I have no interest in thinking about, let alone discussing, my own professional life, but I’d be feel pretty awful if I discovered it was all bullshit, completely incorrect. I’m not sure what I’d do with myself, I’d have to do something else. So that quote that Kay flagged spoke to me:
“I’ve only mispredicted one big Supreme Court case in the last 20 years,” he told me. “That was Bush v. Gore. And I was able to internalize that by saying they only had a few minutes to think about it and they leapt to the wrong conclusion. If they decide this by 5-4, then yes, it’s disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud. Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t. What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty.”
There are a lot of people who should be thinking this way now, not just legal scholars, but political observers who refused to believe the worst about Republicans, and most of all lifelong conservatives/Republicans who have a brain and a conscience.
One of my best friends is an older communist. Nowadays, he campaigns for Obama, voted for Chirac against LePen in 2002 (he’s French but lives in America), and is generally a complete pragmatist. He doesn’t like to talk about communism, he sees it as a failed ideology, and that makes him sad, because he spend a lot of time supporting it and he still essentially believes its basic tenets. But it didn’t work out so well in reality.
It’s time for American conservatives to start thinking that way. That’s why I’m sympathetic to Sullivan and Frum with their endless wanking about the true nature of conservatism. It sucks to have to admit that your long-held ideology is a unredeemable disaster, that your life work was a sham. Admitting there’s a problem is the first step. I give them credit for taking it.
Patricia Kayden
Also credit to Charles Johnson (LGF) and John Cole for leaving the dark side.
Steve
Hypothetically, if the ACA is upheld 6-3 or 7-2, will the folks on the other side of this debate do any rethinking?
DougJ
@Steve:
I will never do any SCOTUS predictions of any kind ever again if that happens. (I never did it much anyway, except on this one, where I think it’s 5-4 against but could be 5-4 for.)
MikeJake
The most convincing explanation I’ve seen for why communism doesn’t work was the recent discussion in Crooked Timber about the practical impossibility of central planners reducing a complex economy to a series of linear equations.
Maybe someone can prove mathematically to conservatives that their belief system is bullshit. It might make it easier to accept.
PeakVT
I think a lot of these supposedly thoughtful conservatives will be stuck in a “MY conservatism cannot fail; it can only be failed” mode forever.
Bailey
@MikeJake –
Would like to think that possible, but reducing a belief system down to a mathematically truth seems unlikely if the group in question already believes 2 + 2 = 5.
Violet
I don’t think they’ve admitted anything about their own work. They’ve made the correct observation that the current Republican party is batshit crazy and full of racist idiots. But it’s always done in the “The Republican party left me” kind of way, never in the “maybe my ideology was problematic” kind of way.
It’s very Normal Desmond. “I am right. It’s the Republican party that got crazy and racist.” No, they were crazy and racist all along, but you ignored it, Messrs Sullivan, Frum, et al.
Southern Beale
Back in March I participated in a blogger meet-up with our Congressman, Democrat Jim Cooper. Blue Dog but ya know, it’s Tennessee, blah blah. Anyhoo, he did vote for the Affordable Care Act and we talked some about the SCOTUS case. He offered the opinion that if SCOTUS struck down the individual mandate it would prove how politics has taken over the court at the expense of the law.
Violet
@Patricia Kayden:
Charles Johnson and John Cole actually left the dark side and now actively work to point out how poisoned it is. Frum and Sullivan just have sads that Republicans aren’t polite like they used to be. There’s a massive Grand Canyon sized gulf between the two sides.
DougJ
@Violet:
I love that movie.
Raven
I started over at 42. Nothing wrong with it at all.
Davis X. Machina
@Steve: They will just redouble their efforts to change the composition of the federal bench.
The Moar You Know
@MikeJake: If I could mathematically prove that there is no God, do you think that would sway even one religious person out of their belief?
Of course it wouldn’t. And it won’t work with your scenario for exactly the same reasons. These people have a belief system, not a set of facts whose worth they are defending.
Violet
@DougJ: I love that movie too. But my hands down favorite 1950’s movie is “A Face in the Crowd”. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a fantastic take on politics and how malleable the public is. Andy Griffith is jaw-droppingly good as Lonesome Rhodes. It’s just fantastic all the way around.
redshirt
@Steve: LOL HAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, that sincere question was funny. Rethink their positions?
The only thing that will stop these fascists is destruction – of our country, or themselves, or both.
SpotWeld
Radical conservatisim (like radical liberialism) doesn’t work.
Thing is, radical liberialism isn’t represented at a national level in this country. Radical conservatisism (or radical capitalism cloaked in conservatism) is.
arguingwithsignposts
Not me. Fuck ’em. Until they achieve a John Cole/Charles Johnson moment, they are dead to me. Worse than useless.
El Tiburon
Bit off-topic, and I am certainly not a pinko-commie-socialist so much – but I don’t see it necessarily as the ideology failed as that those at the top of the power mountain caused it to fail.
I think we see a similar dynamic in play right now right here. Our system of capitalism is nearing that point in which it might fail. It’s not the system per se, but those elites who screw it up for the rest of us.
It’s a conundrum: Those who would not abuse the system are not motivated to seek power; while those who would most definitely abuse the system become CEOs and President.
Raven
@Violet: And it’s a great Tom Petty song!
Linda Featheringill
@MikeJake:
Why communism doesn’t work:
Interesting point. Maybe central planning of a complex system cannot be done well. Or perhaps humans are just too primitive at this point in their evolution to make it work [I like this theory].
No planning at all doesn’t work either, of course.
Do you think that the welfare state may be the best way to meet the needs of the greatest number of people?
Frankensteinbeck
@Steve:
Depends on what you define as ‘the other side’. The people who are sure it will be along party lines should. I personally belong in a zone where I don’t know, and that the issue is at all in doubt is a gigantic blow to the credibility of the Supreme Court. Up until the Court heard it, legal analysts considered this an open and shut case. The law was written with an eye to matching every constitutional precedent. That Clarence Thomas was accepting bribes through his wife to shoot it down was a huge embarrassment, but considered the exception that proves the rule. Then the case was heard, and the conservative-leaning justices started asking truly batshit questions, beyond even the usual level of batshit question inherent in the process. So now guys like Amar aren’t sure, and they’re horrified that it’s even in doubt.
Shorter language: If this is overturned party line, it proves the conservative justices are complete and utter hacks. If it’s not overturned party line, it proves that they’re not COMPLETE hacks, they’re only partial hacks.
28 Percent
Can I change my will to stipulate that, when I die, my corpse should be plastered with medical bills and dumped unceremoniously on Justice Thomas’ front lawn?
miserybob
There’s a great post from Driftglass along the same lines…
“So there you sit with a bomb in your head.
It’s a bomb which will detonate if you ever admit — even for a moment, even to yourself — that the Evil Libruls have ever been right about anything.
If detonated, this bomb will not only annihilate your identity, your ideals and your faith…not only destroy your standing in the community, the esteem of your friends, the respect of your spouse and children and, potentially, your livelihood…but it will also utterly humiliate you.
Should that bomb ever go off you would be forced to admit that have gotten really, really important things terribly wrong for the last 10…20…30…40 years.”
It goes on… worth a read.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2012/05/aint-gonna-let-nobody-turn-them-round.html
Percysowner
I can’t speak to Frum,, since I don’t read him. I used to read Sully until I got the feeling that if the Republicans simply came around to accepting homosexuality and said sorry about the torture, that Sully would be fine with the rest of the party line. Women’s rights, not his problem. Unemployment, doesn’t have to worry about that. Health care for everyone, Sully’s got his, why care about anyone else. Plus he said I was a fifth columnist because I didn’t agree on Iraq and he NEVER took it back. Fifth column means treason and I get a tad upset with people who want me tried and executed for not thinking the way they do.
Rob in CT
I’m with DougJ here, even though I agree that Sullivan and (even moreso) Frum haven’t really changed their ideologies. The GOP left them. The batshit crazy is driving the bus now and that makes them sad.
But baby steps. Noticing the batshit crazy is the critical step 1 to questioning other things. Like the possibility that some of their core assumptions are inseparable from the aforementioned batshit crazy… ;)
If we ever hope to have a reasonable Conservative political party again (as opposed to a reasonable moderate party vs. one that has gone Full Wingnut), enough relatively reasonable conservatives have to go through the process. They’re unlikely to make a full conversion, ala Cole. That’s an unrealistic expectation.
Shorter: More Bruce Bartletts please. The man is not a liberal, but that’s ok. Not everyone needs to be a liberal for things to function reasonably well. We do need sanity and good faith, though.
terraformer
Goes without saying, but without the Rule of Law – as envisioned by the Forefathers (now there’s another intentionally misused term) – we have no democracy. But then again, maybe the Iron Law of Oligarchy is true after all. Sure seems like it.
