In Quick Hits, The Big Hurt calls attention to a question in a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll.
First, from CBS comes a graph of the topline results:
Then, from vanityfair.com comes the breakdown by income:
To balance the federal budget, which of the
following would be the first step you would take?
TOTAL <$50K* $50K-$100K >$100K
Increase taxes on
the wealthy 61% 67% 58% 46%
Cut defense spending 20 20 22 20
Cut Medicare 4 2 5 10
Cut Social Security 3 1 5 6
* Mislabeled >50K in the original.
The results are hardly surprising, as polls have gotten similar results in the past. Indeed, the General Social Survey has long showed that very few people want to cut Medicare or Social Security, while a great number want to increase spending--but this is not the case for military spending. Even after 9/11, most people remained more supportive of Medicare and Social Security spending than they were of military spending. (See tables & charts & brief discussion on the flip.)
But look a little more closely at the internals. Overall, cutting military spending is five times more popular than cutting Medicare. Among those making less than 50K, it's ten times more popular. But among those making over 100K, it's only twice as popular. Once you get into the stratospheric income levels of K-Street lobbyists and others in the influence biz, it's a good bet that the difference vanishes entirely--and that's even before anyone gets paid to advocate for anything.
Some have suggested that Medicare should be means-tested in order to save money. But these polls show that there's already a sharp income-based difference in levels of support as things stand today. Add in means-testing, so that those making over 100K get nothing out of Medicare themselves--or even just substantially less--and the levels of support would certainly erode even further, thus making it even easier for Congress to act against the wishes of the broad majority of the American people.
On the flip: A set of tables & charts, showing just how upside-down the Versailles consensus is from what the American people want.
This chart only includes economic issues (health care registers at 14%--more than twice the level of taxes and the deficit combined). As Eskow says:
Only 6% of Americans think Congress should concentrate on reducing the deficit or changing the tax code, according to the latest CBS News poll. Nearly ten times as many people, 56%, want it to focus on creating jobs and fixing the economy. Guess which set of policies is the center of attention in Washington right now?
Americans overwhelmingly say that the midterm election results that gave Republicans control of the House represented a rejection of the Democrats and not a mandate for the GOP, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted Nov. 11-14. (Story; Poll data). Seventy percent of those surveyed said the results were a rejection of Democratic rule in the House while 17 percent called it a mandate for Republicans. Eight percent answered "neither" and 5 percent had no opinion.
The Democrats lost because they didn't address the people's number one concern. How hard is that to understand? Of course, they did address it sporadically and inadequately--which only makes matters worse, actually. It shows that Democrats know the problem exists, they just don't care enough to actually take it seriously. For all the GOP lies about Democrats "not sharing your values", this truth is far more devastating.
Only 6% of the public is concerned about the deficit. The only thing Washington elites are concerned about is the deficit. The rest of us live on the other side of the planet from the people in DC who make the policies. Maybe the other side of the solar system.
You can see how this divide affects policy. There is a "deficit commission" but no jobs commission. There are millions of people needing jobs and millions of jobs that need doing, but Washington won't "spend," even on badly-needed infrastructure investment. People over 50 (laid off because they were paid more or their health care was expensive) can't find jobs but the DC elite discuss raising the retirement age to 70. The deficit commission proposes cutting back the already-meager "safety net" while cutting tax rates for the really rich even more.
And while all of this goes on the rest of the people in the country are worried about jobs, foreclosures, bills, jobs, wages, jobs, and jobs - the things that matter to regular people. And they are feeling the consequences of the DC/rest-of-us divide.
In 2008, we expected the Democrats to recognize the obvious, side with the vast majority of the American people, and thereby cement long-term majority support. It was no-brainer. Unfortunately, the Democrats showed us they have no brains.
There is, of course, an explanation for this: the elite dominance of American politics, as described and explained, for example, by Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of political parties. In fact, the complete ignoring of the people's overwhelming #1 priority is about the most striking bit of evidence one could ask for proving such elite dominance. The question is, however, why that elite dominance has turned so short-sighted and self-destructive.
The crazy uncle may not be an archetype in the Jungian sense, but he's certainly an American cultural archetype. He lives in his own little world, but he's part of the family (a senior member, in fact) and he insists on inflicting his world on everyone else whenever he gets his chance. The family tolerates him because he's family (and senior member, don't forget!), tries not to hurt his feelings (because it will only make him crazier and louder) and strives to redirect his attention in harmless directions. When all else fails, they lock him in the attic for a few days. If the family's rich, they send him to Florida. If he's rich, they try to have him committed.
