I’ve been reading endless comparisons of the Tea Party with Occupy Together and nearly all of them end with some nonsense about the evils of polarizations and Our Republic’s need for teh centrism.
Let’s think about the policy ideas of people who now call themselves centrists, we’ll take the Kaplan editorial page as an example. You have support for preemptive wars and for the privatization/voucherization of Social Security and Medicare, you have opposition to traditional Keynesian economics and collective bargaining rights, you have acceptance of torture and indefinite detentions. Yes, on social issues, they’re more to the left — support for marriage equality, for example. But on the main economic/fiscal and foreign policy issues, they mostly embrace ideas that would have been far too right to have been considered mainstream 30 or 40 years ago.
I am no longer convinced that there is any meaningful distinction between the Serious Center and the Tea Party. Sure, the Village wouldn’t put us on the gold standard or force a massive treasury default or teach creationism in schools, but that’s about it.
Matt Yglesias, no liberal apparently a self-described liberal, at least, asks a very good question:
In retrospect, a lot of what’s happened in the developed world since 1980 seems to have been based on the logic that since the mixed economy with regulated markets and a welfare state has outperformed command and control socialism, then clearly a pure to free market purism will produce even better results. But what if the success of the mixed economy with regulated markets and a welfare state proves that we should endorse . . . a mixed economy with regulated markets and a welfare state? Just because one slice of pizza is delicious doesn’t mean you should eat the whole pie.
I think that one of the reasons western capitalism has been so stable is that it has tempered free-market purity with a social safety net. Another is that institutions like unions and a free press have given workers some reasonably peaceful means to push back against their Galtian overlords.
A lot of that may be gone soon. Unions are weaker than ever and national media is not only completely dominated by corporate interests but largely delivered by millionaires who naturally identify with others in their economic class.
I can see this all ending very badly.
WereBear
Yup. Because not only do they want to eat the whole pie, they will go to the next table and steal theirs.
Joel
Yglesias may be a technocrat, but he’s no less liberal than Ezra Klein or (better comparison) Nate Silver.
gnomedad
Yglesias sums it up nicely. Which leads to the question: Is there any real country the glibs hold to be outperforming the U.S. because it’s so Galt-licious? They kinda get pissed off if you bring up Somalia.
JWL
There is no “end”, and things are already bad.
Dougerhead
@Joel:
I will ask him if he identifies as liberal. I don’t think he does.
El Cid
We need to extend the need for moderation and centrism to many more areas of life, and get away from all this polarization.
For example, on the one hand, we have an armed robber who wishes to break into your home, steal what he can, and then shoot you dead.
On the other hand, we have you, and you do not wish this armed robber to break into your home, steal what he can, and then shoot you dead.
And yet with all this polarization, we have no way for the two sides to come together.
We endorse a policy of a moderate, centrist approach which takes a responsible outlook and also looks at what policy could actually pass given current armed robber lobby influence.
There will be no armed robbery and shooting of you unless there is a trigger reached when the desire of the armed robber to rob and shoot you passes a level to be set by the armed robber.
At that point, the armed robber will break into your home, but has to leave behind at least several items which could be stolen, although they may in fact be token items of emotional rather than monetary value, and though you will be shot by the armed robber, it will be recommended that he shoot you in an area more likely to lead to serious internal bleeding, though there will be no enforcement mechanism to ensure as much.
Maybe this way we can get beyond the ‘shoot you and take your money’ versus ‘don’t shoot me and don’t take my money’ extremism.
WereBear
@El Cid: Hey! Those armed robbers are anxiety-creators, and vital for making Big Pharma profits.
Ejoiner
I’m currently plowing through a book “1848” about the Great Year of Revolutions in Europe over a 150 years ago and, although many of the fine details differ, it is a very, very eerie read in today’s environment. Just replace the landed aristocracy with today’s corporate-finance-media lords and you realize that somethings never change!
Corner Stone
@Joel:
I find these a couple of very interesting goalposts to measure one’s “liberalness” against.
chrisd
Splitting the difference as a political philosophy: all the indulgence, none of the guilt.
eemom
when the radical priest come to get me released we wuz all on the cover of Newsweek.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
While thinking of themselves, and presenting themselves, as middle class, from David Gregory’s “this isn’t about the fat-cats, this is about people like you and me!” to Tim Russert’s undying fantasy (it outlived him) that he was a champion of blue collar values because he was from Buffalo. Erin Burnett, CNN’s latest stab at getting that Fox Lite demo they just know are out there somewhere, chided people for blaming Wall Street for the economic crisis, ’cause she knows those folks and they “try their darndest”.
Looking up Burnett’s actual quotes from February ’09, it was even worse than I remembered. It’s really astounding. Her example of a Wall St hero is self-made striver Steve Forbes.
DWG
Mix gross income inequality with egregious unfairness in policy, historically high unemployment, onerous debt, shriveling safety net, and a sense that no matter what you do, you cannot get ahead because the system is gamed against you–with a government that fails to see the urgency of the crisis and focuses its concern on the economic class least in need of aid—and you will have an explosion.
What will trigger it? When unemployment finally dries up for the chronically unemployed — expect some riots.
Chris
FOR FUCKING REAL?
How long did it take Yglesias to come to this “ooo, mixed economy! That’s interesting!” realization? The world leaders who shaped the post WW2 era had that exact thing figured out already. Here he comes sixty years later acting like he just discovered sliced bread…
El Cid
@WereBear: Armed robbers are merely serving the interests of their shareholders, i.e., themselves and or other criminals to whom they own money.
I’m tired of all these big policement soshullists trying to crack down on the little man who’s actually working hard to make a living and earn, well, at least, procure enough to fund a successful enterprise.
Whereas you with your government-protected property and body are no more than anchors around the necks of entrepreneurial small businesses.
jayjaybear
It seems like the Right has forgotten the reason for the Western social contract: to prevent total sokialist revolution. The New Deal saved our capitalist society by placating the 99% (as we’re calling it now) with real, tangible benefits that kept them from starving to death.
Today, that’s all water under the bridge and it’s apparently time to stop all that hobo-coddling so the people who really matter can suck up all of the economic rewards of living here.
