The Limits of Left Neo-Liberalism

I wonder what J Quiggin thinks about this. But to me, the self-assurance that there’s some non-neoliberal miracle formula for political sustainability seems refuted by the fact that the pre-neoliberal paradigm in the United States was not, in fact, politically sustainable. So while I think the critique has force, it applies pretty broadly across the board. I

If you ignore the fact that labor unions have been under attack at least since Reagan, Matthew Yglesias might have a point. B

@1, what are you replying to; who said anything about ‘sustainability’?

I’m puzzled as to what “the pre-neoliberal paradigm in the United States” might refer to, and whether or not it really stands in direct opposition to a “neoliberal paradigm,” inasmuch as Henry and Henwood have a strong claim that neoliberalism, particularly in its left-technocratic strain, conspicuously lacks an articulation of the kind of mass politics that might support it.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “weak theories of politics, and in particular the politics of collective action”. Are you using the terms in some technical sense or in their normal meaning? Because in their normal meaning it would seem that neo-liberals have a theory of politics, they just see it as largely instrumental. And they have theories of collective action, but they mistrust populist movements (which is how many large scale unions function and see also the Tea Party). Technocratic and populist don’t always go well together. So to the extent that “neoliberal” suggests “technocratic” it may very well be for serious spending, better labor laws, job programs and infrastructure spending depending on what is seen as the cost/benefit analysis, but it will be at least slightly mistrustful of populist appeals i.e–racial group appeals, nationalist appeals, and class based populism.

It seems to me that “left” neoliberalism has long discarded unions as a positive political force, thus speeding up their demise in American politics. In other words, Henry sees an error where I assume a deliberate choice.

@6

I think it should be made substantially easier to organize labor unions in the United States. I do doubt that this is the political or economic panacea that some people seem to think it is, but it’s nonetheless a fundamental social and political right that far too many people are denied.

I can’t believe the price of Raymond Plant’s Neo-Liberal State, doubtless the most important political theoretic work on neo liberal politics. But it’s a book that this site should probably feature, and its political theorists doubtless know. It is the political theory of social democracy robustly defended.
*
Yet the question of QE3 is on the table. Who’s for it? Who’s against it?
*
The case against ultra-low rates has been made best by Raghu Rajan, a pretty conservative guy. He argues that they hurt small savers, don’t stimulate investment, create property bubbles at home and turn the US into an unstable hedge fund (low Fed rates leads to capital making risky investments abroad leads to foreign governments reversing currency appreciation by buying US debt–so that US investments abroad are financed by short-term liabilities as in a hedge fund).

Krugman has said that the solution for this is not ultra-low rates but anti-bubble policies abroad.

Stiglitz has warned that ultra low US Fed rates move the world towards currency wars.

I’ve never understood this criticism of “technocratic solutions”. Successful social programs generate their own constituency. Nations which implement universal healthcare programs tend not to abandon them. In the US, social security and medicare have proven far more resilient than private sector unions. It is much harder to attack broad-based social programs in which the average citizen can see tangible benefits from government that a union movement that can always be accused of looking out for the interests of its members at the expense of everyone else.

“You also think that managers and executives should be able to ignore or break labor contracts at will – for example, with teachers’ unions – which renders the concept of “organizing a labor union” somewhat meaningless.”

I don’t think he says that. He says that we shouldn’t cave to teacher’s union demands for pure seniority hiring for example. And quite probably, the way teacher’s unions have functioned in the US education establishment provides excellent examples of why populist movements aren’t trusted by neo-liberals.

16:Is it a claim that unions and other populist/nationalist demands for jobs and economic security were really premised upon some form of white supremacy

I believe many young Democrats believe exactly this, with additions for sexism and homophobia etc.

WHY does the technocratic neoliberal left assume that it is simply “obvious” that the pre-neoliberal paradigm was a hopeless model after the 1970s/1980s?

Because it’s very convenient for them to ignore the fact that their ideological soulmates of earlier eras were actively attacking that “paradigm” from the time of Kennedy (when the political bargains that ultimately resulted in shipping massive numbers of manufacturing jobs overseas had their roots), let alone Reagan (and by the way, Carter, the first openly neoliberal Democratic President, broke a lot of the ground that Reagan continued to work.) Why, it’s just a fact of nature, nobody could have known, etc. The patient just died of natural causes, you see.

In the absence of an actual argument, I think MY is probably just inferring “unsustainable” from “wasn’t actually sustained”, which is clearly fallacious. Could a different political strategy have sustained the New Deal settlement for longer? I don’t know. But given that other countries have done a better job of sustaining some kind of welfare-state capitalism, I remain unconvinced of its impossibility even for the US.

> Yglesias @10
> I’m agreeing that this is a problem, but doubting whether there’s
> a clearly superior non-neoliberal alternative.

Would be interested to hear exactly what positive, “going forward” [1] positions neoliberals DO hold. I fear that in the 2 years since a number of A-list juicebox bloggers converted to this line of analysis I have been put in mind of the definition of a libertarian: a Republican who wants to date liberal women.

Cranky

[1] I apologize for the consultant-speak phrase; neoliberals love that stuff though.

Easy money is really a cowardly substitute for redistribution

Otoh, as cowardly substitutes for redistribution go, it’s distinctly better than nothing.

Could a different political strategy have sustained the New Deal settlement for longer? I don’t know. But given that other countries have done a better job of sustaining some kind of welfare-state capitalism, I remain unconvinced of its impossibility even for the US.

And from a more-to-the-right perspective, I don’t see that. If you take the New Deal settlement to be the salient features of the 1950’s-1960’s job market–plenty of work at one-income-can-support-a-family wages, upward mobility for the working class, and social goods provided primarily to the (white) working class–I don’t see any of the Western economies sustaining that since 1980.

They’ve broken at different points; the US focus has been on plenty of work, the French focus on good wages, the Dutch focus on redistribution mainly to the working class–but in all of the US and Western Europe, there is a strong sense that the wroking class has gotten worse off relative to all 3 of: the upper class, the unemployed or marginally employed, and people in other countries. I’d argue that the last two of those were not legitimately avoidable.

This absolutely galls me but I don’t want to be a troll so I will just write this once because I have to go to work and run new water lines to a laundry sink anyhow.

To me this is like a discussion of what sort of world we need, so that the politics we prefer should be effective.

Henry you write, “I’m sure that critics can point to political blind spots among lefties (e.g. the difficulties in figuring out what is a necessary compromise, and what is a blatant sell-out), but these don’t seem to me to be potentially crippling, in the way that the absence of a neo-liberal theory of politics…is.”

I cannot begin to EXHAUST political blind spots among lefties! They were demonstrated continuously throughout the healthcare reform debate.

And lefties are not paying attention, right now.

Look at what should happen, RIGHT NOW: Obama should insist upon his “big deal” on the budget, which includes long-term tax increases, because that would compel the Republican leadership to whip the Tea Party House to vote in FAVOR of taxes.

And the Tea Party will do it but they are going to hate it, and THAT would destroy the Republican Party.

Why? Because it has put McConnell and Boehner on the horns of a terrible dilemma. They must either choose (1) default, which will destroy the GOP brand with voters, or else they must (2) whip the Tea House Party into a vote to increase taxes which the Teas will hate and it will cause a major and lasting split within the GOP.

(Please don’t respond with the gibberish that the Tea House Party is an uncontrollable monster that is intractable to Boehner. That is what he wants you to think. He wants you to feel “fear of default”.)

