#paleoliberals

[avanneman]

Outrageous rage? Democrats v. Schultz

The possible independent candidacy for president of Starbucks coffee high muckety-muck/billionaire Howard Schultz has Democrats fuming like a vente on a January morning in Chicago, while Republicans snicker. What’s the matter, liberals? Don’t you believe in democracy?

Well, yeah, we do, but we also believe in winning. Besides the which, rage is all the rage these days, and has been for some time. The Tea Party was nothing but “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more” for white folks, culminating in that gift that keeps on giving, Donald Trump, and now Democrats have got that rage thing going too, and, anyway, it’s a lot safer to “rage” at old white guy billionaires than feckless teen-agers, even if they do have southern accents and wear Donald Trump hats.

But what’s the deal with Howie, after all? Is he a fit target for hate? Well, I try not to do hate in politics. I don’t think it works, and I don’t think it’s healthy. But I’m way not a fan of Howie either.

Jonathan Chait, over at New York, has written ¾ of my article for me, so if you believe in, well, honor, you might as well skip the rest of this and go read Johnnie, but if not, I can say this:

Howard’s critique of the “new wave” of Bernieites, Lizzieites, and Alexandriaites is about 90% on point, but that 10% ain't chump change. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ever learns to add, she’ll be dangerous, but right now, not so much. Still, she’s expanded the horizon, dared to say, and succeeded in making it acceptable, that taxes on “the rich” should be raised rather than lowered, which is definitely a good thing. And, more generally, there’s no question that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were far too obsequious to, and generally absorbed by, the billionaire boys and girls club. If Hillary Clinton hadn’t been so greedy for those big Goldman Sachs bucks, which were totally irrelevant to her needs—she needed the money to buy baby shoes for her granddaughter?—Bernie Sanders would have had much less traction running against her, would not have energized the long-dormant paleolib wing of the Democratic Party, allowing even a deeply flawed Hillary to lead a united (united, but not terribly happy about it) Democratic Party to victory in 2016. But Hillary somehow just “couldn’t” keep her hands off all that easy long green, and the paleos were invigorated, and (in their own minds, at least), they won BIG in November, and they ain’t taking no neoliberal shit no more.

So that’s the ideological side of the story. And, anyway, as neoliberals go, Howie (remember him?) is pretty awful. In general, Howie is a “Democrat” only because he lives on the West Coast. If he were east of the Hudson, he’d be that quasi-extinct species, the Rockefeller Republican, who these days can be defined as people who are as rich as Rockefeller, if not more so. Howie’s right that “fuck the rich” is not a viable economic policy, but “cutting entitlements on the basis of what’s going to happen 20 years from now” is not a viable political one. Lord Melbourne (you remember him, don't you?) supposedly said “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Well, I don’t believe that, but I do believe that when it isn’t necessary to change, it’s impossible to change.1

What’s really irritating for us Democrats (us sensible Democrats) is the obvious possibility that an independent Schultz candidacy could pull anti-Trump centrists away from the Democratic candidate, whoever she may be, particularly because it will be “unlikely” that any Democrat will be able to win the nomination without endorsing “Medicare for All,” which most Americans do not want—what they want is the subsidized health insurance they’re already getting through their employer.

What’s frightening about Howie is that he sounds very much like a man on a mission. Here is what he said at a recent interview: “Can you imagine what a powerful signal it would send to the Congress and the country if, for the first time since George Washington, an independent person could be elected president.”

To a skeptic/cynic like me, this sounds very much like a man who thinks, not that he could be this country’s second George Washington, but that he should be this country’s second George Washington, and that’s a very bad way to think. Both Schultz’s political thinking—that 40% of the voters in this country are “Independents”—and his “policy” thinking—“We just get a bunch of smart people in a room and we lick this thing”2—are banal. But his ego is even bigger than his bank account. It’s not an attractive combination.

Afterwords Schultz’s personal story, which you can read online for free via the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon for his autobiography, is touching. He grew up in a poor, unhappy, dysfunctional Jewish family in a housing project in New York, his passive mother and father dominated by his grasping “Nana”, a penny-pinching monster straight out of Balzac or Dostoyevsky. But he quickly left all that behind.

