Lemkin

A Vision of America

Matt Yglesias:

Loser liberalism, by implying that all fortunes are created equal, alternately goes too easy on scoundrels and comes down too hard on people who are merely prosperous. [Even “low” paid] folks working on Wall Street are making a living in an industry that’s systematically dependent on implicit and explicit government guarantees. Making a living as a patent troll is totally different from making a living as a genuine innovator. Dentists enriching themselves by blocking competition from independent dental hygenists and tooth whiteners aren’t the richest people around, but their income represents a healthy share of ill-gotten gains. A viable egalitarian politics needs to find a way to distinguish between “malefactors of great wealth” whose revenue streams need to be systematically reappropriated, and people who are just paying higher tax rates because of the declining marginal utility of income.

Reasonable people are going to disagree, of course, as to who exactly the malefactors are and what policy levers can and should be used against them. […] But there’s something deeply unimaginative, cramped, narrow, and — I think — fundamentally incorrect about this vision of America where everything is on the level, but people need to pay a top marginal income tax rate of 39.5% rather than 35%.

I’d say Yglesias has provided us with a rather trenchant distillation of just how warped our national political discourse has become.
Extending his example, the Republicans more or less universally call this potential 4.5% rise in top marginal rates on the richest of the rich “pure socialism,” or, at best, anti-American, anti-jobs, anti-whomever they’re talking to at that moment. That approach tends to be a conversation ender and the point at which the MSM says something along the lines of “we’ll leave it there.” And but also it’s unclear to me how you even address the broader issues in the economy that Yglesias rightly lays out without at least being able to have a semi-sane discussion about tax rates and revenues. If that 4.5% rise can be effectively dismissed using “socialism!” just how is a national candidate supposed to make the more nuanced and complex point?

I’d say it can’t be done in the current media environment. It is not possible. The slow motion implosion that is the GOP’s series of primary debates is a symptom, not a cause. The underlying rot is fundamental to the discourse itself; the growing and brazen willingness to use that rot for personal gain (e.g. by lying your ass off to score temporary political points even within your own party) is simply the work of our old friend the invisible hand. Fix the discourse and you’ll functionally eliminate the lying and its various outgrowths, such as but not limited to uniform one party partisan intransigence that the predominant national discourse inevitably blames on both political houses in Congress. A truly honest assessment could never reach such a illogical conclusion as that. Obviously one party is more to blame in any gridlock situation. Say so. You’ll put the Daily Show right out of business.

Considered relative to our long-term national health, the truly successful national candidate needs to disrupt the discourse itself. On the surface, this would seem a relatively straightforward thing for a President to do (despite the ineffective nature of Presidential speeches)…Obama did make some early feints in the direction of cutting off their air supply but ultimately (and predictably) chickened out. And, frankly, a frontal attack that simply refuses to speak to FOXnews (or similar organizations) will never work; journalists love nothing better than circling the wagons over perceived slights. You’ve got to destroy their memes by making them functionally irrelevant and you cannot do that by simply not talking to anyone but your chosen scribes.
If Obama really wants to be the modern TR, I’d say that’s where to start: with the discourse. Be smart. Explain, but not in novel form. Short, declarative sentences and concise paragraphs. Pick one thing; this cycle it’s going to be an outgrowth of what Yglesias is distilling above. Explain that. Repeatedly and in simple language. People already understand it in a deep sense, but they need you to give those feelings voice (Elizabeth Warren is proving the true power of such an approach; the application of the traditional GOP meme(s) actually increased her popularity). Explain. Say nothing else. If they want to show the President, some of this stuff will have to be included. Never leave that message behind, even for a second. Also provide it to your Congressional allies. Anyone who goes off script loses financial support, chairmanships, or whatever idiotic perks matters most to them. It’s our rotted discourse or the country. Choose one.

"I didn’t go to Harvard. You know, I went to the school of hard knocks."

