I know nothing about psychology, but I’m guessing this proposition is hardly novel: people’s underlying motivations are often misunderstood, even (especially?) by themselves. This is why I can’t believe in rational markets, altruistic Galtians, or impartial pundits. Even if people believe they’re being rational, altruistic, or impartial, there’s a good chance that they’re not, and, to take it one step farther, their belief in their own rationality/altruism/impartiality may well indicate that they are merely delusional or narcissistic.
Atrios makes a good point apropos of the lock-out instigated by the mighty job-creators at the NBA:
Too often we assume that Homo Economicus is truly just motivated by the money, or more ridiculously the financial interests of the shareholders of the companies they run. The truth is, Our Galtian Overlords are frequently just assholes because they are assholes, not because being assholes will actually make them any richer.
Likewise, Charles Pierce translates Ruth Marcus’s cry of the wounded school-marm thusly:
“I are an actual journalist. Please note my concern for the First Amendment, a quaint notion that I believe applies to me and to the eight people I had dinner with last night, and not necessarily to potty-mouthed high-schoolers.”
Marcus most likely wants to silence “potty-mouthed” high-schoolers because their tweets in some way undermine her own her influence, whether she or not she admits it (or even knows it).
When I discuss the American political scene with tote-baggers, the notion they resist the most is that we should question our Galtian and Village overlords’ underlying motivations. When I tell them, for example, that the establishment wants to cut Social Security and Medicare simply because they enjoy fucking the middle-class over, they tell me I am insane. When I ask them what other motivation there could be for replacing a reasonably efficient government health-care system with a less efficient private health care system, they have no answer.
The Thin Black Duke
Bottom Line, the 1% are predators. The rest of us? Prey. It ain’t that complicated.
cervantes
When I ask them what other motivation there could be for replacing a reasonably efficient government health-care system with a less efficient private health care system, they have no answer.
Well I have an answer, and it’s pretty obvious, no? There are hundreds of billions in profits to be made, and the health insurance industry is one of the biggest donors to political campaigns and biggest lobbies. Politicians don’t generally do stuff because they feel like it, they do it because they know which side their bread is buttered.
MrCheesyPuff
Fucking the Middle Class is delicious, of course but the real reason is Milking the Middle Class. It pains the 1% that they spend so much on middle managers and they aim to take back as much as possible.
Walker
I just want to mention that tote-bagger has been used frequently in recent posts, is not in the lexicon, and I am not fully aware of that Internet tradition.
Comrade Javamanphil
@Walker: NPR listening “liberal” i.e. sensible liberals not DFHs
JGabriel
DougJ:
Bingo! Ding ding ding. This. Exactly.
Social Security is a pension tax that falls on the first ~$100k of income. For most people in the top percent, it’s less than a rounding error. Yet many of them still bitch about it like it’s half-ton yoke across the back of their neck. It’s just pure assholery.
.
Chris Gerrib
From a practical point of view, questioning why somebody does something takes the argument from what they did to why did they do it.
Proving why somebody did something is an order of magnitude harder than proving that they did something. It also allows the accused to attack their accuser’s motivations, instead of answering for their deeds.
slag
How does anyone live in the world and not see this?
It’s a mystery.
Linda Featheringill
@Walker:
My definition of a tote-bagger:
A person who is self-defined as liberal, who supports public broadcasting etc. [hence the tote bag] and other liberal causes, but carefully shies away from talking about anything close to class warfare.
Steve M.
I dunno — I think wanting to curry favor with zillionaires and smoke thousand-dollar cigars with them is motivation enough, no?
Frankensteinbeck
Cervantes:
This is exactly what’s being argued against, here. People act against their economic self-interest all the time. GOP voting blocks are based on that fact these days. The rich are not smarter or more rational than the common man, and have less to lose if they’re wrong. THEY have the security to operate out of spite and shortsightedness. Even those who don’t have trouble thinking past ‘This is what my gut wants right now.’
JGabriel
@cervantes:
But no, not really. Most people over 65 wouldn’t be able to get health insurance — we know this because many older people were not able to get health insurance before Medicare, accumulating age being the ultimate “pre-existing condition”.
Without health care, those people died. No profit motive there. Just assholery.
.
MikeJ
@Walker: There could be a whole thread of Jeff Foxworthy style definitions.
If you identify as a liberal and you think NPR is too, you might be a totebagger.
ereinion
but whether “they be ebiiiiil” or not is not the interesting question. people were evil before, yet we have had a radical flattening of social classes in the western world over the last two and a half centuries. how come that happened, and is now being reversed? it’s not because a small group of people became more or less predatory — it’s much more complicated than that. the motivation question is kind of boring.
geg6
@Frankensteinbeck:
This. THIS. THIS.
hamletta
@Chris Gerrib: I’m with you there. I don’t know why I do the things I do sometimes. I’m not comfortable speculating on anyone else’s motivations.
El Cid
The qualities of being assholes (and often sociopaths) are helpful in the ruthless pursuit of economic self-interest, including social acceptance and trust by other insanely greedy assholes and/or complete sociopaths.
It’s not an accident that so many of the super-rich have those sorts of skills deep in their blood — those behaviors are selected for.
It’s sort of a breeding program to produce high A.Q., a high Asshole Quotient in Galtian societies.
bin Lurkin'
@MikeJ:
This.
JPL
@JGabriel: The ultimate goal is to privatize profit and socialize loss. That’s the ultimate win for insurance if they privatize Medicare.
What happened to risk..
geg6
@MikeJ:
Heh. Lemme give that a try…
If you identify as a liberal and you think The New Republic is too, you might be a totebagger.
Hey! You’re right!
