I enjoy Stephen Bainbridge’s blog, because, like him, I am a big fan of food trucks. I would probably feel the same way about Ann Althouse if I had more enthusiasm for box wine. Bainbridge has been on a big tear lately about how anti-intellectual the teatards are. I was prepared to agree with him, but I found some (and I emphasize some, obviously) of his commenters’ critiques of conservative intellectualism pretty convincing.
Populists are gaining support among the GOP voters because of the spectacular failures that resulted when the policies advocated by conservative elites were implemented. The policies pursued by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress from 2000 to 2006 were those advocated by the leading conservative think tanks and institutions. These include the Iraq war (spreading democracy to transform the Middle East), raising the home ownership levels to 70% by seriously undermining underwriting standards (an “ownership society” solves all social problems), tax cuts pay for themselves in all circumstances (we will grow our way out of the deficit), open borders and amnesty, unrestricted free trade, embracing the notion that the US is a post industrial economy and that we should focus on financial innovation, etc.,
These policies were all championed by leading conservative intellectuals and institutions and pursued by the Bush administration.
Would you intellects care to contribute? Figure it out then. And stand up for crying out loud. Snarky Reason magazines, scholarly journals, reactionary think tanks with no vision, and cynical reactions to populists who have actually accomplished something ain’t gonna get it done.
There’s a temptation to look back at the Bush years and blame it all on “faith-based” thinking from a dim-witted would-be cowboy. But the truth is the Iraq War and the housing bubble were caused by wealthy, educated men who use words like “fungible” and “irrational exuberance” and that the would-be cowboy was a Connecticut blue blood. Yes, the teatards of today are the same people who cheered most loudly for the wars and the deficit spending (and the torture). But none of it was their idea.
Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin aren’t that much more wrong about things than David Brooks and Tucker Carlson are, and at least Joe and Palin don’t wear bow-ties.
Captain Goto
The problem (among about 100,000,000,000,000 others) with Conservative “intellectualism” is that since about 1950 it has been dumbed down (from its originally not-so-robust state) to something roughly corresponding to “if some rich asshole with enough money to promote it likes it, it is by definition ‘intellectual’.”
Someone else with more patience might use better language to say this, but I’m off to lunch.
fasteddie9318
There is no “conservative intellectualism.” There are conservatives who claim to be intellectuals, but, as you say, not a one of them is any brighter than Joe the Dumbfuck Plumber. For FSM’s sake, William Kristol is a leading “conservative intellectual” and he’s never uttered a factually true statement or made a semi-accurate prediction of coming events in his entire life.
Xenos
The whole point of Heritage, AEI, Cato, Olin, Manhattan Institute, Petersen Foundation, etc. is to promote groupthink. To a remarkable degree they have been successful in that aim.
The fact that these pseudo-academic vanity universities have created an establishment of scholars whose political correctness would embarrass the Soviet kommisars is an entirely predictable course of events
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Bainbridge isn’t articulating anything different than Franks covered in “What’s the Matter with Kansas”.
PeakVT
Populists are gaining support among the GOP voters because of the spectacular failures that resulted when the policies advocated by conservative elites were implemented.
This assumes the actual goals of conservatives elites were the ones they advocated for publicly. Instead, the conservative conceptual framework exists to mask the real goal: making the rich richer.
ChrisS
Conservative intellectualism is about stuffing as many half-assed philosophical references into saying that greed is good and fuck everyone else.
jacy
It seems to me that the teatards and the “conservative intellectuals” are all of a piece. Populist candidates are only gaining traction because the teatards have stopped buying what the intellecutals were selling. But make no mistake, they were buying it.
You say “none of it was their idea,” but I think that’s beside the point. They aren’t in the business of ideas, they’re in the business of feelings. The intellectuals made them feel good until the point where they stopped feeling good. Now they’re looking for someone else to make them feel good again.
It’s all a scam in the end, and the only thing that makes the intellectuals different from the populists is that they figured out how to profit from the scam in such spectacular ways.
ChrisS
@PeakVT:
The whole of the conservative propaganda infrastructure exists to mask the real goal: making the rich richer.
And I would add that making government as inefficient as possible except for making the rich richer.
Maude
And perhaps some of those tea party guys just want to know if Palin is wearing undies. I doubt it gets much deeper than that.
It’s easier to say/write junk and not think about anything or heaven forbid, do research.
Linda Featheringill
All of you guys that say that conservative intellectual is an oxymoron might be quite correct.
But . . .
They were sold to the puplic as intellectuals, with all the necessary paperwork and titles and etc. If the rank and file of the Republican Party thought they were intellectuals, then the resulting failures of the last several years might well discourage them from trusting anyone with a lot of education.
And I think that is the writer’s point.
John B.
Palin uses “fungible” a lot when she’s trying to sound all smart and stuff.
Cat
The same people who cheered Bush and “other peoples ideas” are now cheering for the Tea Party and “other peoples ideas”.
The Tea Party isn’t a grass roots movement, its astroturf.
ChrisS
might well discourage them from trusting anyone with a lot of education.
Or that the predominant theme during any election has been government is broken, vote for me to make it work for you. “I know government is broken, I’m the guy that can fix it.”
And if the off-season it’s a bunch of politicians on the airwaves talking about government is broken.
Guess what, the message that gets out is that the government is broken and liberals are going to take your money and give it to minorities, vote for me and I won’t take as much of your money as the liberals will.
