A particular Republican is out of work, actually: lobbyist and former US Senator Phil Gramm, the guy who said that the recession was something entirely imagined by a "nation of whiners" -- until he was laid off himself. OK, I'm aware that the newspapers say that he quit "to end this distraction." But trust me, he's out of work, and I don't think there's any doubt that this was a "quit or be fired" moment. Okay, he's really more of an involuntary retiree than the victim of a lay off, and I'm sure he has some rich Republican friends who'll front him his rent and grocery money should it come to that. Still, the fact remains that at this point, the architect of one of the pillars of Reaganomics is radioactive to any potential employers.
Most of the news media have covered this from the inevitable "Presidential horse race" angle, wanting to know what it means to the "contest" between Obama and McCain that Gramm wrote pretty much the entire McCain campaign economic plan; how much of an embarrassment is this to John McCain? And the focus is on that because the top candidates firing, dismissing, cutting themselves off from, betraying, denouncing, renouncing, and/or accepting the only-semi-voluntary resignations of their closest friends, allies, advisers, and staff has been a recurring thread this year, to the point where most news editors and many journalists are begging the rest of the commentariat to throw the phrase "throw (someone) under the bus" under the bus.
But there's a bigger news story here than the wannabe horse-race handicappers trying to juggle the odds on which "horse" will cross the "finish line" ahead of the other, and I'd like to thank the Washington Post's columnist E.J. Dione for calling it to my attention last Friday on Countdown with (No, Really, This Time) Keith Olbermann. Because Dione came very close to predicting this news story, a week in advance, pretty much by accident, with his column for July 11th, 2008: "Capitalism's Reality Check" (registration required). Because in a very real way, the 2008 election isn't about Barack Obama or John McCain. In a weird sort of a way, it's an actual national referendum about Phil Gramm. Because before he was before he was UBS lobbyist Phil Gramm, before he was Senator Phil Gramm, before he was U.S. Representative Phil Gramm, he was Texas A&M University professor of economics Dr. Phil Gramm, whose entire life's work has been about laissez faire economics. He wasn't just the a contributor to the Republicans' "Contract
In the long term, Dr. Gramm argued, it is basically impossible for a business to stay in business by harming its customers, without some unfair form of help from the government. If all government help is withdrawn from businesses, and a free market prevails, then customers will flock to the business that doesn't harm its customers, that business will earn more money than the businesses that do harm their customers, and the bad businesses will either go broke and close their doors or get bought out by the good business. This means that in a free market, any form of government regulation aimed at preventing companies from harming their customers is unnecessary. What's more, the effort that the government spends on checking up on companies that it thinks could go bad costs money, so they have to raise taxes to pay for the compliance checkers, including taxes on those companies. What's more, companies that are having to look over their shoulders at hovering, hostile government regulators have to practice business defensively, have to divert resources that could go into making better, cheaper products into dealing with regulators, have to hire and pay the people who do nothing but placate the regulators, and those costs get passed on to the customer. So according to Phil Gramm (and most other hard-core laissez faire economists) any kind of government regulation of business at all achieves no good end, gives customers no better products or more products than they would have had under a laissez faire market, and does so at a higher cost. Therefore any kind of consumer or citizen or environmental protection by government is an inherently bad thing.
When he was doing his academic work back in the 1970s, American businesses' regulatory compliance costs were at their all-time maximum; from the 1890s to the early 1970s, fed-up American voters had demanded more and more protection from companies by government. And when Phil Gramm was doing his academic work, the US economy was in horrible shape. In hindsight, we can see that this had more to do with horrible budgetary mismanagement during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and the wreckage wrought on the federal budget by the ever-escalating costs of having just lost a major land war in Asia, than it had to do with corporate regulation. But voters, eager for a fast way to repair the wreckage of the Carter-era economy, were willing to listen to the many US businesses who were claiming that there wouldn't be so much inflation if they didn't have to spend so much money hiring people to protect them from unnecessary government regulators. And, in fact, by the end of President Reagan's first term, this academic and political argument had so thoroughly won the day that it not only became a permanent bedrock principle of the Republican Party (where it was no big surprise, as hands-off-big-business had been Republican party dogma since the robber-baron days of the 1880s and '90s), but it even became the majority position on economics in the Democratic Party, as well.
So we've spent the 28 years since Ronald Reagan won his first election to the US Presidency rolling back regulation after regulation, trusting more and more in "voluntary compliance" and "market-based solutions." And even where some regulations were too popular to repeal, businesses in formerly heavily regulated industries like banking, lending, real estate, and finance found ways to shift all of their actual money, all of the actual economic activity, into what had been niches too tiny to come to regulators' attention during the heyday of government regulation. We got exactly what Phil Gramm devoted his entire career to trying to persuade us to want, an almost completely unregulated economy. So it's not terribly surprising that Phil Gramm thinks that our current economy is really, really great; he just wants his side's politicians to make whatever bare-minimum entirely-symbolic gestures are necessary to placate the American voting public long enough for the "invisible hand of the market" to weed out the bad actors and turn the economy over to the good companies, still at a lower cost than government regulation.
But here's what E.J. Dione was writing about, a week ago last Friday: Phil Gramm, and his friend John McCain, and a few equally hide-bound ideologues with no actual business experience of their own, are practically the only people left on the planet who still think so. The same companies that spent the 1970s through the 1990s begging for less and less regulation are now begging for more and more regulation, and so are ever more of the Republican politicians that are beholden to those companies. Not just the American voters, but American companies, are standing up to Phil Gramm and saying en masse, "We tried it your way, and it turns out that it doesn't work." They don't want to hear from some pointed-headed economist turned politician turned lobbyist, who not only never managed a business but who never even worked a day of actual work in his life, how the economy "ought to work." They can see with their own eyes that it didn't turn out that way.
There is, actually, a reason why it doesn't work. It would not be entirely fair to penalize Professor Gramm, Ph.D., for not having foreseen this; much of the math didn't exist during his academic tenure. There have been an awful lot of advances in economics, especially coming out of the application of the school of mathematics known as "games theory," that couldn't have been made without fast and inexpensive computer simulations. But having done the math, and seen the results, there's a perfectly logical explanation in plain English that we can now give. When I do give it, it's going to sound so obvious that you're going to ask, well, sure, why didn't they see that coming? And all I can say to that is, you weren't there, it was a much more primitive world back then. Anyway, here's the reason why it doesn't work: all too frequently, the market doesn't have time to fix itself. Suppose that even just one company cheats by finding a way to make its products more profitable in a way that harms the buyers or that downstreams costs to its non-customers, imposes costs on them involuntarily, and manages to keep this at all secret for even a matter of months, or at most a couple of years. It can then drive prices down to the point where none of its competitors are making any money. They go bankrupt; this company then buys them out or monopolizes the market.
As one company cheats, therefore, there are morally crippling pressures on other companies to find ways to match the cheating company's prices; if anybody cheats, they all know within a matter of at most a few months that they have to cheat, too. Nor can they go public with their knowledge that the other company "must be" making deadly safety compromises with their product or dumping toxics onto an unsuspecting public. They know from their own business experience that that's the only way that the other company can be making that product, in the same market they are, with the same raw materials costs and vaguely similar wages and the same broadly-known business practices ... but they can't prove it in a court of law. It could take them years to find the evidence they'd need to protect themselves if they made that accusation and got sued for libel and slander. And they don't have years; they'll be out of business long before then, probably.
