Sully has an explanation of what he meant by “makers and takers”:
I should unpack a little (and maybe at some point, a lot). The divide I’m talking about is not a hackneyed distinction between God-fearing entrepreneurs and parasitic welfare queens. It’s about those who contribute their labor to produce something of value, and those who primarily rely on government, directly and indirectly, to get them through their lives. This is not about rich and poor as such. It’s clear at this point that the rich and privileged often get as much from government as anyone else. Nor is it about ending a welfare state that provides a core level of health and retirement security. Conservatives should be very comfortable in backing such a safety net – and working hard to make it more efficient and effective. It’s about work vs. welfare broadly conceived. What I think conservatism has to do is recover its core sense of itself as the movement that values work over wealth, individual effort over collective action, and a system that is transparent and fair enough for ordinary folk with lives to live and families to take care of to keep tabs on.
“Work versus welfare broadly conceived”? It’s the latest variation on compassionate conservatism and “Sam’s Club conservatism”, some nonspecific crap about how you don’t want to screw the poor, you just want to make sure they’re really sweating for the scraps you throw to them.
Really, this kind of thing is so contentless that it it should be explained with Boehner-style bubble diagrams.
CT
What a load of tripe-I just read that over at his site and came away with the sense it was just so much squid ink-muddy the water and get the hell away after stepping deep into the sh!t. This is pure Burkean Bells hand-waving-"I wasn’t talking about any actual people-I was just musing about some Platonic ideal of conservatism that doesn’t actually exist". Weak effort.
gnomedad
All Sully needs to do is clarify his concept of "true conservatism" and then find a world that it describes.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
"Well, the only important thing I know about the poor is, I’m not one of them. Fuck the poor! I’ve got mine."
-the core message of the Republican Party for the past 130 years or so
MattF
Worse than contentless– it omits the whole universe of transactions and motivations. The thing be aware of is that people will both make and take, simultaneously and repeatedly. Take and make, sometimes in economic terms, sometimes not. Sullivan is just falling into some sort of debased winger survival-of-the-fittest jargon.
TR
When exactly did conservatism value work over wealth? They’ve been bashing unions and pushing for the end of the estate tax for decades.
And when did conservatism value individual effort over collective action? Can someone explain to Sullivan what a "corporation" is, how it embodies collective action, and which political movement has been trying to protect individual workers and consumers from its power?
I could spend all day on the "transparent and fair enough" smokescreen. This is, after all, the party of bullshit and strawmen.
Legalize
Sully, in his heart of hearts is a traditional conservative. He has his and everyone else "depends on the government" for their existence. The end. His quibble with conservatism and the GOP is and always has been, it makes him look bad on television when he’s trying to portray himself as a reasonable guy with a book to sell. That said, I’d take him as an opposition leader over the current crop of GOPer assholes.
Comrade Darkness
Egads, digging deeper, ain’t he?
government, directly and indirectly, to get them through their lives
Yeah, those pussy firefighters, police, sewer workers and career soldiers. Government in a democracy IS us. If you think it isn’t US, get off your ass and run for office or assist someone you like to do so.
values work over wealth, individual effort over collective action, and a system that is transparent and fair enough for ordinary folk with lives to live and families to take care of to keep tabs on.
What is wrong with collective action? What the hell does he think civilization is?
Transparency is enforced by the rule of law and the courts. Nothing else will produce transparency. But that would be collective action, and my horror, require someone in the government, so that won’t work. Gah, it burns!
ksmiami
Ugh – I wrote my thesis on Faulkner and I could not understand that passage for the life of me. Sorry Sully, the GOP does not believe in a safety net. Get a clue, they have been trying to unravel the New Deal since the first days it passed. They live for income inequality and rewarding the few at the expense of the many as in the middle class. Fuck them with a d**do made of glass shards.
Conservativism for the GOP means I’ve got mine Jack keep your hands off my stack
gnomedad
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
And for the rubes: "You’re not one of them, you’re one of us, and you’ll have yours Real Soon Now. Right after the next tax cut."
guster
In addition to ‘make them sweat for scraps,’ what’s interesting here is this: "It’s about those who contribute their labor to produce something of value, and those who primarily rely on government, directly and indirectly, to get them through their lives."
As if the two things don’t overlap. Constantly. With everyone. And as if those are the only two categories.
What about people who contribute their labor to produce something of -no- value? Ken Lay, say. Hedge funds assholes. Norm Coleman. What of those who primarily rely on government to get through their lives (like, say, lifelong members of the military, or brilliant artists on the dole) and still contribute something of value?
It’s such an anemic worldview.
Fleem
Delurking just to note that this quote makes Sullivan sound slightly more toolish than he does in the post as a whole. Further down in his post:
argh
What I think conservatism has to do is recover its core sense of itself as the movement that values work over wealth
The man is proof of the adage that "an empty bucket makes the most noise."
Martin
I agree with MattF. It reeks of ‘My worldview has merit! Really it does!’
I suspect if you added up all the primary and secondary benefits conferred on the top 10% by government and all the benefits conferred on the bottom 90% by dollar amount, and take out all the agreed-upon safety net stuff, the top 10% are benefitting a fuck-ton more than the bottom 90% from all that government does – more even than the progressive tax rate would account for.