Thoughtcrime
@Bailey:
2+2 is a variable, and will always equal whatever they are told it is at the time.
Linda Featheringill
I have been reading comments and thinking about the high courts hopping into bed with the biggest assholes around and my mind is going Godwin. [Does everyone know how much the courts helped in the 1930s?]
One thing is different this time around though. We have a charismatic leader who might not be as liberal as I would like but is both sane and intelligent. He has some really sharp political advisers. Maybe the bad guys won’t win this time.
General Stuck
And why I don’t give our BJ lawyers a lot of personal grief, from having their lives invested around something like basic faith in the integrity of their profession. At least to a large degree at the pinnacle of that profession/ Even though I see things from a non lawyer perspective, that tells me we are in an ideological fight that few republicans in the game, values their ethics and professional integrity above the greater cause of which way to make a big turn that is just around the bend, as some kind of endgame to their entire belief system, not just the day job.
Republicans are different, their ideology is most of who they are, in the end. Because nothing they want, is all that good for most of the people. And if they can’t win by playing the game with rules, they simply make their own. The sanctity of the judiciary comes second to that prevailing attitude, when they truly believe their right to rule the realm is threatened. Liberals and democrats of all sorts really need to see this clearly, and conduct themselves accordingly.
And that would be now.
slim's tuna provider
i don’t actually feel bad for them, but not because “fuck’em”. i don’t feel bad for them because the democratic party had a place for them all along — they could have easily been centrist democrats this entire time on policy grounds. but no, they had to flash their burkeanism and love of insitutions etc. to get attention, and wound up on the wrong side of the fence, and now have a sad.
TLDR version: if you’re a moderate in america, you have to pick a side. this can go bad for you in one of two ways: your side can go insane, or lose. in the 90s, everyone assumed the risk of insanity was higher on the democratic side — therefore cautious people like frum went RIGHT. they made their bet, they should live with it.
scav
@MikeJake: Interesting thing to me is that they’re more or less pointing out that highly centralized planning may not work, not that Communism won’t won’t work by that approach. We only saw the the collapse of one or a few forms of Communism (and note that there are still some Communisms that are toodling along rather nicely in different formats). Would the collapse of the United States in its current incarnation prove once and for all, definitely, for evers and evers, amenz, that Democracy is a failed system? That Capitalism is doomed to failure? Seems to me all it proves is the exact combination of systems and people we burdened ourselves with went toxic.
jlow
@MikeJake: There is plenty of mathematical evidence that cutting government spending during a recession is bad, and that doesn’t seem to matter much.
Steve in DC
@Percysowner:
Sully is good on social issues, he’s just horrible on economics. Sullivan and Frum both fall into the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” label. But instead of moving over to the left like the rest of those types they stubbornly stick to being Republicans in the hopes that the old New England Republicans will come back and save the party with some grand “rational and polite conservatism” that never really existed.
Sullivan has been one of the most reliable Obama cheerleaders out there, it’s pretty comical. But rather than coming around and admitting that social liberalism + fiscal conservatism = Democrat today he bangs on that he is still are Republican and Obama is actually a conservative because conservatism is noble and good.
Violet
@Rob in CT:
We do. They’re called Democrats. I’m not being snide. Nixon would be considered too liberal for today’s Democratic party. Today’s Democrats are to the right of where Nixon was in the 70’s.
The Moar You Know
@miserybob: That’s a fantastic post. Sums up the problem pretty well; you’re asking these people to give up everything that makes them themselves, and for what? Where’s the payoff for them? There isn’t one. Spending the rest of your life admitting you’re a sucker and were duped is something most of us wouldn’t voluntarily do. Cole and Johnson are rare exceptions, not the rule.
That’s something we – with the help of some damned good social scientists and psychologists – should be working on.
Linnaeus
I was conservative when I was younger, but over time, due to education, life experiences, etc., I moved steadily leftward. It wasn’t always easy confronting what I had once believed to be right and realizing it wasn’t right, and it was really not easy when I came to the conclusion that some of the things I believed (and did) were downright embarrassing. But in the end, I’m glad I made the change, and I have no qualms about repudiating past beliefs of mine.
The French philosopher Denis Diderot argued that it was natural for a person to become more radical as he or she got older, rather than more conservative. That doesn’t seem to have played out generally, but it has in my case.
Davis X. Machina
@jlow: You can’t refute a theology.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I guess I can see where a personally conservative (as opposed to Randitarian or full-on Tea Bagger) would want to tell himself that Bush v Gore was a one off, but Citizens Fucking United didn’t tip him off that this ship has left port, flying the skull and crossbones and captained by the soulless immortal Dark DIck Cheney and first mate Karl Rove? IANAL, but I’m still gobsmacked that not just he decision, but the way it was reached (as I understand, ScAlito and Roberts basically told the plaintiffs to go rewrite their appeal so SC&R could piss on stare deciisis– again, not a lawyer, but I think I’m using that right– and essentially pass legislation from the bench
i
From your use of Burkean I guess you’re talking about Sullivan and Frum, but the one I will never understand is Olympia Snowe. I remember in ’96 she spoke up about the increasing anti-choice bullying of the GOP, and then for fifteen years she sat quietly with her hands folder in her lap, voting for the people who made the ’96 right look like center-leftists, then retired and blamed Obama for partisanship. Now she’s calling for filibuster reform, and the Beltway will not only genuinely no see the hypocrisy, they’ll laud this laughable coward for taking a brave stance against her party. I think there are dozens of Snowes in gov’t and the center-right media/think tank complex in DC, but she held the highest office
Maude
@Davis X. Machina:
I always say, you can’t argue with beliefs.
Violet
@The Moar You Know:
Find out what they want and sell it to them. Up until now they’ve been getting what they want from the Republicans — “You’re better than those black and brown people; you’re the best because America is the best and America was the best when white people were in charge.” So they want to feel smart and the best. How do Democrats sell that to them?
Gin & Tonic
@Linda Featheringill:
I know very many people who spent a good chunk of their lives under a communist system. It fundamnetally failed because people want to see their own results from their own effort. If they work harder they want to get more, or at least a little something. That’s almost instinctual.
The failure was best summed up in the old saw “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
MikeJake
@scav: Well, I’m no expert on communism, but I always thought it was synonymous with central planning if it was to be made workable on a national scale.
But here’s the discussion on CT:
Fascinating post, though on a subject of virtually zero contemporary relevance (though Cosma does add some salient thoughts about capitalism at the end). The two main problems with central planning are:
-An economy has so many variables to optimize that it’s beyond our ability to do so in a useful amount of time, even with today’s computers.
-Even if you did have the necessary computing power, you’d still need a substitute for market prices, something that dynamically determines the relative value of goods compared to other goods. Markets aren’t perfect, but they do allow for price discovery without needing a bunch of scientists and economists to artificially construct a value structure. In the Soviet Union, the sheer complexity of determining the “true” worth of goods was only resolved through arbitrary choices and adding kludge to the optimization functions. Not to mention that the faux-precision of the whole endeavor masks the fact that you’re relying on human beings with their own agendas to give you accurate information about the system and hoping that they believe in the system enough not to game it for their own benefit.
Davis X. Machina
@Maude: To be perfectly accurate, you can refute a theology, but it takes a bunch of kindling, a stake, and a medieval box of medieval kitchen matches.
Even then it doesn’t always work, and it plays hob with the local air quality, especially sub-10μ particulates….
Kay
@Steve in DC:
You write this constantly, but it isn’t true. How do you account for the Democratic Senators who are BOTH socially liberal and economic populists? Doesn’t the fact that Sherrod Brown and Al Franken and Sanders exist get in the way of your constant repetition of this broad theory?
Why do you insist that these two things are joined? That social liberalism excludes the possibility of economic populism? Marcy Kaptur is an economic populist who is anti-abortion, but that’s her only socially conservative aspect. She is also (horrors!) a feminist. People are complicated. Do these “facts on the ground” bother you at all?
If Elizabeth Warren is elected, will you revise this theory?
Trentrunner
Andrew Sullivan = 10% Burke + 10% Oakeshott + 80% Cartman
Andrew Sullivan is a cunty git.
slim's tuna provider
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: i did mean frum et al. i understand politicians a little bit better — for better or for worse, they’re on the hook for policy. for guys like frum and sully it’s much more about what foundation is going to give them grants and what their target audience is.
with snowe, never underestimate 9/11. for politicians on the fence like snowe, 9/11 and the unbelievable popularity that bush got from it was probably something they could never recover from. remember, for a few years, anytime a liberal opened their mouth, someone would say 9/11 and then you just had to shut up.
David in NY
@Violet: Face in the Crowd.
Wonderful, but a cop out in the end. The rich fascists, fronted by Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Williams) had everything going for them and should have kept on winning. But Lonesome just made the mistake of letting his contempt for the rubes show, so the good guys win instead. Deus ex machina all the way.