Even at the height of the Tea Party frenzy over “cutting spending”, which was much more about cutting off Barack Obama’s balls than about the budget—because he had cut Medicare—Congress lacked the courage to make any decisions about cutting spending. The “sequestration” process—which actually did limit spending—was a “placeholder” for decisions to come, decisions that Congress was afraid to make and never made. ↩︎

And that’s all he has. Despite the fact that he obviously thinks of himself as brilliant, he has no substantial policy ideas at all—just that people “like him” should be in charge. ↩︎

[antoine-roquentin]

From the first, Keynesianism was defined in opposition to an ‘old’ or ‘paleo’ liberalism anchored in individual rights organised primarily around property. From that followed a dogmatic insistence on the freedom to transact on markets, which in turn were to be protected against politics and regulation. The liberty of trade was established as something akin to a religion, with Adam Smith and the classical economists as its prophets. In Keynes’s view, such dogmatism, and the rigidity it fostered, were the opposite of what was needed to secure a progressive liberal order.

From today’s standpoint, Keynesianism must also be contrasted with the politics and economics of the market revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, what’s known as neoliberalism. Terminologically speaking, it doesn’t help that Keynes himself would have been quite happy to be described as a ‘new liberal’. In the 1930s and 1940s he engaged in contentious but often friendly exchanges with future luminaries of neoliberalism including Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek. Even on the kindest interpretation, as Keynes saw it, their effort to give new foundations to the market order was a kind of nostalgia, bound to fail in practice. In reality, neoliberalism was more often dishonest, proclaiming its absolute adherence to the rule of the market, only to fall back on massive state intervention. The bank bailouts of 2008 were a case in point. Under modern conditions neoliberalism is, de facto, an anti-democratic politics, which resolves the tension between capitalism and democracy either by limiting the range of democratic discretion or by interfering directly in the democratic process.

Keynes’s purpose, by contrast, was to develop a liberalism that wasn’t retrograde, or held in bad faith or anti-democratic, but squarely faced the problem of making capitalism and democracy work together. One way forward was to widen the scope of politics. Keynes, a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group, was a broad-minded cultural modernist. Among the things he thought a 20th-century liberalism should embrace were drugs, birth control and sexual liberation. But in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, with class conflict as intense as it had ever been, it was clear that cultural liberalism had to be accompanied by new thinking about the economy. It had to be reconceived: no longer a sacrosanct sphere of private rights, but an object of national government.

Keynes and Keynesianism are so routinely identified with the idea of the big state that it is worth emphasising that Keynesianism is not in general an anti-market politics. To the chagrin of the left, it is not a politics of nationalisation or central planning. Clearly, under the right circumstances markets can accomplish remarkable things. But they do not always function well. And when markets affect the entire economy, like the market for capital or the market for labour, then the consequences when things go wrong are not limited to them, but take the form of systemic, macroeconomic effects. Mass involuntary unemployment was an undeniable reality of interwar Britain. What frustrated Keynes was that the economics of his teachers at Cambridge at the turn of the century had so little to say about it. ‘Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task,’ he said, ‘if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.’ Economics must address the storm as well as the calm: it must account both for full employment and for chronic and persistent unemployment, the norm and the exception. That was what made The General Theory a general theory. It did not take as read the conditions that made for full employment. It insisted on the need to explain them.

In economic terms this involved shifting the focus of analysis away from individual markets towards the circular flow of aggregate demand, production and national income. In political terms it involved undoing assumptions that had become entrenched in the 19th century concerning the proper boundaries between political and civil society, government and the economy. For Keynes, these distinctions were not inevitable. Indeed there was good reason to think that the market economy had an inbuilt tendency to generate mass unemployment, and that under democratic conditions this called the separation of politics and economics into question. Worse, the effort to uphold the old boundaries in the face of economic pressures distorted public discourse and, since it was doomed to failure, risked creating the conditions for revolution. Keynes, as Mann insists, had some sympathy for the advocates of radical change – on occasion he would refer to himself as a Bolshevik – but he was also steeped in the Burkean critique of the French Revolution, which insisted that, however compelling the case for it, revolution must ultimately lead to disaster. The challenge was to steer a course between conservative regression and doomed efforts at revolutionary overthrow.