But Sully would still focus on the $400 a welfare mom extracts from the system than the tens of billions that Haliburton and it’s execs sucked out of the Bush administration and then skipped town so they wouldn’t have to pay their taxes.
SpotWeld
If you think about it, a lot of the worst contributers to the current economy are not "makers". They are companies that exist mainly because of the level of regulation set by the goverment. Enron, AIG, the "financial" arm of GMAC.
None of those "made" anything, just shuffled money and paper around and pulling in profit by virture of (mostly) goverment set billing rules.
opium4themasses
I think this fits
Just Some Fuckhead
When did conservatism ever value work over wealth? Did I miss all the conservative initiatives over the years to protect workers and jobs while jacking up the capital gains tax as high as it could go along with other penurious tactics to prohibit the amassing of non-labor wealth?
Conservatism is getting as nonsensical as libertarianism in terms of the mythology not coming close to the actual real-world practice.
Comrade Darkness
While we’re on the topic, and my other comment hangs in limbo . . .
It’s also bullcr*p to claim the government doesn’t produce anything. It produces the environment: in clean water, and low waste, low disease, lower risk from natural disaster (or it would if politics hadn’t railroaded this function), moderately educated voters and workers, common defense from invasion . . etc. etc. etc. That allows capitalism to flourish. It is a necessary precursor of functioning capitalism that the government produce these outputs.
Children. Gah, they are all a bunch of freakin’ children with no idea what keeps the lights on, the water in the tap drinkable, and their beds clean for them to sleep in at night. A fairy comes and waves a wand and makes it all work. Of course.
mistermix
This is a classic mode of argument:
1. Come up with an overly reductive division of the world into moral categories. "Makers vs takers" is a perfect example.
2. When critics point out the obvious (the world is too complicated for such a simple division) respond with some hot, breathless blah blah blah that acknowledges the infinite complexity of the world, be upset that anyone would think that you’re trying to be reductive, and publish long defenses of your new formulation.
3. Watch in silence as a bunch of idiots use your new distinction as a cudgel, just as your critics predicted.
I like Sully, and I think he’s better than this, but it’s a stupid formulation and his defense does him no credit.
Cris
I initially read that as "fuck them with a dodo," which is quite a surreal image.
sgwhiteinfla
Sully just keeps on trying to convince himself and others that conservatism is a good thing. Give me a fucking break. I wonder how his new explanation squares with what he said about people losing their homes.
Every time the government protects someone or some company from the consequences of their own economic profligacy, the chances of future profligacy increase. It’s vital that the government let the Big Three automakers go down, and vital that only minimal help be given for those so greedy or so stupid that they took on loans they had no way to pay off.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/12/a-house-not-a-p.html
Yeah because people who lost their job in the middle of a recession and can’t pay their mortgage must be greedy or stupid in Sullivans world. Funny how easy it is to say such things when you have a job and are doing well and how your perspective changes when you lose everything like Ted Haggart’s crazy ass did.
One of the major problems with conservatism that will never change is the fact that they believe if you aren’t doing well then thats means you must be a lazy bum. That is just not reality. Most people I know don’t think living on the streets is hot or getting welfare is where its at.
opium4themasses
I guess I can’t put in images so here is a link.
Oops.
joe from Lowell
When did conservatism EVER value work over wealth?
1890?
1923?
1957?
1981?
1999?
2003?
Help me out here.
Cris
Which reminds me of the repeated cry from last year: "The government has never created a single job." Umm, have they ever heard of this rather large employer?
DougJ
@opium
I like it.
anonevent
Conservatives can only see one point in space-time at a time. They can see a person making wealth and declare that person to be a contributor to society. Later, if the person is using Medicaid to visit the doctor, a conservative only sees them as takers living off of welfare. It is very hard for them to see the connection between the low wage the person is making and their ability to pay for health care. And even if you convince them of this fact they will only see it for this one person. The next medicaid recipient is still a mooch.
This is why conservatives, like Sully, only come around to a view when it affects them, and why something we see as hypocritical is completely oblivious to them.
Ricky Bobby
I am a big fan of Sully, have been reading his blog for years, but this is pure bullshit. The GOP in no way values work, they value ASSETS. The poor have none, and it is their own fault.
End. of. story.
Bill Teefy
So welfare recipients, banks and the defense industry who rely on the government are on one side and the guy that actually makes the Sham-Wow is on the other?
Which side should the guy that sells the Sham-Wow! be on? He isn’t making anything but money and money is only an agreed upon construct of a society or group – so maybe he relies indirectly on government.
So the real failure of conservatism is in explaining its bias in a way that doesn’t sound bigoted but still labels the "like-me = good" and the "not-like-me=bad." But what is "like-Sully?"
What does Sully make again?
Comrade Darkness
@Cris, these people need to travel more. Somalia would be my first choice, but India would work too. Watching businesses struggle mightily and usually hopelessly with bad infrastructure, which they as individual agents cannot possibly invest alone to fix, would go along way toward clarifying things. They really must not see it. The difference between the developing world and the developed world is a productive government. If they want us to be Somalia, fine, but they should be honest and say that. Otherwise they are talking out their a**es.