Either way it would mean the weakening and perhaps the destruction of the GOP, and make both life and policy considerably easier for several years to come.

So what are the liberals and progressives throughout Bloggonia doing? Whining as usual, about how Obama is selling them out.

What should they be doing? Leaning on members of Congress RIGHT NOW to reject McConnell’s alternative deal, and insist upon Obama’s grand plan.

Why? Because McConnell’s deal is a face-saving measure to save the Republican leadership from the Tea Party’s electoral wrath. What is McConnell’s plan?

Here is the Washington Post, today: “Washington Post, today (July 18) –“Under the plan, Obama would be able to raise the debt ceiling three times over the next year for a total of $2.5 trillion. Congress could also vote on a resolution of disapproval each time, assigning blame to Obama for increasing the nation’s debt….The plan would also create a new congressional panel that would, by the end of the year, seek to come up with a way of reducing the deficit potentially by trillions more through cuts in entitlements and other new tax revenue… While the debt-limit plan has broad support in the Senate, the prospects in the House are less clear and rely largely on whether House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) will bring the proposal up for a vote and how many House Democrats would support it since few Republicans are expected to get behind it.”

You can disregard that last phrase, you can bet that Boehner will bring it up for a vote in a heartbeat.

Do you understand the politics of this? Do you understand that the reason that the Senate Dems may throw McConnell and Boehner a face-saving lifeline (by accepting McConnell’s deal) isn’t because of some ridiculous neoclassical capitalist conspiracy but is simply because of the the tradition of collegiality among the Congressional leaders of both parties? Do you see that the only way to counteract this is to put pressure right now on Congressional Dems so they can turn to their colleagues across the aisle and say, “Sorry, but my constituents don’t want it?”

Now tell me what definition of the word “politics” are we talking about here? In the netherworld of “political sustainable” (because god knows you don’t like to work for it), — or in this world?

Matthew Yglesias when I wrote “at least since Reagan,” I meant, oddly enough, that the assault most likely came earlier.

Replying to Lee A. Arnold’s #32 would derail the thread on the definition of neoliberalism, so I won’t. But to me it is one of the most naive pieces of political analysis I have seen on a blog of the nature of CT in many years.

Cranky

Re Yglesias and schoolteachers: He does think that schoolteachers should make more money, even much more money. This is only an apparent exception to the rule I stated way back there somewhere, as he does not think anyone currently teaching school should make more money; he thinks they should all be fired and replaced by recent honor graduates of Ivy League universities. (Those fired can cut hair, a job for which anyone is qualified.)

There is an unstated assumption here that there is no job for which the best possible candidate would not be the valedictorian of the last graduating class at Harvard.

Thought maybe there is a special “Harvard” definition of “neoliberal,” it occurs to me? It’s a word the Harvard alums at n+1 like to throw around a lot, and tho they’re not exactly pro-business, pro-commercializing tendencies, they aren’t exactly pro-democratic tendencies either.

Steve,
My point (sorry, I am typing quickly because my laptop keeps crashing at inopportune times) was that they do not seem entirely sure whether there is a difference between “liberal” in the sense of “hippie” and “neoliberal.” It seems possible that they’ve heard a lot of neoliberal-bashing and have adopted the same from the right, though what they say is very like the neoliberal-bashing you get in progressive and left forums of various kinds.

SamChevre:

I had something a little more generic in mind, which is why I also referred to welfare-state capitalism, which has basically survived (though not unaltered) in lots of countries. I’m not sure I understand your metric about working-class well-being anyway. Why would it be a bad think for the working class if people in _other countries_ secured a higher standard of living and therefore closed the gap? Why is it definitive of welfare-state capitalism as a model that the gap be maintained? I don’t see it.

(Yglesias had a bit of weirdness on this today (or yesterday) also, or so I read him, by referring to China closing the living-standards gap as something people might “worry” about. I don’t think the worry was about the environmental impacts of higher consumption, either.)

Ah. It seems to me that Yglesias badly needs some backup here…

Henry’s theory of politics is that successful and beneficial long-run politics can only be accomplished by a political party that is the political arm of a *universal class*–of a self-confident, organized group whose collective material interest is in fact the public interest.

Adam Smith saw the improving landlords of Britain as the universal class. The merchants and manufacturers each had an interest in monopoly–they should be kept as far from power as possible. The urban and rural laboring classes were short-sighted and uneducated–they would sacrifice the future for the present. The crown, the aristocracy, and the executive were too interested in playing the negative-sum game of imperialist war and conquest–they needed to be curbed. Only the landlords, whose rents rose with general prosperity and fell with general penury, had the brains, the organization, the far-sightedness, and the material interest to pursue policies to better the condition of Great Britain. Thus the landlords should rule.

Karl Marx, of course, saw the industrial proletariat as the *universal class* in embryo.

Henry Farrell doesn’t say what his alternative proposed universal class is. Perhaps it is composed of, in rough order:

— Unions
— Public employees
— Technologists
— Celebrity entertainers
— Trial lawyers

But the argument that the Democratic Party should adopt the strategy of pursuing policies to enrich those six groups and hope that it all adds up to (a) the public interest and (b) long-run political dominance seems to me to be relatively weak.

Left neoliberal policies may well not produce.

But it is not clear to me that Henry’s alternative would produce either…

> doesn’t say what his alternative proposed universal class is. Perhaps
> it is composed of, in rough order:

Another possible set:

— academic economists — Wall Street economists — Princes of Wall Street — Secretary/Asst Secretaries of the Treasury — salaried CEOs — the US Chamber of Commerce

This is fun!

Cranky

Interesting indeed.

While he would not accept it, Raghuram Rajan seems to think the real universal class is composed of Hegelian disinterested civil servants (like him), sufficiently immunized from democratic pressures so that they can make investments for long-term growth in human capital above all else, instead of give in to the populist solution of easy credit.

Obviously he does not think the Fed is free from populist pressure.

Really like this interpretation of Adam Smith as the voice for improving landlords. It allows me to see the continuity in the Scottish Enlightenment from Smith to Richard Jones.

“I’m not sure this is the best place to get deep into teacher’s union history, but so far as it goes, you seem to be forgetting the ~40 year period, the most recent one, where school boards in such rather large states as Florida and California were almost completely dominated by the teacher’s union supported candidates, and as such were getting exactly what they wanted (with the possible exception of only getting their way on taxes about 3/4 of the time). This is the teacher’s union that young and middle aged Democrats are used to dealing with, and it isn’t pretty.”

Seriously?

Can you even describe how California schools are funded, and how local school boards can have any meaningful control over that? I mean, without immediately going to Wikipedia and looking up the relevant RTC sections and the many confusing and facially contradictory constitutional amendments. I doubt your one of the 20 or so people who can. So I seriously doubt you’re one of the people who could possibly say, with any authority, that teachers unions got what they wanted on taxes “3/4 of the time.” Because I am one of those 20 or so people, and I was there there for the past decade, and they sure as hell didn’t.

Whenever I hear guys like you and Matty talking about the hordes of high-priced, high skilled teachers that are going to turn education around I throw up in my mouth a little bit. When you pull up with a Brinks truck full of money (and for some perspective, Gates’ entire fortune is enough for two years – so keep looking), let me know. Until then, shut the hell up.

