Neoliberalism and OWS

On the TNR editorial, this video is on-topic:

http://youtu.be/i9zkQcLi4Yo

Neoliberalism is not just some idea; it’s an idea that clearly and directly benefits the establishment. And so one shouldn’t take think~tank~invented/useful~idiot~amplified ‘sure, there will be winners and losers, but don’t worry: the losers will be well~compensated’ bullshit seriously.

“We never tried to conjoin market liberalization with appropriately fair and equitable taxation and regulation schemes, so we don’t know that it wouldn’t work.”

It’s interesting that this is placed parenthetically, as if the thought had not entered into anyone’s mind at the time.

Does this means that we still don’t know if it wouldn’t work. What does ‘work’ even mean in this context. Clearly the previous situation worked quite well for a small group of people and practically obliterated a large group of people. The political fact is that neoliberalism was pitched as the next great thing in political economy.

Well, here we are.

I was just going to say that we tried doing the neoliberal thing in Sweden, and it’s been working out for us. Then I saw someone had already made that point, so now I’m not going to. Then I was going to ask what people mean by neo-liberal, but alas! that question had been raised as well.

Thank you for your time.

“Antiglobalisation focused on trade. OWS focuses on income inequality.”

Which brings up another line entirely. Which income inequality? In country or global? Trade, the globalisation thing, has been doing pretty well at reducing global inequality even if it could (and people better at all this than I argue that it does) increase in country inequality.

I seem to remember reading on these pages recently (in a discussion also started by Yglesias) that smashing windows is a net~positive activity. I’m now convinced that those who refuse to smash windows are saboteurs and enemies of the people.

I agree with half of Rich Puchalsky’s kinetic theory of movements.

The idea that the pronouncements of (armchair?) theorists are more representative of a movement than the actions of people actually moving (involved in demonstrations) seems very odd. And more than one window has been broken.

But the difference between static occupations and kinetic marches makes sense to me. Plus, police with video footage can more easily track down static occupiers than they can marchers who have long-since travelled back to where they came from.

For the record, I think a lot of the globalization critics did not describe themselves as either anti-globalization or anti-trade. They described themselves (accurately, in my opinion) as supporting global justice. They critiqued trade polices they argued were destructive to the earth as well as to the bulk of the people in both the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds. They argued that these polices were being developed in secret in the interests of the already too powerful. Isolationism and protectionism are largely epithets hurled at those who question the orthodoxy, rather than useful description of actual political positions.

Also, ditto what Rich said about window smashing. This is not an unimportant point. The idea that these protestors were violent and engaged in routine property destruction was the main justification for the army of police in riot gear that was assembled in response to these protests. Of course, it was the idea that regular people were trying to have a say in some of the more important aspects of how they were governed that scared the governors back then (which has obvious parallels to today).

“Both its heart and its head in approximately the right place”

Unless we’re using a really expansive interpretation on the word “approximately”, then this is a really big claim, and the case for it isn’t really made here. Just because the (liberal) argument against the movement isn’t precisely the same as the one against the anti-Globalization crowd, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

My problem with the Yglesias/Delong tendency — I refuse to call such a graceless socio-economic collage a style — is that it literally has no sense of how the other half lives, and not much interest in whether it does or doesn’t. Being very smart fellows, of course, they’ll never, ever wind up walking behind a plough, although you may find them reading Greek to the idiot sons of the plutocracy from time to time.

Mr. Timberman is basically correct (although unlike Duncan Foley neither DeLong nor Yglesias know Greek), but the problem is not so much their not knowing how the other half (or 99%) live as their not respecting the work the 99% (or the other half) do. Which gets to the original point that redistribution to people whose world of work has been destroyed is pointless, insulting, and will never happen.

Gene: shouldn’t we ask what we can do now that we are freed from drudgery instead of asking to work some more?

14 “The idea that these protestors were violent and engaged in routine property destruction was the main justification for the army of police in riot gear that was assembled in response to these protests. Of course, it was the idea that regular people were trying to have a say in some of the more important aspects of how they were governed that scared the governors back then (which has obvious parallels to today).”

Don’t forget that riot gear , surveillance equipment, security consulting domestically and abroad, etc., etc., are boom-time make-work industries for the crony capitalists, revolving door military, mercenaries, and 1% wannabes. It’s perhaps the most prosperous going, right now. Any excuse for grabbing those big security bucks.

I just read your review of Frums “Dead Right”, Mr Holbo. Very funny stuff indeed. I know these are more serious times but any chance anyone might critique Mark Steyns new production with the same rigour?
I really dont want to read it myself, (it appears the US is doomed as too many people are going to Harvard, joining NGOs/dreaming up ways of regulating capitalism to death, starting work to late in life, 35 apparently, and retiring to early, 44, and not doing enough amateur carpentry in their spare time. Of course all of this would be bad enough without an unstoppable Muslim takeover that political correctness prevents us from tackling)
The mans clearly insane

@18: as opposed, perhaps, to the position that both state violence against protesters and vandalism are both wrong? If you’re advocating violence as a tactic, against whom and on what moral grounds? Your statements would read oddly, if we substituted murder for violence, for example – we don’t only condemn murder (on moral grounds) when it is performed by the weak.

I think the point was that not only is Duncan Foley a better economist than Brad DeLong, he is also better on classical Greece.

26: They’re desperate, either to get Obama re-elected or to make a feint to the left so they can blame the Left for Obama’s loss in 2012.

They will betray us. This is about the only truth.

Meredith @ 30

For the record: In my opinion, there is nothing whatever wrong with knowing Greek, ancient or modern. I was alluding to the practice in Roman times of assigning the duties of a slave according to his qualifications. (There is a banquet scene in Fellini’s Satyricon which makes the same allusion — I love to hear the sound of Greek while I’m eating.) Watching that scene should disabuse anyone of the silly notion that a good education will automatically admit him to membership in the upper classes.

Here’s the meaningful part of Yglesias’s comment:

some of the solutions offered by some protestors are unsound. This is all the more reason that liberals with confidence in liberal solutions should show up and try to persuade people to champion a more sustainable set of economic policies.

The Occupy Wall Street protestors must be co-opted and serious people (like, for example, Matt Yglesias) should be put in charge of implementing their own solutions.

Harold @25,

A very good point. The uses of military hardware for domestic purposes, for responding to protestors, immigrants / borders, urban drug use, etc., is big business.

“Neoliberalism was never – or was never supposed to be – the view that being in favor of trade liberalizaton means market fundamentalism in everything. Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably.”

Well, they’ve certainly had me fooled all this time. There was I thinking ‘neoliberalism’ meant privatisation, small government, more regressive taxation to float all the boats, slashing state spending on healthcare, education and pensions, increased inequality, lower social mobility, sink or swim economics.

How silly.

Tim @ #9:
In country. That’s the political sweet spot.
To take another example, the Indignados are all about 46% youth unemployment. If you want to discuss third world sweatshops you’ll have to bring the subject up yourself.

Yglesias has (quite rightly) taken a lot of criticism in this and previous CT threads, but my hat’s off to him for his TNR symposium comment. Though their presence and influence is now fortunately on the wane, those smug bastards at the New Republic have done considerable damage over the years, and it’s nice to have someone they respect tell them so, however politely.

Were progressives right to try to draw lines in the sand against liberalization, or was that picking the wrong fight, strategically or philosophically or for whatever reason?

Big business wanted to help the working and sustenance classes less.

Let’s say we measure help in dollars. Paying some American workers money to do stuff is helping them by providing some money to them, hundreds of dollars per week per person. Paying some workers in Thailand to do stuff is helping those workers by providing some money to them, hundreds of pennies per week per person. In both cases, we can consider the business to be improving the welfare of workers at a measurable expense.

Big business gets away with losing fewer dollars in the latter scenario. The dollars that are saved and not lost do not get spent on improving human welfare; they are factored into the profit of the company. So in the latter case big business is doing less for human welfare. How this is humanist is hard to perceive.

I refuse to buy into anti-protectionist globalization in the absence of a legal system that ensures the business cannot possibly get away with spending less workers of the world than it spends on workers locally (and ensures that this wage is fair, as measured by a very tight labor market).

I am inclined to support protectionism because I care about workers the whole world over, and I care about holding business accountable for a reasonable contribution to human welfare. Otherwise why should we allow them to exist? We don’t allow business to exist because it turns a profit for its owners, we allow business to exist because it contributes to the welfare of workers and (hopefully) of human beings generally.

If business decides to respond by protectionist policies and never ever move outside the U.S., fine. That’s not a problem at all. We can tax the businesses more steeply and spend more on foreign aid and hire nonprofits to do it.

A business has no inherent right to exist, to act, to interact, to operate, or to sell. We’ve let business get by with abominably low (and lowering) demands on them to demonstrate they are improving human welfare steadily and satisfactorily, and the 99% / Occupy movement is increasingly looking like the best opportunity to demand better. “We are the 99%. We demand better.”

We have no reason and no responsibility to say any more than that until the topic of conversation becomes “Okay, how can we coerce business to do a better job improving human welfare?”

The argument isn’t about violence but legitimacy efficiency and about prudence.

Trust me, that works better. At this time, breaking a window is a very inefficient and somewhat imprudent tactic for disrupting business affairs. We should deploy effective tactics. If others among us employ other tactics, including violent tactics, we should respond to calls for us to denounce them as nonsensical: “give me an hour’s prime airtime to express the damage the banks are doing, and I’ll happily give you a ten-second quote that expresses my commitment to nonviolence. Tit for tat. ‘Til then, no comment. I don’t bother to speak to journalists who can’t be bothered to figure out what the real story is here.”

