, like unions" -- and instead organize itself by geography.

I don't find a link to Sullivan's article, but the Lind article is Mapquest.Dem 12/20/2004.

Lind's position in 2004 in particular was a real throwback to that conventional wisdom of the early 1990s, and an especially blunt statement of it. Part of the flaw of his argument in that 2004 article is that he was trying hard to make a regional argument that fit nearly two centuries of American history, and it doesn't work very well. It also shows a pessimism that, especially in retrospect, looks panicky and despairing:

Outside of selected cities, the core region of the Democratic Party is New England. The Democratic Party is also the minority party at all levels of government.

At present, the Democratic Party is a socially liberal party that welcomes both economic conservatives and economic liberals. But in a country with a center-right majority on social issues and a center-left majority on economic issues of interest to the broad middle class and working class, this is exactly backward: Defining liberalism in terms of social liberalism is a formula for minority status. According to various polls, the number of self-described liberals in the United States is no more than 18 percent or 20 percent. Public attitudes on race, gay rights, and other subjects have been getting more liberal with each generation, but widespread opposition to unqualified abortion rights and gay marriage shows the limits to this trend. ...

The Democrats should retain their bedrock commitment to fighting laws that discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. On other issues, which might include affirmative action, abortion rights, and gay marriage, the Democratic Party as a whole should take no stand.

Or, in other words, keep the Party's principles in rhetoric but on practical issues and specific legislation, throw African-Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and those annoying women with their, you know, female issues under the bus. Or at least send them permanently to the back of the bus. Because the Democratic Party has become "the minority party at all levels of government" and "is slowly being confined to Greater New England." He sounds as panicky there as a Republican who's just heard the word "mosque." Judge for yourself whether the last six years in American politics give credence to his analysis.

For more thoughtful reflections on "identity politics," see the remainder of Friedman's article and Wendy Kaminer's Politics of Identity The American Prospect 09/23/2001.

What scares me is less the effect that anti-black or anti-Latino racism may have on Democratic prospects and more the danger that Democrats will revert to their reflective defensive crouch, which is heavily informed by the flawed ideas of the DLC circa 1990.

Tags: democratic party, racism, white racism

Good advice for Democrats this year from Paul Starr

Paul Starr writes in the cover story to the 20th anniversary issue (Sept 2010) of The American Prospect, A 20-Year Tug-of-War 08/09/2010:

"It could have been worse" isn't much of a campaign slogan.

Tags: democratic party

The Democratic Party and the politics of white racism (1 of 2)

Ross Barnett, Governor of Mississippi 1960-64 and a leader of white resistance to desegregation and the rule of law

While puzzling over the strange "concern troll" polemics of Bob Somerby at his Daily Howler site, I was struck by how his thinking on the subject of Democrats and the politics of race resembles a particular strain of thinking among Democrats circa 1992. For one representative version of this line of argument, see the sad 1991 book, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics by Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall. Here is how Thomas Edsall stated his view around the same time in Willie Horton's Message New York Review of Books 02/03/1992 edition (link behind subscription):

These issues - including, crime, welfare, affirmative action, defendant's rights, the erosion of the family - exploit the combination of racial tension and resentment toward special privileges for the poor, and toward tax dollars going to people who do not deserve them. That such feelings have become so visible and highly charged has put Democratic liberals at a disadvantage. It is hard for Democratic politicians to make political capital out of the sluggish economy and the divisions on the right because too many voters in presidential elections are hostile to their approach to social issues. The contemporary failure of liberalism lies not only in its dramatic loss of majority support but in the vehemence and seeming inexplicability of the sustained rejection by the voters of the Democratic Party and its nominees. The moderately egalitarian New Deal liberalism that produced majorities from the start of the Great Depression through the election of Lyndon Johnson has been undermined by the competition between constituencies and interests that now differ sharply about the meaning of equality. In Birmingham, Alabama, formerly Democratic white firemen angrily oppose still Democratic black firemen over the standards to be met for promotion to lieutenant and captain. In East Los Angeles Hispanic parents claim that whites who fled into the San Fernando Valley twenty years ago are trying to keep Hispanic students out of UCLA.