Malraux
Well, there’s actually two things going on IMO. First, conservative intellectuals aren’t. They are first and foremost conservative not intellectual. Their intellectualness is judged by how many extra circles they can add to ptolemaic model that is conservative thought, not by how rigorous, explanatory, or predictive their ideas are.
Second, of course populism is on the rise right now. The elites have epically screwed up, crashing much of the world’s economy for the second or third massive bubble in a decade. The rich/poor divide is massive and growing. So of course populism is popular on both sides. What is surprising is that the populists on the right think that they can fix the problem with conservative ideas.
Bob Loblaw
Let’s see…a massively unequal wealth distribution, record corporate profitability, a perpetual state of global war, the unassailable dominance of fossil fuel producers as the lynchpin of the global economy, nonsensical investment taxation rates compared to value-producing activities…which part of the modern “conservative” doctrine has failed again? It seems to me like they’ve gotten 80-90% of everything they could ever ask for and more.
They aren’t idiots. They’re just really successful nihilists and plutocrats.
Jewish Steel
On the cultural side of things I think it’s very important to remember that Bush was a Connecticut Yalie and not the good ol boy Texas BBQ buddy he pretended to be.
By contrast Obama was raised, if not in a state of privation, certainly in a manner that is closer to what most Americans would call normal. He has not altered his personality dramatically to appear more “authentic.”
And yet, Bush II’s authenticity, no, let’s call it fakery, was never brought up or questioned.
Ah! I’m going to stop with this line of reasoning. It’s making me mad.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Bow ties are cool, at least on Matt Smith.
How do you tell the masses they are being used when they first thing they yell is “Abortion”?!!
Mumphrey
Hey, now, I wear bow ties, too, so let’s not have any bad-mouthing of bow ties here. There’s nothing wrong with bow ties. I’m tall and skinny, and my wife says I don’t need anything else to accentuate my up and downness. And I just like the way they look. Paul Simon wore one, too, after all, so it isn’t only snotty conservative weenies who wear them. Some of us weenies are liberals.
liberal
@ChrisS:
Very good, succinct summary of why “liberal” is a bad word in the US.
Southern Beale
Interesting, I was just talking about this with a friend today. More accurately, we were talking about the failure of conservative intellectualism.
I will have to give it more thought but I don’t necessarily see the failure of conservative intellectualism related to the rise of conservative anti-intellectualism. I think they are parallel movements. Ronald Reagan was a product of conservative intellectualism and goodness how the Teatards still worship him. Ditto Ayn Rand and Libertarianism.
The kind of anti-intellectualism embodied by Sarah Palin and Joe The Plumber is a different kind of thing, a cultural movement more than an ideological one. It’s rooted in the anti-elitism one sees conservative politicians exploiting for their own partisan ends. They don’t spread this kind of populism because they agree with it, they do it so they can be sent to Washington and continue on with the same old shit they’ve always done.
Basically, the Teatards are an easily manipulated bunch of nincompoops who will do what they are told by their movement’s leaders. Rush says jump and they say how high, no questions asked. If Rush told them Sarah Palin was bad for the country and bad for conservatism, I have no doubt a large chunk of the Teanuts would follow his lead. We’d get the same thing we got with Bush: “Well, I never really liked her anyway…”
Will be interesting to see what happens because I’m getting glimmers that the GOP wants to shove her under the bus, now more than ever. If they get Rush on board then she may be sent packing back to Alaska, save the occasional pro-life fundraiser in Indiana.
jonas
I don’t buy this. If you look a what the teatard crowd says it likes and doesn’t like, it doesn’t really add up to “conservative think-tank eggheads blew it.” Whom do they blame for the mortgage crisis? Not Bush or Greenspan, but the CRA, Barney Frank and Fannie Mae who somehow forced huge banks to give subprime loans to grifting negroes. Sarah Palin is perpetually outraged that Obama seems to not want a fully open-ended commitment to nationbuilding in Afghanistan. And the budget, as we all know, suddenly went into the red by a trillion dollars on January 21, 2009 when Obama bailed out GM and raised everyone’s taxes eleventy times.
In short, they love neocons, they love endless wars, and they think the economic crisis was due somehow to Nancy Pelosi.
So no. I’m sorry. They’re still a bunch of anti-intellectual blowhards.
The Moar You Know
I got sent an invitation by my wingnut father-in-law to some seminar where Not Joe the Non-Plumber was speaking.
How is that guy still getting work? He can’t even fucking string two sentences together.
I know they’re desperate when he’s an arrow in their quiver. Think about that, guys.
Jewish Steel
@Bob Loblaw:
Moral idiots then? Ethical imbeciles?
Loneoak
Those are ideas? Huh. I thought they were shit sandwiches with garlic pickles on rye.
MattF
Well, I’d say that conservative intellectuals (insofar as that’s not an oxymoron) are concerned mainly with wealth, war, and power. It’s their ‘pursuit of happiness’.
Michael
I’m going to be blunt.
The low information voters that create the problems are suburban voters. They suck at the cities that employ them like parasites, siphoning off funds to maintain the extension of infrastructure, all while screaming about taxes and the sort of economic and social diversity that make the places vital economic centers.
They’re much more troublesome than rural voters in genuinely productive agricultural areas, as rural voters can be expected at some point to vote for their own economic well-being and do seem some advantage to government programs.
Nobody squeals as much about taxes as much as a suburbanite white paper shuffler from the heavily tax-subsidized outskirts of Atlanta, Nashville or Dallas. Donchaknow they’re all self-made boomer men?
The Moar You Know
@Malraux: You know who else thought he could fix the problem with the rich/poor divide using conservative ideas?
