I think that Washington’s embrace of Hooverism is of a piece with its embrace of global warming denialism. Once upon a time we were all Keynesians, just as once upon a time Tim Pawlenty and other Republicans supported a carbon tax. Then wealthy interests decided they didn’t want increased government spending during a recession, just as they had decided they didn’t want carbon taxes.
Pretty soon there were all kinds of pseudo-intellectual justifications: if you take a triple-backwards contrarian Amity Shlaes view of the Great Depression, Roosevelt made it worse, the economy is a Brooksian complex system that the enlightened know man can never understand, the earth could just be going through a warming cycle, a carbon tax will slow the economy and what we really need is a powerful economic juggernaut that will solve global warming through the magic of the free market, or maybe through some giant Nathan Myhrvold dome that will never be built if there is cap and trade.
Pretty soon the far-left position is that we should continue with traditional macroeconomic policy and accept the findings of climate scientists, while the far right position is that we should go on the gold standard and admit that snow in Buffalo proves the earth is not getting warmer. The sensible centrist positions — embraced by Brian Williams, Ruth Marcus, Charlie Rose, and the rest — are to do nothing on global warming, while allowing that it may be happening, and to adopt Hooverist economic policies, while allowing that the gold standard may be going too far.
Everyone but the true hippies must at least admit that Al Gore’s heating bill is too high and that John Maynard Keynes was a bisexual eugenicist.
I’m not an Overton window kind of guy, but I have to admit they’ve worked for conservatives on these issues.
Jack Bauer
Anyone else close to despair? I’m pretty close at the moment. If I didn’t have a wife, kids & mortgage, I’d be interested to see how this plays out, but right now? Very worried.
Cris (without an H)
Everything goes better with Paul Robeson.
Matthew Reid Krell
I’ve contacted the Canadian embassy about emigrating.
Mark S.
From the TPM article linked in the last post:
And then a link to the idiots at the American Thinker. There you go: teach the controversy.
I’m not dissing the TPM article; it’s hardly advocating the anti-Keynesian position. It’s just annoying that economics seems to have no baseline where nearly all experts agree. Most news articles reporting on some fossil find don’t bother to get a quote from some Creationist scientist arguing that T-Rex bone is actually only 5,000 years old. Economics obviously isn’t a hard science and never will be, but there are so many hacks in it the layperson has no idea who to believe.
MBunge
“The era of Big Government is over.”
Let’s not forget the biggest Overton Window mover of them all.
Mike
ed drone
I has occurred to me that the Republican’ts have a problem:
All Congressmen and Senators take an oath of office, to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution, in its 14th Amendment, says that the public debt of the United States cannot be denied.
So voting to default — failing to raise the debt ceiling — is by definition UnConstitutional.
Therefore, each and every Congressman that votes to send the country into default is in violation of their oath of office and should be removed forthwith.
Yeah, I know, fat chance getting that enforced, but it’s prima facie evidence that the oath of office is less important to some than to others.
Ed
Mark S.
@Jack Bauer:
Right now, I’m pretty sure they’ll pass a deal. It won’t be great, but it will be the usual level of suckitude we’ve come to expect. I had spent the last couple weeks nearly certain we were going to default, so I’m more “hopeful” than I’ve been for awhile.
James E. Powell
This has got nothing to do with Keynes, Friedman, Hayek, Hoover, or Roosevelt. It’s all about very publicly putting that N! in his place. The Republicans have to, have to, show that he is not a successful president. If they can’t do that, their whole show is over and it will take them at least a decade to recover. A decade is enough time to change the composition of the supreme court. If that happens, the ruling class is hosed forever.
They are fighting a rear-guard action against the demographic wave. They are building a firewall against the coming of Euro-style democratic socialism in America.
Davis X. Machina
Only economists go out the door into an economy every morning.
So long as most people go out the door into a morality play, where thrift is a virtue, and the profligate are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, Keynesianism is playing an uphill lie. In politics, quantity has a quality all its own.
We’re still dealing with the psychic consequences of the Neolithic Revolution, never mind the American, French, Russian versions of same.
MBunge
Isn’t it about time to recognize the basic problem of Keynesianism? It requires democratic governments to spend money when times are bad and cut spending when times are good, which seems to put it alongside communism as a system that needs people to act contrary to human nature in order to work.
Mike
Davis X. Machina
@Mark S.: And like climate science, if you don’t actually own your own hack, they’re readily available on a rental basis.
