James Fallows, in the April Atlantic, on the media and the public:
“I am sad at what feels like a decline in our public culture,” I was told by Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and the author of the recent The Whites of Their Eyes, which compares today’s Tea Party activists with the original Revolutionary War activists. “It feels like a personally abusive and textually violent time.” But she went on to say that it is hard to demonstrate that today’s media and resulting public discussion are, in their totality, worse than before…
__
“It’s not so much that American public life is more idiotic,” Jill Lepore said, referring to both press coverage and the public discussion it spawns. “It’s that so much more of American life is public. I think that goes a long way to explaining what seems to be a ‘decline.’ Everything is documented, and little of it is edited. Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization.”
__
She added that since the 1940s, political scientists had tried to measure how well American citizens understood the basic facts and concepts of the nation and world they live in. “It actually is a constant,” she said. “There is a somewhat intractable low level of basic political knowledge.”
The Washington Post, just after the government shutdown was averted this weekend, reports “In Okla., a beneficiary sours on federal spending“:
OKLAHOMA CITY — Lawyer John Hager paid scant attention as Congress and the White House raced against the clock to strike a budget deal that narrowly averted a governmenent shutdown.
__
As the budget battle moves into its next phase in the coming weeks, he hopes lawmakers will cut the federal budget by much more than the $38 billion trimmed in the current spending plan. The less federal government, he said, the better.
__
“Centralized anything doesn’t really work,” Hager said, adding that he was unperturbed by the prospect of a federal shutdown. “I’m not sure what they do has a big impact on my life.’’
__
That jaundiced view of the federal government is common here, local leaders say, even though the region’s surging economy is built to a large degree on a foundation of federal spending.
__
About 7 percent of the area’s workers are federal employees, more than double the U.S. average, according to a Washington Post analysis. Meanwhile, federal spending on roads, a huge Federal Aviation Administration center and a sprawling Air Force base not only keeps more than 20,000 civilians employed but also is helping to nurture entire sectors of the area’s increasingly prosperous and diverse economy.
__
Overall, the state gets back $1.35 for every dollar its residents and businesses pay in federal taxes, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group. That’s the 15th most generous return among the 50 states.
__
“On one hand, you have this fairly heavy concentration of federal employees and spending here,” said Cindy Rosenthal, a University of Oklahoma political scientist and mayor of nearby Norman. “On the other hand, there is a lot of sentiment that the federal government is too large, too intrusive and probably too wasteful.”…
I’d have thought that a lawyer — pretty much the economic version of what ecologists call an apex predator — would want to have some clue as to the tapsprings feeding the local watering holes. For most people, most of the time, politics may be just another godsdamned hobby, but this kind of intellectual disconnection seems almost willfully delusional.
aimai
Jill Lepore is a national treasure. Her book “The Whites of their Eyes” is really good, as is her earlier book on Ann Hutchinson (her distant relative) and I’ve found her New Yorker pieces to be fantastic.
I think the Lawyer’s notion, in the cited story, that the Federal Government doesn’t “do anything” is a tremendous failure on the part of our civil education–look, the guy thinks that a country founded on collective action, towns, democratic self rule, civil government by elected local officials can’t work because its “organized” and “centralized?” He’s got a fucking screw loose. And not just because there are a lot of federal workers in his state. But because his state couldn’t have existed, as a state, without massive federal intervention and federal spending. They’ve been sucking at the teat of the US government ever since they had to use federal troops to secure the state against its original inhabitants and the new tribes we forcibly settled there. Fuck those randian supermen who came sobbing to daddy and mommy when they couldn’t get their free land hand outs.
aimai
OzoneR
Americans; Looking gift horses in the mouth since 1776.
jwb
“Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization.” That’s a great line. But it’s not just editing, it’s the reality programing that edits for some clichéd, preferably melodramatic story but presents itself as unvarnished reality. In that respect, American politics is today nothing other than entertainment, the granddaddy of all reality shows.
Chris
And that’s why we have no military, just fifty state militias that the Invisible Hand brings together in the spirit of Americanness whenever they’re needed.
And that’s why capitalist economies are exclusively made up of small, localized businesses, because large, world-spanning conglomerates based in Atlanta or Seattle could never “work” as profitably of efficiently as the mom-and-pop shop around the corner.
Hell, it’s why we stuck to the Articles of Confederation instead of “centralizing” ourselves with one constitution or some bullshit.
Pray continue, Mr. Hager.
Bob L
Hey, I work for a defense contractor and none of my libertarian coworkers made the connection until I pointed out the obvious.
And its not just an American thing too – I am reading about Napoleon and the book was pointing out how Napoleon’s policies brought a worse economic crises on for the French than the one that brought down Louis the XIV and most of the French still cheered him. A large group of the population makes their mind up and facts be damned.
WereBear
No, see, in modern life, you can get along fairly well without a clue.
Not a single one!
Maude
It seems that this discussion has happened before and it went around in circles.
The two people quoted are full of it.
You can always tell when someone is trying to pull the woll over your eyes or they haven’t the faintest idea what they are talking about.
The two quotes show two people who are self superior. Noe of this, they believe will hurt them. They are sheltered and protected and can spout nonsense all day long. They do not care about other people.
Nixon was a lawyer.
David in NY
“Centralized anything doesn’t really work,”
Tell it to General Eisenhower, ca. June, 1944.
Edit: Oh, well, Chris said it first, sort of.
Omnes Omnibus
@Maude: Just off hand, what does Nixon have to do with this?