Loneoak
@John B.:
She thinks she is talking about mushrooms.
beltane
Conservative intellectuals and populists alike are primarily concerned with redistributing wealth from wage-earners to those who are in a position to skim off an ever-growing percentage of those wages for their own use. The so-called intellectuals use a large vocabulary of Latin-based words to make their indefensible arguments, while the populists wear teabags in their hair and struggle with the spelling of even the most basic Anglo-Saxon words. Other than that, there is absolutely no difference between the two groups.
Martin
Again, look not at big/small government but of simple/complex governance (and economics).
If you make that shift, the tea party seems a lot more coherent, and the argument against intellectualism a bit sounder. It also brings a lot of what this blog argue in closer alignment with the tea partiers.
The complex financial products are the result of those intellectuals that the tea party is railing against. Granted, those products were allowed to flourish largely because of Phil Gramm, but put that aside, and this blog and the tea partiers are arguing for something similar – get rid of complex financial products that are so difficult to measure that even the regulators can’t stay ahead of them.
The complexity in the tax code, the complexity in the health care marketplace – these are all things that the tea party is fighting (oftentimes not fully cognizant of what they’re really fighting against) but they’re also things that the folks here would agree with, as would GOS.
Rather than add ever greater levels of complexity to government and to the economy, which could be argued is done for the sole enrichment of the handful of people that can understand them, lean on those same intellectuals to build systems that are elegant and achieve similar results.
The tea partiers are idiots for embracing idiots, thinking that if only idiots were in charge of the economy it’d all get nice and simple. But their instincts on where our energy should be placed isn’t so bad.
electricgrendel
So- let me see if I understand this. The teatard populists are arguing that because they were too stupid to keep from falling for the bullshit being shoveled by the “intellectuals” we should now let them run the place? People too stupid to critique and fight against the horse shit of 2000-2006 are going to magically no longer be so lizard-brained as to not fall for the next round of horse shit?
And honestly- what have they accomplished? An unparalleled level of political ignorance? An army of Medicare scooters? A triumphant of racial hatred stoking so great as to make people pine for the moderate nature of Southern white pointy hat meetings?
Oh yeah. And we lost to these fuckers. God save us all. And if he’s busy, for the love of FUCK, give the Devil a call.
Jewish Steel
@Michael:
Yes. Exactly.
As an ex-suburbanite I can confirm all of what you say is true.
@Southern Beale: Is Palin really a conservative icon? I think she is just a media monster. Her “unfavorables” rival Bush II’s, IIRC.
Brian J
It’s possible to find lots of problems with the Tea Party movement because there’s no particular coherence to its platform. Quite literally, it seems like people are projecting onto the party a magical solution to every sort of problem they have with the world, whether it’s about abortion, Obama being black, gay rights, or the alleged rise in government spending.
I’m tempted to say that the people who support the Tea Party aren’t any less coherent than they used to be, just that they are more cohesive now that they have a group, however tenuously connected its members are to each other.
Southern Beale
@Jewish Steel:
Conservative icon is probably not the best description of Sarah Palin. She is a media star with the conservative base. They LOVE her.
You know, I still see a lot of those fucking “lipstick” bumper stickers around town.
I think a big part of her appeal with this crowd is that she pisses off liberals, of course. And that’s by design, too. Her ghost-written Tweets and Facebook posts are all designed to plink that string in the conservative psyche which demands retaliation for all the time those Harvard grads and Hollywood elites snickered at them for being dumb rubes. Palin does that, which is part of her appeal.
But the conservative intellectuals are also Harvard grads and have more in common with the Hollywood and East Coast elites than their base.
Here’s something I’d like to know. We spend so much time talking about conservatives and the conservative base v conservative leaders and blabbedy blah. Let’s talk about liberals. Let’s talk about the liberal base and liberal leaders and liberal intellectuals. Who are these people, where are they, why are they ….
Cat
@Michael:
Boomers…
There is a generational war going on and its Boomers vs the rest of us. They want their SS, their pensions, their tranquil retirement even if it means nobody else gets to have them.
Chris
I don’t understand your point.
Yeah, and none of what they’re cheering for today is their idea either. Who do you think comes up with ideas like “we need to strike Iran,” “the deficit is going to ruin America” or “liberalism caused the economic crisis”? The same so-called “intellectuals” who were preaching deficit spending and war with Iraq eight years ago. Those think tanks aren’t going anywhere. Neither are their connections to conservative politicians. And neither is their influence on the minds of conservative voters.
So I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. The conservative base may be anti-intellectual – it was that way eight years ago too – but it’s not any closer to realizing that the “intellectuals” they’ve been following for the last three decades are false gods.
arguingwithsignposts
The tea party “movement” sprung full blown from the mind of Pen1s Navy and his minions. They’re only “populist” in the sense that a puppet is “populist.”
FlipYrWhig
@Michael:
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those same demographics fall hard for non-denominational megachurch “Christianity,” where you don’t really have to believe very much other than that you’re special because you love Jesus and Jesus loves you.
YellowDog
Generally, I don’t trust anyone who wears a bow-tie during the day–“look at me, I’m a noncorformist in a coat and tie.” John Paul Stevens is the exception. Otherwise, bow-ties should be worn with evening wear or by Chippendales dancers.
Ignorant rage is not going to solve our problems. It only leads to more fighting, which diverts our attention while we are screwed some more. I don’t know that there are any grand ideas that will get us out of this mess. It will take a grand strategy, such as during WWII, of a common goal that involves shared sacrifice. Add to the failed Bush/Republican/conservative policies their failure to ask for shared sacrifice.
