Apropos of Blair on Amanpour, reader numbskull links to an interesting comment on Open Left (it’s safe to click this link, you won’t be confronted with a 5000 word anti-Obama screed, I promise):
The thing about Britain is that their debate is closer to the real meat and potatoes of what this argument is all about. Ours is frustratingly diverted into “Like or Dislike Obama” or “Is the Tea Party Racist” and other tangential questions.
Britain makes it clear: it’s really about social democracy vs. neoliberalism.
It is important that [Open Left] understand this. This is the debate that is barely allowed to be mentioned on our side of the pond but it’s the crucial distinction.
When Paul Krugman argues for Keynesianism he’s taking the social democratic side of this argument. But he’s not allowed to say so, or at least not willing.
I know what they’re getting at, but I think the Krugman example is a bad one. Krugman wanted a big Keynesian stimulus based on his projections about the economy more than on anything ideological; I understand that believing a big stimulus helps during a recession in general may smack of ideology, but the basis for the belief, in this case, is mostly empirical and even quasi-scientific. I think it would be perfectly possible to be neoliberal in most regards — dismantle the welfare state, privatize everything, free trade, etc. — and still believe that a huge infusion of government spending is a good idea during a terrible recession.
But I too am struck by the relative lack of “who would you rather have a beer with” bullshit in UK politics. What is the cause of this? Is it that there’s royalty to suck up all that personalism?
But it seems to me it’s more than that. UK politicians aren’t accorded the same Russert-on-Cheney cowed respect that we see here. Is it that a more obvious class system breeds distrust of very serious people? Is it that politicians get so beat up on the floor of parliament that it seems silly for journalists to suck up to them in public? Is it just the awesomeness of the BBC?
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
How about all of the above, Alex? I have to say that the Beeb rules (and has helped to reduce the impact of Fox-style Murdoch propagandizing in the UK). Wish we had some equivalent here. PBS and NPR aren’t quite cutting it.
El Cid
Making a similar argument but perhaps using the descriptive label “social democratic” would not make the argument any more ideological. Indeed, noting that such an argument happens to be more common on the “liberal” side of the US political spectrum is not somehow more or less ideological.
Associating an argument pushed because of asserted (true or not) empirical basis (or ‘quasi-scientific’) with a particular political tendency is not more or less ideological or biased than not doing so.
Corner Stone
Given the specific blurb you quoted I think it may be accurate that you know what they’re getting at.
But given the linked article as a whole, I’m not sure you know what they’re getting at.
schrodinger's cat
DougJ@top
I think its because of the differences between the Parliamentary and Presidential systems of governance. The Prime Minister is a member of the Parliament, first and foremost and the leader of the majority party in the Parliament. He is also not the head of state, the queen is, the Prime Minister is the Queen’s executive.
In the US the President is the head of state first and foremost.
I have never understood why the press is so deferential to the President. Can you imagine some one as idiotic as Palin being able to survive the question hour?
DougJ
@El Cid:
I think there is a difference between making a decision in a single instance based on data and making a whole family of decisions based on philosophical/ideological considerations.
I’m skeptical of mass incarceration as a means of lowering crime, so I oppose (for example) three strikes you’re out laws. However, there are people who have committed three violent crimes that I would want long prison sentences for, based on the exact specifics of the crimes, etc.
Corner Stone
@schrodinger’s cat: You mean like this:
fasteddie9318
While we’re talking about kthug and This Week, I thought his summation of Obama’s failure to articulate a vision for his policy goals was spot on. Not only does it help explain the political problem, a lack of enthusiasm for an administration that really has gotten quite a bit done, but it also helps to explain his primary policy failure, the insufficiency of the stimulus. It would have been easier to sell a larger stimulus and to keep enthusiasm up if these guys could sell the public on a vision; the vision could be complete horse shit (Reagan’s certainly was), but that’s how you generate support.
DougJ
@Corner Stone:
You can’t expect me or anyone else to be understand what any entire OpenLeft post is trying to say, that’s setting the bar too high. I know that at some level they’re about how Obama sucks (in the same way that most conservative blog posts are about wolverines), but beyond that, there’s no way to tell sometimes.
david mizner
Not really, because committed neoliberals — like Larry Summers, who didn’t even present his fellow neoliberal Obama with Christina Romer’s recommendation of 1.3 trillion, the absolute low end of what progressive economists said was necessary — were and are too mindful of the precious budget deficit to do what’s necessary. Yeah there’s a lot of factual evidence pointing to the need for massive deficit spending during an recession, but neoliberals are happy to deny and dismiss the evidence. That’s what their ideology does.