Elliecat
ed drone @ 6
A couple of folks recently (Garry Wills is the one name I can think of) have pointed out that every Congressman who has signed Grover Norquist’s pledge has violated their oath of office or at least rendered it meaningless.
As the GOPer candidates rush to sign pledge after pledge, Dems ought to make a point—“The only pledge I will sign is my oath of office, my pledge to the American people.”
Frankensteinbeck
If the overton window is moving, Doug, it’s because the media has moved it. They don’t want sane and rational positions. Those aren’t exciting. They want to eagerly discuss whether a batshit strategy to annihilate our economy is a wise political move. Right now the national journalists and commentariat see the world as an action movie, and they’re not only urging the Republicans to race along the edge of the cliff, they’re trying to push them into doing it on 2 wheels. Those people ARE the overton window. All the stuff our commenters wail that the Democrats should say, the Democrats say. But unless the Democrats decide to be equally excitingly insane, nobody will hear about it. Just like you don’t hear about it now.
NonyNony
@Elliecat
Which, if recent history is any judge, will be rated as a “Pants on Fire” lie by Politifact because you don’t sign an oath of office you recite it.
MBunge
“Only economists go out the door into an economy every morning.”
Uh, would those be the economists who didn’t say jack about the housing and credit bubble until it was too late? Or the economists who championed the “shock therapy” approach to Post-Soviet Russia? How about the economists who thought America could export whole sections of its economy overseas and now wonder why there’s no job creation?
Let’s not fall into the trap of technocracy.
Mike
Davis X. Machina
@Elliecat: I was thinking more of a YouTube video of a rap version of Edmund Burke’s Speech to the Electors of Bristol, but it’s the same idea.
agrippa
I guess that we will find out how well Hooverism works out.
sad and true.
MobiusKlein
@11 Elliecat – I don’t think it would work that way.
A Congress-person can always say “I want to vote for a different bill to do X”.
Also, it’s never been disqualifying to vote for a bill that’s later ruled unconstitutional.
joes527
Speaking of the overton window …
I was on a flight on Tuesday where a pack of boy scouts boarded last. They were high spirited and seeing them was a bit of a pick me up at the end of a long day. One of them took a seat next to me and we exchanged pleasantries: “where are you from?” “where did you go?” “Oh, my nephew used to be in your troop” … that kind of stuff.
As we took off, he pulled out his book to start reading. I glanced over and saw that he was ingesting Glen Beck’s tome.
I wept.
Davis X. Machina
@joes527:Family, region, religion, tradition, what everyone else in the neighborhood or at work is doing, will keep even a bankrupt franchise, if not in playoff contention, at least in business.
There are still Mets fans. Which means there’ll always be Republicans.
Frankensteinbeck
NonyNony:
Politifact’s gleeful contrarianism is maddening. I don’t know if they’re trying to lean conservative, or they just love to make the most insane value judgement they can to interpret their facts. They said that calling the ACA ‘job-killing’ is completely true because… 39k jobs are lost in the bureaucratic reshuffling. They didn’t even mention implications in the larger economy, which is what everyone else in the world means with the phrase ‘job-killing’. By the same token they say Obama hasn’t lived up to his promise of stopping torture. Sure he’s stopped torture, they say, but maybe he’ll decide to do some later. After all, his term’s not done yet. These things aren’t lies, but they’re… well, gleeful contrarianism.
Davis X. Machina
@Frankensteinbeck:
Slate‘s IP lawyers are poring over the potential case as we speak.
El Cid
Even though millions of people went to “work” and had “money” to feed their “family” and do stuff which built up much of the country (within months of FDR taking office and replaced by that other public hiring program, referred to as “WWII”), experts like pseudo-scholar Amity Schlaes teach us that those government-funded jobs weren’t jobs, because they weren’t, because they get to define “job” however they want. Because they just do. And also shut up.
srv
The era of Intellectualism is over. The Age of Reason is dead.
We are crippled in every way, but once you start skull-fucking rational economic policy and embrace voodoo economics you are pretty much done for. And we are really only at the beginning of the economic crazy. The republicans have a whole gamut of pins to stick into the body economic to reanimate the corpse and pragmatic democrats debate not the bleedings but the size of the cuts.
