Jonathan Chait frets about "the left" and Russiagate

You have to feel sorry for Jonathan Chait. The poor guy is stuck in some kind of time warp in which it's always August 1968. And the disgusting hippies are about to mess up Hubert Humphreys' Presidential prospects by rudely bashing their heads against the clubs being held politely by Mayor Daley's Gestapo police force.

Chait wants you to know the hippies love Russia. Beause they're Commies, or Putinists, or something. "Trump is the enemy of the left’s enemy," he writes in Why Are So Many Leftists Skeptical of the Russia Investigation? New York 07/29/2018.

Pssst... don't tell him that there was a big war in 1939-45 where the United States and Russia were formal allies, i.e., they actually were friends. It might give the poor guy an aneurysm.

Chait links to an April article of his own, Corruption, Not Russia, Is Trump’s Greatest Political Liability New York 04/01/2018, which he opens with this:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” declared Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States.” To the extent that Trump’s candidacy offered any positive appeal, as opposed to simple loathing for his opponent, this was it. He was a brilliant businessman, or at least starred in a television show as one, and he would set aside his lifelong pursuit of wealth to selflessly serve the greater good. This was the promise that pried just enough Obama voters away from Hillary Clinton in just enough upper-Midwest states to clinch the Electoral College.

So, Chait in April thought Trump won and Hillary lost in 2016 because he sold himselff successfully in the Midwest as a successful businessman. He added, "The Russia scandal is substantively important, but it is also convoluted and abstract and removed from any immediate impact on voters’ lived experience."

Cenk Uygar on The Young Turks' second hour on July 30 talks about two Russiagate skeptics who are part of his own TYT Network, Jimmie Dore and Kyle Kulinski, saying, "They are super upset that the Democratic Party is using this as an excuse for the loss [in 2016]. and trying to misdirect people in that way. I agree with them on that. I think the Democratic Party is over-focusing on it as a reason for Hillary Clinton's loss." He notes that he has some disagreements with Jimmie and Kyle "about to what degree Trump colluded with Russia and on what issues. But it's fair disagreement."

That is the kind of thing that happens when serious people take a serious issue seriously. We're also talking about a massive international espionage and influence opertion. If Chait would read a couple of John Le Carre novels, he might get the idea that such cases are messy and confusing and clouded by disinformation intentional and otherwise, and that serious journalists, analysts, and activists following the unfolding news will come to different conclusions and will be required from time to time to revise them as more facts become available.

And at least back in April, it looks like Chait thought that it was not the Russians who decided the election for Trump. And it's true that Hillary's campaign immediately after her 2016 loss started pushing the Russia-is-to-blame notion. In reality, the election result was overdetermined and we can't honestly say based on the information in the public record now that Russian influence was decisive.

In fact, he sounded then a lot like a Russiagate skeptic himself!

t should take very little work — and be a very big priority — for Democratic candidates to stitch all the administration’s misdeeds together into a tale of unchecked greed. For all the mystery still surrounding the Russia investigation, for instance, it is already clear that the narrative revolves around a lust (and desperation) for money. Having burned enough American banks throughout his career that he could not obtain capital through conventional, legitimate channels, Trump turned to Russian sources, who typically have an ulterior political motive. Just what these various sources got in return for their investment in Trump is a matter for Robert Mueller’s investigators to determine. But Trump’s interest in them is perfectly obvious.

But in his July 29 piece, he goes for ritual hippie-punching on Russiagate.

"The purest form of this sentiment on the far left is a vein of attacks that are almost indistinguishable from Republican rhetoric about the investigation," he writes. This is one of the laziest of stock political assumptions, that the far left is just like the far right. But for a mainstream reporter, it's perfectly respectable to express lazy assumptions - as long as the lazy assumption is part of the conventional wisdom.

This is cute: "Some of the skeptics complain that Democrats are emphasizing Russia too heavily, but this complaint confuses liberal journalists and activists with Democratic politicians, who are mostly concentrating their rhetoric on health care and other economic issues." Wait. Chait's April 1 argument sounds a lot like what he scolds the leftie skeptics for doing in the July 29 one.

Chait singles out three Russiagate "skeptics" who particularly bug him: Glenn Greenwald, Stephen Cohen, and Aaron Maté. And he lists some lesser offenders: Katherine Krueger, Seth Ackerman, Corey Robin, and Osita Nwanevu. I actually talked about recent comments by Ackerman and Robin a few days ago. I've commented on Cohen's position back in February (Russia-Russia-Russia (again) 02/02/2018), and posted a video featuring Maté (Russiagate and the left 02/19/2018). I posted a tweet by Greenwald in More warnings of the need for realism on the Trump-Russia issue 03/31/2018, which reflects his antiwar concerns in the Russiagate issue.

I haven't seen any reason to think that any of those commentators/reporters/scholars are engaged in bad faith arguments over Russiagate. And in all those cases, I have definite points of agreements with their cautionary warnings. I'm not so familiar with Krueger's or Nwanevu's work on the topic, so I'll leave them for another time.