The leading activists within the Democratic Party, who largely control the selection of nominees, are far more willing than the public generally to allocate resources favoring relative newcomers, whether for education or welfare or public jobs, along racial, ideological, and ethnic lines. The bitterness of the disputes over such matters as municipal contract "set-asides" for minorities and over admission to the advanced "magnet schools" in some cities has made heterogeneity, once the strength of the Democratic Party, a source of destructive political infighting. The demands of Democratic politicians for fairer taxes and new public investment might seem to have obvious political appeal in 1992; but those demands are regarded skeptically by voters who ask: fairness for whom? investment for the benefit of which racial or ethnic groups? or which gender? [my emphasis]

Edsall was and still is treated as a liberal. But this stuff has always read like a "concern troll" conservative pitch to me. In form, he's wringing his hands over the dilemma that the Democrats are committed to social justice in various forms, but are confronted with large numbers of white Real Americans who have unfortunate hostility toward various minorities and poor people.

One doesn't have to look too closely to see the problematic nature of Edsall's approach. For one thing, Edsall concentrated on Presidential elections, at a time when both Houses of Congress, a majority of governorships and most state legislators were Democratic. He uses this clumsy slight-of-hand to claim that "too many voters in presidential elections are hostile to their [the Democrats'] approach to social issues." But was that so? There are mounds of poll data one can parse various ways. But one of the paradoxes of the Republican dominance in Presidential politics from 1980 to 1992 was that on individual issues, including hot-button social issues like abortion, a majority or plurality favored Democratic positions. Asking the question, why do voters support Democratic positions but Republican Presidents get elected?, is a very different question than, how can the Democrats address the fact that so many voters are hostile to their positions on "social issues"?

Cut through the "concern troll" talk and what Edsall was essentially arguing was that for the Democrats to be a competitive political party nationally, that they had to convince voters that they were conservative on "social issues" and not so friendly to racial minorities, either. The surface plausibility of that argument in 1991-2 came basically from three realities: Republicans had won three Presidential elections in a row, and conventional wisdom among the punditocracy was that Old Man Bush was a virtual shoo-in for re-election; the realignment of white Southerners from the Democratic to Republican Party was still a relatively recent thing and conventional wisdom still considered Southern conservatives registered Democratic to be in play in Presidential elections; and, California had voted Republican in the Presidential elections of 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988.

As long as California was a solidly Republican state, the Democrats needed to carry at least some Southern electoral votes to be able to win the Presidency. Whatever plausibility the "concern troll" argument had in 1992, in other words, was largely based on the assumption that California was a reliably Republican state in Presidential election. In fact, California voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. Ironically, the racial-fear-mongering Willie Horton ads Old Man Bush used in his 1988 race and to which the title of Edsall article refers, were used by the 1992 Clinton campaign to discredit Bush in the eyes of racially tolerant suburban swing voters.

And in 1994, during the last big wave of xenophobia, Republican Governor Pete Wilson backed the now infamous anti-immigrant Proposition 187. The proposition was so badly drafted that basically none of it stood up in court. But the long-term political effects were dramatic. It permanently and significantly increased the voting participation rate of Latino voters, and it heavily shifted their preferences to the Democratic Party.

It's worth noting in the current context that on race, the Republican Party of 1992 was on the whole considerably more moderate in its outward approach than today. Old Man Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas turned into a public fiasco even though he was approved for the Court (after which he went on to become one of the Court's least distinguished Justices in history). But the nomination also gave Republicans the opportunity to tout the existence of conservative Republican African-American figures. Until Prop 187, the Republicans were working hard to appeal to Latino voters. In 1991, Old Man Bush and other prominent Republicans were very public in opposing the election of Louisiana's Republican Senate nominee, the notorious racist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. That didn't mean they had given up their Southern Strategy of appealing to white voters on the basis of racial fears and prejudices. But they were going on the assumption that to be perceived as encouraging or countenancing open white racism would be electorally detrimental to their prospects.

The Democratic Party realignment in the South today has long since taken place. The question for the Democrats there is how to build majorities. But the Republicans' Southern strategy has given them pretty much a lock on the voters who can be swung by racial resentments and prejudices. So the Democrats' prospects for boosting their support among white voters turns around winning over voters for whom anti-black and anti-Latino prejudice are less important than other issues. And also on winning over the increasing Latino voting demographic. After the passage of the anti-Latino SB 1070 in Arizona this year, polls in Texas showed a significant shift there among Latino voters to the Democratic Party.

