Month: February 2010

Realistically what I think is going to happen is that almost no significant legislation of any kind will pass until 2017, by which point the GOP will [likely] control both the White House and the Senate and immediately eliminate the filibuster via the “nuclear” approach [meaning 50 Senators vote in favor of an opinion on the part of the President of the Senate that the super-majority is unconstitutional; thus the filibuster ceases to be]. Republicans, to their credit, tend to prioritize their vision of the national interests over issues of process and ego. Democrats, by contrast, seem to have mostly gotten into politics in order to bolster their own sense of self-righteousness and aren’t especially concerned with whether or not their conduct in office is efficacious.

Matt Yglesias, positively bubbling over with optimism for the country. If the filibuster goes in my lifetime, I think this is exactly how it will transpire, though: as the first action of a Republican controlled Senate serving a Republican President.
Yglesias is also 100% right that the credible threat of filibuster reform is more potent and much more likely to end in real reform than the actuality of that process (meaning: pushing a bill to end it with everyone knowing 67 votes aren’t out there). Democrats can never get these concepts through their heads, though. So forget about it.

Why We Fail

Jonathan Chait looks over Paul Ryan’s economic proposals, notes their direct and admitted lineage to the pop-philosophy of Ayn Rand, and the worshipful treatment it receives at the hands of many in the right, including Ryan himself. He furthermore folds in the lunatic ravings of Jonah Goldberg (author of Liberal Fascism, which makes the stunning, transitive “discovery” that American liberals like social programs, the Nazi party was made up of National Socialists, thus American liberals are Nazis) and opines:

They’re written by people who don’t understand liberalism and the left at all, and are thus unable to present liberal ideas in terms remotely recognizable to liberals themselves. The specific lack of understanding lies in an inability to grasp the enormous differences between American liberalism and socialism or communism, seeing them as variants on the same basic theme.

[…]

The result is a tendency to see even modest efforts to sand off the roughest edges of capitalism in order to make free markets work for all Americans as the opening salvo of a vast and endless assault upon the market system.

Um, no. We are not talking about any lack of understanding here, unless you count “willful lack of understanding used towards cynical goals” as falling under that rubric. If anything, they understand liberalism all too well. The work of Jonah Goldberg et al. is entirely predicated on making fantastical statements with little or no logical underpinning in the cynical hopes of selling a few books to the choir. Period. No different from Ann Coulter or, for that matter, Glenn Beck, though his brand of hucksterism veers more towards that of a TV preacher hawking prayer rags than actual “political thought” insomuch as you can call the Goldberg-style spew “thought.”
Their weapon is precisely in understanding that the Left will dutifully take these ideas up, just as Chait does here, as though they are seriously offered, based on serious thought, are entirely legitimate points of view, and thus worthy of serious discussions and/or use as the basis of policy negotiations going forward. By doing so, the Left signals that, far from being abject lunacy, these are the points of discussion and arguments for the political class, and thus are the goalposts ever moved rightward.

It’s the logical fallacy of “when did you stop beating your wife?” writ large, and the right uses it relentlessly and with disheartening effectiveness. Say: “Well, the Democrat isn’t a Nazi because…” and you’ve already lost, no matter how the thought ends; you’ve implicitly agreed that there is some reason to make a Democrat/Nazi connection and/but here are the rational arguments against such a thesis. This is horseshit. Induce laughter at the mere idea, the immense foolhardiness of it all, and you’ve won. Same idea goes for Palin, and all the rest of this anti-intellectual crowd. They must find themselves automatically marginalized from “Washington Society” until such time as something rational emerges from their festering maw. More than anything, they crave the attention. That is why it must be removed.

That the progressive or liberal thinkers in this country continue to entertain Goldberg et al. as rational, serious contributors to the dialogue of this country going forward is precisely how you lose. I agree that you can’t just ignore them, but you must never, ever imply that there’s even a grain of truth to what they are saying; they must, therefore, be made objects of derision. Their output is, after all, utter foolishness. You may as well let reports of Bat Boy in the Weekly World News drive Medicaid policy and coverage limits. As Rachel Maddow recently noted:

They are not embarrassed. Charging them with hypocrisy, appealing to their better, more practical, more what’s-best-for-the-country patriotic angels is like trying to teach your dog to drive. It wastes a lot of time, it won’t work, and ultimately the dog comes out of the exercise less embarrassed for failing than you do for trying.