And, I’m curious… Is anyone on pulling comments out of moderation duty?
Brachiator
Wow. He’s just digging himself deeper into a hole as he struggles fruitlessly to apply abstract philosophical principles to a real world in which people try to make a living.
I have no idea what he means when he says, "conservatism has to … recover its core sense of itself as the movement that values work over wealth." Does he think that people work to gain self-esteem?
He seems incapable of writing anything even remotely intelligent concerning the present state of the economy, and cannot confront the GOP’s role in engineering near-total economic collapse.
James F. Elliott
So, I have a question: My wife owns a small business. About 30% of her businesses receipts come from being a vendor for state early childhood intervention services and contracting with school districts. Is she a "maker" or a "taker" in Sullivan’s estimation?
I am a public employee — I oversee and steer vendors (both for- and non-profit businesses) to provide services to nearly 100 children and young adults with developmental disabilities at any given time, such as providing a behaviorist for a child with autism. I also educate the police and mental health professionals, provide crisis intervention, and make sure that tax dollars are spent wisely. Am I a "maker" or a "taker?"
Inquiring minds want to know.
ksmiami
Cris – The GOP is a bunch of dodo birds and their mythology of the "free market" is about to go the way of the dodo bird too. I say let them live in The Phillipines or Guatemala. Low tax, low labor cost countries without much infrastructure although medical treatments in the Phillipines are quite the bargains and the people are very nice
wasabi gasp
This notion that conservatism needs to recover (or worse: that we need it to recover) is getting a bit tiresome. I want to say something snarky like "Let them fail!", but that doesn’t cut it. If the conservatism product is that defective, maybe folks need to start yanking it from their shelves.
Zifnab
There’s merit to the idea. But Sully refuses to believe that anyone outside his conservative niche thinks that way. When Bill Clinton embraced EITC and pushed for tax code reform alongside Gingrich’s Republicans, he was trying to embrace those "conservative" ideals as a liberal. COBRA and SCHIP and Medicare Plan D all started out as liberal plans to reward the workers, but eventually got warped into corporate welfare schemes by the same conservatives Sully wants to laud for their "values".
There is a very slim minority in this country that thinks it should get something for nothing, but even then that minority isn’t clustered in any single income bracket or ideological Big Tent. Sully just doesn’t want to acknowledge that programs like Medicare, Social Security, Universal Health Care, and minimum wage are designed to reward the exact same virtues he says he extols. :-p
gopher2b
this site is getting really bitchy.
Scott H
This is fundamental Sullivan. I quit reading him a year and a half ago. Having nothing good to say, one says nothing more.
Brandon T
Sullivan justifies all the stereotypes about political science Ph.Ds. Burkean bells this and intimations of Oakeshott that. Simplification of complex social structures into arbitrary divisions that suit one’s own political viewpoint. Inability to distinguish between morality in theory and in practice…
Joshua James
Sully is somewhat popular now among some progressives because he decried the obvious corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration, well, he did it eventually, and too late to really make a difference, but he did… because he did that, pointed out the obvious (which, to his credit, many pundits would not) it’s felt he has some credence in terms of a progressive view … it’s sometimes forgotten he’s a proponent of a corrupt world view known as conservatism, which cannot be reinvented, really, the last 8 years were what every conservative wanted, when you think about it, and it failed … and that’s why he cannot really explain it, there is no redefining or explanation, it’s a failed philosophy and he still cannot accept it.
IMOHO, of course.
gnomedad
@Brachiator:
Well, yes, once they have their survival needs handled. The trouble is a lot of folks cannot meet those needs or are on a survival treadmill. These people clearly need tax cuts.
Malron
Sully’s actual failure is his constant need to defend conservative ideology in nearly every post.
Robin G.
@gopher2b: A lot of people learned nothing from the last ten years, and reading their stuff results in a certain amount of bitchiness, what can I say.
gnomedad
@gopher2b:
Maybe the PJM ads entertained people more than they were willing to admit.
Brandon T
The funny thing is that Sullivan doesn’t even believe this. Anyone who’s followed him over the last year or so has seen him twist himself in knots as he talks about various features of the liberal project that he agrees with, but tries to frame it as loyalty to the TRUE conservatism. He’s increasingly trying to fit new and uncomfortable views (in this case, populist rage at aggregators of wealth with little public benefit) into an incompatible philosophical framework that he is utterly wedded to and refuses to jettison.
NonyNony
The funny thing is, I could swear I heard thoughts similar to these from Marxists when I was in college. "Makers and Takers" especially sounds somewhat familiar – what with the "workers" doing the making and the "capitalist pig-dogs" doing the "taking" from the workers.
For myself I’m fairly certain that if you can boil a socio-economic worldview down to a statement of "on the one hand … while on the other hand …" choice between two labels, you probably don’t have much that’s actually worth saying. And at least the Marxists I knew in college had a fairly coherent worldview that underpinned their bumpersticker-style rhetoric – I’m not sure that Sully even HAS a consistent worldview anymore. The things he writes these days feel like the writings of someone who has suddenly discovered an incontrovertible proof that there is no God and has no idea how to deal with it so he’s scurrying back to the Bible for an answer.