This Occupy thing is, as I think you’d agree, an emerging opportunity to form a coordinated assault on the perpetrators of profitable injustice. Here in [city redacted] we’re doing teach-ins every week, have a crowd of regulars already, and also new people who are somewhere between ‘fed up’ and ‘curious.’ We’ve got people who never attended a protest before helping us coordinate sit-in raids on bank headquarters within driving distance. We’re ramping up, and holy crap, people are following. We speak openly of evolving plans to disrupt a bank’s administrative headquarters to make loudspeaker announcements of that bank’s specific contributions to the disastrous economic situation that we and the majority of the whole world find ourselves in. People who I never would have expected to get involved are talking about doing things I never could have plausibly expected them to consider doing, a mere year ago. I am reminded nearly every day of Harry’s story of a gentleman who, contrary to appearance and initial dismissiveness, unexpectedly expressed strong sympathy with the miners’ strike and donated money to them.

Tim Worstall whines: “Standard whine: neoliberal seems to have two different current meanings. Hayek/Friedman etc style and Yglesias/DeLong style. The latter seemingly being a recent and American neologism. /whine.”

Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy’s “Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction” calls Bill Clinton and Tony Blair “second wave neoliberals”. David Harvey’s “Brief History of Neoliberalism” is, if I recall correctly, rather strident in its claims that their ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between Reagan and Thatcher on the one hand and Clinton and Blair on the other.

It’s not an American neologism. It’s not recent either–people have been calling me a “neoliberal” since at least 1993…

Brad DeLong

Just to clarify my last point: calling political actors who present themselves as liberals (in the American sense) “neoliberal” (in the international sense) is, in effect, denying that they are liberals in the U.S. sense at all. The folks who coined the American term “neoliberal” in the 1980s (and a much smaller and more recent group of people like Matt Yglesias who seem to be trying to revive the term to describe themselves), on the other hand, use it precisely in order to continue to lay claim to the legacy of American liberalism, while largely embracing the policies associated with liberalism in the European sense.

I would like to second, third, and nth Mitchell Freedman at 24. That is the key point about this situation. Economists of a “utilitarian consequentialist” bent of mind would like us to treat the outcomes/allocation of resources as the moral object, and the means of distribution (trade, prices) as morally neutral.

Then they can propose astonishingly absurd things like “the winners can compensate the losers”.

This—promising post hoc rectification of unsustainable situations—is the overall pattern of prescriptions from mainstream economics, and the only real response is to demand prior restraints on inequality: by restraining trade, capital flows, etc.

“It’s not an American neologism. It’s not recent either—people have been calling me a “neoliberal” since at least 1993…”

Brad DeLong

IIRC, you’ve been calling yourself that for a while, to the point of having a blog post where you marked your neliberal beliefs to market.

Whatevah, alpers

David Atkins at Digby’s place has a great history of the fight between assets and wages since the 70s. “It has to do with a battle between the forces trying to raise wages, and the forces trying to raise assets. ” Keys off Schumer’s terrific plan to offer visas to foreigners who buy the foreclosed houses of the outsourced and downsized Americans, who can then just die.

Assets vs. wages. Capital vs labor. Which side are you on. This is not complicated.

I’m wise to the lies of the company spies.

49: Efficiency is an aspect of prudence. The main but but seldom-expressed objection to violence at demonstrations is not “Violence Is Wrong” but the recognition of the state monopoly of legitimate violence. If a cop shoots a demonstrator it’s unfortunate but he gets the benefit of the doubt, but if a demonstrator shoots a cop it’s monstrous. And this can be reasonable, though your attitude toward police violence is an index of your authoritarianism. And as the state’s legitimacy becomes more doubtful, the demonstrators’ violence becomes more legitimate.

The momentary devotion to Gandhi of loyal citizens facing violent demonstrations is at best the commonsense acceptance of the status quo monopoly of violence, if it isn’t a concern troll attempt to delegitimize the demonstration.

I’m sure that scholastic casuists had an explanation of why government violence is OK, while the same act by a private citizen would be immoral and wrong, but non-violence should be left out of it.

Another index of authoritarianism is the degree to which the heinousness of small violent acts is multiplied when it’s perceived that they are directed against the state power. Small-time vandalism isn’t even a felony in most places, but many feel that one demonstrator’s (or provocateur’s) vandalism can delegitimize a whole movement. But that’s just an index of authoritarianism again, and a litmus test for your relative acceptance of the status quo.

People should prepare their response to the first violence, because it will come sooner or later. My own opinion is that we’ve entered the zone where delegitimization starts to become reasonable, but few agree with me on this or anything else. Sometime things do change, though.

NGDP targetting has pretty much outed itself over at Nick Rowe’s place this week. I knew from day one that Sumner was about asset inflation at the expense of wages, employment, and gov’t services. I just didn’t have the cops to explain it. Rowe actually came out with the accusation of “envy” to anyone who would stand in the way of Chuck Norris.

Not that your opinion really matters Bob, but if this is the kind of attitude you’re going to bring to the subject the only way you are going to help shift the status quo to the left is if there is an opportunity for violent revolution. Maybe this is what you’re hoping for, but there are an awful lot of problems with that outlook. In the meanwhile, I’m not going to confuse people like Sumner for what they are. And that is someone who is unlikely to be a big supporter of the 99%, but is an advocate for sane monetary management in a legitimate effort to improve economic growth on behalf of everyone. I don’t know what you think you’ve discovered about him recently but bringing down unemployment is almost certainly a necessary precondition to improving worker incomes.

I also find it quite remarkable that Yglesias comes in for so much criticism regarding the neoliberal agenda. Liberalism lost control of the Democratic party at least before Yglesias was in college. I don’t see how he’s responsible for it. Regarding actual policy proposals on the table in the United States, I don’t remember him taking the ‘wrong’ view except on Iraq and ed reform. The former I’d ascribe to naivete and the latter pigheadedness. The folks at TNR will not waste any time undermining a legitimate effort to recapture the Democratic party or the national discourse for the left, but I don’t have any reason to believe Yglesias would join them, this article being exhibit A.

“If a cop shoots a demonstrator it’s unfortunate but he gets the benefit of the doubt, but if a demonstrator shoots a cop it’s monstrous. ”

Right now, I think Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna is wishing that rule still applied the way it usually does. For that matter, I don’t think there is likely to be a Bull Connor Memorial in the Mall any time soon.

But your point about the presumption is valid. If a demonstrator throws a punch, and a cop uses a baton and pepper spray, it won’t matter who hit who first – the cop will, as you say, get the benefit of the doubt. The tactical implications are pretty obvious.

@62:

I’m not denying that, say, Red China, is on average much better off with rising inequality, but also a large growth rate, vs. earlier when things were far more equal, but everyone was dirt-poor, obviously. (Red China’s Gini is now around 47, just a hair more than the U.S. at 46.7). And some countries, such as Brazil, have seen declining inequality, with its Gini falling from 62 to 56, real “progress”, which was no doubt felt by the popular classes, which is why Lulu retired from office with an 80% approval rating, though it’s still a very high level of inequality. However, the U.S. and the E.U. together are 50% of world output, at least measured in $ terms, with Japan maybe another 5-6%, etc., so rising inequality in developed countries/economies plays a large role in the overall picture, whereas the only thing that is required for “between-country” inequality to diminish is that growth rates in “developing” countries/economies exceed those of developed ones, which is easily the case, since the latter are starting from a much lower level, playing catch-up, and are not at the technical production possibility frontier. So it’s not prima facie clear how much the declining “global” inter-country inequality really counter-balances the “global” rise in intra-country inequality, as a justification, nor an explanation. What does seem clear is that the old “Kuznets curve”, whereby developing nations experience rising inequality, as developing, modernizing sectors race ahead of traditional sectors, whereas, as development/modernization takes hold across sectors, inequality should decline, is holding up. Which should be cause for some re-thinking of both theory and evidence.

JQ@65

Even Tony Baloney was only punished because he was caught red-handed on video and he’s hardly getting harsh punishment (losing vacation time isn’t nothing, but it’s nothing compared to the punishment a civilian would get for doing the same to police).

JH @ 64

From where I stand on the left, the difficulty with both the angelic and demonic strains of neoliberalism is only incidental, and only incidentally a matter of economics. Both strains define what’s gone wrong with modernity as a management problem. Concerning our present crisis, DeLong freely admits that we thought we had it under control, and I was surprised to find that we didn’t. Sometimes he feels a little bolder and goes so far as to claim that we know what to do, but not how to make anybody do it. Implicitly in such statements, and more explicitly in others, he advances the two-part thesis that a) once we figure out the politics, we’ll be home free, and b) we don’t need any help doing that from people who are both too stupid and too ignorant to run the machinery of the economy, and by extension the machinery of civilization itself. That, in case anyone fails to get it, means most of us. Democracy, in other words, is not only not indispensable, it’s mostly a pain in the ass.

To which I reply, even if it’s all true what you say, Matt and Brad, it’s deeply unsatisfying. If what we’ve got is the best you technocrats can do, we don’t really care whether you want our help or not, you’re going to get it. We suppose we should be sorry for the inconvenience, but maybe we’ll wait to apologize until we see how well we do.

RE: “William Timberman 10.22.11 at 2:31 pm: My problem with the Yglesias/Delong tendency—I refuse to call such a graceless socio-economic collage a style—is that it literally has no sense of how the other half lives, and not much interest in whether it does or doesn’t.”

Would you mind defecating less and thinking more? For all of our sakes, it would be a mitzvah.

