Jed continues to quote AP, and then point out that what AP's complaining about is basically just normal government spending, with some reference to local construction projects as part of the mix.
First, if those are the most egregious examples of spending abuses the AP could identify, then this may be the cleanest spending bill in the history of the United States of America. The president has said a main goal of this legislation is to invest in our infrastructure and make a down payment on alternative energy technologies, and that's exactly what the projects listed by AP are intended to do.
Second, the AP's whining about Obama using local highway projects as examples of the kinds of benefits the bill could achieve is absurd. What in the world is wrong with the President localizing the benefits of his most important legislative initiative? They seem to be getting all outraged about him talking about some potential benefit of the bill in terms that they think sound like some other pork barrel projects of the past. It's just really weird.
I've got no problem with the AP calling the President a liar. What I do have a problem with is calling him a liar when their claim has no basis in fact.
Jed's point is pretty much an open-and-shut case. But there's something deeper and much more insidious going on here. Basically, conservatives are denying the very notion of the common good. Since any government spending in this sort of bill comes from the general revenue, but gets spent for a particular purpose, they are, essentially, arguing that ala libertarian extremists that it's a "statist theft" of private property. Any government spending whatsoever is fundamentally illegitimate according to such views.
Which is why, in their view, there's no essential difference between the Stevens/Palin bridge to nowhere and the New Orleans levees that Bush declined to build in time to save New Orleans.
Of course, the sane portion of the human race realizes that government spending long predated the emergence of modern-day liberalism, dating back at least to ancient Egypt, Babylon, Sumeria and the like, and without it, we'd still be stuck at the hunter-gatherer and horticultural stages of development, with agriculture as a form of science fiction. But knowing or thinking about that would require a knowledge of history, and libertarians don't believe in history. It's just a statist scam, don'tcha know!
I've written many times before about Kegan's levels of cognitive development, in which each stage takes as content/object the background context/subject of the stage before it, and how conservatism is a natural fit for level three, while liberlism is a fit for level 4:
| Kegan's Subject/Object Schema of Cognitive Development | | Stage | We Are:
Subject
(structure of knowing) | We Have:
Object
(content of knowing) | Underlying Structure | | 1 | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses | Movement
Sensation |  | | 2 | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions | Perceptions
SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS
Impulses |  | 3
Traditionalism | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states | Concrete
POINT OF VIEW
Enduring Dispositions
Needs, Peferences |  | 4
Modernism | Abstract Systems
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship | Abstractions
MUTUALITY/
INTERPERSONALISM
Relationship
Inner states
Subjectivity
Self-consciousness |  | 5
Post-
Modernism | Dialectical
INTER-
INSTITUTIONAL
Self-transformation | Abstract Systems
Ideology
INSTITUTION
Relationship-Regulating Forms
Self-authorship
Self-regulation
Self-formation |  |
This means that conservative thought takes the individual as object within a framework of existing social relations, while liberalism takes society's social relations as object, within a framework of it's own autonomous judgment and conception. Or at least, that's how things stood when the two political traditions first emerged clearly in the late 18th Century. But conservatism was fundamentally ill-prepared to deal with the quickening pace of social change, and thus many conservatives clung to past frameworks of social relations--often, even, ones that were partially or wholly made up--while also revolting against the actually existing social relations.
Thus we are left with a mindset that is (1) intellectually incapable of clearly conceiving of how a whole society works, instead falling back on thinking of individuals disconnected from one another, except in terms of personal relationships, and (2) conceives of those relationships in terms of an imaginary past model of what such relationships should be. This is the tacit background behind both economic and social/religious conservative ideas. In the later case, it gives rise to such clearly anachronistic notions as making women obedient and subservient to men--first their fathers, then their husbands. In the former case, it supports all manner of conservative economic myths, such as trickle-down economics, rationalized by such pithy phrases as "I never saw anyone get a job from a poor man."
Of course, nowadays--and for several generations now--lots of jobs come from companies that could not survive without credit, which plays a much more significant role in their finances than the wealth of owners, if indeed such wealth has anything at all to do with the day-to-day finances of the company.
From a level 4 POV, it's quite easy to see that jobs come from the effective demand of customers--the fact that there are people out there wanting to buy something, and that even someone who is deeply in debt can keep their business going as long as (a) there are plenty of good-paying customers, and (b) he can roll over his debt in the short-term as he works toward paying it off (or at least down) in the long run. A level 4 consciousness readily grasps the interconnected nature of a modern economy, whereas a level 3 consciousness sees only a collection of businesses, which it only understands one at a time.
Because of this, the level 3 consciousness never really grasps how public spending flows through the initial recipients and into the larger economy. Or more properly, they can grasp this exotic (for them) idea, but only if it doesn't conflict with some more fundamental notion that's truly at home in their system of understanding.
And that's the whole purpose of the GOP propaganda barrage, to create conflict between an idea that's difficult for level 3 conscious to grasp and others that are easy to grasp--even if they are utterly misleading at best, or downright false at worst.
This is the logic by which people come to believe that tax cuts are more stimulative than public spending, even though economists across the political spectrum all agree that the opposite is the case. The can readily envision tax cuts coming directly to them, benefiting them directly, whether they spend them or not. (Even though economists know that it's the spending that benefits the economy as a whole.) And if it benefits them--so they reason--then it must benefit the economy. OTOH, who knows (so they think) whether they'll see any money as a result of public spending. Thus, they assume, "if it doesn't clearly benefit me, then it won't benefit the economy."
This is not necessarily selfish thinking. But it is narrowly individualistic thinking that's limited by the level 3 perspective that has difficulty grasping how people actually are connected in a modern economy. It cannot really grasp, for example, that it's not the money coming from the government that benefits the economy so much as the circulation of that money that's important. |