Betsy
"makers and takers"
It sounds like what Sully wants is a dumbed-down producerism.
Someone should give him a history lesson. "Producerist" values were not so much associated with the capitalists, and were never conservative. Even if they did disdain the very poor, for the most part their rage was directed at "the ruling class."
But as everyone with two brain cells to rub together can see, the fundamental problem here is that the dichotomy he presents here is even stupider than most such oversimplifications. Virtually everyone is both a maker and a taker, to use his silly terminology. Homemakers, cops, lawyers, truck drivers – every single one takes from the value created by others and also creates value themselves. This is because we live in a society, and not some Lockean state of nature.
Dave C
That post from Sullivan is just begging to be destroyed by Hilzoy.
DougJ
Were you hear two or three years ago? That was bitchy.
I’m actually disappointed that people have gotten so much nicer.
RSA
One of the stupidest things is that Sully would presumably point this out as something characteristic of conservatism and not of liberalism. But if you think about it, the only difference seems to be that conservatives think people on welfare are lazy and undeserving, while liberals… well, liberals are willing to consider other explanations. Am I missing something?
The Moar You Know
Sully knows he is wrong, has been caught dead to rights, and is unwilling to admit it.
I am not surprised. Next.
John S.
This is entirely true, only I don’t think Sullivan thinks this means what it actually does.
And interestingly enough, this is precisely what my company is re-branding itself to be: An ad agency that takes an honest look at what value we actually create for our clients, and prices our work accordingly (i.e. if we fail we make much less, if we succeed we make much more).
This is the paradigm shift that needs to occur right now – in ANY business. And the question needs to be asked, "Does what I (or my company/industry) do have REAL value?"
harlana pepper
@Scott H:
I don’t put much stock in anything influential writers who supported the Iraq war back in the day those of us who had better sense were being called "terrorist sympathizers." I only overlook the same shit from our lawmakers b/c I have no choice (although I will never forget). All of these folks should be admitting their mistakes, begging our forgiveness, and trying to convince us why the fuck we should ever trust anything that comes of their mouths (or keyboards) again.
Calouste
@Malron:
And the problem with that is that conservatism actually doesn’t have any content as an ideology, unless you count "I got mine, screw you!" as an ideology. It’s not like it is Marxism with a few proper philosophical tomes behind it. All it has are a books or two written by a bloke who died more than two centuries ago and a crappy novel in which someone invents a perpertuum mobile. Other than that every conservative ideologue just invents whatever they like themselves, and of course than you get to the point that their specific ("true") version of conservatism solves all issues as long as someone would implement it properly and not corrupt it like all those "pseudo-conservatives" like Bush and Cheney have done.
Comrade Darkness
@John S., this is the part about a market that is so elegant. Barring monopolist behavior or collusion (both these capitalist-market-destroying behaviors can only be righted by the government, note) the market cleans its own house. We vote for politicians maybe once a year, but we vote with our feet and dollars every single day.
Comrade Dread
I think I might be willing to give that whole free market thing a try again, if the GOP is willing to end to all forms of corporate welfare, subsidies and tax breaks to businesses, artificially inflated price floors, farm welfare, especially bailouts, and pushing an amendment to invalidate the concept of Corporate Personhood.
canuckistani
Fuck you, fucker.
Svensker
@DougJ:
Ah, fuck off.
(Feel better now?)
Canukistan beat me to the punch in the face!
LD50
I think maybe a consistent thread running through all real-world conservatives is that they map their philosophies off a mythical American/Western past where everything was perfect, and if only we can get back to that past, everything would be wonderful again. In that sense, the difference between the modern GOP base and Sullivan is that the former idealize a mythical small-town, Little House on the Prairie white Protestant utopia, while Sullivan harks back to an even more imaginary, rarified utopia of Burkean conservativism, where the government ‘valued work over wealth’. "Things used to be so much more conservative and BETTER!" seems to be the unifying thread.
Napoleon
@Comrade Dread:
The US has never had a free market, ever. Since day one Government has put its thumb on the scale in one way or another, and every businessman last thoughts before going to bed and first thing he thinks of when he gets up in the morning is how to subvert the free market. A "Adam Smith" free market will exist on the same day that a true communist society will, the day after never.
Ed Drone
OK, friend — put up or shut up. Let’s see your support for those efforts and we’ll stop thinking of you as a schmuck. Till then, if the foo shits, wear it.
Ed
Comrade Kevin
@DougJ:
Screw you, chump!
Dennis-SGMM
@LD50:
They all blind themselves to the fact that conservatism never was what it was. Sullivan, for all of his learned affectation, doesn’t seem to grasp that once you take any "ism" off of the printed page and put it into the hands of real people to execute the results will bear only a passing resemblance to the stated ideal.
LD50
My wife is a teacher, and the state of California has made countless attempts to take away our medical benefits. I just found out yesterday that the latest thing Sacramento is trying to do is to remove health benefits for retirees and their spouses. Since I’m self-employed, use my wife’s health coverage, and can’t afford private health insurance, this could very possibly wreck my quality of life and shorten my lifespan in my retirement. The only entity anywhere trying to prevent this are the Wicked Teacher’s Unions. So in short, I really wish Sully would shut the fuck up with his stupid wingnut Them Evil Teacher’s Unions nonsense. It’s like large chunks of AS’s philosophy stopped growing after 2002.