What terrifies both paleoliberals and neoliberals about Keynesianism is the slippery slope. Once the need for intervention was granted, where did one stop? Keynes, as a true liberal, understood that fear. One tempting solution was to transfer decision-making to a technocratic elite; economics would have achieved its true calling, he joked, if it achieved the status of dentistry. But it would be wrong to see Keynesianism as technocracy pure and simple. As Mann says, the point wasn’t, as is ‘commonly said of bureaucratisation or so-called managerial capitalism … to neutralise politics, in the interests of an apolitical society stripped of debate and public life’. Keynesians in fact take a sunnier view. Their ideal is that capitalism and democracy should function together without endangering each other. One way of putting the Keynesian question is to ask how much political intervention in the economy is necessary to build a platform of prosperity stable enough to support democratic politics. The answer lies in what Mann calls ‘Machiavellian’ tactics, in which the boundaries of the political are treated as malleable. The art of modern government does not consist in drawing up everlasting constitutions that permanently demarcate the line between the political and the unpolitical, but in continuously defining and redefining what does and does not need to be governed. A classic instance is Keynes’s argument that if wages are no longer perfectly flexible because of the power of trade unions, and if breaking the trade unions amounts to open class war, then the most convenient means of adjusting real wages to achieve higher employment, and the means least likely to endanger democracy, may be to act indirectly by way of a modest increase in inflation, which reduces the real cost to employers of hiring more labour. Conversely, fixing an exchange rate at an uncompetitive level is dangerous not only because it hampers exports, but because it puts huge pressure on the political system to force through wage cuts.

The situational and tactical awareness in Keynesianism expresses itself in a pragmatic approach to time, which gives Mann’s book its title. Keynesianism doesn’t abandon the progressive worldview of Whiggish liberalism; it doesn’t deny that many of the predictions of classical economics may come good in the long run, under ideal conditions, once the various forces have had time to work themselves out. But it does deny that these verities translate into simple rules for action in the present. In the long run the basic tendencies of market equilibrium may well show themselves, but ‘in the long run we are all dead.’ As Mann puts it, it is not in the ‘long run’ or even the ‘medium term’, but in the ‘short run’, ‘the infinite moments of deferral in between, that the problem of maintaining “civilisation” must be undertaken’. It is here that the pressures of necessity make themselves felt. And it isn’t by accident that ‘when liberal government comes face to face with necessity, it “goes Keynesian”’; in other words it ‘acknowledges uncertainty and disarticulation, recognises imperfection and indeterminacy, and turns away from the long run to the immediacy of the moment’. The crisis of 2008 was a classic demonstration of this. What central bankers like Bernanke were asking politicians to do in September and October 2008 had been unthinkable only weeks before.

In the end, of course, short runs add up to the long run. To embrace Keynesianism fully would mean abandoning oneself to the flux, without any long-term goal. It would make policy highly unpredictable. The search for ‘credibility’ in economic policy, which has been of paramount concern in the neoliberal era, has been an unceasing battle against governmental discretion. That battle is worth fighting, the argument goes, because trying to govern the economy without having established the general conviction that one is following some fixed principle tends to encourage opportunistic behaviour in the economy itself. The economic deterioration in the 1970s could be understood in these terms, as trade unions and employers contended to protect themselves against inflation, pressuring the government to raise spending, which further increased inflation.

So the ad hocracy of Keynesianism is in constant oscillation with more conservative and constrained models of government. One of Keynes’s contemporaries, the Polish Marxist Michał Kalecki, perceived the origin of this cycle in the contradictory interests of capitalism itself. In a crisis, business interests will not resist even massive interventions, provided they serve to maintain economic activity. But fundamentally they have no interest in seeing wages and costs rise, so when the crisis is over they rediscover their commitment to discipline and rigour. Keynesianism is thus condemned to exist for ever in the mode of stop-and-go. This bears on its intellectual history too. There is no unbroken continuity of Keynesian thought, even if as Mann shows in a brilliant series of cameos, despite their intellectual distance from Keynes himself, modern day economists of a reformist disposition, such as Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz, nonetheless reprise the sensibility typical of Keynesianism.

