A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Sep 04, 2010. Original HERE.
Note: This is actually more sTiVo's post than Daniels, but it was Daniel's choice as one of his top posts of the year.
In response to my quick hit on UK public opinion strongly favouring having the Labour party abandon the "New Labour" neoliberal agenda, sTiVo has the following to say:
The thing about Britain is that their debate is closer to the real meat and potatoes of what this argument is all about. Ours is frustratingly diverted into "Like or Dislike Obama" or "Is the Tea Party Racist" and other tangential questions.
Britain makes it clear: it's really about social democracy vs. neoliberalism.
It is important that [Open Left] understand this. This is the debate that is barely allowed to be mentioned on our side of the pond but it's the crucial distinction.
When Paul Krugman argues for Keynesianism he's taking the social democratic side of this argument. But he's not allowed to say so, or at least not willing.
The mistake of our side in the past period was in not understanding how strongly our opponents believed in the other side of this argument. It was indeed their central rationale. It wasn't "just politics".
cont
I've talked about this before, but evidently not nearly enough. Two major points:
(1) Obama is a raging ideologue. He is not a pragmatist. "Pragmatism" is his ideological rhetoric, nothing more. It's progressives who are the real pragmatists today. Not all of them, and not all of the time, but it's pragmatism to note that the war on terrorism is a miserable failure, and we need to try something else. It's also pragmatism to note that (a) law & order responses to terrorism generally work a whole lot better than military responses and (b) soft power--including efforts at dialogue, understanding, humanitarian aid and the like--works a whole hell of a lot better than blowing people to bits. It's fact-hating ideology to oppose such measures.
Likewise, it's pragmatism to use cheap money (damn near free) to invest today in putting people back to work building the green tech and human infrastructure of tomorrow as a way to get out of the recession. It's fact-hating ideology to reject this as "discredited Keynesianism". And it's scientifically-based pragmatism to get atmospheric CO2 down below 350ppm as soon as possible. It's fact-hating ideology to reject this as "politically naive" or "extreme" or whatever, as if physics and chemistry give a damn about hominid politics.
Starting to see a pattern here, are we?
(2) But here's something more to help fill out the picture--a bit of an explanatory backdrop, if you will. From digby yesterday, "Triangulating In The New Millenium":
The base was in a very different place in 1992. Clinton ran as a New Democrat promising to end the "braindead politics of the past," much like Obama. The idea at the time was rather technical however, at least in part --- that you can use modern market based processes to achieve liberal goals. Now certainly there was a political desire to neutralize social issues, particularly about being soft on crime and changing the "incentives" in social welfare, which sort of defined DLCism of the 90s. But essentially Clinton was saying to liberals, "I'm with you on the goals, but we need to shed the old labels and try a different way of getting there." At least that's what I think liberals heard, whether or not it was true. Regardless, throughout the Clinton years, for the most part, there was a belief in his good intentions -- and he was actually pretty clever (more clever than Obama) in sending the liberal dogwhistle and telling the folks that he was on their side. (Taylor Branch's Clinton biography says that Clinton really was a liberal who was backed into the compromises and changing his priorities, just like Obama. But who really knows?)
Liberals were a defeated force in that decade and were willing to try this new thing to see if it might work. (We were all pragmatists then.) I know that I was open to seeing how the experiment would come out, and at the time, when the economy picked up and happy days were here again, we thought it might have worked. It's very hard to argue with prosperity. (And then there was the modern conservative movement hitting congress like a gale force, which was like nothing we'd ever seen before ...)
When Bush came in and blew a hole in the hard won balanced budget by giving tax cuts to millionaires, it was finally irrefutable to even the die-hards that it had all been a fools game and that the DLC experiment was a failure. It was clear that the Republicans had become ideologically bankrupt political terrorists and the Democrats had basically done their dirty work for them.