Jewish Steel
@Southern Beale:
w/r/t Palin the icon: No no no! La la la! Fingers in ears! I can’t hear you!
I’m a stereotype of the liberal base myself. Straight out of central casting. And yet conservatives loooove me. I guess the generalized other is always easy to hate. But when confronted with a friendly, knowledgeable, bespectacled real life example? Irresistable.
Alwhite
@Cat:
Not only is that a gross generalization totally absent any evidence, it is the sort of jive bumper-sticker bullshit that end discussion without moving the discussion forward.
Not all boomers want all their goodies from the government for free and it is not just boomers that want it all for free. There are morans in every demographic that feel they have paid for more than their share so they deserve to have more without paying for it. There are morans that don’t believe they get anything of value from the government (some riding SS funded Hoverrounds some buying homes on mortgage made possible by government activity and some attending schools propped up by government money). There are even morans that think they would be better off without any government ‘interference’.
Instead of blaming this moronic behavior on any one group it would be more helpful to identify the root causes of the disease and look for cures.
Silver
I cannot take Bainbridge seriously. I used to read him, but I found him to be insufferable.
He is a fucking teatard. He just woke up and realized that since he teaches at a public university and has a education, he’s actually the enemy to them. Steve, you made your bed…
ChrisS
@Jewish Steel:
As an ex-suburbanite I can confirm all of what you say is true.
I guess I’m a subrubanite, but I’m only six miles from my work and ~12 from the city center. It doesn’t help that my city is one of the most sprawling urban areas in the country. But I digress. I live in a “village”. What kills me are the people that want to build their new McMansion juuuuuust on the other side of the municipal boundary so they don’t have to pay them damn taxes. Without stopping to think for three seconds that the reason that the village is such a nice place to live is, for the most part, because of the taxes that are invested in there.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin:
There is (as usual with Martin’s comments) a lot to like in this analysis. But I think we tend to miss things when we look at US politics in isolation, or as a domestic zero-sum game.
The elephant in the room is the effects of globalization. The last two decades of globalization enriched elites across much of the world but in a seeming paradox have also improved the lot of some (not all) former peasant families in those countries like China which were able to take advantage of the new rules of the game to rapidly industrialize.
Now in all the previous examples which I’m familiar with of large scale industrialization from the 18th thru the 20th centuries, somebody lost out. Typically that was domestic agricultural labor in the countries which were industrializing (and their major trading partners), plus any aborigines still available to be dispossessed and slaughtered in order to grab the resources they owned. Sometimes this would happen slowly (e.g. the decline of British rural labor with the enclosure of the commons, the Corn Acts, etc, or the politically imposed collapse of the native texile industry in the British Raj under the pressures of imperial mercantile policy), and sometimes it would happen very fast (e.g. Stalin ordering the liquidation of the kulaks in the USSR). But whenever there has been large scale industrialization of previously agrarian economies, somebody somewhere was taking it in the chops to help pay for it.
What is unique about our era is that, as the global supply has shrunk of aborigines who still possess valuable resources worth stealing and prosperous peasants who can be ground down into a state of pastoral beggary, the next logical step was to auto-cannibalize the middle class of the existing industrial nations, starting at the bottom of the heap and working upwards as needed. Some nations have been more eager to expose their citizens to this process than others, and as usual the USA just had to be #1.
Steve
The thing is that the “populists” are, more or less, doing nothing but serving as useful idiots for the conservative elites they supposedly have all these differences of opinion with. The Republican insurgency was supposedly going to return power to the people back in the ’90s and they wound up spending their time on stuff like deregulating the derivatives market. When this year’s model starts pursuing an actual populist agenda, I’ll believe they’re different.
debbie
When George W. Bush “developed” his Texas accept and declared again and again that he was just a regular guy, the low-information suburbanites fell for his masquerade of being one of them. They took that as evidence that they too could be president and felt free to start voicing their opinions. Then, when it turned out that the establishment Republicans of the ’00s only ignored them, they got angry and then furious. And that is how the Tea Party was born.
Cat
@Alwhite:
Its a pretty big freaking stretch to say Gen X or any of the later generations has had a major impact on political and economic policy of the last 20 or 30 years. That just leaves the Boomers and their parents.
Martin
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Thank you for the comment, btw.
There’s a few parts here that shouldn’t be ignored.
1) There’s complexity that is foisted upon us. Globalization is one example. The ‘force multiplier’ of cheap computation is another. Healthcare is complicated because computers allow actuaries to do shit not even dreamed of 30 years ago. Same goes for the financial system.
2) There’s complexity that we foist upon ourselves. Gramm didn’t need to push for those new financial instruments to be opened up more broadly – we could have kept them in the little box they were in. Further, we didn’t need to exempt them from oversight on top of that. Health care complexity can be constrained by state insurance commissioners, dependent on the degree of regulatory capture taking place.
The industrial/import/export system was relatively straightforward prior to the 70s/80s when shipping went fully into intermodal containers. With the deregulation of the trucking and shipping industries and the new efficiencies of containers, getting stuff from China to Boise was so cheap as to be insignificant to the larger cost. The old transport system was sufficiently antiquated to make imports uncompetitive with domestic products, even with nearly-free labor overseas. People that grew up with a strong US industrial base don’t understand how profound this simple change was, and continually misplace their energy thinking that there’s some kind of lack-of-willpower, or consumers-hating-America problem in the US.