Brad DeLong

John Holbo writes: “All this is consistent with saying that neoliberalism is still a strategic catastrophe, because you always get the liberalism first – that is, the market stuff – and then you never get the ‘neo’. Because the process of getting the liberalization stuff erodes the progressive base that could demand the ‘neo’. And the paranoid point applies here, too: if neoliberalism requires sincere neoliberals, in positions of power, to implement it, and – in the nature of things – most neoliberals are really just apologists for malefactors of great wealth, wearing a mask (or holding a copy of TNR in front of their faces) then you’ve got a problem.”

We neoliberals-in-power got an awful lot of real wage gains and considerable gains in employment back in the 1990s. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, that was pretty tasty “neo”, IMHO at least…

And we neoliberal types all worked like dogs to elect Al Gore and continue the pattern–which at least some non-neoliberal types did not. We all remember Ralph Nader and his supporters in 2000, don’t we?

“When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: ‘Bush.’ Not that he actually thinks the man he calls ‘Bush Inc.’ deserves to be elected: ‘He’ll do whatever industry wants done.’ The rumpled crusader clearly prefers to sink his righteous teeth into Al Gore, however: ‘He’s totally betrayed his 1992 book,’ Nader says. ‘It’s all rhetoric.’ Gore ‘groveled openly’ to automakers, charges Nader, who concludes with the sotto voce realpolitik of a ward heeler: ‘If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win…’

You can criticize us neoliberals for not being strong enough to win elections and continue our policies with the 4% Nader albatross hanging around our necks. But the charge of bait-and-switch seems to me to be ill-founded.

Now if you want to (metaphorically) hang the miserable Nick Clegg higher than Haman, I will happily bring the (metaphorical) rope…

Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong @ 72

From each according to his need, to each according to his ability. Or something like that, right? As Meredith says, we’ve learned a lot from you, some of which you’re aware of, and some of which you’re not. No need to be concerned about which is which.

How about some Pascal here? “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” I take this statement as expressing the perfect intersection of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. With a lean toward R, at least at moments when E is overwhelming all else. Listen to Dr. Hilarius. (Btw, the whole modernism/post-modernism drama is really the same old same old.)

Here’s that Saez graph set for the real income gains of the 1990s:

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/pages/interactive#/?start=1990&end=2000

So from 1993 to 2001, the richest 10% got 63% of the growth in real income.

Yeah, if only Gore got elected, the top 1% would’ve been in trouble now. And the 99% swum in luxury. Lol. So, it is the case of “neoliberalism has never really been tried”. Really, there are only two possibilities here: utterly idiotic or outright disingenuous.

Clinton and Gore, with their policies of demonizing welfare and the federal workforce, represent neo-liberalism par excellence. They threw the poor under the bus. They did some good — I’m not sure what.

“@ 44 ““In country” inequality has been rising “globally”.”

Well it has certainly risen sharply in some countries, such as the United States and UK. Other countries such as France, Denmark and the Netherlands not so, or not so much (depending on how you measure).

Back to the original post — although the thread has been fascinating.

Here is my take on neoliberalism: In the parts of the world (just about all of it except the US) where liberalism meant support for limited government, civil liberties, cosmopolitanism, anti-militarism and free markets, neoliberalism means support for free markets, period. A neoliberal is willing to use repression and war to impose free markets on the unwilling. This would horrify traditional liberals.

In the US, where liberalism refers to activist government in the tradition of FDR and Dewey, neoliberalism refers to a reformulation that embraces markets and rejects the ethical critique of profit-seeking. US neoliberals want free trade, outsourcing of government functions (e.g. charter schools or even vouchers), market-friendly environmental policies, etc. On the financial crisis front, a neoliberal like Geithner probably stays awake at night thinking of new ways the government can make financial stability profitable.

I am not casting judgment here, just describing. For what it’s worth, over the years I have moved a bit toward some aspects of neoliberalism, but mostly not.

The alter-globalization movement definitely had the “wrong” issue at the wrong time. Trade liberalization was a core commitment of US neoliberals, and they were armed with a theory that said that (a) unrestricted trade is in the collective interest of every society, (b) nevertheless some interest groups would lose out, and therefore (c) those who understand (a) and (b) must either defeat the “losers”, buy them out or both. Most economists to this day think that (a) has the status of a mathematical truth, even though this is not at all the case.

On top of this, the liberalization of developing countries in the 80s as a condition of life support in the post 1982 period and the entry of the ex-Communist world into the capitalist world market in the 1990s dramatically raised the stakes for trade and capital liberalization. The purpose of trade and investment treaties like NAFTA was to make as permanent as possible the liberalization temporarily achieved through pressure. Backsliding would have severely restricted profit-making opportunities. Between the intellectual and political-economic arguments, there was no space at all for opposition to the trade agenda short of outright rebellion.

The OWS situation is similar and different. Impinging on the freedom of investors to pursue the highest returns possible under the broadest public guarantees possible is also very dicey from a political-economic standpoint. The 1% has a lot of money and a lot of power. OTOH, the intellectual argument is clearly not there in this case. The global justice crowd could be attacked as “protectionists” (which some of them were), and it was difficult to explain why that was misleading, but the corresponding epithet, “populists”, is not very epithetical (to coin a word), nor does it point to a ready-made frame in the sense of the free-trade-versus-protectionism trope.

On top of which, the views of elites of all sorts have been called into question by the economic morass, even to the extent of engendering some self-doubt at the very top of the economic pyramid.

It’s a more favorable moment.

On the neologism. “neoliberalism”: J. M. Keynes was the prototypical neoliberal. He explicitly rejected the laissez-faire policy as an artifact of an “incomplete hypothesis introduced for the sake of simplicity” that “depends on a variety of unreal assumptions.”

Today’s neoliberals (both kinds) should really be called neo-neoliberals, although such a neo-neologism would be uglyugly. The two kinds of neo-neos are the Keynesians-on-steroids and the 19th-century-Viennaphiles. The former variety suffers from what Freud described as “the neurotic’s family romance” whereby they fantasize Walras as the true fountainhead of their general equilibrium wet dreams.

“paternity is always uncertain, maternity is most certain.”

Perhaps someone can explain to a puzzled Sandwichman how blaming Nader for Gore’s defeat in ’00 differs from blaming Republican poisonous partisanship on the Democratic Senate rejection of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987?

A big part of the problem with the neoliberals is political tone-deafness, but this is not accidental. A primary neoliberal principle is that you can’t pander to your base. Republicans can, but not Democrats. Both parties ended up agreeing that the great unwashed, labor and the unemployed and the poor, were a threat to good governance and that their influence and the influence of populist, left, and majoritarian movements should be minimized. Unfortunately, this works differently for Democrats and Republicans, since the Democratic base includes the very people who can’t be pandered to. Thus, “The Democratic Party hates its base”.

Lincoln was able to do what he did because he was pushed by people on his left who often hated him. Same for FDR. But since 1948 Democrats have successfully destroyed their entire left: militant unions, communists, radicals, populists, progressives, every independent force. So now THEY are the left.

And it’s their turn to be destroyed.

Salient, the proof that a business benefits society is its customers and its employees.

The compensation that employees receive is a factor when determining how beneficial a business is, but as for customers, absolutely not — access to customers is the core privilege that a justified business is permitted. This is why the disruptive tactic of sit-ins makes philosophical as well as strategic sense: if a company has behaved abominably, a sit-in raises awareness of that behavior, but the more important aspect is that it significantly reduces their ability to access customers–sit-ins are a concrete attempt to at least partially revoke that privilege.

As for what is a privilege afforded to business and what is a measure of their benefit to society, in general, you can split stuff into “things that justify the business” from “things that the business must justify” by splitting “things a rational profit-maximizing business would rather not do if it could get away with it consequence-free” from “things a rational profit-maximizing business actually does want to do or would love to do.”

Businesses want to sell things to customers, providing those customers with a product that is worth less to the business than the thing sold (the discrepancy in value is profit). This desire holds regardless of how happy and grateful (or frustrated and ungrateful) the business’s customers feel about the opportunity to provide that profit. To justify firms’ right to access customers and earn profit (and also to justify the negative externalities they produce), they must demonstrate the benefits they provide to society ‘outweigh’ the profits they extract from society. This is not at all an impossible thing to do, and we can be accommodating in our judgment (taking long-term customer satisfaction into account seems fair). Nonetheless, I see no compelling reason to give businesses a free pass by default.

…the proof that a business benefits society is its customers and its employees

viz prostitution and drug addiction

Mandos wrote: “But the point, Brad, is that neoliberal policies (in the sense of what was wrought under Clinton) are self-undermining, even when they “succeed,” leaving aside rather quaint arguments about Nader.”

Hmmm…

First, it is not clear to me in what sense Nader is “quaint”–he comes around Berkeley occasionally, and is still very proud of how he managed to keep Gore from becoming President and thus revealed the violence inherent in the system.

Second, I agree that our policies were undermined. It’s not clear to me that they were “self undermining”. Politics matters. Elections matter. Administrations matter. ClintonWorld was a very different place from GHWBushWorld and DoleWorld. GoreWorld was a very different place from GWBushWorld. (It is not clear yet whether ObamaWorld is a very different place from McCainWorld: it depends on whether the ACA is implemented or not. I do think that HRCWorld is a very different place from McCainWorld and from ObamaWorld: I cannot conceive of HRC having the deference to Bernanke-Geithner and the lack of concern about the long-term economic, social, and political consequences of >9% unemployment that we appear to see in Obama and McCain.)

And you need to be *very* careful about who you trust for your analyses: the ignorant and the dishonest claim that Clinton-era policies were ineffective at reducing inequality, and then point to estimates of the pre-tax and pre-transfer distribution of income. Here in the real world, Clinton’s expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, marginal rate increase on high-income tax payers, and uncapping of HI collectively made up the largest progressive redistribution of income in America since Roosevelt. It’s a bad thing to try to erase the historical memory of that and take that away from him–and from us who worked for him.