Kyle
I think this is an excellent point. And not to start an anti-religion flame war, but this point is why I don’t trust religious people. If they can convince themselves that that bronze age fairy tale is real and that there is some big guy in the sky watching their every move to make sure it praises him enough, then they can convince themselves of anything, including that “love the sinner, hate the sin” crap they roll out when they are being their most hateful.
cthulhu
One good book out there which discusses a lot of research in relation to human irrationality, and often involving consumer type decision is Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I read it years ago but the story of the creation of the “black pearl” market continues to stick with me above all other items in the book. There really are no perfectly “rational” markets and with all the overlying emotion involved, the healthcare market will absolutely never be close.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Walker: nominal liberals of the Reasonbale and (frequently) upper-middle class (or aspirational) variety who listen to, trust and give money to NPR (hence the tote bags) and think David Brooks is a Reasonable Conservative, Tom Friedman sure knows about foreign policy, and David Broder and Tim Russert were non-partisan, above-the-fray observers of our political scene.
Motivations are complicated, less so for the 1% than for the middle class, mostly white, mostly male voters who support them. They’re caught up in all kinds of myths: They’re self-reliant Americans who stand on their own two feet and have never taken anything from the government! and you know who takes things from government: black bucks eating steaks and my sister-in-law’s ex-husband who gets disability but plays golf three times a week. and I got an email about an illegal immigrant who had million dollar surgery! and 15 dollar muffins! Combine this with an infantile and obsessive ideology that boils down to “Government bad” (underlying philosophy: Because it is!), and you get 2010.
-but you get Social Security and Medicare
-I earned that, you fucking Commie freeloader!
J
Indeed. I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if the infinitely flattered, cosseted, fawned-upon narcissists who dominate our worthless ruling class were just to pay the money in tax that they now pay to professional liars for anti-tax, anti-government propaganda. Probably a better world for all of us, billionaires included. They would, however, rather feed their massive insatiable egotism by sustaining a huge class of mendacious parasites.
For my part, as a would-be Galtian overlord myself, let me put my cards on the table.
I dream of a world in which each is pitted against each in pursuit of illusory advantage to the common detriment of all.
bleh
You’re questioning their faith, and faith by definition is neither rational nor rationally defensible.
You might as well try to talk with a fundamentalist about the various scientific means of assessing the age of the universe. You quickly run into the blank stare, the obvious lack of cognitive processing, and the simple animal insistence that it is the way they say it is, full stop.
It’s probably a mercy. They might all jump off a building or something if they started thinking. That might be good for overpopulation, energy consumption, etc., but it would be a hellacious mess to clean up all at once.
JGabriel
@JPL:
Among the health insurance companies themselves, sure — and even they don’t want to wipe out Medicare, they just want to collect profits via Medicare Advantage until their older customers get sick and can be shunted off to regular Medicare with no expensive medical outlays on the company’s dime.
But the truth is that most of the people whinging and bitching about Medicare and Medicaid, and proposing to privatize them, aren’t even in the health care or health insurance industry. Again, they’re just assholes.
One could add that a number of such advocates work for conservative think tanks, but that’s pretty much synonymous with “asshole”, haina?
.
slag
@El Cid:
Exactly. I wish I could remember the post that DougJ did about the Galtians deriving their wealth from the fact that there are some jobs normal people just won’t do–like being a sociopathic asshole for money.
cervantes
@ JGabriel
But no, not really. Most people over 65 wouldn’t be able to get health insurance — we know this because many older people were not able to get health insurance before Medicare, accumulating age being the ultimate “pre-existing condition”.
Without health care, those people died. No profit motive there. Just assholery.
Not so J. The Republican plan is to give them vouchers with which to buy private insurance. It won’t cover their needs, but it will be taxpayer money that flows to private insurance companies and those who can will dig as deep into their own pockets as they must to get somewhat more adequate coverage. Yes, it will be hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The people will get fucked over, the taxpayers will keep paying, and rich assholes will get richer. That’s the whole idea — fucking the people over is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
JGabriel
cervantes:
Which many elderly won’t be to get because the health insurance industry doesn’t want them as customers. They get sick and they’re not profitable. It’s not like the GOP will mandate that they have to sell insurance to old people — that would be commie regulation! So the profit motive in privatizing Medicare/Medicaid is somewhere between negligible and negative.
.
jah
@JGabriel:
but SS funds have been used to pay for general gov operations for years now, and the time is coming where the gov will have to pay back SS. where is THAT $$ coming from? its a nice shell game reagan started.
cut income taxes -> raise payroll taxes and use the SS ‘surplus’ to cover lost revenue from income tax cut -> cry for SS reforms now that general revenue must start to cover SS.
a nice way to shift tax burdon to the middle/lower class! al gore got laughed at by proposing a solution (lockbox, LOL!)
El Cid
@slag: It’s like how Karl Rove was a “genius” for simply being willing to do immoral and criminal things others wouldn’t do. It’s not “genius” to smear your opponents by stealing their letterhead and sending out faked messages — it’s just rotten. Most people are pretty aware that there’s a dividing line between the hideously-immoral and the not-hideously-immoral; their avoidance of crossing that line isn’t stupidity, but integrity.
You wouldn’t have that many billionaires if too many of the sorts of people who could become billionaires were also the sorts of people likely to do anything to endanger the pursuit of another million dollars, and another million dollars, and so forth.
It’s a social system which selects against people without those characteristics. Imperfectly selecting, perhaps, but pretty damned effective.
It’s why this nation’s political system is thoroughly dominated and always has been by the super-rich and the related uppermost classes, but isn’t brutely and simplistically and absolutely so.
burnspbesq
No, you’re not insane, but your world-view is severely messed up, because it proceeds from the implicit assumption that no one who believes things you don’t believe can hold those views sincerely. There are less things in heaven and on earth, dear DougJ, than are dreamt of in your cynicism.