Yeah, this is a battle between competing ideologies — a battle somewhat obscured by Obama’s ability to obscure the fact that he’s an (increasingly doctrinaire) neoliberal.
arguingwithsignposts
Britain is a much smaller collection of countries (I think that’s the correct term), as well.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@schrodinger’s cat:
I can’t, though I’d love to see the carnage. But I wonder if the reason PMQ is so hardcore is because it’s not reporters asking the questions, it’s members of the other party(ies), right? Imagine the stupid kinds of questions Louie Gohmert would spew out of his piehole if he had a chance to ask Obama questions on the floor of the House.
Redshift
@El Cid: But that’s not the point. The post is claiming that Krugman is “not allowed” to associate his empirical argument with “social democratic side of this argument,” which seems rather ludicrous when his NYTimes blog is called “The Conscience of a Liberal.”
El Cid
@DougJ: I don’t think that claiming that decisions are being made upon empirical and ‘quasi-scientific’ argumentative reasons is a realistic distinction in empirical terms from those who tend to have a certain political tendency, because many of those in various tendencies would assert that their arguments are no less empirical and no less ‘quasi-scientific’, hence the disagreement in social science journals upon these vary same empirical and ‘quasi-scientific’ arguments.
Jewish Steel
I agree with the all of the above option.
You could include comedy current affairs programs like The Now Show, The News Quiz and a raft of others on radio and television that perform the same function as The Daily Show. Some of them have been around for a couple of generations and so have a kind of institutional authority behind the very healthy democratic practice of sneering at VSPs
david mizner
@Redshift:
And also ignores Krugman’s gradual but pronounced move from one camp to the other. Krugman, let’s not forget, championed NAFTA, and he’s still neoliberalish on trade issues, but in other areas, he’s firmly in the social democratic camp.
DougJ
@Redshift:
Indeed, I don’t think Krugman wants to associate the point with the social democratic side, he wants to say that his examination of the Great Depression and the Japanese recession makes him believe that bold action is needed, economically. I do read columns (maybe not Krugman) that say “I’m for this because I’m liberal” or “all liberals should support this” (though more often it’s “all conservatives should support this”, etc.) , and that’s fine, but I just don’t think that is how Krugman frames his economic arguments.
DougJ
@El Cid:
I see what you’re saying, but I still think that it’s one thing to say “I think we need a huge welfare state and to stop privatizing stuff because in the long-term that seems better or because philosophically, I think it more fair” and another to say “we’re headed into an economic disaster unless we dump a huge amount of government money into the economy pronto”.
schrodinger's cat
@Corner Stone: You know I once met Elizabeth Bumiler at a concert when I lived near DC. She seemed like a nice person. I recognized her from seeing her on TV, and went up and spoke to her, she also introduced me to her daughter who was with her.
david mizner
@DougJ:
Well, of course, he uses facts, so what?
He’s still informed by — and identifies with — an ideology.
Corner Stone
@DougJ: That’s fine as far as it goes. But this isn’t “any” OL post, it’s a specific one making specific points. And therefore can be read and understood to be making certain points.
Mark S.
@DougJ:
I think the post on the whole is very interesting:
Maybe that’s right, maybe it isn’t. But by all means, let’s have our fifty millionth discussion on how stupid the media is.
fasteddie9318
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Mr. President, were you yourself not, in fact, a Terror Baby? Do you recognize other Terror Babies in this very room, sir? WHERE ARE TEH TERROR BABIES! STOP HIDING THEM FROM US! WE NEEDS THEM!
Marmot
That made me think of an article I thought seemed strange at the time — a BBC account of MP George Galloway testifying in front of a Senate Subcommittee hearing. I think this is the one — it’s by the Washington correspondent, but it’s still full of the-august-U.S.-Senate-type description:
schrodinger's cat
@fasteddie9318: Aren’t you a manly man? why so afraid of babies? should be the Democratic response
DougJ
@david mizner:
I’m not saying that economics is a science, but, by the same token, I identify with an ideology when I say that it was gravity and not earth spirits that made my coffee cup hit the ground.
It could be that ideology is used so stupidly in this country that I’ve become confused about what it really means but I think “we should end all government regulation because regulation is bad” is more ideological than saying “we should deregulate this specific industry because the regulation isn’t working”, for example. Similarly, saying “government has a big role to play in ameliorating this recession” is different from saying “government has a big role to play in doing everything”.
DougJ
@Corner Stone:
I felt it went off in two different directions. I’m dealing with the first direction, because I don’t agree with the second at all.
schrodinger's cat
@DougJ: I wouldn’t equate physics and economics. The state of economics today is like that of physics at the time of Archimedes.
As for Krugman, he has been right about so many things and for so long, that I do take what he has to say very seriously.
Chad N Freude
Fanny Trollope offers a few clues. One of my Most Favorite Books of all time.