This is complexity that we simply need to deal with. The CEO of the marble company on Colbert the other night was great. She’s arguably a medium business owner. I’ve seen their operation working, and it’s flat-out 19th century in many respects. But she said that Chinese marbles arrive in the US for $.27 per pound, where her energy costs are $.21 per pound. She’s not immune to the complexity of this problem. Where 40 years ago you could trust the cost of shipping to mask all kinds of inefficiencies and cost differentials, now you can’t. China’s energy costs are negligible because it’s unregulated coal powered. We’re trying to change that through climate legislation, but the GOP fights it calling it some kind of global conspiracy, but if they’d support it, we’d start evening out that energy cost differential. But there’s too many moving parts to this for people to get – certainly for average voters who have jobs and families and American Idol to watch. All they see is economists coming up with quantitative easing and TARP and all manner of other solutions that make no fucking sense to the people voting. I can’t blame them for pushing back. And when finreg came around, Congress didn’t go all-in on simplifying the financial sector so that voters would better understand what was going on. Those are serious problems that get both tea partiers and Democrats in some sort of general alignment.
I think a great tactic for Democrats – and it’s something that Obama has embraced in principle, if not in practice in many places – is to simplify and streamline government. Push for that with the tax code, even if that means losing some sacred cows. Push for that with HCR and everything else coming along. Push for deficit reduction policies that make sense to voters. Take the time to educate the voters. I think that is a big part of where Obama failed – he’s a GREAT teacher – that’s what a lot of us picked up on during the campaign. He can make the case for his policies, but that takes time, and the WH didn’t take the time the last 2 years. He needs to go out and sell his ideas before 2012.
Ash Can
I do believe there is such a thing as a conservative intellectual these days. The reason I think their thinking is fucked up is because they either start with flawed premises, or are dishonest with regard to some or all of the aspects of their arguments. In other words, they have smarts, but don’t use them well.
ktward
Opines Bainbridge commenter:
Spectacular failures. Agreed.
But I would suggest that those failures were a direct result of a uniquely ideological but influential cabal within the GOP that controversially happened to barely get elected in ’00. The understandably shaky aftermath of 9/11 proved destructively handy– in effect, it granted them carte blanche toward implementing their own neocon & corporatist aims. (C’mon, we know that Medicare Part D was never about doing right by our seniors. It was all about Big Pharma.) Imo, Dems were complicit in GWB’s razing. For whatever reasons. (Lest my blame be considered partisan.)
Meanwhile, there were energy/conservation/social policies (health care reform!) long advocated by conservative elites that the GOP, during GWB (and Clinton), simply wouldn’t touch.
There was a time when the GOP was, more or less, the execution arm for conservative policy churned out by their think-tank elites. GWB’s reign completely overturned that dynamic, which is where their elites truly failed.
David Frum is an excellent example of this: he knew it was all going to hell in a hand basket, nevertheless he stoically carried water for the GOP. It’s only post-GWB that he found his well-publicized voice of reason which resulted in his well-publicized ostracism. But he’s still, in the end, a loyal GOP water carrier. (Pre-midterm, he admitted that, if he were a DE resident, he’d vote for McDonnell.)
Conversely, there are more than a few prominent conservative thinkers who have completely abandoned the GOP and carry no allegiances. (They were either pushed out the door a la Buckley/Bartlett, or they finally ran out the door a la Lindsey.)
During GWB, the GOP was downright encouraged to pervert, to their own aims, the very concept of deep-dive thinking: consequently, ‘elite’ is, today, a four-letter word even among con thinkers themselves. Like poor Arthur Brooks, reduced to a nonsensical GOP mouthpiece:
It’s the GOP Team that now dictates the plays to their otherwise loyal coaching elites. (Did I butcher this metaphor? I’m not a sports person.) The GOP’s transparent end game is to get elected by whatever means (case in point, McCain), and what works for them is head-in-the-sand, Religious Right fomented policy: fear-mongering, anti-science, phobic nationalism.
Bainbridge commenter continues:
Would the Tea Party care to contribute?
What, exactly, has this newborn TP populist movement contributed other than torches and pitchforks? Hey, I’m the first to agree that the GOP ‘establishment’ is FUBAR. But I fail to understand how electing arguably unbalanced or otherwise unknowledgeable candidates gets the GOP to a better place.
The Tea Party, in all its successful disorganization*, proffers no solutions that can withstand any sniff test. Their angry argument: sniff test? We don’t no stinkin’ sniff tests.
*While the TP endorsed Scott Brown and counted him a first tick in their Win column, that rose is long off the bloom. Hell, Rand Paul (!), not even seated yet, is already starting to walk back on his TP beloved no-exception promise against earmarks.
Lurked
I have to say this repeatedly since it never seems to sink in, but the very oldest Boomers will not turn 65 for another month and a half or so. The largest number of Boomers are in our 50s to very early 60s. Very few of the Baby Boomer generation have retired yet (voluntarily, at least).
Our parents, the “Greatest Generation,” are mostly dead now, or are getting quite old.
We prepaid for our retirement by paying extra SS taxes since the mid-1980s, and that’s what is being stolen by the Bush tax cuts.
The people in the scooters wailing about getting the government out of their Medicare are mostly members of the so-called Silent Generation, born during the Depression and WWII. Roughly speaking, they are the parents of GenX. Both those generations are quite conservative, according to some surveys I’ve seen. The Boomers are more liberal, in general.
Martin
@Cat: I think the Boomers and their parents are even too narrow a group, though its a good start. Extending my thesis on complexity, look at what’s going on among the electorate here.
