He may not be ready to gut Social Security just yet, but he has definitively jettisoned 70 years of economic history. Government no longer steps in to spend money when consumer demand fails. Instead, government works hard to make matters even worse. With state and local budgets once again being cut across the country, there will clearly be net decreases in government spending as far as the eye can see. Herbert Hoover would be so proud! And yet, it's not enough, as the WSJ reports:
Obama to Call for Nonsecurity Spending Freeze
By DAMIAN PALETTA And JONATHAN WEISMAN
William McKinley: NOT A Kenyan
WASHINGTON-President Barack Obama will call for a five-year freeze on nonsecurity discretionary spending in his State of the Union address Tuesday night "as a down payment toward reducing the deficit," a White House official said.
The freeze won't touch some of the budget's biggest items, such as Medicare, Social Security and defense spending, nor will it apply to homeland-security spending or foreign aid.
But Mr. Obama will look for "cuts and efficiencies" in other areas, the official said. For example, the president is pushing the five-year plan designed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to slow the growth of military spending, which officials believe would save $78 billion.
The president's plan would save about $26 billion over five years, according to the White House budget proposal for the current fiscal year. Those savings would be dwarfed by the $100 billion in cuts for this year alone that many House Republicans are pushing.
Republicans said Tuesday that Mr. Obama's proposal wouldn't do enough to rein in spending.
So why is this? Why has 70 years of macro-economic history and understanding been tossed out the window, in favor of returning to the darkness of pre-macro ignorance? This is a variant of the question that Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman have been asking in anguish for many moons now. Why has a rage to punish the poor, and even the middle class completely taken over and displaced the commonsense interest in preserving the basic stability of the economy through as quick a recovery as possible?
It's a classic case of be careful what you wish for. President Barack Obama wanted to end the baby boomer-era culture wars - and he's done it.
But along the way, Obama has sparked an even more visceral values debate about whether he's moving the country toward socialism and over the very definition of what it means to be American.
At a moment that finds the right energized and seemingly ascendant, the battles over morality-based cultural issues such as gay rights, abortion and illegal drugs that did so much to drive the conservative movement and dominated the political conversation for more than 30 years have abated, giving way not just to broad economic anxiety but to a new set of emotionally charged issues.
Much of the right - including the noisy and influential tea party movement - sees greater and more immediate danger from this administration and Congress on issues related to the role of government and the very meaning of America than from the old "social issues." For while Obama has avoided single-issue fights on issues such as gays in the military and federal funding of abortions - angering parts of his base, in the process - he has, in the minds of conservatives, pushed a comprehensive agenda, and that is far more threatening.
So much stoopid, one just doesn't know where to begin.
Of course, Obama deserves a good deal of the credit. Trying to blame the culture wars on the Baby Boom generation might have seemed like a pretty slick campaign move. And arguably it was. But it was a helluva stupid governing philosophy, right from the get-go.
Politico, of course, adds to the stupid, with their ridiculous claim that Obama has ended the culture wars, just because the issues have morphed a little bit--the same as they always have over the past 40 years or so.
But, perhaps most idiotic is the notion that it's somehow new twist that there's "an even more visceral values debate about whether he's moving the country toward socialism and over the very definition of what it means to be American."
Hell-o-ohhhh! Father Coughlin? Liberty League? Richard Nixon? House Unamerican Activities Committee? Joseph McCarthy? Any of these pre-Boomer political figures register anything over there? Got your Wikipedia bookmarked, at least? You know, on the Intertubulettes?
In response to the weekend's murder of George Tiller, MSNBC's lead thought this morning was that the "culture wars" have returned.
Not to always be the irritating know it all sitting in the first row of class or anything, but I have news for MSNBC. The culture wars never left American politics. In fact, they will always be with us. We are never going to enter a period as a nation where our cultural differences fail to have an impact on our political choices.
While I do agree that (1) MSNBC was being foolish, (2) the "culture wars" never went away, and (3) cultural differences will always have a substantial impact on our politics, I think history shows quite clearly that there are ways to mitigate the intensity of such conflicts, which have varied considerably in their intensity over the course of our history. Thing is, though, the Versailles CW is (wait for it...) wrong once again on both where this comes from, and how it might be overcome.