Nor does it help that we had a wave of shareholders' rights lawsuits back in the 1970s and 1980s, all with the same conclusion: company boards of directors have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder return in the short run, and since it is a fiduciary duty, they can be sued for not doing it. If there are investors out there (and there are) who think that the company should take insane risks with public safety because their competitors are doing so and thereby returning more value to their shareholders, it doesn't even help if the company that would rather do the right thing and wait for the market to catch up is still somehow minimally profitable, or if it has the cash reserves to wait until the evidence comes out: they'll still get sued, there'll still be a hostile takeover of that company, and new management will be put in that has no such optimistic faith in the goodness of markets.
And all of that makes Phil Gramm what he richly deserves to be: a retiree. At age 66, he's an academic economist who, through his success in politics, actually got to experiment with an entire nation's economy. As a "scientist" who still won't admit that the experiment didn't produce the results that his hypothesis said it would, even after all the evidence is in, he deserves to never work again; he's not just a bad person, he's a poor scientist. So he belongs where he is now, laid off, unemployed and unemployable, living off of Social Security and his US Senate pension, not anywhere near the reins of power; Gods help us, if he could, he'd repeat the experiment again, rather than admit that his model was flawed, in hopes it would turn out differently a second time.
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okay - Music:Fragile Life - mixed by Side Liner, on the Chillout channel via DI.fm
This is another journal entry, like yesterday's, where in order to verify that I understood the facts of the matter, I had to wade through a ton of absolutely garbage journalism. Yesterday, I wrote about Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive Senator Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to vote for the current version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal, the one that gives legal immunity to the telecom companies that spied on American's phone calls (whether or not anybody actually listened to the calls so tapped, it's technically still spying, technically) without the niceties of even the shallow fig-leaf of a FISA warrant application. Journalists all over the world have "knowingly" (cynically) assured people that Barack Obama doesn't "really" mean it, that he can't "really" mean to eliminate the penalties whenever the NSA taps Americans' phone calls without a warrant, that he's just pandering to the crowd who are afraid the Democrats will be "soft on terrorism." I spent yesterday's journal entry documenting the reasons why that theory is almost certainly false; it is much more likely that Senator Obama really does intend for America's spies to keep violating the law, and even the Constitution, and relying on in-agency and telco whistle-blowers to protect us from actual harm, just like every US President since Lincoln.
The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.
And in fact, even the limited extent to which the Southern Baptists have gone along with the current administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has startled me. When I was being trained in Christian theology and Republican politics by Independent Baptist and Southern Baptist teachers back in the 1970s, they were entirely opposed to this kind of thing, for two solid practical reasons. First of all, they explained to me as a kid, just because your church is on the approved list for government funding this year, doesn't mean that it will be next year, not if the voters get any say in it, and we do elect a new administration every 4 to 8 years. And secondly, their own limited experience with accepting even the most indirect of government funding, through grants to private schools, left them with a sour taste in their mouths. They told me that every time, the politicians and government bureaucrats had waited until the churches' organizations were dependent on that money coming in, and then made intolerable demands in order to keep it. After one particularly horrific experience nearly bankrupted St. Louis's second-largest Protestant school back in the 1970s, the Missouri Union of Christian Schools passed a resolution forbidding any of their member schools from taking any government money. The state legislature had allocated funds "to promote physical education" by making grant money available to any school that wanted to build a gym, public or private. But then didn't allocate enough money to pay for one in one year. St. Louis Christian Academy had 2/3rds of the money they needed, paid the architect, got the permits, dug the foundation for their new gym. Then their legislator came in and said, in so many words, that the legislature was thinking of cutting off the funding to any school that didn't use the state-approved textbooks, including pro-evolution science textbooks. So SLCA said, fine, and tried to drop out of the program. The next day, a building inspector came by, asked them how they were going to finish that gym, and when he found out that no construction was ongoing, he condemned the building. It took fund-raising all across the state to raise the money in time and to pay the legal bills to fight that condemnation. So tell me why, with stories like that in circulation, churches want to let legislators and bureaucrats in Washington get their hooks into the churches' budgets? Can their greed have so thoroughly overruled their own knowledge and common sense?
What's more, at least two Christian legal organizations have already spotted one potential trap-door in Barack Obama's proposal, too, that's making them nervous. Obama gives what seems to him to be the reasonable requirement that if the taxpayers are funding someone's salary, then hiring for that job can't discriminate against applicants on religious grounds, or any other protected status like race, ethnicity, or Vietnam veteran status. He's on solid constitutional ground, there, in theory; I recall working indirectly on the case of a Wiccan clerical worker for the Salvation Army who won her case on the grounds that her duties were not in any way religious, so Sally's couldn't claim that sharing their Christian faith was a bona fide occupational qualification, a BFOQ. But as both the Center for Law and Religious Freedom and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations have pointed out, this gets problematic fast given Obama's commitment to roll these grants out to smaller and smaller churches, because those churches have hardly any paid employees, maybe even only one. Commingling of funds becomes automatic, impossible to avoid. And a commenter at the Center for Religious Freedom's blog pointed out an even bigger trojan horse in this proposal: the same law that Obama refers to covering discrimination in hiring, Title VII, is one that he's already promised gay and lesbian groups that he intends to amend to protect sexual orientation. So under Obama's proposal, any church that takes dollar one of federal funding and allows one thin dime of that money to commingle with church general revenue can no longer fire the pastor, or any other employee, if they find out he or she is gay.
But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.
So given that difference in how white Americans and black Americans feel about their churches, if you thought that America's first black President wasn't going to funnel money any which way he can to the African Methodist Episcopal church, and probably the American Baptist Church, and conceivably even smaller black denominations like the Nation of Islam, by any means possible, whether you or I or any white person likes it or not? If you think you have to make up some implausible conspiracy theory to explain why he'd suggest he wants to do so? If you think that your conspiracy theory is more likely than that he just plain likes and respects the black churches that much and wants them to be richer whatever it takes? Then I think you just plain don't know what you're talking about.
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good - Music:Arthur Lyman - Beyond The Reef
Back during the 2006 election, one of the things I was crabbing about regarding my own (Democratic) party was a lie I got very tired of them telling, almost all of them implicitly and some of them explicitly: the promise that electing Democrats would return us to the Clinton economy. What I was pointing out at the time, even occasionally going farther back to the primaries of the 2004 presidential election, and what I have stood by for years, is this premise: "Anybody who tells you that they have a plan to return the economy to where it was in 1999 is either an idiot or a liar." Yes, Bill Clinton did something that no President has done since before WWII, and no President since him. He not just balanced the federal budget, he actually made our only consecutive payments against the principal on the national debt in the last 50 years or more. But he didn't get the money to do so because his economic policies were so brilliant, nor was it because of the economic policies of the Republicans who controlled Congress during his terms. The biggest thing that went "right" with the economy of 1992-2000 was the dot-com stock market bubble of the 1990s. The capital gains taxes paid by active stock market traders on their ever-rising stock prices as they churned in and out of (actually worthless) dot-com stocks were the only thing significantly different between his budget and his Republican predecessor's. Nor was the dot-com stock bubble something he did on purpose; it was almost entirely driven by American industry's desperation spending on hardware and software to fix the Y2K bug. Yes, that investment did improve productivity, some, and was mostly worth it for its own sake, mostly, just as the people predicting "The Long Boom" in stocks were claiming. But not enough to make the whole stock market rise in profitability indefinitely, not at the 20% or more per year rate that it would have had to keep rising to keep balancing the federal budget. That defies gravity. And what I said in 2006 was that unless there turned out to be another problem that forced all American business to invest yet again in one industry at the same time again, you were never again in your lifetime going to see a bubble like that one.