Barack Obama, however, has never agreed with that. Indeed, Sargent is right that he primarily sells himself as a conciliator and a bipartisan deal maker who is doing the best he can in a hostile situation. But then Clinton did too. In fact, all Democrats have thought that since the 1980s. The problem for Obama is that unlike Clinton, the experiment in "pragmatic, non-ideological" politics in the age of GOP nihilism has already been tried. And it failed. (They may have had a nice party for a while, but the hangover is one for the books.) He's living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present.
"He's living in the past and liberals are trying to drag him into the present." The exact reverse of Obama's standard Versailles-approved shtick. Turns out that he's the one wedded to the failed policies of the past.
The point here is simple: Once upon a time it was at least plausible to argue that liberals were wedded to outmoded ideas and ways of viewing things (and in some ways, I'm sure they were--though much more in terms of strategy than anything else, I'd argue.) They needed to try new ideas. And so we did. And what did we get for our troubles? We lost the House after holding it for 40 years--and lost it for more than one term for the first time since 1932. We got a president impeached as the result of the 5-year witch-hunt. We got a presidential election stolen in plain sight by the Supreme Court, while Versailles applauded. We got a balanced budget which the GOP immediately plundered to plough enormous wealth into their their rich and super-rich base. In short, we got an epic political and policy failure. That's what digby is reminding us of.
So, after all that, one can no longer adopt the Clintonian policy position on the grounds of pragmatism. Although it had some limited successes, that position overall has proven itself to be a spectacular failure. Ergo, those who continue pushing it are doing so as a matter of ideology (or pure corruption, take your pick). Now, because of past history, they may adopt a rhetoric of "pragmatism" and even profess an ideology of "pragmatism" ("We're doing this to solve America's problems.") But the clear reality is that there's nothing whatsoever actually pragmatic about what they're doing. They're either shallow, clueless, unreflective ideologues, or else they're simply shills.
Paul Krugman in what may be his finest blog post articulates a fear I have had but been unable to properly express:
But watching the failure of policy over the past three years, I find myself believing, more and more, that this failure has deep roots - that we were in some sense doomed to go through this. Specifically, I now suspect that the kind of moderate economic policy regime Brad and I both support - a regime that by and large lets markets work, but in which the government is ready both to rein in excesses and fight slumps - is inherently unstable. It's something that can last for a generation or so, but not much longer.
By "unstable" I don't just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that's part of it. Equally crucial are the regime's intellectual and political instability.
The failure here is not the policies themselves, but the 2nd and 3rd order intellectual and social structures that maintain sufficient social support for the policies of curtailed capitalism and the state enforcement of broad social mobility and equality. In this sense, I say the New Deal did fail, because it failed to sustain itself much past the generation of people who lived through the crisis that made it possible. It is getting harder to protect Social Security because with each passing year there are less people with living memory of what life was like without it. Those people were generally immune to the propaganda, but those of us left behind lack that personal connection to seeing retired people reduced to begging and literally dying in gutters and under bridges.
That's what we have to account for if and when we create the conditions to implement a New New Deal. How to make the liberal consensus not only strong enough to do it, but self sustaining?
Not to endorse everything he says, but the ending is particularly good, and while I think increasing global governance (yes, "One World Government") is ultimately the only way to ensure peace and human rights to a globalized One World Economy, I'm fine being wrong if something like this can do a good enough job:
Via Barb Morrill, here's New Republic Editor-in-Chief (and off and on, currently on, publisher) Marty Peretz:
But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.
Of course, Rauf is one of the most prominent clerics who has denounced Islam being used in the name of violence and tried to foster tolerance and understanding. If anything, he's one of the Western clerics Al Qaeda can't stand. But that doesn't matter to Peretz, since "these people" smacks of Ross Perot's "you people" at the 1992 NAACP Convention and many other broad-brush characterizations that leads to intolerance and prejudice. And what really gets me about comments like this, as Into The Woods notes, is that they feed into the perception that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam itself. This morning I saw that Gen. Petraeus urged members of a Florida church not to go forward with plans to burn copies of the Koran, arguing it would endanger U.S. troops, as did the White House:
"It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems," Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said in a statement. "Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community."