ETA: The Kindle edition is $0.00.
ETA2: The book is about the have-a-beer-with state, so different from the Brits.
fasteddie9318
@schrodinger’s cat:
Because they’re TERROR babies! Being afraid of them is right there in the name!
These are the same brainless scumbags who want to keep our overseas gulags open, because presumably if we relocated suspected terrorists to a SuperMax prison in the states, they’d be able to use their mutant super powers to break out and wreak havoc on American cities. If the adult terrorist has enough mutant power to do that, it follows that the babies must be powerful enough to pose their own existential threat.
Doctor Science
@fasteddie9318:
Tell me more! Or link. Details, I want details.
Corner Stone
@DougJ: Hmmm. You think that at heart Obama is not a centrist? His philosophy and decision making?
DougJ
@Corner Stone:
I don’t know and I don’t care. He passed historic health care legislation, had a too small stimulus, passed a pretty good fin reg bill, that’s how I judged him.
Chad N Freude
@schrodinger’s cat: The equating of economics with physics is what made the Quants so successful in devastating the economy. Read Dan Ariely for some good reasons not to equate them.
fasteddie9318
@Doctor Science:
No transcript, but as he was smacking down the notion that “uncertainty,” and not a lack of demand, is the cause of the economic slowdown, he argued that there is a relevant political uncertainty about what exactly the administration’s vision is. Sometime Obama talks like a liberal, other times he concedes the message war to the right, and never has there been a clear statement, a la Reagan, that we were on the wrong track under the previous administration and THIS (whatever it may be) is the new track we’re going to follow from here on out and people need to get on board with it.
Of course, if you side with the folks at OpenLeft, he can’t say that because he really doesn’t believe that in the main we WERE on the wrong track under Bush, just that the details need to be tweaked. I’m not sure I buy that.
Corner Stone
@DougJ:
Ok. I’m just going to stop now. But I appreciate it.
James E. Powell
Any economic policy position is ideological. Economic policy, even when it’s quasi-scientific, is about outcomes. Those outcomes are ideological.
But, in American political discourse, the actual desired outcomes are almost never mentioned. It is very odd that although Americans apparently hold the president responsible for the state of the economy, specific outcomes are never part political campaigns. Both parties claim to aim for a vaguely defined jobs, strong middle class, thriving small business outcome. And, since Mondale, no one talks about taxes without saying relief. No one ever mentions fairness.
For example, no Republican advocates tax cuts in order to give rich people more money or to force the elimination of social programs. That is the desired outcome of their economic policy, but it’s never explicitly put before the voters.
While America includes a wide range of economic ideologies, the range of acceptable (serious) political discourse on the economy is very narrow. (Cf. Israel.)
I think this is because rich people, either as individuals or through corporations and other entities, provide almost all the funding for political campaigns.
The American deference to the president is the product of several ideas. Leader of the Free World. The myth-making necessary to be a national candidate in the first place. And the authoritarianism that permeates the right wing.
Presidential worship is mostly a right wing thing. If a country-western singer declared that she hated Obama because he is a Muslim Socialist determined to impose Sharia law and turn the country over to The Terrorists, her records would not be burned or banned, she would not get death threats.
arguingwithsignposts
@Marmot:
I’d like to see video of that Galloway testimony. That would be so full of win.
FlipYrWhig
@fasteddie9318:
Do you really think everyday people particularly care about The President’s Grand Vision, to the degree that if they feel like they can’t say what it is, they lose enthusiasm for him? If we’re using the Reagan parallel, did people continue to like Reagan’s Grand Vision when they were getting socked by that early recession during his first term? Or did they latch onto the vision thing retrospectively to give a shape or a theme to the better economic conditions that followed? It seems to me that this is an overcomplication: the economy sucks, thwarting attempts to talk about policy successes, even were there to be perfectly conceived Lakoffian frames for doing so.
Which is not to deny that part of the reason why the economy sucks is that panicky, spending-averse conservative Democrats don’t support the kinds of corrective measures you, I, and Krugman would be happy to see. That’s the major reason I continue to think that “selling a larger stimulus” was well-nigh impossible, but I’ve belabored that point around here enough lately.
liberal
@DougJ:
That’s odd, given that placing a politician on the ideological spectrum is very useful when it comes to predicting the policies that politician will support.
A mere summary of what e.g. Obama has supported gives no predictive value, unless one does extra theorizing which is equivalent to placing him on the political spectrum anyway.
A C-minus-ish fin reg bill is “pretty good”?
Occasional Reader
There’s an analogue of the “who would I rather have a beer with” in UK politics – it’s the debate over whether a candidate is “too posh”.