Life isn’t like that. See Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity. Sean isn’t going to be caught dead dissing his audience — in fact he may be a true believer himself.
I always wondered in the ’50’s and ’60’s why things were as good for liberals as they were, and why the right didn’t use its money to buy off everybody. And now they have. (I’ve also always wondered why liberals were so terrible at packaging their message … but that’s another quandary.)
Mark S.
@General Stuck:
I value the opinions of several of our BJ in-house counsel (Omnes, Kay). But some of them are arrogant assholes (you can guess the two I’m thinking of).
Valdivia
I have been exchanging emails these days with quite a few folks who teach constitutional law. I get the sense that for a low of them this decision is a watershed moment, in ways that Citizens United wasn’t in legal terms. I think CU was a terrible decision but quite a few of them said the legal points were consistent with precedent. Not so in this case. I too would be despondent if my profession would be revealed to be an an Emperor without clothes.
Davis X. Machina
@David in NY: The rubes don’t necessarily revolt even when you hold them in open contempt.
Cf. Bush, George W., and “I call you my base…”
ETA: I’ve also always wondered why liberals were so terrible at packaging their message…
Republicans benefit from the fact that any party predicated on a series of appeals to the worst in people begins every election cycle half-a-lap ahead. Appealing to the best has the obverse set of problems….
Tehanu
@scav:
Maybe democracy only works well in smaller venues, like (say) Iceland. Or maybe an oligarchy can only be effectively kept in check in places that aren’t suffering from the endless Dolchstosslegende we’re stuck with — that is, the refusal of the diehard Confederates to admit that they lost the fucking Civil War and they aren’t entitled to “racial” superiority.
Tonal Crow
@MikeJake:
You’re kidding, right? “Conservatives” wank all day long about how the greenhouse effect “violates” the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This argument persists despite resting upon a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of thermodynamics and of quantum physics. That is, it’s utter claptrap. Yet they cling to it.
MikeJake
Link failure!
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/
And I have no idea why half my comment had a strikethrough.
Friggin wordpress.
Steve
@Davis X. Machina: When I said “the other side” I didn’t mean conservatives. I meant the people on the other side of the debate over whether the Supreme Court is just a bunch of political hacks, i.e. folks like DougJ. I see now where my comment was ambiguous.
Steeplejack
@Linda Featheringill:
Everything the Nazis did was legal under German law. The courts were complicit, if not active collaborators.
scav
@MikeJake: Not an expert in communism either, I just don’t equate Communism in toto with Strict Centralized Planning in All Things, any more than I equate Democracy with Strict Free Markets, Unfettered in All Things. There are the idealized systems, there are the instantiations thereof. There was a point in time when planning wars on the scale of continents was impossible, now we unfortunately seem to manage them rather well. Companies are the size of nation-states now and seem to have figured out planning to certain extent: is it impossible for us to envision a decently run company of a certain size where people are fairly rewarded for their efforts and the elites at the top don’t skim off everything to their personal benefit while driving the company bankrupt?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Violet: At a more fundamental level, what Democrats have to break through is More-Money-than-someone-else = Success. Until we can end the worship of the dollar, it will be hard to change anything.
slim's tuna provider
@General Stuck: not sure most lawyers think of the Supreme Court as the “pinnacle”. i think we know it is one of the more politicized and pie in the sky aspects of law practice and learning.
Kay
@Steve in DC:
Debbie Stabenow, hell, Ted Kennedy, if you want to go outside the rust belt.
Where did you get the idea that excluding “feminists” and “civil rights” and “social issues” leads directly and inexorably to economic populism? IMO, it leads directly to Democrats alienating 75% of their base, in the hopes of gaining a couple a points on the coveted “white male working class” metric. It’s suicidal.
Corpsicle
Same reason so many avoid psychologists and therapists, at some level they know the truth, or at least how wrong or fucked up they are, but can’t summon up the courage to face it.
lacp
@Steve in DC: What part of The Bell Curve do you find to be ‘socially liberal?’
Cris (without an H)
And honestly, I still occasionally hear mutterings to that effect from the Communist-sympathetic left. “It’s not that communism doesn’t work, it’s that all those totalitarians who called themselves ‘Communists’ weren’t really practicing Communism.” Which is true enough, but it raises the question — if the only people who ever implemented your ideology (whether communist, libertarian, Republican, or whatever) mangled it into an inhumane killing machine, what makes you think anybody will ever get it right?
Someguy
@MikeJake:
Since when did the Crooked Timber folks start spouting Hayekian nonsense about the complexity of systems?
Joel
“One of the things that my father taught me besides physics – whether it’s correct or not – was a disrespect for respectable… for certain kinds of things. For example, when I was a little boy, and a rotogravure – that’s printed pictures in newspapers – first came out in the New York Times, he used to sit me again on his knee and he’d open a picture, and there was a picture of the Pope and everybody bowing in front of him.
And he’d say, “Now look at these humans. Here is one human standing here, and all these others are bowing. Now what is the difference? This one is the Pope” – he hated teh Pope anyway – and he’d say, “the difference is epaulettes” – of course not in the case of the Pope, but if he was a general – it was always the uniform, the position, “but this man has the same human problems, he eats dinner like anybody else, he goes to the bathroom, he has the same kind of problems as everybody, he’s a human being.
Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something special he did, or his honour, or something like that.” He, by the way, was in the uniform business, so he knew what the difference was between the man with the uniform off and the uniform on: it’s the same man for him.”
Richard Feynman
(because blockquote doesn’t work).
The Moar You Know
@Violet: Precisely. This shouldn’t be hard, but is because we’ve been approaching it the wrong way.
You can’t sell a guy anything by telling him his beliefs are wrong. If he needs to feel better than a black guy, let him. You don’t need to encourage that, but you do need to not be getting in his face and screaming that he’s a racist imbecile, either. At that point, as the good Barney Frank says, you’ll have better results arguing with a table. Also, if you’re calling him an idiot/racist/whatever, the problem from a larger viewpoint is not him, it’s you. You failed to sell the product.
You need to sell him something new and different. And this can be done, advertisers do it successfully every day.
Just Some Fuckhead
Look, the mandate WAS the conservative solution. If it’s struck down, that isn’t a failure of conservatism, it’s the direct result of letting the radicals take over. There’s nothing conservative about today’s so-called conservatives. They’re just a bunch of know-nothing radicals blowing everything up for the sheer delight of it.
There is a conservative party. They’re the ones that passed health care reform that included the mandate.
Xenos
@Steve:
As someone who expects a 5-4 vote overturning both the mandate and the rest of the ACA, and some extra new judicial doctrine that was not plead or argued by anyone, but is custom designed, out of nowhere, to lock in corporate control of our political system for the next century, I would be thrilled to be proven wrong.
I have been wrong before. Please let it happen now. I will take back at least a few of the mean things I have said about Scalia, Roberts, and Alito. Hat, or crow, will never have tasted so good.
Rob in CT
@Violet:
I understand your point, but the Democratic Party is a rather large ideological tent right now. There are certainly a bunch of ConservaDems in the tent. There is also the Progressive Caucus. And for that reason, I dubbed them a moderate party. The results we see are Conservative, because the GOP has gone Full Wingnut, and the ConservaDems have leverage that goes beyond their numbers alone would indicate.
Brachiator
@El Tiburon:
Added to this is the fact that communism has failed everywhere it has been tried, not a good track record.
@Linda Featheringill:
Problem here is that evolution does not have a direction, purpose or goal. We can’t count on some automatic natural process to get us out of this jam. We’re going to have to find a way to figure it out for ourselves.
And back to the main topic.
But hasn’t this day of reckoning been coming far a while. Since the last years of the Dubya Debacle, and with Republicans becoming more extreme, there has been a steady slew of stories about conservatives wailing and moaning about being alienated or pushed out of their movement.
And yet others keep hanging on. And Sully hasn’t gone Full Demo yet.
And also, despite all the wailings and gnashing of teeth, you have hard core conservatives happy to kick those of weak faith out, and despite all the optimistic predictions of the Great Demographic Rapture, the GOP is still able to recruit new members from the ranks of the perpetually afraid and angry.
dollared
@General Stuck: General, I can’t cut our resident attorneys much slack. They belong to a profession, with professional standards. Instead of being all “realpolitik” and worldly wise and weary, they should be doing what I do, which is harangue my local bar association to enforce ethical standards. By those standards, John Yoo should be disbarred. As a federal attorney, he could not willfully reinterpret federal law in a way that is entirely novel. That’s an extreme example. Let me give you a more local one: In Wisconsin, a prominent law firm (head of the RNC is a partner) advised the Republican legislature that if they outsourced redistricting to the law firm, then all communications between the Republican caucus and the law firm would be attorney-client privileged. In other words, all steps in the state redistricting would be secret, up until the day of the vote. You cannot imagine a scenario more calculated to subvert the vote, the most basic process in a democracy.