The White House also condemned the Florida church's plan, with press secretary Robert Gibbs reiterating Petraeus's contention that U.S. forces could be put in harm's way as a result. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called the proposed demonstration "un-American" and said it was "inconsistent with the values of religious tolerance and religious freedom."
Peretz's prejudice is along those same lines, and gets to what I always thought is the strongest argument against opposition to Park51- the perception it creates, that we in the United States are beholden to prejudice.
Frankly, I couldn't quite imagine any venture requiring trust with Arabs turning out especially well. This is, you will say, my prejudice. But some prejudices are built on real facts, and history generally proves me right. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
In response to my quick hit on UK public opinion strongly favouring having the Labour party abandon the "New Labour" neoliberal agenda, sTiVo has the following to say:
The thing about Britain is that their debate is closer to the real meat and potatoes of what this argument is all about. Ours is frustratingly diverted into "Like or Dislike Obama" or "Is the Tea Party Racist" and other tangential questions.
Britain makes it clear: it's really about social democracy vs. neoliberalism.
It is important that [Open Left] understand this. This is the debate that is barely allowed to be mentioned on our side of the pond but it's the crucial distinction.
When Paul Krugman argues for Keynesianism he's taking the social democratic side of this argument. But he's not allowed to say so, or at least not willing.
The mistake of our side in the past period was in not understanding how strongly our opponents believed in the other side of this argument. It was indeed their central rationale. It wasn't "just politics".
cont
The main problem with the Gibbs kerfuffle is the lack of understanding of what lies beneath the surface. In my previous diary, "Shorter Gibbs", I presented one view: that of the political domninance of economic elites over both parties, as described by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe in their new paper, "Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and thePrecipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States". But another way of looking at it is in terms of specifically what Versailles Dems are up to, in contrast with progressives. And the most economical way to describe that is in terms of neoliberalism vs. social democracy. Roughly speaking, social democracy represented the West's non-communist consensus after WWII. They were not about to let it get too far out of hand, of course. After getting rid of the Mosadegh government in Iran and restoring the Shah's dictatorship, our next CIA adventure was overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala, precisely because it was trying to become too much of a social democracy, aspiring to be more like Europe in the future, and less like its own impoverished past.
Still, when it came to the development community--concerned as it was to promote enough growth and hope to keep Communism at bay--a tepid form of the social democratic model, providing education, sanitation, and the like as public infrastructure goods, was basically taken for granted as part of how things should be done. This view shifted around the time of Ronald Reagan's election, with a pronounced re-direction toward the neo-liberal model in which cutting the size of the state was supposed to be the key to prosperity--what quickly came to be known abroad as the "neo-liberal model". It's the same model, actually, that New Democrats came to pick up on with increasing enthusiasm in the 1990s. And it's visible in many aspects of Obama's politics today.
Because such policies were implemented so widely around the world--thanks largely to the imposition of "structural adjustment policies" by IMF/World Bank--there's actually a rather robust database by which we can judge the effectiveness of neoliberalism, and five years ago, that's just what the Center on Economic Policy Research (CEPR) did with "Scorecard on Development: 25 Years of Diminished Progress" by Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker and David Rosnick.
In its executive summary, the paper first explained its most significant finding:
This paper looks at the available data on economic growth and various social indicators - including health outcomes and education - and compares the last 25 years (1980-2005)1 with the prior two decades (1960-1980). The paper finds that, contrary to popular belief, the past 25 years (1980-2005) have seen a sharply slower rate of economic growth and reduced progress on social indicators for the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries.
And explained the basic methodology it used in order to avoid unfairly biasing the results:
Countries are divided into quintiles on the basis of their starting point at the beginning of each period. The study therefore does not compare the performance of the same country over the two periods, because this would tend to find reduced progress for the second period due to "diminishing returns." In other words, it would be more difficult for a country to move from a life expectancy of 70 to 75, than from 50 to 55. By comparing the performance of countries that start out at a certain level in 1960, with countries that start out at the same level in 1980, this study avoids the possibility of interpreting such inherent limits on progress as evidence of failure in the second period.