DougJ
@liberal:
I think that seeing what a politician has supported has much more predictive value than labels like “centrist”, for better or for worse.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: I think that at heart Obama has liberal ideals, but believes extremely strongly in consensus-building and counts small changes as wins. I think that he’s using community-organizing tactics on Democratic politicians, trying to get them to articulate what they want and then coming up with a plan to help them get there, so that the greatest number of people are on board and pulling in the same direction. But that necessarily includes finding ways to make the rightmost members of the caucus feel like they, too, are being heard. The much-derided “compromiser” streak arises from his desire to find common ground with conservative Democrats.
That said, I do have a feeling that his success as a Senator in joining with Republicans to make policy — like working with Coburn on transparency and Lugar on disarmament — makes him feel like Republican Senators _can_ be engaged, which is why Democrats keep trying to do that [e.g. with Grassley on health care and Shelby on Wall Street]. But McConnell has them by the balls and won’t allow the kinds of collaborations Senator Obama undertook to happen for _President_ Obama.
And sometimes I think it’s Obama’s young-dad sense of sportsmanship and fair play that flares up once in a while, typically at moments when netroots-y bloggers want to see anger and battle.
fasteddie9318
@FlipYrWhig:
You may be right that the Grand Vision didn’t make much difference in the moment, and certainly Reagan’s 2-year approval ratings would back you up since they were worse than Obama’s are. But I think if we believe that Reagan’s Presidency, for better or worse, was transformational (and Obama apparently does, whether or not you or I or anybody else agrees), part of the reason for that is because the myth writers who developed around Reagan had an easy time turning his Grand Vision into the Grand Unified Theory of How Everything Is Supposed to Work. I’m not sure how the Obama myth writers are going to tackle the problem of what, exactly, Obama’s vision was. Incrementalism doesn’t make for much of a vision. The OpenLeft folks think they’ve pegged him as essentially a neoliberal, but I don’t think that’s any clearer than the idea that he’s a social democrat playing 11th dimension chess.
EconWatcher
I think Krugman is a very valuable citizen, which can be said of few other economists. But I’m not too impressed with his purported prescience on the size of the stimulus.
It seems to me that he ultimately picked a number bigger than could politically be sold (after flirting in the press with some lower numbers not too out of line with what was ultimately passed). By doing so, he made an unfalsifiable prediction.
Anyone with any sense could see this mess wasn’t going to be straightened out quickly, no matter what. By claiming that a politically unattainable level of stimulus might be the cure, Krugman could not be proved wrong.
Don’t get me wrong–it was important to have a credible voice clamoring for a bigger stimulus, and I wish he had prevailed. So I give him credit for pushing for our best shot. But our current predicament doesn’t prove him right or prescient.
My own view is that the American economy has been built on smoke-and-mirrors for so long that it’s going to take a generation to try to return to some kind of sustainable reality. And I’m less and less convinced that our democratic institutions will remain intact in the process.
Brien Jackson
@david mizner:
God I fucking hate ideologues. Even moreso when economics are involved.
Chris
Yes; but at the same time, there is something ideological (or perhaps philosophical) as a backstop here: the assumption that a good economy is a good thing.
Some people benefit personally when everyone else suffers. To them, a good economy is a bad thing.
(In general, we call those people “upper class” or “the rich” or similar. And if they are sensible, they will realize that this benefit is quite limited and long term, they wind up better off if everyone is better off. Alas, most people think not with the cerebrum, but with the amygdala, as it were.)
DougJ
@david mizner:
Krugman is pretty neo-liberal in some regards, though. He’s extremely pro-free trade, for example.
I’m just not convinced he’s a paradigmatic social democrat.
Brien Jackson
@DougJ:
That’s because this whole thing is a false dichotomy: it’s perfectly possible to have neoliberal views on trade, social democratic views on the welfare state, and accept the premise of keyensian stimulus. What’s happening here is that everyone is trying to lump everything into neat little boxes and then impute protectionism as an inherent social democratic value, which is stupid.
morzer
Some points:
1) Britain has some major newspapers that are more or less aligned with liberal ideas and policies
(especially The Guardian and The Independent).
2) Britain has much more in the way of public access to debates in parliament, and that access is not dependent on or skewed by TV coverage that cuts away at the critical moment
3) Britain has more effective libel/slander laws, and this limits the political propaganda someone like Murdoch can get away with
4) British political parties tend to be more cohesive and strongly whipped, and this means that when the left/liberals do have power, they can generally do more with it
5) “Christian” mobs simply don’t have the same power to blackmail legislators as they do in the US. Similarly, the abortion debate isn’t really relevant, and nor is the idiotic NRA posturing.