What's more, it's not always a good thing to calm the culture wars. Gaining equality for despised and disempowered groups has regularly required that the culture wars heat up, not cool down: freeing the slaves, winning women's rights, ending racial discrimination, gaining social acceptance for every major wave of immigrants, winning equal rights for gays and lesbians--all these struggles have been held back by the insistence on social peace, and only advanced when people were willing to risk intensified social strife, which now goes under the rubric of "culture wars".
This gives rise to a simple observation: as a first approximation, there are three favored ways to end the culture wars:
(1) Conservatives believe that subordinate groups should stop "causing trouble" by pushing for equality. (The problem is those people.)
(2) Progressives believe that subordinate groups should be granted full equality, so there's nothing to fight over any more. (The problem is lack of "liberty and justice for all.")
(3) "Responsible" centrists believe in Santa Claus, and tell us we all need to be good little boys and girls, and everything will work out just fine. (The problem is individuals with bad attitudes on both sides.)
I have long been deeply skeptical about some of Barack Obama's core political assumptions revolving around the culture wars-that they are a more or less symmetrical, irrational distraction from real, pragmatic problem-solving perpetrated by left as well as the right, which are rooted in the 60s and the Baby Boom generation, but have no real relevance to the problems of today.
Having lived through the entire period from the 1960s onward, it seems quite clear to me that the 1960s represented a fundamental rupture with the past, in which fundamental and pervasive institutionalized forms of prejudice-most notably against women, blacks and other racial minorities-were dramatically challenged, morally delegitimized, and largely dismantled. In response to this, political conservatives organized a sustained backlash, and used it to attack not just the breakthrough advances of the 1960s, but a wide range of New Deal political advances and their extensions as well, which largely benefited the working class whites, and helped to create the modern middle class. As such, there was never any sort of symmetry between the sides in the culture war, nor was there anything irrational in fighting against the politics of reaction. Finally, given that the 1960s saw the fall of age-old structures of race and gender oppression, it was quite clear that culture wars didn't start in the 1960s, except in the terms of "bully logic"-"It all started when he hit me back!"
Obama's promise to end the culture wars is a source of enormous appeal. And why not? Wouldn't we all much rather solve actual problems-ones that could even threaten the future of human civilization? The only problem is the question of how realistic such a promise can be. I've pointed out in the past that the partisan polarization we're experiencing has causes that go far beyond individual goodwill. And I've pointed out that this period of increasing polarization and prolonged gridlock also corresponds with an unprecedented period of bi-partisan divided government. It's also obvious that political battles over culture have a very long history in America, and did not just appear out of nowhere in the 1960s.
Here, I want to take a different approach. I want to examine the claim, made fairly often by Obama supporters, that the culture wars are over for young voters. I'm going to look at data from the General Social Survey on two hot-button culture-war issues for which we have continuous long-term data: abortion and homosexuality, comparing results for successive decades from the 1970s to the 2000s. And for sake of comparison, I'm going to present data on Boomers-those born from 1946 to 1964, and those under 30 at any particular time they are surveyed. The results show quite clearly that these culture war issues are not resolved among younger voters.This is not to deny the obvious point--which Chris has pointed out a number of times--that younger voters are increasingly abandoning the GOP and shifting to the Dems. But it is to say that culture war issues have not all been resolved. The most plausible explanation is simply that conservative governance has been such a disaster that it has simply overwhelmed all other considerations-much as the Great Depression did in the elections of 1930 and 1932.
But don't take my word for it. Look at the data yourself, and then we can debate what it means.
I'm laboring under the handicap of not have read the research underlying this piece.
(Is there a PDF somewhere? Or, if it's published, a journal reference?)
But, as it stands, the proposition support of which is attributed to the academics in question looks pretty flaky: it's suggested that because rural areas showed a higher level of support for hetero-only marriage, but no similar differential existed on other policy issues, homo-bashing won Bush his reelection.
Where's the evidence of causation of the various issues on voting? What kind of analysis of the 04 National Election Survey have the writers done?
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William McKinley: NOT A Kenyan