Alan Simpson is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with America. He's a crazy uncle, of course. But that's not the problem. The problem is, no one tries to contain his craziness or limit it in any way. To the contrary, his craziness is not just encouraged, but celebrated. It's normal. "A feature, not a bug," as they say in the trade.
Yesterday, digby wrote a post about Simpson's craziness. She hit all the high notes:
The problem with Alan Simpson's comments is bigger than the fact that he said "tits" and insulted women. Not that it wasn't crude and sexist of him, mind you. But the real problem is that he seems to believe that social security is some kind of welfare program for lazy old bastards who should either be rich or set out on an ice floe. Here's what he said:
I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits!
He's been calling retirees "greedy geezers" for years and seems to think the whole thing is some kind of con game in which elderly people are taking the country for a ride. Does anyone think that is a reasonable approach to this issue, even from the right? It's nuts.
Despite his puerile insults about others' alleged inadequate knowledge, and his ridiculous protestations of having an open mind, we know that he's also tragically uninformed about the way the program works.
And his pathological illogic renders him nearly incomprehensible. Simpson continuously tells the elderly to STFU:
You remember the last time we corrected Social Security, and people calling me. Let me tell you, everything that Bush and Clinton or Obama have suggested with regard to Social Security doesn't affect anyone over 60, and who are the people howling and bitching the most? The people over 60. This makes no sense. You've got scrub out [of] the equation the AARP, the Committee for the Preservation of Social Security and Medicare, the Gray Panthers, the Pink Panther, the whatever.
So, crazy uncle. No doubt. And his latest insulting outburst has lots of folks saying he should go. But hey! We knew he was a crazy uncle going into this thing. As People Magazine wrote in 1991:
I get it. It's true. There is an in-group mentality common to virtually every human social group you can name. It's not just the right, it's present on the left as well. But there's still a helluva difference between a group that thinks anyone who's not a member in good standing is going to Hell, and a group that thinks virtually every religion has something good to teach--a group like the Unitarians, where I grew up. And this isn't the only way that left and right may appear similar at one level--often limited to process--but then look quite different when you actually take a closer look, oh, say for example at the substance of what they're about. After all, the left gave us Martin Luther King and the NAACP--both demonized as "Communists" during the height of the Civil Rights struggle--while the right gave us all-Americans like George Wallace and the KKK.
One of the great tests of politics in the present time is just how much reality is able to break through Versailles' profound confusion on just such basic matters. It was demonstrated once again this week in slightly-more-sophisticated-than-usual piece by AP writer Charlest Babington, "Voters hate partisan sniping, but fuel its growth", which Digby took note of on Wednesday. She quoted the following passage:
In a January poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 93 percent agreed there is too much partisan fighting between Democrats and Republicans. In a March Associated Press-GfK poll, 84 percent said it was important that any health care plan have support from both parties in Congress.
Voters' behavior, however, often works against such sentiments.
"People will tell you they don't like partisanship, but their solution is, 'The other side should give in to us,'" said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, author of "Voice of the People: Elections and Voting in the United States."
She then observed:
Uhm yes. They want their agenda to be enacted and they don't like the idea that their opponents are standing in the way. When one party say, wins a super-majority, they think they have a perfect right to expect that it will happen. It's a mistaken idea they learned back in civics class in high school, I imagine.
Now, Republicans have good reason to define bipartisanship as Democrats capitulating because there is a history of doing just that. Democrats, not so much, but that's no reason they shouldn't think that "two way street" might be defined as the Republicans doing the same thing when the Dems are in the majority. (Alas, they have learned the hard way that this is not going to happen.) I fairly sure it's only the vaunted "centrists" who define bipartisanship as a Chinese menu or splitting the baby. Everyone else thinks that elections actually mean something.
While the above passage takes note of one crucial asymmetry between left and right, it's hardly the only one here. After all, the "Democrat's healthcare plan" that passed into law was actually based on the GOP's plan crafted by the Heritage Foundation back in the 1990s and implemented by George Mitt Romney in Massachusetts just a few short years ago. Furthermore, Abramowitz's statement:
"People will tell you they don't like partisanship, but their solution is, 'The other side should give in to us,'"
ignores the rather unsurprising fact that Pew recently found that Republicans were far less interested in compromise:
Miller counts off the grim statistics of American society's most intractable problems: "40 million uninsured; 15 million working poor; 10 million poor kids in failing schools." Soon, making these costs seem trivial, baby boomers will retire. And the political system, distorted by money and special interests, refuses to seriously address these issues. Miller, a radio commentator and syndicated columnist, has a plan. With an increase of government spending of 2% of GDP, we can solve all these problems...
Gosh! 2%--it's such a tiny slice! Why can't we all just get along?