One reason I was sure of this turned out to be wrong; until now, there was usually at least 20 years between bubbles, because once burned, each generation of investors has always learned to distrust bubbles, making it impossible to inflate another one until a new younger, still naive, generation came along. This should have made the housing bubble impossible; sadly, it didn't. But the housing bubble didn't do nearly as much to raise revenues for the federal government as the dot-com bubble did, because since Clinton, there is no capital gains tax due on the profit, however wild or inflated, from the sale of a primary residence that you've owned for 2 years or more. So still, I stood by my claim that we were going to stay in deep do-do until we found some non-bubble way to grow the economy way, way more than it has been growing in my adult lifetime, until we came up with some major tax revenue (not rate, revenue) increases, which meant that sooner or later, the US government is in for something resembling bankruptcy. At the rate we're borrowing, our interest payments are rising even with artificially low interest rates. When those rates go up (as they inevitably have to), that line of the federal budget is going to skyrocket, bankrupting the country, wrecking the currency even faster than it's going down now. That's why I've been campaigning and arguing for years that we need to expand the labor force in this country, to take in tens of millions of new legal immigrant citizens and put them to work; we need their taxes.
But here's where I may have been wrong in one particular: we may yet have, gods help us, one more ridiculous stock market bubble in this generation of investors: a green technology stock market bubble. Odds are, most of the companies making money on it will be just as fraudulent, or at the very least have business plans just as indefensibly stupid, as the software and Internet stocks were. But it would no longer surprise me if we got one. I will say this, though, in defense of Bill Clinton: may the gods grant that the President and Congress, if we do get an explosion in capital gains tax receipts because of yet another stock market bubble, be at least as smart as he was about resisting the call to lower taxes, be at least as determined as he was to use that money to pay down debt rather than count on it continuing to come in at that rate forever.
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A week or so ago, specifically June 25th and June 26th, I was struck by something that seemed kind of out of character, but definitely funny, about Jerry Scott's syndicated comic strip Zits. Summary, for posterity: Jeremy Duncan has just turned 16, after having been 15 for the last ten years; his parents are aging and now highly respectable ex-hippies. Jeremy has been consistently portrayed, ever since the strip began, as just barely short of pathologically lazy, and nowhere more so than with regard to chores around the house. So imagine his parents' surprise when he lectures them about trash that should have gone into the recycling or the compost heap, and then mentions in passing that he checked and fixed the air pressure in the family car's tires on his own initiative, so "you should see better gas mileage." Jeremy then goes on to pile up all the newspaper in the house, put it in the recycling bin, and roll the recycling bin out the curb without being asked. The kicker in the second strip is when Jeremy says to his dad, "A green lifestyle isn't just a fad to me ... it's real! My generation's job is to rescue the planet from damage caused by your generation!" Walt defensively replies, "We baby boomers got a few things right." And what he's thinking to himself after that, mentally finishing the sentence, is, "... like raising you guys, for instance."
And what struck me, especially after just having re-read Generations and having blogged about it a couple of weeks ago, was the generational politics of that strip. Since Jeremy, like a lot of comic strip characters, ages at a fraction of human speed, he has now been effectively retconned as a trailing-edge member of the Millennial Generation; his parents, though, apparently are and always will be Boomers. In the strips for 9/25/08 and 9/26/08, Zits' author Jerry Scott has written a moment of intergenerational bonding: despite any innate conflicts between parents and children, the one thing an aging hippy and a naive young kid of today can have in common is that they share an innate interest in the morality of environmentalism, and in using debates over the moral issues of global warming in inter-generational competition. Which is, of course, enough to make a cynical old Gen Xer like me want to gag. But then I got to thinking about something else Strauss & Howe wrote about in Generations: the Crisis of 2020.
As I alluded to in that column two weeks ago, Strauss and Howe predicted back in 1989 that like every other generation in American history that's gone through a massive "spiritual quest" in their teenage years, it is pretty much inevitable that just as their oldest members begin to reach retirement age, the Baby Boom generation of Americans will seek to find some cause with which to rally the nation behind their moral leadership. If we're lucky, it'll be something that the Biblical fundamentalist half of that generation and the liberal humanist/New Age half of the generation can agree upon; otherwise, they'll be tempted to make their generation's old-age fight be one between Americans. Strauss & Howe predicted (based on when they were going to be the right age) that it would start no earlier than 2000, probably not before 2010, and be at its absolute peak no later than 2020; that somewhere around 2020 will be the year that the Baby Boomers, and America, declare victory over whatever "monstrous evil" that "cannot be compromised with" the Boomers collectively decided to elevate (artificially, if necessary) to that status. They had at least four suggested scenarios, back in 1989, for what the Crisis of 2020 would be about, without expressing any confidence in any of them, just offering them as hypothetical examples: a war between the Christian and secular west and Islam, a global depression brought on an energy crisis, some kind of religious civil war between the secularists and the fundamentalists, or ... environmental collapse (actual or hypothetical), as in, global warming.
For decades now, I've scoffed at that last possibility. For one thing, I predicted with a high degree of confidence that the fundamentalist wing of the Baby Boom generation was wedged so far up the Republican Party's backside that there was no way you could persuade a broad majority of that generation to care about the environment. One of the joint projects in the fundamentalists' effort to fake up a form of twisted, anti-Christian "Christianity" that would be compatible with the Republican Party platform was a determined effort to "prove" that it was okay if we wreck the planet in our lifetime, because any second now Jesus is going to give us a new one. See my previous (moderately famous) essay series "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God," parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. And in particular, remember Reagan administration Secretary of the Interior James Watt's famous answer when a reporter asked him if he thought we owed it to the next generation to leave them any natural resources at all. He answered that it was "the position of the Reagan administration" that Jesus was going to return to Earth "during fiscal 1988" (I always adored the fact he tied it to the fiscal year), "at which time God will hold us accountable for any resources we haven't used" (based on a very twisted interpretation of the Parable of the Talents). That it's God's will that we destroy the planet as fast as possible after the Jews' return to Israel, so we can use up all its natural resources in the same generation, so we don't get blamed by Jesus for having let them sit idle, has been the official doctrine of pretty much every fundamentalist Christian denomination for so long that I took it as inevitable that it was permanent.
So imagine my surprise when, this year, polls started showing that evangelicals, including fundamentalists, are suddenly turning environmentalist? That the devastation that will be wrought on the low-lying areas of the Third World (where, admittedly, those same denominations have missionaries) by global warming is now ranked by them as one of their top 2 or 3 issues? It would appear that I was wrong: it may well actually be possible to broadly unite both halves of the Baby Boom behind a Holy War against Global Warming. And I will admit, it suits them perfectly, in some ways. Like so many other "spiritual" generations before them, there is nothing your average baby boomer loves more than to get into a "dick-waving" contest with another baby boomer over which one of them is more moral. These various websites that make it possible to calculate your "carbon footprint" may have been the best idea anybody's ever come up with, no matter whether they're right or not: they give Baby Boomers a measurable way to compete against each other, in a competition of spiritual austerity and virtuous strength, for the coveted title of Holier Than Thou. I could just easily see them semi-secretly loving that to death.