I’m pretty sure Yglesias began describing himself as “neoliberal” semi-ironically, in response to the fact that that’s what everyone else started calling him. My Google skills are not offering up the half-imagined post in which he threw up his hands and went with the flow on this one.

In general, I think there are enough specific things to disagree with Yglesias about that I’m baffled that he seems so routinely misinterpreted (usually through some sort of tortuous “reading between the lines” which divines his underlying intent). Doesn’t mean he doesn’t get stuff wrong, but the whole “I know what he REALLY cares about and doesn’t care about” thing is weird.

LeeEsq (#49),

This is one reason why Yglesias thinks that parlimentary systems are better than Presidential ones. He thinks that parliamentary systems are less political because once you win a majority in the legislative assembly, no more politics is needed. Just have a technocratic cabinet write the laws/policy and parliament will pass it. This is wrong, especially in multi-party parliamentary democracies but its how Yglesias views them.

I think this gets Ygelsias and parliamentary systems quite wrong. Matt has made it pretty clear over the years that it frustrates him to see people thinking that politics consists of grand compromises/consensuses; democratic politics for him–and I think he is absolutely correct here–is a matter of fairly constant partisan contestations. The virtue of parliamentary systems is that, in principle (and to a lesser degree, even in practice), they actually allow elected parties to rule, as opposed to having even clear majorities be stymied by special interests that can make use of numerous veto points whose defenders will dress them up as constitutionally sacrosanct “checks and balances” (e.g., “without aggressive judicial review/an effective supermajority requirement in the Senate/the undemocratic electoral college/etc., all will descend into tyranny!”). Parliamentary systems of democratic government empower majority-winning parties and coalitions to move their agenda forward, which gives their opposite numbers something clear to run against, as opposed to generating desperate accusations and conspiracies out of mid-air. Again, I realize–as I’m sure Matt realizes; he’s definitely not stupid–that parliaments rarely manage all this…but still, the idea is that parliamentary governance is a tool for making democratic politics more legitimate and responsible, not that they are a way to get away from politics entirely.

“But the argument that the Democratic Party should adopt the strategy of pursuing policies to enrich those six groups and hope that it all adds up to (a) the public interest and (b) long-run political dominance seems to me to be relatively weak.”

Even if you like left neoliberal solutions to what you perceive are the country’s problems then you still have a collective action problem and a massive power asymmetry. In a contest between the imagery “public good” against the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, etc. We know who will win. Unions aren’t the only answer, of course, but I think if left-neoliberal really understood that politics was a struggle for power, then they would accept that unions were an irreplaceable ally and try to stop the policy drift that has helped destroy them. (Of course, there would still be the problems stemming from globalization and the move to the service sector as well as the competition among states, but surely the left should at least but supporting policies such as card check to ameliorate the problem.)

It seems to me that Delong’s and Yglesias’ implicit assumption about politics is that it consists of (should consist of?) a kind of Habermasian public debate that, if it weren’t disturbed by the Tea Party or crazy Republicans who keep distracting the public, would come to a reasonable accomodation between left neoliberals and right neoliberals–with the former having the upper hand due to their superior arguments. I say this even though I know that in certain contexts both have an excellent sense of the politics of, say, the debt crisis etc., but I really see no other way to explain this refusal to look at how power affects politics.

(The above was written before Henry’s reply)

“Seriously?”

Quite. It is a fact that the teacher’s unions have dominated California school boards for almost 40 years (and were strong even before that). They get what they want on the school board level, which is the level of union contracts, collective bargaining, and all the things you could want out of local union power. They have also been an enormously powerful force on the state level, being one of the very very very few entities who got their taxes pushed through the CA initiative system in multiple elections in the 1980s and 1990s. The fact that they got what they wanted for decades and decades and still want more is not really worth whining about no matter how much appeal to authority you want to make about the budget structure. Yes *now* that CA’s budget is completely falling apart, the teacher’s union can’t squeeze everything it still wants out of the budget. But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t completely dominated the education field for 40 years. They have. And if you aren’t happy with education in CA, there has to be an enormous heap of blame for the union–it has been as fully in charge as you could plausibly hope for–and for decades. Neo-liberals generally aren’t thrilled with the state of education in places like CA, so it is perfectly natural that they would be highly skeptical of the powers that have been in charge of education for 40 years–which in CA is definitely the teachers union.

Castorp:

bq. It seems to me that Delong’s and Yglesias’ implicit assumption about politics is that it consists of (should consist of?) a kind of Habermasian public debate that, if it weren’t disturbed by the Tea Party or crazy Republicans who keep distracting the public, would come to a reasonable accomodation between left neoliberals and right neoliberals—with the former having the upper hand due to their superior arguments.

Me:

bq. He does have a theory of politics. It is that people would see the pure light of wisdom radiating from people like him, if only those pesky people to his left would shut up and stop frightening the horses.

Actually, I think both of us are right.

> Henry 07.18.11 at 6:30 pm
> Also – as BJN suggests – this comments thread would be rather
> better if it got away from the “polemics and specific personalities” as
> the original post suggested, and concentrated on the underlying questions.
> I’m actually not trying to defend ‘left neoliberalism’ here, but instead to
> try to figure out why it seems to me to be systematically blind about
> a lot of stuff, regardless of the personal merits or demerits of its
> various proponents.

Henry,
I agree, but it might help if some of the A-list blogger/analysts who are self-proclaimed neoliberals could provide a thorough (and, one hopes, convincing) definition of what neoliberalism /is/ and a general theory of what its positive policy prescriptions are or are not. “Use markets, outsource government, and unions are OK as long as they don’t ask for wages benefits or work rules” is basically just mildly regulated libertarianism[1] which we already have plenty of without it attempting to colonize progressive space or the entire Democratic Party.

Cranky

[1] Remember that John Galt carried a union card at the 20th Century Motor; it wasn’t until the union “went too far” that he revolted.

Chris (#64),

Readers of Crooked Timber may be aware that a few weeks ago in a post linked to by Russell above, I tried to open a discussion of how we might build a progressive coalition (workers plus hippies if you want to caricature – which I’m sure you will) in the light of the disintegration of the working class as an effective agent for social change (as argued by Jerry Cohen).

I’m still waiting for your promised follow-up to this, by the way!

> Now do you understand why many others on CT (not me, I
> emphasize) consider you a heartless and brainless twit?

Not to mention so often wrong-by-omission; local teamster unions may well have assisted but the primary force behind regulations on inter-city trucking were the railroad executives and the capital behind them. The railroads lost economic and political power throughout the 1960s and 70s; then up pops deregulation of trucking in 1978. What a coinkydinks!

Cranky

“In actually-existing-capitalism, as we see it in the US today, we see an enormous disparity of influence between a small group of elite actors (with the financial industry being particularly important) and the vast majority of the public (who endure stagnant real incomes, have minimal influence on politics etc etc). ”

Henry, if the financial industry is, in fact, the most influential player in American politics, how is it that TARP, the most important piece of legislation dealing with the industry in the last decade, was killed by the House of Representatives the first time around, and killed precisely because the vast majority of the public was against it? The initial defeat of TARP erased well over a trillion dollars in equity values, sent bank stocks spiraling downward, and put numerous firms on the edge of bankruptcy. If the financial industry is, in fact, the fundamental arbiter of what happens in Washington, how did it fail so miserably in a task that was so important to it?

It’s remarkable that you can critique Yglesias for having a weak theory of politics when your own is really just a crude updating of the idea that the state is the handmaiden of the capitalist elite, and is almost comically indifferent to the actual political views of most Americans.