I would argue that in a broad sense, younger voters are more comfortable with complex systems and more trusting of others to manage those systems. I would also argue that voters in more demographically and economically diverse areas are more comfortable and trusting of complex systems. So, younger voters, urban voters, and voters already in complex environments are less likely to align with the tea party and with this sort of ‘radical simplification’ movement than those in very traditional regions. And that seems to be exactly what we see in the electorate.
Low-information voters are also low-understanding voters.
I don’t see that it’s desirable to tell people looking for a government and economy they can understand to suck it up and just vote for Democrats. But I don’t see that easy-to-understand solutions explained well are antithetical to progressive ideals. In many ways, solutions such as single payer healthcare are significantly simpler than the free-market system we have – yet Democrats haven’t made ‘simplifying health insurance and healthcare’ the goal that they seek. They haven’t made simplifying the tax structure (even if a tax increase comes along for the ride) a goal. Hell, campaign on an income tax structure that recognizes there is a certain cost of living for each individual and for each dependent, and that there will be a progressive tax rate on all income above that level regardless of source. Easy to understand, and most people wouldn’t argue against it. Lay down some simple boundaries – as the deficit reduction commission has just done. Federal taxes will never exceed this number. Spending on corporations (including defense contracts, etc.) will never exceed taxes collected from corporations – no individual taxes will ever be used to bail out a company, give them a subsidy, etc. Any excess money collected in one of these pools (because this simple, but coarse system will generate those results) will be used to pay down the national debt.
Now, actually working out a system that is this simple will be fucking hard, but hey, our masters of the universe should be up for that kind of challenge. Just like computers brought us all the complexity of spam and phishing to navigate around, it also brought us one-click buying. It’s really damn hard to make things really fucking simple, so let’s use all of this energy to do that, rather than to make things really fucking complicated. Rather than make us do all the hard work, make the legislators and economists and consultants do it.
Martin
@Lurked: I agree. My parents are Boomers, born in 46. They’re already drawing SS and will hit Medicare soon. My parents have split ideologically, with my dad, living on the coast getting more liberal by the day, and my mom, living in the heartland, getting more conservative by the day.
I don’t think it’s entirely right to say that the Boomers aren’t a part of this, however. They may not be individually pushing this movement along, but the majority of the commentariat either pushing them or enabling them certainly is. The pro-teaparty group among the media are almost entirely Boomers, from what I can see. Santelli was born in 53. Palin in 64, so she’s straddling the line there. In other words, if the Boomers aren’t a part of the movement, they need to improve their marketing here. You guys excelled at protesting, so get your ass out there and make your case.
ktward
O’Donnell! O’Donnell!
[shaking head in self-editing embarrassment]
It’s either my own deficient tagging skills or some other coding force beyond my control that erased my links. Whatever. But I’ve no similar, seemingly reasonable excuse for Mc vs O’. Other than Old Brain Syndrome.
For anyone interested, my links were these:
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2010/07/02/brink-lindsey-vs-arthur-brooks/
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/10/27/pm-frum-this-election-vote-gop/
Mark S.
Conservative intellectualism:
McMegan could have written that sentence with less grammatical errors. That’s not a compliment to McMegan.
Cat
@Martin:
This seems a bit off. Even if the marble magically appeared on the boat the thought of $540 a ton for China to US shipping way to low to be believable. The price per ton on container ships used to be more then $1000 a ton and peaked close to $4000 a ton last decade. Maybe the marble is shipped on special ships that can get a lower $/ton price point, but I can’t see how that helps her if shipping costs go up.
The cost of energy for production are the least of her problems if shipping costs have to increase 1000% for her marble to be competitive.
ktward
@Lurked:
It’s an interesting, generational political legacy that you paint.
Myself, I’m tail-end Boomer (’61).
If I must categorize my own political inclinations, they more closely mirror modern-day Progressive ideals. But I should mention that I was both a registered and largely knowledgeable GOPer until Clinton’s 2nd term.
My parents are firmly pre-WWII. (’31 & ’38). They’re not remotely ‘Silent Gen’, and no scooters. (Yet.) They used to be innately and reflexively GOP. Not anymore, particularly since GWB.
I generally agree that, politically speaking, historical knowledge affords us a more broadly informative bigger picture.
But honestly? Given today’s socio/industrial/geo-political facts on the ground, we’re in altogether new territory. History should, of course, inform us going forward, but it shouldn’t, by unexamined default, dictate modern-day policy.
I’m fully aware that such an opinion flies in the face of the very definition of Conservativism, which most values variously defined models of “Tradition” above all else. This explains why I’ve now long counted myself outside that club.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Cat:
Wild speculation:
It is possible that the container ships are taking the marble on as ballast so they have something with which to stabilize a load dominated by much higher value-to-weight ratio products (e.g. manufactured goods). This was a common practice in bulk shipping prior to the 20th Cen (I’m not up to date on whether things have changed more recently) – to pack the bottom of the hold centered over the keel with something heavy and not especially valuable (although it was not always the less valuable cargo – in the 18th Cen and earlier it was common for Chinese porcelain to perform this function).
If there is only a limited selection of Chinese primary products which are: (1) in demand in the US, (2) heavy, (3) impervious to crush damage, and (4) do not tend to shift during transport excessively, then the shipping cost offered to the marble exporting firm(s) may be next to nothing.
If so, that would make it a special case not applicable to broader economic arguments.
Redwood Rhiadra
@Cat: Are you sure the costs are $4000 per *ton*? Because it looks to me from a brief web search that the $4000 price is per *container*.
And at least one Chinese stone company says they can ship 27 tons per container, which works out to about 7.5 cents per pound for the shipping costs.