And, as Jerry Scott reminded me in Zits, you don't have to convince a member of the Millennial Generation that it's his or her moral duty to save the world from global warming. Even the parts of that generation who have figured out that they were lied to by their DARE officers haven't even begun to consider the possibility that the "global warming experts" of their college years aren't any smarter or any more honest than the "anti-drug experts" of their childhood were. Not least of which because the whole global warming "thing" plays perfectly to their generational vanity, and to their other defining generational personality traits like fierce conformism and a habit of wanting to do things in huge groups or teams. (Anybody born between roughly 1982 and 2000 truly who considers themselves to be a highly independent individual knows the true meaning of the word suffering.)
So where does that leave us in what the marketers call Generation X and Generation Y, what Strauss and Howe called the Thirteenth Generation? Exactly where our "reactive" type generations have always been during great moral crusades. In every great national civic crisis (except for the one that was a national disaster, the Civil War), the "generational constellation" has been idealists in elderhood, reactives in midlife, civics in young adulthood. The idealists take advantage of the fact that the nation is used to being harangued by them over matters of principle to unite the nation against evil, the civics band together in obedient and cheerful teams to save the world from evil, and the reactives tell the civics how to do it. In part it's because reactive, neglected, abused, "lost" generations tend to get conservative once they outgrow their youth. In part it's because no matter how conservative they get, to a reactive generation, life is cheap enough that they will tell a bunch of young civics to march and die if that's what's needed. But another reason is clear: to the "winners" among a generation like mine, throughout human history, to the ones who make and get to keep their fortunes, rule #1 has always been, "anything for a buck!" Where it isn't "for a buck," it's, "anything for glory!" And being the CEOs, the managers, the generals, the officers during a national crisis (whether you personally believe in it or not) is a great route to glory, fame, and big bucks.
And thinking about that kick-started the part of my brain that suddenly remembered that I'm way way overdue to remind everybody else of two things that I need to tell everybody who was born between 1960(ish) and 1981(ish) in America. First of all, if the baby boomers and the millennial generation want to make a great national civic crisis, a national war of good versus evil, out of "preventing global warming," for the love of all holy gods and of your nation, do not stop them. If they don't wage war on global warming, they'll plunge us all into a decades-long war on something, and they could pick something a lot worse than global warming if we talk them out of this one. And secondly? Some of us could make a ton of money off of global warming, and if you were born between 1961 and 1980 and are in the peak years of your life for business, management, entrepreneurship, and investment, and luck breaks your way? It could be you.
- Mood: good
But you know what? All that being said? If global warming is your number one issue, you and I do not need to be enemies, and I'll tell you why. There is almost nothing that you want to do to stave off global warming that I don't want to do, too, for my own even better reasons.
You want the world to burn a lot less coal? So do I. Not because I give a rat's hindquarters about CO2 emissions, but because there are only two ways to mine coal: completely wreck the local ecosystem, or send people down under the ground to die over and over again. It routinely chaps my back end that a bunch of moronic tree hugging hippies and crybaby luddites talked us into sticking with coal over nuclear over the last thirty years, when nuclear power (in any country that uses even vaguely modern safeguards) has killed exactly zero people in the whole time since it's been invented, but coal mining kills dozens or hundreds of coal miners every year.
You want the world to burn a lot less oil? So do I. Not because I think that what comes out of commuters' tailpipes matters all that much to the environment (now that we've cleaned up auto exhaust so much since I was a kid, thank Prime). Not because I'm all that terrified of "Peak Oil," a goofball idea that requires that you know exactly nothing about the oil industry. I had my eyes opened on this one by a guy I went to college with who was a petrogeologist for an oil exploration firm: there is always about a 75-80 year supply of oil in the known world oil reserves. Why? Because when it gets over 80, everybody cuts funding for oil exploration, starting it back up again when it drops below 70. If that ever happens and then the geologists don't find oil, then I'll worry, but it hasn't happened yet. I will say this, though: we may be about to run out of cheap oil, out of major oil reserves of light, sweet (low density, low sulfur, easy to process) oil that's close to the surface and under enough pressure to make it nearly free to extract. But whether we are or not, and whether it matters to the atmosphere or not, I want the US, especially, the heck out of the oil consumption "biz."
For one thing, most of you weren't even born yet when I acquired my permanent chip on my shoulder over OPEC. I lived long enough to see the Bell System dismantled; I hope to live long enough to see those damned OPEC sheiks crawl helplessly back to their cheap-ass tents and holes in the ground, so the rest of us don't have to care about their hopelessly corrupt medieval religious fundamentalist feudal backwater countries. Just about all of the major oil producing regions of the world right now are in violent backwater underdeveloped, horribly misruled, gangster-ridden, warlord-dominated parts of the world like the middle east, southeast Asia, Russia, west Africa, and Latin America, because those of us in the few decent places on the planet to live used up all our local oil (or all the cheapest parts of it) half a century ago; I'm sick and tired of watching America's finest march off to die in every stupid conflict in the third world, because we have to care about them because they have oil. The sooner we can stop caring about their stupid oil, the happier this cynical old-too-early curmudgeon will be, whether it "saves the planet" or not.
But for another reason, I know this about history: the reason America was the one bailing England out in 1943, and not the other way around, was that oil was just that much better than coal, and starting 50 years before that, we made the switch and England didn't, so we got rich and powerful while the fabled "empire on which the sun never sets" (because, as any Irishman will tell you, God Himself wouldn't trust an Englishman in the dark) shrank to a handful of counties in northern Ireland and a tiny little sheep farm off the coast of Argentina. Right now, something really important is happening all over the world. For the last hundred years, the rich white owners of every single corrupt sewer of a country in the third world have been doing everything in their power to keep the brown and yellow majorities in this world poor and enslaved, and over the last couple of decades, they've been gradually and grudgingly failing to keep people down. Despite the best efforts of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and every rich white elite in the tropics, the rest of the planet is developing a middle class. That middle class is going to want, going to need, a middle class lifestyle. And given a choice of technologies to power and fuel that lifestyle, they are not going to choose oil. They're going to buy nuclear power, or maybe solar, or maybe wind, or maybe geothermal, or maybe tidal, or maybe some combination of the above.
And here's the damnedest thing about that: our scientists and engineers are at or near the forefront of over half of those technologies. It could be us that they have to buy them from, it could be our companies that collect the patent royalties on those technologies (and pay taxes thereon), it could be our country that gets those jobs. But if we do, it'll be over the Bush (and probably McCain) administration's dead bodies. The President's current budget proposal cuts subsidies for solar research, already a pittance, by 7%, right at the point where the world is deciding where the factories are going to be built, and whose technologies are going to be the dominant ones, in 3rd generation flexible thin-film non-toxic inexpensive solar cells. That's inexcusable. That's selling our country's future out for cheap, considering what we're talking about cutting is 7% off of what was already only a $170 million dollar appropriation out of a $2 trillion budget. We could quintuple that research and development allocation and it would still disappear in the rounding error on the deficit. But you know what? My thinking is that all those new middle class citizens all over the world are going to buy solar, whether they buy it from us or from someone else. Probably not to "reduce their carbon footprint," no matter what they say, but for the same reason that those same parts of the world abandoned their old, corrupt, inadequate government landline phone monopolies and went straight to cellular: faster build-out, less politics, more choice, and able to be built in smaller, cheaper increments at a time. If it takes all the rest of you freaking out over global warming to get the US to get in front of that wave, fine; I'll go along, even though you're almost certainly wrong, because I want what you want, too.