Exceeded again.

Bob at 18 has a point. Surely one of the easier political issues of our time is taxes. Raise taxes tremendously on the rich, and use the revenue to lower taxes tremendously on the below 250 thou crowd – the 80 percent. A nice, majoritarian solution to the tax problem which runs into the fact that most neo-lib technocrats are among the targets of that movement. Naturally, I don’t expect them to welcome it.
Still, treating taxes as though it were an all up or down proposition is, in fact, what makes Dem policies as unpalatable as GOP ones. The old calculation by red staters, before, was not at all stupid: they could pretty much foresee that the meateating conservatives they would elect would not, in actuality, shrink government. This was simply moral pablum. Enough Dems and GOPers of all stripes would veto any serious inroad into these areas. But they did see that the GOP could get taxes lowered. And they noticed that the Dem reply was to raise taxes not on those who benefited most from our absurdly unequal distribution of wealth, but on the middle and wage class. A tax policy in combination with other government policies to actually shave, say, 10 percent of the wealth from the top 20 percent – who own 75 percent of it – and shift it to the bottom 80 would, among other things, have been a perfectly logical response to the great Recession. Instead, the technocracy mounted the largest welfare operation in history for precisely those top 20, culminating in a truly absurd program of loaning +6 trillion dollars, via the Federal Reserve’s ‘special’ programs, to those with incomes and assets within that top 20. This policy held steady under Bush and Obama, often with the same players facilitating it. There was no excuse for it, and it stuck a knife in the back of the middle and wage class. In compensation, they got a terrible healthcare insurance program that will probably not work when it comes on line, as the Democrats start cutting social security benefit increases and finding ways to carve away on Medicare.
This is not some unexpected result of a benificent intention. The new class takes care of itself. Yglesias is a product of that new class, dallying with libertarian economic doctrine – for instance, about the American auto company bailouts – and finding in Obama the kind of ruler who he once supported, on his own account , in Mass.: Romney. These poeple many not destroy the Democratic party,but they will hollow it out until it is meaningless.

Since one of the standard tropes of the juicebox generation bloggers is to “unpack” what others say and decide which subparts are doing the “heavy lifting”, I don’t see how either you or MY could object to others doing the same to his work. And since the neoliberal analysis – both in general and MY’s specifically – contains ginormous unstated assumptions and unexplored chains of consequences IMHO it is quite fair to do so.

I’m not objecting to analysis, I’m objecting to analysis proposing that, say, Yglesias’ affection for parliamentary systems (which I’m not qualified to assess, since I don’t know anything about them, and you’d be perfectly fair to snark that neither does he) stems from antidemocratic sympathies rather than, say, frustration that the popularly elected POTUS can’t get the Senate to confirm anybody, or that individual Senators can, quite undemocratically, enforce chokeholds on the process of government. Cherrypicking comments sections is generally unfair, but mostly I have in mind a variety of “I bet he also thinks [horrible thing] is great!” when, in fact, he’s on the record as saying “I think we need to focus attention on trying to alleviate [horrible thing].”

But I think this side discussion is a good illustration of why in the post Henry suggests moving away from discussion of specific personalities. Personally, I don’t think “liberal” or “progressive” vs. “neoliberal” is a helpful way to think about the dynamic here, in part because those terms are, as seen, so loaded as to preemptively color the discussion.

The limit of neo-liberalism is liberty. Neo-liberals are nothing more than fascist war mongers with a D in front of their names. So much so I bet you all make ole GW Bush quite jealous. Liberty will win, statist war monger, mass murders will lose.

Personally, I don’t see how these neoliberal technocrats deserve the prefix “left”. Surely someone advocating, say, humane treatment of slaves in 1850’s South can’t be called ‘left slavery advocate’? They are correctly identified as ‘center-right’ everywhere, except of the US, for some reason.

> medrawt @83
> Personally, I don’t think “liberal” or “progressive” vs. “neoliberal” is a helpful
> way to think about the dynamic here, in part because those terms are, as seen,
> so loaded as to preemptively color the discussion.

I appreciate your #83; I agree with much and disagree with some.

For the specific quoted point, this is a standard talking point of neoliberals when they come under criticism from progressives or actual liberals. The problem being that it isn’t clear to the liberals why they should abandon their principles, goals, and politics to help the move to a gently-regulated libertarianism just because those who have abandoned liberalism to take up the neoliberal mantle say it is a “more optimal” state. Remember that many of the neoconservatives were originally strong leftists; their departure to form a new wing of Republicanism didn’t work out very well for anyone on the planet.

Cranky

re 80 “And while there is no necessary reason that the state should be the handmaiden of the capitalist elite, and almost comically different to the actual political views of most citizens, that surely seems to be the state of American democracy today.”

The state needs tax revenue; there is no taxable income unless business invests; state is therefore structurally subordinate to the interests of private capital.

The state must do what it can to get private financial actors to make credit flow again, and industrialists to invest again. This is the first policy priority of the state, and it must accomplish it within the property rights regime.

Henry, this is a really old argument. You’ll find it in Poulantzas and the writings of a couple of Stanford academics–Martin Carnoy’s book on the state and Joshua Cohen’s On Democracy.

He is anti-school union as a part of his ivy league disdain for real teachers and love “teach for america” types though.

So, Teach for America folks aren’t “real teachers”? Wonder what they’re doing in those classrooms, then. Playing parcheesi?

Matthew Yglesias: I think it’s more plausible to say that the policy environment has grown more hostile to unions as a result of unions’ decline.

The graph you linked to shows that from around 1937 to 1980, 25% or more of the labor force was unionized. Since 1980, less than 25% of the labor force has been unionized. Once could fairly say that “Since Ronald Reagan became President, the share of the workforce that is unionized has dropped to pre-New Deal levels.” Attributing decline in union power to Reagan is more about the drop to pre-New deal levels of union membership since 1980 than it is about union density in itself. Do you think that Reagan’s economic policies had no impact on union membership?

“What do you call a libertarian who wants to date rightwing women, though?”

A conservative?

“The state needs tax revenue; there is no taxable income unless business invests; state is therefore structurally subordinate to the interests of private capital.”

Actually, the state can print whatever money it needs, at least in the case of the US. It chooses not to, but it is not, in any sense, dependent on business for taxable income. Voters, by contrast, are very much dependent on business investment for their livelihoods, since capitalism is the only system that has proven capable of generating high living standards for the vast majority of a country’s population. Which may have something to do with why a politics based on pitting labor v. capital has never come close to being a majoritarian politics in the US.

On Matt Y’s twitter feed, he seemed to be looking for specific areas of policy disagreement between him and people more sympathetic to the old left-wing coalition. I would say some major examples would be —

a) Private provision of public service
b) Trade
c) Immigration
d) Degree of regulation of business practices (for instance, regulatory limits on returned check fees.)

k.williams, in the 50s, the marginal tax rate for millionaires was about 90 percent. The last time wealth disparity was as high as it is right now was in 1929. So, basically, I’d say Americans are very content to use their majoritarian power to soak the rich, knowing that the rich do nothing but manage and invest, and that they will continue to do so in the U.S. – as they have done through the 20th century – with much grumbling, but without really pouting or taking Ayn Rand’s solution seriously. Contemporary capitalism doesn’t mean aberrant inequality – this is more characteristic of such less developed countries as Turkey and Mexico.
However, at the moment, there is no party mechanism for even trying to achieve a majoritarian solution. Both parties, for instance, heartily approved of what the Fed lending program was all about. Both parties have designed an industrial policy for the U.S. that de-favors manufacturing and favors finances. At the moment, it looks like the policy elites are simply going to continue down that path for a while. But I’d bet Americans will surprise you if that policy continues to produce a lowering of their standard of living. Then ‘ideals’ like capitalism will go right out the window. Socialism is an ideal, but capitalism will always simply be a vehicle.