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
The rise of wingnut lawyers has had a huge negative impact on normal metrics of human freedom. From a practical standpoint, what it has really done has been to impact decisions at a trial court level, as the pool of judges to rule for the status quo has markedly increased. Gone are the days when a trial court would rule against precedent – now, they slavishly follow it, even as our conservative activist judiciary makes further decisions whittling away at the ability of the individual to confront corporations, police or government puritans.
Keith G
First, I have run across some lawyers who were really stupid people. Second, 30 years of constant messaging pays off – government is bad.
So far, the post Bill Clinton Demoratic party has zilch messaging skills. So by default, government is bad.
From Both Sides
Just to pile on – that lawyer’s attitude is not unusual. The most right wing individual I deal with on a regular basis is a personal injury/accident attorney in California. He hates the centralized government that built the roads his clients use – and hates the government that imposed the safety regulations his firm uses to win cases. Top it off, he’s out of San Diego, which is so dependent on federal dollars. It’s as if having the smarts (or other… attributes) to earn a law degree somehow removes any social or economic responsibilities or ties to reality.
kdaug
And so the widening gyre widens yet more.
Y’all hear about the gamma ray burst headed for earth?
Best quote: “The best explanation at the moment is that we happen to be looking down the barrel of this jet”
cleek
that’s exactly what it is. people know certain things about the world: government is bad, smaller government is best, less spending is a virtue unto itself, the personal income taxes of the wealthy influence how they make hiring decisions for their business, etc.. these are incontrovertible. and so, our minds massage new data to defend the things we already know.
also, big government is bad and less spending is always good, but the giant military bases that fund much of rural America are OK because … the military is great! so great that the GOP just expanded Obama’s military budget instead of reducing it, and that’s OK!
Zifnab
This isn’t completely impractical. European nation-states haven’t been doing so bad as American states. Germany and Texas are comparable in size. There’s no logistical reason I can think of that would prohibit Texas from self-governing the same way Germany does.
Luxembourg and Monaco and Iceland continue to exist, through good economic times and bad, despite not having some central government ruling over the three of them.
Of course, then your definition of “centralized government” is subject to change. Is the Germany parliament more or less “centralized” than the US Congress? How about the Texas State Congress? How about the Austin City Council? At what point are we at the “local” government level? What benefits are we expected to derive from this more localized government and how can we measure them?
I haven’t seen much serious, concrete analysis. Maybe Oklahoma could get by just fine without the Feds, if they just rejigger their tax policy or their spending priorities. I’d love to give them a shot. It’s not like Oklahoma brings us a whole bunch of national pride.
OzoneR
@Keith G:
the era of big government is over
Maude
@Omnes Omnibus:
I hit submit by mistake and meant to take that out. AL said she was suprized a lawyer wouldn’t want to know the source of stuff. I don’t rate lawyers on a high level. They go to school and pass a Bar exam. It’s like Bush was a MBA.
It doesn’t matter if someone is a lawyer. Look at Nixon. He broke laws and didn’t care.
aimai
@From Both Sides:
The whole notion of a “meritocracy” and the lack of class consciousness in the US helps people who were–in Ann Richards memorable phrase about George Bush “Born on third…thinks he hit a triple.” There are people who will absolutely tell you with a straight face that their parents “never gave them anything” apprently under the impression that being born in a nice, upper class neighborhood, going to the right schools, having your teeth straightened, regular checkups, good roads, dancing lessons, and tutoring is “nothing” and that they got wherever they got by their own hard work. Not like those lower class, inner city, non white people who used affirmative action to…what? Unless the government stepped in and gave every newborn child 240,000 dollars to be spent solely on their enrichment there’s no affirmative action that can make up for class/race/luck.
aimai
jayackroyd
Fallows point though, is that this state of affairs is not new.
And do keep in mind there is a massive disinformation campaign going on–from Fox promoting one set of false messages to the Village elite, promoting theirs. (“jobs? what jobs? The country is broke.”
Chris
@aimai:
Is it just me, or do they really sound like the Marxists of a hundred years ago? The guys who believed that if you could just do away completely with the system as it exists right now, then the State would fade away, society would be self-governing and everything was going to be all right?
Weird that their ponies-and-rainbows utopians would sound so much like ours just one century ago.
cleek
is there any job which more relies on the practitioner’s skill at persuasively sidestepping inconvenient facts than Lawyer ?
Bob
ppcli
@Bob L: Unless you’re referring to the Fronde, which didn’t really bring down the young Louis XIV, I would assume you mean “brought down Louis XVI”. But it is true that the economic crisis that eventually consumed Louis XVI had its source-waters in the out-of-control military adventurism and deficit spending of Louis XIV. I’ve often been struck by the similarities between the arrogant policies of the Sun King and those of the idiot Son who became king.
rea
@Yevgraf (fka Michael):
“Gone are the days when a trial court would rule against precedent – now, they slavishly follow it”
Actually, the wingnut judge are hellbent on trashing precedent and remaking law in their own image.
Villago Delenda Est
The ability to see the big picture, and the interconnectedness of everything…the ecology of society, as it were…seems to be in drastic decline. If a lawyer, who presumably has been trained to understand these sort of concepts, doesn’t see that his very professional existence hinges on government’s own existence, can’t see this, then we really are doing a shitty job of training lawyers.
Steve
@Keith G: This is not a recent development. Go read Perlstein’s book on Barry Goldwater, particularly the parts where he talks about the proud, independent Arizona mentality. The West has always been a huge recipient of federal tax dollars and they have always hated the federal government.
