Sophistication and Politics (Draft)

Eagle? Penguin? Ostrich?

George Lakoff has written about the connection between morality and politics and there certainly seems to be something to his Strict Father versus Nurturing Parent models of morality and how those correlate to conservative versus liberal political views. 

But I think it is increasingly difficult to ignore the intellectual divide in politics today.  In an argument, calling the other side stupid is name calling; “serious” critics and politicians avoid this offence at all cost.  However, if it is the case that you have a bird that looks like a duck and sounds like a duck it just might be a duck.  When it comes to intelligence and politics, I think we can identify a few ducks.

Perhaps what I am really after is sophistication in politics and political positions.  It might not be fair to say that politicians mindlessly repeating ideological dogma regardless of the facts are stupid — although it is hard to look into Michele Bachmann’s glassy stare and not wonder how things could be otherwise — when maybe some politicians just don’t have the right information. 

Duck.

But there’s the rub.  How far apart is a lack of facts from a lack of intellectual inquisitiveness?   Wouldn’t you hope that someone standing up for a cause and ideals would have facts to support his or her claims?  Not in the Republican Party.  In fact, the less you know, the better.  And, I’m sorry, it is hard to respect the political right, both its leaders and the following horde, as sophisticated thinkers because of it.

Clearly we are not as smart as we should be as a nation.  Too many of us don’t have facts, we don’t understand our nation’s social and economic history, for example, and yet we expect intelligent political decsions from American voters.  We laugh at bits like Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking” in which he asks average Americans simple questions about history and current events and gets blank stares instead of easy answers.  That might be funny, but it points to a bigger problem here:  People don’t care.

Paul Krugman once again offers a smart essay today about America’s short-term thinking.  Mr. Krugman annoys the right — and sometimes the left — because he makes sense; he makes intelligent arguments based in facts.  You don’t hear that from the right.  (Glenn Beck?  CPAC?  Your local GOP representative?)

What you hear are inane folksy pleas for simple-minded solutions that exist completely out of any meaningful context with the facts. 

How often have you heard the tired complaint that government must learn to “live within its means”?  Great.  Who would disagree with that?  However conservatives have used a policy of planned underfunding to cut government to a point where there is no meaningful application of this argument today without turning us into a third-world oligarchy.  You can’t say to someone, for example, go fill my car’s gas tank and give them $20 and expect to get it done.  If they ask for the needed $50, they are not living frivolously, they are asking for what is needed to get the job accomplished.

For decades the right has demonized government, made it the scapegoat of all problems, big and small.  In the process the right supported irresponsible underfunding and debt-building policies that have left budgets from the federal level on down through local levels strapped with burdens that will be impossible to correct without funding changes.  Yet the solution to these problems is to cut more and more.  Even as we see our wealth and social progress collapse all around us, the right presses on.  Can this be a sign of intelligent behavior?

And don’t even get started on the racist, jingoistic fear and paranoia from the right.  Ignorance breeds fear and violence.  The cry babies on the right have all sorts of villains to blame for our economic and social decline.  The self-righteousness of it can be frightening and has already caused us much loss in war.

I think a lot about fear and ignorance in our country, and the reactionary bitterness it breeds, while I am reading The Coming of the Third Reich (2004) by Richard J. Evans.  I think we can do much better, but heed the warning of George Santayana:  Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

What is so difficult about this?

America Needs to Invest Elsewhere

An op-ed in today’s New York Times by Bob Herbert (“Winning the Class War“, New York Times, 27 Nov 2010, A16) does not need much introduction or comment.  It clearly and plainly lays out the growing situation of economic inequity in the United States.  

There is nothing inherently wrong with success.  However one has to ask how much of success that is rewarded with the highest financial gains is truly deserved.  In an adjacent op-ed William D. Cohan notes that Wall Street is the number one destination for “the best and the brightest.”  Is that true?

That makes some presumptions about what defines the best and the brightest.  And it also feels like a cop out when, as Cohan does, we bemoan the fact that “the best and the brightest” are not going into other fields like engineering.  Is Wall Street’s success, deserved or not, also a reason why the United States is losing its competitive edge in fields like science, engineering, and the like? 

I would argue that Wall Street’s success, our loss of global competitiveness, and tolerance for both is tied up complacency and laziness.  Who around this country is ready to do the heavy lifting any more?  I have commented on this blog my complaint about America’s impatience and I think that goes hand in glove with ideological complacency.