Well, perhaps because increasing government spending without increasing revenues is what the GOP has been doing for a long, long time--producing massive deficits which it then turns around and blames on Democrats. And because New Democrats like Barack Obama have pretty much given up on arguing that "taxes are the price we pay for civilization," as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. so neatly put it. Which is why it's so relevant to re-post a couple of charts that Chris put up during the week in "Federal taxes at historic lows":
The relentless decline in income tax rates--far more significant for the super-rich than for ordinary Americans--reveals Miller's pipe dream for the utter fantasy it is. Miller implicitly assumes a fixed difference between static liberal and conservative positions. But as with the Supreme Court, so with the tax rate--any failure to continue the relentless march to the right is considered "socialism" by conservatives, as would Miller's proposal, if anyone were to serious pursue it, say with health care reform (Publishers Weekly reviewed continued, precisely where it left off above...)
but it will require "grand bargains" between the parties, with Democrats agreeing to accept market-oriented programs if Republicans will generously fund them. For instance, Miller says many Republicans would support universal health coverage if Democrats would allow a plan relying on tax subsidies to cover private insurance policies.
Ha! It's only fair to note that Miller published this book in 2003, and that afterwards, Mitt Romney seemingly validated it... in Massachusetts! Of course, as Michael Dukakis can tell you, Massachusetts is not America, which is basically why this whole approach is detached from reality.
So, to summarize what's delusional about this sort of centrism:
Yesterday, I wrote a diary, "Why does Chris Matthews hate America?", focused on his utter cluelessness regarding basic civics, and the importance of defendant's and suspects rights in US history and the Constitution--something I was taught in grade school, then again in junior high, then again in high school.
I had originally intended to say more about his lack of grasp about separation of powers as well, as a comment by comment by Thomas Twinnings reminded me, but the flow of the diary had a mind of its own, and I let it be. Now I'd like to say just a little bit about that as well. As Thomas rightly notes, military tribunals are part of the executive--as is all of the military. Trying suspected terrorists there is a violation of separation of powers. Separation of powers is the core of the constitution, its basic architecture. Separation of powers is the means by which government power is checked by being divided against itself. It's the structural key to preserving limited government--government with limited powers, as opposed to absolute government, government with absolute powers. Republicans--who claim to love "limited government," but don't even know what it means, and who claim to hate government tyranny--have been undermining separation of powers every which way they can when it suits them, at least sine the time of Richard Nixon. And Obama's willingness to continue blurring the lines himself show just what kind of "constitutional scholar" he is (no kind at all, just a teacher, as someone said in a comment I now can't find--Grrrr! Arrrgh!) But I'll have more to say about Obama on the flip. First, let's turn to David Broder.
This week, Broder wrote yet another career-ending op-ed. He's written more of them than most people have written words. But to have an elite pompous ass like Broder lecturing the rest of us about our pompous elitism for not seeing and appreciating Palin's "pitch perfect populism" on the same day that his own paper is out with a poll showing that "Forty-five percent of conservatives now consider her as qualified for the presidency, down sharply from 66 percent who said so last fall." Well, that's just priceless.
Matthews and Broder are beacons of Beltway Babbitry. They epitomize how things are done, undone and not down in Versailles. Obama supposedly ran to change all that, but instead he's shown himself to be the ultimate champion of it--even as it's strangling him politically. But don't worry too much about Obama getting strangled, worry instead about him strangling us, as with his plans for a deficit catfood commission to cut back Social Security and Medicare. As Dean Baker says:
According to PPP, 35% of the country thinks either that President Obama was not born in America (23%), and / or that George W. Bush had something to do with the 9/11 attacks (14%). My favorite line in their press release is "a very troubled 2% of the population buys into both of those conspiracy theories." Ha!
On the bipartisan front, 25% of Democrats think that Bush was involved in the 9/11 attacks, while 42% of Republicans think that Obama was not born in the United States.
The idea that the left and the right are both inhabited by a "fringe" is a favority mainsteam trope, which PPP plays off of, though it does note that, "It's hard to call a third of the country a fringe." Nonetheless, the "fringe" characterization is a long-standing one, and it's always a handy way to avoid discussing the substance of any sort of criticism from the left. One simply equates the criticism with crazy ranting from the right, and then smiles a knowing "we're all above such foolishness" smile.
But who's to say that the "center", such as it is, is not similarly beset with ludicrous counter-factual beliefs, even though they may not take the same conspiricist forms? In fact, there is substantial evidence that this is the case, and the centrist counterfactual beliefs are far more injurious to the health and welfare of the republic than either the Birthers or the 9/11 Truthers. Here a sampling of such centrist myths, which, to my knowledge, no one has ever thought to poll.