Steve
There is a maxim that one should never ascribe to malice what can equally well be attributed to ignorance. That seems to apply here. A lot of these people just don’t have the faintest clue about Social Security.
piratedan
risk is for “other” people
El Cid
@Steve: That sentiment can be applied to a lot of peoples’ thoughts on Social Security.
However, no one should ever think of that phrase as some sort of useful political insight.
It’s simply unreasonable to insist that we begin with an assumption of a lack of malice rather than allowing that to be one of the things that the empirical world tells us. There has never been a lack of malice in politics. It might be a requirement to do so in law, formally and in principle when it has to do with deciding cases, but in the public sphere, it’s not a requirement.
Assuming malice is no more nor less empirical than assuming a lack of malice, and making either assumption too hastily or using either as a substitute for reason & research are just as bad.
[Not to mention that there are people who think that peoples’ confidence in receiving, or perhaps receiving too much, Social Security is bad for them. That’s a moral argument, I hear it all the time from people talking about whether or not other people — not themselves, typically — deserve to get it.]
schrodinger's cat
I think economists have both physics envy and math envy. As for totebaggers, they think that Washington Post is liberal.
geg6
@Kyle:
I would agree wholeheartedly with you on that.
J
@Steve: Well, but there is such a thing as culpable ignorance, an extreme form of which is willed, cultivated, chosen ignorance. It’s not difficult to find out about social security, to look at it’s history, to see how it works. On the other hand, it takes hard work to be as ignorant at its opponents are. What is more, you might think that people who hold forth about/take stands on/pay for propaganda to be produced regarding an issue have a positive responsibility to inform themselves about it.
Ignorance isn’t always an excuse.
Ben Cisco
@MikeJ:If you identify as a liberal, but still watch network newscasts thinking you’re being informed, #youmightbeatotebagger
Fred Wertham Jr
“Totebagger” is the best thing ever. I salute the Balloon Juice community.
Steve
@El Cid: You don’t have to assume a lack of malice if you don’t want to. But DougJ’s argument that goes “you can’t think of any motivation other than malice, so therefore it must be malice” has a big gaping hole in it.
For the most part I think some people just get their jollies from believing that everyone who disagrees with them is just plain evil. That doesn’t become any less of a silly position if we stipulate that yes, in fact there are some evil people out there.
For the most part talking about motivation in politics is just a waste of time anyway. I don’t really care whether Republicans say tax cuts raise revenues because they stupidly believe it or because they like to lie. Probably there are some in each category but I don’t see why it’s useful to waste your time sorting out which is which. The important thing is to show that they’re wrong.
I do think it’s pretty well-established that “the other guys are evil” is a better message for rallying the faithful and “the other guys are sadly misguided” is a better message for appealing to the undecideds. So sometimes you just have to pick your strategy.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think that’s closer to it. I wouldn’t say that anti-SS/Medicare Establishment “liberals” (Friedman, Cokie Roberts, Joe Klein) enjoy screwing the middle-class, but they have no idea what the middle class is, because they consider themselves and everyone they know (in the Kaelian sense) to be middle class, and this fuels a puritanical attitude toward “entitlements”. See also Charlie Gibson, who if he makes less than $5million a year I’ll eat my hat, blithely assuming that a pair of professors at St Anelm’s college make a combined $250K/yr. David Gregory worried that Obama’s tax increases aren’t just aimed at fat cats, but people like you and me!
SenyorDave
@El Cid: I’ve always thought one basic difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats can’t find people who are willing, at a high level, to do anything at all to win elections. Even a bottom-feeder like Carville has his limits. Rove, and Atwater before him, have no limits.
Also, having no limits is IOKIYAR, so the media will never really go after a troll like Rove. I just pray for karma in his case, because I love to think of him chained to a rock with vultures picking at his liver for eternity (not up on my mythology anymore, but I think that was the punishment to the person (god?) who gave man fire).
JGabriel
Steve:
We’re talking about a class of people, Republicans/conservatives/right-wingnuts, who repeatedly engage in hateful and eliminationist rhetoric. As JD Rhodes commented last night (and DougJ highlighted):
How can one possibly attribute the motives of people engaging in such rhetoric to anything but malice?
burnspbesq:
How does sincerity enter into it? Sincerity is not really a measure of one’s ethical egalitarianism. It’s quite possible to sincerely believe that society exists merely and solely for one’s own benefit: that is to say, it’s quite possible to be sincerely evil or sincerely sociopathic. Cf., the entire oeuvre of Ayn Rand.
.
slag
@El Cid: Agreed. And there are less egregious examples of this as well.
The differences between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made Jobs one of America’s top billionaires and Woz just some rich dude. And Woz probably wouldn’t have even been that without Jobs. Woz would have probably just made an amazing machine and given it to the world for free. Jobs wanted the money. Woz wanted the value. Which one had greater success in purely economic terms?
Rick Massimo
And yet Our Galtian Overlords – and particularly those who worship them – have no problem telling the rest of us that we don’t know what our own real self-interest is.
Mike Goetz
This is no better than the “Obama on the couch” bullshit articles you see everywhere, trying to use Obama’s family history against him: fear of abandonment and all that jive.
There’s one at TNR online right now for the morbidly curious.
cat
Humans are easy to understand once you stop thinking of us as noble savages and accept that we are just savages who think they are noble savages.
Some of human’s “brains” are more resistant to cognative dissonance and so they act like savages and then some of them good at making raional arguments as to why they acted like savages. While others can’t handle the dissonance and thus act noblely even when they shouldn’t.