Tune into any conservative talk show and you’ll hear result.  Not long ago a series of callers each identified themself as a working class person struggling to get by.  They could not be more emphatic — even to the point of expressing frightening hate — when responding against any idea of restructuring tax policies.  Even when pointed out that tax rates in real terms tend to be lower on higher earners than struggling lower earners the callers said the higher earners had earned the benefit of lower taxes through their hard work. 

Don't Believe It.

Really?  Earning millions a year in compensation, sometimes much more, isn’t enough?  Taking for granted things like health care, housing, food, and other essentials that more and more Americans worry about every day isn’t a reward?  Tax fairness is somehow taking away “our freedom”? 

If people understood economies of scale they might understand that earning millions, even billions, isn’t necessarily a factor of being the best and the brightest.  It is a matter of being in the right place at the right time.  Professional athletes and entertainers earn today many times what pro athletes and entertainers earned just 20 years ago in large part because the product they produce can be sold to more people and sold in more ways.  Is Eli Manning 100 times better than Bart Starr?

And if the best and the brightest need to be bailed out, supported by government subsidies, given extra tax credits and cuts, and given access exclusive markets, how special are they?  Look into how Wall Street is making money today.  They can essentially borrow from the government at zero percent, buy debt from the government that earns them 3%, pocket the profit and charge the government fees for handling the transaction!   Any semi-competent trader could make that deal profitable.

The entrepreneurship and ingenuity that starts great ventures is still out there, but we cannot expect to stay ahead of the curve if we keep reinvesting in the past.  Our economic oligarchs. when they do invest in future technology, are as eager — perhaps more eager — to invest overseas as they are here.   I’ll harp on this again, the private sector is not getting it done for us.   Now is the time for Americans to pull together and support government investment in projects now.  Infrastructure, new technology, education, research.  Dollars that will be spent now.   In other words, support something other than Wall Street and businesses that rely on internal combustion engines.  Wall Street in particular has had their hat out long enough.

Conservatives have been winning the class war.  They have the ideological edge.  Again, I want to recommend George Lakoff‘s books, especially Don’t Think An Elephant, as a quick primer on this subject.  The conservatives have done such an effective job that even the struggling working class are voting against their best interests. 

1929. 2009.

But even more surprising, it is hard to see how supposedly bright people like Tim Pawlenty really think they personally will be better off feeding their economic masters.  How do policies that dismantle the middle class square with their pro-American discourse?  (Answer:  It doesn’t.  They live in the same fog as the misguided people who vote for them.)

There are true villians out there, genuinely bad people.  And there are real idiots out there, genuinely stupid people.  Too many of them are getting our votes and as long as that happens we have only the voter to blame.  It might pay to remind people that this is a democracy.  We can indeed vote in our best interests, but if people don’t understand the facts and the history of the issues affecting them they are vulnerable to misinformation. 

This country thrived when it truly pursued freedom, even when it was not perfect and pretty.  The United States thrived with less austerity and more progressive public investment.  We need to look again at what worked keeping in mind that progress toward a goal is worth more than abandoning the goal all together out of impatience.

Related Articles

• Winning the Class War (nytimes.com)
• The Power Of Failure (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Les Leopold: Wall Street Brings Class War to America? (chelseagreen.com)
• Why The Republicans Triumphed in Two Words (themoderatevoice.com)
• David Brooks Feels Bad for the Middle Class [Class War] (gawker.com)

Post-Thanksgiving Leftovers

Blair A'Bhualite. Beautiful.

I have started three blog entries and changed my mind three times this morning.  It might be too early to turn over a new leaf and get serious anyway.  U No Hu will just have to bear with me.  I’m jumping in.

 

Topic One:  Reading the StarTribune Readers’ Comments

As a matter of full disclosure — that now-cliched disclaimer that connotes a level of false importance — I should tell you that I post regularly on the StarTribune comments boards.  I’ll also admit that I get carried away from time to time.  I argue from fact-based positions, but it is hard to resist taunting the knuckle-dragging mouth breathers who seem to live on the site posting from dangerous fringe. 

Today, however, I find myself not really engaged in the sport.  An odd depressed feeling overcame me instead.  (Perhaps this is what the Minnesota Vikings have been feeling all season?)  I posted one or two predictable and flat comments and then limped off the field.  I wasn’t going to change any minds today, if ever, and I guess I have known this all along.  To paraphrase Rocky Squirrel:  There is an unlimited supply of misinformation out there.

I am bothered by the political and economic climate out there.  Misinformation, yes, and willful ignorance, too.  I am going to point fingers.  I lay the blame on misinformation at the feet of conservatives, whether willfully or otherwise.  At best they are misled into believing that values trump facts, that the past follows the present.  At worst they deliberately deceive for political ends. 