Keynes was the paradigm, but was he the first Keynesian? Mann’s answer is bold. If Keynesianism is a constructive liberal response to revolution, a response that seeks to reorganise the social, political and economic order so as to address the tensions revealed but not resolved by violent upheaval, then the first thinkers of this type emerged in the wake of the French Revolution, and their godfather is Hegel.

Both Hegel and Keynes lived in the wake of revolution. Both of them, caught up enthusiastically in the drama of world history, rejected the assumption that political and economic order could be derived from natural foundations. Hegel didn’t believe that order would emerge spontaneously from society. His remark to his students in the 1820s that one should beware of assuming that ‘things will adjust, they will take care of themselves’ could come straight from Keynes. As devotees of Hobbes, both Hegel and Keynes agreed that providing order was the ‘political function of the state as the sole … legitimate universal institution’. And it was up to civil servants to do the job. What tools could they draw on? The law, certainly, but also the new social sciences, above all political economy. Economics, as Hegel recognised, was ‘one of the sciences which have arisen out of the conditions of the modern world’. It had ‘the task of explaining mass relationships and mass movements in their complexity and their qualitative and quantitative character’. For Hegel, as Mann puts it, ‘political economy is how the modern state thinks.’

The alignment of Keynes and Hegel isn’t merely a historical claim highlighting particular parallels. The line Mann draws from Hegel to Keynes, and from there to the Keynesians of the present day, marks a boundary within liberal modernity. Keynesian political thought, like Hegel’s, is impelled by an apprehension of the deep tensions within modernity, a highly dynamic socio-economic system that perpetually produces poverty and crises that it cannot overcome, but which it contains by means of political ordering and reordering. Mann argues that we should read Keynes today as Marx read Hegel, as someone who was bent on maintaining the socio-political order, but whose thinking carved at the joints of that order. He then goes a step further. Hegel was ‘the first to fully elaborate a Keynesian reason, the reluctantly radical but immanent critique of liberalism that ultimately found its fullest and … most powerful historical realisation in The General Theory’. Hegel, in other words, was a Keynesian. ‘The effort to put Keynes (or Hegel) in his proper historical “place” – which would obviously rule out the idea that Hegel was a Keynesian – is a holdover from an age commanded by progress.’ In fact the essential similarity of the political problem addressed by the two suggests that talk of progress is illusory. Neither of them could find a way out of the impasse of a radical reformism that refuses the possibility of genuine revolution. It is an impasse in which we have been caught, according to Mann, since the conservative backlash against the French Revolution in the Thermidor of 1794.

[riverofspirits]