6) The idea that the state is often the best guarantor of equality, access and freedom doesn’t produce paranoia and mass self-soiling as it seems to in America. Yes, Britain has its right-wing/libertarian crazies, but most people can recognize charlatans when they see them.
7) There is a North/South divide, but it’s far less radical and hate-filled than the equivalent division in the US. People joke about it, but nothing more than that as a rule.
FlipYrWhig
@fasteddie9318: I see your point, but we don’t have the benefit of hindsight on Obama yet. I can easily imagine that if the economy turns around, and as people embrace the big-ticket items like HCR, historians will go back to his campaign and inaugural themes about being your brother’s keeper, all the stuff about being part of a larger whole, etc., and find that to have been the spirit holding together all the new policy.
FlipYrWhig
@EconWatcher:
With so many things that have happened under Obama, you’ll find a lot of people saying versions of “What we really need is X, but Y is a start, so I support it.” Supporting version Y doesn’t mean failure to see the merits of X.
That’s why I find the gloating from certain quarters, the “Aha! I told you all along it wasn’t big enough!” so irritating. I don’t know anyone in the blogosphere who would have chosen to have a smaller stimulus on ideological grounds; it was obvious to everyone who joined those discussions that bigger stimulus would be more effective. The whole disagreement was over how best to maximize it, given the publicly-stated level of support for such things, and particularly whether it was possible to change that level of support by rallying the people to a degree that they would in turn pressure stim-skeptics to go along with a bigger number.
James E. Powell
@FlipYrWhig:
and particularly whether it was possible to change that level of support by rallying the people to a degree that they would in turn pressure stim-skeptics to go along with a bigger number.
Among the many charges that the professional left makes against Obama is that neither he nor the Democratic leadership made any effort to change the level of support by rallying people. On the contrary, it appears that the towel was thrown in before the fight even started.
There was a lot of talk about this being the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression, but almost none about policies that would meet the challenge. There could have been a rally around “the rich got us into this, and they have to sacrifice to get us out of this.” That would have resonated with the great majority of Americans. There could have been a public campaign of “the Republicans and their policies got us into this, and now they have to get out of the way so we can fix it.”
What did Obama & the Democratic leadership have to lose by doing that? Broder would have whined? So what?
Despite his stated admiration for Reagan’s transformational politics, Obama learned nothing from Reagan’s strategy and tactics.
bago
When you own a share for 30 seconds, you’re not investing.
PeakVT
@DougJ: Krugman is pro-free trade, but I think he’s also coming to realize we live in a world of mercantilists, and perhaps unilaterally disarming isn’t such a bright idea.
bago
Actually, that leads me to think: “What if you injected a valuation of a ‘cooldown period’ into the market?”
A sliding scale of pricing that used as a parameter the length of time you intended to hold that asset as the input to the pricing function.
For Example: If you bought your share with the option to resell it immediately, you would be in the most expensive tier, as companies can’t really trust an investment that might evaporate in 30 seconds. Now, they could sell the same share at a slightly lower price if they could guarantee that the investor would keep their cash in the company for the next payroll cycle, so for 30 days. You could then offer shares at an even lower price if you contractually agreed to hold the share for a year, allowing management at the company to know more firmly how much capital they had to leverage over time.
In other words, you could offer management some stability in future planning, making for a much more stable economic system.
In trying to game this system, High Frequency Traders would just need a little more capitol to play their games. They really don’t care about price, they care about relative price. However if you established the three tiered sale system I described above, and normed the sale price of every share to the middle 30 day tier, you could punish short term investors and reward long term investors.
Any thoughts?
FlipYrWhig
@James E. Powell:
IMHO they didn’t have enough support among conservative Democrats, particularly the “deficit hawk” brigade that includes people like Evan Bayh, to be able to make a full-throated clamor that We Democrats want to do this, and They Republicans are standing in our way. So what they had to lose by doing that was the support of conservative Democrats.
I don’t think the “professional left” appropriately accounts for the intransigence of conservative Democrats, especially those who represent states and districts that never supported Obama to begin with. It’s that group, the Blue Dogs and Blue Doggish conservative Democrats in the Senate, at whose feet I lay almost every unsatisfying-to-liberals legislative development of the last two years.
That’s why every policy gets pulled to the right, not to satisfy Republicans, because they’re willfully useless, but to give cover to these Republicanesque conservaDems. The median Senator in the Democratic caucus is significantly to the right of the liberal blogosphere, and to me that’s a pretty solid explanation for why policy hasn’t been more liberal.
AhabTRuler
@arguingwithsignposts: Galloway’s still an asshole in a big way, but I believe that was also about the same time as the occasion for describing Chris “I’ll be in hell soon” Hitchens as “a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay.”
John W.