For the same reasons and because no matter what tech they use, for the next several decades all those new middle class customers are going to be living in places where electricity from the national electrical grid is shortage prone, expensive, and unreliable, you can bet this about them, too: no matter what they use to generate power locally, they're going to buy the most energy efficient household appliances and corporate equipment they can get their hands on. You want people to upgrade their air conditioners and refrigerators and furnaces and computers and lightbulbs and what-all-else to new ones that use a lot less energy, so power plants will emit less carbon dioxide? They're going to want to do so because it's cheaper than building new power plants. Heck, we're insane if we don't do so rather than build new power plants. Over a decade ago, several major national electrical utilities did the math and showed their shareholders that, for less than the cost to build a new power plant of any kind, they could buy all of their customers new appliances that would eliminate the demand for a new power plant. They called it "generating nega-watts," and failure to implement those proposals is something we're all going to feel as oil and natural gas get more expensive, driving up the cost of electricity, while demand rises faster than new plants are built, browning out more of our electrical grid every year. And the most annoying part of that to me is that we're long past the point of Jimmy frakkin' Carter in a cardigan begging people to freeze in the dark to reduce energy consumption. We have the means now, from more efficient cooling of computers and smarter power-saving software to better-designed appliances to lower-friction higher-efficiency pumps and motors of all kinds to three entire new categories of suddenly-cheap lighting technology all of which generate as much light at 1/10th the power consumption with 1/10th to 1/100th the waste heat beaming down on you, to live as well as we are now, only cheaper. Get this through your heads, if you haven't already: even if gas goes to $7 a gallon and that results in runaway inflation, you don't have to live any worse than you do now; you only have to live smarter than you do now. You're worried about people's energy wasting wrecking the ecosystem? Fine, worry about that if that's what it takes to get you to do what's necessary to get people to stop wasting money we can't afford to keep spending and getting nothing back to show for it.
And if you want people to use more energy efficient gear to save the planet, and I want them to do it to save the economy and provide American jobs selling energy efficient gear, we have a common enemy. The same presidential budget cuts subsidies for energy conservation research by 27%, from the (again) already laughably low number of $870 million. Wow, we were spending a whole 1¢ a day per American subsidizing that research? And we're cutting it? Wouldn't it generate a lot more jobs and a lot more future revenue for the US treasury and a lot more wealth on the American stock market if we spent a whole dime per person, if that's what it takes to get our companies out ahead of what's obviously about to be a booming market? Whether it saves the planet or not?
Although speaking of wasting energy and money, what's the poster-child for global warming crusaders, the Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and Satan himself rolled into one of the environmental movement? The SUV. You want people to drive a lot fewer Sport Utility Vehicles because you mistakenly think that their tailpipe emissions are going to raise sea level? I think you're a fool, hopelessly incapable of estimating even order of magnitude of the impact of those emissions -- but I hate SUVs even more than you do. Not because they pollute, not because of their "carbon footprint," but because they're mind numbingly stupid vehicles! Because they're so big, they cost a fortune, not just to run, but to build and buy, some of the most expensive cars in America. With America going into a period of stagflation, just like we did after the last deficit-financed bogged-down unwinnable land war in Asia, well, if we're not going to end up with another Great Depression (let alone the Wiemar Germany type meltdown that a few economists are warning of), then it's going to take the American people getting a lot smarter about their money. When we're talking about SUVs, that means getting them to look at the actual crash safety data and the actual accident statistics and realize that this "SUVs are safer for my kids" (if not yours) thing is not just immoral, it's factually in error. Which leaves the excuse that they sometimes need a car that big? Please. No more often than your average person hauls that much freight or that many passengers, it wouldn't just be better for the planet if they owned a subcompact and rented an truck or a van the times they needed one, it'd be thousands of dollars per year, maybe tens of thousands of dollars per year, cheaper. And for the tiny percentage of Americans who do routinely carry five, six, or more passengers on a daily basis? We used to have this thing called a "station wagon." Oddly enough, some car companies still make them. They seat just as many people as an SUV, just as comfortably. But at a third less weight, and half the height, they're cheaper to make and a holy heck of a lot cheaper to run. Watching people complaining about the economy while wasting money hand over fist by buying SUVs just annoys the heck out of me.
So yeah, those of you who actually think it's important that the planet have polar bears in the wild, who tremble at the thought that we might have to move our farming activity to land that hasn't been strip-mined to chemically-supported desert by industrial farming if the rain moves, who look at the long-shot chance of some of the world's worst slums getting flooded and see that as a problem rather than an opportunity, and who think that nattering on and on about "cap and trade" or "carbon footprint" is somehow going to stop all that? Don't mind me over here rolling my eyes and thinking that you're full of crap. Unlike the short-sighted morons who are running this country at the moment, while our reasons may be different, you and me, we want the same things. I'm not your enemy, and you're not mine, no matter how stupid I think you are (or you think I am).
P.S. For those of you who didn't see it on BoingBoing, there's a fantastic way to see, visually, just where the government's money is going. WallStats.com sells a gorgeous poster of the President's proposed budget for fiscal 2009, called "Death and Taxes." I bought two, one for myself and one as a gift. That's where the numbers on federal funding of energy conservation and solar, above, came from. There's a pan-and-zoom version of it on their website, too.
(Editorial note: In the interest of brevity, skip all the arguments intended to prove anthropogenic global warming. I've read them; anybody who wants to read them and find out why so many aging stupid tree-hugging hippies and mercenary scientists getting paid by think-tanks to pontificate out ahead of the data or outside their areas of expertise and naive young kids think that I'm full of crap can find it all online elsewhere. Grist's "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic" is the best summary I've seen; I just don't feel like arguing about that right now. Save the comments here to discussions of the things that do or don't make sense for economic and practical reasons whether or not they "save the planet.")
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rnk35 asked me overnight what my opinion was on D.C. vs Heller. Good timing; if I hadn't been asked an easy one, I might have been too lazy to write anything tonight. For those of you who don't know, that's the Supreme Court case this last week that (in all too common fashion these days) completely overturned the previous Supreme Court interpretation of the 2nd ("Right to Bear Arms") Amendment to the US Constitution while pretending to be completely compatible with it. (See the always-brilliant Dahlia Lithwick, "Was It Ever Miller Time?," Slate.com, 6/26/08.) The relevant back story, as documented in almost every worthwhile history on the subject, is that during the writing of the Bill of Rights they engaged in that classic bit of parliamentary hand-waving that you sometimes have to do to get a majority to pass anything: write an ambiguous piece of legislation that both sides can think means what they want it to mean. In this case, it was an argument over whether the US would grant unlimited gun ownership rights to every individual citizen, or just to the various state militias, what we now call the National Guard. Half the Founding Fathers said they would only approve it if it restricted gun ownership to the militias; half threatened to veto it if it restricted gun ownership at all; the resulting legislative compromise muddled the issue to this very day.So, what's my opinion? I honestly don't care. No, let me make this really clear. Not only do I not care, I think less of you if you care a whole lot about the 2nd Amendment. This has got to be the most mind-bogglingly stupid thing we've ever argued about as a nation.
First of all, I don't care what you think the US Constitution says, and I don't care what laws you pass: if you think you can disarm the American people, you're an idiot. The closest thing I can come up with to a plausible estimate of how many firearms there are in the US is about 192 million, including about 65 million pistols. (Jeremy Travis, "Guns in America," National Institute of Justice, 1997.) I cheerfully invite you to imagine any way, in any way at all consistent with the 4th Amendment, that you could forcibly collect all 200 million or so guns there already are in here. And the government that spends billions of dollars a year to keep however many hundreds of tons of drugs from entering the country and fails, the government that devotes thousands of agents to trying to prevent umpty thousand illegal immigrants per year from entering the country and fails, isn't going to have any better luck stopping gun runners from importing and illegally selling as many handguns per year as the American people want. Period. So, the American people are armed. And they always will be armed. Get over it.