The root cause here is not “30 years of anti-government messaging,” it’s that people really, really want to believe that they succeeded on their own merits. Good luck bursting that bubble.
aimai
@Chris:
My great grandfather was an anarchist. A real, live, breathing anarchist who founded two anarchist communes. Those guys followed Kropotkin and they knew they were experimenting with a new way of living (which didn’t work out, sadly, and his book “Quest for Heaven” is very funny about it with a chapter called “nuts and fruits” about all the weird people who joined the commune). Ditto the early Marxists–they were trying to do something that had never been done before and priviliging theory over history.
But these guys aren’t exactly doing that. They think they are already living in a world where the federal government “Doesn’t do anything” and “does’nt have any effect” on their lives. They think you could shut down the FAA and planes would still fly safely (ok, bad example), that a lone cattle rancher could get access to international beef markets without a federal government doing some inspecting and guaranteeing for them. That the rancher could get his food to market without federal roads. etc…etc…etc… They are more like toddlers who think “snack time” is a magical fact of nature rather than something that happens because parents and teachers make it happen.
aimai
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
Sorta sounds like the Libertarians, doesn’t it? The people who worship property, but don’t have the slightest clue that property as a concept is a function of the state.
Or do they all plan on becoming hunter-gatherers on the plains, chasing bison about?
PeakVT
“It’s not so much that American public life is more idiotic,” Jill Lepore said, referring to both press coverage and the public discussion it spawns. “It’s that so much more of American life is public.
I don’t think that’s right with respect to political discourse. (It’s certainly true with respect to the lives of celebrities and the sub-average Joes on Cops.) Instead, I think the torrent of information we receive today – some of it right but very complicated, and a lot of it merely truthy-sounding – has made too many people think they are experts when they definitely aren’t. With their new-found confidence, fewer people are willing to defer to experts, who in themselves have become less honest and more ideological. So, we’re no dumber, but we think we are smarter. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect on a continent-wide scale.
Roger Moore
@Bob L:
It’s not just facts be damned. They deliberately keep themselves ill informed so they don’t have to encounter facts that might conflict with their preexisting worldview. It’s very hard to educate somebody who had deliberately shut his own mind.
PreservedKillick
No need to burst it, just pull back government subsidies and watch what happens. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll be damn quick.
kdaug
@aimai: Ding. Aimai, where should we ship your internet prize to? Spot-fucking-on.
Legalize
You know … morons.
Omnes Omnibus
@Maude: I would take issue with AL’s premise that lawyers, as a rule, are apex predators. As you suggest. lawyers have done well well enough in school and on tests to get into a law school. Most are probably above average in intelligence (by any standard measurement), but it does not take more than that and some hard work to get through law school and pass the bar. Lawyers, however, given the nature of legal education can have a significantly greater understanding of legislative processes and political machinations than others, but it does not automatically follow that passing the bar gives greater insights in much other than the law of the state in which one is licensed.
jwb
@Zifnab: I think most of the states would be able to muddle through. There would be the loss of a lot of efficiencies that come from being one country. My guess is that the Northeast and California would probably benefit the most, the South and underpopulated interior states would fare the worst. But, yes, hostility would simply transfer from the current Federal level to the state level, because people seem not to believe that things like roads, cops, teachers and even basic governmental tracking of numbers cost serious money; and that most of us would not be able to do our jobs in anything like the form they currently exist without a fairly high level of government involvement.
Dennis SGMM
@aimai:
I think of people who hold those beliefs as Goldfish: “What is this ‘water’ you speak of?”
Stillwater
@Chris:
But you left out the argument – condensed as it is – for justifying the speakers view here:
This is an example of the self-serving denial of facts and evidence coupled with the sociopathic rejection of normal morality that defines today’s conservatives.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@aimai:
It’s a difference between trying to live a theory and live a belief. True pioneers, true idealists, true scientists, etc., etc….they try to live a theory, fully aware that they’ll encounter the unknown.
What we mostly have now are folks living beliefs, and utterly rejecting anything that doesn’t neatly fit into it, and making the rest suffer for it.
kdaug
@ppcli: Parallel narratives, much?
Chris
@ppcli:
Since you bring the Fronde up, what I’ve been struck with are the similarities between it and American politics in the last two years.
Government needs to raise taxes to pay down deficits from the previous government’s wars. Nobles use their power and influence to direct the tax burden away from themselves and onto the commoners. Nobles then stir up the unhappy commoners into a revolt against the throne. Nobles lead the revolt, and use it to reconquer the privileges they’d lost under Richelieu.
Cause popular anger, ride it back into power and then leave the people exactly where they started except maybe a little worse off: sound familiar at all?
jrg
@PreservedKillick:
This. It’s truly stomach-churning to read about these fucking ingrates, particularly during tax season.
Keith G
@OzoneR: “I did not have sex with that woman”
He meant both with equal sincerity.
mclaren
And we have our new Balloon-Juice front page tagline!
“A personally abusive and textually violent blog”
kdaug
@aimai:
OK. Awesome. And stoled.
Elia Isquire
@aimai: Yeah, I think this is the right take. I also–perhaps evincing my silliness–give people more credit than some might, and rather than thinking guys like this lawyer are crazy or ignorant, I think they’re full of shit. I think it’s defensive and resentful and couched in faux-naive language; but this level of willful ignorance (especially coming from someone who, ostensibly, had to spend years studying government) is a cover for what’s really a noxious and reactionary worldview. I have much more sympathy for working class people who spout these kinds of glibertarian platitudes — they don’t exactly have the time to read the Federalist Papers, etc.
JGabriel
Oklahoma. Alabama. Mississippi. South Carolina. Alaska. Louisiana. West Virginia. North Dakota. South Dakota. Kentucky. Montana. Missouri. Tennessee. Idaho. Arizona. Kansas. Wyoming. Nebraska.