Attn medrawt at 83: I think the mistake that Yglesias makes frequently is that he believing that if things were a little different than policy would go the way he wanted to more often. Recently he had a post that basically pointed out that the cost of building a continental high-speed rail network is slightly less than what was spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. Factually this is true, if the United States government did not spend so much bad/stupid on things like the War on Terror or the War on Drugs than there would be more money to spend on better things.

However, Yglesias seems to assume that the United States government would spend more on things he likes, and that most of the readers of this blog would like, if it did not spend money on the bad/stupid things. I think this is a mistaken assumption. Without an actual grassroots movement/demand for a continental high-speed railnetwork than it would most likely not happen even if the money. If a trillion dollars is suddenly made available for trnasportation, most of it would go to road contruction/repair or air travel rather than bus/rail transit.

This is why I’m not really much of a fan of Yglesias’ advoacy for parliamentary government. Its one of his if things were a little different than things would go my way more often desires. Without a grassroots demand/movement for something, whether it would be desegregation, labor rights, welfare state programs, or the Second Avenue subway than they won’t happen.

“k.williams, in the 50s, the marginal tax rate for millionaires was about 90 percent. The last time wealth disparity was as high as it is right now was in 1929. So, basically, I’d say Americans are very content to use their majoritarian power to soak the rich, knowing that the rich do nothing but manage and invest, and that they will continue to do so in the U.S. – as they have done through the 20th century – with much grumbling, but without really pouting or taking Ayn Rand’s solution seriously.”

The marginal tax rate on millionaires in the 1950s has little or nothing to do with what I was talking about (the lack of majoritarian support for a labor v. capital politics), and, for that matter, has nothing to do with the left v. neoliberalism question. Yglesias is in favor of higher taxes on millionaires. Delong is. I am. More important, it’s a profound mistake to see the high marginal tax rate as in some way an expression, in any sense, of anticapitalist sentiment. In the first place, the number of people who were actually subject to that tax was vanishingly small. Second, most of the investment that was done then was done by corporations, not private investors — companies generally funded investments out of earnings, rather than relying on capital markets. So there was no conflict between taxing a few really rich people at high rates and being friendly to business.

Finally, the often-unnoticed truth of the postwar years in America is that while those years were very good for workers, they were just as good for corporations. American companies have never enjoyed profit margins as high as they did in the 1950s and 1960s, and corporate income never constituted a greater share of GDP than it did in the early 1960s. (The corporate share in the middle of this decade equaled that of the earlier period, but once you account for the fact that a hefty chunk of the “profits” earned by the financial industry during the bubble were in fact illusory, the earlier period retains its title.) The magic of the postwar era was not that it somehow exalted the interests of labor over business, but rather that labor and business were able to happily prosper together. I’ll just say it again — there’s never been a time in American history when an anti-capitalist, anti-market project had a hope of being majoritarian.

I want to draw people’s attention to the following sentence in

From an elite point of view, the primary problem with a jobs program—and with employment-boosting infrastructure projects—is that they would put a floor under employment, making workers more confident and less likely to do what the boss says, and less dependent on private employers for a paycheck.

I think this applies with even greater force to health care. Even though a universal health-care plan in the USA would save most businesses money and improve their international competitiveness, the opposition has been intense, and this may be because it makes people independent of employers for their very health; in some cases their lives.

K. Williams @99

capitalism is the only system that has proven capable of generating high living standards for the vast majority of a country’s population

When and where did that occur?

Also, what version of “capitalism” are you talking about? I assume you mean something like post-WWII (watered-down) Social Democracy with economic regulation and a government-run pension/anti-poverty program like Social Security.

The Raven @ 109:

I think that’s right. Universal health care would significantly empower low and middle income households and make them less dependent on any particular employer. That’s why I like it and, I have no doubt, why others dislike it.

“When and where did that occur?

“Also, what version of “capitalism” are you talking about? I assume you mean something like post-WWII (watered-down) Social Democracy with economic regulation and a government-run pension/anti-poverty program like Social Security.”

Well, relative to the standards of humanity, it happened in the United States in the first two decades of the 20th century, although it obviously took the postwar era to see its most vibrant flourishing. Japan did it beginning in the 1970s. South Korea did it beginning in the early 1990s. And most of Europe had done it by the 1960s.

Russell #114 – well it may suffer a bit from trying to address a wide popular audience. I think it is making lots of the right noises though and serves as a counterexample to Yglesias’s TINA.

Coming to the discussion vv late:

Chris Bertram@59 re: a viable politics for the 21st century:
Given that capital is global, pushback needs to be global. Or rather, there needs to be pushback at the local level globally by the “wage” class against the “ruling” (financial) 1%. The folks protesting in Greece learned a great deal from Tahir Square and Madison, something little noted in the MSM. The problem seems to me to be persistent/residual nationalist loyalties – what does the unemployed university graduate in Cairo have to do with the teachers of Madison, and what do either have to do with impoverished pensioners in Athens? Quite a lot, actually, but how to overcome nationalist allegiances for global allegiances (as capital has so effortlessly done)? I don’t think the answer lies in neo-liberal / technocratic approaches.

John Quiggin @104. Hear, hear for hope.

I’m very impressed – Brad DeLong and Mathew Yglesias both responding to this post! Doubtless both are convinced they’re the Smartest People in Any Room They Enter , and they certainly make this humble commenter feel stupid (that’s the point, right?). But I had the good fortune to meet someone smarter (bloggers on CT excepted, of course), namely Greece’s new Minister of Finance, possibly the Smartest Person in Any Universe Imaginable. I would really, really like to see him debate DeLong …

@Ben I’ve always assumed that both DeLong and Yglesias mean “neoliberal” in this sense, and not the standard international sense.

The only blog post I wrote that got more than a few comments on tried to support a definition of “neoliberal” that seems similar to the Ben Alpers mentions. His post at the US Intellectual History blog is the only time I have seem it defended. (I could have sworn the term was used in something like this sense in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? but Google Books says no.)

I also see that the post was a response to a recent alumnus of Dartmouth, not of Harvard, though IIRC he was in or around the n+1 circle, and that he claimed the confusion between “neoliberal” and “liberal” was not his but Walter Benn Michaels’.

I can make neither heads nor tales out of J. Bradford Delong’s last post. As I understand the Farrell’s ideal political system it is one in which money and position are neutralized so that various interest groups and individuals can discuss more or less rationally which policies and end points they’d like to implement in order to achieve. Of course, I could be wrong.

What Delong hopes to achieve by being a horse’s ass, or in any event writing like one, escapes me entirely.