It takes dozens and dozens of generations to breed aggression out of animals and still requires a verry narrow selection process. I see no evidence the animal side of humans has left us except in a few people would exist any any large enough population of animals.
schrodinger's cat
@Mike Goetz: Doesn’t MoDo specialize in this BS. To be fair she has done it to Dubya and Clinton. BTW is it just me, or is the current Republican Clown Show is much worse than Dubya ever was.
eemom
Just a theory, but perhaps you might do better at convincing people if you didn’t insist on using cutesy euphemisms like “Galtian overlord” and “Villager.”
Call a spade a fucking spade. That is why I love “the 1%” –though as the Krugster pointed out recently, it is really more like the “.01%”
Or still more explicitly, the “superrich”. The “obscenely rich.” Phrases like “pure greed” are good too.
srv
Unless assholes are a new class, this isn’t class warfare.
This is a war between those who have personality disorders and those who do not.
Hoodie
When I discuss the American political scene with tote-baggers,
Well, that is one possibility, especially if you define “fuck over” in a broad, abstract sense that encompasses the less intentionally malicious “what good is having all that money and/or power if you can’t use it to make judgments?” Marcus, Brooks, Friedman, et al. live to opine about others, and do it using the common narrative construct that you can’t have virtue without vice. It’s like Christianity and Hell. You replace a reasonably efficient government health-care system with a less efficient private health care system because it’s good for the souls of the beneficiaries even though they may very well materially suffer from the result.
ericblair
@bleh:
Agreed: ask an economic fundamentalist, like your basic libertarian/objectivist/Future Master of the Universe what the purpose of the economy is, and you’ll get some sort of angry incoherent reaction. It’s exactly like asking a religious fundamentalist what the purpose of God is; not only is it a question he can’t begin to get his head around, it’s also straight-up heresy.
Any reasonable answer on the purpose of the economy, such as efficient allocation of goods and services, pretty soon leads to the conclusion that our current Lords and Masters are doing a shit job of fulfilling any such purpose. So that won’t do.
DougJ
@Steve:
They are also ignorant. Because they are ignorant of everything quantitative, they choose between “tough love” for the middle-class and other options. Because they are assholes, they choose “tough love”.
That’s my point here. If they were simply assholes, and not ignorant assholes, they might well want to fuck the middle-class less, because fucking the middle-class doesn’t make much sense economically.
DougJ
@eemom:
I don’t use the words when I talk to these people. But they are also very resistant to the 1% stuff. They do hate bankers, though.
joes527
@JGabriel: No, the answer is still: money.
The push to gut Social Security is an attempt to sidestep the whole “we used the trust fund to pay for tax cuts and the day is going to come when we have to make that good.” thing.
Watch for any restructuring to draw a line that essentially says that the money that has already been transfered to the 1% is theirs to keep with our thanks.
Brachiator
@DougJ:
Jebus H Chris! Even though I tend to agree with you, just because a person you talk with has no answer does not mean that your analysis is correct. And you are assuming what Galtian Overlords motivations are, not testing the proposition.
This only says that some of the people that you talk with are less imaginative than you are.
@slag:
Jobs. In every way that mattered. In the early days, Woz would come up with some amazing stuff and give it away for free to the Home Brew Computer Club. Jobs looked for a way to turn these ideas and innovations into computers usable by millions of people, and for the money. Woz would have been happy if PCs continued to be a niche product for geek hobbyists cobbling shit together in a corner. But together, they helped transform a considerable part of the world. And created value.
JGabriel
@schrodinger’s cat:
Bush tried to obscure his and the GOP’s sociopathy during his first campaign, and, to some extent, during his last two years in office due to the shellacking the party got in the 2006 elections.
But if you think of the period January 2003 – October 2006, then, no, the current GOP Clown Show isn’t worse than in Dubya’s day, it’s just less successful because they don’t a Republican President rubber-stamping their every whim.
.
Satanicpanic
@ericblair: Great point. It’s really hard to get people to think about questions of why and how. Just because our current system does X, doesn’t mean X is the only way to do something. Economic systems don’t just fall out of the sky.
Nemesis
It doeesnt seem a matter of rationality/altruism/impartiality.
Its just the right so love to put a thumb in the eye of libruls. Its that simple.
In fact, they hate us so thoroughly, so totally, they would gladly elect a complete baffoon just to see us collectively scream like our hair was on fire.
Cause control of gummit to them is a big game that they should always win, due to their manafestly superior almost human qualities.
cat
If you call yourself a liberal but you think the biggest problem with the food stamp program is fraud #youmightbeatotebagger
Jenny
@DougJ:
Why is that?
schrodinger's cat
@JGabriel: I have to take your word for it, because I was completely turned off politics during that time, mainly due to personal reasons.
Jenny
O/T
Obama is on MSNBC right now giving one hellva stem wider.
Brachiator
By the by, here’s a fun example of GOP dopiness, from a tax and accounting reference site:
So one question might be what middle class program the Republicans will try to slash in return for a payroll tax cut.
Comrade Javamanphil
Oh noes! The filthy rich have brought out the big guns: I give you, the co-host of the Man Show. Hoocoodanode.
ericblair
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’d recommend Debt:the First 5000 years, by David Graeber. He makes the argument that the standard Econ 101 development of money argument (barter, coinage, then credit) is exactly backwards, since we don’t find barter-only societies at any time in history anywhere in the world (only in artificial situations like modern prisons). Rather, it’s a construction that allows economists to divorce themselves from all the messiness of politics, anthropology, and sociology, which has a lot more to do with economics than most economists like to admit.
