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David Bromwich: The Character of Barack Obama
He has always had a reputation for being fair-minded -- a strength only attainable by someone who is (to begin with) fair-minded. But the cautiousness of his first six months as president shows a pattern of accommodation that often lands him on the far side of actual prudence.
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Alongside Obama's reticence sits a curiously incompatible trait, a certain grandiosity. This showed recently in his second statement about the Cambridge police. Offered a chance to concede that matters of local law were ultimately outside his province, he replied that in his view such things were "part of my portfolio." Psychologically, this may be so. But Obama is mistaken if he thinks many Americans want to see that portfolio carried into many other towns and cities. People like to think a president is too important for that. He stands at the very head of the dignified part of government (as Walter Bagehot called it). He can't at the same time enter into the efficient part of government at the level of the city police.
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His characteristic way of handling confusion in the audience is to come back and give good answers to questions. That is very well, but no substitute for an early explanation. Mopping up in question-period is an academic skill: the points you failed to clinch in lecture you recover when the hands go up. But this presumes that everyone signed up for the lectures and everyone already knows something. Here, Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.
Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.
The Pragmatist
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If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days,
"ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted
logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the
blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the
slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.
But privileging pragmatism over ideology, while perhaps understandable
in the wake of the Bush years, misses the point. For one thing, as Glenn
Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead
decision-makers to ignore facts, it is also what sets the limiting
conditions for any pragmatic calculation of interests. -
Principle is often pragmatism's guardian.
Particularly at times of crisis, when a polity succumbs to collective
madness or delusion, it is only the obstinate ideologues who refuse to
go along. Expediency may be a virtue in virtuous times, but it's a vice
in vicious ones.
There's another problem with the fetishization of the pragmatic, which
is the brute fact that, at some level, ideology is inescapable. Obama
may have told Steve Kroft that he's solely interested in "what works,"
but what constitutes "working" is not self-evident and, indeed, is
impossible to detach from some worldview and set of principles. Alan
Greenspan, of all people, made this point deftly while testifying before
Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee. Waxman asked Greenspan, "Do
you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish
you had not made?" To which Greenspan responded, "Well, remember that
what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal
with reality. Everyone has one. You have to--to exist, you need an
ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not." - 1 more annotations...
Edge: ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE By Douglas Rushkoff
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It's not. It's a product not of nature but of engineering. And to treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It's as if we woke up in a world where just one operating system was running on all our computers and, worse, we didn't realize that any other operating system ever did or could ever exist. We would simply accept Windows as a given circumstance, and look for ways to adjust our society to its needs rather than the other way around.
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In short, these economic theories are selecting examples from nature to confirm the properties of a wholly designed marketplace: self-interested actors, inevitable equilibrium, a scarcity of resources, competition for survival. In doing so, they confirm — or at the very least, reinforce — the false idea that the laws of an artificially scarce fiscal scheme are a species' inheritance rather than a social construction enforced with gunpowder. At the very least, the language of science confers undeserved authority on these blindly accepted economic assumptions.
slacktivist: 'Satan's strategy' (part 1)
We're not talking about a clever or a plausible deception. We're talking about swallowing impossibilities and categorically disproved falsehoods. That sort of deception cannot be believed without an active, vigorous component of self-deception. And self-deception, by definition, can never be 100-percent effective, convincing or sincere.
Open Left:: Obama Quandary Comes Into Sharper Focus: Part Two, Economic Substance
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
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What's Missing From Lind's Analysis
First of all, Lind fails disastrously to comprehend the role of race. Chris has written about this before, and I'll be writing about this tomorrow again, but there's a clear correlation between racial homogeneity and support for the welfare state. It was neither accidental nor peripheral that the New Deal was a form of massive affirmative action for the white working class, much of it on its way to becoming part of the largest middle class ever known. By keeping agricultural workers and domestics outside the realm of coverage for Social Security and minimum wage protections, the New Deal effectively created the black underclass as a separate entity, while whites in very similar circumstances at the time (1935) went on to decades of steadily increasing incomes and various forms of government assistance.
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Indeed, the New Deal system repeatedly proved incapable of dealing with rightwing demonization. In addition to kowtowing to Southern racism, they were driven from power by McCarthyism in the early 50s, and Johnson initiated full-scale war in Vietnam precisely because he thought a repeat was inevitable if he were to withdraw instead.
Furthermore, the system of national industrial development and landuse developed during this period directly served to undermine the New Deal system. As described in The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America , the Cold War era saw a massive disinvestment in the Rustbelt, as military production shifted dramatically outward, to the West Coast, Sunbelt and East Coast. This was reinforced by the Interstate freeway system, at the same time that urban cores were disinvested in, while segregated suburbs were heavily subsidized. Amazingly, it was as if the entire New Deal establishment was utterly blind to how it was committing economic/demographic suicide.