And in this environment, people like Somerby expect that the Democrats are going to damage themselves politically if they are vocal about opposing white racism?

Incidentally, I use the phrase "white racism" in particular because white people have never had a problem finding ways to criticize racism among African-Americans are Latinos. For those of us who actually can perceived white racism when it's staring us in the face and shouting in our ears, it's a very familiar refrain that its those people who are racist against us. I don't use the phrase to minimize the harm of anti-white racism. I use it because I want people to know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about white racism.

(Continued in Part 2 tomorrow)

Tags: democratic party, racism, white racism

Summarizing the Howler on Democrats and race

Since I've been writing a fair amount on the topic, I thought I would recap my understanding of Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby's position of late on the topic of race in American politics.

Somerby's outlook as expressed in his writing is heavily reminiscent of the press conventional wisdom about race and American politics circa 1992. That view assumed that white voters' fear and/or hostility to minorities, especially African-Americans, was fatally damaging the Democratic Party's electoral prospects. And that to reverse that trend, the Democrats at a minimum would have to distance themselves from black and Latino "special interest groups." It was a deeply flawed understanding of the realities of 1992. It's even less realistic in 2010.

Somerby in his 08/11/2010 column makes the remarkable admission that he basically doesn't know how to perceive racism and finds it a not very useful concept. If we take his word for it, one has to ask why he bothers to talk about race at all.

I can't see his position there as anything but disingenuous, if not downright cynical. Race and racism, especially white racism, are very real factors in American life and politics. Pollsters and social scientists find it challenging to identify racism in voting patterns. But "challenging" does not mean impossible and there has been a lot of valuable work done in that field. Somerby's postracial epistemology gives him an excuse to dismiss all of it: if racism isn't a valid category for understanding the behavior of American voters or politicians at all, any survey results exploring its effects are by definition meaningless.

Somerby's often-bitter polemics on the topic of race focus heavily on attacking liberals for criticizing what they understand to be manifestations of white racism among Republicans and conservatives. In this, he mirrors the attacks made by conservatives, even though Somerby packages them in "concern troll" trappings.

One of the most disturbing trends in American politics today is the increasing "mainstreaming" of ideas, claims and attitudes from hardcore far-right groups of the Patriot Militia variety. And whether Somerby cares to recognize it or not, the Christian Right is a major influence in the Republican Party. These groups are not only pushing theocratic notions and weird conspiracy theories; some of them are inciting violence and promoting white racism and anti-Latino xenophobia. But these groups also use what to most people is quirky language. Without understanding something about their particular political vocabulary, you can't understand what they are promoting. For instance, when hardcore Christianists denounce the Dred Scott decision, if you think they are expressing anti-racist sentiments, you likely have completely missed their meaning. Somerby appears to be clueless about this whole very real aspect of American politics and today's Republican Party.

I'll give a few links here to a few of the more memorable work I've come across in recent times on white racism in American politics:

• Nicholas Valentino and David Sears, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South" American Journal of Political Science 49:3 (July 2005). They concluded that what pretty much everyone involved with politics assumes is actually demonstrably true: that appeals to white racism among Southern white voters played a decisive role in the shift of national voting patterns to the Republican Party since the mid-1970s. More than one conclusion for Democratic Party strategy might be drawn from this. The notion that Democrats can simply not talk about white racism while the Republicans beat them over the head with it is not a reasonable one.

• Spencer Piston, Political Behavior Online, "How Explicit Racial Prejudice Hurt Obama in the 2008 Election" 02/23/2010. Piston's conclusions could be used to make an argument for the Democrats downplaying race-related issues. But it's one of many examples of how racial prejudice in voting behavior can be studied. And a more reasonable application of his findings for Democrats would be that it's to their political advantage to stigmatize white racism and associate it with Republican-style Predator State governance.