Secondly, if you think that any law, whether pro-gun or anti-gun, has ever had any effect on crime rates in America, you're at best ill-informed. Study after study after study has shown, to the contrary, that if you compare two jurisdictions of equivalent demographics, one with strict gun control laws and one with no gun control laws (or even, as is true in a couple of places, mandatory gun-ownership laws), there is no net difference. None.
And you know what that makes this whole debate? An absolute and total waste of everybody's time. We donate tens of millions of dollars a year to pro-gun and anti-gun lobbying groups, who spend that money on TV ads, who use that money to influence legislators if they can, and who spend millions of dollars every couple of years on stupid pointless Supreme Court cases like D.C. vs Heller, and for what? You would literally not notice the difference, no matter which side won. So no, I really don't care a whole heck of a lot which way the Supreme Court ruled on individual gun ownership. I have a very faint prejudice against banning anything, so to the faint extent I do care, I'm happy with it. But you know what? They could have ruled the other way and it wouldn't have bothered me one tiny bit. No, again, I'm understating the case: they could have ruled the other way and it still would have qualified, in my opinion, as the least important thing the Supreme Court did all year. I just wish we could bloody well settle the issue, get all the dim-witted or narrow-minded "single issue voters" who only care how a politician votes on guns to care about anything that would actually affect the country instead, and that both sides would just shut the heck up about the stupid guns.
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lazy
See, if I were a professional journalist, or even a professional member of the commentariat, it'd be a condition of my employment that I comment on things the day they happen. Some times it works to my advantage that I have a backlog of things I want to write about. In this particular case, it stopped me from sputtering incoherently at the peak of my then-still frothing rage over former Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's op-ed piece in the last Wednesday's New York Times: "The End of Intervention: Why We Can't Help in Myanmar." It gave me a couple of days to calm down, and for my tactical instinct that it's better to give both sides' political philosophies a fair hearing, to demonstrate to the other side that I have heard them and do understand what they're saying and then demonstrate why they're wrong, calmly and rationally, than to start screaming things like "war criminal!" and "murderer!" at them. It just works better that way.
Do you know the story of how Colin Powell stopped being an Independent and became a Republican?
Say what you will about Colin Powell. I myself think that after he compromised himself so brutally in order to maintain his access to the inner circle of the Bush administration, after he repeated their lies in front of both Congress and the U.N. knowing that he was lying, after he concluded that it was worth sacrificing his reputation and his honor in hopes that by staying inside the administration he could (despite the open contempt the rest of his colleagues there felt for him) do more good than if he did what was right and refused to lie for them? The man's dead to me, worthless, ruined, used-up, no longer of any value or use to the nation. It's a shame; there was a time I would have voted for the man for president, even without knowing any of his stands on any of the issues, just off of the sheer brilliance of one piece of writing: "U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead," Foreign Affairs, winter 1992/93. The summary of the conclusions to that article came to be known as the Powell Doctrine, and as a work of military science, I would rank it right up there with Sun Tsu's "The Art of War" and Carl von Klausewitz' "On War." It was a careful, case by case analysis, summarizing what every war ever won by a democracy had in common, that was different from the wars that were lost by democracies. Improving upon Caspar Weinberger's previous partial analysis, it laid out an absolutely brilliantly simple set of rules for predicting in advance whether or not the US could actually win any hypothetical war. And if a man is that smart, well, if his word is any good then I almost don't care what his politics are; he has my vote.
But Colin Powell had the misfortune to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Clinton administration, which had (on Hillary Clinton's urging) appointed Kissinger-wannabe Madeleine Albright to be its Secretary of State. And from the very beginning of her term in office, Albright clashed openly, loudly, and dismissively with Colin Powell over the proper uses of US military force. She had no use for the Powell Doctrine; she had her own "Albright Doctrine," and although it was never written down, if it had been, it would have been something like this. After the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no nation in the world, nor even any combination of nations in this world, that can stop the United States from doing whatever it wants. That's what it means to be "the last super power." And fundamental morality says that if you have the power to save even one life, if you have the ability, and you intentionally choose not to do so, then you are at least partially guilty of that person's death. Therefore, regardless of any (in her opinion, cowardly) uncertainty from the Joint Chiefs as to whether or not a proposed military intervention was winnable, if a US military intervention stood the chance of saving even one life then the US had an obligation to militarily intervene. And so she did seek to insert the US military into almost every conflict in the world, believing that our infinite wealth (which we don't have) and our infinite military power (which we don't have) would be sufficient to enforce peace between all of the warring factions on earth, whether in the Somali civil war, the Burundian/Rwandan civil war, partisan violence in Haiti, sectarian violence in west Africa and north Africa and Lebanon, or between the various secessionist movements and the government of Yugoslavia.
And every time she laid out her case for how lives were at stake and the US had the power to save those lives, Colin Powell would speak up and give his analysis, using the Powell Doctrine, of whether or not a military intervention in that crisis was likely to succeed. And we're told that at one such cabinet meeting, she actually screamed at him, something to the effect of, "Why are we spending all these billions of dollars to have an army if you won't ever let me use it!?!?" Powell responded to this insanity the only way an honorable man could; he resigned immediately from the Clinton administration. He made the Clintons decide between the Powell Doctrine and the Albright Doctrine; when they chose the Albright doctrine, he withdrew from their administration. For a while thereafter, he maintained the public fiction that he was still neutral, still a political independent. But nobody was at all surprised when he was picked as a Bush administration cabinet secretary. I wonder, to this day, how he feels about that, how betrayed he felt when he found out that all of the rest of the Bush cabinet were enthusiastic devotees of the Albright doctrine, too? And that they were just as dismissive of him, and just as inclined to impugn his morality and impute cowardice, as Madeleine Albright had been?
Which brings us to Albright's angry screed in last Wednesday's New York Times, where she argues that the incompetence of the Bush administration has discredited her lovely theory. Because an Albrightian intervention in Iraq, a war that overtly violated almost every single one of the minimum requirements of the Powell Doctrine, turned out so badly, she worries that for an entire generation, America will follow the cowardly and immoral Powell Doctrine, leaving untold thousands or millions to die whose lives she thinks we could have saved, rather than follow her brave and moral Albright Doctrine, sending US troops into the field to risk their lives and die, if need be, in an attempt to overthrow every murderous regime and stop every civil war in the whole world.
You know where I stand, so it shouldn't be hard for you to guess how badly I wanted to punch a hole in my monitor while I was reading it. But I had most of a week to calm down before it got to the top of my queue, so I was able to give her argument something closer to a fair hearing and a fair summary. So, read her op-ed, read the Wikipedia summary of the Powell Doctrine, and then you tell me: if those are the two choices, where do you stand?
Poll #1206203 Powell, Dean, Kucinich, and Obama? Or Albright, the Clintons, McCain, and Bush?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None
Who's right about when the US should intervene militarily in a country that hasn't attacked us?
Powell Doctrine: Only when all 8 of his criteria have been met, or else we'll lose.
101 (99.0%)
Albright Doctrine: Whenver any President wants, because nobody can stop us. 1 (1.0%)
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Behold another work of Karl Rove's genius: "50% plus one." It works like this.