I have a sick feeling that it won’t take much to trigger a massive reminding of the reasons for the New Deal, courtesy of the 99%…
El Cid
@Chris: I know. I marvel at the abilities of many writers to appear to believe that they are intellectually innovating by being convinced of something from longstanding arguments.
AA+ Bonds
The main difference as far as I can see is that the OWS movement is right, and the Tea Party is wrong.
That doesn’t mean the left is always the friendliest wing for the facts and what to do with them, but currently, the right brands itself as Fact-Free Since ’93 and acts as you’d expect.
Joel
@Corner Stone: That’s the world we live in.
AA+ Bonds
@Occupier:
^ Mods, please read this post, and then please ban this poster’s IP
Corner Stone
@El Cid: Couple questions. Can we at least negotiate down the amount of emotionally significant items to be left behind by the robber? Say maybe he takes the silver framed pictures of the child’s significant youth event, but leaves the DVD’s of youth sports clips.
And second, on the shooting part, do you think we can set up a system where we can at least be referred to the robber’s hospital/medical system so we can at least get them a referral fee for their trouble, and maybe a 10% off coupon for our follow up visit?
jayjaybear
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Malcolm Forbes’s son and heir, Steve Forbes? Has he ever actually made two bits through his own efforts?
MaximusNYC
Matt Yglesias is a liberal who knows how to speak neoliberalese. This seems to confuse some people.
His actual positions are almost always left of center (except perhaps on school reform). But he writes dispassionately rather than heatedly. Some leftists with reading comprehension issues are apparently thrown by this.
gnomedad
@Chris:
Or perhaps he means to say “well, DUH.”
Corner Stone
@Occupier: Good to see you again BoB.
Davis X. Machina
The widespread embrace by political elites, left and right, of the point of view in the Yglesias quote, helps to explain why, or at least describes how, the political left has entered a long-term secular decline all over the OECD countries, even when the left remained nominally in power. Blair’s Labour would be unrecognizable to Nye Bevan’s, Jospin was as energetic privatizer as Chirac. The SPD went all Clintonesque under Schröder.
Dougerhead
@AA+ Bonds:
I did.
Cassidy
By badly do you mean the bankstas and brokers running for their lives, pissing themselves in the hope they will make it to their yacht before the mob catches up? If so, we have different definitions of “badly”.
El Cid
They happily supported Reagan’s slaughterwars around the 3rd world and trumpeted the need to protect ourselves from the vast but mostly invisible Soviet menace threatening us by the powerhouses of Central America. You know, when we were fortunate to keep Nicaragua from building up a powerful air force of several planes which obviously could theoretically carry nuclear weapons to southern Florida, as otherwise the USSR would have no way of reaching such far-flung goals, or taking hostage the world’s best supply of bismuth, sending businessmen dependent upon Pepto-Bismol into the arms of other stomach-soothing medication.
They regretted the sloppy degree of bloodletting and the occasional snub to the foreign policy chieftains of the Congress, but they fiercely opposed any policies which seriously impeded these programs.
Including censoring entire sections out of the Iran-Contra Commission Report so as to create bipartisan harmony.
Dougerhead
@MaximusNYC:
The lack of any proofreading doesn’t help.
Corner Stone
Matt Yglesias is no more a liberal than EDK is. Peas:Pod.
MaximusNYC
So Chris and El Cid: Yglesias is not allowed to reiterate liberal arguments from the past? Is anyone?
I’m not sure what you’re faulting him for. Agreeing with you?
Did you think Matt just discovered the virtues of a mixed economy? Have either of you ever actually read his blog? This has been his position for years.
@Doug: Yeah, he badly needs a copyeditor.
Dougerhead
@MaximusNYC:
I like his blog, btw. I am not sure he should be considered liberal, though, or if he considers himself liberal.
Joel
@Corner Stone: Translated: “Yglesias disagrees with me on something, ergo, not a liberal”.
NCSteve
@chris and @Cid,
You’re both reading far too much into a rhetorical device. He’s not claiming to have discovered some new phenomenon or changing his position he’s doing the equivalent of “gosh, ya know, maybe the reason we keep having all these crazy summers is all that gosh darn C02 in the air. Somebody should look in to that.”
El Cid
@Davis X. Machina: Well, there was the remarkable coincidence between the ‘Right Turn’ in American politics from the late ’70s and the decisions of organized corporation power to attack the labor- and middle-class-gains of the New Deal to then. (Labor had tried to push to regulate outsourcing, which was apparently the final straw for the Cold War’s economic right / “anti-Communist” labor collusion.)
When the corporate community unites to publicly remake discourse and pursue favorable policies, there’s pretty much unanimous support among the establishment.
When necessary, the establishment centers of Democratic Party power will make sure to weaken or eliminate Democrats who oppose such a view. (I.e., USA*NAFTA, the largest corporate coalition ever assembled in its time, and the power of the President and conservative Democrats to pass the policy over and against majority Democratic opposition in both houses.) This not only works, it sets powerful precedents.
jl
A reposted comment due to a bad word I forgot to code correctly:
Yglesias, whatever you may think about him, is correct about the switcheroo that has been played.
I remember debates in grad school we had about free market reforms and deregulation that heated up as the Soviet Union fell apart.
Free market fanatic profs would advocate all sorts of stuff on the basis of their hyper logical tinker toy models. Other profs and most grad students would object. A common retort was ‘how can you look at the great wealth and opportunity produced by market economies and not say that free markets are good’.
The re retort was that the historical free market economies they celebrated as being so successful, were precisely the regulated semi s * s h * l * s t messes that they proposed to replace with their theoretical speculations.
Their re re retort was a usually a tantrum. Or threats that our career opportunities would go down into the dustbin of history if we kept talking like that.
Corner Stone
@Dougerhead: Looks like the comment is deleted, so I’m not sure if it was edited after I saw it. But the commenter was banned for that?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
in somewhat related news, I got an email from Elizabeth Warren
Anybody have any idea how to interpret those figures? I read something this morning that EW has about 50% name recognition in MA, and she has 11,000 contributors more than a year before the election. Sounds good to me, but I don’t know how it compares to a statewide/MA race
Corner Stone
@Joel: Shorter me: “I’ve actually read MattY.”