When these folks move to stop efforts to “sand off the roughest edges” they are not moving to compromise. They do not begin with “the best intentions.” They are moving to destroy, utterly, the progressive position and are willing to do so by any means at hand; and, they are not embarrassed. They don’t care how they look in the process, because their treatment thus far has shown that how it looks won’t matter. Not long-term. This is why they never apologize, never compromise, and never even bother to negotiate in good faith. It is because they fear no reprisal of any kind. So there’s no cost to these actions.
You, the progressive, must be prepared to move as ruthlessly. That the left’s first impulse is, inevitably, to find the “serious person” middle-ground is precisely why the country ends up with policies far to the right of the position of most Americans on any given issue. That this policy is then called “centrist” is precisely what is systematically making it harder and harder to even “sand off the roughest edges,” precisely because yesterday’s far-right position is today’s tomorrow’s “sensible, centrist compromise.” And, to add insult to injury, recent history has found Democrats coming to the table already having given away anything resembling a center-left policy; thus, any “compromise” made to push a bill through only results in de facto GOP legislation. Which, of course, they proceed to filibuster anyway.

The Democrats have got to start re-framing everything, every issue, soup to nuts. It won’t come easily, and it won’t be a short term project. Yes, this will also mean doing politically uncomfortable things like prosecuting Bush administration law breakers. But, more to the point at hand, it means screaming out every hour of every day of every week for the next decade or so, relentlessly and unavoidably, the moral, intellectual, and ultimately patriotic bankruptcy of the right. The American people need to be so sick of hearing about this stuff that they want to cry. Then, a few years after that, we’ll find that the polity have quietly and progressively become inoculated to the sort of brazen bullshit routinely peddled today such that they will simply not listen to it anymore, will react negatively and automatically to it, and the various outlets of today’s noise machine will gradually find themselves ignored. Accordingly, the right wing noise machine will cease to exist. Simple demographic shifts in the country will help, but the Left must act as well.
You can see faint instances of this in the last election. Noun/verb/9.11 and several other right-wing memes simply didn’t hold sway over voters anymore; all the while, users of these levers were made to look all the worse as the public finally saw at least some elements of the emperor’s new clothes. Unfortunately, those changes came about organically or accidentally for the most part. The Democrats need to see to it they begin to come about systematically.
This means message discipline. Part of the problem of the W-induced Democratic tidal wave was that it returned the Democrats to control before they had spent sufficient time in the wilderness to hone their message, to feel, deeply, the fierce urgency of now such that, when power came, they acted. Ezra Klein, commenting on Democratic resistance to using reconciliation to finish health insurance reform legislation, notes:

At this point, Democrats have passed health-care reform bills through the two legislative chambers charged with considering them. The president stands ready to sign the legislation. The roadblock is that 41 Republicans have sworn to use a parliamentary maneuver to obstruct any effort to smooth out differences between the bills. It’s pretty clear who’s stepping outside the traditional workings of the process here. Yet Democrats have allowed the other side to make it look like they’re the ones who are bending the rules! It’s completely astonishing.

It’s not astonishing, Ezra, it’s simply how things are done by the Left in D.C. today. Everything, and I mean everything that progressives get up to in this country needs to be aimed at this long term goal: re-framing the tenor of the political discourse in this country. Nothing in the near term matters as much as resetting the frame for political discussion back to where it was pre-Reagan. Nothing. You start with the lowest hanging fruit: jobs, bankers, Wall Street. The GOP literally has no defense to offer in these arenas. Make them pay for it.

Mirandizing terrorists inhibits intelligence collection? Wrong. Charging a terrorist in criminal court is a danger? Hundreds have been convicted that way. Non-torturous methods of interrogation fail? They work better. Call the Obama team pussies and they’ll back down? They’ll smack the tartar off your teeth. The public will rally around Republicans if they just ignorantly yell OMG TERRORISM loud enough? They’ll go to the other guy.

There’s just nothing left. […] [T]he GOP, for the first time in decades, is completely discredited on national security, without any credible spokespeople.