I am certainly no “expert”. Quite a piker actually, so by all means expect many technical mistakes here. I hear a lot of people talking about “The New World Order”, but I don’t think they really understand what that means.  Beyond dystopia, what is it exactly?   The NWO is a global economics plan.  It seeks to make the entire resources of the globe act as one economic system.  If you’ve studied economics even a little bit you know what that means.  Everything is considered on a cost-effective, more “efficient”, and margin basis.  EVERYTHING.  “Liberalism” has become obsolete.  What is the TRUE BENEFIT of “humanitarianism” compared to cost?  Why so much spent on “overhead” as opposed to “delivered results”?  The NWO takes little to no account of the principles of “fairness” and “justice”.  It is completely “rational” and unfeeling.  Many people since at least the early-mid 70s (much earlier in the cases of racism against black and indigenous people) and legions since have suffered greatly.  Many lives have been lost.  Many dreams have been squandered.  Humanitarian considerations are minimal. The true crime of Globalism is that it has been in process for 40 years without the consent of the people.  OR the manufactured consent, which is arguably worse.  YES it brings the wealth to the TOP of the pyramid (which of course cannot sustain itself - and now wants to blast-off to Mars) and leaves the comparative scraps for the rest.  Is it really “right” to try to convince people that they can “make it” on only “hard work and merit” anymore?  It may keep people “reaching”, but if those opportunities you seek have been literally removed from your society, you are simply chasing an empty dream and many will have collected thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands from you on your unhappy journey.  This is by design.  Someone who knows much more than I do would have to explain it. Political parties, like celebrities, push PR for their own collective egomaniacal means.  I was raised a “Roosevelt democrat”,  And, like many democrats I was asleep when Bill Clinton turned the Party forever away from the Roosevelt ideals and more toward a moderate republican stratagem, while the republicans continued to turn to venture into authoritarian territory.  There were now the “paleoliberals” and the “neoliberals”, ushered in by the Clintons.  The neocons had already been ushered in by Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.  You may have noticed that this is when America really started to really  “change”.  This is when social services started seeing real cuts, this is when Congressional bills started taking on names that literally mean the opposite of what they are meant to DO, this is when “drown the beast” became a political strategy that in no way was meant to benefit “the People”.   Part of this political PR is demonizing, and frankly even dehumanizing those considered “inconvenient” to it.  When I was a child in the 1960s We never disrespected “welfare mothers” that I remember.    I never heard such disparaging remarks about the handicapped.  No one ever talked about it.  And I eavesdropped on MANY adult conversations.  But most importantly, democrats and republicans would have lively discussions, but not hateful ones.  The general rule I grew up with was “never discuss politics and religion”.  Maybe what we are experiencing now is just the vomitous angst of being “pent up” so long.  Who knows? This video will show that there is PLENTY of support on both sides of the aisle for the “NWO”.  The globalists lie on both sides of the line.  And the only ones who benefit from it are “them”.  And when I say “them”, I mean BOTH democrats, the neoliberals (not the roosevelt democrats, like the Bernie supporters.  Bernie is simply a roosevelt democrat) AND the neocons.  These people benefit when they keep the masses at war with themselves.  Go to your nearest message board for all the “proof” you need. Someone asked me once to explain the difference.  My answer:  “The neocons are the ones who blow shit up.  The neoliberals are the ones who come in and rebuild less at thrice the price”. They work TOGETHER.  They truly are the wings to ONE bird.  The “heart” of this bird used to lie in London and New York.  The financial sector.  Now the financial system is a diffuse structure with hubs around the world (Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow, etc).   There’s tons and tons of information out there on the topic, but you MUST stay focused on the ECONOMICS.  NOT the conspiracy theories, the gun nuts, the survivalist,  ones trying for their own purposes to con you out of a buck.  Follow the ECONOMICS.  Understand that the economics (which I personally consider a false “science”, or perhaps more accurately, the “science of greed”) IS the problem.  Understand it is “rational” (in an irrational way).  THAT is “why” the politicians seem so “cold” and “uncaring”.  Because they are literally following��“the plan” (whatever that is). In the current world we live in, make NO mistake about it.  ECONOMICS DRIVES EVERYTHING.  EVERYTHING.  END OF. I just thought of something.  Adam Curtis has made some extremely good “explanatory documentaries” (as I call them) on YouTube.  Starting with “Century of the Self” Which I will post.  In fact, I may post several because they carry such important information.  “Hypernormalisation” is good.  He may have also done one called “The manufacturing of consent.”  I love his ability to break it down in an interesting way using the actual news stories (or whatever) as proof of his argument.  And I am college educated and didn’t “all” of my information from Adam Curtis.  Just saying! 😂😂😂 And to my “MM bloggers” (if you’ve gotten this far😂), the reason why I started following you all (outside of the obvious) is because this is ALL CONNECTED. The “Hollywood arm” of the monster is the propaganda arm to keep the people happy, busy, fighting, and anesthetized.   22 May 2018

.   

[manolo-ssa]

Em tempos de "moderna teoria monetária" e de retorno de um certo neoliberalismo arqueomonetarista, a @editoratresestrelas acertou na mosca com a publicação deste paralelepípedo escrito em prosa simples e direta pelo antropólogo e anarquista estadunidense David Graeber. São 702 páginas muito bem argumentadas que, se não trazem propriamente nenhuma novidade radical no campo da antropologia, serão muito úteis no campo do direito e da economia: trata-se de um longo "passeio" pela história da humanidade, vista.pela ótica da reciprocidade, da dádiva, do favor, do compromisso, da honra e da dívida. É, portanto, um passeio histórico de fôlego pelos fundamentos morais e éticos destas duas disciplinas -- com os ônus e bônus mais óbvios de uma obra tão generalista. Leitura recomendada para quem acredita no quá-quá-quá paleoliberal de Paulo Guedes e quejandos, ou para os neodesenvolvimentistas que o criticam achando-se o supra-sumo do método histórico-dedutivo. (Na verdade o livro é recomendado a qualquer pessoa interessada nos temas descritos, mas não resisti.) https://www.instagram.com/p/B2P9qmZnaVE/?igshid=1tohoubkfu3u2

[lorajackson]

What Is the Difference Between “Left Wing” and “Right Wing”?