This is easy: the Brits save the reverent bullshit for the monarchy. I’m sure someone mentioned that, but I’m not combing through 57 comments to give credit for something really, really easy to figure out.
America merges the head of state with the head of government. No new constitution does this. THere’s a reason why.
numbskull
@DougJ: Doug, that’s just lazy. That particular post is pretty easy to comprehend. As near as I can tell, you’ve gotten it about half right in your response. Well, that is to say, I agree with what you’ve written. :)
But go read the rest of it. It’s about much more than just the lines you bquoted.
That said, thanks for FPing it. It still stands as the best thing I’ve read today (admittedly, I spent several hours saving the world elsewhere this afternoon), and to think, it was simply a post in reply to an FP ‘graph.
Makes me wish I was smarter and deeper.
morzer
@John W.:
No true. Brits tend to regard the royals with amusement, pity, disdain and occasional active dislike, but old-school deference and reverence is rarely seen these days. If you consider how the Press used to avoid covering anything remotely like a royal scandal, you’ll see from the coverage in recent years how great a shift there has been in the public’s attitude towards the royals.
Bubba Dave
@bago:
I’d prefer to tackle that through the tax system. Add in a $.02 transaction tax for every transaction (whether you sell 1 share or 100,000) and set the capital gains tax to 80% if you held the asset for <1 day before selling it, 60% if <1week, 50% if <1 year, and same as your tax bracket otherwise. High-speed automated trades are gone, day traders are curtailed, and the market swings back to looking for long-term investments instead of sell-on-the-bounce strategies.
Bob Loblaw
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, then that’s pretty stupid, isn’t it?
Having your party hotshot you to the front of the line to kiss Lugar’s ass on a bill that was guaranteed to pass isn’t very representative of the modern process.
Nah, man, the Messina hiring indicated exactly what kind of Senate policy this White House was going to run. And they have. Start from the Blue Dog position and work right, rather than try to divide and conquer the centrist Dems with the House as your cudgel. When it works, it works (HCR), but when it doesn’t…well, L-shaped recoveries don’t look good come election time.
DougJ
@numbskull:
Taken at face value, the second half saying that the bad economy would be hurting Obama less if he seemed like more of a social democrat, and I just can’t see any evidence for that. And I think there’s a difference between thinking Reagan-Thatcherism is irreversible and thinking that it will be very hard to reverse it. So, yes, I do think it devolves into a fairly muddled “Obama sucks” even though it does raise interesting points.
Corner Stone
@DougJ:
That’s not what it argues DougJ.
FlipYrWhig
@Bob Loblaw:
I think there has been a huge paradigm shift in how Congress works — in a way that has never really been the case before, the Republicans have decided that their best course of action is not to pull policy to the right but to interfere as much as possible with making policy at all. And I think the Beltway insider media and Democrats alike, especially the old hands, have been very slow to adapt to these new conditions.
And I really think there is no good solution to them: if you’re a teacher and your class decides one day that they’re just not going to sit down, it doesn’t matter how much you yell, you really can’t _make_ them do it. You can make threats, but what if they’re not scared? You can give them bad grades, but what if they don’t care? You can call their parents, but what if _they_ don’t care either? You can send them home, but what if they like it there? Ultimately, they just have to get tired of or guilty about being brats.
So, I agree with you, Republicans are going to keep being this way until we figure out a way to make them suffer for it, and it’s stupid not to keep that in mind. But without attempts to engage some of them, I’m not sure they’re ever going to get tired of their own antics. It’s a no-win situation for anyone who cares at all about policy, _even conservative policy_, because making policy _at all_ is now beyond the pale.
Bob Loblaw
@FlipYrWhig:
Which is why the only solution is a majoritarian body. But this will never happen, because 51 senators will never agree to cede their institutional authority until it’s too late.
losingtheplot
There’s a slightly less Murdoch-controlled press in the UK than in the US, which helps. But my (UK-born) partner was very puzzled when we first watched the State of the Union address by Bush – why are they all (i.e. Democrits) applauding this clown? why do they stand up every 90 seconds or so and applaud statements that are antithetical to their party’s stated policies (supposedly). So is it ritual deference to the post of President that catapults Senators from their seats in joyous approval at SotU addresses, or do they really mean it?
FlipYrWhig
@Bob Loblaw: The only other solution would involve finding a way to make Mitch McConnell and all future Mitch McConnells pay a price for all the purely obstructionist bullshit they’ve pulled. But, you’re right, the Senate as a body has some odd perks — all those “holds” and the “blue slips” and other asinine procedural things, along with the filibuster — they’re not likely to relinquish.