Every.attorney.in.Wisconsin.should.be.demanding.sanctions.agagainst.that.firm. Or their law license means nothing. And no lawyer in Wisconsin has any excuse for being worldly and shrugging their shoulders.
MikeJ
@Steve: This is not the only case upon which one can build the argument that the Supremes are a political body, not a judicial body. However, if the court were actually follow the law in this one case I would be very interested in reading the opinion to see exactly what it was they thought they couldn’t get away with trashing.
dollared
@Brachiator: Compare Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and tell me that every communist regime has failed.
The Moar You Know
@Mark S.: the mom got the banhammer this week. I gotta say, I consider myself a patient and tolerant man but our good host is WAY beyond me in those terms. He puts up with daily abuse I wouldn’t tolerate for a second. At any rate, she crossed a line in a big way and Cole dealt with the problem.
scav
Well, practically speaking, just about every system the human species has every tried has eventually failed, just like so very few of us have achieved immortality yet. We’re all pikers to the Egyptians though. They had interregnums that lasted longer than these here U-Benighted States.
Hunter Gathers
OT – Alex Pareene hilariously destroys K-lo.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@scav:
Most of America’s “systems” (in the broad sense) were designed in an environment of cheap resources and (relatively) expensive labor. We’re reaching the end of both of these curves at once. Almost everything we bitch about here has its ultimate roots in this, one way or the other.
IMO some kind of Upheaval during 2030-2045 is inevitable. Too many curves hit the “Oh Shit” point right about then. But I still haven’t given up hope that it can be a reasonably well-managed Upheaval with a not-unpleasant endpoint…
…if only because much of this country’s history can be described as a series of Upheavals, some reasonably well-managed, some not. And here we sit.
Violet
@The Moar You Know:
Exactly. It’s not that hard. The example that was made to me in a gardening class I’ve been taking was about how to get people to stop using pesticides. In practice, just explaining that pesticides hurt the environment, damage rivers and streams via runoff, etc. didn’t work very well. So they changed their tactics and taught people how to attract more butterflies and hummingbirds. Can’t use pesticides because it kills them. Viola! People reduce use of pesticides.
What’s the lesson? People want more hummingbirds and butterflies. Sell them that and you end up getting what you want, which in this case was reduced use of pesticides. The same tactics could be applied in politics, and in fact are by the Republicans. Democrats haven’t figured out how yet.
Anoniminous
@MikeJake:
It’s already been shown, several ways and along several axis, Conservative Economics – NCE, Laffler Curve, trickle-down, Austerianism, etc. – is intellectual rubbish. Teh response has been for them to either completely ignore the proofs or stick their fingers in their ears while screaming, “La! La! La! I can’t HEAR you!” The basic reason, in my opinion, is the Limbic System gets first whack at Thinking (writ large,) Conservatives have a strong emotive (a la Logical Positivism) attachment to the means by which Conservatism is preached, and negligible Critical Thinking skills.
Politically speaking, Conservatism seems to be untouched by any results of Social Science research after November 14, 1831 (when Hegel croaked.) It was about the same time non-Euclidean geometries started appearing, Logic took a turn for the Inclusive Middle, and it became apparently maths and Logic can be True and Valid but not necessarily Accurate-to-Reality.
Cris (without an H)
No kidding! Whereabout, I’d like to rubberneck the thread.
Ruckus
@Tehanu:
Maybe democracy only works well in smaller venues, like (say) Iceland
Or when one has an actual democracy, not a representative one. Although an actual democracy may not work in a very large setting(sort of like what we are seeing now) just because it could be pretty unwieldy.
The Moar You Know
@Steve: It would tell me that either 33% or 22% of the highest justices in the land are psychotic idealogues who put their duty to their party over the good of the Republic. I do not feel good about that, but it would be an improvement over a 5/4 split in favor. To have the Maginot line between a corporate-owned judiciary and one that observes the rule of law be one guy who is well over 70 isn’t a state of affairs I can put up with.
If the Supremes toss out ACA on a 5/4 split, all bets are off. It will tell us that we were right about Bush v. Gore, and that the Court is just a bought and held tool of those who paid for it.
And it won’t be 7-2. Maybe 6-3 if upheld, an outcome I doubt, but Alito’s personal vendetta with Obama will not allow him to vote in favor of this. I still to this day don’t know what happened with those two, but it obviously wasn’t a good thing.
Violet
@Cris (without an H):
Yeah, what happened, or is there a link? I guess I missed that.
Steeplejack
@MikeJake:
If you put a hyphen just ahead of text at the start of a paragraph, FYWP thinks you want strike-through. It also does it (unreliably) in other places.
-If you really need it, I think you can work around it by using the HTML code -, as I did at the start of this paragraph. Or, hell, step up to the big time and use a bullet (•). Easier to remember.
• ETA: Bullet paragraph.
Violet
@Steeplejack: Put two hyphens and no space it it works pretty well too. Not sure about the start of a paragraph, though. It works inside a sentence.
Mark S.
@Cris (without an H):
It was a Freddie post from about a week ago.
Cluttered Mind
@Violet: As long as someone is not completely poisoned with propaganda and living in an alternate reality, you can usually find some argument that will work with them. My best friend’s father is a traffic lawyer in NYC, a fairly wealthy one, who was very conservative for most of his life. He isn’t stupid and isn’t intellectually dishonest, he just believed that the post-Reagan system was working because it was working for him. Then he started to notice that the system was not, in fact, working for a lot of people he knew and cared about who had far less money than he knew they deserved to have for the quality of work they were producing. He could never be persuaded by arguments appealing to compassion or social justice, but if you explained to him why his ideology was wrong using financial arguments, which my friend was eventually able to do, he would respond. He doesn’t vote Republican anymore and recognizes that he was wrong. You just have to find the right approach for the right person.
Steeplejack
@Joel:
Blockquotes can’t fail; they can only be failed.
The Moar You Know
@Cris (without an H): Can’t find it but here’s a reference to what went down by JC himself.
But I haven’t seen her back here since.
Lojasmo
@Kay:
No facts bother SteveinDC’s precious head.
Brachiator
@dollared:
You’re kidding, right? I don’t see Cuba as a success. Do you? Have they achieved the fabled dictatorship of the proletariat? Or are they simply another authoritarian regime controlling their citizens?
It always amuses me when liberals who don’t have to live under authoritarian regimes sing their praises. And I include here friends, professors, and various colleagues who have visited Cuba. They always found ways to rationalize the human rights violations they saw with their own eyes. Or excused them as temporary and necessary.
Cuba is better than the vile Batista regime. But that’s still damning with very, very faint praise.
You want to compare the Dominican Republic with Haiti and then claim that the DR is a paradise?
Raya
Re: Communism, people tend to ignore the fact that many countries — notably India — still have functioning Communist Parties that actually get seats in elections, and sometimes even form governments (at the regional rather than the national level). It’s not true that “Communism is a failed ideology” unless you think “Communism” = “Soviet Union.” That’s just one version of Communism (and one that was quite unfaithful to Marx), and arguably it represents “Communism” as a whole about as well as the USA represents “Democracy” (i.e. not all that well).
Anoniminous
@Linda Featheringill:
It can’t be done well and, eventually it can’t be done at all.
See Soviet Union, collapse of.
We’re seeing similar preliminary conditions – IMNSHO – for a move to a new Fitness Landscape in the US and the rest of the First World for a similar reason: the producers of wealth are, by and large, receiving no benefit from the wealth they produce.
Mark S.
@The Moar You Know:
Huh, so I guess she ain’t banned.
I’d rather read an entire book entitled “EEMom: The Life Story” than read another dipshit comment from burnsie, but whatevs.
TenguPhule
A Republican would simply sell their soul and proceed onward.
Mike Lamb
@The Moar You Know: Check this thread: https://balloon-juice.com/2012/06/13/were-already-in-a-class-war/#comment-3344697
I have no idea how to make it more user friendly.
Chris
@David in NY:
Elites are very powerful but not omnipotent, and in those days they just didn’t have the ready made split between the people to exploit – civil rights provided that split.
Brachiator
@Raya:
Absolutely true. And states like Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura have or have had communist governments, often successful, but under a larger non-communist national government.
On the other hand, Marxist guerrillas in Nepal are simply inflicting more pain on an already unfortunate land.
NR
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Which was passed by a Democratic supermajority.
And somehow this is a good thing?
FlipYrWhig
@The Moar You Know: Liberalism had more traction when things were going well in the free-market economy. When times are rough, people enjoy finding scapegoats and blaming them. Why the scapegoat du jour is some updated version of “welfare recipients” (public employees, illegal immigrants, etc.) and not “rapacious businesses” is hard for me to understand, but that’s what seems to happen under pressure.