It then cited some of it's most important findings, starting with a stagnation in GDP growth:
A sharp fall-off in the growth of GDP per capita was found for all groups of countries except the bottom quintile. (See Figure 1) In the fourth quintile, marked by per capita incomes between $1238 and $2364, growth falls from 2.4 percent annually in the first period to 0.7 percent in the second period. To get an idea how much difference this makes over time, at 2.4 percent growth the country's income per person will double in about 29 years. At 0.7 percent growth, it would take 99 years.
The middle quintile, with GDP per capita between $2364 and $4031, drops from a 2.6 percent growth rate in the first period to 1 percent in the second. The second quintile ($4086-8977) falls even further: from 3.1 percent in the first period to 1.3 percent in the second period.
Even the top quintile, which at $9012 to $43,713 contains a mixture of middle-income and highincome countries shows a sizeable falloff in growth, from 2.6 percent in the first period to only 1.3 percent in the second period....
The decline in growth rates for all but the very poorest countries is clearly quite dramatic. And given this decline, it's not surprising to find declines in many other indicators as well. Less text, more charts on the flip to fill out the whole story.
It's not that morality plays no role for neoliberals: it's an input, a variable, a side issue--it can take on any number of forms... except that of an actual moral imperative.
And Mark added:
The whole point was neoliberals use a different decision making process than progressives. That is true regardless if they end up agreeing with your final conclusion or not.
However, as I argued in an earlier diary focused on economic policy, "The sensible center outraged by the 'sensible center'", there's a further difference between neoliberals who have a firm grasp on certain significant historical facts--such as Brad DeLong and Matt Miller in that case--and those that do not--such as President Obama--those who are ultimately creatures of whatever political process they find themselves embedded within. For Obama, all facts are eventually fungible, as a too-small stimulus becomes "just right", a cowardly, mean-spirited, obstructionist senator (Democratic or Republicans) becomes a great statesman (or woman) aand whatever war needs fighting next automatically becomes a "smart war" even though all the evidence of history tells us that it is as dumb as eternity is long.
The neoliberal way is one that "goes meta" by treating everything as a process to be analyzed considering all the variables (including moral considerations), tweaking them here and there, and then coming up with a supposedly "optimum" solution. At least that's the aspiration. This contrasts sharply with leftist traditions that "go meta" by adopting religious, philosophical or scientific frameworks that are inherently skeptical of and stand apart from the everyday discourse used to discuss a given subject.
I had meant to write a diary about all that today or tomorrow. But then came this segment on The Racel Maddow Show yesteday, and I think it's sufficient to simply state the above as a framework for viewing this segment, and in particular, the section that I've quoted below. It demonstrates in tragic specificity how this double difference between left/progressive analysis and Obama's entirely relativist form of neoliberalism:
MADDOW: A week before Congress passed the joint resolution authorizing war against Iraq in 2003, an Illinois state senator stood up before an anti-war rally in Chicago. He described Saddam Hussein as a bad guy who the world and the Iraqi people would be better off without. But then, State Senator Obama said this, quote, "I also know that Saddam poses no direct threat, no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength and that in concert with the international community, he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dust bin of history." "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require an occupation a U.S. occupation of undetermined length at undetermined costs with undetermined consequences." "I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst better than the best impulses of Arab world and strengthen the recruitment of al-Qaeda." "I`m not opposed to all wars," he said, "I`m opposed to dumb wars."
The number of U.S. troops in Iraq since that young state senator became president of the United States has dropped by 90,000 and will apparently drop to zero by this time next year. The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, however, since that young state senator became president has tripled. Joining us now is Andrew Bacevich. He is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He retired at the rank of colonel after 23 years in the United States Army. And he`s author of the new book, " Washington Rules: America`s Path to Permanent War." Professor Bacevich, thanks very much for being here.