I refuse to believe that Herman Cain is a psychopath!

http://p.castfire.com/D8aEY/video/750957/750957_2011-10-10-182057.1323.m4v

Salient, you seem to think that people buy from business are not preferring the goods they get to the money they payed for the good. There is no society to be harmed by transactions: only actions can do harm.

Sam, making women dependent on their husbands as the source of income is very regressive. Work is participation in society the way we have society today. Its just wrong to say that making one half dependent on the other is a good idea.

Salient, you seem to think that people buy from business are not preferring the goods they get to the money they payed for the good.

That is, and must be, completely irrelevant to the justification for the business, (especially if we assume that, were we to dissolve the business as an entity, there exist people, namely former employees and managers of the business, who could construct a similar business providing similar goods). If I am starving, I’ll ‘prefer’ your single slice of bread to my $20.

Seriously, the biggest mistake that anyone attempting to proffer justification of a business’s existence could make, is to give the business any credit whatsoever for finding a way to profit off other people. I get that every business would like to count “but our products make people oh so happy!” as the chief justification for existence (this is especially hilarious if attempted by a bank), but recognizing this particular attempt to self-justify as absurd and unacceptable is necessarily the first step to constructing a moral theory of institutions that makes a damn bit of sense.

To spell it out, pretty much any given business could be nationalized, transferring ownership to the state while keeping all employees in their current capacity. The nationalized business could continue to provide its existing products at existing prices without much trouble. As we assess the legitimacy of a business, the main operational question is: Does this business have a strong and coherent argument against its nationalization? It’s the responsibility of the business to convince us that we as a society have sufficient reason to not do this.

Most small firms clear this bar with ease (it’s a three-step argument: first they point to meager profits, and relatively small amount of negative externalities that can be directly attributed to them, as evidence that they don’t have a whole lot of bad to justify in the first place; second, they point to how little of that could be plausibly changed for the better by government ownership; finally they argue that the additional bureaucratic overhead that would be generated by nationalization outweighs those little changes for the better, and the net result is less beneficial to society than the tax on profits that the business is currently paying).

First, it is not clear to me in what sense Nader is “quaint”—he comes around Berkeley occasionally, and is still very proud of how he managed to keep Gore from becoming President and thus revealed the violence inherent in the system.

Nader is not quaint. The argument is. Which is what I said.

Second, I agree that our policies were undermined. It’s not clear to me that they were “self undermining”.

The fact that you, one of the best-intentioned of the mainstream bloggy economists, can’t see this is one of the biggest problems here. I daresay it might actually be the issue at stake. In the pursuit of a fleeting mathematical prosperity, the kinds of social supports and guarantees that hold a society together (protecting jobs, a generous welfare state, limits on financial shenanigans) were undermined—and, arguably worse, nothing of the intellectual detritus of the Reagan period was really overturned.

It has brought us to this moment, that electing Obama meant only a 2% change of course from Bush. It brought us the Tea Party and a slew of disastrous state legislatures. And if it didn’t bring them, it didn’t do anything to keep them away.

So, blame Nader if you want. The handful of votes in Florida—it should never have been that close—would have brought us to this moment one way or another, because the neoliberals in power spent too much time intellectually peeing on the Seattle protesters and finding increasingly clever ways to hold the left hostage.

_After all Britain did not obtain even universal manhood suffrage until WWI more or less forced it to adopt the Representation of the People Act of 1918 which finally broke the bond of electoral franchise to property._

Arguably, the United States didn’t catch up until the 1960s given the propensity of many states to disenfranchise blacks.

Totally parenthetical, in a way. Some thoughts on Nader. I’m tempted to think of him as a vain man who is also principled. In other words, not so different from many others (of us, included).
But then, I really know nothing of Nader’s personal psychology, so my calling him vain is groundless. But maybe I can legitimately note his lack of institutional connections, lack of embeddedness. His strength but also his weakness.
The embeddedness question may be key. Into which bed does each of us climb? Toward which people do we extend our imaginations? So, not so parenthetical: into whose beds are (US, okay, okay) neoliberals make the effort of imagining themselves climbing? (Maybe that varies, btw.)

From 94: This vile, cowardly, undemocratic behavior is a reflection of the official Democratic Party’s preference for remaining even a permanent junior partner in a two-party system over opening up the electoral system to fundamental reform. How many of Nader’s prominent, tenured vilifiers have devoted equivalent energy to supporting proportional representation, automatic voter registration, abolition of the Electoral College, and other elementary concessions to fairness and good sense?

Brad, no comment on this aspect of the 2000 election? Nader’s egomania and the frivolousness of the left are the only lessons you draw from that episode?

But I am absolutely and completely astonished and gobsmacked by Obama’s—and Bernanke’s, and Geithner’s—belief that >9% unemployment is something to be tolerated rather than something to be changed as fast as possible.

Given your astonishment at the behavior of that crew, what makes you suppose you wouldn’t also be “astonished” had HRC been president?

Yet instead, in the U.S., no matter who wins the presidency, we are going to fight hard for Social Security and Medicare.
Because their current benefits can’t be paid for by their current revenues.

We are going to fight for environmental protection. Because the cost of environmental regulation continues to rise relative to median income.

SamChevre #123 “Because their current benefits can’t be paid for by their current revenues.”

If we are going to consider it as a separate account, as you do here, then it has been prepaid and has full solvency until around the year 2035.

“Because the cost of environmental regulation continues to rise relative to median income.”

A lot of things are rising relative to net income, a condition which helped to trigger the Occupation. But I rather doubt it, about this one. Are you cost-benefitting the entire ecological effects of such regulations? Because surely the net is benefit, not cost. This was even the conclusion drawn by George W. Bush’s administration, as I recall.

SamChevere@123 While I’m curious about the claim that “the cost of environmental regulation continues to rise relative to median income” (even if true, is it due to a drop in median income), environmental protection should be in a category separate from other expenditures.

Environmental benefits don’t have a time horizon. They last for the future for as long as a future exists. A livable and enjoyable environment is fundamental to everything, it is a tangible reality quite different from “economic health”. As for the cost of maintaining a healthy environment, preventing damage will always be cheaper than repair or mitigation as long as the second law of thermodynamics remains valid.

Brad Delong @ 103

And you need to be very careful about who you trust for your analyses: the ignorant and the dishonest claim that Clinton-era policies were ineffective at reducing inequality, and then point to estimates of the pre-tax and pre-transfer distribution of income. Here in the real world, Clinton’s expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, marginal rate increase on high-income tax payers, and uncapping of HI collectively made up the largest progressive redistribution of income in America since Roosevelt. It’s a bad thing to try to erase the historical memory of that and take that away from him—and from us who worked for him.

Can you link to time-series data showing post-tax & transfer income distributions over a reasonable time period surrounding the Clinton presidency? I’ve been unable to find this data myself.

On the specific subject of the EITC, Rothstein notes that:

In all of the scenarios that I consider, a substantial portion of the intended transfer to low income single mothers is captured by employers through reduced wages. The transfer to employers is borne in part by low skill workers who are not themselves eligible for the EITC and are therefore made strictly worse off by its existence.

Ten seconds after I posted that, I found some vague figures at OECD.org.

It shows Gini coefficients (post tax & transfer) for time periods labeled “Mid-70s” through “Mid-2000s”. The U.S. shows a rise from 0.32 (in the Mid-70s) to to 0.38 (in the Mid-2o00s). There may or may not be a brief pause in the increase from the “Mid-90s” to “Around 2000” period (both are reported as 0.36).

That data doesn’t support the claim that Clinton’s policies reduced inequality, though perhaps less-crude statistics would show that. At best, you could argue that it would have increased faster under some different set of policies.

Bruce Webb quoted Mark Thoma as saying (some years ago) “Economics does not do equity well”.

I like Mark Thoma (after all, he links to Ecologicalheadstand) but my response is: the economics that doesn’t do equity well doesn’t do economics well. The old equity/efficient tradeoff canard (Okun) is 100% hokum. Okun’s hokum. It is unmitigated nonsense on stilts. This solemn cornball comes up with the notion that “dammit, there should be a tradeoff between equity and efficiency” and ever after the timid economists’ chorus sings the refrain that there IS a tradeoff. Give me a break. Give me an effing break. There is no such thing. It is a figment of the economists’ imagination. And they dutifully pass it down, teacher to student, like holy lump-of-labor relic. It is horse cock.

“a dim understanding that Canadian and Australian versions are orthogonal to both but is there a commonality between the latter two?”

Canadians and Aussies are identical, with the exception we wrestle with beaver instead of crocodile, eh?

Perhaps DeLong, Yglesias, et al. are consistent in their thinking but this doesn’t make neo-liberalism in practice any less of a horrific disaster for millions of people or an ideological shell game.

They want it to be less of a disaster, and that’s nice and all. It made me safer, knowing the wages were higher and unemployment was low in the US even though I didn’t get much in the way of wages (I was a student). But the ’90s was a disaster for Latin America. Clearly, we’re in the throes of a worse disaster now.

I don’t know if it means all that much to credit neo-liberalism for these nice things that it might have wrought when you think about how much better it could have gone, for so many more people.

Yeah, mostly what I hold Obama accountable for is his continuation and even extension of the Bush-era assassination, surveillance, war-augmented-by-private-mercenaries-unaccountable-to-any-law ‘security’ state, all of which has been executed through the executive branch. (I gather we’re converting our entire military force in Iraq to private contractors and mercenaries by the end of this year. Yay?) He can have a pass on not getting additional domestic stimulus measures through a hostile Congress.