Okay, I’ve generally internalized that the amount of polarization that goes on when the topic is Yglesias as some kind of exotic light antisemitism, but this is such a stupid thread. And Henry is unfathomably generous to Doug Henwood, because the link is to a screed that essentially has no comprehension of why Yglesias or anyone else would want inflation targeting (I am not saying Yglesias is right, here), and then drifts off to (for all intents and purposes) gold-buggery, and frankly weird interpretation of the monetary motives behind populism, and just keeps going on…

The big thing that’s wrong with this thread is that there is almost zero interest in understanding how political systems work, despite all the people who think they’re hip to it all. There’s almost zero interest in past technocratic policies or the people involved in them. We have totally no idea who’s a left technocrat or not? Shouldn’t we be talking about Larry Summers and NAFTA? Or welfare reform, section 8 housing, drug decriminalization, LNCB, or any number of other technocratic projects, left or right?

Instead it’s all about how Matt’s a weenie.

*sigh*

Matt’s just is not as dumb as some of y’all think he is. He’s wrong, a lot, and you do yourselves the favor of just arguing *that* instead of yelling at Matt. He’s not your demagogue, okay? Moreover, he’s usually arguing from a sequence of ideas and positions, i.e., he almost always makes fairly internally consistent arguments, and you have to work just a wee bit harder to noodle them (when it’s not education, of course).

“In all your instances, you’re describing regulated economies (in the U.S. 1900-1920 falls right within the Progressive Era and includes the creation of the FTC, FDA, Department of Commerce, and Department of Labor).”

Yes, I’m describing regulated economies — in the case of the 1900-1920 US economy, regulated by regulations proposed by the Progessives, who were the neoliberals of their day. I’m unaware of any neoliberals of note who oppose the FTC, the FDA, or the SEC. On the contrary, sensible regulation (as opposed to absurd regulation, like airline and trucking regulation pre-1978) is clearly an essential part of any healthy market economy. The difference between the Chris-Bertram left and the Yglesias/Delong neoliberals is not a difference over the proper scope of regulation, or marginal tax rates. It’s a difference between people whose fundamental orientation is anticapitalist, and who view business primarily as a force to be opposed, and those who see markets and private enterprise as central, if flawed, elements in any healthy economy and polity. In that debate, American voters have always sided with the second group, which is why the Marxist/Marxisant left represented by Robin and Henwood has always had little or no influence on American politics.

Okay, I’ve generally internalized that the amount of polarization that goes on when the topic is Yglesias as some kind of exotic light antisemitism

WTF?

(Comment 1 of 2) People are making BDelong’s comments out to be a little more mysterious than they are.

MYglesias recommends certain (extremely sensible) policies. In fact, he does so frequently. Just as frequently, leftier-than-thou bloggerasters take him to task for it. Their policy critiques, however, are confused, garble details, and can be difficult to take seriously on the merits, even if there is something appealing about their indignation. HFarrell sees the angel in the marble: beneath the bloggerasters’ apparent critique of the substance of MY’s policy preferences lies an attack on his strategy. Specifically, liberal policies alienate and weaken the collective actors and organized interest groups who would make the left wing strong; the bloggerasters’ counter-proposals are intended to unify and strengthen collective actors and organized interest groups around an energized left.

Now, HF doesn’t come out and say this next part, but obviously the bloggerasters’ prescription, even after HF’s charitable exegesis, makes no sense at all unless you assume that a Democratic Party controlled by unified and strengthened organized interest groups would actually advance the public good. And it would be naive to assume that this would happen, unless the interests of these interest groups were themselves quite close to the public good.

This is where BD comes on the scene (today wearing his “massive erudition” hat rather than his loathsome “red-baiting” hat). We’ve heard this song before, BD reminds us, and we didn’t like how it turned out. Adam Smith sang it first, and in retrospect it looks like a sad little apologetic for the petty fascism of the squirearchy. Marx sang it next, and that hasn’t played out well, either. The theory behind the “universal class” approach to politics has always been impeccable. The problem is that it has never worked in practice.

HF response to BD was that he didn’t want just one class (farmers-workers ftw!), but I think that pluralistic interpretation of what a “universal class” is was explicit in BD’s original comment. To reply that both sides have organized interest groups at their disposal doesn’t seem germane to me. So I’m not sure why HF is acting baffled.

I found BD’s intellectual contextualization of HF’s exegesis extremely enlightening. For better or for worse, I think I understand what the bloggerasters are after much better now.

“I believe that is a reference to the Democrats supposedly being the “party of Hollywood” and the decadent creative classes (both Los Angeles and NYC) in general.”

Thanks Cranky.
What does Brad have against them? Did Al Pachino steal his lunch money as a kid or something?

Shah: “Okay, I’ve generally internalized that the amount of polarization that goes on when the topic is Yglesias as some kind of exotic light antisemitism”

That is really ridiculous. I think insofar as that is true that there is polarization–and I don’t think it was manifested here–it is due to Matt’s snarky dismissal of views he disagrees with. That tends to irritate those who disagree with him. His new FB comment system has largely fixed that problem though.

Sigh: “Matt’s just is not as dumb as some of y’all think he is.”

Who thinks he’s dumb? I actually think that given Matt’s committments, his focus on monetary policy is a really good and somewhat original idea. I would certainly sign on to it for now, given that nothing better seems possible in the short-term. That still begs the question of whether his or other left neoliberals’ theory of politics is correct. I happen to think that there is failure to recognize that power must be grappled with in politics.

unhelpful personal attack, and hence deleted.

Dear Shri shah8,

I am not accusing Mr. Yglesias of being a rootless cosmopolitan bent on the destruction of Der Vaterland. I am saying that his inflation target is a thinly disguised mechanism for a retrograde nationalism.

Look for example at how Joe Gagnon defends the inflation target. He himself notes that QE2 did not do much to get the banks to lend money out, so he defends it in terms of alternative routes: ‘The basic channel is the bond market. The Fed is buying up long-term bonds and that pushes interest rates down on those bonds. That’s what makes it attractive for people to borrow. The market then does some arbitrage. The equity market looks at the bond market and says “oh, well, long-term bond rates are low, so we are going to discount future dividends and profits differently.” This makes the value of stocks more attractive and raises their values. And this encourages businesses to invest. Also, international investors look at rates of return in other countries, and they say “these other countries have higher rates of return than in the U.S.,” so that pushes the dollar down. These aren’t direct channels of monetary policy, but they are linked.’

Yes QE eased worries about deflation, but it is being defended here primarily in terms of its effect on the dollar.

An inflation target pursued through QE is really a form of competitive devaluation, a nationalist attempt to export one’s way out of crisis.

I am only making the point that Joe Stiglitz already has. Is Stiglitz a thinly disguised (self-hating) anti-Semite?

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/01/currency-war-no-winners

Also, towards the end of increasing net exports the inflation target may increase the demand for labor here via real wage reductions effected through price inflation.

This is an intervention aimed at winning the world market, increasing net exports on the backs of labor. It is precisely a politics of reactionary mercantilism masquerading under the benign name of an inflation target.

Technocratic monetary Keynesianism points not to a better but a more gloomy future.

The fact of the matter is that neither Robin nor Henwood understands what is fundamentally wrong with the inflation target. Stiglitz does.

The Keynesianism that we have will end in tragedy; neo-classical economics is a farce.

@136: This is in response to all those who think public transit should be run more for the sake of the bus drivers, schools more for the sake of the teachers, than they currently are

This presumably generalizes to something like: “How self-evidently foolish to think that enterprises/workplaces should be run for the sake of those who work in them.” A careless slur, eliding the fundamental and difficult question, “Shouldn’t those who do most of the work of an enterprise have a say in running it, along with others who have a large stake, including those for whose sake the work is done (ie, the consumers) and also (though not exclusively, as at present) those who have invested money in it, along with their representatives, the management?” If you think you can dispose of the whole question of economic democracy by jeering at misbehaving unions … well, it actually does seem to be a pretty effective tactic nowadays, but you can’t retain your intellectual self-respect at the same time.