Political scientists’ general consensus is that “left wing” includes liberals, progressives, socialists and communists, and the “right wing” includes conservatives, traditionalists, reactionaries and fascists. The spectrum also includes moderate, center-right, center-left, far-right and far-left politics.

History of the Left-Right Political Spectrum

The left-right political spectrum was born during the French Revolution of 1789. In the French National Assembly, supporters of the king sat on the president’s right, and supporters of the revolution sat on his left. In 1791, the National Assembly was replaced by the Legislative Assembly, and the seating arrangement continued ‰ÛÓ this time with moderates occupying the center seats. By the early 20th century, the terms left and right were associated with specific political ideologies.

The Left and Right Wing in the United States

In the United States, the Democratic Party is generally identified as being on the left, and the Republican Party is generally identified as being on the right. The two parties disagree on a number of topics, which include abortion, gun control and the death penalty. While the liberal thought supports abortion, government interference with the right to bear arms and oppose the death penalty, the republican ideologies support the opposite.

American liberalism supports government regulations in order to provide support for the disadvantaged, in order to promote social and economic equality. On the other hand, American conservatism uses government influence in order to uphold certain morals, often cited from religious sources. Unlike American liberalism, it does not promote government regulations in economic or business matters.

Additional Ideologies in the Left-Right spectrum

Generally speaking, left-wing politics support social equality. In addition to liberalism, other examples of left-wing or left-leaning ideologies include Stalinism, Maoism, socialism, communism, progressivism, anarcho-communism and social liberalism.

Conservatism is one of the most well-known of right-wing and right-leaning ideologies. Other examples include fascism, Nazism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, libertarianism, paleoliberalism and anarcho-capitalism.

Extreme Left-Wing Ideologies

One of the more extreme examples of left-wing ideologies is communism. Communism calls for the end of capitalism and private ownership of any belongings. The idea is that the government provides all of one’s needs, and in turn, the individual contributes whatever they can to society. In practice, communist countries are viewed as oppressive by democratic countries.

Extreme Right-Wing Ideologies

Neoconservatism is considered to be one of the more extreme right-wing ideologies. It takes a firm stance against anti-authority media and aligns itself with religious conservatives. Neoconservatives consider the state of the culture of America when discussing politics and their worldview.

Criticisms of the Left-Right Spectrum

The left-right spectrum has been criticized for being too narrow, as it is possible for a member of a political party to hold positions on the opposite side of the spectrum. For example, the pro-life and pro-choice causes are identified with the right and left respectively, but there are pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans. In fact, it’s common for people to hold a set of beliefs and opinions that transcend just one political party. Rather than embrace all aspects of any political affiliation, it’s wise to come to one’s own conclusions to find one’s place in the left-right political spectrum. Understanding one’s position on political matters is crucial when it’s time to vote, both locally and nationally.

Source

The post What Is the Difference Between “Left Wing” and “Right Wing”? appeared first on Land of Fathers.

What Is the Difference Between “Left Wing” and “Right Wing”? published first on http://landofourfathers.com/

[skluug]

paleoliberal

[sproutfavorites]

Wait, you mean the police, who couldn’t solve the case for decades, and who overlooked evidence they had pointing to one of their own, now claim the increased interest in the case due to citizen investigators like Michelle McNamara had no effect on the outcome? I’m shocked!

— Paleoliberal (@markeightyeight) April 26, 2018

[avanneman]

Yo, Paleoliberals! You can’t go home again! (not really)

David Ignatius reports that Charles Peters, long-time editor of the Washington Monthly and, not incidentally, one-time mentor/editor to David, has the solution to the Democrats’ electoral woes, presented in his new book We Do Our Part.