With modern geographic statistical databases, it is possible to predict how actual voters will react to any focus-group tested phrase, to any policy recommendation, all the way down to the Census-tract level, an area ranging from about two blocks down to maybe as few as four houses or buildings. How should this technology be used? Well, let us accept as a premise something that I'm sure Karl Rove was told by his Boomer-era employers, that politics is a matter of principle, not a disagreement between conflicting ideas of how to achieve mutually agreed-upon good aims or avoid mutually loathed bad outcomes, but a titanic struggle between the forces of Good (our ideas) and the forces of Evil (everybody else's ideas). Further, he would have been told even in (sadly) most America social studies classes that in a democracy, winner takes all. If these things are true, and Karl Rove clearly accepts this, then the software and advertising tools available to him lead to an inescapable conclusion. The proper use of politics, in the hands of a genius like him, is to spend no more time packaging the principles of Good than necessary to achieve a majority vote, a bare majority vote of 50% plus one voter, whether the venue is a statewide election, a national election, or either house of Congress. If the best packaging and advertising and focus-group-tested messages can not result in that 50%+1 simple majority, then the obvious answer is to make the minimum possible compromise with those who espouse the principles of Evil in order to recruit enough voters to reach that 50%+1 threshold.
Why stop at 50%+1? Because, in Karl Rove's brilliant scientific view, spending any more time on persuading people that your principles are right than is necessary to reach 50%+1 is an entirely unnecessary distraction; the time, money, and effort are better spent on implementing the policies of Good. If compromise is necessary to reach 50%+1, then any level of compromise beyond that which is necessary to reach 50%+1 is unnecessary acceptance of Evil. And it is by these principles that the entire "political shop," the entire campaigning, policy-making, and public-opinion shaping side of the Bush White House, has been run for the last seven and a fraction years.
In November of 2006, the Republicans got their first warning that the reason that nobody else ever did it this way is not because Karl Rove is the unprecedented "Boy Genius," but because everybody else in the history of democratic political process has understood, if only intuitively, why this is a dumb-ass idea, one that cost them control over both houses of Congress. The legacy of this dumb-ass idea is almost certainly going to cost them the White House in November, too, resulting in the near-total triumph, by their own hands and deeds, of those that they consider the forces of Evil.
If nothing else, it's a dumb-ass idea for two reasons. First of all, and perhaps the most importantly, persuading people that your political policies, your opinions, your prescriptions for society's ills, your priorities, and why the other side is wrong about these things is not "wasted effort." It is a core function of the job of an elected official, of every elected official. The actual governing is done by a career civil service, hired and managed in a compromise between meritocracy and seniority meant to select for people who know the system and its rules, and who have a proven track record for implementing what they're told to implement. It is not the job of elected officials, or their advisers, to micro-manage the bureaucracy, or at least, that is not their primary job. It is primarily their job to inspire, to instruct, to persuade. That is at the very heart of what democracy, government by the consent of the governed, means: it means that you must continue, year after year, to beg the voters for their individual consent, and to do so, you must make the case for your principles. Stopping that job when you reach the 50%+1 threshold leaves a substantial part of the job undone: huge numbers of people who could have been persuaded to agree with your principles, who could have been persuaded to be your allies, whose consent to be governed by you and by your principles could have been obtained, you go without.
And the second, and tactical, reason why 50%+1 is a dumb-ass idea is that it is governance with zero margin for error. It means running the country as a high-wire act not only without a net, but without even a balancing pole. If you truly believe that your principles are all that is standing between Good and Evil for your country, trying to govern by winner-takes-all 50%+1 politics absolutely maximizes the number of people who hate your guts. People who might otherwise have rooted for you to be right, who might otherwise have cut you some slack when you make mistakes, who might have hoped (in spite of any evidence that turns up to the contrary) that you know what you're doing because you're in charge, so you better know what you're doing, now hover like buzzards over you, or worse, like feral wildcats, waiting for you to show the least sign of fallibility in hopes of descending upon you and rending your flesh. Yes, in any struggle between matters of principle, those who disagree with your principles will always do just that ... but is it smart, in any way, to try to go out of your way to create as many such people as possible? If your principles are as important to you as you say they are, why gamble them all on an incredibly high-stakes bid that you will never once make even one tiny mistake, one that could alienate as few as two voters?
I do not mean to suggest that this is an entirely uniquely Republican fallacy. The Clintons have their own version of it, albeit a lesser version, and it's called "triangulation." If Clintonesque "triangulation" falls short of Karl Rove's level of malignant stupidity, it is at least in this one way: when looking for principles they could compromise, the Clintons never stopped at the 50%+1 level, they never sought to stop at the bare winner-take-all minimum. Instead, they have spent a lifetime looking to see, in a world mostly persuaded of Republicans' principles, how many of their own party's principles they can persuade themselves to jettison, how many of those Republican principles they can substitute for their own in order to try to build a national consensus that would give them the authority to implement however few Democratic principles they kept. Not to sacrifice the minimum number of their principles to build a one-vote majority, but to sacrifice as many of their own principles as they can and still sleep at night, still convince themselves that they stand for something. But Clintonian triangulation is still a failure to stand up for your own principles (most of the time), a failure to persuade. And, let me say it again, in politics and in democratic governance, persuasion is job one.
But I will also say this about the difference between Clintonian "triangulation" and Rovian "divide and conquer." There is a third, less obvious reason to reject the politics of 50%+1 majorities and winner-take-all, or at least, one reason that wasn't obvious except perhaps in hindsight. The strategic, broader reason is that it sets the maximum possible number of Americans against each other. It incites the maximum possible amount of inter-American hatred. It pushes us dangerously close to the level of anarchy and civil war, and as Abraham Lincoln reminded us during that last great battle of 50%+1 versus 50%-1 politics when nearly one in thirty Americans was murdered by another American over matters of principle, "a house divided against itself cannot stand." So if nothing else were to give me reason to hope in 2008, there would be this: the abject failure of Rovianism almost certainly means the end, for at least some years to come, of 50%+1.
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| "HOPE IS NEVER FALSE." -- Barack Obama |
Is this the kind of thing some of you are talking about when you worry that Barack Obama isn't a politician, he's a Sun Myung Moon-like cult figure? (Which is ironic, considering how many Republican candidates have, in fact, been backed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, his Unification Church that practically defines a cult, and his cult-owned newspaper.) Is this what makes you see people waving their fists in the air and chanting "Yes We Can!" and instead of seeing happy, cheering people, you see Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies? The end of his victory speech in St. Paul last Tuesday night:
"America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love. The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America."
Or, as Chris Muir parodied it:
But it really loses something, both the emotional impact for his supporters and the fear it engenders in his opponents, without his ringing tone and the cheering, crying, screaming mass of tens of thousands of fans, with another ten thousand and more outside wishing they could get in:
Is that what you're afraid of? Is that what scares you so much?
Then you've forgotten your own history. Because what I thought when I was listening to that speech, at least what the analytical part of my mind was thinking and saying was, "That man's been studying his Reagan." Specifically, three words: "Morning in America," quite possibly the best damn political speech of the entire 20th century. Because Ronald Reagan, and his speech writers, knew that trying to make the conservative case to America in 1979 and 1980 was an uphill battle. Nobody trusted the Republicans, not just because they'd screwed up the country so badly in the past (that was over a generation before, who was thinking about that?) but because conservatives had a reputation, already by 1979, of being nothing but haters. Bitter, angry, hate-filled harridans and mugwumps, viciously foaming at the mouth about everything that was wrong with America. And it wasn't an unfair characterization, nor is it one still: almost without much exception, nearly every conservative hates America, even still, even after so many years of conservative rule, for not living up to their post-WWII "Return to Normalcy," "Father Knows Best" fantasy of America. And you know what? The American people (quite rightly) fear and despise and loathe haters.