What do these 18 states have in common? They each bitch routinely, consistently, and frequently about federal taxes — and they each get back 10% to 102% MORE from the feds than they pay in.
If we’re gonna cut the budget, I say we start with funds allocated to projects in those states. My state — which gets back from the feds 21% LESS than we pay in — is sick and tired of paying out our own good money to a bunch of greedy, selfish, Republican (but I repeat myself), whiny ass titty babies who don’t appreciate a good thing when they’ve got it.
.
Omnes Omnibus
@Elia Isquire: I agree that most of the people expounding on the virtues of smaller government are using that language to cover up for the fact that they are IGMFY people at heart.
Dennis SGMM
@PreservedKillick:
Considering that most Red States (Save for Texas, IIRC) get back more money from the gov than they pay in, a malicious part of me thinks that it would be hilarious to allow them to secede.
Villago Delenda Est
Pretty much how so many “free market” fans don’t get that the market is a social construct, not a force of nature. If they’d bother to actually READ AND COMPREHEND Adam Smith, they’d understand that. But of course they don’t.
Redshift
@aimai:
Paraphrasing from an anthropology lecture I was listening to Ms. Redshift prepare last night: “Anthropologically, an ideology is a belief system that explains and justifies why a society is not egalitarian.”
Yeah.
Haiwei
Obama should propose another base closure and realignment commission (BRAC), and target at least $25 billion in annual savings.
Most of the useless bases we have left at this point are in fucktard country, and – hey – those voters demand smaller government.
Next item on the list should be farm subsidies, and then oil industry subsidies.
Chris
@aimai:
I see what you mean.
Early Marxists and anarchists thought they could bring about a better, utopian form of society. The current crop of nuts thinks we already live there and only need to get rid of a few things to go back to a state of perfection.
Maude
@Omnes Omnibus:
You put that so well.
It’s like people who become famous and all of a sudden they know everything.
It’s pretense and I despise pretense.
300baud
@Chris:
I agree the lawyer’s a dunce, but I think you overstate your case here. What large companies seem to be good at is being large. That has a lot of economic benefits (ranging from easy capital access to monopoly rents to
bribery ofsupport of politicians to mass media use), but it’s not clear those benefits accrue to us regular citizens. McDonald’s may be more efficient than the local restaurants it drove out of business, but efficient at what, and at what cost?Also, I’m not convinced that the proportion of direct federal activity is maximally efficient. I suspect we’d be better off if a lot of federal spending were shifted to the state and local level. There are circa 700,000 citizens and $8bn in spending per US Rep. That makes them insensitive to (and unaccountable for) all but the largest problems. I’d personally rather deal with my alderman, who I’ve met and to whom my vote matters a lot more.
ppcli
OK, I will be the first to admit that I really don’t understand the nuts and bolts of how actual governing works. No doubt my remarks are naive and overlook all sorts of practical obstacles. But when I read stuff like this, I just can’t keep from asking: Why doesn’t Obama (or his designated hatchet-man) go to whoever are the congress-baggers for Oklahoma city and environs and just say: Look, you want to rave about cutting everything? The first thing to go is going to be that FAA centre. Also, half of the functions of that Air Force base will be transferred elsewhere, along with half the personnel, assuming we can’t just close it altogether and move its functions elsewhere. Say the tea party loons demand $1 billion in cuts. Write a budget that saves all sorts of loot by eliminating every single red-state boondoggle. Target every district that elected someone like Ryan with 70% of the vote. No more ethanol subsidy. NASA functions in Huntsville Alabama and Houston cut, and moved closer to CalTech or MIT. That goddamn FAA thing in Oklahoma city closed and moved to just outside Seattle. That factory in Böner’s district making weapons the Pentagon doesn’t want. GONE. Alaska’s status as Federal money magnet is over. They can pay for their own goddamn bridges to nowhere and under-used airports in the tundra.
And so on.
Then when the tea party howls, you can say: look, we’re talking about cutting TWICE as much as what you were talking about cutting. And we’re broke – you said so yourself. We can’t afford this factory in Redneckville Mississippi. Make it clear that if they aren’t going to genuinely cooperate to face problems realistically, they and the fantasyland voters who voted for them in droves will get a chance to taste the austerity they want for everyone else. I expect that many tunes would suddenly be changed.
OK, I know that this is just naïveté talking, and ignorance of the ways of the world. But I can’t help thinking that this is what LBJ and Sam Rayburn would have done.
mac
You hear that, Steve Jobs?
Xecky Gilchrist
In all seriousness, Schoolhouse Rock taught me more about civics than the typical American seems to know. It’s time to get some more of those going to teach about how the government actually works (the good early kind like “I’m just a bill”, not the later ones like the incoherent “Tax Man Max.”)
Poopyman
@aimai:
I think this is an awesome analogy, and I’m going to remember it for as long as my little brain will let me.
Also, it’s not just a truism that half of the population is of below–average intelligence.
Sko Hayes
I live in the middle of farming and ranching country, and the cognitive disconnect of these farmers and ranchers and their dependence on the government to provide certain services, while at the same time crying that we don’t need government, is truly awesome.
Some examples:
A woman who is diagnosed with cancer and applying for SS disability. Her employer health care (subsidized by tax payer dollars) pays for her cancer treatments.
A rancher who depends on federally inspected plants to sell his beef on the global market, and depends on federally subsidized crops to keep his feed cheap.
A farmer who depends on crop subsidies, crop insurance (subsidized by the Feds) and also has about 5000 acres enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (in which the government pays farmers to not grow crops on highly erodible acres).
Nah, they don’t need government out here!
Villago Delenda Est
No, they’d just adopt a new tune: “The Kenyan Islamofascist is terrorizing us!”