Debt crises happen periodically during history when the elite figure out how to funnel all the resources to themselves. It usually doesn’t end very well. Most long-term successful societies placed some sort of social or moral restrictions that curbed this tendency for some period of time. After that, it’s peasant revolt demanding the destruction of debt records, reallocation of land, and forgiveness of debts, pretty much every time.
Seems that some religion that started in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago had a few choice things to say about debt. “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Lots of commie shit like that.
Woodrowfan
If you think Richard Cohen makes sense, you might be a totebagger.
cat
If you call yourself a liberal but think poor mothers need to get a job, but affluent women should stay home with the kids #youmightbeatotebagger
slag
@Satanicpanic:
No.
So the Lord sayeth unto man, the rich shall inherit at no benefit to the commons.
Rand 1:20
Jenny
Cole would love this.
Martin Bashir is yelling (yes, yelling) at Russert’s kid for his dim witted stenography.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jenny: damn, and I hit mute just as soon as he said “Luke”
schrodinger's cat
[email protected]
A correction
Its not the markets that are rational its the agents (consumers etc) who participate in the market, who are supposed to be rational.
DougJ
@Jenny:
Linky?
Martin
Like evolution and climate change, most people want a world that works they way they want it to work, and not the way that it actually works.
As noted above economists want a population of uniform density living in a vacuum and working at a frictionless assembly line at the end of which is an infinitely large heat source.
This is why we really should be praising quite reliably the work of the behavioral economists. Even if they are still often wrong, they’re at least moving the field into a state that recognizes that people are, well, people.
Villago Delenda Est
I think it’s because they all have a deep, hidden desire to be in a remake of “Tale of Two Cities” in which they get to watch the knitting up close and personal before the blade whisks them to oblivion.
At least it seems that way. There are many in the top 1% who seem to get this, and want to avoid it, but they’re not running the show right now. The really stupid ones are.
Jager
@JGabriel: I can picture it now, poor seniors with all kinds of ailments standing on street corners selling their vouchers to rich seniors for 10 cents on the dollar, then shuffling off to the 7-11 to buy aspirin and cat food.
handsmile
I realize that we’re painting this particular fence with broad brushes, but I’d like to offer a modest defense of “totebaggers” insofar as that term is defined above by Linda Featheringill (#9), Mike J (#17), and geg6 (#20).
To begin with, they are self-described liberals. As such, they are generally members of the “reality-based community” and are receptive to reasonable discourse and evidence. Proud of their capacity to marshal and process information, they may be persuaded or perhaps shamed to consider more heterodox views. Unlike fundamentalists of the right or left, they value tolerance and reform.
In short, meaningful dialogue is at least possible, if often exasperating, with a prospect that viewpoints may be amended. I can draw upon my own experiences with a good number of family members and friends who could be described as “totebaggers.”
Also, it need not be emphasized that totebaggers are rarely part of the 1% (much less the 0.1%), and most certainly are not practicing members of the Village media.
One final line of defense: in my nearly two years of reading/commenting upon this blog, I have observed quite a few totebags being brandished on a host of issues.
FormerSwingVoter
Dude, of course people are unaware of their own motivations. Talk to a conservative sometime. They’ll give you plenty of contradicting but strongly-held beliefs that are the most important things in the world to them, then change all of those beliefs to their polar opposites as soon as The Angry Man In The Radio tells them to.
Their motivation is hate. They hate, therefore they are. Hate is not just what conservatives are, it’s who they are. If those that they hate aren’t the purest force of evil in the world, then they would need to re-evaluate their entire worldview.
And not a single one of them has the stones to do that. So they hate.
Jenny
@DougJ: no linky, was watching it live.
ETA: Russet started reading the winger talking points against the payroll tax, saying it would result in a tax increase for “job creators” (he actually said that) and Bashir cut him off and called out the bull shit.
schrodinger's cat
@ericblair: Systems without modern banking can be far worse though. For example the landless or indentured laborers in India who have no access to modern banking have been exploited by money lenders who charge exorbitant amounts of interest and you can never pay back those debts and for all practical purpose you, your family and successive become indentured laborers serving the landlords/moneylender. This has been the topic of many a tear jerker in Hindi cinema and Indian cinema in general.
Saying that credit and debt are responsible for all economic woes seems rather simplistic.
Comrade Javamanphil
If you call yourself liberal but believe both sides are to blame for the super committee failure (or debt ceiling fight or any failure of congress), you might be a totebagger.
Jenny
Rick Perry was right. The military doesn’t like the president.
http://www.daylife.com/photo/0fIJ5s66ea4TP?__site=daylife&q=obama
Makewi
Here’s a maxim for you. When the government starts making noises about taking more from the rich, the middle class should get worried – because the rich didn’t get rich by meekly submitting to the grabby hands of the government.
MikeJ
@handsmile: I have no doubt that totebaggers mean well, but they are underinformed and not as curious as they should be.
Just the other day we were discussing how to open the eyes of totebaggers. Keep showing them every single day how the so called liberal media[1] really isn’t.
ericblair
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yes, it would be, but that’s not the argument. It’s actually the other way round, that debt and credit are the essential historic foundations of the economy and many other social interactions, and the sorts of bank notes and coins that we associate with “money” are the johnny-come-latelies. It’s rather that, unless controlled, debt gets out of hand and tends to get adjusted, either with jubilees or with pitchforks and guillotines.
MikeJ
@Jager:
The GOP will then produce stories of the elderly selling their vouchers for drug money and use it as an excuse to kill the program.
Hell, that’s the story they’d use if it worked as intended.
Martin
@Brachiator:
I agree.
Jobs seems, based on a variety of statements he’s made, to have been motivated by the understanding that without revenue and cashflow and capital and all of that, that technological progress (toward whatever goal) would stop.