@149 – I neither jeered at unions, nor claimed that they were misbehaving. It’s a point about political orientation. If you think that the biggest impact we can make by spending an extra dollar on buses or schools is to improve the welfare of bus drivers and teachers, you’re already a libertarian, you just don’t know it yet. If, like me, you think that the biggest impact we can make with that extra dollar is to bring mobility and knowledge to the downtrodden, you’ll be singing Soyuz nerushmy with the best of them when the revolution comes.

As for your Fundamental Question, the only general answer can be “It depends/it all depends/on what you have to build with.” I can look at a specific school district and, after long cerebration, tell you, out of the teachers, principals, superintendent, school board, and parents, what specific configuration of power would lead to the best result for everyone, but the exercise would be fruitless and you would still find something to complain about.

In defense of 20-something progressive bloggers like myself

/me squints…

Inflation targeting is not the same thing as currency manipulation. There are consequential weakening of the currency, but you’re not going to have a currency war if other countries can get US customers. The quote I note is this one:

The answer to this seeming stalemate is simple: resume global growth, and appreciation of the currency will naturally follow. Restoring growth requires that all governments that have the capacity to expand aggregate demand do so. The US has a special responsibility, both because of its culpability in creating the global crisis and because it can borrow at low interest rates, an advantage partly derived from its status as the de facto reserve currency. This is the time for the US to make the high productivity investments it needs. Spending on things such as high speed rail and green technology would actually improve America’s balance sheet. Higher growth would generate more tax revenue and lead to a lower long-run national debt. Such actions would not only help the US, but also have strong positive spillovers both in the short run (from the increased growth) and in the long run (from the technological improvements) for the rest of the world.

And yes, Stiglitz is talking about fiscal measures, rather than monetary measures, and he prefers fiscal measures. However, the primate need of increasing aggregate demand, and the overall consequences of weaker currency as a consequence holds. We aren’t talking about matching our currency (at a higher or lower rate) to some other country’s currency as what goes on in subsidizing export and fueling currency wars. We’re talking about making enough of our own currency for our own use. These are not the same things.

No shah8 you clearly don’t understand what you are talking about. Yes the Stiglitz piece was saying what I said it said, not what you claimed. First point.

Second, you don’t think quantitative easing has effect on a currency? You don’t realize that it’s being explicitly defended for just that effect?

Now third there are good counter-arguments to what Stiglitz has written and what I believe to be true.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/17/g20-globalrecession

But that’s where the debate is–between Stiglitz and Eichengreen.

Haven’t read every single word of the thread, but following up on JQ @121: I believe Henry’s ‘left neoliberalism’ is (more or less) Ben Alpers’s ‘Washington Monthly neoliberalism’. They’re talking about the same thing. (I express no opinion on whether Yglesias belongs in this category or not. I never read him.)

I looked at The Washington Monthly occasionally in the 80s when Charles Peters was putting forward his neoliberal manifestos. IIRC and as the OP suggests, Peters and others were concerned that the Dem Party had become too closely aligned with a union agenda that caused Dems to oppose things like school vouchers and the sort of welfare reform that Clinton eventually got (this is probably all in Alpers’s posts at USIH). The neoliberal critique became, politically, mostly a moot point after c.’84 or so as the power of organized labor continued to decline and as Clinton/DLC basically took over the Dem party in the 90s. Substantively, however, the weaknesses the OP identifies re the understanding of collective action were always there, I think, in Washington Monthly neoliberalism. A number of journalists began at the Monthly and then went on to larger-circulation mainstream outlets and successful (often very successful) careers (if I’m not mistaken, James Fallows and Jonathan Alter, to mention just two), so the influence of Charles Peters, at least in some attenuated way, lives on.

andthenyoufall: Sorry, I must have misunderstood. Of course I agree with you that “the biggest impact we can make with that extra dollar is to bring mobility and knowledge to the downtrodden.” But I couldn’t imagine who you meant by “those who think public transit should be run more for the sake of the bus drivers [and] schools more for the sake of the teachers, than they currently are,” if not people who defend unions as a step toward economic democracy. How do libertarians come into it?

Henry #80: “Short version is that business lobbying power is extremely effective, except on those rare occasions when there is genuine public controversy for exogenous reasons, when we may expect to see action taken against business (but quietly undermined again after public attention has drifted away). This seems to me to be a rather good model of what happens – and one that fits well with the TARP story.”

Yes, that is exactly right, with one important addition to complete the model: The Congress is less instructed in ideology, or less conformed to ideology, than most people here seem to think. What we see is cynicism and collegiality, defaulting to ideology.

It’s everybody and anybody at all. The ruling elite is on the other side of a porous membrane — if you have enough money or you win an election, then you pass through the membrane, too. On the other side, if you have any ideals, you will find that acting upon them is not always rewarded by your constituency. So you get cynical, and you realize that the eternal horse-trading gives you more in common with your colleagues across the aisle than with your constituents.

There have been dozens of politicians who have expressed sentiments like this.

Now you may say “Oh well they’re just tools of capitalist ideology and Wall Street’s influence and they need lots of money to get elected and re-elected” but then you just said that you cannot explain the counterexamples except by a more general theory of interest-group pressures that is occasionally not based on a single ideology.

The reality is that Washington D.C. acts more like a mechanical game whose levers can be pushed by ANYONE on the outside who sees a vantage point. It isn’t just interest groups or money, it may be a big idea or a common expectation or a power-broker like Grover Norquist. I would argue that according the Constitution, U.S. politics is almost neutral but it defaults to the loudest heaviest whiners — e.g. Wall Street on most days, but occasionally outrage at TARP the next day.

So what do you want to achieve practically? The big fight to come is that government MUST GROW LARGER as a percentage of GDP to provide healthcare, with its cost increases, to a demographic bulge. It is a specific necessity and it is huge. It will also widen the passage to a more social democratic attitude.

So I think the necessary theory of politics is going to be both mechanical and contingent. Don’t bother putting together an interest group before you begin, if you already have one. You don’t always need labor unions to move forward. In the current situation, if bad actors like the Republicans have maneuvered themselves onto the horns of a dilemma, then don’t wait, make sure one or the other horn spears them through the belly. So what if it is about something stupid like the debt ceiling or taxes? It is going to be about something stupid because they are actually stupid. Make the public see it. If you wreck their name-brand, you make it much easier next time to elect people who are heading in the better direction. And the resulting protection of the provision of healthcare, retirement, better education CREATES constituencies that are future actors.

So I think I will stay naive instead of engage in fruitless blabber about definitions and theories, and about where bloggers should be placed on the left/right spectrum. That last one is just an embarrassing facsimile of a real discussion.