Spencer Ackerman, who’s right about everything except for his implicit assertion that the public understands this in any kind of durable way. Without continual, drumbeat messaging they will soon forget and fall back on the MSM trope that only the GOP can be trusted with Our National Security. It’s just too pervasive a frame, and one that has been repeated so relentlessly, explicitly and implicitly, for decades to the point that, like gravity, it’s just there, and not even noticed when invoked. You can’t and won’t undo that overnight. See: health insurance reform and government takeover of, subhead Death Panels. Democrats just don’t do this idea of “messaging” very well, if at all. I’m seriously not yet convinced they are aware of it as a concept.

1776

We fought the British over a 3 percent tea tax. We might as well bring the British back

–William Temple of Brunswick, Ga., perhaps marginally better known as the fellow appearing at tea-party events dressed in his trademark three-cornered hat.

Indeed, William, why don’t we? The Brits are at least having a truth-commission of sorts that aims to get to the bottom of (but not prosecute those involved in) their complicity in the lie-laden run-up to the Iraq folly. Likewise, the Brits enjoy (and broadly support) their National Health Service, which, I might add, routinely outperforms American healthcare in any outcome metric you might reasonably choose to look at and costs half as much (as a share of GDP) to operate. Conservatives in Britain strongly support NHS. Wouldn’t think of privatizing it. Furthermore and finally, the Brits actually have a functional parliamentary system, as opposed to our functionally parliamentary system in which nothing can get done. In scary, scary Britain, when your party wins an election, you get to set the policy and set about governing. Imagine that. If the public broadly disapproves of your outcomes and prefers the platform of the shadow cabinet, then, hey what do you know, those folks get elected and start governing. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s what we in the Big City call “representative democracy.”

So count me with the Tea Partiers. Let’s ask Big Daddy Britain if we can just come back and all is forgiven.

Connections

A: Many of the tea-party organizers I spoke with at this conference described the event as a critical step in their ascendancy to the status of mainstream political movement. Yet with rare exceptions, such as blogger Breitbart, who was reportedly overheard protesting Farah’s birther propaganda, none of them seems to realize how off-putting the toxic fantasies being spewed from the podium were.

B: Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin’s Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room.
(http://www.newsweek.com/id/233331/output/print)

All during that health care debate, whenever things got impossible you could always say: “What I think they should do is pass the Wyden-Bennett Reform Plan,” and everybody would shut up and slink home to look it up on Google.

It’s a more elegant version of the Bipartisan Study Commission. Which, by the way, the Republicans recently filibustered.

Actually, I think we just need one simple change that will get us back to the good old days when Congress was capable of passing standard legislation and could occasionally summon the will to make large, imperfect fixes of urgent national problems.

Get rid of the Senate filibuster. It wouldn’t make things tidy. It wouldn’t be utopia. The Democrats will miss it next time they’re in the minority. But when people elected a government, it would get to govern again. And probably, it could keep the lights on.

Gail Collins, apparently summoning this material
from some long forgotten font of agreement between us.

Manna

Sweet, sweet research proves what I’ve been shouting about for a while now; this study took a look at what people react to (and email), essentially hoping to quantify why some articles go viral while others just sit there:

People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” […]

“Science kept doing better than we expected,” […] “We anticipated that people would share articles with practical information about health or gadgets, and they did, but they also sent articles about paleontology and cosmology. You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

Wait, wait, wait. I thought the answer to today’s problems in media were to shorten the article, dumb it down, and pack as much advertising (preferably blinking or animated) into the entirely theoretical “above the fold” space while also requiring innumerable “next page” clicks such that any still-sufficiently-interested reader would be so challenged to identify actual content that he or she would drop into a rage-seizure of some kind. Huh. Consider me gobsmacked. They continue:

To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.

A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity.

[…]

More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics. (The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different readers.)

Emphasis added by me to highlight the thing I want most: variably dimensioned articles. Got 15 seconds on the subway and just want the USAToday bullet? Here it is. Need an explainer that goes long on the various competing pieces of the legislation. Here it is. Want 10,000 words on the complete history of this movement in the United States. Here it is. Want a slideshow about the effects of doing/not doing this? Here it is. Want a video depicting those most affected? Here it is.

This sort of thing is not necessarily easy, and it’s certainly not free. But they’re doing a chunk of it already; they just don’t tie it together very well because they universally see themselves as, first and foremost, being in the dead-tree distribution business. The first newsroom with a national imprimatur that successfully enacts this can charge whatever they want. Eventually. The first hit is always, and must always be free. Wonder why the NYT paywall is going to work that way. Fascinating.