But Ronald Reagan had a very unique biography, for a conservative. For decades, he'd been a moderate-liberal anti-communist labor leader, and a washed-up 3rd rate character actor. Then his second wife converted him to conservative Republicanism, and through her family connections, General Electric hired him to go out and give anti-communist speeches ... and something nobody expected, something magical, happened. Ronald Reagan fell in love with his live audiences. And through them, he fell in deeply, rapturously, sensuously, palpably in love with America, and for it, America, even so many Americans who knew better, loved him back. And from then on, it came through in everything he said; he could say the most hateful or spiteful or stupid things, but you knew, you just knew from the sound of him the sight of him, that even though he meant every word, he still loved America, he still loved Americans, and he still believed in America. Hence, the single most reliable applause line of so many Reagan speeches: "There is nothing wrong with America! that cannot be fixed! by what is right with America!"
And so it is with Barack Obama. His bizarre family story and unusual upbringing sheltered him from so much of the things that turned other men and women of his generation, myself included, so bitter and cynical. And through the power of his religious faith, the man has truly fallen just as deeply in love with the American people as Reagan did -- and even more than Reagan did, he's done so without losing his mind, without losing his skills. The generation after mine, the Millennial generation, finally old enough to vote in large numbers, are lapping this stuff up; it's what they've been raised from birth to look forward to, to hope for, to believe in. If the Republicans had even one candidate with Obama's defining features, his love of the words "us" and "we," the humility (real or faked) with which he entrusts himself to his young campaign staffers, his ringing call to band together and make the world a better place than the ideologues and the cynics have made it (again, a generational call to the Millennials, the DARE generation, who've grown up hearing that just this was their eventual mission), and above all, that bright, shining love for America that is all over his face every day? Then we'd be the ones who were in big trouble.
When Obama speaks, it's not for nothing that you see people in their 30s and 40s openly weeping. I know how much that scares you, how cultish and freakish and messianic religious it looks to you, but you've misread it. What you're seeing is the generation that Strauss and Howe called "Generation Thirteen," the groups that advertisers and demographers called Gen X and Gen Y, the people born between 1960 and 1980 or so, whose life experience as the most Aborted, Retried, Ignored, and Failed of all American generations has made us almost entirely bitter and cynical to a man and to a woman, of every race ... being dared to hope. Being dared to believe that the fascist nightmare of post-9/11 America is temporary, being dared to believe that we are not going down together inevitably to the darkness, being dared to believe that Karl Rove's bitter and vicious "50%+1 vote" divide and conquer strategy for keeping all Americans angry and at each others' throats can and will end. And I know what those crying people at the Obama speeches are crying about, because sometimes, I cry too, for the same reason I cried a little in my seat at the end of Avenue Q when people and muppets of my own generation tried to reassure me that just like the good things in life, everything disappointing or scary in life, including George Bush, is also only "For Now."
We cry because we're not like the leading-edge Boomers who rushed to embrace Reagan's similar promises that the stagflation and rampant crime and racial rioting of the 1970s were not an inevitable slide into oblivion for America. (Little-known fact: ex-hippies gave Reagan his single largest generational majority.) Boomers are idealists. Boomers want nothing more dearly than to be told that all that's necessary to change the world is to find the right ideas and cling to them no matter how much evidence piles up. (And don't think for a second that the next generation after you doesn't blame you for that sickness of the mind.) So when Reagan appealed to your idealism, when he begged for you to hope and to believe again, it wasn't terrifying to you, it was affirming. You could reassure yourself that it wasn't your idealist mindset that was the problem, only that you'd been trumpeting the wrong ideals. But when Obama offers us hope, offers it to those of us who lived through the wreckage of the "consciousness revolution" and then the "Moral Majority" and the "Campus Crusades," and then Reaganomics' union-busting and deliberately engineered high unemployment that exactly coincided with our generation's graduation from college? And when Obama makes us, by the sheer force of his own belief he makes us want to believe in the same "promise of America" that he believes in, the same American Dream? Damn right we cry. We cry, "You, you, you motherfrakker. You had better not be lying to us. You had better not make a wise old bitter cynic like me believe when I know better. If you're going to tell me that everything I've felt and everything I've believed my entire life was a lie and make me believe it, you had better the hell be the one of us that's right." Asking us to dare to hope that George Bush hasn't wrecked America permanently, it hurts.
But that's not a cult. That's a national transformation. Don't fear it as a cult. Although, if you are a Baby Boomer conservative, especially if you're a fundamentalist Republican or a conservative "Democrat for the Leisure Class"? You can fear it as maybe the end of your day. Because with the Millennial Generation's hope and sunny optimism and generational bent towards teamwork, and our generation's savvy rules-lawyering and our wary eyes watching out for them, and a few Boomers who've found something new to believe in watching over them? We're going to try our damnedest to bring an end to the nastiness, the American-on-American hatred that has been your generation's legacy for the last almost 50 years. And with a man who loves America and who believes in America and who truly loves the American people as our standard bearer? That's not a cult. That's change, baby, change you better believe in. Because it's going to happen, whether you believe it now, or not. Not believing that the American people are going to fall in love with Obama isn't going to do you any more good than not believing the American people could be stupid enough to fall for Ronald Reagan did me back in 1980, so you might as well start getting used to it now.
- Mood: hopeful
And, well, I sort of have my own focus group: the public, out-of-character chat channel for the City of Heroes server I play on. At least, I keep telling myself to think of them as a focus group; it's the only way I keep succumbing to the overwhelming internal pressure to make a big hairy deal out of the fact that Someone Is Wrong on the Internet. (I swear I'm going to get that machine-embroidered on a vest sooner or later.) These people are so insanely misinformed and underinformed that if I let myself, I could do almost nothing all day but correct their idiocies, at the cost of my blood pressure, my last remaining sanity, and the pleasure I still get out of playing a villain in City of Heroes. So instead, I just try (hard, and not always successfully) to discipline myself to just listen to what they're saying, just take it in and think about what they believe to be true, what seems most plausible to them, and what that means for the campaign, without trying to argue with them or even direct the conversation. (It's maddening. I don't know how real focus-group professionals do this all day without going nuts.) Almost all of the ones who argue about politics in that chat channel (nearly incessantly) insist when I ask that they're registered voters where they'll be in November, and over half insist that they've voted in one or more of the November 2000, 2002, 2004, or 2006 elections. And yet the vast majority of them raise the same two concerns: is it smart to vote for a Muslim while we're in a War on Terror? Or, contradictorily, is it wise to vote for a President who'll be under permanent threat of assassination from all the Muslims in the world because he's an apostate, an ex-Muslim?Of course, those who know me well can guess the real reason why this drives me to distraction. I have, as I've commented before, a bad case of Engineer's Disease: I can't stand to see anything done badly. So I've been wanting to find the person or group that's at the heart of this BS rumor and shake them, not for the all-too political crime of slander, but for the sheer idiocy of making up a lie when the real truth about Barack Obama's religious background would be just as toxic, or maybe even more so. Barack Obama wasn't raised Muslim; his middle name is only Hussein because that's an extraordinarily common family name where