ANDREW BACEVICH, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, BOSTON UNIVERSITY: Thanks for having me on the program.
MADDOW: Do you think there`s really no difference between Democrats and Republicans on the biggest most important issues in national security?
BACEVICH: The differences are far smaller than one would conclude from all of the rhetoric and the hype. I`ve long believed that if you`re looking for the big truths about American politics, about the way Washington works, you don`t look at the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. You look for the continuities. And I think when it comes to the national security policy, going all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War, the continuities are quite evident and very strong and continue down to the present day with the president who promised he was going to change the way Washington works.
MADDOW: And that, to you, boils down to Washington rules, this credo that America has to determine sort of the means by which the rest of the world is allowed to run and that we need to enforce that by global military dominance. That means having troops everywhere all over the world, being able to project force all over everywhere in the world and being repeatedly almost in a recidivist way, being interventionist all the time?
BACEVICH: Exactly right. I mean, I was really struck by that quotation from State Senator Obama who, at that point, is not a creature of Washington and who, in that quotation, reflected, I think, a real skepticism about the way we do our national security policy. That skepticism today with President Obama has long since vanished. I mean, you have to be struck by the fact that President Obama has followed a path in Afghanistan that is probably identical to the path that Sen. McCain would have followed had we elected Sen. McCain president. There is no real change when it comes to national security policy. And as someone who voted for the president and admires the president, I have to say that that absence of change is not only disappointing. I think it may even qualify as tragic.
That's what happens when your highest principles are just variables in an equation--or rather, when your highest principle is to adjust the variables in all your equations to fit the political environment of the moment.
[T]here's something wrong -- something sick, really -- with Ygelsias' war-as-stimulus argument that strikes me as far more offensive than the fact that some fiscal conservatives are hypocrites when it comes to the National Security State. If you believe the war in Afghanistan is vital to protecting America, well, go ahead and make your case. Explain why pushing the couple dozen or so members of al-Qaeda allegedly still in the country over to Pakistan, while creating new enemies with each errant air strike, actually makes us safer.
What you shouldn't do in a debate over war, at least if you want to maintain your status as a Non-Despicable Person, is argue that bombing and occupying a foreign nation makes good economic sense. Even if it were true as an academic point, it's grotesquely out of place in a discussion of matters of life and death. War, if it can ever be justified -- and I have my doubts -- can only be so on the grounds that it is absolutely necessary to protecting human life: there is no other choice, it's a last resort.
This is a pretty obvious and morally compelling point, which really goes to the heart of what's wrong with neoliberalism generally: it is, all too often, an ideology of calculations in which "market forces" and other process gobbledegook utterly displaces questions of morality.
Oliver Stone has just released a new documentary, South of the Border, featuring interviews with seven South American presidents--six present and one immediately past. The point of the documentary is to help redress the terribly distorted nature of US media coverage of the rest of the hemisphere, particularly the continent of South America, where the election of Hugo Chavez has helped set off a wave of similar electoral breakthroughs that have finally allowed the continent to assert a degree of independence from outside influence that has not been seen in at least 100 years.
On Monday, Stone and one of his screenwriters, political activist, author and journalist Tariq Ali, appeared on Democracy Now to discuss the documentary. At the very beginning, Juan Gonzales kicked things off with a brief intro to the film's trailer:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone has taken on three American presidents in JFK, Nixon and W. A Vietnam War veteran, he was decorated with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. As a filmmaker, he's tackled the most controversial aspects of the war in his classics Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. He looked at the greed of the financial industry in the Hollywood hit Wall Street, and the sequel, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month.
Well, now the acclaimed director of films like Salvador, Comandante and Looking for Fidel, returns to Latin America. In his latest film, releasing this week in the United States, Oliver Stone takes a road trip across South America, meeting with seven presidents from the continent. Here's the trailer. It includes Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Argentine president Cristina Kirchner and her husband, former president Néstor Kirchner, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa.
