Tag: 2012

southpol:

The Third Depression:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

I’d agree with all that Krugman says above (and in the editorial), but take small issue with this part:

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery.

I think the GOP leadership realizes all too well that not enough has been done. They have chosen to use the crisis for short-term political gain. There is no other explanation for the withdrawal of unemployment benefits. None. They just want to maximize pain to the citizens out there that may be inclined to vote come 2010 and, more urgently from the GOP perspective, in the 2012 follow-on when they could well be poised to take power in both branches.

Then, of course, they’ll fix it all with a rigorous program of tax cuts for the wealthy. Which is touched on in the closer:

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Yep.

Hopey Changey

James Fallows positively nails it:

the significance of the vote is moving the United States FROM a system in which people can assume they will have health coverage IF they are old enough (Medicare), poor enough (Medicaid), fortunate enough (working for an employer that offers coverage, or able themselves to bear expenses), or in some other way specially positioned (veterans; elected officials)… TOWARD a system in which people can assume they will have health-care coverage. Period.

-and-

this [set of reforms and all the attendant process arguments] will not seem anywhere near as poisonous seven months from now as it does today. Jobs jobs jobs is what will matter most then.

So very true. If unemployment is at or near 10% in 2012, Obama will not be reelected. Period. If the economy continues to pick up this year, Democratic losses come November will be not-so-bad…not that they’ll be presented that way, of course. Anything short of a 100 Democrat Senate will be treated as an Historic Upset of the “normal order,” which, of course, currently has many Democrats representing historically red districts. But, back to Fallows:

There are countless areas in which America does it one way and everyone else does it another, and I say: I prefer the American way. Our practice on medical coverage is not one of these.

Nancy Pelosi touched on this point last night in her floor speech: that losing the fear of living insurance-free will let a thousand startups bloom. Folks locked into their current jobs simply to maintain a safety net for their kids can now think solely on the basis of how good they think their idea is. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. This is where the much longed-after “new economy” will ultimately come from.

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.

I think, kind of tougher to, um, put our arms around, but allowing America’s spirit to rise again by not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a God fearing nation where we’re not afraid to say, especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, where we’re not afraid to say, you know, we don’t have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again. To have people involved in government who aren’t afraid to go that route, not so afraid of the political correctness that you know – they have to be afraid of what the media said about them if they were to proclaim their alliance on our creator.

Sarah Palin
Judging by this quote she’ll be the next President of these United States.
And The Democrat will have put her there.

No change, same game

Jeff Zeleny runs down some of the bigger bullet-points coming out of the new book by the execrable Mark Halperin and “journalist” John Heilemann. Among them, this little tidbit:

In the days leading up to an interview with ABC News’ Charlie Gibson, aides were worried with Ms. Palin’s grasp of facts. She couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Of course, the real question here, the real fucking point: if you asked her today, could she tell you why North and South Korea are separate nations, what the Federal Reserve “does,” and, most importantly, who planned and executed the attacks on 9/11/01?

Her public comments since the election strongly imply that we already know. This sort of substantive information will not and will never come out in a media forever obsessed with the horse-races of the day. This will inevitably work towards Palin’s biggest asset: her “mish-mash of populism, everywomanism, and paranoia – coupled with a light touch on policy specifics – [that] has proven to be highly prescient in terms of everything that has come thereafter.”

Sad but true: ignorant ciphers like Palin and W. Bush are simply the odds on favorites for nationwide campaigns in this day and age. Anyone with an actual viewpoint, or that attempts to make a nuanced, non-rhyming statement, or dares wear a four-button suit, simply doesn’t have a chance. Not in that environment. Accept this information and begin planning (and messaging) accordingly. Or suffer the consequences.

End of Days

Rick Hertzberg and I agree on three out of four things:

1. The Beck-Limbaugh purification of the Republican Party will continue apace.

Populist nihilism—increasingly the default position within the G.O.P., especially on national level—still has a lot of energy left in it. As the party’s core shrinks (a process that will continue even if its share of the vote increases relative to the Democratic share), the resentful right’s stranglehold will grow stronger.

2. The Republicans will gain seats in next year’s midterm election.

The party holding the White House always loses seats in a new President’s first midterm, the only exception being the special case of 2002, the year of Bush-Rove post-9/11 electoral terrorism.

3. The right, and much of the commentariat, will discover a cause-and-effect relationship between No. 1, above, and No. 2.

They’ll figure it this way: post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Then we diverge. He offers:

4. President Obama will be reëlected.

He’ll be the safe choice. Having been elected on hope, change, and adventure, he’ll be reëlected on reassurance, stability, and … experience.

I think it’s more like:

4. If unemployment is below 10% nationally, Obama may be reelected, depending on opponent. If it’s below 8%, he will win in a landslide regardless of oponent.

It’s really as simple as that.

We’re back in agreement on the bonus Fifth Thing, which is presented more as a prayer:

5. The number of Americans who realize that more of our problems stem from structure (especially the Senate, and most especially the filibuster) than from politicians’ lack of moral fiber will reach the cusp of a tipping point.

Amen.