I would like to see Brad DeLong (#124), who I read regularly, actually advance the conversation. Henry likes Dahl’s pluralist ideal (but surely doesn’t believe it as an empirical model); Brad doesn’t think that model is right, but doesn’t say what model of politics is right or desirable. I’ve got to weigh in with a demand that Brad put up else stick to making unrealistic demands that major media outlets shut themselves down. (btw, I really do value BDeL posts, just not those ones …)

Now, I’ve got to go to work at 7 to try to do my part with the other people who go to work at 7 and try to figure out how to accumulate some of that countervailing power …

“It is always enlightening to be informed about what I believe, because otherwise, well, I just wouldn’t know. ”

Chris, anyone who puts up a post consisting of a video of Jerry Cohen offering up a tired and poorly theorized critique of modern capitalism — a critique called, cleverly enough, “Against Capitalism” — with the appended comment “great stuff” is someone whose fundamental orientation is anticapitalist. If you don’t recognize that, then, yes, you do need someone to inform you of what you believe.

I guess what I am missing is where neo-liberals are claiming to have a rich theory of politics. Theirs I thought was more or less a prescription for governance in in the liberal states in the context of the global capitalist order that has emerged in the last four decades. It doesn’t claim to be the political theory best able to deliver long-term fundamental political benefits to the broad interests of society. It just claims to offer guidance to policy makers on how to, mostly, avoid major disasters resulting from faulty governance, or perhaps to achieve somewhat more desirable conditions on the whole, again, in this political-economic context in which we live. I do think that in measuring the desirability of the conditions it sees as desirable, it has tended to overweight the interests of the economic elite (with exceptions among its exponents). But this is more a function of its basically peaceful, accommodative relationship with the global capitalist order than with the lack of a strong theory of politics. A strong theory of politics would simply be an irrelevance to what neo-liberalism (leftism being another question) aspires to be, which is an enterprise in study with the more or less explicit goal of discovering ways to make the global capitalist order marginally more beneficial to the greater mass of people (whether in a country or globally), accepting certain policy viewpoints as fixed starting points (preference for freer trade, liberal labor policy, etc.) Critiquing it for lacking a strong theory of politics of the kind described here seems to me to be akin to noting a socialite’s breach of etiquette in failing to bring a jackhammer to an Upper East Side cocktail party.

I predict we’ll see K Williams’s comment at 77 again in a few years’ time, along the lines of “if Rupert Murdoch was so powerful how come his whole empire fell apart over a mere phone-hacking affair?”

‘capitalism is the only system that has proven capable of generating high living standards for the vast majority of a country’s population’

Oh please. The living standards of the Western World sit on a moral hazard the size of the moon. Absolute poverty has actually increased in the developing world over the past few decades.

Re: “Brad DeLong@124 – since you understand the argument perfectly well when it’s J.K. Galbraith talking about ‘countervailing powers,’ I can only presume that you’ve entered into that peculiar mental state of willed obtuseness that you get into when you decide that someone is too left-wing to engage with their ideas. Hence, I don’t really see any possible value in further engagement with you on this.”

Oh. I understand the “countervailing power” we-want-our-interest-groups-to-balance-theirs-so-good-public-policy-bubbles-up-from-below-via-democratic-processes argument. I think it is interesting–which is why I quoted JKG. I just don’t believe it. Collective action problems prohibit using elections to determine the public interest by adding up the votes of informed voters who understand their material and ideal interests and how they ought to translate those into economic policy.

That’s just not how it works.

If knowing what doesn’t work were the key to political wisdom, I suspect that we’d all be potential philosopher kings — which is nice work if you can get it, but if you lack a serviceable set of knee pads, it’s damned difficult to find a capitalist willing to pay you for it.

Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Brad DeLong have all at various times and in various places argued for the need for greater union viability. I take them at their word that they believe that. Nevertheless, they virtually always speak of unions elegiacally, as though they are vestigial instead of ever-present but latent. There’s a kind of hardening of opinion in that that smacks of the right-wing cant “Unions had their place, but now we need to move on…” I’m not claiming that the three men mentioned above are deliberately spouting right-wing orthodoxy, but I am suggesting that in perpetually looking for the new way, the novel way, they have a blind spot for the political efficacy of very old well-worn but necessary advocacies.

I think the discussion isn’t helped by the concept of “sustainability,” and should instead shift to efficacy. Nothing in politics is sustainable, but certain things work at certain times.

@36 I’d love to know where you find evidence for suburban school boards being in the pockets of the unions. The NEA (the union of most non-urban school districts) is kind of the powderpuff of teachers’ unions–they don’t exert much muscle and really don’t get into bread and butter/salary wrangling. The flashpoint is almost strictly the AFT in the cities.

“By organizing blacks and funding the New Left, labor unions were behind
the 1960’s New Left and the political disorientation it created.”

Labor unions as a whole could at very best be said to be black civil rights neutral in the 1960s. And that is only if you count the unions which formally embraced civil rights at the national level while allowing the local chapters of the union to exclude black people. The idea that labor unions were generally a major force in the black civil rights movement is historical revisionism.

funding the New Left

Funds? As far as I can remember, the New Left had no funds. The New Right had unlimited funds. That’s (mainly) why they won and we lost. No, don’t even begin to suggest that it was because the Left had “tired old ideas” and the Right had “good new ideas.” It’s too fatuous …

I recall reading that Yglesias’s uncle is an economist at MIT. Yglesias’s positions are simply mystical dogma — whether he got them from is uncle or came up with them on his own. They have nothing to do with the real world. The fact that he advocates destroying the lives of thousands of people for the sake of abstract principles is deeply repugnant.

Another: ” He is anti-school union as a part of his ivy league disdain for real teachers and love “teach for america” types though.”

James Reffell: ” So, Teach for America folks aren’t “real teachers”? Wonder what they’re doing in those classrooms, then. Playing parcheesi?”

I imagine that what was meant by ‘real teachers’ was ‘people who are going to spend more than a couple of years at it; people who will make a career at it; people who aren’t passing through it on their way from an Ivy League university into their actual careers’.

http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/sep2007/ca20070913_229347.htm

Teach for America has even forged partnerships in recent years with 100 graduate school programs and 15 employers, including Deloitte & Touche (No. 1 on this year’s list), Google (GOOG) (No. 5), and General Electric (GE) (No. 12). These companies let students defer their job offers to spend two years teaching. Corporate Partner JPMorgan (JPM) (No. 17) gives students their signing bonuses before their two-year stints at Teach for America and offers summer programs to keep them involved with the company while they are teaching.

Bob Corcoran, vice-president of Corporate Citizenship at General Electric, says that his company’s partnership with Teach for America is a win-win. “We [GE and TFA] look for the same types of people, people who want to make a difference, people who have good leadership qualities and who truly want to jump in and lead something. Teachers do that everyday,” Corcoran explains. “When these students come out of college and they defer to take on these roles, they learn how to lead. And Teach for America gets some great students who otherwise would have been nervous to jump out of their discipline and teach.”

Meanwhile, young workers view Teach for America as a valuable launching pad to an assortment of careers and paths. Former D.C. corps member Rachael Brown is amazed by the strong support network of alumni.

@192: I have no idea what the current generation of historians think about the link between Protestantism and capitalism, so I’ll shut up about that. But by that token Luther and the 95 Theses would do just as well.

Being a neoliberal involves signaling a willingness to go along and get along by playing the game — ignoring empirical evidence and showing a willingness to engage in outright lying on certain key issues. It’s a sine qua non of politics.

Brad DeLong #177: “Collective action problems prohibit using elections to determine the public interest by adding up the votes of informed voters who understand their material and ideal interests and how they ought to translate those into economic policy.”
“That’s just not how it works.”

Don’t you mean “That’s not how public choice theory works”? Because in reality, after voting, people accept the resulting compromises, if they are fair.