OLIVER STONE: Who is Hugo Chávez? Some believe he is the enemy
JOHN ROBERTS, CNN: He's more dangerous than bin Laden. And the effects of Chávez's war against America could eclipse those of 9/11.
OLIVER STONE: Some believe he is the answer.
MAN ON THE STREET 1: [translated] I am with you, Chávez.
MAN ON THE STREET 2: [translated] Hello, President.
OLIVER STONE: But no matter what you believe, in South America he is just the beginning.
GEORGE TENET: Venezuela is important because they're the third largest supplier of petroleum.
PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ: [translated] Bush made a plan: first, Chávez, oil; second, Saddam, Iraq, oil.
PRESIDENT CRISTINA KIRCHNER: [translated] For the first time in the region, the leaders look like the people they govern. If you go to Bolivia and look at the face of Evo, the face of Evo is the face of a Bolivian.
OLIVER STONE: Could we say the goal of presidents of the region would be to own their own natural resources?
PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] The only thing I want is to be treated as equals. I personally have no interest in fighting with the United States.
OLIVER STONE: Rafael Correa is now being cast as one of the bad left.
PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA: [translated] With all due respect, knowing the North American media, I would be more worried if they spoke well of me.
REPORTER: Today, the Argentinian president, with concern about US trade policy, seemed in no hurry to embrace his American counterpart.
NÉSTOR KIRCHNER: [translated] Bush told me the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war. Those were his exact words.
NARRATOR: This summer, take an incredible look at an extraordinary movement.
PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] For the first time, the poor are treated like human beings.
PRESIDENT HUGO CHÁVEZ: [translated] And perhaps this is one of the things that keeps us going-the optimism, faith and hope, and the concrete evidence that we can change the course of history. It's possible, Oliver.
NARRATOR: South of the Border.
OLIVER STONE: I'm just curious. How many sets of shoes do you have?
PRESIDENT CRISTINA KIRCHNER: [translated] They always ask questions like this to women. I don't get it. They never ask a man how many pairs of shoes he has.
And it comes from a conservative commenter on conservative David Frum's site, in response to his excellent, I shit you not, Waterloo article:
" ...If the plan the Democrats are passing has such a good Republican pedigree (Romney, Heritage Foundation, etc.), then how is this such an "abject and irreversible defeat" for Republicans? Seems like you could just as well argue that it's a delayed victory for moderate conservative governance: What were once Republican proposals have become the new doctrine of the Democratic Party, shoving aside most of what the left wing of that party actually wants (single-payer etc.). Big win for the Heritage Foundation! All they had to do was be patient, and eventually a Democratic president and Congress did their dirty work for them..."
Here's a rule of thumb I routinely use: If one person screws up, then they're very likely at fault. If hundreds of people screw up, then the system or situation they're a part of is very likely at fault.
Now, there are obviously plenty of situations that are genuinely ambiguous, or that are over-determined, where you can readily find both individual and systemic factors to blame. (And, of course, there are intermediate levels of analysis--the small group, the institution, etc. So the individual/system dichotomy I develop below needs to be taken as a deliberately simplified first-order approximation.) But even in such situations, it can save you a whole lot of grief to step back and try to see which broad explanation is likely to yield the biggest immediate payoff in terms of changing the direction of things.
That's why I can share a great deal of frustration with individual politicians--even including members of the Progressive Caucus, for example, without necessarily focusing my blame on them.
Now, here's the thing: It's my belief that the period of time in which the blogosphere formed was a period when both sorts of explanations/approaches were much more evenly balanced. This was true for a variety of reasons, but the best way to summarize was to say that things were in a massive state of flux and uncertainty, typified in the realm of physics by what happens with common forms of phase transition:
A phase transition is the transformation of a thermodynamic system from one phase or state of matter to another.