But Obama probably shouldn’t get a pass on nominating Ben Bernanke for a second term, and more importantly, Ben Bernanke shouldn’t get a pass for being Ben Bernanke for a second term. And Obama definitely shouldn’t get a pass for sitting on TARP as though its hundreds of billions of dollars were meant to protect Treasury undersecretary backsides from park grass stains; neither should Geithner. Neither the BB nomination nor the disuse of TARP money was the responsibility of a hostile Congress.

But I’m only niggling because my mugshot appears in Fronts of People in Judea; carry on.

Weirdly, I’m ok with some of Salient’s conclusions, but the premises seem crazy:

“Paying some American workers money to do stuff is helping them by providing some money to them, hundreds of dollars per week per person. Paying some workers in Thailand to do stuff is helping those workers by providing some money to them, hundreds of pennies per week per person. In both cases, we can consider the business to be improving the welfare of workers at a measurable expense.

Big business gets away with losing fewer dollars in the latter scenario. The dollars that are saved and not lost do not get spent on improving human welfare; they are factored into the profit of the company. So in the latter case big business is doing less for human welfare. How this is humanist is hard to perceive.”

How is it that here, on crookedtimber, not a single person notices that this is the very marginal utility theory of money argument which is used to support progressive taxation? Pair it with the immigration discussion from a few threads down and we can easily see that redistribution from the American worker to the Thai worker is justified because the marginal difference in money utility between the American worker and the Thai worker is enormous, and that we shouldn’t worry about borders when analyzing the justice claim. You really can’t have it all.

But on the other claims Salient is more right: having an ethos where profit is the only motive, like practically any idea where you let one part of a social balance overthrow all the other parts, is really bad. Good societies have a good balance of competing interests, and we’ve let the balance get way out of control in the favor of a pure profit focus. And this isn’t a government-only problem. This is a societal culture problem reflected in how governments operate. The problem with neo-liberalism is that it largely accepts the profit-only frame. Because it accepts the profit-only frame, it has trouble dealing with the other values which have gotten out of balance in favor of profits because it doesn’t fit them into a framework where they are an important driver of anything.

Brad DeLong writes at 103:

bq. Here in the real world, Clinton’s expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, marginal rate increase on high-income tax payers, and uncapping of HI collectively made up the largest progressive redistribution of income in America since Roosevelt. It’s a bad thing to try to erase the historical memory of that and take that away from him—and from us who worked for him.

Like some others above, I’d like to see some figures on this. But those I’ve managed to find suggest that there were real benefits to people lower down the scale under Clinton, even if those at the top continued to do better. Since, given real-world constraints, it is very hard for policy-makers to change things – and especially in the US – I can see that those in government who put their shoulders to the wheel might reasonably feel aggrieved when they don’t get the credit they deserve for what they did manage to do (I suspect that an identification with counterparts in the UK may also lie behind DeLong’s willingness to defend New Labour’s record again sniping lefties like me too).

More Oy.

elm at 129. Who gives a crap whether Clinton reduced income inequality. Did employment rates increase to levels not anticipated under standard NAIRU theory? Yes. Did workers experience stronger than normal Real Wage increases than that NAIRU theory that guided Fed policy through the 60s through 80s suggested would happen? Yes. Do I give a crap that my contemporary Bill Gates earned billions while all I got was a solid middle class lifestyle? Hell no. Particularly since I no longer have it.

Pragmatism and “greatest good” is not strictly equivalent or even approximate to equal outcomes. The fact that that are fabulously wealthy people in Social Democracies like Finland and Sweden is not a bug. The proof of the Clinton years is in the pudding. As in I had some then and don’t now.

Contrary to certain wingnut belief structures New Deal Liberalism wasn’t about redistribution for its own sake, “greatest goods” doesn’t necessarily imply equal goods. Oddly the key question for New Dealers was posed by the poster person of the anti-New Deal, one Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off now than four years ago?” a version of which carried Bill Clinton to his second term. Liberals unlike classical Socialists don’t demand that we measure pie slices comparatively with micrometers. We just want enough pie to get by and see our kids do better than we did. That Bill and Melinda’s two kids might inherit billions not being a problem

@116 The main Australian conservative party is called the Liberal Party, a name chosen with reference to the European version of liberalism, and to the English Liberal party, and by contrast with the (then reasonably serious) socialism of the Labor Party. This was in the 1940s – the party had previously gone under various names, most commonly Nationalist. Very occasionally, people in that party try to claim allegiance to liberalism in a philosophical sense, but mostly this party (along with the rural-based National Party) are referred to as “conservatives”.

In normal Australian usage “liberal” (spelled out as “small-l liberal” if needed to avoid confusion) is commonly taken to refer to the civil liberties/social component of liberalism, something to which most large-L Liberals aren’t particularly friendly.

It is far from obvious that nationalisation or privatisation had any impact on the UK’s real-terms GDP per capita whatsoever.

That Bill and Melinda’s two kids might inherit billions not being a problem

I can never understand this logic.

You work, produce something. I work, produce something. We trade, we’re both better off. That’s the idea. Now, Bill Gates built a house for himself, worth $150 million. Or, rather, some people, thousands of them probably, built the house for him. All that they produced at that time, it all went to Bill Gates, because he has these billions. And you and I had to work more to produce stuff for the people who were working for Bill Gates, and give it to them, without getting anything in return. You bet it’s a problem.

Why would anyone think that neoliberalism is an honest belief system – or, more accurately, if they did, why would they take it seriously.

This is a group of people who have advocated using market means to attain social justice for over 30 years now. During that time, this group, due largely to the corrupt nature of American elections, has managed to ‘win’ every debate (not among the voting public, but by buying votes of both parties in a system where third parties are all but impossible). We no see the results of those wins today: massive income inequality, government for, of and by Goldman Sachs, few jobs and fewer well paying ones. This is really undeniable at this point, which is a big part of why OWS goes over so much better than Seattle did (people on here talk about vandalism, but the truth was that back in 2000, people were still relatively fat and happy).

Given that, it is still possible to conclude that self-described liberals are ‘honest’ about the ‘rising tide lifting all boats’ BS, but even if you do conclude that, it is still impossible to conclude that these are people who’s observations we should give any credence to. If they are incapable of seeing what their own policies have wrought and changing their tune, then they are either dishonest or complete morons.

K. Williams @ 154

the fact that the countries in history where the vast majority of people have been able to enjoy sustained levels of prosperity are countries whose economies have been dominated by private enterprise. What’s the explanation for this, if businesses are so invested in—as you would have it—in maintaining people in a state of immiseration?

Presumably it’s explained by the fact that you only want to talk about countries with “sustained levels of prosperity”. When you restrict discussion to only prosperous countries, it’s not surprising to find that they’re prosperous.

Furthermore, those countries with sustained prosperity achieved relative prosperity often employed a variety of protectionist measures which inhibited trade and limited the ability of the capitalist class to export capital and jobs.

Which entails, of course, that the existence of countries in which the vast majority of people enjoy sustained prosperity is a very recent and quite possibly temporary phenomenon. In both the US and Europe we are heading back to the 19th Century, for which this is most definitely not an honest description of the state of play in ANY country.

I understand “neoliberal” to mean original Washington Consensus.

William- indeed. So far the historical situation appears to be that true mass prosperity is a brief post-WWII parenthesis- that currently seems on the way to being closed- in the history of capitalism. On current evidence it would be unwise to place our bets on the side of those who want to believe that it’s the “crisis”, not the good stuff that preceded it, that’s temporary.

May I make one correction to the issue of window-breaking at the WTO? It was more than a single guy with a sign, or a single Starbucks.

There was a core group of about 20-40 “black-block” anarchists who were actively involved in targetted breaking of windows throughout the downtown retail core where the WTO protests took place (and it should be noted that there were many other anarchists at the protest who were not part of it). It was very deliberate and very targetted – I was quite impressed, when walking around in the days afterward, how carefully they managed to break the windows of major trade-implicated chain stores like Gap and Starbucks while leaving the small sandwich shops and independent stores next door unscathed.

The “black bloc” that engaged in the window breaking did so in direct violation of the non-violence principles agreed upon by the vast majority of the civil-disobediance protestors (who opposed vandalism for the tactical reason that it would divert attention from the political issues of the protest, not out of some deep respect for corporate property). The “black bloc” protestors were openly opposed to the non-violence principles and had previously stated they were going to engage in property destruction (for reasons which have been well chewed over in the anarchist press). People I knew who were involved in the non-violent blockade were generally disgusted by the property damage.

There was also a mini-looting in a Starbucks late in the day on N30 that from what I saw was fairly spontanious and not connected to the organized vandalism.

This doesn’t take away from the fact that a few acts of window-breaking was used to justify a totally inappropriate police response, or that the media used the incidents to deamonize protestors. However, we do a disservice to both the protestors who opposed the damage and those who perpetrated it (for deliberate political reasons, however much I may personally disagree with them) to downplay it as a single spontanious event.

John

wasn’t exactly = was pretty

…and I never seem to see the Left acknowledging that working class whites fled them, in droves, in the late sixties and beyond.

Because it isn’t true. In 1968, Humphrey got the same proportion of union and blue-collar ethnic (Poles, Italians, etc) votes that LBJ got in 1964. What broke Republican in 1968 were the urban upper-middle-class and educated elite classes, and that was mostly fear of the black nation, not hatred of hippies. This class then moved to the suburbs.

We hippies always, always knew we had more to fear and hate from the “Clean for Gene” types than from Merle Haggard, and fifty years has absolutely proven us right. Merle is still toking up and hating war and bankers. How about Yglesias?

> Four years later, however, working class ethnic whites and the unions that
> represented them abandoned McGovern and the Democrats. The AFL-CIO
> officially endorsed nobody; unofficially they endorsed Nixon.