Admittedly, I’ve never tried shipping anything, so I may be misreading the price quotes I saw.
El Cid
I think it’s unfair to conservatives to argue that it’s all about making the rich richer.
Powerful conservative ‘intellectuals’ and pundits and politicians have also enjoyed calling for and then blowing up lots of brown people.
They also enjoy stirring up racial resentment among whites by continually telling that the coloreds are getting more and are being allowed to destroy society and the family and so forth.
And they also enjoy punishing women who in any way depart from patriarchal control, behavior, and styles.
And, of course, punishing the poor as inferior and, well, deserving of punishment for their laziness and lack of success.
Cat
Yes, I mixed up ton/container.
That comes to around 1/14th the cost of Chinese marble is in shipping assuming the price per pound is roughly the same for containerized cargo and marble. Its probably close enough.
So it would take 1400% increase in shipping costs to double the cost of Chinese marble from $1,000 a container to $14,000. That would probably be catastrophic on global trade.
While the exact numbers are wrong, the general point is still right. It would take a huge increase in shipping costs to make American marble competitive with Chinese marble.
DFH no.6
@Cat:
You wrote:
Try it this way:
“There is a race war going on and it’s Blacks vs the rest of us”. See how that sounds, asshole bigot?
Do you understand why what you wrote is bigoted?
I – and those in my age group – had no more choice over when and where we were born than we did over the color of our skin. And, you may no doubt be surprised to learn, we don’t all think or act alike, either.
Fuck your ignorant, prejudiced stereotyping. I was fighting the good fight before you first started wasting oxygen.
debbie
@ Cat:
Lancelot Link
They were sold to the puplic as intellectuals, with all the necessary paperwork and titles and etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUCZXn9RZ9s
Mnemosyne
@debbie:
So you want to pull the ladder up after you and not let anyone else use the same system you did to enjoy a comfortable retirement?
That’s kinda what you’re arguing here — that we should end the system, give you your money, and screw the younger people who would have benefited from it in their old age. And that’s the attitude most people are complaining about: you’ve got yours, and the rest of us can FOAD for all you care.
ETA: Also, too, I hate how “entitlements” has been successfully cast as a bad word by Republicans. Of course SS and Medicare are entitlements: you paid into them your whole working life, and now you’re entitled to benefit from them as planned. I don’t really get how “entitlements” became “things people didn’t deserve.”
ChrisNYC
The problem the GOP has is that they have no idea people anymore. They haven’t spent a second on ideas since Reagan — whether you like those ideas or not, they were ideas and they had spent decades thinking about them. See, e.g. Ayn Rand BFF Alan Greenspan. And, for comparison, McCain’s pick for Treas Sec — Meg freaking Whitman.
Look at the scraping and bowing before Paul Ryan. It’s because he at least speaks about substance in a way that goes beyond sound bites, ludicrous accusations and saber rattling. I’ve tried and I can’t think of any other GOPers in Congress who can do that, on any issue. NOT ONE. Whereas, on the Dem side — financial services (Frank), Constitutional issues (Leahy, Whitehouse), healthcare (obviously, like the bill or not), foreign policy (Kerry, Biden), cap and trade (Kerry).
And when your elected people have zero interest or inclination for ideas, you don’t win bright hangers on. If you were a smart policy person with a conservative bent, would you be associated in any way with Michele Bachmann? Why toil away at some new conservative scheme for healthcare when you ultimately have to bring it to the likes of her? I think all the GOP policy- potential people said, at some point into GWBs term, “Hey, I can make money in the private sector and not have to deal solely with imbeciles. No more think tank for me.” Then, you end up with “idea people” like Jonah Goldberg.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mnemosyne:
Who was the fncking communist who said this:
The really sad part is what a titanic struggle it has been over the last 120 years for the US to catch up with the social reforms which the author of that speech pushed thru in the 1880s. Go Team USA! Only slightly more reactionary than Wilhelmine Germany!. Now that’s something to brag to our grandchildren about.
debbie
@Mnemosyne”
No, and I’m sorry if that’s the way it seemed. I totally support the idea of Social Security (and not just for me), but since it’s beginning to look inevitable that it will be cut off, then I want my money back. I think the real problem with Social Security is how it’s been stretched to be a giveaway for people other than retirees. Did you know you can get SSDI (or whatever it’s called) for attention deficit?
Calling Social Security an entitlement is as bogus as those death panels. The real entitlements are the corporate giveaways.
Mnemosyne
@debbie:
I think you’ve been misconstruing what us younger people have been saying: we’re pointing out that the system may not be there for us in 20 or 30 years, so what’s the point of our paying into it now? If older people were saying to politicians, “Yeah, that’s right, why are you trying to cheat the next generation?” then it wouldn’t be a problem, but there seems to be a whole lot of retirement-aged people who are more than willing to take “their” money and run.
Of course, that six figures that you paid in is long gone — it went to pay for your parents’ Social Security. When you retire, I (and others of my generation) will be paying for your retirement. I don’t have a problem with it — that’s how the system is set up. But it does get a little tiresome hearing retired people talk about “their” money when, no, it’s money from me that will prevent you from having to eat cat food in your old age.
You’ve never known anyone with severe ADD, I take it. My nephew has been committed to a mental hospital for it several times, and it ain’t because he can’t sit still in school.
Yes, it’s true, there are some people who have mental illnesses so severe that they are unable to function. There are people who are so physically or mentally disabled that they’re unable to work. What are we supposed to do, throw them out in the street?