Roger Moore
@Haiwei:
Can we gut the oil industry subsides before the farm subsidies, please. Farmers aren’t actively undermining climate science the way the oil industry is.
BruinKid
I’m just confused now. I was feeling better after seeing ABL’s piece on what’s actually being cut, but now there’s talk of Obama allowing for cuts to appease the GOP in raising the debt ceiling.
Now, if those cuts are of a similar kind ABL had written about, that’s one thing. But now that people have written about the specific cuts, and once the GOP realizes what happened, you think we can do that again to them for the debt ceiling vote?
Can’t we just all agree to mock the everloving shit out of Jon Kyl for his epic lie about Planned Parenthood funding?
ROFL!
Bulworth
I’m sure he does. What he and other feeders at the federal trough want is for the fed gov to cut all the trillions of dollars spent each year giving strapping young bucks steaks and Caddies.
Cermet
@Zifnab: You overlook that even these tiny countries have equivalent “state” levels of government and city/county levels of government, too; just like us – their bureaucracy is not any different from ours on these levels and they still have their local national Government, still. But now they have yet another level of government above the national level – the EC Union! Here is your analysis on the subject and it really does not merit more than this superficial treatment – this nation state on a small scale in Europe has just lead to more levels. Maybe an Africian country would be a better comparison.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yep, exactly. Though they don’t usually talk about it out loud, conservatives who receive government money tend to believe *they* deserve it, because X.
All that bullshit about how unionized workers, poor people, immigrants and minorities supposedly have “special privileges” is there in no small part to justify that: they believe everyone else is cheating, so they need to as well in order to stay afloat. Or at least they pretend to believe it or allow themselves to believe it, because the alternative involves admitting that they’re really a bunch of leeches too, no different from that supposed welfare queen in Harlem.
catclub
@Roger Moore: “Farmers aren’t actively undermining climate science the way the oil industry is.”
But they are doing their best! Nitrogen fertilizer is made how?
SweetNostrils, fka Scuffletuffle
@OzoneR: Please make this a bumper sticker!
Stillwater
@BruinKid: I’m just confused now. I was feeling better after seeing ABL’s piece on what’s actually being cut, but now there’s talk of Obama allowing for cuts to appease the GOP in raising the debt ceiling.
Shorter BK: Sure he did the right thing last time, but that’s only evidence he really is out to F&@% us all!
catclub
@ppcli: “LBJ and Sam Rayburn would have done.”
The key point here is SAM RAYBURN. If you own the House and Senate, these things can be done. If not, then the House writes the LAWS to put them where THEY want them and you cannot arbitrarily move them.
I wish he could do what you suggest, too.
PreservedKillick
Since I live in a state that pays more out than we take in, I absolutely agree with you, it’s not at all maximally efficient. :)
Ever pointed out to a teabagger that the military could be readily seen as our single largest social program? Yowza.
300baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Let me make a partial defense of the notion that lawyers are apex predators. I don’t think that means they’re particularly gifted, just that they’re unusually dependent on the rest of the financial ecosystem.
Compare a farmer with a litigator. If the economy goes to hell, the farmer will certainly notice, but because they are directly productive, they’re in a good position. The main job of a litigator, on the other hand, doesn’t create wealth; they try to take it, or try to prevent other lawyers from taking it. In the same way it takes a large, healthy ecosystem to support a lot of tigers, it takes a large, healthy economy to support a lot of lawyers.
So in theory, this lawyer should be keenly interested in a vital economy, if only so he can continue to prey upon it.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
@rea:
The wingnut appellate judges do that, certainly. However, the judges at the trial court level are now either wingnut or are so terrified of being labeled as “librul activists” that they bend over backwards to follow the now firmly established body of wingnut precedent as if it were graven in stone by God above.
It was the double whammy. In the past, you could get a fairminded judge who’d be willing to buck the tide and put the onus on law enforcement or the corporation to file the appeals – in that environment, you actually have a shot of making it stick on an appeal. Now, it is always an uphill battle.
PurpleGirl
OT OT OT OT (but I can’t wait for an open thread)
Today is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. NASA has produced a video of a flute duet between Catherine Coleman (on the space station) and Ian Anderson (currently on tour in Russia). The link I’m providing is the Making Light‘s post on the anniversary.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012955.html#012955
Redhand
Pardon me, good Annie, but this ad hominum attack is a crock of shit. There are more Atticus Finches out there than you might think.
Admittedly this guy is an idiot, but as a lawyer myself I tire of this ‘tude. I don’t represent aliens in immigration matters for the big bucks, ditto laid off employees in bullshit denials of unemployment comp on “misconduct” grounds. Some of us actually give a damn about the people we represent.
Reserve “apex predator” for the wehore at places like Goldman Sachs, who deserve it.
joes527
@catclub:
bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Gentlemen: I give you the 111th Congress.
tehehehe…
mclaren
I think the right reads that quote as “A Republican, if you can keep him.”
Roger Moore
@catclub:
There’s a difference between using products that produce greenhouse gasses in their production and trying to convince people that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist. The former is something we all do, though we can make better attempts to avoid causing problems. The latter is outright evil and deserves to be smacked down as hard as possible.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@kdaug: Amen and amen.
Villago Delenda Est
@PreservedKillick:
In more ways that you’re thinking, I’d venture
Racial integration was pioneered by the military, back in the late 40’s. It set the stage for the changes wrought in the Civil Rights era. Furthermore, blacks and whites, fighting and dying for a futile cause in Vietnam, side by side, changed a lot of attitudes for the better, albeit at a horrendous price.