In writing the book, Charlie gets in line behind paleolibs Thomas “What's the Matter with Kansas?” Frank and Michael “Up From Conservatism” Lind, not to mention Robert Reich and a host of others, about whom I am too lazy to be funny. The gist of all these books is that “we” need to go back to the good old days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman lunch-bucket liberalism when the Democrats stood up for the little guy and won all the elections, instead of all this Chablis-sippin’ bicoastal milquetoast1 bullshit that doesn’t help anyone with less than five mil in his portfolio.

Well, I agree with about 40% of their rap, but since I live two blocks from Dupont Circle and listen to opera, when I’m not watching it, I’m not crazy about their tone. Still, they make some good points. I’ll get to those later, however, since it’s more important to talk about the ways in which we differ.

My basic point is that we can’t go back to the good old days and (point two, actually) we shouldn’t want to. The New Deal liberalism that all these dudes love so much what “Recovering Republican” Chris Ladd has shrewdly labeled “white socialism”. The original Social Security Act did not apply to farm workers (i.e., share croppers and others) or servants, cleverly excluding the majority of the black population. Eligibility for unemployment insurance was governed by state law, ensuring that lazy good for nothings (like, you know, black people) would be kept off the rolls. Employer-provided health insurance, which came in during World War II and was officially recognized as a non-taxable benefit in the early 1950s, was effectively restricted to white-collar (that is to say, white) employees and workers in union shops, found only in the North. Farm subsidies poured cash into the pockets of land owners, who were almost all white as well.

The GI Bill provided extensive benefits to veterans, but blacks were largely left out, for a variety of reasons. Thanks to substandard educational opportunities, and non-existent health care, many blacks could not meet minimum standards for service. In addition, blacks were more than three times as likely as whites to receive a “not honorable” discharge, disqualifying them from any benefits.

Blacks were defenseless against this discrimination both because of their numbers (about 15% of the population) and because most of them lived in the South, where they couldn’t vote. As blacks began to move north their economic and political situation improved, but as Democrats moved to expand “white socialism” to include everyone, the New Deal coalition cracked. Peters, Frank, Lind, et al. simply won’t recognize that the white working class stopped voting reliably Democratic when the Democratic Party leadership made clear its intention to make blacks full participants in the social programs once reserved informally but effectively for whites. The “Tea Party” was very largely born as a reaction to passage of the Affordable Care Act, which effectively turned “white socialism” into “socialism”.

Peters and the rest of the paleolibs gloss over the "white only" aspect of the New Deal reforms because what they remember is not the thirties but the fifties and sixties, when the post-war boom did float all boats, although, even then, white boats rose faster than black ones. The paleolibs believe we can go back to the way we were in a sheer act of will, despite the fact that none of the "objective factors", to sound a bit Marxist, that led to the postwar boom exist today. After WWII, the U.S. had been starved for investment in such basic areas as housing for a good fifteen years. Consumers had spent the war buying savings bonds, and now they were ready to spend. The population was growing rapidly, and so was the education level. Above all else, the United States had the only "advanced" economy in the world--American goods were the best, and the cheapest, that you could buy.

It didn’t matter that the U.S. economy was heavily cartelized. Even though there was little real competition, U.S. goods were the best, and the cheapest in the world. It didn't matter, very much, that they could have been appreciably better, and cheaper. The dominant companies, like U.S. Steel, General Motors, Boeing, etc. could enjoy monopoly profits, and pay monopoly wages to their unionized workers, and still provide their customers with unbeatable "bargains".

Those happy days are gone forever. It's true that the U.S. infrastructure could stand some sprucing up, but there's nothing like the underinvestment that once existed. The population isn't growing the way it did after WWII, and it probably never will. Educational attainment in the U.S. soared through the seventies, but has plateaued ever since. Most of all, of course, we are no longer a unique economy. Other nations have learned all our tricks. We can't change monopoly prices anymore, because we aren't a monopoly.

The paleolibs don't want to hear this. They aren't interested in economics. Their model of the economy is the "Walter Reuther" model. Reuther was the long-time head of the United Auto Workers. His model was simple: the bosses have an infinite amount of money. No matter how high wages and benefits go, they can always go higher.