Chris
@redshirt:
This. And I do mean it. The Civil War and WW2 argue pretty strongly that fascism won’t stop unless you put a bullet in it. “Contain them and wait for them to collapse from their own contradictions” may have worked for the Communists, not for these guys.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: Maybe the erstwhile conservative solution is the most liberal possible option with the body of elected officials we’re saddled with. I don’t know why this continues to baffle you.
Amir Khalid
@The Moar You Know: In what thread did eemom get the hook? And what did she call John Cole?
Mino
What for lack of a better term, I call the American Consensus woudl seem to be dead. We will be whipsawed and gridlocked and business and the bond market will begin to reflect this.
Republicans have claimed that uncertainty is chilling investment. They are probably right, but they mistake the source of the instability.
I am forced to conclude that America in the 30-40’s consisted of the most far-seeing generation of Americans since our founders.
NR
@FlipYrWhig: That’s not what baffles me. What baffles me is why so many so-called progressives here are cheering it, and continuing to support such an obviously broken system.
Mino
@NR: Perhaps because we all have relatives or friends who are damaged by the pre-existing condition horror of health insurance.
Lurker
There’s one thing that puzzles me. How would overturning ACA help Republicans?
In the short term they might score a few political points for stopping Obamacare, but people like me with preexisting conditions and no easy access to health care will still exist. Sick, uninsured people will show up in the emergency room and drive up the premiums of insured people. Employers will still drop insurance for their employees because they can’t afford the premiums.
What’s in it for Republicans?
Steeplejack
@The Moar You Know:
Cole said that it was a joke and that she was banned only for a couple of hours. But it was misinterpreted by many, probably including her, because I haven’t seen her around here since then.
Omnes Omnibus
@NR: Aux barricades! Amirite?
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
Antonio Gramsci may have had a point about hegemony; when “rapacious businesses”, or rather the class that controls them, can dominate the discourse, it can be hard to get people to think outside of it. I’m not saying that’s all there is to it, but I don’t think it’s a point one can just dismiss, either.
WereBear
Liberals tend to have the serious political handicap of honesty.
Liberal sales pitch: If we just all pull together, treating everyone as equals with contributions to make, and care for each other, some of us will be saved from wrenching misery! Who’s with me?
Conservative sales pitch: You are just the bestest person ever, and none of the crap you are wading through is your fault, it’s the fault of those people over there, who aren’t even as good as you in a million years! Who’s really angry about that?
And there you have it.
Jay in Oregon
@The Moar You Know:
We could try re-education camps. I hear those are popular.
beltane
@Linda Featheringill: That’s a good question. The answer is that the German courts were instrumental in assisting and legitimizing the crimes of the 3rd Reich. Everything the Nazis did was 100% legal according to the German judicial system. Most dictatorships, in fact, pay scrupulous attention to observing legal niceties (this applied to Stalin as well as Hitler). Once a system has been thoroughly corrupted the who Rule of Law thing becomes meaningless because the laws themselves, and those who interpret these laws, have been co opted by the regime in question.
arguingwithsignposts
@NR:
Perhaps because some people realize that even if we stomp our feet, pout, and hold our breath until we’re blue, the magical unicorn pony isn’t going to appear.
Linnaeus
@Lurker:
What’s in it for Republicans – particularly Republican elites – is, among other things, a pool of increasingly disempowered and dispossessed workers who, by their reasoning, are more easily controlled due to their desire to hold onto whatever modicum of security that TPTB will offer.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Violet:
Nope. He didn’t have much of much of an ideology at all other than to stay just to the right of the Democrats.
Violet
@NR:
Because it’s better than the alternative.
Steeplejack
@Cris (without an H):
The original banning is here.
“It was a joke.”
beltane
@Linnaeus: Yes, a fearful populace is a docile and submissive populace.
lamh35
OT, but I hear for the twitter see that Obama is burning it up at NALEO
Villago Delenda Est
This is how you deal with fascists
The Moar You Know
@Violet: Perfect example. Absolutely perfect.
The climate change folks need to figure this out as well. “Give up your car, hot showers and air conditioning” isn’t going to work with anybody who has experienced the joy of any one of those things, and that includes me. “Give them up or you’ll all die” works even less well.
Sell it to me. Get me to pay. The hybrid car makers have done it, gotten people to get on waiting lists and pay a 50% premium for cars that (with the exception of the Tesla roadster, and boy did those guys do it right) don’t last as long, look ugly as shit, and have zero driving excitement. And I see a lot of those cars being driven by Republicans.
I know we can make the sale. We need to figure out how and start doing it in a big way.
huckster
@Lurker: I sometimes wonder if they really just didn’t think this through. It’s much easier to rail against the ACA intact than to have to deal with the aftermath of it being overturned. I honestly think a majority of them never expected in a million years that it might be, which explains the Orangeman’s memo. Sure, the tea-billies will rejoice, but it’s going to put the party in a tough spot since they have no plan.
Davis X. Machina
@Lurker:
A cowed, contingent populace, who can’t afford to look up from their conformist crouch long enough to ask why things are the way things are.
John Holbo’s review-essay on Donner Party Conservatism (triggered by David Frum’s 1991 book Dead Right) is as good a treatment as any.
From Frum:
Steeplejack
@Brachiator:
WTF? I think Dollared was saying that Cuba is better off than the Dominican Republic, and I think we can extrapolate from that that he/she probably thinks Cuba is miles ahead of Haiti.
Elie
@Violet:
I dunno —
We are all in this mess because Nixon decided that he could add the racist white Democrats to the Republican column, when they became disaffected after the passage of civil rights. He was right — they became Republicans in droves. To help bring more over, the Republicans launched into overt recruiting messages playing to their racism and other biases — offering more oxygen to their ideas that undermined the WE in “we the people”. Adding the Christianists and fusing them onto the corporatist fusilage, and bingo, we have this monster that truly is not viable long term, but sure as hell is going to tear up the village until it dies from its own excesses…
You risk a lot by allowing the most hate filled and narrow minded to dictate your norms and values. At some level, the most extreme and destructive must be suppressed by the will of the community that holds a sense of honoring broader values. Without that, the reckless and narrow dictate our terms.
So yeah, on one level, there isn’t much we can give those who hold their racist and insular points of view. At some point they are just going to have to learn to be different and those who can’t will ultimately die off.
Violet
@The Moar You Know:
Okay, so let’s brainstorm. How do you sell the idea of voting for Democrats? How do you make it the thing smart people do?
Villago Delenda Est
@Davis X. Machina:
The problem of course in the current capitalist economy, those at the top are NEVER at risk.
Just look at Rmoney. Insisted that he be insulated from financial and reputation damage if Bain Capital failed.
Look at the entire financial system. They take huge risks, but someone else pays for the bets they lose. They walk away with bonuses.
The system is utterly broken. Those at the top have no risk. those in the lower 99% take all of it. Socialize the risk, privatize the profit.
It may very well take the blood of the 1% to change this but it must change.
Raven
“Philadelphia jury convicts monsignor of endangering welfare of child; jury unable to reach verdict on second cleric. “
lamh35
read this story and try not to laugh the description of Politico given.
POLITICO suspends reporter
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/politico-suspends-reporter-mitt-romney.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Brachiator
@WereBear:
Two problems. First, it’s more a sermon than an economic prescription. How this will directly, indirectly or even coincidentally lead to more jobs and better wages is unclear.
Second, we are all supposed to pull together, but only some of us will be saved, is not a winning argument.
Bill Murray
@Gin & Tonic:
But our current capitalist system doesn’t really do this either, plus it’s on its at least second attempt to destroy the world. But as long as rich people like it, it’s not going anywhere
LongHairedWeirdo
I guess I don’t understand the thinking here.
People *claim* that being a “conservative” means “supporting the Republican Party’s current strategy” but that doesn’t mean that’s a good definition.
The Republicans are against all tax increases, including the ending of a temporary tax break. That’s not “conservative”. There’s nothing “conservative” about it. It’s not “conservative” in the sense of careful and prudent; it’s not “conservative” in the sense of doing what has worked in the past. It’s a great wedge issue, one the Republicans have been playing very well for a long, long time… but it’s not in any way “conservative”.
The Republicans decided to invade a country that was doing us no harm, based upon lies. That was in no way “conservative”. But it was a great wedge issue.
The Republicans decry regulation in all forms, which is not only “not conservative”, it’s completely fucking insane. But, again, it’s a great wedge issue… they’re *always* saying “deregulate” and that means anyone who cares about the health of the nation (in all senses of the phrase) needs to demand regulation. Regulation on one side, deregulation on the other.
The Republican Party is not conservative.
But people keep talking about them as if they were, as if they had anything to do with being conservative. That’s a way of hiding the problem.
Brachiator
@Steeplejack:
My point is that the comparisons do not work out to an endorsement of communism.