• Chris Caldwell, Why the GOP Is Doomed Hoover Digest (4/1998). I commented on it in Let's not talk about the big white elephant in the room 09/19/2009

• Bill Moyers, Fred Harris, et al, Bill Moyers Journal 03/28/2008

• Mark Graber, The Conscientious Objectors Speak Balkinization 06/28/2007

Tags: bob somerby, white racism

Jane Hamsher is right (as she often is)

Jane Hamsher writes of the Obama administration's punch-the-hippies approach for which she credits White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel (Glenn Greenwald, Dylan Ratigan & Me on the "Professional Left" Firedoglake 8/11/2010):

Rahm's genius strategy paid off last night in Connecticut, which saw 20% turnout in a hotly contested Democratic primary last night (down from 43% in 2006). If that keeps up, November is looking awfully grim for the Democrats The White House is in la-la land if they think this is happening because a few cable TV hosts and a couple of bloggers are being mean to them.

Obama failed in his promise to stand up to corporate America, and it’s not just liberals who are upset. Tossing progressives a few bones and telling them to be happy about it while handing the government over to JP Morgan, PhRMA and AT&T is just not going to get it done.

Tags: democratic party, obama administration

Punching the hippies,aka, the Democratic Party base

Also known as Democratic officials trashing the Democratic base. Glenn Greenwald tells the story of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs showing his respectability by trashing Democratic voters in Robert Gibbs attacks the fringe losers of the left Salon 08/10/2010. He includes an update on the ritual walkback Gibbs later did, saying "what I may have said inartfully."

This is a silly dance in itself. And there are a number of things we could say about it. It shows the Democrats stuck in their chronic defensive crouch. It risks discouraging base voters in this year's elections. It squanders chances to reorient the general political narrative in a more Democratic direction. It panders to conservatives who aren't likely to vote for Democrats anyway. It sounds dumb on the face of it. And so on.

Digby makes an important further observation about it in this post, borrowing a famous phrase from Franklin Roosevelt for her title, Welcome Their Hatred Hullabaloo 08/10/2010.

What with all the hoopla over Robert Gibbs' comments today it pays to simply remember that everyone in Washington hates liberals. ...

But what's dangerously myopic about going ballistic as Gibbs did in his statements is that just 10 years ago we had a little event in which only a tiny portion of the base went with a third party bid from the left --- and the consequences were catastrophic. Democrats, of all people, should remember that every vote matters.

It's embarrassing to have David Frum point out the obvious --- that the Republicans fear their base and the Democrats hate theirs, but it has been so since I was a kid --- a long time ago. At some point they are going to realize that their demanding activist base is the way it is and that they need to figure out a way to deal with it rather than rail against it. You cannot browbeat people into loving you and you can't argue them into being enthusiastic. Certainly characterizing them in cartoon terms by saying "they want to eliminate the Pentagon", they are on drugs and --- worst of all --- suggesting they are not part of America --- isn't going to get you there. [my emphasis in bold]

Markos Moulitsas weighs in on Gibbs (Inartful Daily Kos 08/10/2010):

So here's Gibbs "reality" -- something that a pseudo-conservative says on MSNBC says means that liberal bloggers want Canadian healthcare and the elimination of the Pentagon. Oh, and we wouldn't be happy even if Dennis Kucinich was president. Because the blogosphere is a hotbed of Dennis Kucinich supporters. Sheesh.

Whatever. Gibbs is clearly locked up tight in his DC bubble. There's no other way to explain how he'd think that Ratigan was somehow liberal. Why? Because he was on MSNBC? The same network that blacklisted me because I criticized Joe Scarborough? Criticism, by the way, that was defending the administration from his (and GOP) bullshit attacks?

Meanwhile, in the real world, Markos points out there are real reasons that Democratic base voters and others have to be dissatisfied with the Obama administration's performance, whether or not we think a McCain-Palin administration would have been worse:

The unemployment rate is brutal, while high-profile cave-ins to nefarious interests, like the Cornhusker Kickback during the health care debate did more to drive the Democrats' numbers down than any blog post or MSNBC segment ever did.

It may be easier to blame the dirty fucking hippies and kick them in the face, but that sure won't address the root cause of Democratic malaise, and it sure as heck won't better motivate base Democrats into helping close this November's intensity gap.

Glenn makes the straighforward point on why Democrats need to criticize Obama's shortcomings:

Being a rational, engaged citizen means objecting when political leaders do things that you think are wrong or bad and praising them when they do things you think are good and constructive. That even includes President Obama. It's just that simple, and pointing to Scary John Boehner hovering in the corner in order to ratchet up fear levels isn't going to change that, nor should it. Barack Obama is President of the U.S. at least until January, 2013, and wields vast power. It's therefore vital that he, like any other political official, be held accountable for the bad actions he undertakes -- just as he himself always argued.