I will write more about this later, but the arguments for economic recovery on the right don’t hold up to facts.  (See my posts here below.)  It simply is not a good idea to get your economic lessons from politicians — left or right — and it is especially true today when the right is so firmly — evenly openly — fighting for failure.  We live in a global economy, one which we eagerly promoted since the Nixon years, and yet we act like the United States is the only major economy.  Arguments worshipping American exceptionalism are making us rather ordinary.

We simply don’t have any respect or appreciation for the social and economic gains that better Americans left for us.  Americans have always been suspicious of government, but government has always been the enemy.  Even through our most paranoid moments — e.g. anti-communist “Red Scare” — government wasn’t the problem, people and ideas were…which isn’t any better, I’ll grant you that, but I am keying in on government.  Government is our collective investment in each other and we have lost that sense of common good. 

I will put out there a call for examples of liberal America engaged in the kind of factless prejudiced discourse that is taken as routine from the right.  Give me examples.  I will also put out there a call for something — anything — that conservative government has done to improve our country in recent decades.   I will grant you that we have had Democratic leadership in Congress in this period, but I will also argue that on the whole they had bought into the politics of the Great Moderation that defined fiscal and domestic economic policy from Reagan through 2007.    We changed course in this period and I am questioning the long-term results.  We have seen a growing decline in our competitive advantage, economic status, global security, the middle class, and basic social and physical structures once supported by us through our government are shutting down and sometimes literally collapsing.

And what do we do to fix this?  After 18 months of fighting change we reinstate people with the failed ideas that got us here in the first place.  Am I right or am I wrong?

 

Topic Two:  Vintage Commercials

A sure sign that I am getting old.  I retreated to old television commercials for a feeling of nostalgic relief.  The interesting thing about my nostalgic relief is I feel most satisfied by commercials that precede my experience!  Who gets that feeling?  An old 1950s Chesterfield commercial has a special resonance even if I wasn’t there to experience it.  The same with old European films.  (They had a great sense of style back then, by the way.)

I tend to disagree with the argument that the 50s, 60s, and 70s were a naive and idealized era.  It strikes me as very different.  There was a lot of worry, paranoia, and uncertainty.  But I believe there was a legitimate reason for optimism.  The economy was, after all, humming along.  Quality of life in real terms was improving.  And I think you see all of that in these commercials.  What we see as corny is more like adolescent awkwardness.  It is real.  There’s something else that is real in this era, too, that I think we have lost entirely:  Patience, and to a certain extent tolerance.

 The 50s ,60s, and 70s straddled two eras.  Economic freedom was leading to social freedom on an unprecedented scale, but there were the old divisions of race, class, eduction, and even region pulling on those freedoms.  The emerging geopolitical and global economic reality that we take for granted today was pulling — or maybe pushing — on these new freedoms, too.  I believe one had to be very patient to move along optimistically with all the new opportunities that were confronting limits imposed by fear, paranoia, racism, classism, and all the other uncertainties you want to uncover in those decades. 

Today we have lost that sense of patience.  If things are not right, it is worthy of screaming and name-calling.  We have lost what class we did have.  (Have you watched television recently?  Political rallies?  Where are the adults??)  Problems are someone else’s fault and heads are going to roll.

So I go to tolerance.  I believe we are losing our edge in tolerance, too.  We might not have the same degree of racism and sexism as we did 50 years ago — it is less institutionalized — but we are scapegoating race and gender again.  We have a blatantly racists element in conservative politics today and certainly tacit racism even in the mainstream GOP entertainment industry with guys like Beck and Limbaugh.  

But more importantly we have intolerance of a different sort:  Intolerance of ideological diversity.  This is a country divided, not necessarily by race, gender, and class, but by different qualities that I am not sure how to define.  My hunch tells me it is a moral divide.  (cf. George Lakoff, especially Moral Politics and Don’t Think of an Elephant.)  This divide seems to be growing wider and more dangerous.

Watching old commercials you can forget about these problems rising again.  Or you can watch them and realize that the idealized era of the 50s, 60s, and 70s had issues of its own, but functioned nonetheless.  You can watch Fred and Barney sell Winston cigarettes and scoff or you can think about what that era did right versus what this era is doing wrong.

Topic Three:  Conclusion

I read advice on a “how to blog” site that said a post should never go over 500 words.  I just surpassed 1100.  I can only hope I picked a bad “how to” to read.

Related Articles

• Jonathan Bloom: Be Thankful, Not Wasteful (huffingtonpost.com)