And again, the Dominican Republic is miles ahead of Haiti. Do you, then, want to endorse the authoritarian regime of the DR?
And let’s cut to the chase. All those in favor of importing the current political system in Cuba to the US, declare so now. Their version of communism by definitiion excludes democracy. Are you all up for that?
Not theoretical improvable communism. Communism as actually practiced. Let’s throw in the still communist on paper Chinese as well.
NR
@arguingwithsignposts: Wow, you’re a fucking idiot.
NR
@Violet: I fail to see how all of us becoming slaves to private corporations is better than the alternative.
NR
@Villago Delenda Est: And you do realize that voting for Democrats will not bring about that change, right?
Linnaeus
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Perhaps “Toryism” would be a better descriptor of the Republican Party’s political philosophy.
Valdivia
@Brachiator:
thank you for answering that.
Another good example. Why not compare Chile and Cuba? hey both had dictatorships, one came out of that dictatorship and it is the country that is doing best in the hemisphere. The other one? Still a dictatorship, granted nowhere as hideous as the Chilean was, but they are one of the least developed and the least free country in the hemsiphere.
beltane
@Bill Murray: Most successful, or at least long-lived economic systems (feudalism, slaves economies, etc.) have have not provided any sort of positive incentive or “results” to people who work hard. The whole “work hard and you’ll get ahead” thing is just as much a myth as a belief in an afterlife. Just because it is the belief system we all grew up with doesn’t mean we have to take it as empirical fact.
Sticks, even literal sticks, are just as effective as carrots, and “results” don’t always involve working as hard as possible in order to amass the greatest amount of money. Surveys of medieval villages, for example, have showed that the peasants tended to work only as much as they had to, and that most times of the year they had an awful lot of leisure time on their hands. Sure, they could have looked for ways to fill up that time with revenue producing activities but it mostly seems that they preferred sitting in their doorways, gossiping and picking lice out of each other’s hair. Who’s to say they were wrong?
Capitalism is no more the natural state of affairs than Christianity is humankind’s natural religion. To pretend otherwise is nothing more than a display of one’s own cultural biases.
Omnes Omnibus
@Linnaeus: Poujadisme.
weaselone
@Valdivia: Chile didn’t essetnially have all its oil cut off in the 60s and suffer under a decades long trade embargo. It’s amazing that it isn’t an absolute hellhole. Who knows how it would have turned out without excessive outside interference.
Linnaeus
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s a good comparison, given that contemporary conservatism often embraces a populist style and lionizes “small business”, which is not something we think of when we think of Tories.
That said, it seems to me that the Republican party cloaks its Toryism in the clothes of Poujadisme. But I could be wrong on that.
Cheap Jim
@NR: What’s your solution, Chief?
dollared
@Valdivia: Cuba and Chile? Why don’t you ask a Chilean below the 90th percentile in income?
Cuba is far more “developed” than Chile. The human capital is as fully developed, in terms of health and education, as the US. Chile is far behind that.
Oh, by “developed” you must mean “strip malls.” My bad.
arguingwithsignposts
@lamh35:
What a load of shite.
David Hunt
@David in NY:
This is just my personal opinion: They still had the power of the coalition that FDR built to work against the Big Money interests in favor of working class people…or some of them. A big piece of FDR’s coalition were Southern Democrats who were vehemently against any type of civil rights gains. In essence, FDR beat back Big Money by teaming up with Big Racism. This is why Social Security originally didn’t cover teachers, agricultural workers, domestic workers, and some other areas of work that tended to be done by someone other than white men. The price the forces of Big Racism extracted was to make sure that very of few of Those People got to benefit from the program.
Then liberals starting getting behind civil rights legislation in a big way in the 60s and Big Racism dropped out of the coalition. Liberals have been having trouble getting things to go their way since.
Vastly oversimplified but I think that’s at least a part of it.
Violet
@NR:
Is “becoming slaves to private corporations” how you describe having health insurance under the new law? Not everyone views having health insurance through a private corporation that way.
However, to answer your question, if the alternative is dying from a disease because you can’t afford health insurance, then many people will prefer to live. If the alternative means depleting your retirement savings, selling your house, and generally impoverishing yourself to be eligible to go on Medicaid, if it even still exists in your state, then many people will prefer the to have health insurance, even if it means it’s through a private corporation.
The law is a start, just as Medicare and Social Security were starts when they first began. Doesn’t mean they can’t be improved upon. You have to start somewhere. This is the start we have. I’d much rather keep it.
NR
@Cheap Jim: Vote for parties that actually support progressive values. And don’t listen to the so-called “pragmatists” around here who will rant and rave at you for doing so.
dollared
@Brachiator: I would not advocate Cuban communism for the US. If, 50 years from now, all the arable land is owned by ADM, the public school system has been destroyed, 95% of the population is uneducated, does not have health care, and is terrorized by private armies of the wealthy, I might.
But since that is not the case, it seems like a bad idea.
What’s your point? You were saying communism never works. Now you only seem to want to prove that the US should not adopt it. Pardon me if I observe that those are two different assertions.
NR
@Violet:
It’s how I describe being forced by law to give money to private corporations, yes.
Medicare and Social Security started out as government programs. The ACA is a corporatist bill. There’s really no comparison.
Valdivia
@weaselone:
excuse me? and since the 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet Union they got aid and oil for FREE just because they were communists. And since 1998 they have been receiving millions in oil and money from Venezuela. The only time in which they suffered from the embargo (which by the way I think it is the most pathetic excuse for Latin American policy I have ever seen from a country) was when the Soviet Aid dried up after the collapse and they went into the Periodo Especial where some of the restrictions were lifted and private citizens could open little restaurants and hotels in their homes. Oh and women could return to being prostitutes like in the good old days of Batista.Want to know what Cuba is really like without having been there? I reccomend you go read all the articles by Alma Guillermoprieto in the New York Review of Books. She was a dancer in the 60s and 70s with the Cuban National Dance Company and is probably one of the best journalist in the US now writing about the region. Cuba is not a fucking tropical communist paradise.
Your comment is the perfect example of the ‘it didn’t fail it can only be failed’ type of excusing of a dictatorial regime that gets a free pass just because it happens to be communist.
Violet
@NR: You don’t have to buy the insurance. You can just pay the penalty/tax. Government program for you.
Cheap Jim
@NR: And when those parties lose, as they ever have when I voted for them? And by lose, I mean not by a few votes, but given a fine shellacking?
Brachiator
@NR:
So who do you vote for instead?
@beltane:
So here’s a question. Are you suggesting that people who want to work, or who even want well paying jobs, are just suckers?
Are you suggesting that the average citizen can’t get ahead? That the game is inherently rigged?
So, even Democratic presidents who promised a Fair Deal, or a New Deal, were just shills trying to keep the masses complacent and happy?
Does this also mean that you can show that even unionized workers never got ahead, never did better than their parents? Never, at any time in the history of this country or any other country?
Valdivia
@dollared:
Happy to. Go look at literacy rates at every level. At infant mortality rates. At the possibility to get a job in the area in which you have an education. At social mobility. At the ability to come and go in the a country as you please. Also: Chile is the ONLY country in the region that has made a dent in the difference of incomes at the top and bottom quintiles. I would recommend you go and look at the CEPAL report about development in the region and see just how well Chile has done this under democracy and how Cuba has done worse in a dictatorship.
I really have to wonder what is this fetish of people to defend Cuba as if it was a miracle of wonders when it is not.
Mike G
And for the Republican lawnorder authoritarian-follower trash, who find pseudo-security in obeying the powerful, a heirarchical system where they always have some ethnic/social minority below them that they can freely boss around and abuse, no matter how low their own rung.
Lurker
@NR:
If you get health insurance through your employer, you’re already being “forced” to give money that would otherwise have gone into your paycheck to private corporations.
Why can’t cancer survivors like me get the same right to fork over our own money to not-for-profit health insurers like Kaiser Permanente?
Linnaeus
@Mike G:
Right. To make an admittedly imprecise analogy, they figure that if they support giving the lords what the lords want, then they might get to be the reeve or the bailiff.
Cheap Jim
@NR: What I’m getting at, Chief, is that your solution doesn’t have a different outcome from what I do now.
mclaren
If this fool hasn’t realized that law is politics and nothing but politics, he’s already wasted his life.
What is the law but a set of rules for how people in a society are to conduct themselves? And how do people determine how to conduct themselves except by (wait for it…) politics?
Well over 80% of the laws in America are “blue laws,” laws which do nothing other than attempt to regulate the conduct of an individual behind the closed locked door of hi/r home. Copyright laws, anti-drug laws, laws involving sex with the wrong people (formerly anti-gay laws, today, laws against sex with minors — highly amusing insofar as a “minor” in Britain is anyone under age 16, while a “minor” in the Netherlands is anyone under age 14, and a “minor” in America is anyone under age 18)…all “blue laws.”