MCA
DougJ, what do you mean by “Pretty soon?” We’re already there. Macroeconomics 101 is now seen as intentionally ruining the economy through overindebtedness, and/or communism.
wrb
Yup. Odd to look back on the time when we looked down on those irrationa,l superstitious, backward countries in Asia, knowing they could never compete with us. We’re now each what the other was.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Frakensteinbeck #12:
There is plenty of blame to go around. Yes the mass media have been prime movers, but they have to have an audience. If low-info voters opted to use the OFF button on their TV remotes every time this bullshit came on, the media would change their tune, except for those outlets like FOX that are being run as ideological loss-leaders (i.e. it doesn’t matter if the audience is shrinking).
We are trapped in this hellish limbo because: (A) we are a country deeply divided between evenly balanced and irreconcilable politico-cultural factions such that only the votes of about 5% of the electorate stuck in the middle between the two dominanat groups actually get to determine the outcome of our elections on a national scale, and (B) that 5% are a subprime tranche of the most cynical and apathetic portion of our electorate who still actually manage to show up at the polls at least every now and then.
The result is that we are getting precisely the governing that we deserve, if you qualify “we” to mean only the low-info voters in the mushy middle and not everybody else who suffers the consequences.
JC
I actually think that there are at least a couple of ‘political fact’ sites, that were taken over/infiltrated by conversative partisans.
So their job is to, without lying, meddy the waters, using things like contrarianism, to do so.
somethingblue
Actually the far right position is that a heat wave in Buffalo in February proves the earth is actually getting colder.
That’s the real climate crisis but of course the mainstream media is covering it up because of their well-known liberal bias.
Fortunately it’s nothing that a few tax cuts won’t fix.
Jim in Chicago
Given recent history, denying the effectiveness of moving the Overton Window is right up there with climate science denial. It’s time our side learned how to move it — i.e., that our “leaders” listen to progressives who do understand this stuff. By now Frank Luntz must be bored having no opposition to play against!
Danny
Well, I don’t agree with these constant announcements of the Death of Keynesianism that is the rage these days among pretty much all netroots.
In the public discourse we have Obama and dems borrowing some rethorical tropes from the Hoover crowd (while gently subverting them towards Keynesianism – e.g. we must still “invest”, etc).
On policy we have Obama and the dems conceding to “spending cuts” but pushing them into the future. Tellingly, even Boehners plan only cuts a billion next year which is not even close to one percent of overall federal spending.
The reason Obama & the dems are pushing cuts into the future is because they are Keynesians: they want to minimize damage to the recovery.
They’ve also been pushing for a payroll taxcut as part of tax reform. That’s also because they are Keynesians, pragmatic ones that think that that’s what they could plausibly get through congress.
So what we’re seeing is far from the Death of Keynesianism in America.
What we are seeing is Keynesian policies getting little play in the DC media bubble this last month, and the Hooverian framing dominating the macro perspective. Sure, that is concerning – because the economy looks very weak atm. But lamenting death now is pretty much conceding defeat in the war just because we’re beat back in the current battle.
Frankensteinbeck
Jim in Chicago:
This is a claim that always baffles me. Why does the left fringe think they’re better at messaging? Their message isn’t getting out, either. In fact, the media uses any extreme liberal message it can find to reinforce that the conservatives are completely reasonable because both sides are equal so that they can go back to giddily proclaiming how brilliant the GOP’s psychotic stances are.
Boots Day
I don’t think this is what happened. Plenty of wealthy people recognize that government spending is a good thing during a recession.
What happened is that the Republican Party convinced itself that whatever the Kenyan community-organizer teleprompter wants must be bad and wrong and evil. So if he thinks government spending would be good for the American polity, well, then, we have to fight against that tooth and nail.
MBunge
Given recent history, denying the effectiveness of moving the Overton Window is right up there with climate science denial. It’s time our side learned how to move it—i.e., that our “leaders” listen to progressives who do understand this stuff.
Does it ever occur to anyone that the very things that make the GOP so effective at messaging are the very same things that make them batshit insane? I don’t quite grasp how people can see the Republicans as reckless, stupid, irrational and evil, yet insist that imitating them is the key to a better world.
Mike
Frankensteinbeck
MBunge:
THISTHISTHISTHISTHIS.
NR
This is what happens when you have an “opposition” party that won’t fight the crazies, but rather dedicates itself to co-opting and endorsing as many of their policies as they can.
Danny
Another thing that strikes me is that we all seem to agree that the teabaggers are crazy, irresponsible and unfit to govern; perhaps on the verge of plunging the world economy into a crisis.
Yet we’re envious and want to imitate them.