Comrade Dread
@Napoleon
I know. It was one of the many straws that got me to break with the GOP.
They weren’t for ‘free markets’, they were for markets where all the welfare breaks went to their corporate masters and friends.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@DougJ:
Whomever was writing the Darrell spoof needs to come out of retirement. Maybe.
Laura W
@DougJ:
F’in Cork Tease!
AmIDreaming
Well, at least there’s one good thing to come out of this episode. John has crystallized the usage of the term "Boehner Bubbles."
The world has been waiting for this term, and the meaningless PowerPoint presentations that it evokes, for some time now.
mark
so what about people who labor to produce nothing but paper profits through fraud (i.e. virtually all of wall street)? on which side of this great divide does sully put these people?
jake 4 that 1
And then there are people like Sullophane who are neither one thing nor the other.
Please, someone take his computer away.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
Sullivan again? Ack.
gex
@wasabi gasp: Maybe conservatism needs to get off the ideology rehabilitation welfare wagon. If conservatism wants to rebuild itself, by all means, it should grab its Randian bootstraps and get on with it. But Sully needs to quit imploring us to help it recover.
Comrade General Stuck
Being in total control of government is turning out to be a bummer for blogging. The wingnuts are busy gluing themselves into human pretzels, and we’re left to chew on each other, and fight about the color of the sofa. Not much fun.
Corner Stone
Almost 70 posts and John Cole hasn’t shown up to defend his Life Partner? Andrew "His is an essential blog" Sullivan?
It’s very clear that what everyone here but John understands is AS knows fuck all about nothing at all. The man is a buffoon, always has been and it’s clear nothing much has changed.
If ever there was a post by Sully that cried out to be shortened to:
"We must go forwards, not backwards, upwards, not downwards – and always, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"
This one is it.
Corner Stone
@DougJ
Others beat me to it, but what the hell.
Fuck You!
gnomedad
@Napoleon:
My take is that regulation is the necessary infrastructure for a "free market" and I would like to reclaim that phrase from the right. I confess I have not read Adam Smith but my understanding is that he acknowledges lots of caveats and is less "Smithian" than, say, Milton Friedman.
chuck
It’s okay Sully. I’m with you. Don’t listen to the haters.
I too want to see the means of production go to the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.
Rise up, comrade.
Laura W
@Comrade General Stuck:
;-)
Corner Stone
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Comrade General Stuck
@Laura W:
LOL. And that too.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
@Laura W:
Arf!
Corner Stone
@sgwhiteinfla
They all honestly think that people who are less well off had a choice at some point in their life – a choice where they could make a decision to be less wealthy, or less healthy, or physically disabled, or mentally unstable, or lose their job when their employer shipped it overseas – that everyone who isn’t them also had some kind of support network they could lean on, or had their college paid for, or got a summer job at daddy’s friend’s shop.
And everyone but them chose…poorly
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
And, that.
John S.
Damn right.
And it’s high time that consumers start remembering the muscle that we actually flex. Chase called me today to threaten me about my payment on my HELOC (which I had already paid and made an extra payment on). It took 10 minutes of yelling at the stupid CSR, and another 10 minutes yelling at her idiot manager to "straighten out" a problem that didn’t exist.
Looks my local credit union gets to take over servicing my $130k mortgage, $50k HELOC, joint checking account and platinum Visa card that I will be taking away from Chase. And Djimon and Co. can blow it right out their fucking asses and go belly up for all I fucking care.
Lupita N
One of the many things government does is keep middle- and upper-class gay men safe from their allies who’d be quiet happy to bash and burn homosexuals. Poorer, more female, and less white GLBTs hope that someday we may get the same kind of protection–we don’t resent Sullivan’s safety so much as we think it’s so good everyone should have it.
Is that making or taking?
Andy
I suppose his definition of "takers" should also include any military contractors. They depend on the government for all their needs.
TenguPhule
And to add insult to hypocrisy, when it happens to them "it’s not their fault" and "just bad luck". And then they’re fighting and screaming to the front of the line for help.
Jess
@LD50:
Thanks for chiming in on this issue. I’m thoroughly fed up with the anti-teacher’s union/anti-tenure BS as well. Some seem to think ditching these will magically improve the quality of teachers, as if the only problem with the system was all the bad teachers keeping the good ones from getting jobs. What would happen is 1) all the innovative teachers who are willing to challenge the status quo and therefore scare the administration would be fired instantly, as would college professors who don’t fit with the prevailing political paradigm (while the ass-kissing hacks, of course, would remain), and 2) no one with any sense or competence would be willing to go into teaching, a profession with notoriously poor financial rewards, without the perk of stable employment, good benefits, etc.
If any group should have the protection of unions, it’s teachers. This is the only way to maintain any level of critical thinking and intellectual integrity as a society, and that’s our only hope for being able to govern ourselves as free people. Not that we’re doing such a great job of it, but imagine how much worse it would be if the same sort of people who run Fox News were able to fire, intimidate, or otherwise silence educators.