This is Cenk Uygur's discussion with Kyle Kulinski on Russiagate, which is a far better airing of the how-seriously-should-we-take-Russiagate matter than anything we're likely to see from Jonathan Chait, RUSSIA DEBATE: Kyle Kulinski vs Cenk Uygur 02/07/2018:

Neoliberalism as policy and as polemic

I'm not sure I understand what's going on in this Twitter thread:

The "neoliberals" are actually more progressive in economic issues than Sanders supporters. https://t.co/RVkSCLGSZ3 https://t.co/x6sY8Nr4bz

— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) October 27, 2017

The linked article is Jonathan Chait's New Study Shows What Really Happened in the 2016 Election New York 06/18/2017, in which Chait reports:

You think the Bernie Sanders movement was about socialism? Not really. Sanders voters have the same beliefs about economic equality and government intervention as Hillary Clinton supporters. On the importance of Social Security and Medicare, Sanders voters actually have more conservative views ...

Where they mainly differ is on international trade and the question of whether politics is a rigged game. The ideological content of Sanders’s platform is not what drew voters. It was, instead, his counter-positioning to Clinton as a clean, uncorrupted outsider.

But the word "neoliberal" doesn't appear in it. It's apparently the quoted passage that Amanda Marcotte interprets as she does in the tweet.

This led to an exchange with MSNBC's Joy Reid.

It actually a real term. It just doesn’t mean what they think it does. And they falsely apply it to liberal women/WOC as a smear. pic.twitter.com/TGpfPXKjdi

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) October 27, 2017

The rose avi crowd has decided it means “woman and especially women of color who refuse to worship Bernie Sanders and thus must be purged.”

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) October 27, 2017

I must admit that I don't know who the "rose avi" is to whom she refers there, and even Mr. Google couldn't clarify it for me. Maybe she's referring to some academics who write on neoliberalism?

Apparently this notion that complaining about neoliberalism means you think women's rights, minority rights and immigrants rights should be low priorities has become a "thing" (slogan, polemic, whatever) among the corporate Democrats. Joy Reid at least notes that neoliberalism is a meaningful term, although her notion of what is seems to be limited. Milton Friedman and his libertarian-monetarist ideas, for instance, don't fit entirely comfortably into the mode of Reagan-Thatcher economics. And neoliberalism is a broader social ideology, as well.

The report on which Chait relies for his analysis is Lee Drutman's Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond:Tensions Between and Within the Two Parties Democracy Fund Voter Study Group June 2017. Chait seems to be inviting his readers to jump to the conclusions that Sanders voters are more conservative than economic issues than Hillary voters, including on support for Social Security and Medicare. Drutman specifies that the Sanders/Clinton comparison is based specifically on their primary voters. Hillary Clinton had much higher name recognition and did especially well in early primaries in 2016. And not all the states have primaries. So those findings are interesting information. But generalizing those to defining characteristics of the divisions within the Democratic Party at this moment.

Bernie's support also skewed distinctly younger than Hillary's, which could account for much of the discrepancy on the intensity of support for Social Security and Medicare. Younger voters are generally not focused on those issues. No, that's not a dig at millennials. It may be partially a factor of age in general, in the sense that people under 35 don't tend to focus on retirement planning very much. But it also has to do with the economic challenges facing people in their 20s and 30s, including the student loan debt that has soared the last 15 years. But it's also because of the massive disinformation campaign over decades against Social Security, with Republicans claiming relentlessly and falsely that Social Security will go broke in a few years. With many Democrats including Barack Obama constantly feeding into that by talking about the alleged need for "entitlement reform." A lot of younger voters just aren't aware of how bogus those claims are.

And it's an even bigger leap from there to what Amanda Marcotte tweeted, apparently taking "neoliberals" to be nothing more than an insult word for Hillary partisans, that neoliberals/Hillary-partisans are more progressive on economic issues than Bernie/New Deal Democrats.

Talk about neoliberalism, by the way, is a particular bugaboo for Jonathan Chait, e.g., How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals New York 07/16/2017. That piece was devoted to griping that "neoliberal" was just an insult against True Blue Liberals from dirty leftie hippies. That case surely benefits from the fact that outside of the US and Canada, the meaning of "liberal" in economic policy means "free-market," deregulation, anti-union policies. And that's the "liberal" in neoliberalism when it comes to economic policy.

Chait's July piece includes this gripe about the left, "Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz? Neoliberals both." That's a link to a Jacobin piece by Paul Heideman (Bulletproof Neoliberalism 06/01/2014) that, well, doesn't actually say that. It's a review of a book by Philip Mirowski. Citing it, Heideman writes:

Mirowski thinks that this is at least in part a result of the impotence of the loyal opposition — those economists such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman who attempt to oppose the more viciously neoliberal articulations of economic theory from within the camp of neoclassical economics. Though Krugman and Stiglitz have attacked concepts like the efficient markets hypothesis (which holds that prices in a competitive financial market reflect all relevant economic information), Mirowski argues that their attempt to do so while retaining the basic theoretical architecture of neoclassicism has rendered them doubly ineffective.

That's different than saying Krugman and Stiglitz are neoliberals. I would push back on the characterization of the two as buying into neoclassical assumptions. Both are Keynesians. Now, neither of them identify as anti-capitalist. And classical economic, neoclassical economics, Keynesian economics all share with neoliberalism some basic assumptions about the functioning and even the normative value of capitalism.

But both Krugman and Stiglitz are leading critics of real existing neoliberalism, even if they haven't roused the academic economic profession out of its stubborn conservatism. (Or conservatism in its liberalism?) Both have been astute critics of problems of the eurozone and of the limitations of Obama's general tendency to embraced neoliberal assumptions on issues like Social Security and the balanced budget.