We want to both condemn the thug who puts a gun to our head and robs us of our money, but at the same time we want the power that he gets by putting the gun to our heads. But we’re pretending that whatever public disgust that is in store for the thug wouldnt come to us if we adopted the same methods.
What we’re seeing from the right atm is a conservative movement that’s grown pathological. John McCain was on the telly a while ago and created headlines that said he thought the baggers were lunatics.
Sure, we should be moving Overton windows, but not like they’re doing it atm. It’s the deranged tail wagging the dog. And they’re gonna pay in the court of public opinion. If not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow.
What we need to “get” is that the republicans are powerful – not because they’re following some emoproggers proposed playbook (they aren’t) but because they have built up independent institutions that are more effective in getting messages to the american people (not to Daddy Obama). And they’ve crowded the village with an army of Grima Wormstails. On top of that they’re bankrolled by big biz. And on top of that they won the last election.
We cant fix all that today, that’s frustrating so we’re susceptible to pitches to buy snake oil.
But while Erick Eriksson knows fifteen times more about moving overton windows, being effective and leading a movement than e.g. Jane Hamsher, what he’s up to at this moment is working hard to make the republicans look like clowns. We don’t need to emulate that even if they manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by some miracle in this particular fight.
The movement conservatives have devolved into faith driven high stakes gamblers, and such people tend to lose in the long run. The only thing they got going for them is the factors I outlined above: institutions, village clout and backing from the galtians.
We have neither – we cant afford to be as reckless as they are.
gwangung
Yeah, pretty much this.
Leaving it up to just established institutions, like political parties, is just another form of authoritarianism. You have to have multiple channels with an array of similar, but not identical, messages.
Hard? You bet. But leaving it up to just one or a few handful of institutions may actually leave it vulnerable to gatekeeping.
Danny
@33 mind melt
Danny
@37
A clarification: I meant “independent” mostly in the sense “not explicitly ( R ) branded” – like Limbaugh, Cato, etc… But we’re pretty much on the same page.
AnotherBruce
Overton window. Wouldn’t it be great if a Democratic leader talked about lowering the eligible age for Social Security if one wanted to take an early retirement? This would decrease the size of labor pool and make more jobs available. Or how about increasing SS benefits by 10%? Would the older Republican voters rethink their support? I don’t know because the Democrats are always playing defense, and never offense.
Danny
@40
It would be hammered to pieces in the village because: Institutions, Grima Wormstongue, Galtian Overlords, 2010 midterms, and long term deficits projections are a real problem – in the long run (but not an imminent problem).
Hey, sometimes it’s tough to be the poor kid and have to look at the other kids getting a pony. But that’s what we are, the poor kid. Since about ’68.
That doesnt mean the situation is not about to change. I think it’s changing, right now.
But if we bet everything on get-rich-quick plans because we cant stand our current predicament, well chances are we’re gonna be on the corner selling dope or ourselves.
NR
Yep. The biggest problem right now is that the Democrats have abandoned even the pretense of fighting for a progressive approach to economic issues. They’re pushing the false “austerity creates jobs” meme straight out of the right-wing playbook.
It’s one thing to take what you can get in the face of determined opposition. That’s politics, and most everyone on the left knows that a genuine jobs and stimulus program right now would be basically impossible thanks to the Republicans. But, that doesn’t excuse the Democrats’ claim that the present move toward austerity is the right way to go. By embracing right-wing policy, they’ve choked off any debate on actual effective solutions to our current economic problems. Thanks to the Democrats, the center of the debate right now is between the right and the batshit insane fringe right.
Danny
@42
And Milton Friedman coined the phrase “We are all Keynesians now”. Yet he helped move the Overton window to the right.
But you’re overstating your case. Democrats in the aggregate aren’t pushing “austerity creates jobs”.
cokane
John Keynes’ body lies a-mouldering in the grave
Tonal Crow
Rhetoric is fundamental.
Democrats tend to believe that effective persuasion consists of citing reasons that Democratic policies are better than Republican ones.
Republicans believe that you can make people cut their own throats if you consistently feed them the right rhetoric.
And the evidence says?
Time to join the reality-based community, Democrats.
Danny
WPost: Is McCain the Maverick back?
Tonal Crow
To clarify 45 (edit no workum), arguing from emotion is good rhetoric. Arguing from rationality is almost always bad rhetoric. Why? Because most people decide most questions mostly emotionally, with their reason trailing along to rationalize the decisions that their emotions make.