Maude
@Corner Stone:
Now you see him, now you don’t.
AA+ Bonds
The Republicans have pushed popular policies, implemented by our most popular president, to the far left of the political spectrum in America.
One likely result, the one we’re seeing now, is the reidentification of Americans at large with the left when needs must. Those programs are popular for good reason.
Occupy Wall Street was preceded by polls that, since 2008, have shown a precipitous drop in people’s favor for terms like “finance” and “Wall Street”. The negatives for “capitalism” are at record highs since such surveys began (that is, since Karl Marx sent them out in the 19th century).
This doesn’t mean a Marxist America, of course. What it means is an America that sees capitalism without rose-tinted lenses. What it means is that America desires the return of real, regulated American capitalism, and the demolition of the anti-American piracy of the right.
They want an end to rewards for the screw-everyone philosophy that led Charles Koch to write Friedrich Hayek to convince him to collect Social Security benefits.
El Cid
@NCSteve: I’m not — I was a loyal reader of Yglesias and got bored, frankly, at the continual pushing of trivial observations along with continual suggestions of what views were just too unrealistically liberal. This is a long-term observation.
MaximusNYC
@Dougerhead: Well, he works for the Center for American Progress, which “seeks to provide a forum that advances progressive ideas and policies.” If Yglesias is not a progressive, someone should let his employer know.
I think the dry, wonkish style of Matt’s arguments is a useful counterpoint to the more hot-blooded stuff found in much of the lefty blogosphere. It may be especially useful in a place like DC, where only right-wingers are allowed to be excitable.
Villago Delenda Est
The social issues (racial tolerance, sexual tolerance, lack of obedience to the voices in your head that claims he’s your invisible sky buddy) is what makes the media “liberal” in the eyes of the so-called “conservatives”.
They don’t even look at the economic side, or how the MSM fights very hard to maintain the economic status quo at all costs.
That doesn’t even enter the fucked up brains of the “conservatives”.
cleek
@MaximusNYC:
i stopped reading his blog after reading one too many glib posts urging the deregulation and abolition of licensing requirements for various occupations.
AA+ Bonds
@MaximusNYC:
Yglesias is the sort of boring that is instant death to any movement, that’s for sure.
Dougerhead
@Corner Stone:
Yes.
Linnaeus
Funny thing to me is that Schlesinger’s “vital center” would be labeled as downright socia1ist now, even though Schlesinger was positioning a “vital center” against both laissez-faire and socia1ist economic systems.
eemom
what did “Occupier” say?? Damn, ya gotta at least give us ALL a chance to be outraged.
Roger Moore
Herman Cain would beg to differ.
Dougerhead
@eemom:
He said Occupy Together women were fat.
Judas Escargot
This TPM Blurb needs more traction, IMO. There are high-level government functionaries finally willing to say the truth on the record now: The GOP’s antics are breaking the country.
Gates (a Bush appointee) is arguably the least political SecDef we’ve had in decades. But he also knows, more than anyone, how this broken Congress is interfering with the basic functions of government.
I suppose the drones at WaPo and Pravda on the Hudson will just declare Gates, Bernanke, Biden and the rest as DFHs, not worthy of consideration, and move on to the next cocktail party…
Arrik
@Cassidy:
Yes, I agree that many of these Galtians and their media shills would look nice rolling down the street in a tumbrel. (Image courtesy of Roy at Alicublog.)
El Cid
@Corner Stone:
These may not be unreasonable points, but I think it’s harmful to public interest to begin screaming about policy specifics when we haven’t yet heard the result of the Armed Robbery Regulation and Stability Commission. Such a respected body comprising a majority of Armed Robbers and Armed Robber supporters should first be given a chance.
Personally, I would think it enough government intervention to suggest to would-be entrepreneurial property reclamation enterprises that they leave behind some or all of the photos encased with desirable frames.
However, increasingly these photos are stored and presented on valuable LCD-display photoframes, and are therefore more considered valuable investment instruments.
On the medical care situation, probably we should first start with a tax deduction for medical care for armed robbers who may be injured in their business ventures; it’s not uncommon for them to occur serious cuts and scrapes in the commission of their business ventures.
Automakers and repair shops have also been leading with proposals for tax deductions on vehicle depreciation, damage repair incurred while fleeing, and for the purchase of new work vehicles.
For the homeowner, it seems somewhat unfair that they would fail to have access to similar tax deductions, but at some point people have to pay for their decisions to place hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of property in such easily burgled areas.
I blame Fannie and Freddie.
Ruckus
I can see this all ending very badly.
Right now, I can’t see it ending any other way. I wish I could, but no.
If you don’t agree then please explain how I’m wrong.
I have no faith in my government any more. I haven’t had a lot of faith for quite a number of years but it diminishes by the day. I have no faith in a large number of my fellow citizens to recognize their roll in humanity. I am seeing that number seeming to shrink. A little, but every bit helps. Most of my life I have been an optimist but that is fading.
I hope like hell that I’m wrong.
I am the 99%
AA+ Bonds
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’m not so sure about that. I read right-wing media every day (do you? you should) and, without statistics at hand, I’d still assert that FoxNews.com has moved a bit away from gays/abortion/Satan in the last year or so, and toward more stories on union thugs and the virtues of the wealthy.
I think conservatives are very concerned about economic issues right now (just look at 2011 numbers on the Paul campaign compared to previous years, or Cain’s numbers now, to see that reflected).
Further, they’re being manipulated to “care” more about their own paranoia, because the money behind the Republicans/Fox News (and it is the same money) understands that growing support for organized labor and growing anger at Wall Street are threats to its power.
@Dougerhead:
:D Good eye!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Judas Escargot:
I suspect there are a great many prominent Republicans who walked away–Chuck Hagel, John Warner, William Cohen–who agree, but they don’t have the guts to meaningfully fight their own party
Cat Lady
I would love to see OWS adopt the Gadsden Flag, carry signs of Lloyd Blankfeld and Jamie Dimon in Louis XVI wigs complete with moles, and wear some revolutionary war era costumery (no teabags stapled to heads, kthx), just to see how the media idjits pretzel themselves into contortions to explain how Tea Party- Serious! OWS – Not Serious! With the winter coming, may I suggest the Revolutionary War costume resemble Washington’s army in Valley Forge, just for that extra touch of verite for the cameras.
