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.
Take a slo-mo aerial tour of Earth. Released on June 5th, over two and a half million people have already watched Home. The message is potent: it is too late for pessimism. We can redirect our use of energy, of farming, of transportation. We can and must live a different paradigm.
Much of the news these days--the AIG fiasco, Geithner's flawed bailout plan, the financial crisis itself--points to a single essential truth: Wall Street rules. The GOP's subservience to Wall Street is longstanding and unmatched. But Wall Street also holds power over the purported party of the people, most notably in form of Robert Rubin and his acolytes. It's fair to call Wall Street, as Robert Kuttner does, the Democratic Party's most powerful interest group. Which would be horrrendous even if Obama weren't trying to solve a financial crisis that Rubin and his acolytes helped to create.
It's not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.
In my intro to that diary, I said:
This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Examples of those limits are everywhere, but none is better than the virtual exclusion of single-payer health care from discussion in the health-care debate. Private insurance companies take roughly one third off the top for their bureaucracy, their advertising, their lobbying and their profits, and they don't contribute anything to providing health care. In fact, they are a clear impediment, as millions of people know from their personal experience on a daily basis. They are, at this point, purely parasitical on our diseased political culture. Yet, getting rid of them is politically unthinkable in Obama's mind, in the world he accepts as given. On Democracy Now! on Friday, this was the topic of discussion with Harpers senior editor Luke Mitchell, author of the article "Sick in the head: Why America won't get the health-care system it needs."
Note: Last weekend, I wrote a diary "George Lakoff's 'Obama Code' As A Partial Model", which largely validated Obama's reading of Obama as a progressive, while noting some problematic aspects to his analysis. This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Michael Lind is pretty much an old-fashioned centrist, without being stuck in the past. Like David Brock after him, he started out as conservative foot-soldier rising rapidly through the ranks, then grew appalled by what he saw once he rose high enough to finally grasp the rot within. Yet, as Publishers Weekly noted in the review of his watershed book, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America:
It is too late to rescue American conservatism from the radical right, he declares, pointing out the surprising sympathy conservatives have for antigovernment hate groups. Lind doesn't dwell on attacking the left; he did that in The Next American Nation. Given that few politicos today espouse the "national liberalism" he propounds a centrist populism that unites moderate social conservatism with economic class warfare.Lind urges his readers to support neoliberals such as President Clinton.
So what's he doing writing a piece in Salon bewailing "Obama's Timid Liberalism"? Setting the record straight, that's what. Like many others, I was pleasantly surprised by his budget proposal the week before last. To be honest, I was relieved after all that dangerous talk about entitlement reform and center-right "fiscal responsibility." But that still left so much uninspired policy muddle draped in Obama's inspiring rhetoric that it was difficult to know where to begin. Lind knows where:
Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...
Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?
Oh. OK. Never mind.
It wasn't just FDR and atomic power, Lind reminds us. It was FDR and Social Security, too. And Eisenhower and the Interstate freeway system. The direct public provision of public goods. And it worked. Hello, President Pragmatism! Over here!
As David Sirota recently noted, Nick Kristof, the neoliberal with a heart of gold, has penned another brilliant attack on the vulgar protectionists and their bizarre campaign against sweatshops and for "labor standards."
I think Kristof is very brave for speaking out on this issue and ruffling some left-wing feathers. Needless to say, I heartily agree with Kristof's arguments; but I would take his proposals a step or two further.
In keeping with the spirit of free enterprise and market solutions, impoverished children of the world's shantytowns should be allowed to sell their organs, limbs, etc. on the international market. The income from a kidney sale would be enough to feed one ragamuffin and a good many of his or her relations for more than a year. Would we sooner let a little girl die of starvation than let her sell a cornea or a patch of skin? If anything, these budding young entrepreneurs should be encouraged to make the most of their anatomical capital.
Let's be clear here. Opponents of organ sale are snatching food from the mouths of hungry children. Won't somebody think of the children? Organ markets now!
A more radical proposal would be to have urchins of the Third World rounded up and sold as slaves. Surely their daily ration of slave gruel will be better than eating garbage or nothing at all, their work aprons better than their present shameful nakedness. Would the poor little scamps rather huddle under muddy tarps or enjoy the warmth and comfort of modern slave quarters?
Who but Nicholas Kristof will speak for these precious little ones. Won't these abolitionists think of the children? Slavery now! Slavery forever!
In my first diary yesterday, I questioned whether, as Chris argued, another wave election victory for Democrats, based primarily on the Iraq War, would be enough to produce a genuine realignment, and the overthrow of the conservative coalition. I picked up on David Sirota's diary about a three-country expansion of NAFTA, and agreed that this sort of politics had proven deadly for Democrats in 1994, but disagreed somewhat about why and how.
In my second diary, I looked at Naomi Klein's reframing of "free market" conventional wisdom in her new book, The Shock Doctrine, and a 7-minute trailer for it. The "free market" is not natural, inevitable, noncoercive and beyond politics-as, for example, neocon Frances Fukiyama argued in The End of History--but rather the product of deliberate anti-democratic interventions carried out when societies are helpless to resist.
This is, of course, one of the key dynamics in Iraq. Although Saddam was a brutal dictator, he kept Iraq's basic social contract intact. Iraq was a Western-style welfare state, based on its oil wealth, with a highly educated middle class. The oil law we are trying to impose is central to changing all that, transferring enormous wealth to oil companies, and leaving Iraq with a vastly impoverished public sphere. (Which, of course, opens the way for "faith-based initiatives" of the Hamas, Hezboolah, even bin Laden persuasions.) The oil law is a key requirement of the Iraq Study Group recommendations- recommendations which some have proposed should form the foundation of the Democrats' alternative to Bush's endless war.
The fact that this oil law could be nonchalantly accepted in such a manner is indicative of how poorly we understand the nature of the political struggle we are in. Stealing Iraqs oil wealth-for that is what the oil law does-should be anathema, morally repugnant to us. That it is not is a reflection on our general ignorance of the "free market" dogma and its impact on the rest of the world. We simply fail to focus on the oil law because we do not see that larger movement of which it is part-a movement to extract as much wealth as possible from the poor people of the earth, which is what "free trade" is actually all about.