The military, for all of its many faults and inherent flaws, has the advantage of being a place where there are no options for its members in regards to a lot of social policy. Which is why the repeal of DADT is such a big deal. It is going to do for gays what it did for racial minorities. I don’t see straight, I don’t see gay, I just see green (Army version of the mantra).
Elizabelle
@PurpleGirl:
I’m enjoying today’s Google logo.
RIP Yuri Gagarin.
(And all those space dogs and chimps — Spam in a Can — too. Honors to space pioneers.)
Ash Can
@PurpleGirl: What a great little video! Thanks for sharing that link. Just delightful.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
Sorry, but the pathetic invertebrate life form called Harry Reid is no LBJ, not by a long shot.
Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, have much in common.
Chuck Butcher
@Cermet:
To continue your thought, I live in a small place – 10K pop – and we are not capable of dealing with the Fed programs that have local consequences. We do not have the resources in people or infrastructure to distribute or monitor such programs. At the State level, we are 2/3 of the state with hardly any population and the State and population centers see us as more of an annoyance than anything else – not the group you’d like to see in charge of more than they already are; if you live here…
PurpleGirl
@Elizabelle: Yes, the Google logo is really neat.
@Ash Can: Thank you. I thought BJers would like it.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
I agree on DADT. If conservatives lose the military, they pretty much lose America. DADT means they’re going to lose the military on that issue.
No apartheid in foxholes, the line from “Blood Diamond” went.
Omnes Omnibus
@300baud: On of the problems with this conceptualization is that you are describing a very small number of lawyers. Many are not litigators, but rather people who work to make systems run, putting deals together, providing business advice, and the like. Even among litigators, the number who fit your description is rather small. With litigation, it is not the lawyers, as rule, who are trying to take wealth form someone else, it is the clients.
Stillwater
One other thought on this:
If we know anything about Obama at this point, it’s that he prefers negotiation and consensus building to unilateral power plays. He did this most effectively – in my mind – with DADT repeal. And personally, I think he adopts this approach for very good reasons. Some people may not like that approach, preferring more Hammer Time, and they therefore unjustly criticize him for being ‘weak’ and ‘lacking leadership’. But I think those criticisms simply reduce to a desire to see unilateral displays of power that conform of a different and misguided stereotype of what ‘leadership’ actually is.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
Spam was not a product of the space program; it goes back at least to WWII. You may be thinking of Tang. Also, the space pen.
salacious crumb
the geriatric conservatives in my area of illinois are just like that lawyer. we will just fund enough to keep the military and they can rampage around the world to protect our freedoms (and oil), the old fucktards say. yup and they are all new Tea Party members
catclub
@joes527: Yeah, pwned. (Self-pwned)
But see my comments on Obama’s refusal to use anger (in some other thread). Obama, if not the rest of the democratic party, has done very well by NOT being an angry black man.
Heck, the US elected him president, why do Teabaggers think that he would hate the US?
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
Haven’t you read The Right Stuff? “Spam in a can” is what the test pilots out at Chuck Yeager central in the middle of the Mojave called the Mercury astronauts.
catclub
@Stillwater: I agree. I think Obama actually made LOTS of campaign speeches on just this topic. Most folks were too interested in the horse race to realize that he actually meant them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Fucking typos.
@Redhand: This.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Steve:
Correct, but I think there is a causal relationship between these two things. Dependency breeds resentment. And from military occupation and ethnic cleansing of the natives to modern water management heavily subsidized by other parts of the country, the American West has been massively dependent on the US Federal govt. It wouldn’t be out of line to call it a colony.
Captain Howdy
@300baud:
I think this is backwards. An apex predator is not dependent on any one species within an ecosystem, but many species within it are reliant on him or her (for stability, mainly).
Thus if the wolf dies out, that could cause an imbalance between competing species at a lower trophic level (or in the case of lawyers, a trough-ic level, ha)–rabbits and gophers, e.g., causing one to overrun the other. (Which could in turn cause a cascade effect at other trophic levels.)
I don’t think the analogy holds up very well with lawyers, although the argument can made that the whole system would be chaos without them.
kdaug
@Stillwater: Agreed.
Sly
@David in NY:
Tell it to the Framers of the Constitution, ca. Summer, 1787. This country started moving towards centralized government before the ink was even dry on the Articles of Confederation. It sped up dramatically after the 1860s and again after the 1940s, but the seeds were planted the moment the Framers agreed that a loose confederation of states was inadequate to the task of building and defending the nation.
And for good reasons that are plain to see today. We are the product of very intrusive and penetrative Federal policy, and there is no institution more effective at provoking socioeconomic change, likely in the history of human civilization, than the centralized state. Early Americans who were anxious about centralized authority were not anxious because they thought such a state didn’t work, they were anxious because they knew such a state worked extremely well. North Carolina Senator Nathaniel Macon said it best in 1818: “If Congress can make canals, they can with more propriety emancipate [slaves].”
Now as for Mr. Anarcho-Lawyer, though this isn’t clear in the article, irony demands that his practice focus primarily on corporate law, because I’m assuming “centralized anything doesn’t work” also applies to business.
soonergrunt
@Anne Laurie, top;
Forget it Jake, it’s
ChinatownOklahoma City.As someone who lives here and works at Tinker AFB, which is much more a collection of aircraft repair/refit factories than a military installation, and has a job interview with the VA tomorrow for a full-time government civilian job, I can honestly say that these people, like most people, want the government cut, they just don’t think that includes the government spending that benefits them.
OzoneR
@Stillwater:
What we need in this country is a head of state AND a head of government.
We sorta have that in that Reid and Pelosi should be the “head of government” and therefore should be the one making the power plays.