(A) We can provide universal health care, like all other advanced industrial nations, and cut costs to 12% of GDP or less, like all other advanced industrial nations, while still allowing insurance companies to skim 30% off the top.
(B) We can militarily subdue Afghanistan with enough troops and machismo, even though no one in history has ever done this before.
(C) We can successfully deal with global warming without even trying to reduce atmospheric carbon to 350 ppm, which is what the world's scientists say is required.
(D) We can fix the financial system without actually fixing the financial system, simply by trusting the folks who helped bring us the meltdown in the first place.
(E) Money is speech.
(F) Corporations are people, with all the Constitutional rights that entails.
(G) Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on weapon systems that don't work, and/or aren't designed to fight enemies that actual exist means you are "strong on defense," even if you did everything human possible to avoid serving in a war zone when your country called. Questioning the wisdom of doing so makes you "weak on defense", even if you are a war hero.
There are literally dozens and dozen of such crazy beliefs that enjoy strong "centrist" support, at least in Versailles, if not always in America. But does anyone ever thing of them as evidence of some sort of dysfunction? Yet, that surely is precisely what it is--evidence of a deeply dysfunctional political system.
Here's my definition of maturity. Yours may vary, and I'm mature enough to realize that, and perhaps even appreciate it. But here's mine: If you find out you've been wrong about something, and you respond by changing your mind, and feeling grateful for having learned something, then you've shown the cardinal sign of maturity. If, instead, you get really angry, and insist that you "are too right!" then you've shown the cardinal sign of immaturity.
In other words, maturity is when you have an ego, immaturity is when your ego has you.
Here's why I think it's important. The number one problem facing our civilization today is our collective lack of maturity.
A classic example: The Iraq War was a terrible mistake, but those who questioned or criticized it have not gained stature or influence because of their superior good judgment in not going along with a very bad foreign policy blunder. Instead, they've been treated like they should apologize for getting it right. (And even then, the apology should probably not be accepted.) Who is listened to instead? Who is on cable TV, writing on the op-ed pages, taking up space on the Sunday talk shows? Those who got it wrong. The hook-line-and-sinker crowd. But it's not just the media, it's the Obama Administration as well. Who is running America's foreign and military policy? Again: Those who got it wrong.
How about torture? The outing of Valerie Plame? Any of the Bush national security screwups? Any of them? FISA?
On Thursady, AZDem had a recommended diary at DKos, "The Myth of Certainty: Obama, Liberals & Daily Kos " that's arguably a perfect example of the way that a marginally hipper version of High Broderism manifests itself at DKos, and elsewhere throughout the blogosphere and beyond.
As with Broder himself, the diary depends on a simplistic, schematic false equivalency of left and right, which ends up praising shallow centrism as a fount of deep wisdom. Given its origins, it does not end up outright endorsing center-right policies as if they were centrist. It simply praises Obama, so that as he compromises further and further, it will have exactly the same effect, praising him for his centrism as he moves ever farther right ... unless, of course, progressives reject this argument, and pressure Obama so that he does not drift further and further right. What's more, it even goes so far as to label this centrism as "true liberalism."
In this diary, I want to challenge the simplistic terms of AZDem's narrative about certainty, and I want to propose an alternative framework--the Enlightenment framework of critical reason, which an August 2003 congressional report found to be under sustained attack by the Bush Administration. While AZDem wants to push the narrative that other Kossack liberals have run amuck with Bush-like certainty, deludedly attacking Obama for his anti-Bush willingness to hear all sides, I propose a radically different view, one that's much more grounded in the nitty-gritty of the actual historical record.
In my view, the problem is, quite simply, that Obama has not consistently committed himself to re-establishing and rehabilitating the framework of truth-seeking in policy-setting and communicating with the American people. My problem with Obama is not that he listens to conservatives, but that he accepts as valid conservative claims without empirical foundation, while at the same time ignoring progressive points of view--even when well-founded, and when representing substantial majority opinion.
A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.
That's the first line of his June 4 column. And he's absolutely right. But the title of that column is "Rush and Newt Are Winning" and that's absolutely wrong. That's not the root of what's wrong in his column, though. It's just the tip-off.
Dionne continues:
Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don't. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina.
The mention of Steve Forbes provides the opening for seeing what's wrong with Dionne's headline formulation: It's not "the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis". It's our entire political class that's out of whack. Not just Rush-Newt and Steve Forbes and Dick-Liz Cheney and Sarah Palin and Rick Perry and Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and etc., etc., etc. Not just the rightwing crazies, in other words, but the "sensible" Democratic establishment as well. In short, all of Versailles.