If you want to make people’s lives better, whether you think that can happen through computers or iPhones or medical advances or whatever, it doesn’t matter how good your ideas may be if you can’t actually deliver it. That’s his ‘real artists ship’ quote. Had they not sold the Apple I, they wouldn’t have had the capital to make the Apple II, and from that the Mac, and so on.
This is the corporate corollary to the liberal attitude toward individuals – that if young people don’t have the means to go to school or are caught under the yoke of being the working poor, they may never be able to deliver what potential is within them. They may have great potential, but if it can’t be delivered, then it’s an opportunity wasted.
The problem now is that too many US corporations (most, I would argue) have (metaphorically) discarded traditional engineering for financial engineering. That is, they don’t innovate, don’t build infrastructure, don’t train and advance their workforce, and so on. Those are seen as less likely to generate a decent return as raiding the pension fund and gambling it on mortgage derivatives. In a sense, US corporations have adopted largely the same consumer habits as the population.
Rafer Janders
@Linda Featheringill:
My definition of a tote-bagger: A person who is self-defined as liberal, who supports public broadcasting etc. [hence the tote bag] and other liberal causes, but carefully shies away from talking about anything close to class warfare.
Also, too: a self-identified liberal who’s with the left on all social issues (i.e. racism, misogyny, homophobia, gay marriage, etc.) but not at all down with any real economic issues.
If it’s something they can imagine happening to them or their other upper middle-class friends and family, i.e. they’re OK, which is why they oppose discrimination. But since they can’t really imagine true economic distress and have never experienced it, their ability to sympathize with and fight for the poor is extremely limited.
Unsympathetic
DougJ:
I strongly urge you to consider the idea that there is NO underlying motivation – that even the 1% are simply making decisions in a fly-by-night, piecemeal, one-off process where every day is 100% disconnected from the last one. Anyone spending the effort to ascribe some sort of long-term motivation to these buffoons seems rather similar to Andrew Sullivan beardedly deciding there’s both reason and logic behind the “blacks are stupid” IQ theory.
They could be assholes who are coincidentally also stupid.
Schlemizel
I think you are wrong to say they have no answer as to why they want to fuck SS & Medicare. The ones I know all have a very good reason
We all KNOW those are ponsi schemes that will just bankrupt the entire nation if they are not slashed to the bone. All reasonable people know this.
Low information moron is not just a disease of the right
slag
@FormerSwingVoter:
This is true. And I’ve found it fascinating. But I generally prefer to not sit too close to the ballet.
MarkJ
@El Cid: Exactly. To paraphrase, the Village constantly mistakes lack of integrity for genius.
JGabriel
@MikeJ:
Hell. that probably IS the intention.
.
gil mann
@Makewi:
You offer pics of Mila Kunis in a garter belt and deliver a libertarian screed? Total ‘bate and switch.
schrodinger's cat
@ericblair: I think we got it right between the period following the Great Depression until the 80’s (the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism)
slag
@Martin:
Jobs wasn’t an engineer. Woz was. Jobs was closer to being a financial engineer and was much more handsomely rewarded economically. That’s the gist.
Makewi
@gil mann:
Libertarian screed?
MarkJ
@ericblair: As an economist I would agree that all that messy stuff about power, information asymmetries, politics, etc. should be considered in the field of economics, but is mostly ignored.
It’s not because of the barter economy issue, but because assumptions of rationality and perfect information and perfect competition underly the elegant mathematical models on which microeconomic theory is founded. Violate those assumptions and all the beautiful utility curves, marginal cost curves, demand and supply curves, etc. start to disintegrate. Many in the field believe that if we lose that pseudo-scientific mathematical representation we become no better than sociology, which is unthinkable.
Judas Escargot
Unlike DougJ, I don’t know too many totebaggers in real life. Outside of my family, I don’t even know anyone who’ll admit to being a Democrat in public (the few young liberals I run into seem to be firebagger-style Progressives of the ‘Not a Democrat, Obama’s almost as bad as Bush’ variety). My wife has turned more liberal over the past few years, but finds the Dems too wishy-washy and weak to declare herself one (can’t really say I blame her, either).
So my conversations tend to be very different: Not only do these folks know damned well that the “Winners” play a rigged game, but they see no real problem with that. “Hmph, that’s how the real world works.” Or “Yeah, like you wouldn’t do the same thing in their position.” would be the general responses you’d get. The “Gubbmint should be run like a Bidness” meme is still in full flower, as far as I can tell. They don’t care about Social Security, because they’ve already been convinced that they’ll never see that money anyway. They don’t trust the government to fix health care. They won’t care about the USPS until it costs $12 to send a letter using FedEx, and by then it’ll be too late.
As far as their own personal fates go, they seem much more worried about immigration than about anything else…. where “immigrant” implies “Hispanic”, and also seems to imply “illegals”. You’d think the northern burbs of Massachusetts were being invaded by a Mongol horde on horseback, the way these people talk.
No real point here, just another perspective/set of observations: The default politics of Northern White Suburbia seems to be this sad, self-destructive cocktail of Xenophobia, reflexive fear/derision/hatred of science and liberals (which have somehow become conflated), “life is hard, take it like a man” machismo and “nothing can ever be fixed” nihilism.
handsmile
@MikeJ: (#85)
Could you direct me broadly to the thread on which “[j]ust the other day we were discussing how to open the eyes of totebaggers.” Perhaps it took place during last week’s holiday weekend when I was mostly offline.
The comprehensive failure, by now a feature not a bug, of the American corporate media is a hobby-horse that I’ve been riding (and screaming about) for many years. At the moment, Ruth Marcus’ employer, given its history and influence, is the single most pernicious newspaper now published in the United States.