Villago Delenda Est
@AA+ Bonds:
Yeah, but the MSM is on the side of the top 1%.
As far as the teatards are concerned, that doesn’t change the “liberalism” of the MSM. Because they do not hate on the brown, do not hate on the gay, are not outraged that sluts are able to avoid pregnancy with contraception, they are LIBERAL.
That the MSM is in the pocket of the 1% on economic matters does not matter. They’re still LIBERAL.
gogol's wife
@Dougerhead:
I find that a little strange, given what some commenters are allowed to go on and on about (jwest, reality check, etc.) I wasn’t fond of the comment, but why was it so bad compared to other things that get said here?
Joel
@cleek: I will say this; Yglesias’ cab driving and barbershop fetishes annoy the crap out of me. But everyone annoys the crap out of me at some point or another.
Wag
@Dougerhead:
…and here I am, late to the show, wondering what entertainment I missed.
AA+ Bonds
@MaximusNYC:
I’m not exactly sure how “only right-wingers are allowed to be excitable” means that unexciting quasi-liberals are the left’s Last, Best Hope.
Certainly Yglesias gets a small group of smarty liberals hard, but I don’t think he’s a realistic route to control of Washington. A much better model? Elizabeth Warren – accomplished, intelligent, personable, and passionate.
AA+ Bonds
@Villago Delenda Est:
Oh, I agree there. I just wouldn’t subscribe to the idea that those cultural issues are what motivates the Republican base anymore.
I think that might have been true in the 1990s but is less true now – the nutty Bircher conspiracy of imminent Communism, secretly behind the hunt for the Clintons, went mainstream around 2008. The wedge issue now is whether any given figure is a Communist, a secret Communist, or a Republican.
Judas Escargot
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
No arguments here. But I still don’t understand– those men are all rich, safe, and set-for-life. None of them is ever going to have to face the voters again. Their books would still sell. They’d still get invited to speak on tv, just on different networks. In fact, one could argue that it could be an excellent ‘rebranding’ move on their part (ie if it really is all about the money… they’d make more money!).
So what are they so afraid of?
harlana
HERB says that all those OWS protesters are just jealous cause they don’t have jobs on Wall Street.
Nutella
If we had an adequate press (heh) then everyone who claimed to take a centrist position would be checked against the actual positions of the US public as shown by polls since a position held by a small minority is obviously not centrist.
Then centrist positions would include getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; keeping and strengthening Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; and raising taxes on the rich. Those all are preferred by more than half of Americans.
Dougerhead
@gogol’s wife:
I’m not so keen on “no fat chicks” type misogyny.
El Cid
@AA+ Bonds: In general someone shouldn’t assume that if a reader doesn’t care much for Yglesias, then he or she isn’t reading actual policy analysis sites and writers. There really are lots of sources of ‘sober’ analysis (and that includes writers and sites which someone who likes reading Yglesias might consider ‘extreme’ or over-excited).
AA+ Bonds
@Cat Lady:
I think this is a good idea.
@El Cid:
Amen to that. Naked Capitalism, Zero Hedge, Paul Krugman, Brad Delong, the eXiled – if one of these outlets pisses you off, there’s someone else on that list who agrees with you, and compared to all of them Yglesias is dry as dirt.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think a lot of it comes down to personal relationships. Barbara Boxer campaigned for Joe Lieberman. I can’t really fathom that mindset. Also, the refusal to believe that Republicans, especially TP Republicans, are what they say they are is deeply rooted in the Village’s collective psyche. “John McCain may have tried to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Presidency, but he’s not the sort of person who would put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Presidency.”
El Cid
@Nutella: This would have proven (in fact did) that Ronald Reagan’s policies were broadly and often severely unpopular, though this doesn’t predict what the hell’s in people’s heads when they’re voting.
Davis X. Machina
@El Cid: You also saw, right across the OECD, again, successful attempts, by players within as well as outside the parliamentary left, to use culture-war issues to splinter what were increasingly coalition-lefts, the largely trades-union-based lefts of the inter-war period, and the 50’s, slowly giving way to the point where by the late ’80’s the chances were greater that a Labour voter would be white-collar than blue, even controlling for the changing nature of the workforce.
Not all the Reagan Democrats were Democrats…
TooManyJens
Yglesias begs to differ on the “no liberal” tag: http://twitter.com/#!/mattyglesias/status/123468690359451648
geg6
@Joel:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Funniest joke I’ve seen on the interwebs today.
Oh, wait. You weren’t joking. Sorry dear, but Matty Y is NOT a liberal. A libertarian, yes. A liberal, no.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Judas Escargot:
Wild speculation based on no data: social-shaming by their socioeconomic peer group. They’d no longer get invited to the right sort of cocktail parties. And when you get to be to the advanced age of these folks there really isn’t much else left to make life worth living, despite what Bob Dole may have told you on the TV about a certain medical product.
El Cid
Just to clarify, I don’t hate Yglesias or find every single thing he writes awful or objectionable, etc. There are simply too many things available to read online every day for me to choose those I don’t find entertaining or regularly enlightening. For example, there’s a whole lot of foreign press to read everyday, teaching you far more than any number of preferred US bloggers.
MaximusNYC
@AA+ Bonds: I didn’t say Yglesias was liberalism’s “last best hope” for control of DC. I just think his voice and style are useful.
I also think the more passionate and populist style found elsewhere on the left (e.g., this blog, which is my favorite daily read) is useful.
Neither are wrong.
AA+ Bonds
@TooManyJens:
I think Yglesias is a certain kind of quasi-liberal, the kind who should be crunching numbers for someone else instead of bloviating uselessly about his opinions in a style presumably designed to alienate most Americans.
The best thing about his bizarre anti-regulatory stances is that most people on Earth won’t make it past the second sentence of anything he’s written.
@MaximusNYC:
Yglesias would probably be best cut out for a trade paper aimed at a small circle of policy nerds on the center-left, which is pretty much what he operates. I think he’s found the outer bounds of his usefulness as a ‘dispassionate’ writer, and that was probably around three years ago.