The only reason for most of the laws on the books is politics. A majority of the foolishly ignorant and crazily prejudiced American population gets upset if someone behind the closed locked doors of their home is toking some weed or banging a 17-year-old girl or ripping a DVD they rented from Netflix. In other cultures, none of these activities are crimes (in the Netherlands it’s perfectly legal for a 17-year-old girl to fuck an older guy, in various countries in Europe it’s perfectly legal to make a personal copy of a DVD for backup purposes, in various other countries in Europe marijuana is legal).
Even within the various states of the United States of America activities which are perfectly legal in one state are crimes in another state. In Baltimore Maryland, carrying around a bottle of beer and drinking from it on the street is legal as long as it’s in a paper bag: in Chicago, the same activity is illegal. In New Orleans Louisiana, carrying around any alcoholic beverage in an open cup is entirely legal provided the beverage was purchased at a bar licensed to sell alcohol (they call it a “go cup”).
The notion that law has anything to do with logic or precedent is a piece of propaganda purveyed by lawyers. Laws are nothing but politics and always have been.
Calouste
@Steve in DC:
FTFY.
catclub
@The Moar You Know: I do hope that banning is implemented in such a way that for the banned poster, their posts still appear, but not for any other reader.
It is more insidious that way. And the banned ones can keep posting more and more to get a response.
Barry
@28 Percent: “Can I change my will to stipulate that, when I die, my corpse should be plastered with medical bills and dumped unceremoniously on Justice Thomas’ front lawn?”
No imagination whatsoever. How about held in a warm chamber for a week, until it is incredibly putrid, and then run through a vaporizor upwind of certain people’s houses?
The odor will never come out.
Barry
@Linda Featheringill: “[Does everyone know how much the courts helped in the 1930s?]”
Do you have sources? I’ve heard some stuff about the Weimar era (short form – kill a liberal/leftist, get a slap on the wrist; kill a right-wing, get executed).
arguingwithsignposts
@NR: Clap louder purity troll
David in NY
@David Hunt: Sure, LBJ thought he’d lose people for a generation when he passed the Voting Rights Act. He didn’t think it might be forever.
dollared
@Valdivia: Chile will not beat Cuba in literacy and infant mortality.
Chile v. Cuba is a good argument – Chile had a low population and an abundance of resources, and an existing strong education system from its pre-Pinochet days. It has had success in development, although its inequality of wealth and income is still far above the OECD average. Simply put, it’s still a class driven society with very little social mobility, but one that has had success expanding and modernizing its economy and sharing some small portion of the gains. It certainly has outperformed the northern half of South America.
However, Cuba had much greater disadvantages in natural resources, higher population density, and greater historical inequality. And an aggressive neighbor that was the most powerful nation in the world. So it is hard to say that its repressive regime was an irrational response to external threats.
So, could Cuba have modernized under the Chilean model? Not a chance. So what should we conclude?
David in NY
@NR: “ACA is a corporatist bill”
Are you campaigning to make your car insurance single payer, then? I bet not. Because a “corporatist” solution can work. It can assure people coverage they wouldn’t have otherwise. It can (and does) limit profits the insurance companies can make; indeed, these provisions have resulted in refunds to many policyholders already. It can further reduce premiums (and thus profits) by the insurance exchanges that will make the insurance market more transparent and thus increase competition.
The corporations pay a price for having people required to get insurance. I don’t think that’s so bad, if everyone can be assured coverage. But you seem to think the status quo, with millions of uninsured, will be better. But we’ve been there — let’s move on.
Brachiator
@dollared:
Actually, I amended my own statements, but not explicitly enough for your tastes. I tried to be honest, and agreed with the poster who noted that India has a number of states that have had successful communist governments. Not quite the same as success on the national level, and not even problem free on the state level, but examples of successful (and largely democratic) communist political entities.
However, to suggest that Cuba is successful is not accurate, especially when their “success” is based on compulsory methods in which the citizens cannot leave, or change their their government or leaders. This kinda begs the question of what success means.
And to try to declare Cuba a success by comparing it to the Dominican Republic or Haiti is just plain dishonest.
And I am not trying to prove that the US should not adopt Cuban style communism. But people, with good reason, assert that the US would be better off if we adopted France’s health care system. It seems reasonable to conclude that if you think that Cuba is successful, then you would be amenable to living under that system yourself. Today. Right now. It is an intellectual evasion to say that communism is good enough for them there Cubans, but not good enough for you.
Valdivia
@dollared:
is your argument one of faith here? That no country can beat Cuba on infant mortality or literacy? Give me the data where you prove no country can beat Cuba. Many countries in latin america have made an effort towards literacy and infant mortality (see Costa Rica) and they did it without an army, repression neither from the left or the right.
And while each country had completely different colonial histories, natural resources and ethnic compositions you seem to argue that Cuba cannot be Chile so it’s ok for it to be communist because it was the only way for it. This is a circular argument that does not address the issue: why are you so hung up on the idea that a dictatorship is in any way the only form of governance that would make a country like Cuba function? I guess you think all the other Caribbean islands would be better off too if they were under a Castro-like regime, just so that we compare apples to apples.
WereBear
@Brachiator: I’m just saying what happens… not what we should do!
Barry
@slim’s tuna provider: “TLDR version: if you’re a moderate in america, you have to pick a side. this can go bad for you in one of two ways: your side can go insane, or lose. in the 90s, everyone assumed the risk of insanity was higher on the democratic side—therefore cautious people like frum went RIGHT. they made their bet, they should live with it.”
Anybody who assumed that was a fool; the Democratic Party was moving right at full speed in the 90’s.
Valdivia
@dollared:
here you go, because data is our friend: Argentina in 2003-4 had a higher literacy rate than Cuba. Chile was just half of a percentage point behind. Uruguay has the highest rate. Costa Rica and Panama are in the same range 93-94% literacy. All these countries did it without having recourse to a dictatorship and with vastly different histories between them.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
OK. Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
FlipYrWhig
@NR: You’re being forced by law to give money to private corporations _who then have to provide you with services_. Do you complain that your tax money goes to private corporations when your local government hires contractors to pave the roadways? Personally, while I like public employees, I care more if the road gets built on time and on budget than who cashes the check for building it.
FlipYrWhig
@Barry: The Democratic Party was moving right in the 1990s because they could gain votes that way, for instance by coddling big business and grousing about runaway spending. Democrats running as “fiscal conservatives” started to win, especially in the Sun Belt and Rust Belt. And that’s why they still do it now: because it’s a profile that does better in many spots on the map than “dedicated to sustaining a generous welfare state” does.
Racist populists used to be Democrats, and swung Republican after ’65. Budget-balancing technocrats used to be Republicans, and swung Democratic — albeit not decisively so — starting about ’88.
negative 1
@Cris (without an H): That’s like saying Putin is an indictment of capitalism. It’s because totalitarianism is a political doctrine, whereas communism is an economic doctrine. Unless you can prove they’re inseperable, the point is valid.
Barry
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “From your use of Burkean I guess you’re talking about Sullivan and Frum, but the one I will never understand is Olympia Snowe. I remember in ‘96 she spoke up about the increasing anti-choice bullying of the GOP, and then for fifteen years she sat quietly with her hands folder in her lap, voting for the people who made the ‘96 right look like center-leftists, then retired and blamed Obama for partisanship. Now she’s calling for filibuster reform, and the Beltway will not only genuinely no see the hypocrisy, they’ll laud this laughable coward for taking a brave stance against her party. I think there are dozens of Snowes in gov’t and the center-right media/think tank complex in DC, but she held the highest office”
Because she’s a lying sack of sh*t? She happily stood sorta in the middle, enabling the GOP to do what it wanted, collecting her bribes, and enjoying a reputation as ‘reasonable’ and ‘moderate’.
And *now*, when she’s retired, she start talking brave sh*t.
Weaselone
@Valdivia:
You assumed a lot about my feelings about the Castros and communism from an extremely short and what I considered a relatively uncontroversial post. I would be impressed, if you weren’t so completely wrong.
At no point did I suggest that Castros were awesome, or that communism was an economic system I considered viable. I intended to make two points.
1.That Cuba has been subjected to a decades long trade embargo while Chile has not so comparing the current states of the two country’s economy’s and pretending that it says anything about capitalism vs. communism is a bit of stretch.
2. That the evolution of Cuba’s government may have been significantly different had the embargo not been put in place and the US had pursued a different relationship with Cuba.
Midnight Marauder
There is a reason a sustained campaign was launched to move Andrew Sullivan to the “Blogs We Monitor And Mock As Needed” category.
There has never been, and never will be, anything serious about him as an intellectual.
Valdivia
@Weaselone:
apologies but it definitely sounded like you were blaming the embargo for whatever went wrong with Cuba, instead of blaming the regime that has stunted a lot of development opportunities for the sake of ideology.