Or, at least that's what he argued before he became President.

DemFromCT is not specifically addressing Gibbs' dumb comments in Left out of the process" Daily Kos 08/10/2010. But he puts his finger on why the Democrats' at-least-we're-not-as-bad-as-Republicans electoral strategy for 2010 is problematic:

Voters get the part about "Bush sucks". They get the part about the GOP being out of ideas. But they also get the part about Wall Street getting a more sympathetic ear than Main Street. That's the consequence of catfood commissions, dawdling on unemployment benefits, and pretending jobs don't matter as much as the deficit. That latter includes Blue Dogs, so don't blame it all on the GOP (even though much of it is them.)

Voters are results oriented, and the economic results right now are not pretty, regardless of whatever steps are being made to fix things in the future. Speaking of the future, the question on the table is "will that future include me?" If people are uncertain whether your plans include them, why would they vote for you? [my emphasis]

Tags: first subject

The sad evolution of Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby has reached the point that I now regard him as a full-blown "concern troll", very often echoing conservative complaints but framing them as the advice of a concerned liberal, wanting to help progressive Democrats clean up our act.

In his Howler post of 08/09/2010, his sad evolution is evident. He defends Glenn Beck's allegedly perceptive analysis of education spending, being careful not to endorse or critique it. (Since Somerby writes frequently about educations issues, it's not clear what would be so difficult for him to check Beck's information.) Somerby defends poor persecuted Beck against the horrible attacks of that bigoted liberal shrew Joan Walsh, whose Salon he now describes as "smutty", when she objected to Beck's characterization of Obama's government as "Planet of the Apes".

As Walsh explains in the post Somerby targets ("It's like the damn Planet of the Apes!" Salon 08/06/2010), this has become a favorite them of white supremacist groups. Somerby doesn't seem to be bothered by such things. But he's very bothered when one of them thar horrible libruls criticized a fine white man like Glenn Beck for white racism. Weirdly, he says it's fine when Beck assumes a mock Southern accent but evil libruls condescension to sensitive white Southerners when Rachel Maddow does it. In a classic concern-troll formulation, Somerby writes of the evil libruls and their discussions of white racism:

... we hapless liberals only know one political play. This is all we know how to do; in truth, we have no other politics. In part, this explains why we liberals have been the loveable losers of American politics for at least the past thirty years.

I had a direct exchange with Somerby in the comments to a Digby post of 08/03/2010 at Hullabaloo. (The link is to my comments and Somerby's; at this writing I was unable to link Digby's post itself.)

Bob Somerby may have been Al Gore's roommate back when. And for years he was a staunch defender of Al Gore and the Clinton's, and a perceptive and funny critic of the very real failing of our Establishment press corps. But he's now reduced himself to patrolling liberal commentary that argues against white racism. It's a sad but also ugly development.

Tags: bob somerby, white racism

Today in neolilberalism

Paul Krugman continues his Cassandra act of raising unconventionally sound alarms over the state of the economy while those who were conventionally and respectably wrong about the state of the economy leading up to the Great Recession blather on about the terrible, hideous threat of federal spending. In America Goes Dark New York Times 08/08/2010, he writes:

... a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we're seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere. [my emphasis]

Despite the literary flourish in that last sentence, Krugman is pointing to a real problem. The brand of neoliberal, "Washington Consensus" economic ideology that became the dominant ideology of both parties over the last 30 years has produced a severe disparity in the distribution of income and wealth, creating a situation where the economic elites and their most visible advocates worry less and less about the general state of the public good, as long as their own prosperity - and the maldistribution of income and wealth - continues.

What we see today is the situation as it evolved over the last two decades that the late great John Kenneth Galbraith described so well in his brilliant and under-appreciated book, The Culture of Contentment (1992). He describes the situation in which the voting public in the US is relatively content with the direction of the country, then in its second decade of major deregulation, rapidly rising economic inequality, privatization and the post-Vietnam idolization of the military and its glorious generals. Given the factual exclusion of the less-contented portions of the population from direct influence on political decisions, the US is left with what in this passage from the conclusion Galbraith calls "a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong."

Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy — one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong, the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.