I’m not sure that that’s true, but assuming that it is: how’d that work out for them?

Cranky

“Them”, in this case, including “us”, meaning two generations of my family and young Semi-Cranky, who were deeply invested in the demographic you describe.

Elm at 152

I take Pragmatism seriously. Does the existence of Bill and Melinda Gate’s ACTUAL fortune and it’s allocation to Greatest Good ends outweigh the byproduct that their children like Bill Gate’s himself (the child of extreme privilege, his parents were and are Seattle royalty prior to an apart from Junior) will inherit at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars, that is a fraction of their parents’s wealth?

Why Yes. Andrew Carnegie like Joseph Kennedy Sr. like God Help Us JD Rockefeller may have been bastards in their own ways but I am not weeping because the fourth generations of Kennedy’s and Rockefellers all have more than comfortable lives. With exceptions here and there both the patriarchs and progeny delivered and continue to deliver much more pragmatic good than harm. The Koch Brothers not so much. But redistribution for the sake of it quite detached to utility leaves me a little cold. Then again mostly we can’t separate it from utility.

Bob, you’re right, I shouldn’t have gone back to 68 — although I wonder who, exactly, voted for Wallace in California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio and other states where they more than made the difference between Nixon and Humphrey. I shouldn’t have gone back that far because 80 and especially 84 tell the tale. At least the tale relevant to looking at the electoral space embraced by Clinton.

I wish we didn’t live in a country — a world — where George Wallace could swing victory to Richard Nixon, or Ralph Nader to George W. Bush. We live in that world.

Steve at 150.

JD Rockefeller, in some ways the biggest bastard that ever lived, asked his scientific philanthropic advisors if there was some debilative disease that his money all by itself and given the science of the time could eradicate. And they thought hard and said ‘Hookworm’. A parasitic disease no one thinks about anymore because sonof a bitch JDR Jr put up the money to eliminate it and succeeded. Similarly Bill and Melinda Gates are just this close to eliminating malaria in their own lifetimes, news just this week is incredibly exciting, and we are talking about a disease that has probably irradiated tens to hundreds of millions of lives over the last couple centuries. And I am supposed to get exercised because Bill spent a few million bucks building a house cum conference center cum fundraising venue on Mercer Island across I-90 from Seattle?

Are you high? If not keep your focus. The tax system pre-Reagan was deliberately designed to produce this kind of voluntary redistribution. And while we could argue about the relative utility of the Getty Museum against the Rockefellers donation of the land on which UN Headquarters sit we should admit that not all Malefactors of Great Wealth are created equal. After all both Roosevelt’s and all Kennedy’s fall into that general category. At least in origin.

Two comments, Bruce and still not the beginning of a response to what I actually said @150? It’s not about “resentment”, and if you think it is, you’re a fool.

Cranky @ 169: “I’m not sure that that’s true, but assuming that it is: how’d that work out for them?”

1. It was true. 2. Not good.

I’d forgotten until reading the Cowrie excerpts that PATCO had endorsed Reagan against Carter.

Not to continue the diversion, but this blog post from Maxine Udall, Girl Economist also hits some of the issues with philanthrocapitalism:

http://www.maxineudall.com/2011/01/philanthrocapitalism-or-paternalism.html

John

Bruce, Bill Gates will not have eradicated malaria. If it happens, it’ll be done by other people, people who work for a living. Bill Gates is just a guy who stole a lot of money from you and me.

I like 160 & I like 185. Somehow this discussion is about Clinton, Bush, Clinton & Obama, whereas there were a billion or so others steering the decisions of the last decades. There is a lot to be said for that billion being misinformed by a few but then the action is to get a bit better information out there – e.g. on how it was possible for a majority out of a billion people bying into the misinformation.

At some point in time somebody needs to admit that all of the woes of today originate in a default acceptance of Reaganomics (full employment and hence no need for social security) combined with a gradual inescapability of Thatcherite deregulation (because of the organization of global competition without global market regulation). Some may have tried to challenge that status quo but nobody succeeded until such time when this crazy system drove itself into a crash taking everybody with it.

Some modesty – certainly from commenters in the US and the UK – might actually lead to the realization that defending actions of the past is not very helpful for the future.

bob mcmanus 10.25.11 at 1:32 am

” 168: The introduction to Cowie’s book is immediately available at Amazon. I loved it.”

Could you please link? I couldn’t find it.

thanks!

Earwig, all that stuff you cited was unadulterated crap, a mixture of untruths, half-truths, and goofy impressionism. If you still believe it 10 years later you’re an ignorant moron. I voted for Nader and never have liked Gore much, but the media coverage of the Bush-Gore campaign was a disaster.

I’m always puzzled about discussions of the Left in American politics in the 1970s. Who? What? The unions were defending individual contracts and the specific interests of their members. Workers outside of already unionized manufacturing sectors were ignored. Unionizing low-wage service workers was viewed as not being cost-effective. The ideological left (distinct from anti-war protesters, who were all over the political spectrum, but mostly focused on the war itself without much theoretical underpinning) was little more than isolated, inbred sects of Trotskyites, socialists and geriatric CPUSA members.

I’ll have to read the Cowrie piece. The remark @173 bears on the confusion between “hippies” (creatures akin to unicorns in numbers) and shaggy, dope-smoking members of the working class. Hunter Thompson in Hell’s Angels notes an Angels’ employment on a GM assembly line to be a “tribute to whatever flexibility remains at the shop level in the American labor movement” given that Terry the Tramp had a “full beard, shoulder-length black hair and a wild, jabbering demeanor” along with a multitude of arrests for narcotics, theft, rape and public cunnilingus. Hell’s Angels at 7. Now that’s full employment.

Barry, Antonio,

It’s not that I believe it — it’s that it happened. Those statements about Gore constituted the overarching frame of the campaign. They were mainstream. Those beliefs, trumpeted by the press, undoubtedly cost Gore far more than Nader did — and that’s understating it.

The electoral impact of Nader was but a rounding error compared to the press attack on Gore.

Frankly Antonio, your views (along with Timberman’s and some others as well) in your several comments here come fairly close to expressing my own feelings about the subjects under discussion.

The comments on Nader from DeLong and some others, however are nauseating in their refusal to engage the reality of that election campaign (really, their attempt to tell a preferred story that elides the truth of the trashing of Gore and its impact as compared to that of Nader, who serves in this case as a hippie-punching stand-in).

I regret and apologize for any confusion arising from the lack of sarcasm markers in my original @188.

“The comments on Nader from DeLong and some others, however are nauseating in their refusal to engage the reality of that election campaign (really, their attempt to tell a preferred story that elides the truth of the trashing of Gore and its impact as compared to that of Nader, who serves in this case as a hippie-punching stand-in).”

So true. It seems demented but I guess the press can retaliate and Nader can’t, so have at him.

Wolf.

Dammit.

Not to dive into the Nader in Y2K fray again, but it bears repeating that…

1) A case can be made that Nader’s personal goal was to defeat Gore. But Nader failed to do so. Gore almost certainly got more votes in Florida than Bush. If you want to identify a culprit here, it’s neither Nader, nor the media, nor Gore himself, but the Supreme Court who was at fault.

2) While a case can be made that Nader himself set out to defeat Gore, that was not the goal of all or even most of Nader’s supporters. To the extent that Nader’s supporters (of which I was one, in the overwhelmingly red state of Oklahoma) had an electoral goal it was to get 5% of the vote and qualify the Green Party for federal funds. This is why there was so much talk of vote trading between battleground states and safe states in the run-up to the election. And we fell well short of achieving this goal. Indeed, Nader totally underperformed his poll numbers, presumably because many Nader supporters, especially in swing states, actually saw Gore as a lesser evil.

3) If you actually believe that Nader’s supporters wanted to defeat–and succeeded in defeating–Gore, why do you think they would have voted for Gore if Nader hadn’t run?

4) And yet, here we are again, with the same strategy: beat Obama, and make way for the new Left dawn. Who exactly is this aimed at? Nobody in this thread has demanded that Obama must be defeated. Obama is facing no serious primary challenges. There are no serious left-wing third party challenges planned for next year.

When evaluating the claim “Nader cost Gore the 2000 election”, why do so many people insist on pretending they have no understanding of the concept of ceteris parabus?

When evaluating the claim “Nader cost Gore the 2000 election”, why do so many people insist on pretending they have no understanding of the concept of ceteris parabus?

Well, all else being equal, Nader not running doesn’t change things.

The only way Nader not running changes things is if you assume that all else wouldn’t have been equal, i.e. that a significant number of people who didn’t vote for Gore in 2000 would have done so had Nader not run.

This latter assumption is, needless to say, rather difficult to maintain if you believe, as CharleyCarp apparently does, that Nader’s voters wanted Gore to lose.

uh, not that I would ever vote for a Republican. Never have yet, even for dogcatcher.

But I won’t feel ashamed of voting for Jill Stein.

One more Nader-v-Gore discussion? Really? I understand that you were baited, but still.

“And yet, here we are again, with the same strategy: beat Obama […]”

That is annoying too, because of the above-mentioned complete lack of a Democratic primary challenger or major third party attempt. But it has a certain — well, not truth — a certain something to it. Why do people think that OWS has emerged now? It would never have emerged in this form if the people in it hadn’t give up on Obama and the political system as presently constituted. They aren’t going to try to beat Obama, but they certainly aren’t going to help him win.

Gah, second para is also Ben Alpers and should be italics.

Well my in-laws in Colorado, lifelong dems from dem families, expressed their displeasure with how things were going by voting for Dole and then Bush. So not everyone who was dissatisfied voted for Nader.