According to Ignatius (remember him?), Charlie Peters (remember him?) praises, then faults, Bill Clinton for talking the talk in his 1992 campaign, but then not walking the walk once elected. That’s because in 1992 Bill Clinton ran more or less on a platform of white socialism, promising to “fight for the people who work hard and play by the rules” (that is to say, not lazy blacks), to “end welfare as we know it in two years” (time to go to work, lazy black people!), along with a middle-class tax cut (so the government will stop giving your money to lazy black people).

I agree with Peters’ complaint that Clinton effectively “went Hollywood” when virtually his first act after taking office was to attempt to integrate homosexuals into the military.2 But, as everyone knows, the real catastrophe was the health care bill. Yes, Hillary’s incompetence was a dead weight, but the real killer was the simple fact that a great many working-class whites don’t think health care should be a right. It should, somehow, be “earned”. And they don’t want their “earned” benefits reduced or taxed to pay for the benefits of lazy black people.

The paleolibs simply can’t accept the fact that many working class whites are racist (racist and now xenophobic). They continually moan that white voters are being “tricked” by Republicans when they aren’t being offended by the politically correct shenanigans of the left. Well, there’s something to the latter, but working class whites aren’t being tricked when they vote for Republicans who talk about how much they hate big government. They know that “big government” is code for welfare and foreign aid, not for “white socialism”. Ronald Reagan, who never got tired of telling that hilarious “joke” “The scariest sentence in the English language is ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you’” is the same Ronald Reagan who “saved” both Social Security and Medicare (programs that he loathed) and also boasted in 1986 that his administration had given more money to farmers than all previous administrations combined!3

The paleolibs don’t know why the Democrats keep losing and they don’t know how the Democrats can start winning. Where do we agree? We agree that economic inequality in the U.S. is growing, that this is a bad thing, and that “markets”, of which I am much fonder than they, can’t solve the problem all by themselves. So what can be done, and, more to the point, what should be done?

First of all, markets can help. Specifically, liberals in enclaves like New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, et al. should lower the drawbridges and drain the moats. Forget about “smart growth” and go in for “real growth”. Get rid of rent control, height restrictions, and all (or most) of the restrictions that discourage new housing construction. Just let it happen, without planning!

Yes, you read that right. Stop being like the Old Man of Sung, who used to pull on his rice plants to make them grow faster, and just let construction happen. The cost of living will drop, and employment and wages will rise. Yes, your condo/exquisite townhouse will lose value, and you may even lose your view as well (I have a view and I would hate to lose it, but, yes, I would make the sacrifice). The heart-felt cry “That’s why I moved here in the first place!” (so don’t change anything) is not the clincher that most people take it to be. According to a paper by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, reducing geezer-friendly restrictions on housing in New York, San Francisco, and San Jose alone would boost the U.S. Gross Domestic Product by 9.5%.

Beyond that (and a few other things), we should address economic inequality directly through the earned income tax credit, discussed by Cass Sunstein here. The EITC could be greatly expanded and, as Cass explains, simplified as well. Unlike food stamps and other economic distribution programs, the EITC is both invisible and portable.

Sadly, to go back to my less than modest proposal for relatively unrestricted housing development in prosperous urban areas, I think it’s very unlikely that anal-retentive condo-canyon liberals will wise up to the fact “letting go” is not seldom the truest wisdom when it comes to economic development. Their hatred of the profit motive constantly leads them to cut off their nose to spite their face. But at least my dream would work. Which is more than I can say for the paleolibs.

“Milquetoast” as an epithet was fading even when I was a kid. “Casper Milquetoast” was a once very famous newspaper cartoon, drawn by H. T. Webster. Mr. Milquetoast, as you have no doubt gathered, was a fastidious sissy. The strip ended in 1953, and Word can still spell his name. Impressive! ↩︎

Actually, I don’t think Clinton “effectively” went Hollywood. I think he literally went Hollywood. I think he tried to bring homosexuals into the military because Barbra Streisand asked him to. ↩︎

Ronnie learned that price supports are sacred the hard way. In the 1976 Iowa Caucus he was holding forth on the merits of the free market when the assembled farmers asked his position on “parity” (i.e., price supports). “You don’t understand,” Reagan told them. “I want to give you the benefits of the free market.” “We don’t give a damn about the free market!” the farmers told him. “Where do you stand on parity?” “Well, I don’t know what ‘parity’ means,” lied Ronald Reagan the coward. ↩︎