There is special occasion here for sadness — for a sad ending — for what is needed to save and protect, to ensure against suffering and further unpleasant consequence, is not in any way obscure. Nor would the resulting action be disagreeable. There would be a challenge to the present mood of contentment with its angry resentment of any intrusion, but, in the longer run, the general feeling of security in well-being would be deepened. [my emphasis]

What he described there is a spiral that, with short-term reversals, has continued to spiral downward since then.

On the one hand, I have little use for cynicism about politics. Things need to be fixed. But if reality presents pessimistic prospects, it's also important to understand that situation clearly, as well. I'm not making an argument for Blue Dog politics. On the contrary, the Blue Dog Democratic approach is manifestly a failure in breaking down the political "culture of contentment" or in addressing the vital needs of the real (if not voting) majority of the public.

But the events of the last 20 years have largely been consistent with Galbraith's thoughtful pessimism. He was pointing out that there were major social and public-policy problems that needed to be addressed to maintain the long-term health and quality of life in the United States. As a result of largely having passed that opportunity by, we have experienced several of the very kinds of events Galbraith noted then might bring enough of a shock to the Culture of Contentment to set more fundamental changes in motion.

We've had two major domestic terrorist attacks in 1995 (Oklahoma City) and 2001 (the 9/11 attacks). While not a major attack in itself, the still-unsolved anthrax attack of 2001 played a critical role in shaping public and (especially) elite attitudes toward terrorism, coming as it did soon after the Al Qa'ida attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We've had a series of wars, leading us to the point that we have two unpopular wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) in progress, with no actual end yet in sight, though the prospects look better for a foreseeable exit from Iraq. As Andrew Bacevich points out in his important new book published last week, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War, we are now in a mode where the Pentagon, the corporate media and political elites of both parties have largely accepted the notion of continual shooting war as a norm for US foreign policy. And, of course, there is the Great Recession that officially began in December 2007, which is likely to have been the beginning of what Krugman calls the Third Depression (the first starting with the Crisis of 1873, the second with the Crash of 1929). And we've had a massive oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico which lays bare for the moment the dangerous nature of excessive "partnership" between the people's government and private corporations.

The question at this point is whether popular mobilization in some form can respond effectively to the deteriorating situations and the major shocks to the Culture of Contentment in a way that will unseat the dominant neoliberal ideology, policies and "narrative." It's certainly reasonable to see the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 as a move in that direction. And Obama's record of real accomplishment is also an illustration of the increased public insistence on addressing some major problems.

But it's way too soon to say that there has been a decisive turn away from neoliberalism. And every reason to believe that Obama and his administration are opposed to such a turn. A key moment in that ongoing conflict will be the report of the Catfood Commission (Deficit Commission) this December. If Obama and/or a substantial portion of the Democratic leadership embraces the concept of phasing out Social Security and Medicare - which would like come in the initial form of raising the retirement age and slashing benefits - it's hard to picture what the political fallout from that would be. At the very minimum, one would hope that it would energize progressive challenges to Democratic incumbents who support the Catfood Commission's anti-Social Security and anti-Medicare recommendations.

Tags: bp oil disaster, second subject, obama administration

The original V television series

I just watched the first episode of the 1983 V miniseries. I like the current series and I remember the miniseries and the previous TV show being fun. The V in this series stood for "Visitors" (the invading space aliens preferred name) and "victory" (in the hope of the human resistance), and shouldn't be with the V (vampire blodd) in True Blood.

I hadn't remembered the dialogue as being so cheesy. The special effects were good and mostly hold up well 27 years later. But the melodramatic silliness of a lot of the dialogue and the early-eighties hair styles are almost as much fun to see now as anything else in the series.

Jane Badler, the head alien villain Diana in the original, will be joining the new ABC series this fall. (Mikey O'Connell, Original 'V' star Jane Badler joins Season 2 of ABC reboot Inside the Box 08/06/2010) Hearing that is what made me curious to see the original again.

The original 1983 miniseries was closed with second 1984 miniseries, V: The Final Battle. Then the Visitors returned to Earth nastier than ever for a 1984-85 weekly series, also called V, like the current ABC series. One of the stars of the original is Robert Englund, who went on to fame as Freddy Kruger of the Nightmare on Elm Street slasher movies.

Tags: v series