— Scott Brown, describing his time in the urban hellscape that is the Medford campus of Tufts University. Later in life, he took on the mean streets of Boston College Law School. Chestnut Hill is about to get real.
Also worth noting that Harvard tuition is ~$39,849. Tufts: $42,962. Warren’s actual alma mater, University of Houston? That would set you back $9,211.

"…first a Keynesian observes that fiscal stimulus can increase growth in a depressed economy. Second, as an attempted reductio, a conservative says “if that was true, then you could increase growth by breaking a bunch of windows.” Third, the Keynesian accurately points out that you could, in fact, increase growth by breaking windows. Fourth, the conservative accuses Keynesians of wanting to break windows or believing that window-breaking increases wealth. But nobody ever said that! The point is that we have very good reasons to think smashing windows would be a bad idea—there’s more to life than full employment—and that’s why Keynesians generally want to boost employment by having people do something useful like renovate schools or repair bridges."

— Matt Yglesias, leaving out the next line in the exchange; the one where the conservative screams “that’s socialism,” makes a lot of unfounded claims about runaway spending, and then says government initiated stimulus has never worked, and most especially never worked in the guise of the colossal stimulatory effect of government spending to fight WWII. That recovery was the either “power of the markets” or “the markets anticipating Reagan and ‘morning in America.’” As usual.

Read Up →

Yglesias details the 10 “Weirdest Ideas” in Rick Perry’s Fed Up. It’s a must-read post that I’ll tease with this single, highly representative sentence:

The propriety of a federal role in regulating the banking industry has been the subject of bipartisan agreement since the Madison administration.

Says it all.

"…in a decent world, conservatives would be forced to acknowledge that these are the [employment] results they claim to want. The private sector’s not being held back by the grasping arm of big government. Government is shrinking. And the shrinking of the government sector isn’t leading to any kind of private sector explosion. It’s simply offsetting meager private sector growth. Indeed, I’d say it’s holding it back. Fewer state and local government layoffs would mean more customers for private businesses and even stronger growth on the private side."

— Matt Yglesias, pining for a decent world. That sort of attention to detail would require the media to leave critical questions about Weiner’s penis on the cutting room floor. I don’t think anyone wants to live in an America that’s like that.

"When Republicans reached basic consensus about what they wanted to do [relative to Ryan’s plan], they then delegated the details to a small group of people who fleshed out the plan, it was then presented to the caucus and within a week they had the vote. Democrats, by contrast, put their health reform plans through an agonizing months-long process of public intra-party disputes. That gave people who didn’t care about the details tons and tons of time to organize a backlash while tending to signal to low-information voters that Democrats were doing something controversial even among their own partisans. The backlash against Medicare privatization is overwhelmingly likely to grow over time, but it’s also the case that between today and November 2012 other events will intervene and crowd the agenda space possibly letting members off the hook for an unpopular vote."

— Matt Yglesias on the key differences between how the GOP and Democratic Caucuses operate.

Ideal Framework

Ygleisas dares to dream about the “ideal negotiating framework” for the debt ceiling:

White House demands clean debt ceiling increase, House majority demands big spending cuts, Senate majority demands partial repeal of Bush tax cuts, and we all compromise on just doing the damn debt increase.

That would be nice. But it would also require non-feckless Democrats in the Senate. Which, so far as I can tell, do not exist.

But, since the plutocrats and banksters seem to realize they’ve got skin in this game, maybe we can just cut some insanely rich people’s taxes, raise the debt ceiling, start a fourth war (I’m thinking Spain is due), and call it a day.

"Serious journalism is about having lunch with powerful people so you can write about what they have on their iPod and, later, spoon feed you self-serving leaks."

— Matt Yglesias on the rigors of Serious Person journalism.

"I don’t really want to propose revolutionizing the pension system based on one article I read in The New York Times"

— Matt Yglesias, former blogger, jumping the shark. Buy him out, boys.

"PREDICTION: House GOP will almost certainly lose some seats in 2012 then dump Boehner for being not conservative enough."

— Matt Yglesias rends the fabric of time and space via Twitter. I think he’s almost certainly right.