@djw:

My comments were much more aimed at the ridiculous notion that Nader voters wanted Gore to lose. The perfectly reasonable assumptions you make entail rejecting that ridiculous belief.

Yes, it is trivially the case that had Nader not run, Gore would probably have won. It is also true that had Gore had a significant campaign presence in NH he would have won. If the Supreme Court had slightly different membership he would have won. If Palm Beach had a different ballot design, he would have won. It was an extraordinarily close election; many things would have plausibly changed the outcome.

(Incidentally, had Pat Buchanan not run, Gore might have lost NM.)

Clinton impeachment after seven years of the Whitewater “scandal”, all bought and paid for by one billionaire

Systematic Media hostility

Jeb Bush and voter suppression

Butterfly ballot

Supreme Court

Counting overvotes give Gore election

Etc., Etc.

The problem with ceteris paribus, applied to such a singular de minimis is that it leads you to lose the forest for a tree — no, not a tree, a dwarf mulberry bush.

This is not a case of losing the kingdom, for want of a horseshoe nail, though the kingdom has been lost.

Democracy, itself, has been under assault for a long time in the United States, with the entire political system becoming less and less responsive to the concerns and interests of the 99%, and in the 2000 Presidential election, it was pretty much lost completely, to an assault on many, many fronts — an assault, which has continued in unrelenting fashion.

I get why people don’t want to face the reality that Obama is evil, and they have little or no power to influence, let alone replace, him. They will say, “vote for the lesser evil”, but they think it’s a wry joke. I get why people puzzle over politics in Washington becoming such a farcical horror show, and real solutions to real problems are never available, and elite wrongdoers rarely go to jail. And, I get why neoliberals want me to vote for their version of corporate fascism, instead of the neocon-libertarian version of corporate fascism.

ceteris paribus I don’t get, even with four years of Latin.

One needn’t view Clinton-land with Delong-tinted glasses to find this particular use of the word “trivial” puzzling.

Shouldn’t it also be trivially the case that if Al Gore was better at getting asses into the voting booth he might have won? It’s not like participation in presidential elections in Florida has decreased since the dragon slew mighty Al. So yes, if we take all those numbers as they are and remove Nader (and fuck him anyway) Gore wins, but that Gore didn’t draw the votes can only be Gore’s fault.

It comes down to this: if you believe Nader didn’t cost Gore the election, ceteris paribus, then you must believe one of two things

I think I can believe that Gore cost Gore the election with or without Latin involved and, with luck, not contradict the scholarship.

The problem with ceteris paribus, applied to such a singular de minimis is that it leads you to lose the forest for a tree—no, not a tree, a dwarf mulberry bush.

No, it doesn’t. When dealing in a large country that ends in a tie (more or less), it should be obvious that many different changes to the process would probably have effected the outcome, just as if you fail an exam by one question, you can dwell on every missed question as a chance you might have had to pass the exam.

The difference in a presidential race, however, is that many of the possible changes that would have changed the outcome lie in the hands of many different people. Some of the plausible differences that might have changed the outcome fall in Gore’s lap, but others (ballot design) fall in the hands of hapless functionaries. One of them–exactly one of them and only one of them–was in Ralph Nader’s hands. That’s what the ceteris paribus helps clarify.

Gore didn’t even bother to campaign in NY. They wrote us off.

And I basically agree with you, Antonio, about the reality that is coming. That said, I do think there’s a difference between the two major parties and their candidates, which is why I think it’s worth voting for the one that is marginally less bad, even though I have no illusions that either our situation or the Democratic Party will get any better as a result of their winning.

But I’m also significantly younger than you and can (foolishly or not) continue to hope that sometime in the relatively far future things might actually get better

Nader voters wanted Gore to win so badly, they voted for . . . Nader. Seriously, they didn’t think Gore was good enough, or that he had earned their votes. Maybe they’re right. Actually, of course they’re right. It doesn’t matter, it’s a two man race, and if you don’t vote for one, you’re as good as voting for the other.

Of course Gore didn’t campaign much in NY. Jesus, a candidate’s time and money is limited. They have to focus on states in play.

Bob, neither your vote nor mine will make any difference in the 2012 race, because the Republican candidate is going to win both our states. We have a luxury of voting however we want without responsibility for the outcome.

OK, I’m boring myself.

In addition to the “Nader cost Gore the election” and “Gore cost Gore the election”, I’d like to see more people giving attention to the option that in the absence of Nader’s campaign, the Republicans of 2000 would have found more ways to steal enough votes to get them either a plausible victory outside the Supreme Court or Bush v. Gore pretty much as was. We know, after all, that the Republicans are really serious about both suppressing Democratic and independent votes and stealing votes for themselves any way they can – there are all too many examples in the decade since.

Say that in the spring or summer of 2000, Nader calls off his campaign, for any reason you care to pick, and no comparably engaging substitute emerges. The race is Bush versus Gore with only the usual third parties. Is it really that hard to figure that someone in Republican campaign planning would say “Well, would have been nice to have the spoiler, but…what else can we ratchet up to throw things our way?”? Doesn’t seem so to me, and has the merit of being consistent with observed Republican behavior in all the elections since.

Oh, and a Romney victory might conceivably defang the radical right to some extent. That would be useful too.

On the “Gore cost Gore the election” argument: some versions of this aren’t very plausible (criticizing him for losing his home state is my favorite idiotic one ), but some are probably correct. But in any presidential election in which a candidate loses by a few hundred votes in one state, “Candidate cost candidate the election” will necessarily be true in a number of ways. Candidates make mistakes. Some of were legitimate tough calls, others, arguably, may be lain at the feet of an over-reliance on a pathologically worthless class of permanent ‘consultants’. We don’t have politicians–on either side of the aisle–who are capable of perfect campaigns. If Gore had won NH but not Florida, it would probably be accurate to say Buchanan spoiled the election for Bush by costing him NM. We could then construct a number of narratives, with various plausibility, about missteps in the Bush campaign that cost him the election, and many of them might well be accurate. In *any* election that close “losing candidate cost losing candidate the election is necessarily true and utterly banal. Raising this point, banal truth that it is, takes absolutely nothing away from fundamental soundness of the claim that Nader’s presence in the race tilted the outcome.

djw: Under your carefully hedged qualifications, you’ve established the “fundamental soundness of the claim that Nader’s presence in the race tilted the outcome.” What follows from this? That third-party candidates should never run? Should run only after an elaborate (and probably impossible ) calculation that the chances of their helping elect the worse major-party candidate outweigh the chances of their actually getting across some good ideas to the electorate that neither party has ever or will ever embrace? That attempts to break the stifling, anti-democratic dominance of the two major parties are hopeless? That attempts to bring a modicum of rationality and fairness to the American electoral system are hopeless? When will you and Brad De Long and everyone else who seems intent on blaming Nader supporters for the last twelve years begin to address the important, permanent questions, rather than rattling on about whether or not Nader behaved spitefully in 2000?

We are the world, we are the children?

Apart from a few Gini coefficients and some talk of tariffs and “we need to make what we buy and buy what we make” (who’s “we” in this scenario? people in my household? city? state? country? what arbitrary line am I drawing?), it’s as though the only country with any significence is the US, and the only lessons we can learn about left/leftist/leftish politics boils down to observing a sequence of US presidential elections and its impacts.

Bully for pretty much all of you, I guess. Carry on, have at it.

geo: to be clear, my central purpose is to attempt to kill a zombie lie about the 2000 election. It’s a hobbyhorse of mine. I didn’t set out to advance a position on the bigger picture elements of this discussion—my intervention stemmed from my obsessive, quixotic need to the record straight on a factual question

Sigh. You really don’t do yourself any favors by assuming your conclusion. Needless to say, I find those sorts of rhetorical tactics deeply offensive. Particularly since Gore actually did receive more legal votes than Bush in Florida.

So your hobby horse is now “Gore won in Florida, but Nader still cost him the election because he didn’t win by enough votes to prevent the matter from going all the way to the Supreme court.”

I’m not actually sure that this is true. An Obama loss might make future Democratic politicians pay more attention to the left.

I really wish I could believe that were true. But that was also the lesson I hoped they’d draw from the midterm elections, when it was clear that Democratic losses had at least something to do with depressed enthusiasm and turnout of their base, only to see Obama and co. tack further to the right in search of the mythical swing-voters who reward “sensible centrism” with magical victories. That told me that it doesn’t matter how angry their base becomes with them, and how many victories that costs them. High-level Democratic politicians like Obama will always frame those losses in terms of the swing-voter/triangulation fairy tale, because it provides the most convenient rationalization for doing what they want to do anyway: please the money-men. I don’t know what kind of event could dislodge this particular form of DLC magical thinking, but I can’t imagine it will happen at the ballot-box anytime soon.

It’s like watching a well-known gang steal your car and push it to the edge of a cliff, leaving it teetering there. As it sways there, a butterfly lands on the hood and your ride topples into the canyon.

You guys then all run to get butterfly nets.

With ~9% unemployment Obama is very likely to lose anyway. If someone who’s opposed to much of what Obama does votes for him as a lesser evil and then he loses anyway, that’s REALLY a vote thrown away. You end up seeming to support someone you oppose, and then he loses anyway and you have NOTHING to show for your vote, and your worst enemires within the Democratic Party retain firm control.

One of the creepy things about all this is that a lot of what we’re hearing is pre-emptive blame-shifting and excuse-making by people who know that their candidate is weak and extremely vulnerable.

I also have to wonder about the political tactic of insulting voters in order to persuade them to support your candidate. Obama seems to have turned into a pure technocrat who resents having to campaign. (He wasn’t like that before 2009). I thought that one of the rules of politics is that SOMEONE has to like you, but Obama has spent 2 1/2 years sucking up to people who still hate him with the heat of 1000 suns.