For better options, we have to look elsewhere.
fasteddie9318
Here’s my question: has “this,” in all the many times we’ve seen “this” occur throughout human history, ever not ended badly? I’m all for guitars not guillotines, but I can’t figure an episode like the one we’re in that hasn’t ended with lots of dead folks and a maniacal leader or two who needed to be put down. American exceptionalism is nice and soothing to think about in situations like this, but that doesn’t make it true.
pete
@geg6: Pretty please can we stay away from (a) Manichaean fallacies, (b) the linguistic picking of nits and [c] the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
aisce
@ aa+ bonds
ahem. i believe what you meant to say is that you’re glad that professional pundits like yglesias and organizations like cap exist and support the common welfare, and that maligning potential allies is counterproductive to the movement.
where did your solidarity cheerleading disappear to? 2012! we gotta stick together and march with one common voice and purpose, remember?
if you’re gonna insist on acting like an obnoxious fuckwit, i have to insist you not be a hypocritical one who throws his happy together talk out the window in the face of…”boring.” get it together.
/shorter me: god, you suck.
Barry
@El Cid:
“@Chris: I know. I marvel at the abilities of many writers to appear to believe that they are intellectually innovating by being convinced of something from longstanding arguments.”
I’ve frequently felt that Matt was a data point in favor of the theory that Harvard doesn’t educate undergrads, just helps them network.
geg6
@cleek:
Yes, this.
Samara Morgan
the Tea Party is top down, funded by the corporatists.
as we can easily observe, the Tea Party requires ideological purity.
Anonymous and the owies, OTOH, require only a temporary alignment on a single facet. That is the genius and the strength of the paradigm.
MBunge
Yglesias may be liberalish in affect but it’s hard for me to believe anyone actually thinks he’s a liberal for real. Being an urbanist whose libertarian tendencies stop at inconveniencing yourself does NOT make one a liberal.
Mike
Cacti
@WereBear:
And if they can only have 7 slices of a pie rather than all 8, they’d rather take a dump on the pie so nobody can have any of it.
slag
@Dougerhead: He did characterize himself as a liberal in one of his more recent posts. Though I can’t remember which one, I remember him doing it.
Dougerhead
@aisce:
Next pointless rant from you has some redeeming quality or I’m putting you in time out.
You’re not adding much here.
Dougerhead
@MaximusNYC:
I like Yglesias, to be clear. I thought he did an official break with liberalism or I never was a liberal post when he was talking about licensing all the time, but I guess not. He did say something along those lines about doing more libertarian posts but I guess I must have read too much into it.
Barry
@MaximusNYC: “His actual positions are almost always left of center (except perhaps on school reform). But he writes dispassionately rather than heatedly. Some leftists with reading comprehension issues are apparently thrown by this.”
Did you bother to read what Dougerhead wrote?
AA+ Bonds
@aisce:
That’s right, 2012. I’m concerned with today’s left, not the left of 2006. Step it up, you’re falling behind.
Tony J
‘Both Sides Do It’ doesn’t just happen by itself or grow out of professional dedication to an unbiased review of reportable facts. It takes work.
Two years ago the MSM chose to see and present the TEA Party as a genuine, grassroots movement of mostly middle-aged, middle-class, small-c conservative voters willing to get off their backsides and unite in bipartisan opposition to what they saw as the Obama Administration’s dangerously left-wing policies on Health Care Reform.
It took about a year and a mid-term election for the MSM to grudgingly accept, but not openly acknowledge, that the TEA Party was a corporate-funded movement of far-right, big-k Konservative voters who were all Republicans and opposed to the Obama Administration’s dangerously Democratic policies on absolutely everything, full-stop, period.
By ignoring, mocking and nutpicking the OWS movement into a frame of ‘Leftist TEA Party wanabees’, they’re not only proving that – they – can learn from their mistakes, but they’re challenging Democrats to disown the protestors and prove that their initial, ‘evidence-free’ dismissal of the TEA Part wasn’t just partisan business as usual.
See? Balanced.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@fasteddie9318:
Depends on how bad it has to get before we reach the definition of “badly”. IMHO the US socio-political system between 1900 and 1950 did about as close to an optimal job of correcting the excesses of industrial capitalism without going thru large piles of rotting corpses as you are ever going to get, and even then it took 50 years, some extraordinary individuals turning up in just the right place at the right time, and a lot of luck in the form of factors external to the US pushing that change in a favorable direction. To me that means theoretically we could do it again today, but the odds are long on it happening that way.
TooManyJens
@AA+ Bonds: Not really arguing — I haven’t read the guy in many years — but Doug was wondering whether he identifies as a liberal. Apparently he does.
geg6
@pete:
Matt Y, no matter what he claims, is a libertarian. Read anything he’s ever written about teachers, schools, barbers and beauticians, cab drivers, and on and on and on and on…it’s all your typical libertarian boilerplate, fancied up by Matty Y’s Harvard credentials and horrific grammar and spelling. But it’s little different than anything you’d read at McArdle’s, or the Fonzie of Freedumb’s, or any other libertarian site. He’s not a wonk in anyone’s mind but his own, AFAICT. I read his stupid shit for years and finally got so fed up with it that I deleted it from my favorites about two years ago. Haven’t missed it one bit. I still, amazingly, understand population density and all kinds of other esoteric things. And my blood pressure thanks me.
AA+ Bonds
@TooManyJens:
I stopped reading him regularly when he endorsed the Wittgensteinian fly-bottle, which is sort of like a Harvard undergrad endorsing the end of the capital gains tax – not only is he wrong, but no one should believe him anyway. That must have been something like 2003. Everything I’ve happened across of his since has been either extremely boring or generally wrong.
Linda Featheringill
@Dougerhead:
misogyny by occupier:
I get the impression that occupier’s comment meant more than I perceived at the time. That’s entirely possible.
Chris
Fasteddie @ 81: yes, it was called the New Deal. But since the MOTU didn’t learn that lesson, guess the future’s up in the air again.
eemom
@Dougerhead:
wow. No more Mr. Nice Dougerhead.