I don’t have a lot of hope either that that will change, but if it’s going to, it’d probably be after the retirement of a lot of the senior Democrats. I think they have been the slowest to adapt to the new conditions, and the most likely to cling to their prerogatives because they want to maintain some power under the next Republican majority. Power they’d never use the way Republicans use theirs, of course, because they can be made to feel guilty much faster.
FlipYrWhig
@losingtheplot:
It’s much easier to get Democrats to make gestures of support for Republicans because (1) Democrats believe in sportsmanship; (2) Democrats fear that if they don’t make those gestures they’ll get ripped for being uncooperative, soft and unpatriotic. There is way less stigma associated with Republicans showing themselves to be angry, bloodthirsty and uncaring.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
They are rewarded for it.
pointer
My answer to DougJ’s question: it’s got a lot to do with the role of nationalism in both countries.
The British are acutely aware they are a fading empire. Knocking themselves is a national past-time. It also means that there are far fewer people insisting that the Crown can do no wrong. They’ve already gone through that excruciating phase — East India Tea Company anyone? The late 19th and early 20th century in terms of British history is almost a long line of humiliations.
The US is only beginning to realise that its star is — slowly — dimming.
Chris
@bago: You’re basically reinventing “share classes”. Possibly a better version of share classes, mind you. :-)
Note that the company generally does not get money directly from share transactions. Shares have a dollar value, which allows the company to use “company treasury” shares to buy some things, but most shares that are bought and sold never venture through the company treasury. This would complicate the equivalent-dollar-value of treasury shares as you’d have to look at restrictions put in place when those shares are used.
Note also that companies now use “restricted stock” as a form of compensation, so we already have a framework in which shares cannot be sold immediately. We’d just have to extend it somehow.
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: Ok, since you’re not going to ask:
It argues that Obama et al had a pre-conceived belief set that does not comport with reality. Not political reality, nor economic reality. They were counting on a set of circumstances that were never going to happen.
And once the kimono was opened they had no place to pivot to.
Nazgul35
I think that the fact that the leader is elected by Parliament shapes some of that discussion. Less individual candidate focused and more on party policies.
Mark S.
@Corner Stone:
And that reality, according to the post, is that neo-liberalism (Reaganism) is a big con. Obama is hoping to put a few band-aids on the economy and everything will be back to normal. But if the problems are more fundamental, if neoliberalism is a failed project, then Obama and the country are fucked.
Like I said, I don’t know if that’s right or not, but it’s a lot more interesting (and important) than “Why does our media suck so hard?” which is a topic that has been thoroughly explored at this place.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
The UK is a single media market in the way the US is not. You have national newspapers with distinct ideological leanings. But you also have the BBC as the main tv news, with Jeremy “why is this lying bastard lying to me” Paxman or the interviewers at Channel 4 news who are only slightly less terrifying. BBC news is almost a complete Oxbridge closed shop, so the journalists are as smart or smarter than those they’re interviewing. And election laws prevent $$$ ad buys bypassing the media.
mclaren
Oh, come on, this is simple.
The PM of Britain is not…b…l…a…c…k.
The president of the united staates is…b…l…a…c…k.
That’s all there is to it.
Lee Atwater said it clearly:
That’s what all the “he doesn’t like Obama” stuff is about. It’s code for “he’s a closet Klansman.”
morzer
@mclaren:
Too simple. We saw the same nonsense with Clinton, and he really doesn’t look black at all.
Ecks
Some of you dropping the knowledge (morzer, Sock Puppet of the Great Satan), others less informed. I’ll add this:
In the US. the ethical standard for media is balance: Tell both sides, don’t take a position yourself, let the public decide. This works fine until one side is willing to lie shamelessly, at which point it breaks down. The Republicans have figured this out and are taking full advantage, while the Dems struggle mightily to square this with the idea that they are supposed to be doing something useful, and so get treated too much like pinata’s.
In the UK the ethical standard for media isn’t balance, it’s truth (except for the partisan papers, in which case the standard is “our guys, right or wrong). So if you listen to a completely standard, normal interview of a regular journalist interviewing a regular politician in the UK (i.e., just switch on the radio randomly and find a news program), it sounds completely hostile to American ears. The interviewer will push the pol, challenge their facts, play devils advocate… and this is understood to be completely normal. In the US this same behavior would be a major breach of decorum (John Steward flirts with it kind of obliquely on rare occasions, and everyone here gets wood), and would represent the interviewer “taking sides,” which is a cardinal sin for journalists in the US.
So a lot of it is just that the journalists job is viewed differently in the UK.
mclaren
@morzer:
That sound credible until you start to compare the Repubs’; reactions to Clinton and Obama.
With Clinton, the criticism was that he was “Slick Willy” and that hit home. Bill Clinton was a smooth-talking slick guy. I never really trusted him, though he was a pretty good president, and other people had the same reaction — he was too smooth, too glib, too facile.