From Both Sides
@catclub:
This one writes itself; because all the people who elected him are closet islamofascistcommie traitor anchor-baby-whelping naturalized immigrants intent on destroying the country. How do you not know this? (/snark)
aimai
@soonergrunt:
I’ll keep a good thought for you, soonergrunt, on the job front.
aimai
Paul in KY
@jayackroyd: I voted for that dipwhack back in 1980. I was a silly young man.
rickstersherpa
First, they draw a big distinction between “the Federal Government” and the FAA, the Air Force, Social Security, and Medicare. In part, this is because the current generation of neoliberal Democrats find the connection with these programs somewhat embarassing and because the Republicans do their best to pretend that the military and these common, non-means tested programs, have nothing to do with the “Federal Government” (Ron Paul and Paul Ryan excepted, God Bless them. What is the “Federal Government?” Its the thing taking one’s tax dollars and giving to all those undeserving, sharia imposing, illegal Mexican immigrants and slum dwellers, with the left over going for Foreign Aid to even more undeserving foreigners.
aimai
@Redshift:
Redshift! No wonder I always like your comments. Great, great insight from Mrs. Redshift–go anthropology!
aimai
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’m not a big Harry Reid fan, but I think unflattering comparisons with LBJ are unfair. LBJ had an almost uniquely favorable situation to work with in the Senate, both while he was majority leader and later when he was in the WH.
Conservatives and Liberals were split between the two parties, so he could cobble together a voting bloc that was part ideological (pulling in liberal Republicans as well as liberal Dems) and part partisan (pulling in conservative Dems ). When you can get half of your votes because they want to vote that way and the other half of your votes because as members of the same party you have them by the balls on patronage issues, it is easy to win a lot of votes.
Since the Southern strategy caused a reshuffling of the partisan/ideological divide, it doesn’t work that way anymore. No post-1980 Senate leader is ever going to have the cards that LBJ held, so hankering for another LBJ is just going to drive you crazy.
Bob L
Argh, your right, the XVI (the guy who had the Revolution)
@ppcli:
Consider this line of consequences of the Sun King; The English Whig’s foreshadowing the NeoCons with their policy of constant war with France. This never ending war with England in turn help create fiscal crises that triggered the French Revolution. The French Revolution produced Napoleon, who was a nightmare version of the Sun King.
Makes you wonder how the Idiot Son will play out over the next century.
Sly
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think this is more a product of the technocratic mindset that a legal education often foists on members of the legal profession. As an admittedly anecdotal corollary, I think this is why most of the Objectivists I know are lawyers, as Objectivism is a fundamentally technocratic ideology. Incidentally, the Objectivists I know who aren’t lawyers are engineers, which is also a very technocratic profession.
Villago Delenda Est
@Sly:
Yeah, but to the wingtards and the teahadists, they have a fantasy version of the Founding Fathers who were all holy-rolling Jeebofascist smacktards who were going to start a jihad on the Islamists as soon as they took care of the Injuns.
The actual Founding Fathers were mostly what these cretins would call, with sneering disdain, ‘liberals’.
Nethead Jay
@soonergrunt: Good luck with the interview. Just a little warning though, the VA can be a mixed bag. There are absolutely wonderful people and places in there, but also some very crappy ones. I know people who have had to fight desperately to get the necessary help. But I imagine you know that. Still, fingers crossed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sly: I don’t disagree with that.
ppcli
@Villago Delenda Est:
OK, OK, good point. Granted. But since they’re saying this anyway, we might as well try to ensure that reality makes at least one of the things they say true. It’s the least we can do.
Sly
@Villago Delenda Est:
I never said American conservatives actually knew their own history. My general observation is that that they don’t. Of course, I don’t think the American left knows much of its own history, either, but at least they tend to have a workable knowledge of it, even if it tends to be oversimplified.
This actually provides cultural advantages. When you don’t know your own history, you can rewrite it to explain and justify present desires. It’s bullshit, but it’s powerfully effective bullshit.
The Founders weren’t really liberal, either. They fell along a fairly narrow spectrum (in the totality of European politics, anyway) that, if you think about it, served to create the fundamental distinctions between the American right and the American left. That’s kind of the beauty of the Declaration of Independence… it’s a document that can just as easily be claimed by both sides, in large part because it is a reflection of their mutual origins.
ppcli
@soonergrunt: My wife works as a physician for the VA. She loves that organization and so do I. Good luck with the interview!
Villago Delenda Est
@Sly:
They rejected the notion of the Divine Right of Kings. And of a hereditary aristocracy.
That was pretty radical at the time.
You forget that the wingtards on a fundamental level reject the very concept of the Enlightenment…and the United States is very much a product of the Enlightenment.
This is an inherent contradiction, one among many, that American “conservatives” doublethink away.
jim filyaw
to put it in a nutshell: “keep your government hands off my medicare”
paul ryan: “my pleasure”
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Bill Maher to the Tea Party Movement: “I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing: while you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them, and smell like them, I think it’s pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would have hated your guts. And what’s more, you would’ve hated them. They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris and thought the Bible was mostly bullshit.”
@Sly:
I’ll buy that they weren’t actually liberals in the sense that we understand the word today. On the other hand, as VDE says, I find it perfectly plausible that they’re the kind of people the teabaggers of today would sneeringly dismiss as liberals, elitists, and intellectuals without a second thought.
mclaren
Anyone who has ever dealt with lawyers knows they’re the most pig-ignorant motherfuckers on the planet. These people couldn’t figure out how to empty a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.
Lawyers are almost (not quite, but almost) as hoeplessly ignorant and clueless and doctors.