May I suggest you do the same if toko-loko hijacks the thread with bullshit about fucking Anonymous? GOD, she is tedious.
fasteddie9318
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
There’s also the tiny matter of the complete breakdown of society in Europe during that same period as a result of the same excesses, with some fairly horrific outcomes for all concerned. I view America’s ability to come out of that period relatively unscathed as more a function of the fact that there are winners and losers from every catastrophe than as a great success story.
Bruce S
Social democracy – to varying degrees – IS in historical terms “the center.”
The peculiar political position of, on the one hand, ideological social democracy being tagged as “the left” and, on the other, liberals and social democrats holding political power and managing government being “the establishment” is a tribute to what one would broadly term social democracy’s rather stellar success in the West. The politics have become much more complicated than anticipated and the social contract less “binding” than anticipated. Globalization is one big factor in opening the door for corporate power to regain overwhelming hegemony, along with a subversive political strategy that dates back to the beginning of the ’70s when Lewis Powell wrote his notorious memo to the Chamber of Commerce about how to turn the New Deal, etc. around. I have to give the bastard credit in that his “plan” drew their attention, was inve$ted in heavily by the Forces of Evil and worked brilliantly almost to the letter.
fasteddie9318
@Chris:
The eventual global recovery from the Great(er) Depression came at unspeakable, and horrific, cost. That cost was borne unevenly, sure, but it was still there.
Bill E Pilgrim
“What if”? Since we know that deregulation of markets led to complete disaster, we already have the answer to why a non-regulated Galtian free-market model is a failure.
The simple fact is that we are nowhere near a soc ialist system, never were, and have become farther and farther from one over the past decades. Those of us living in near-soc ialist systems can attest to this if no one else can, it’s freaking obvious.
This is all doth protest too much territory, the cries of “we’re becoming soc ialist!” are the cover under which they’ve turned us into the farthest thing from it. It’s like the claim of “liberal media!”, heard non-stop as the media actually slid more and more to the extreme right.
Sly
It’s not like the WaPo editorial page is the vanguard of the gay rights movement.
They’re tepidly liberal on issues they don’t care about, and insistently conservative on issues they do care about. That isn’t centrism, that’s conservatism. Their goal, and the goal of much of the political press, is to be conservative without seeming conservative. Centrism gives them that air of respectability.
Not just tempered. You can’t have western capitalism without a safety net. It’s the grease that keeps everything working smoothly.
Joel
@Judas Escargot: Losing their friends. A lifetime of politics means that everything you’ve built in your life is based on the politics you’ve chosen. To turn your back on that is to turn your back on your career, friends, etc.
Dougerhead
@eemom:
I’m not banning her, she may get the occasional time out. She has written interesting comments before, someone has to be 0 for life or cross certain boundaries (I banned Church Lady for going after that woman in Seattle that Weiner junk-tweeted) to get a ban, at least from me. aisce or whatever his name is is 0 for life here.
Dougerhead
@aisce:
You’re gone, no time out, straight to blacklist. That’s at least 50 comments in a row that are just pointless insults.
geg6
@Linda Featheringill:
Sounds to me like Occupier is a well-know racist, misogynistic BJ troll who has an obsession with the idea that all left leaning women are fat and ugly and all rightwing women are the most beautiful and desirable in the world. And with making pizza in his back yard or something.
I know BJ doesn’t do permanent bans (I don’t think so, anyway), but if anyone here would have deserved it, it’s that particular troll. I’ve never seen anyone here as offensive as he could be.
Dougerhead
@geg6:
We do permanent bans. I don’t do IP bans though so they’re not that permanent in effect.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@fasteddie9318:
Yes, but the US was already set onto a more progressive path during TR’s administration, i.e. well before the First World War, much less the Second. So while I think you can make a pretty good case that WW2 in particular accelerated the building of progressive policies and institutions here in the US, we might have gotten there without it. IMHO WW1 is more of a mixed bag in terms of legacy: it gave us both the income tax and the Palmer Raids, to put it in the most simplistic fashion possible. The relationship between the domestic political economy of the US and the Euro-centric imperialist system on the eve of the Great War is an almost unfathomably complex topic, so I don’t know how far this rabbit hole I want to go, but you’re welcome to do so.
pete
@geg6: I don’t care what box you put M.Y. (or anyone else) in. I am open to agreeing with or disagreeing with anyone, irrespective of the label they prefer, or the label their opponents choose to give them.
And remember, “liberal” used to be an insult, meaning one who was co-opted by the establishment. Time to bust out the old Phil Ochs (not the best verse of the song but the most appropriate right now):
eemom
@Dougerhead:
ah. I wondered what happened to Church Lady.
Must admit I got kind of a kick out of her. She was just SUCH an insufferable bitch.
Dougerhead
@eemom:
I think I just spam-listed her so she could come back if she emailed us. She really went after that woman in Seattle, though, and I just can’t tolerate that. I found her fairly amusing in general, even if 3/4 of her posts were straight trolls.
Samara Morgan
@eemom: Crone, Anonymous IS occupywallstreet.
along with many other things.
:)
Cat Lady
@ Dougerhead:
Please don’t ban the Wrong Way Chicken Little John Doom Galt Cole guy. I think he’s fucking hilarious. Weirdly obsessed, but hilarious.
eemom
@Samara Morgan:
no it isn’t, you little idiot.
Generally I tolerate you pretty well, but that statement is just stupid beyond belief.
DFH no.6
@AA+ Bonds:
I agree.
The large issues for the fascists in the 2012 campaigns (especially the presidential) will not be “God, guns, gays” or any other “culture war” bullshit.
Oh, sure, the redneck, real-Murican “values” and racism will always be there – it’s who these people are. Some of that shit (like the anti-immigrant state laws being contested in court by Obama’s administration) will play a part, but it will be minor.
Instead, the rightwing media is, as you say, busily preparing the ground to be fought on the economic front, and in many ways (debt and deficit, anyone?) have already won the framing battle.
El Cid
@Barry:
I think I recall repeated friendly little mentions of Megan McAddled, and I once again sniffed that stink of friendly little in-groups among the self-regarding.
It doesn’t have to be just Harvard, though; there are so many highly famed academic programs which are just as accomplished at turning out desired proteges with peer networks as they are actual scholars.