A phase of a thermodynamic system and the states of matter have essentially uniform physical properties. During a phase transition of a given medium certain properties of the medium change, often discontinuously, as a result of some external condition, such as temperature, pressure, and others. For example, a liquid may become gas upon heating to the boiling point, resulting in an abrupt change in volume. The measurement of the external conditions at which the transformation occurs, is termed as the phase transition point.
Phase transitions are common occurrences observed in nature and many engineering techniques exploit certain types of phase transition.
The term is most commonly used to describe transitions between solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter, in rare cases including plasma.
During a phase transition, what's most important is the change in the energy state of the entire system: keep the heat on, and the water will turn to water vapor: it will boil. But at the same time, it needs specific places where the boiling process concentrates, as anyone knows who's watched water boil in a glass container. Likewise, when water vapor condenses into water, as dew forms in the morning, it does so at specific points, rather than everywhere equally at once. Because we have individual agency, at times in which social/political systems are transitioning like this, the actions we take to help create the change both "generate the heat" to alter the entire system, and specifically direct it toward particular condensation or boiling points--we bring particular pressure to bear on individuals and specific situations.
Harold Ford is a joke. His pandering, flip-flopping and sizzle-to-steak ratio are all legendary. But in the end, his politics are unremarkably neo-liberal, with nothing special to distinguish them. Take away his black skin, and he'd be a dime a dozen. Which reminds me of a certain President I know, who has either reappointed or replicated George W. Bush's team on national security, economic policy, and education, and Bill Clinton's team--at best--on most other top issues.
With Obama's resume, there's no doubt that he's a very smart individual. But with the great financial meltdown there's no doubt that tons of smart people can get together to do very stupid things. So the question is, "What purpose is Obama's intelligence devoted to? And is the end result going to be smart or stupid?"
The answer I propose is simple, perhaps too simple, but I think it serves as a good-enough first approximation: His intelligence is devoted to being a smarter version of Harold Ford. Okay, a lot smarter version of Harold Ford. But still, Harold Ford.
If you want a less-simple answer, then I'd say he's trying to be Booker T. Washington for 21st Century America. Booker T. Washington is not a prominent historical figure today, but when I was in high scholld back in the 1960s, he was one of just two black figures to appear in my American history textbook. The other was George Washington Carver. And yes, it seemed as weird to me then as it does writing it today. Even though the were presented in a way that made them seem even more alike than their names and the timing of their lives suggested, I recognized a significant difference. Carver was a remarkable scientist/inventor whose work helped save Southern agriculture in the wake of widespread soil depletion from cotton monocrop agriculture.
Booker T. Washington, OTOH, was an accomodationist educator and author who preached economic development within the framework of segregation. He was very popular with northern philanthropists. Significantly less so with Northern blacks, who soon grew quite frustrated with having their tune set by the "sensible" limits of what was politically possible in Dixie. This is not to say that Washington did no good. He did a lot to improve the conditions of blacks in the South--but he did it under the delusion that it was leading to eventual political equality, once blacks had "proved themselves" to the racist white power structure of the South, something that was never going to happen. What's more, he emerged as a national figure (with his 1895 "Atlanta Compromise" Speech) at precisely the moment when segregation was being politically consolidated--at precisely the historical moment when black acquiescence was most valuable to the Southern power structure.
So, too, today, when Republican rule has culminated in every conceivable form of disaster, Obama comes along to preach the virtues of accomodation with the purveyors of sweeping and systemic failure, and all of their failed philosophies and schemes: the failed deregulatory philosophy, the failed trickle-down economics, the failed war on terrror philosophy, the failed standardized testing and school privatization philosophy, etc., etc., etc.
And so I have to ask, in all seriousness: Is Obama just a (lot) smarter version of Harold Ford? Or is he something more? Because if he is something more, I'll be damned if can see it.