That’s why a good lawyer says
instead of
MBunge
“The biggest problem right now is that the Democrats have abandoned even the pretense of fighting for a progressive approach to economic issues.”
“The era of Big Government is over”.
Mike
ranger3
The current political crisis is almost entirely a result of the rise of the religious right which was a backlash against the sweeping social changes in the decades following WWII. The Born Again/Left Behind movement is the reaction of paranoid authoritarians to post modernism. Once the GOP consolidated these folks into their party infrastructure, the die was cast. The Tea Party insanity is the end result of this unholy marriage. There is simply no reasoning with this bunch. It is literally their religion. As far as they are concerned, Obama is in league with the devil. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
NR
Then why have they spent the last two and a half years talking about how great Republican policies are?
KCinDC
I can understand that there are a fair number of extremely wealthy folks who are in a position to profit immensely, à la Shock Doctrine, from an economic collapse. Someone’s who has lots of properly protected cash can buy up gobs of companies, real estate, government property, and such.
But sure there’s a much larger number of very wealthy but perhaps not quite as wealthy folks whose interests would be severely damaged by an economic collapse. So why are they being outvoted on the Hooverism?
NR
As bad as Clinton was, he was still better than Obama.
Clinton raised taxes on the rich. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
When the Republicans tried to cut Medicare, Clinton shut down the government. Obama proposed a “Grand Bargain.”
I’d take Clinton over Obama any day of the week.
NR
Mind you, I’m not singing Clinton’s praises here. He was working with Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security until the Lewinsky scandal derailed everything. I’m just saying that he was better than Obama has been.
Tonal Crow
@ranger3:
And ironically, most of the paranoid authoritarians are the most extreme kind of postmodernists, implicitly arguing that reality is what they say it is merely because they say it.
chopper
didn’t clinton sign off on 150 billion in cuts to medicare and medicaid?
Alex S.
Very nice postings, Danny.
Brachiator
@Ol’ Dirty DougJ:
If the GOP gets their way, there won’t be any such thing as climate science:
I’m pretty sure the Democrats in Congress and the Obama Administration will block this, but you can still see where the GOP is headed.
And if the GOP wins the White House the next time out, the anti-science and anti-rationality movement will make Dubya’s presidency look like the Age of Reason.
Chris
@ wrb,
I wouldn’t be nearly so concerned about that if what came out of Asia upheld democratic values, but right now, that’s not what China’s selling, and China’s still the big kid on the block.
Rational, modern economics in service to dictatorship. Me no likee.
Mnemosyne
Yep, nothing says “better than Obama” like signing off on Gramm-Leach-Bliley and other assorted crap legislation that got us into this mess in the first place.
But, hey, why look at reality and history when you can just blame the guy who’s in charge at the moment, amirite?
arguingwithsignposts
@Mnemosyne: don’t forget DOMA and DADT.
Yeah. I’d take Clinton over Obama any day of the week. /snark
wrb
Chris
And no matter how menacing our face paint or how stirring our chants we’ll fare no better than other primitive societies have when confronted with aggressive advanced ones.
Chris
“Confront?” I don’t think anyone’ll need to go that far. Just sit back and whistle and watch us go Soviet. Or Spanish Empire.
Honestly, part of me’s pinning hopes and prayers on India right now. God knows they have enough on their hands just with their internal problems, but they’re the only ones I can see in the future having what it takes to stand up to China. Assuming they’d be interested.
Quiddity
Tea Party influenced Republicans have moved away from conservative/Republican policy positions that they held as recently as 10 years ago. That includes the Heritage Foundation -style health care plan, Keynesian economics, global warming, and so on.
Republicans are in thrall to a movement, and it’s still moving. If history is any guide, when a movement breaks out of the boundaries of logic, empiricism, and social convention, it doesn’t stop. It builds to a frenzy.
And that’s what we are witnessing with this debt ceiling debate. Do not be surprised if in the coming days you read about even more radical proposals (constitutional convention, anyone?) from House Republicans.
Unfortunately, movements like the Tea Party – substantially helped by eccentric billionaires – while they eventually implode, they cause a lot of damage before doing so.
Danny
@Quiddity
Koch Bros: I-I-I-I-I-T-S A-L-I-I-I-V-E!!!
Faith driven high-stakes gamblers believing God’s got their back.
Doug@
You mean that there is really a reason to respond to these asshats? In these cases, believe me; ignorance is not only bliss, but it’s way better that responding….