Comrade Javamanphil
@Martin:
Ironically, given this thread, I heard an interesting story on NPR last evening about Aravind, a charity in India, that by operating as a business, performs around 300,000 eye surgeries a year, half for free. They can do this because they have become so efficient, and effective, that wealthy people happily pay for their service. Fascinating story and gives some insight (npi) into how capitalism can be made better.
r€nato
@Comrade Javamanphil: I always felt in my heart that Adam Corolla was a ginormous, overflowing colostomy bag. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
Everyone in the Pool
There is a great joy to be found in screwing around with people lives. It is a joy reserved for rich and powerful a**holes, and is as foreign to a tote-bagger as the joy of sex is to a nun.
If you want to understand corporate sociopathy, you could do far worse then reading Venkat.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
catclub
@MarkJ: “To paraphrase, the Village constantly mistakes lack of integrity for genius.”
The secret of Newt’s success?
MikeJ
@handsmile: Google was being unfriendly. Every time I tried to search for site:balloon-juice.com dougj totebagger it would “correct” dougj to dough.
https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/25/talk-about-it-talk-about-it-talk-about-it-talk-about-it/
4jkb4ia
Lewis Lapham knows a number of the 1% and what their motivations are likely to be. But he was absolutely devastating when he simply pointed out that you have to look at who benefits from Republican policies and that they have consistently favored capital. At least some of the people DougJ is talking about will be familiar with “power is who gets what, when, and how”. The difference between visions of power as who gets what and when has become starker along with income inequality. Moreover motivation is almost irrelevant if you think your preferred policy will screw people over (or help them) and it does not. Having a sister who works for the CBO (on transportation) and has been equally disgusted with all of them at different times helps to bring this point home.
Villago Delenda Est
@MarkJ:
It seems to be about all those nice, certain, precise numbers.
The catch is, there are messy, uncertain, irrational human beings who fuck up every one of those lovely curves by doing shit that in theory they’re not supposed to do. Like, for example, tonight I won’t have a burger, I’ll have a pizza, even though the pizza costs more. Makes no sense from the raw numbers perspective, but people do not live on raw numbers alone. Value is a very very subjective thing. You see this most readily in MMORPGs, where certain items command fantastic prices when they’re introduced into the game, but soon become much less valuable at time goes on. Value is not a constant for much of our economy.
TheF79
I think Atrios’ comment is less about rationality of pepole, but rather that people’s utility functions include more than just money/consumer goods. So if Policy A gives you $1000 dollars but Policy B lets you punch a hippie, if you value hippie-punching sufficiently high, then choosing Policy B is a perfectly rational response. In fact, choosing A when you really like punching hippies would be the irrational thing to do.
Most economists would embrace the idea in theory that people derive value from non-consumer goods (in environmental economics it’s SOP to assume that people are willing to trade real goods for better environmental quality), but for some reason the default in discussing real world events is to focus on money/consumer good outcomes as if they’re the only things that matter to people.
Speaking of behavioral/experimental economics, there’s a famous result from studies of the Ultimatum Game that is quite relevant to this discussion. In the Ultimatum Game, one person is endowed with some cash (say 10 $1 dollar bills), and they make a take-it-or-leave-it offer to split the cash to the other player. If the other player accepts, they get the agreed upon terms, but if the other player rejects, no one gets anything. Purely money-motivated economics would say that the equilibrium is for the offerer to offer $1 and keep $9, because the other player prefers $1 to $0. What behavioral economists have found is that that is not at all the equilibrium. The other player will often reject vastly uneven offers, because it’s worth $1 to them to screw the other guy out of $9. In general, the equilibrium is much closer to equitable distributions.*
* – in variations where the offerer is the person who won some first stage contest, the equilibrium outcome is much more unequal, suggesting that people’s concept of “fairness” is quite complicated and context-based.
PTirebiter
@El Cid: Hearing seemingly decent village people discuss and sometimes “begrudgingly” admire Rove made me nuts. It was if he was the dirty head coach of some rival football team with bragging rights being the only thing at stake. Yet even with a possibility of being rewarded for doing things one should rightly be shunned for, your right, most us just wouldn’t do it.
FormerSwingVoter
@Judas Escargot:
The anti-liberalism, anti-intellectualism, and downright fascism of supposedly “deep blue” states doesn’t get nearly enough press. I’ve taken to saying things to people like “Science is not a liberal conspiracy, and you don’t get to pretend that it is” or “killing people for disagreeing with you is the purest form of evil in human history”, just to point out to people how indefensible their positions (that they won’t stop telling everyone about) truly are.
MarkJ
@catclub: I hadn’t thought about that in the context of the recent glowing coverage Newt is getting, but it’s the most plausible explanation.
chuckbutcher
Part of the problem is that Americans don’t know their own history. Many get some of the “highlights” and miss completely the context. Take for example the “renegade TR” busting the trusts – well it did happen, but the context of the nation being on the verge of exploding gets missed. It might pay (in light of today’s GOP) to consider that TR’s actions in the face of crisis resulted in his getting the boot from the GOP.
You can look at the course of “radical” changes in our history and once the context is considered it becomes clear that those changes didn’t happen out of altruism, but rather survival instinct.
Somebody stated awhile back that if Obama wins in 2012 that we win. We don’t win, we manage to dodge the bullet of accelerated GOP craziness – worth something, but certainly not something to chalk up in our win column.
If you honestly think that the dislocation of wealth is going to be even minorly addressed by a top marginal income tax rate of 39% you’ve paid no attention. The addition of about 4 more tax brackets topping at about 80% with all linked to median wage that treat capital gains as income …
Sure … a win in 2012 … uh … 2016 … uh – when the damn people are showing that they’ll burn the damn thing down before they’ll tolerate its continuation.