I notice that you’ve bought into the right-wing meme that Social Security is somehow “in trouble.” Social Security has more than enough money to fund your retirement well into your 90s even when you include the disabled … as long as the US stops spending it on other things. Basically, George W Bush sent your retirement money to Iraq.
Medicare is a different story, but the right loves to lump Medicare and Social Security together so they can try to imply that the perfectly healthy program (Social Security) is somehow in trouble just because of the association. But it’s not.
Bernard
the real success of the Conservatives has been the “language” war they won. Social Security is a trust fund we/i have paid into since i started working. there was an assumption i made, however stupid at the time, that i would get that money back when i retired. Thanks to St. Ronnie and Voodoo Economics et al the Republican/Democratic theft, i probably won’t. i’m too young to retire and too poor thanks to the Conservative lies bought by enough Americans about Government, for one.
that Social Security is blamed for the Deficit is part of the Successful lies spread by the Thieves who want and will get the money free after all we working people have paid into it.
Heard of the SS Trust fund lock box? SS taxes goes there to create a trust fund that pays out benefits. Making the Rich pay back SS trust fund money is one reason they want to connect it to the Deficit. it’s not connected at all. Raising FICA taxes above the $106,000 limit would ensure “surpluses” if and when more money is needed.
People only pay taxes up to that $106,000 limit. the rest of earnings is not taxed anymore for SS. How’s that for a scam.
Making more than $106,000? you only pay on $106,000. Do you ever hear that?
that the Conservatives have lied and distorted “facts” through the constant PR campaign: Government Bad.
Social Security is the public version of life insurance.
Conservatives have won the war on America by using the “right” words. What have the Liberals done to counter this BS war of “words?” not much.
if ignorance is bliss, America has been in heaven for a long time. and Palin is part of the proof.
Fight the Conservatives, find the “right” words to fight the fight. first understand the facts involved so we all know what’s what.
Gosh, it seems most “liberals” haven’t a clue about Social Security funding/FICA taxes, and how SS works and who is lying? This is so sad and outrightly stunning.
how can we fight the Masters of the Universe if we haven’t even got a clue on the various “paths” they scam America with.
pattonbt
I think conservative intellectuals are brilliant. They are brilliant at making pseudo sounding BS counter factuals to mask the true positions they hold (straight up plutocracy and oligarchy).
The modern “conservative”/Republican movement is a ponzi scheme that would make Madoff wonder in awe. And the reason the rubes are so willing to buy into it is that they have invested far too much intellectual capital in the “team” to want to believe anything that might upset the scheme. Thats why when Graham (not Lindsay) said all people had to do was (paraphrasing) “believe” in the system and it would work, shows exactly what it is.
The rubes have believed they have been getting great returns on their investments and do not want to believe they were suckered out of their money. So they double down.
Thats why part of me wants to see the system fail, because only then will eyes be actually opened and progress allowed to be made.
As long as the ponzi scheme lives, we are in trouble. And conservative intellectuals are great and advertising the scheme.
pattonbt
@Michael: My brother resembles this remark!
Cerberus
@Southern Beale:
Well, that’s why we lose.
There are none.
The left, liberals, progressives, whatever you call it, is a hodge podge of generalized empathy, underdogs, sane people, so on. There might be people who are “highlighted” owing to a strong leadership persona on an issue, but in general, most liberals are like herded cats and few latch on to personalities or leaders because they are on the opposite end of the authoritarians and they have a wealth of issues they have strong opinions on or close connections to rather than generalized psychological needs for simplicity.
On the right, there is authoritarianism and the seduction of it is the illusion of simplicity, that all this thinking and change and things not being like when you were a kid can all just disappear as long as you listen to us and do what we say.
So there are leaders on the right because it’s about a personality cult following for emotional satisfaction being manipulated to whatever the leader wants.
A leader on the left may highlight a political desire, but the left is too fragmented and to divided on issues of implementation and priority to really rally behind anyone.
Xecky Gilchrist
Populists are gaining support among the GOP voters because of the spectacular failures that resulted when the policies advocated by conservative elites were implemented.
Which explains why they’re still pushing for exactly the same policies, only with more stupidity and anger.
debbie
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry I couldn’t respond sooner.
Please know that I do understand the system, and I have had no problem with paying forward. My point is that I don’t see anyone paying forward for me; particularly when I read of younger people bitching about having to pay it at all since it won’t be there for them. How is that any different from what I was saying?
I’ve got a couple of nephews with ADD. I don’t know how severe they have it, except that it’s caused their parents a lot of grief. I didn’t base my remark on science, but on observation. There are lawyers who make their living on handling cases of denied SSDI, so that tells me it’s a really lucrative “business.” Same for workman’s comp: sure there are people who can’t work, but you can’t deny there are plenty of people who game the system.
I don’t buy into the right-wing argument that Social Security’s on the brink of failure. But that doesn’t guarantee that the program won’t be ended anyway.
Deb T
@Southern Beale:
Palin’s shtick reminds me of the basic premise of the Beverly Hillbillies TV show. Those wise old, common sense, country hicks are smarter than city slickers. This was not an uncommon theme in movies and TV shows of the fifties and sixties. Ma and Pa Kettle, and to some extent, though more palatable, all those wonderful Frank Capra movies.
But that’s fantasy, show biz, entertainment. Book learnin’ is the way to go in this modern world (and even more so in the past). For all his log cabin credentials, Lincoln was a brilliant man who used his education to propel him to the presidency.
In the immortal words of John Prine:
“It don’t make much sense that common sense don’t make no sense no more.”