A lawyer is a kid who’s just smart enough in grade school to throw the teacher’s question back at her confusingly enough that she doesn’t realize he never read the assignment. When asked “When was America discovered?” a future lawyer sneers “Do you mean North America or South America?” and then wastes so much time haggling and squabbling and quibbling about irrelevant minutia that the teacher gives up and asks another student.
Sly
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah, they rejected British Toryism in particular and, incidentally, the worst insult you could possibly hurl at someone between ~1780 and ~1820 was to call them a Tory, because it put them outside the spectrum of acceptable political thought. And even today, conservatives don’t have all that much love for Toryism (Sullivan being the notable exception, but largely because he’s culturally British). If there is any British root to American conservativism, it comes from the more conservative elements of British Whiggism. But I think the lion’s share comes from the death of Toryism.
As for the Enlightenment, its important to note that the Enlightenment was not a uniform political ideology; you had Enlightenment writers who you could call leftist, like Thomas Paine, and ones who were more conservative, like David Hume. The Enlightenment left was much more popular in early America than the Enlightenment right, though not exclusively, and I think this is why “Enlightenment ideals” never really took hold among American conservatives.
To demonstrate further; Hamilton, for instance, loved David Hume and the conservative Enlightenment, but no side really claims Hamilton today. That’s one of the larger ironies of American political thought; the American state is extremely Hamiltonian in character, yet the neither the modern right nor the modern left don’t have much love for the man. Some people on the “intellectual right” do, like Brooks, but you’re not going to win acclaim from conservatives by saying what a great guy Alexander Hamilton was.
Bill Section 147
@aimai: This.
I am reminded of all the hoo-hah over Christmas and how it has ‘lost its way’ by a bunch of people who think Christmas when they were 10 is what Christmas ‘used’ to be like. They seem to be unaware that when they were 10 they saw everything through 10-year-old eyes.
Almost everybody they knew went to the same or a similar church, celebrated Christmas the same way and all that food and family and gift stuff was magic.
Well all that Federal stuff is like their parents: assembling and wrapping gifts while they sleep; cooking while they play with their new toys; doing the dishes while they play with their new toys; and cleaning up their mess and all the wrapping paper.
They moan that Dems want a ‘nanny state’ while they enjoy the real invisible hand of the parent state.
Sly
@Chris:
I fully agree, but only to the extent that the historical development of American political ideologies is an incredibly complex subject. For conservatives, who ironically position themselves as the champions of tradition, this development has a very clear narrative because that is what they need to justify present beliefs.
I don’t particularly like harping on this, but you see this among members of the modern American left, too. No where near the degree to which it occurs on the right, but there are some disturbing commonalities. The biggest one I tend to notice is the canonization of ideological saints, especially in terms of past Presidents. For instance, I bet there are quite a few liberals who never thought the left would ever start to re-embrace LBJ. Their draft cards are still smoldering.
Comrade Dread
I think there is an assumption that if they gut the Federal government, the State and Local governments or the free market will immediately be able to step into the gap and take over those functions for less money or something.
Look, Randian philosophy is heavy on making assumptions about human nature that are extremely impractical and stupid if you tried to apply them to real life.
Davis X. Machina
@Steve:
Left-liberalism has some real marketing problems when it comes to the self-concept of the potential customers.
By implication, you’re selling the message that one needs others, even strangers, to flourish, even perhaps to survive; that others, even strangers, have a valid claim on some of your time and treasure; that there exist actual problems beyond one’s power to solve alone, or beyond even one’s immediate tribal community to solve.
That’s a tough sell, especially in certain quarters, which helps to explain the persistent gender gap.
Socialist universalism, and les ouvrieres n’ont pas la patrie, evaporated in 1914 as soon as mobilization was ordered. Rival tribalisms competed — the Proletariat v. The Nation — and The Nation won.
Sly
@Comrade Dread:
Disagree. The assumption is that they don’t benefit from government at all.
catclub
@Paul in KY: I didn’t!
I told my grandparents (who lurved him) in 82 (in my mature genius phase) that he would wreck the economy. Mostly wrong in the short term – far too right in the longer.
Chris
@Sly:
Didn’t completely understand that – the lion’s share of what?
Chris
@Sly:
Also – so, back in the day, when the original divide was Federalists vs Jeffersonians, what were the roots of that in Britain? Were there any? Could you trace them back to a political divide or to political parties in Britain, or were they pretty much just fresh American products?
Just asking: my knowledge of pre-Civil War American politics isn’t too strong, and my knowledge of British politics very weak, and you seem to know way more about both.
uptown
The economy sucks, so people are paying more attention.
BTW – some really great comments in this thread. Worth reading through them.
Paul in KY
@catclub: We’re talking about Rep. Anderson, right?
Nellcote
@Xecky Gilchrist:
We should petition PBS to run Schoolhouse Rock again.
Anne Laurie
@Redhand:
No, no, apex predators — lions, tigers, wolves & bears — are good. They’re a key part of a thriving ecology, and the quality of the predator community is a strong indicator of the health of the entire ecosystem. But it takes a lot of zebras to keep a lion pack fed, and if those lions are going to stay fed, they need to be smart enough to hunt where the zebras are, rather than sitting in a comfortable spot assuming the zebras will eventually stumble over them.
The Goldman-Sachs people aren’t predators, they’re parasites. Thus the ‘vampire’ in ‘vampire squid’ :)
soonergrunt
@Anne Laurie: I was about to say, there’s a huge difference between predators and parasites. Predators only kill what they can eat. They do this because hunting and stalking takes a LOT of energy, so predators go out, hunt, miss, hunt, miss, hunt, kill-eat-eat-eat, sleep. Parasites sit and eat and sit and eat and sit and eat and sit and eat…