If they gave those "personality tests" to the French or British Aristocrats at any time up to the later 20th century, what you'd find would be identical to this theme:
5. Has a sense of entitlement
6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends
7. Lacks empathy
9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes
All the same features that Wall Street exhibits today. It's simply part of an effort by elites in all times and at all places to turn themselves into an aristocracy and to justify their greed and exploitation of the poor by believing they are separate.
The same, of course, goes for Versailles, as was particularly evident when AG Eric Holder's scrupulously honest dismissal of charges against Stevens because of prosecutorial misconduct was egregiously misrepresented by all his Versailles buddies as vindication of his ahem! "sterling character". What better way to thoroughly blacken their own?
Reading Mike's diary, "Next Big Change Up: Health Care Reform" on Friday, it became quite clear to me that there were two different frames at play simultaneously. Within frame one--the big-picture of what Obama is proposing, compared to (a) what the rest of the world does and (b) what's most economically rational for the economy as a whole--this is definitely a rather tepid, centrist sort of approach that's only a first step toward really doing the job. But within the second frame, the framework of American electoral politics (including the institutions related to it) it is clearly pushing the boundaries-hard-and it's being designed with the clear intention to succeed, no matter what. As Mike himself stressed, the lessons of the Clinton's failure are clear, and Obama is moving quickly and boldly in order to not lose the momentum, while leaving details to Congress in order to reduce the number of bites the established special interests can take.
It strikes me that this two-frame view is an example of how we need to become more sophisticated in how we talk about politics in the current Democratic Trifecta era, particularly as we're still way behind the curve in changing the larger media and institutional environments I so lovingly refer to as "Versailles." As long as that hegemonic infrastructure remains firmly in place, there will be sharp differences between how things look seen through one frame vs. the other. These two frames are both objectively real. They are not just ideological constructs that different people buy into, though they certainly do depend in part on ideology for their existence-but only in part.
At this level, ideology can perhaps best be understood as a common framework shared by different actors that configures political space-including who the actors are, what their alliances are, what their current and prospective interests are, etc., etc., etc. Ideology in this sense is not something that's just in someone's head, it's an interactive reality, rooted both in realworld relationships between people and things (individually and collectively) and in how people interpret them. Versailles embodies the smaller frame-it's a set of institutions, inhabited by a group of people, who share a set of ideas and practices in common, all of which sharply limit the realm of the thinkable, so that it routinely includes-or at least deems reasonable- preposterous lies, while excluding all manner of inconvenient truths.
We in the netroots spend a great deal of time bashing the Villagers for the profound disconnect with reality, and the disconnect has rarely been more glaring than over the Stimulus bill and the lack of bi-partisanship in passing it. One of the themes I really admire in Glenn Greenwald's writing is the times he reveals prominent journalists implicitly presuming their own opinions must reflect the broad American polity not merely in the absence of empirical proof, but in direct contradiction to it as polling on that very question had been done.
Friday, on Bill Moyers Journal there were a couple of remarkable segments (transcript here). I doubt I'll have time to discuss the segment with Eric Foner, one of America's top historians, but it was really excellent, a sharp contrast to the almost endless mindless blather one routinely hears about Abraham Lincoln. Foner comes at Lincoln as an historian who's written extensively about much more ordinary people of that time, and so he carries a perspective that much more in tune with how the blogosphere sees power today. But I want to focus on the other segment, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen.
What was so good about the segment was not the content per se, which most of us are generally familiar with, but they way they were able to convey it in the tv medium, in a very distilled, but not dumbed-down manner. And I'd like to use that distilled presentation to link what they were saying to a couple of excellent books from the 1990s that can further illuminate the historical background of what we're living through and fighting against.
They began with a discussion of the Daschle affair....
The death of Mark Felt (AKA "Deep Throat") has Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr., wondering "Could We Uncover Watergate Today?"
Over at Dkos, LithiumCola notes that Downie had been "executive editor of the Post from 1991 (after Ben Bradlee stepped down) to earlier this year, when he retired. Downie therefore held Bradlee's post for most of the Bush Administration. A point which makes his column in Sunday's edition of the Post particularly mystifying, or maddening, at any rate revealing."
LithiumCola goes on to note:
The recently retired executive editor of the Washington Post is musing about what "would" happen if a "story such as Watergate" were to emerge once again.
A wild hypothetical, to be sure.
It put me in mind of an article I wrote for Random Lengths News back in June of 2006, constituting "a conservative list of 25 reasons to impeach President Bush." For by now, one thing, at least, should be blazingly clear: the entire Washington establishment was in on this particular crime spree, every last step of the way.
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