Throughout the month of August, I responded to several Salon columns by Michael Lind--published on Tuesdays--the following weekend. This week, I responded to Lind's column the same day, in "[I Should Be] Looking For The Next FDR With Michael Lind". Out of that came a very clarifying comment by John Emerson that inspired me to write a followup diary this weekend. But as I started work on it, I realized that I first needed to finally correct a long-standing oversight, and discuss the importance of social science situationism, not to be confused with the revolutionary Situationist Internationale. The Situationist blog associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School explains:
There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else.Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception.Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong."The situation" refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. "Situationism" is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation.
An important part of my core differences with Lind spring from a situationist perspective. I don't think that many people's basic attitudes have changed as much as he does, nor do I think that some of the actors he identifies are responsible for the changes he associates them with. Rather, I think that the political/economic situation has changed dramatically, and that we need to adopt political practices that take account of that changed situation, and seek to modify its impact.
One of the clearest ways to get a handle on that change is from the various presentations of changes in income and wealth concentration from the work of US Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Here's an example:
It's my primary contention that people living in a highly income-polarized society--as we do today--will act in ways quite different from those living in a more income-equalized society, such as predominated during the Post WWII New Deal Era, and even into the 70s and early 80s. It's my second contention that while changes in attitudes and actions have taken place, and vast ideological structures have been erected, these are more reflections of a changing economic situation, and have substantially less to do with changes in core attitudes. It's my third contention that the neoliberal trap Obama is caught in--which Lind wrote about in the column I agreed with most--is itself a manifestation of old-style non-situationist thinking, which systematically misapprehends the foundations of human action. In short, the problem goes much deeper than the Team of Rubins.
This is part 2 of a two-part diary on two new articles that provide insight into the newly visible weakness of Obama's politics. Although I have serious disagreements with some of their content, their main thrusts are both accurate, they complement one another, and though they reinforce arguments from the left, they both primarily grounded in pragmatist arguments. In part one, I examined "The Character of Barack Obama", by David Bromwich, which was really more about the process side of Obama's politics. In this part, I turn to Michael Lind's critique of Obama's cult-like faith in neoliberalim, asking, "Can Obama be deprogrammed?".
The main thrust of Lind's piece is unassailable: New Deal liberalism worked. Neoliberalism does not. New Deal liberalism produced the broadest prosperity, the largest and most affluent middle class in the history of humanity. Neoliberalism produced a bubble economy in the 1990s that briefly balanced our federal budget, but utterly failed to stop the erosion of our manufacturing base and our rising trade imbalances.
By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the "Third Way." The term was misleading, because New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968 and its equivalents in social democratic Europe were considered the original "third way" between democratic socialism and libertarian capitalism, whose failure had caused the Depression. According to New Deal liberals, the United States was not a "capitalist society" or a "market democracy" but rather a democratic republic with a "mixed economy," in which the state provided both social insurance and infrastructure like electric grids, hydropower and highways, while the private sector engaged in mass production....
The transition from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism began with Carter, but it was not complete until the Clinton years. Clinton, like Carter, ran as a populist and was elected on the basis of his New Deal-ish "Putting People First" program, which emphasized public investment and a tough policy toward Japanese industrial mercantilism. But early in the first term, the Clinton administration was captured by neoliberals, of whom the most important was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Under Rubin's influence, Clinton sacrificed public investment to the misguided goal of balancing the budget, a dubious accomplishment made possible only by the short-lived tech bubble. And Rubin helped to wreck American manufacturing, by pursuing a strong dollar policy that helped Wall Street but hurt American exporters and encouraged American companies to transfer production for the U.S. domestic market to China and other Asian countries that deliberately undervalued their currencies to help their exports.
Lind is also very astute in capturing how Obama's agenda seeks to elide the deeper economic problems that neoliberalism is not prepared to tackle, and how it seeks to rationalize doing so:
Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama's team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to "market failures," the private sector will not provide.
But there is another layer that Lind gets wrong-a layer dealing with race from the New Deal forward on the one hand, and the nature of post-50s progressive politics on the other. I'll first review what Lind gets right, and why it's important to advance this perspective, then I'll look at what he gets wrong, and what its significance is.
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