Corner Stone
@TenguPhule
True story – long time friend of mine is a devout winger. Voted for Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes in different R primaries.
Used to work for Arthur Andersen and when they were shut down he started drawing unemployment. Now mind you, he was a middle 20-something white male in normal health. When I challenged him on it he said essentially, "Hey, I’ve paid my taxes. Everyone else gets it so why shouldn’t I get some back of what I paid?"
Oookay fine. He then proceeds to get a loan *cough* ( unrepaid gift) from his parents to start his own resale shop. While that’s coming online he files for an *extension* of unemployment! I challeneged him on it again and he basically refused to answer. There was absolutely no shaming him about anything, anything at all because it was him doing it and not some other random slob.
Between unemployment and the shop he breaks even for a while then it starts to slide. He sells the pieces of the business and never repays his parents for the *cough* loan.
To this day he spouts viciously about people who aren’t doing as well as he is, and rants about inefficient govt, etc.
Never once has he acknowledged that he did not actually "pull himself up by his bootstraps" or that others do not have parents who can afford to *cough* loan several thousands of dollars on a hare brained flyer. Or any of the other benefits he has on others who are less fortunate.
We generally end in screaming matches when we talk. Of course, he’s in favor of our govt torturing "terrorists" also so that’s probably a big part of it.
gex
Poor Andrew. Poor Brit gives and gives, and then gives some more. He tirelessly scours the universe for things that he considers or rationalizes as good, then works hard to explain how these very things are the essence of conservatism.
And all he gets for his efforts are these blue collar laboring Americans sucking off his teat taking their welfare from makers like him. Asking that they have health care, or at least a form that won’t cost them everything they have if they get unlucky. Or hoping they might just be able to send their kids to school so their offspring can blog all day and become a maker just like Andrew.
You all have some nerve mocking him.
arguingwithsignposts
The explanation is worse than the original, IMHO. Sully lost a reader yesterday.
b-psycho
How a self-described "conservative" realizes this and still calls himself a conservative, when actual in practice conservatism FAVORS the corporate welfare state, puzzles me.
He needs to reconsider what he’s saying here, then approach "conservatism" with less "oh, I’m trying to scholarly reason with my peers, they are merely misunderstood and will come around with patience & coffee talk" and more "WHAT IN THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ‘TARDS?" And I say that as someone who links to Sully on my own blog*.
(* – before anyone barks, I also link to this site and Talking Points Memo. Oh yeah, and multiple left-anarchists, who are more my speed.)
gex
@Corner Stone: The only two people I have ever known to have received welfare from the state of MN both went on to become ass-wipe Republicans who had the nerve to complain about how much money they were given when they were in dire straights.
I guess they were consistent enough, in that they seemed angry that they didn’t lose everything, including their house. They just didn’t have the integrity to not take the hand out that they would deny all others. Of course, that’s conservatives for you: everyone else who needs the social safety net is a no-good lazy moocher. They were just unlucky SOBs.
Nancy Darling
LD50 and Jess, I also worry about all this bust the teacher’s union talk. The problem with our schools is poor parenting. When I was a kid, if I got in trouble at school (even unjustly), I knew my ass was toast if my parents found out about it. My two kids knew the same thing. Now kids threaten that their parents will sue you. A sister-in-law who normally teaches junior high taught first grade one year when she lived in Alaska. She said she was up to her arm-pits in runny noses but did not have to worry about some kid throwing a chair at her and calling her a fucking bitch. Surprisingly, she went back to junior high at the first opportunity. Actually not so surprising—it’s called dedication. Two other teachers in my family are just as dedicated and trying to make a difference in young lives. My daughter teaches guitar to a little girl once a week at an inner city Los Angeles school. She is in awe of how dedicated and hardworking the teachers at this school are. I went to 8 different school districts in 12 years (Dad was an oil field worker). I’ve had good teachers and I’ve had bad teachers and I can tell you this; a bad teacher cannot stop a motivated kid from learning and a good teacher cannot make an unmotivated kid want to learn, especially if that kid comes from a troubled home environment.
This is not a defense of bad teachers. There just aren’t as many of them as a lot of people would like to believe and they all are struggling with sometimes insurmountable problems.
Betsy
@DougJ: Quit your fucking whining, asshole.
Corner Stone
@myself #86
(putting on my Sully voice)
I should unpack a little. I didn’t challenge him for taking unemployment – I challenged him because he had ceaselessly railed against those taking unemployment.
When it came to be his turn he did what all of us who needed help would do – he got a little help. From the time I’ve known him and since all the time after that period of taking unemployment he has never once admitted that sometimes people just need a helping hand and for a lot of us the government is the only entity capable of providing it. He never once went to his church to ask for help, never went to a Goodwill store for clothes, never did any of the things he felt the "others" had at their beck and call if they just got off their lazy butts.
The sheer hypocrisy of not living your espoused principles was just too damn funny for words. Still braying like a jackass too but eh, that’s life right?
anticontrarian
so, does that mean the blue states should cut off the red states? cuz every study i’ve ever seen indicates that coastal states with high educational acheivement and more liberal politics pay more into the kitty than they get back, and interior states that swing to the right get way more money in federal subsidies than they pay in in taxes.
don’t get me wrong. i’m all for it. i’ve often wished to see the randites and the ‘real americans’ exercise a little actual self-reliance, just for a year or two, so they know how good they have it now, but it almost seems cruel, like making your kid pay rent, just so they know how nice you are to provide a roof over their head.
wasabi gasp
@Corner Stone: My sister is a wingnut, a dittohead, yet she possesses an amazing wealth of knowledge in what state programs are available for her and her kids.