My point was to compare countries that have both had dictatorships contra the previous commenter. If I wanted to do a serious analysis of Cuba I would look at the first half of the 20th century in all the Caribbean countries and then track their different paths after the Cuban revolution. But instead I went for an easy comparasion about communism not being the shining miracle that everyone always credits with being the best system in the region. The data just doesn’t support it.
I also think that the embargo cannot be used as an explanation because Cuba benefited greatly from money that came to them in spite and because of the embargo. I think we can all agree the embargo has been an utter failure as a policy so to make it into the one determining cause of how Cuba turns out, seems like a way of not looking at the failure of the communist system itself as it is lived and practiced in Cuba.
Barry
@Lurker: “What’s in it for Republicans?”
1) Money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Whatever decision is made will have been made in close
consultation with deep-pocketed parties.
2) Trashing President Obama – the political goal of making
him look weak. This shores up the right, and will lead some
independents to believe that he is indeed weak (and wrong).
3) Asserting Federalist power. Each rancid decision is a
legal and political precendent for the next. Think of what
Bush v. Gore did; SCOTUS played politics, and got away with
it (with a bunch of back-stabbers on the alleged left
justifying it).
4) Personal ego and power. Imagine what Scalia, Thomas,
Alito, Roberts and Kennedy would feel like. They will
have b*tch-slapped the most powerful single man on the
planet.
Barry
@Lurker: “There’s one thing that puzzles me. How would overturning ACA help Republicans?
In the short term they might score a few political points for stopping Obamacare, but people like me with preexisting conditions and no easy access to health care will still exist. Sick, uninsured people will show up in the emergency room and drive up the premiums of insured people. Employers will still drop insurance for their employees because they can’t afford the premiums.”
And you’ll notice that the right is actually doing just fine.
They don’t care until it’s their problem.
dollared
@Valdivia: I said that Cuba had a higher literacy rate than Chile. I was correct. I never raised any other latin american country on the subject of literacy. You are just raising strawmen.
As for all these countries having development without dictatorship, are you forgetting Agusto Pinochet? Or the dictators of Panama and Argentina? Or the US invasion of Panama?
I’m not saying that any of these dictators/invaders were beneficial, but you are so wrong on the basic facts…..
Barry
@Valdivia: “and it is the country that is doing best in the hemisphere. ”
Actually (a) Chile didn’t do so hot and (b) it started doing reasonably well about five years after Pinochet lost power.
dollared
@Brachiator: I would not welcome Castro’s regime in the US. We don’t have the conditions and history in the US that they had in Cuba.
And I did not say that I would not support liberalization of politics in Cuba now, two generations after the land redistribution and after two generations of raised living conditions for all residents.
Cuba could be liberalized tomorrow. Step one would be a noninterference pledge from the US. Step two would be a treaty with the US invalidated all compensation and land claims from exiled Cubans. Until then….defense is the best offense.
Valdivia
@Barry:
I never ever said Chile did well because of Pinochet or during his tenure as torturer extraordinaire.
But while Chile has been hit by the recession these last couple of years, under the Concertacion governments (left-center coalition) after the transition to democracy Chile did extremely well and not only well for just the top of society but for everyone.
Valdivia
@dollared:
I am not wrong on the basic facts. All these countries had a terrible history (except Costa Rica, which has been lucky) but they all reached literacy rates TODAY without having been under a dictatorship for 40 odd years, like Cuba has.
And you said NO ONE COUNTRY would be better than Cuba and you were wrong. Cuba is a smidgen above Chile, so little as to be insignificant. Are you saying that the difference between 97.3 and 96.8 is worth 40+ years of living under a dictatorship?
What truly gets in my grill is people who romanticize the Cuba experience at the expense of countries in the region that came out of hellish dictatorships and did the hard work of democractic governance and they do as well or better than Cuba. But I guess they deserve no credit because they didn’t have Che Guevara or the perfume of revolution to have them commended.
dollared
@Valdivia: Please show me where I said that Cuba was #1 in literacy in the Western Hemisphere.
And if literacy were all, then you might have an argument. Now let’s talk about life expectancy, crime rates, access to health care, overall education level.
And to compare Cuba to Chile without looking at demographics and history is absurd. I’m glad we’re talking a matter of degrees. But in my book, Castro is a net benefit to 11 million people. As to the 500,000 he pissed off, they got to live in either Madrid or Miami. And yes, I would rather live as a person of average means in Havana than La Paz or Buenaventura. YMMV. Perhaps freedom to die an early death of disease or malnutrition is the highest freedom. But I pass.
Valdivia
@dollared:
I am really quite sure that you, not having lived in Cuba, would rather live there in your theoretical universe than live in Mendoza, or Puntarenas, or Guanacaste or the many cities in Latin America were life expectancy, crime, education morbidity are at the level of Cuba or better and they have freedom which I know seems trite but when you live day in and day out in a dictatorship it may not be so trite.
Finally because I really can’t make it any clearer: You seem to make it out to be that the choice in Latin America is to live in Cuba or live in the worse poverty possible. And that is what I find pernicious as an argument. You are drawing a caricature of what the hemisphere is like, and on the basis of that caricature you declare Cuba to be better. I give Cuba props for what they have done for their citizens I just recognize it has come at a very high price. You on the other hand seem to not even acknowledge that democratic governance in the region has done as well or better without the need of a repressive regime at the top.
I want people recognizing the good of the democratic regimes in the region, and not the same old song from the 80s and 70s about how only Cuba got it right. Give room for the reality that other countries have succeeded and that Cuba, is a fucking dictatorship.
Valdivia
@dollared:
I should add that you were right that you didn’t say Cuba would beat every country just Chile. That was my misreading as I tend to think of Chile as the country that does best therefore beating Chile meant beating everyone. It turns out that Uruguay is the country that does best.
Lurker
@Barry:
I know right-wingers who are blind, broke and/or dead because they were uninsured when they got sick. It’s their problem right now.
…unless you’re referring to right-wing politicians, judges, and pundits, who all have great health coverage. In that case, I got nothing.
Kathleen
@Violet: Oh, yes indeed, Violet. Face In the Crowd is brilliant. Face, Network, and Idiocracy are documentaries more than feature films.
Dollared
@Valdivia: No, Valdivia, I would consider moving to Mendoza, or Punta del Este, or (if I could swing it) Bahia Inglesa.
I am well aware that Latin America is bigger than the US and very diverse. However, anybody who thinks that what the vast majority of Colombians – not la clase alta, the vast majority – have been through since 1958 is to be preferred to what the vast majority of Cubans have been through in the same time period, is, simply put, not honest or not thinking. Or let me say it another way: We can’t ask that question of the 1 million Colombians who were killed, and it’s hard to ask the question of the 3 million who left Colombia.
And the conditions in Cuba in the 1950s were vastly more unequal (and for the poor, much more difficult) than the Southern Cone in teh 1950s. And when the inequality is massive, and the rich are supported by the US, there is little hope of change. Castro solved that problem. No one else has established a peaceful, egalitarian society in the Caribbean basin. Costa Rica comes closest, and no other country comes close at all.
Cuba needs to reform soon. But I cannot be sorry that their people are educated, have long life expectancy, and that they were able to permanently eject their parasitical and murderous upper class.
Dollared
@Valdivia: One more thing: if the Supremes reverse Wickard 5-4, it doesn’t mean our profession is empty. It means that about 10% of our profession has abandoned their ethics and their respect for the law, for personal gain.
It is our job to call out their corruption, and root them out of our profession, and restore honor and integrity to our profession, and the rule of law to our society.
It just means we have more work to do.
Caz
So you’re saying that American conservatism is dead, wrong, and out-of-touch, so much so that those who hold conservative beliefs should let go of that ideology and recognize that it’s dead and gone and they should move on to a new ideology?
You do know that more than half of Americans consider themselves conservative, right?
Sometimes I think you BJtards are just flat out lying with the crap you come up with. There’s no way that someone at least smart enough to read and write could hold that many ridiculously absurd views and perspectives of what’s going on in the country/world.
Our govt has run up a debt that is 107% of GDP, the president thinks he can murder U.S. citizens in his sole discretion without any regard for Constitutional rights, and the Senate hasn’t passed a budget the entire time Obama has been in office.
There is significant dysfunction and corruption throughout our govt, led by Obama, and particpated in by both the R’s and D’s in Congress. Yet, you continue to support Obama and his legion as if they are running a well-oiled machine of govt and deserve 4 more years.
Don’t you realize that 4 more years of this ineptitude and corruption might actually have effects that you will finally feel in your life? I know you think hyperinflation, food shortages, fuel shortages, unruly mobs in the street, and KGB-like arrests of citizens during the night could never happen here, but if we have to endure much more of the status quo, that’s just what you might get!
Wise up, it’s not a game, it’s real life – try standing up for freedom for a change, BJtard.