Book Review - 'The Myth of the Rational Market,' by Justin Fox; and 'The Sages,' by Charles R. Morris - Review - NYTimes.com
THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.By Justin Fox
THE SAGES Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets By Charles R. Morris
Open Left:: The Political Broadcast Spectrum
If people are content to have a politics based on image and identity, without giving a rats ass about actual policies, then yes, indeed, we are living in a center-right nation. If people are primarily concerned with broad platitudes and abstract principles, then welcome to Barack Obama's center-dominated bipartisan world. But if people actually want something done, well, then, welcome to progressive America, because that's what people want when it comes down to brass tacks.
Open Left:: Obama Quandry Comes Into Sharper Focus: Part One, Political Process
Paul Rosenberg analyzes and interpolates the David Bromwich essay from Huffington Post "The Character of Barack Obama"
Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again—By Kevin Baker (Harper's Magazine)
Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.
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This is an analysis consistent with Obama’s personal story. Like Herbert Hoover, Obama grew up as an outsider and overcame formidable odds—hence his constant promotion of personal responsibility and education. He came of age in a time when hardworking young men and women like him went to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley, and—once properly “incentivized” by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—seemed to save the national economy, creating what appeared to be great general prosperity while doing well themselves. There’s no need to do battle with these strivers and achievers, individuals as accomplished in their fields as Obama is in his. All that’s required is to get them back on their feet, get the money running again, and maybe give them a few new rules to live by, a new set of incentives to get them back on track.
Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.
Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a “pragmatism” that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools—all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.
Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination
Situations intends to address the current malaise of the radical imagination in both left theory and in popular consciousness. We aim to explore the social conditions and lived experiences that lead to this malaise and to support explanations which do not reduce political phenomena to a reflection. Situations will foster modes of thinking that recognize the creative role that society plays in its own production. In opposition to simple determinisms, Situations will attempt to show the contingencies and peculiarities of political phenomena.
Lance Mannion: A nation of soloists
The human being losing his job is expected not just to understand but to approve. The nature of the business has become the nature of our society---we are all expected to understand that we are each expendable and replaceable, that our sole (soul's) purpose is to be at the service of the business and we should appreciate it when we are expended and replaced because aren't we lucky to live in a society where our being expendable and replaceable so improves the common good? Stock prices go up, someone else gets to keep his job---probably the guy telling you you've just lost yours---money's being made and spent and somewhere someone will eat well tonight because we have served the business by accepting that we are no longer of use to it.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Markets in public services
The issue, then, is not so much one of principle as empirics: what is the educational production function? To what extent is a good school scalable? The thing is, AFAIK (I’d welcome corrections) there’s not much hard evidence here
Obfuscating Inequality « The Baseline Scenario
Will Wilkinson has gotten a lot of Internet love for his article “Thinking Clearly About Economic Inequality”, which argues that increasing inequality is not as bad as people like Paul Krugman make it out to be. I thought it was a rhetorically clever but deeply misleading attempt to blur the obvious issue – economic inequality is increasing – by looking at it through a dizzying array of qualifying lenses.
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Wilkinson then tries to explain why increased income inequality does not translate into increased happiness inequality (although Steven and Wolfers actually say that it has translated into increased happiness inequality since the 1990s). There are two parts to this argument, but basically they collapse down to one. First, he says that the quality of budget-level products has increased faster than the quality of luxury-level products (like refrigerators), so that the differential in material comfort is decreasing for a given differential in monetary consumption. Second, he says that rich people are actually taxing themselves by spending huge amounts of money on “real estate with ocean views, or Ivy League diplomas, or goods like yachts” that do not provide value commensurate to their cost.
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And here Wilkinson undercuts his own argument. He points to the relatively small practical difference between a $300 refrigerator and a $10,000 refrigerator, which is far bigger than the difference between no refrigerator and a refrigerator – which was the relevant difference maybe fifty years ago. Good point. But he also talks about how vanilla and pepper suffered the same fate – only much longer before. The lesson is that different products and services that people want change over time, and at different times, from being rare luxuries to being relative commodities. Just because one former luxury good is now a commodity good doesn’t mean there aren’t other valuable goods that many people cannot afford.
The Failure of Macroeconomics « ThinkMarkets
it is not simply a matter of finding the right explanation of the recent financial meltdown and recession. The search by most macroeconomists is constrained by a certain set of unquestioned methodological precepts. These precepts go to the heart of the conception of Economics as a Science.
Douglas Rushkoff » Life Inc: Introduction
, but people of all social classes making choices that go against their better judgment because they believe it’s really the only sensible way to act under the circumstances. It’s as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self- interested, short- term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share-holders than members of a society. The more decisions we make in
this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape. In a dehumanizing and self-denying cycle, we make too many choices that—all things being equal—we’d prefer not to make.
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