AnneLaurie
No, you missed the conservatard/libertarian memo — ‘so-called failed states’ ENABLE proud Makers to employ five-year-old garbage pickers and nine-year-old whores and twelve-year-old soldiers without destroying their creative initiative with a lot of nanny-state talk about ‘basic literacy’ and ‘encouraging pedophilia’. Nothing encourages results-focused creativity and
sociopathic narcissisma strong sense of personal responsibility like knowing that you are literally one mugging away from dying destitute and ignored in the gutter!Blue Raven
@anticontrarian:
As a side note, my parents had us kids pay rent starting from our getting our first real outside job as a means of reminding us that we’d have to do it after leaving the house so we might as well learn how to budget for it sooner than later. And we were raised as and by yellow-dog liberals. It’s a matter of why it was being done, I suppose.
As for Sully, the man is a disgrace to his ancestors. O’Suillebhain needs to study the Great Hunger and think about the conservative financial practices that contributed to it. When the Cherokee Nation gave more to help the Irish than many members of the British Parliament wanted to give them at all, it speaks volumes about "free market principles."
Vic
Poor Sully… that British class system dies hard, doesn’t it?
I’m sure that Sully considers himself a "maker" in his equation, but really what does he "make?" Hair splitting definitions of what really is Conservatism? What does that go for in the open market?
wobbly
Nancy Darling, a good teacher CAN make an unmotivated kid learn.
I saw my school teacher father do it many a time, I saw some of my boy’s teachers do it, and I had a few such teachers myself.
I would not put myself or my children in the "badly parented category", but many of my father’s pupils were, and they remember him.
I still run into them, and when they find out whose daughter I am, they say "Tell Mr. Bradley I graduated high school/got my GED/got into vocational school!!! Tell him I got a job, a wife/girlfriend, and a couple of kids who bring home good report cards!…."
They never say, but I know that these former kids were in very bad place when my father paid them some extra attention.
That works, in many situations. It does not produce miracles, but it does make a difference.
None of the above mentioned teachers did the "extra" attention for "extra" money.
They couldn’t even stop themselves from doing it!
LD50
Thank you. People who are massively ignorant of the facts on the ground in schools, like, say, Conservatives, Republicans, & Andrew Sullivan, fail to acknowledge that there is a teacher *shortage* in America. They never explain how their magical combo of cutting teacher’s pay and benefits coupled with removing job security and seniority is somehow going to make things better. Nor do they like to talk about how one of the main things teachers unions do that piss state governments off is HOLD DOWN CLASS SIZES. This does not mean the unions force the states to reduce class sizes every year. It means that ONLY the unions even have a *chance* of resisting class the size increases that are proposed every year a state wants to cut its spending. So if you gut the teacher’s unions, as Andrew seems to think would be such a wonderful panacea, say hi to class sizes of 40-50 students and upward. Not only would that have the predictable effect on quality of education, it would make teaching so insufferable that *even fewer* people would go into it. Tho I suppose the Norquist crowd would approve of it as another small part of drowning government in the bathtub.
LD50
Not always. My wife has taught in some seriously blighted inner city schools, and while a diligent teacher can indeed make some kids want to learn, believe me, there are *some* kids who will not learn a thing no matter what *anyone* does. And her district has a lot of very dedicated teachers of every ethnicity imaginable.
Katharsis
Conservatism is not a political ideology. When will this be understood? Conservatism is the worship of Masculinity, and nothing more. The don’t like those who work, the like those who delegate to those who work. They’re all just looking for Daddy…
Nancy Darling
Wobbly, Every teacher has stories like your father’s—probably even some of the "bad" ones. My sister has former students calling her 15-20 years later to tell her what a difference she made in their lives. She was born to teach and was very good at it (she is seven years older than I and taught me to read before I was five years old.). But there are also the kids that she never could reach, and I’m sure your father had them, too. I know there are exceptional teachers like your father, or my sis, or LD50’s wife but there are also a lot of seriously damaged and hurting kids out there, and it is not fair to place the solving of all these problems in the schools. As a society, we are failing our children and the schools alone can’t fix it.
John127
While the modern American left has been (justly) riding the waves of the colossal failures of the Bush Administration, it will soon have to come to terms with the fact that they have very few novel ideas to offer or policies to enact. It needs to be internalized more amongst the liberal-left that the Great Society initiatives of the 1960s failed flatly because they were conceptually flawed. It needs to be internalized that the **most** progressive piece of legislation of the last twenty years was the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Once the left can come to terms with the fact that Aid to Families with Dependent Children had positively evil effects — much more extensive than anything every performed by Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan — they might face the prospect of continued political success.
coyote
I don’t understand… what’s wrong with allowing people to earn money, rather than having it handed down to them?
jcricket
Word.