With Obama, the criticism from Repubs is flat-out insane. Obama is a soshulist fascist commyounist Mooooooslim. That’s crazy. You can’t be a fascist and a communist simultaneously. You can’t be a true communist and a Muslim. The criticisms aren’t based on reality. They’re just weird name-calling.
The Republicans’ attacks on Clinton were based on reality. Everyone recognize that Slick Willy was not to be trusted in a clinch, though he sometimes did the right thing.
So it seems to me that comparing the Repubs’ reactions to Clinton and Obama doesn’t work. They had some substantive criticisms of Clinton. With Obama, the Repubs have got nothing. They’re just throwing sh|t at him in the frantic hope that some of it will stick. Seems like the reason for that is skin color, not just that Obama is a Democratic president.
Ecks latches onto something important. The British press has long enjoyed an attack-dog mentality toward its government. The Brits don’t give a damn about balance in their press. Their papers openly take sides. You’ll get one paper that’s avowedly Tory, another paper that’s openly Labor. Here in America that used to be the case during the 19th and early 20th century but it’s largely vanished, replaced by that weird fantasy of “fairness.” So when some nut claims the earth is flat, the journalists have to be fair to him and arrange a debate with a scientist and then report both sides. They don’t go for that bullshit in Britain.
Mrak S. pointed out:
This sounds exactly right. Geither and Summers and the rest of the Wall Street guys seem to have convinced Obama that it’s business as usual, this was a just another recession, we can do the usual deficit-spending and lower-the-interest-rates dance for 2 or 3 quarters, and everything will back to usual.
But once again, it baffles me that Obama’s supposed to be a smart guy, because it’s so obvious this isn’t right. Look at a historical chart of house prices. We’re way up in the stratosphere, wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy out of line with historical reality. Housing values still need to fall another 50% to 70% (nobody is sure exactly how far the prices will overshoot on the downside) to get back in line with historical norms. Doesn’t Obama realize this? Can’t he look at a chart like this and read it?
I mean, WTF? If Obama is so smart, why can’t he just sit down at his computer and google HISTORICAL GRAPH HOUSING PRICES SINCE 1890 and get this chart? And then when his advisors tell him this is just another recession, why can’t Obama print this chart out and throw it in their faces and say, “Guys, you’re bullshitting me here. This is not just another recession. We are looking at a major realignment of the U.S. economy. We have got to do a lot more than just sprinkle some of Ben Bernanke’s helicopter money around to the big banks and broke car companies if we want to get this economy moving again.”
Doesn’t Obama bother to read articles showing that offshoring is accelerating and hitting hard at white-collar skilled jobs now? Doesn’t Obama realize that Taiwan grabbed the lucrative netbook market because U.S. companies had offshored all their laptop manufacturing to Taiwan, and when time came to develop new products, a Taiwanese company like Acer had the expertise but American companies didn’t?
Doesn’t Obama realize that’s what will happen with all American industries? When we offshore most of our production overseas, the new products will get developed by the overseas manufacturers and not by American companies because the overseas manufacturers are so close to the hardware and the software they can see trends coming that we can’t. So U.S. industry just gets hollowed out until there’s nothing left. Soon we won’t even be innovating and creating new products — the companies we’ve offshored all our manufacturing and design to will do that too, and they’ll leave us with nothing.
If Obama is so smart, why doesn’t he realize this? It’s not rocket science. When a country stops creating things and starts doing nothing but money-changing, it decays and collapses. It happened to Spain when it got rich from the gold in the New World and became Europe’s banker. Two centuries later, Spain had fallen apart. There were no longer any centers of learning, no longer any great shipbuilders or master architects, no longer any skilled artisans, just money-changers.
That’s where America’s headed. Can’t Obama see that? Doesn’t he realize the U.S. economy is structurally broken and has to be re-engineered at a basic level? It’s not like there are no books on the subject — the bookshelves are crammed full of books about this. Can’t Obama read?
Porlock Junior
@mclaren:
That was the most righteous and reasoned rant I’ve seen in some time. Red meat from beginning to end.
(Oh, that’s supposed to be a positive metaphor. Stuff you can get your teeth into, you know. No actual cattle were injured in making that post.)
Dead-on, anyway, with the Clinton vs Obama and the offshoring of the whole economy and all between.
someguy
It is there. Here it’s about race & class hatred versus decency, with maybe 90% of the people not having a clue there’s even a debate occurring. Our mass media sucks.
Draylon Hogg
Is it because your nation was born out of revolutionary war, and its political system created from scratch on Enlightenment principles; whereas mine, since William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution of 1689 has been a gradually evolving constitutional monarchy?