But then, that’s in part their purpose — we really do have an overclass-dominated government and political system, and whether or not they use this sort of blunt language (sometimes, not usually though), there must be a system capable of cranking out well-socialized policy experts to staff the vast numbers of positions needed.
It doesn’t mean a rigid cranking out of individuals with equivalent views, but continually cranked-out cohorts of those accustomed to being selected for notable positions whatever their actual accomplishments, which could be great or embarrassingly bad.
Samara Morgan
@Dougerhead: you do timeouts.
piratedan
@Tony J: tyvm for this…. it shows that the Right side doesn’t just use its idiots well as visual cannon fodder, they leave their genius sociopaths in charge where they can do the most damage. Really makes it hard to root these bastards out because at the very core, they’ve managed to seduce a small cadre of very smart nihilistic types that are quite capable of doing their bidding and damn near all of them are in the media.
Samara Morgan
@eemom: OpOccupywallstreet was originally an Anonymous franchise.
Like OpBart and OpFacebook.
Do you want the links?
Dougerhead
@Cat Lady:
I won’t ban anyone where there’s redeeming value to what they write, unless they do something way overboard.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Dougerhead: I’ll send you an address to which you can ship my replacement keyboard.
Samara Morgan
Listen and learn, juicers.
fasteddie9318
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I don’t think you need to go down a rabbit hole to see that economic conditions for the average person got bad worldwide in the first half of the 20th century and, while America may have escaped direct consequences for the most part, it ended badly. There were no guillotines in the literal sense, but it really did end quite badly. I don’t look to the Great Depression and recovery as a historical model for how to come out of economic troubles peaceably and, like I said originally, I don’t think such a historical model exists.
Chuck Butcher
People like to point to TR as some sort of reformer without looking at what was facing this Republican son of wealth and power in the nation. There isn’t anything nearly comparable going on today other than the dislocation/concentration of wealth. The nation was on the verge of going up in flames thanks to the outright warfare between the plutocrats and labor/”anarchists”. I don’t mean loud complaining by warfare, I mean guns, fires, and murder under cloak of judiciary. Sanitized junior high school American History isn’t useful to understanding what has been and is going on. You might note that even at that date the modest TR “reforms” got him kicked from the GOP…
Evan
Yglesias’s point about barbershops and cabs is that these are occupations that can be performed by people with little in terms of formal education, but because of certification and other artificial barriers can remain out of reach to poor people seeking to go into business for themselves. These artificial barriers persist because the benefits go to the stakeholders (existing cabs get constant fares because there is a shortage, e.g.) but the costs are spread out (haircuts are more expensive than they would be otherwise). He’s no libertarian, but he thinks that some regulations are harmful to a neighborhood/city/society, and they get ignored, so he’s trying to bring some attention to them.
And he can’t spell.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chuck Butcher:
Not sure if that comment is aimed at me, since you didn’t quote, but I’ve said repeatedly in comments here that one of the biggest differences between our era and TR’s is that today we don’t have a violent anarchist movement which threatened not only the stability of society at large but also and more importantly the personal safety of the plutocrats and their families. And I very much doubt that we’ll turn around our present troubles until things get just that bad again. But contra fasteddie9318’s comments at #102, 104 and 128, I don’t think a future large scale inter-state war and/or genocide is necessary. Those things might very well happen, but I don’t think they represent the only path we can take to reach a future society with greater economic justice. On the other hand, at this point I’m very pessimistic that there is any path which doesn’t involve violent anarchism.
Chuck Butcher
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Not you so much, but a decent reply was eaten by FYWP and I don’t have the energy. The driving force beyond “anarchistists” were the murder and other mayhem by the Oligarchs – murdering neighbors is rotten PR.
fasteddie9318
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I don’t think they’re “necessary” either, but they’re among the many possible “bad” potential outcomes from the situation we’re in, as compared to the, in my opinion, roughly zero “good” potential outcomes that remain. I don’t see any historical analogue to present circumstances where the ship was righted without violence.
jefft452
@Joel:
“Yglesias may be a technocrat”
No he aint
As to if he’s a liberal or not I agree with MBunge @87, but I wouldn’t bother to argue it.
On many topics (as diverse as education, agriculture or energy subsidies, city zoning , and professional licensing) he consistently ignores evidence and instead he goes with what he learned in philosophy class
That is just about the opposite of being a Technocrat
Cat Lady
@fasteddie9318:
Violence on who by whom, is the question? I worry about an analogue to the Amritsar massacre. Gandhi had the force of outrage and injustice on his side to conduct his non-violent campaign against the British and I don’t wish to see a repeat.
MBunge
@Evan: “Yglesias’s point about barbershops and cabs is that these are occupations that can be performed by people with little in terms of formal education”
And that point ignores that those professions do have certain requirements that the public would wish to know are being met. Such as cab drivers not having a history of drunk driving and what not, a situation that is infinitely easier to deal with through licensure than traditional law enforcement.
MattY isn’t totally wrong on rent-seeking behavior but like a college freshman who just took his first philosophy class, he’s incapable of putting his ideas into useful context.
Mike
Comrade Luke
@Evan:
As opposed to political pundit?
DanielX
@AA+ Bonds: All too true. In the not too distant past, there has been some commentary from “sensible” and not so sensible pundits recognizing that the inmates have taken over the asylum, the asylum being the Republican party. (See Brooks, David, Will, George, Sullivan, Andrew, etc.) Blinding flash of the obvious, since it’s only been happening for the last thirty years or so. But there was some recognition that Tea Party ideology and its true believers were not exactly the best option for the country as a whole.
However…this 99% versus 1% business? THAT is something that truly gives them a case of the red posterior, and defending the interests of the 1% is a cause they can truly get behind….because in many cases they are part of the 1%. I would be truly surprised if George Will, to name one obvious example, gets paid less than a quarter mil a year (probably a good deal more) for the drivelings that he spews forth, and I’m sure he feels that he earns every penny of it. So it’s easy for him to say on the one hand that Republican unwillingness to compromise on the debt limit is a problem, and on the other that Elizabeth Warren is next thing to a Commie for advancing the idea that those in the 1% ought to pay more taxes, because they have obtained more of the blessings of living in this here US of A.
jefft452
@MBunge:
“And that point ignores that those professions do have certain requirements that the public would wish to know are being met”
Yes, and this is pointed out to him countless times in his own comment section
And he ignores it completely
Corner Stone
@DanielX:
George Will wouldn’t wipe his dick on a $250K dollar bill.