People don’t like change – until the pain of staying with the status quo trumps the pain of change. It’s a lot more appealing to find scapegoats than it is to admit that what you’re doing is totally screwed up.
Never mind – juat a DFH here…
chuckbutcher
Moderated? WTF, I didn’t even get close to the penis word
handsmile
@MikeJ: (#106)
Thanks much for your trouble! Sure enough, the thread occurred last Friday, a day that was devoted to eating and napping. I look forward to reading through it.
slag
@TheF79:
Indeed. But at what point can you argue that so valuing punching hippies is irrational in itself?
ericblair
@MarkJ:
Yes, I was simplifying the argument. The gist of it was that capital-E Economics had constructed a sort of origin myth that allowed it to assume a Platonic ideal of a market that was separate from the social and political structures around it. That way, you could wall yourself off from all the messy meat-space stuff and assume all sorts of nonsense about perfectly rational actors oblivious to people around them except as market participants who are solely interested in profit maximization.
ed drone
@cervantes:
Awww, can’t it be both?
Republican One: “It’s a profit center.”
Republican Two: “It’s a religious duty.”
Galtian Overlord Voice: “You’re both right! It’s a religious duty to screw the people for profit! Be sure to denounce anything else as Socializm!”
Ed
mclaren
Doug J. wrote:
Current cognitive neuroscience research supports this claim.
“Where the Motivation Resides and Self-Deception Hides: How Motivated Cognition Accomplishes Self-Deception,” Emily Balcetis, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 361–381.
“Choices, values, and frames,” Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A., American Psychologist, Vol. 39 No. 4, April 1984, pp. 341-350.
“Prospect theory in the wild: evidence from the field,” Colin. F. Camerer, Chapter 5 in Advances in Behavioral Economics, ed. Colin F. Camerer, George Loewenstein and Matthew Rabin, 2003.
“Neoclassical Theory Versus Prospect Theory: Evidence from the Marketplace,” John List, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 9736, June 2003.
In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic science. What made this unusual — indeed, unique in the history of the prize — is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. (..)
Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme. There are essentially three phases to his career. In the first, he and Tversky did a series of ingenious experiments that revealed twenty or so “cognitive biases” — unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the “anchoring effect”: our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. (In one experiment, for instance, experienced German judges were inclined to give a shoplifter a longer sentence if they had just rolled a pair of dice loaded to give a high number.) In the second phase, Kahneman and Tversky showed that people making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not “maximize utility.” The two then developed an alternative account of decision making, one more faithful to human psychology, which they called “prospect theory.” (It was for this achievement that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel.)
Source: ” Two Brains Running,” By Jim Holt, New York Times Sunday Book Review, 25 November 2011.
El Kabong
@PTirebiter: I’m not sure Rove is called “genius” just for being evil. There have been evil men in politics throughout human history. Rather, I think he invented his own Picard maneuver that repeatedly worked out so well for him and the repukes, namely, accuse your enemy of displaying the bad traits which are in fact your own. The Rove maneuver 1) shocks your enemy. Call John Kerry a war coward, even though you represent George Bush. Kerry’s initial reaction was probably to laugh. Then when there was traction in the media, he didn’t know what to do. 2) The maneuver gets the first sound byte because your opponent was too much of a gentleman to call you out, and 3) once you actually point out who the actual coward is, people have moved on, you’re just being shrill, both sides lie, blah-de-blah-de-blah. 4) Rinse and repeat. Democrats want to cut your social security and medicare, grandma. THAT’s the genius of Rove.
ed drone
@MikeJ:
“Drug money” being what they use to pay for their heart, blood-pressure, and diabetes medicines, not “drugs” as in what the Day-Traders use to “settle their nerves.” That stuff isn’t “drug money,” if the users are the 1%. You don’t see SWAT teams busting doors on Wall Street, do you?
Ed
JGabriel
ed drone:
I am so stealing this. It just needs an SNL reference to finish it off: “It’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping!”
.
Martin
@slag:
While Jobs was not an engineer, he kept the focus of the company on engineering. Apple under Jobs was and still is a company that solves every problem with innovation.
There’s no notable financial engineering taking place there. Yeah, there are supply chain optimization and junk like that, but they have no debt and most of their cash is in US Treasuries. They don’t use money to make money. They use money to make better products than the competition (at least, that’s the plan), and use products to make money. That’s the point. The financial engineers skip the whole producing something step. Apple never did that. In fact, they are extraordinarily conservative on the financial side.
Brachiator
@slag:
Not at all. Especially, in the early days, they needed each other.
And if all you are focused on is on how much either was rewarded economically, you miss the entire point of why Apple, or any other tech company, was founded.
That Woz was an engineer and Jobs wasn’t doesn’t really say much at all about either man.
mclaren
@Brachiator:
Indeed.
Steve Jobs was a designer of genius, on a par with Raymond Loewy or Charles & Ray Eames.
If you don’t know who those last three people are, take a look around — you’re living in the world they designed.
fasteddie9318
@geg6:
FTFY
Rafer Janders
@JGabriel:
Exactly. I’ve met sincere Communists. I’ve met sincere Nazis. I’ve met sincere Islamist, Jewish and Christianist fundamentalists. In all those cases they sincerely and genuinely held their hateful beliefs.
Brachiator
@mclaren:
Thanks for this. I recently read about Kahneman, but couldn’t recall where or if there was any Web related item regarding his work.
ETA: I recently read or heard that Jobs respected Eames and that this influenced the Apple design sense.
Paul in KY
@El Kabong: It’s just another version of ‘The Big Lie’.
Goebbels/Hitler would be pissed at you making Rove out to be the creator,