Sully is John without the renouncing conservatism because Sully makes a living as a professional conservative (perhaps both of those words should be in quotes). Sully moves increasingly towards middle-of-the-road Democrat with the occasionally conservative fiscal idea, and as such he becomes less interesting and relevant.
I think Sully’s in his "last throes" :-)
Mary
John Cole is more intellectually mature than Andrew Sullivan.
I’ll bet Sullivan works his assistants like dogs and steals their work too.
When Sullivan lets his mask slip, he just seems like a phony.
harlana pepper
Yes, & he lets himself get tongued by Christopher Hitchens.
gwangung
Absolutely not. Because it’s factually WRONG.
jim filyaw
sullivan is a conservative when it behooves him to be a conservative. when he’s comfortable, he doesn’t give a tinkers damn about those who are not. but give him something that hits close to home, gay marriage, government sponsored hiv research, etc., he’ll make lenin blush. never trust a man whose favorite quotes are his own.
Xenos
@gwangung: Aside from the facts of whether they were failed, the premise that the Great Society initiatives were failures is utterly unsupported. Food Stamps? AFDC? Medicare?
To which you can add the Civil Rights Act of 1964, consumer protection laws, the expansion of Medicaid, and so on.
This country would be a nightmare today if we did not have these programs. It is enough of a nightmare in spite of having them.
LD50
I remember around 2001-2003, the internet saw its first wave of GOP ‘concern trolls’ (before that handy term was coined). These consisted of wingnuts who would go onto left-wing websites and earnestly babble about how "if you libs ever want to win an election again, you have to start acting exactly like Republicans". (Tho the Dems in congress actually DID that 2007-2008.)
Even tho wingnut concern trolling is kind of dying out, it’s funny to see a new spin on the practice in 2009: to claim that ‘we libs’ have to start acting just like Republicans if we want to *keep* winning elections.
Gee, if acting like Republicans was such a surefire road to electoral success, why didn’t *McCain* win?
LD50
I think many Republicans *do* think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was ‘flawed’.
gwangung
@Xenos: Technically, being failures and being conceptually flawed are two different things.
But either way, the statement’s factually WRONG.
Just another attempt at a BIg Lie, like about how the New Deal was an utter failure…
gwangung
I’m sure they think it’s a failure FOR THEM.
jcricket
They’ll say the same thing when we pass a healthcare bill with a public insurance option (and anything after that that strengthens the ability of the government to get healthcare under control while still providing good service to people).
They’ll say the same thing with any major environmental initiative ("cap and trade"). A repeal of DADT or DOMA would be met with the same response.
The things the GOP thinks are a failure are only so because they make it abundantly clear the GOP opposes what the vast majority of Americans want. They oppose these things because they don’t mesh with their ideology, and if enough of these things become law, it shows the GOP is 100% wrong.
TenguPhule
That’s not a great compliment.
I find things in my fridge more mature then Andrew Sullivan.
TenguPhule
So how do you treat your enemies? (I kid, I kid)
jcricket
It’s worse – it’s Democrats caused the Depression (like those well known Democrats Hoover, Smooth and Hawley) and then the New Deal prolonged the Depression. It’s only that great free market event known as WWII and the independent expenditures of the free market companies known as the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines that brought us out of the Great Democratic Depression.
Since then, Democratic New Deal programs like Social Security and have kept millions of seniors from dying in the street alone, broke, cold and hungry like god intended. And unemployment insurance has prevented homelessness and family structure unraveling from coming to fruition, as is the commandment of Jesus himself, when someone loses their job. Democrats are clearly interested in thwarting god’s will.
TenguPhule
Because god is a dickhead.
pattonbt
Its simple, really, there is no humanity in conservatism as defined by Sully. It really is anarchy and selfishness to the extreme. There are valid arguments to be had about what the ‘right’ amount of public versus private balance should be, none of us will agree 100% where to draw the line. But conservative ideology, the kind that Sullivan pines for, must have the line set at zero. It presupposes the underpants gnome logic:
1) ‘real’ conservatism
2) ???
3) Utpoia
It basically strips humans of human failing. The "Ive got mine, fuck everyone else". I mean, god forbid, one person (or a statistically insignificant percentage of the population) abuses ths system. Then we must get rid of the system.
Any day of the week I will take a system where a small percentage of people game the system for personal gain while making sure those in need get help versus ensuring no one gets help to ensure no one can game the system.
Conservatism, as defined and desried by Sullivan, is a hateful, inhuman ideology.
disinterested observer
As many others have said before me, Mr Sullivan is not a man who rewards serious attention.
He has a semi-convincing serious shtick – an English gay Tory Christian – and there are not many of them (except in England) – but each English speaking country does seem to have one of them. Google Matthew Pariss and Christopher Pearson (Australian), for example.
But when you read his stuff you quickly see that he is completely clueless about anything to do with economics or social policy. His only skill appears to be the ability to persuade peope send him nice photos.
It is not just that he doesn’t know much about the topics, he misunderstands most of what he reads – others may describe this as stupidity. Indeed, he makes Megan Mcardle look good.
However he has had a malign influnce on American public policy in helping to sink the Clinton health care plan – not that this was necessarily the best solution – but the problems have only got worse since then.
We should just ignore him.