Tony J
@piratedan:
If anything it’s worse than than. The smart, nihilistic types aren’t in the Media, they’re in the much more profitable Lobbyist business where they rake in millions of dollars leveraging tens of millions of dollars in donations into political influence for their employers. The cover and support provided for them by the Media doesn’t – need – smart people, it just needs a constant supply of cravenly opportunistic backstabbers who will write or say anything Editorial tells them to if it means they get to draw a nice paycheck and go to the right parties.
Put it this way, the current menagerie of GOP candidates is so weak – because – the real power in the Republican Party doesn’t rest with the politicians, or the media spokesmen, or the rabid base, or the big money donors. It rests with the smart, nihilistic SOBs who co-ordinate it all from behind a wall of money and great lawyers. What they’re selling is so clearly ridiculous that no one with ambitions beyond 2012 wants to be associated with it. The big names are sitting this one out and leaving the space for the true-believers, the one-shot chancers, and the perennial wanabees to ride that tiger.
IMHO the TEA Party was such a fraud because it was (a succesful) effort to pre-empt the quite genuine wave of disgust and scorn many proto-Teabaggers felt for their own Party’s economic mismanagement, and the resulting bail-out of Wall Street and the Banks, by providing a convenient vehicle to direct that anger at the usual suspects. What could have been an ideological split between the GOP base and its political wing was stitched back together and turned into a resentment industry by letting the rabid base set the tone for a few years.
It wasn’t the politicians or the media that did that. It was a number of well-mannered, well-prepared, well-paid professionals sitting down in a room and dispassionately weighing up resources and capabilities, then forming a short-term plan to manage the problem in the most profitable way possible. Now the Teabaggers are starting to look around and realise they got played, but there’s an election coming, and who are they going to vote for anyone but the Republican when it – really – comes down to it, regardless of the policies they’re asked to vote for?
And I’m waffling. But you get what I mean.
Chuck Butcher
@Tony J:
So what you’re talking about with the ‘baggers is co-opting. I’d say that this is one thing the OWS are trying to avoid. IF the OWS lasts, it will almost certainly get co-opted, and the process will involve the invocation of a lot of “laudable” goals – you know, like getting “x” re-elected/elected because “x” isn’t As Bad As.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Sadly, I have to concur with this bleak outlook. A responsible politician would realize that if we are to have a stable economy then we need counterbalances to the negative aspects of unbridled capitalism. Unfortunately there are very few responsible politicians left, definitely not enough to change the direction we are heading. Once a pol goes pro at the federal level, they have to make money and build power in an attempt to keep that position. The voters may put them there but the deep pockets can keep them there or buy some competition for them in the next election. Responsibility is not a high priority for an officeholder at the federal level, getting reelected is. This is what is going to lead to disaster.
We have few real statesmen in office. They are too busy getting theirs to care about statesmanship.
Bruce S
“George Will wouldn’t wipe his dick on a $250K dollar bill.”
Because it’s too small?
I mean his dick…
MBunge
@jefft452: “Yes, and this is pointed out to him countless times in his own comment section
And he ignores it completely”
Which is why I don’t consider MattY to be a technocrat. Technocrats certainly have their flaws but advocating policies simply because they like the way they sound is not one of them.
Mike
Robert Waldmann
This is genuinely odd. You argue that self described centrists agree with the Tea party. Steve Benen argues that they agree with Obama.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_10/has_thomas_friedman_met_barack032710.php
You might argue that the claim that Obama is a centrist is inconsistent with the facts that he ordered indefinite detention and the killing without trial of a US citizen far from war zones. But you can’t argue that he is a tea partier.
You provide no links for your claims that the Kaplan editorial board accepted torture or opposed Keynesian stimulus or collective bargaining rights. I don’t know if this is true (I can’t stand to read WaPo editorials). But uh [citation needed].
And how can you have failed to notice that Yglesias describes himself as a liberal ? What makes you question that self description ? The evidence you present is consistent with his claim. What exceptions have there been in the past 8 years ? He wants to pay some teachers more, he doesn’t think barbers should be licensed — neither is proof he is not a liberal. I write 8 years because he supported the invasion of Iraq, but he was very young then.
jayackroyd
I am so sorry I missed this yesterday.
What’s being missed, over and over again, is understanding that capitalism and free market competition is heavily dependent on regulation. This is a core message of Adam Smith, writing the first liberal tract, the Wealth of Nations. (I’m rereading that book now, and it’s even more liberal than I remembered.) The natural tendency of business owners is to form groups to operate collectively to lower wages and raise prices. Roosevelt’s Square Deal promised to break up those groups, those trusts, and enforce competition in those markets. Likewise, the New Deal enforced limits on commercial banking, creating a competitive environment of banks limited to operating in a single state. In the absence of such regulation, we’ve ended up with mega “banks” that are now completely entwined with the government–and not really in the private sector at all.
jayackroyd
@Robert Waldmann:
Matt’s a centrist. He denies it; on Virtually Speaking, in reference to health care reform, he said he’s a “socialist.” But, of course, you have to be realistic and work within the existing system. And so he supports Obama’s American Heritage/PPI/Daschle-Dole HCR plans.
This claimed pragmatism as justification for adopting policies that are not liberal–that see “reality” as consisting of large corporate stakeholders who must be preserved, even subsidized, in order to implement any policy.
The centrist democrats believe, like Matt does (and like Matt’s boss John Podesta does) that things are different now.
from http://bit.ly/oIGtnJ
This is the core centrist axiom–that the rules of a new globalized economy unfortunately don’t permit us to retain the regulatory regime and the social safety net of the New Deal. They’d LIKE to be liberals–they believe in liberal ideals, but it is simply unrealistic to believe that these shopworn policies can succeed in the new global environment.
That’s where Matt is, too. He’d like us to have a socialized medicine program, like Cuba (he actually said that–Cuba is the system he prefers) but you have to be practical.