“I don’t think that an Obama loss would move the party left because both the party leaders and the centrist part of the base are preprogrammed to blame the left.”

Yes, that’s unfortunately true. I went through a sort of flow chart back when Obama made his comment about the sanctimonious purists he had to put up with:

1. No primary, Obama loses. Everyone blames the left.
2. No primary, Obama wins. Everyone ignores the left because you don’t need them.
3. Primary, Obama wins. He hates us more than he already did. But really no primary.
4. Primary, Obama loses. Not going to happen.

So we’re in a no-win situation no matter what. That’s the short-term implicit reason for OWS (the long-term reason being the whole 99% thing.) If Obama was a leader, we wouldn’t need a leaderless movement.

With ~9% unemployment Obama is very likely to lose anyway. If someone who’s opposed to much of what Obama does votes for him as a lesser evil and then he loses anyway, that’s REALLY a vote thrown away. You end up seeming to support someone you oppose, and then he loses anyway and you have NOTHING to show for your vote, and your worst enemires within the Democratic Party retain firm control.

You’ve got to remember that most voters are “quid pro quo” voters – they’re going to vote on the basis of what a candidate promises to deliver (though admittedly expecting politicians to deliver on those promises, no matter how explicit they may be, is coming to be seen as rather quaint). And since there’s way more of them than there are of you, your strategic vote strategy won’t count for much.

One of the creepy things about all this is that a lot of what we’re hearing is pre-emptive blame-shifting and excuse-making by people who know that their candidate is weak and extremely vulnerable.

The flip side of the quid pro quo voting numbers is that a candidate who is perceived to be a welsher – someone who made some rather big promises that he can’t weasel out of but who nevertheless fails to fulfill them – won’t get a lot of sympathy next time their number comes up at the polls. Bust the deal, face the wheel.

And Obama has been one of the biggest welshers we’ve seen in, well, decades.

So yeah, all that’s exactly what all this talk is – creepy pre-emptive blame shifting by Obama partisans.

Did I mention that it was creepy?

“Both factors—the bizarrely awful treatment of Gore by the media and Nader’s presence in the race are both entirely sufficient to cause Gore to lose.”

No. Nader alone is insufficient. He can’t get the car to the cliff. But your butterfly hunt is amusing if one actually doesn’t care about outcomes.

ScentofViolets,

I typed this:
to be clear, my central purpose is to attempt to kill a zombie lie about the 2000 election.

Only after after I wrote a long post discussing voting behavior, exit polls, models and so on in comment #210. Perhaps you missed it. Perhaps you spotted a fatal flaw in my reasoning but it forgot to point it out. At any rate, if your point is that the quoted statement assumes the conclusion as a matter of formal logic, you are correct and i concede the point. But I assume the conclusion because I’ve already given the empirical demonstration that the conclusion is correct. I expect I’ll have to do that many more times in the future, but I thought it would be rather tiresome to repeat in in each and every comment.

Nader alone is insufficient. He can’t get the car to the cliff. But your butterfly hunt is amusing if one actually doesn’t care about outcomes.

Once again, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the concept of ceteris paribus.

ScentOfViolets, he didn’t assume the conclusion. He made his conclusion after presenting his evidence. Which was pretty comprehensive and explanatory about his position. “Evidence that did not personally convince ScentOfViolets” does not equal “assuming the conclusion”.

“Now, at this point, you’ve got two options: you can immediately kowtow, tell me most humbly that you were wrong and that yes, you did assume your conclusion. And you need to do this with no waffling whatsoever, just a straight-up “you’re dead right, and I was wrong to say this.” ”

The weird thing is that here YOU are the one who is totally wrong. You’re being abusive, obnoxious, and wrong all at the same time. No one has any responsibility to kowtow to your basic misunderstandings of logic.

“I shouldn’t have to say it, but guys, if you want to convince someone of the point you’re advancing, you’ve got to above all, be persuasive. ”

Quite. I wonder if you ever listen to yourself?

“I shouldn’t have to say it, but guys, if you want to convince someone of the point you’re advancing, you’ve got to above all, be persuasive. ”

Quite. I wonder if you ever listen to yourself?

WHOOOOSH!!!

And on a separate point, Seb my boy, why don’t you tell me just I’m trying to sell so other people here, what I’m trying to get them to accept as factually true that requires me to be persuasive as opposed to my usual skeptical self?

What’s that you say? Nothing? Give the man a cee-gar.

I’ve been very blessed to have people like Sebastian for enemies ;-)

Ok, then, I can accept: All other things equal, Nader’s running is sufficient to cause Gore to lose. That of course means one of those equal things is the universal media trashing of Gore.

So we’re arguing past each other. You want an irrelevant focus on third party candidates, who can materially affect the outcome if and only if the media destroy the Dem candidate — a huge factor, quite likely to change outcomes even in the absence of a Nader.

Groovy. You’ve decided to waste everyone’s time.

“Seb my boy, why don’t you tell me just I’m trying to sell so other people here, what I’m trying to get them to accept as factually true that requires me to be persuasive as opposed to my usual skeptical self?”

Not to get involved in another pointless argument SoV but I think what you are trying to persuade people of, or perhaps just djw, is that he assumed his conclusion. The fact that he laid out his reasons for supporting his conclusion doesn’t seem to matter I guess.

From the outside, it looks like the shift to the right of the Democratic Party has more to do with the conservative leaning of the largest growing segment of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is picking up large segments of the Latino vote which also tends be also be conservative Catholic on social issues such as abortion, marriage, etc. The African-American vote also tends to be conservative on these issues.

The Democratic Party is picking up large segments of the Latino vote which also tends be also be conservative Catholic on social issues such as abortion, marriage, etc. The African-American vote also tends to be conservative on these issues.

That doesn’t speak to the zombie economics that have turned out to be the larger problem.

That THAT, LaBonne!

“And on a separate point, Seb my boy, why don’t you tell me just I’m trying to sell so other people here, what I’m trying to get them to accept as factually true that requires me to be persuasive as opposed to my usual skeptical self?”

I don’t think I’m your boy, do you use racially charged asshole language which was routinely employed to demean black people on purpose?

You are attempting to sell the accusation that djw assumed the conclusion of his argument, when in actual fact he laid out the reasoning behind his argument. He therefore did not assume the conclusion of his argument.

You are wrong in that, and while being wrong you you employ a vicious game of demanding apologies and cranking up the rhetorical heat even when you are the one who is wrong.

You are further attempting to sell the idea that you are a logical person when in actuality you regularly employ hyper-emotional use of the language of logic classes as a bludgeon when you won’t’ engage rationally in the conversation at hand.

It is unlikely that anyone other than yourself is convinced by either sale.

“I can’t figure out why anyone would have wanted either Nader OR Gore in the Presidency, I should stay out of this.”

I don’t know… I like to think that Gore would have made a decent technocratic president. Certainly better than the stumblebum that ended up with the job.

“But…but…we’ve got a decent technocratic president now, haven’t we? I was under the impression that most of us still aren’t happy—and for damned good reasons, I should add.”

Oh agreed, but I am not sure that Obama isn’t to the right of Gore and given the mess Bush made can you blame me for wondering what could have been?

The choice between trade and protectionism is a false dilemma.

What we should have done–and should still do–is tie access to our developed, civilized market to human rights standards and environmental standards.

This is quite different from closing off access to our market to protect it from competition–it is, rather, using our market as a carrot to expand global trade based on *natural* advantages, as opposed to trade based on exploitation-derived advantage.

Sadly, the Republicans would rather increase our competitiveness by increasing the pollution in our air and water.

This, of course, is in line with their refusal to extend unemployment benefits on the profound theoretical grounds that apparently-cyclical economic downturns, apparently aggravated by charlatan financiers, are actually the fault of lazy workers.

All this connects to the fact that the debt is what it is. If we hadn’t been moving our economy to the third world in the cyclical upswing, we’d have a much smaller debt, and running the deficits we need to run to deflect another Great Depression wouldn’t be so horrifying.

No, after all is said and done, it turns out that Obama apologists love people like you, what with your intellectual strategerizing – you make it sooooo easy for them to blame somebody who isn’t Obama for his mistakes.

Lost me there. what I’m proposing is not voting for Obama, maybe for a third party candidate, under certain conditions which I think will be met. Is that what they love about me? Or is it that I am willing to vote for a lesser evil under certain conditions? Probably the latter, I suppose.

All I mean to say is that if Obama should lose in 2012, these apologists won’t have to face the fact that they backed a really lousy candidate; instead, they’ll insist that you and the 3/4% of the population who voted “stratergerically” were the ones who were really responsible for the ll-dimensional chess player going down in flames.

“And on a separate point, Seb my boy, why don’t you tell me just I’m trying to sell so other people here, what I’m trying to get them to accept as factually true that requires me to be persuasive as opposed to my usual skeptical self?”

I don’t think I’m your boy, do you use racially charged asshole language which was routinely employed to demean black people on purpose?

Yawn. So, saying “Seb my boy”, or “Mike, me lad” or some other similar appellation is now “racially charged”? First I’ve ever heard of that.

You owe me an apology ;-)

Next time, read what I write, and read the responses carefully before you go on about ratcheting up the rhetoric. Going off half-cocked like you have been just makes you look ridiculous.

Uh-oh. Now the boy is going to accusing of making sly innuendos about the small size of his penis. Of course Seby, that’s exactly what I was doing, sigh.

“Uh-oh. Now the boy is going to accusing of making sly innuendos about the small size of his penis. Of course Seby, that’s exactly what I was doing, sigh.”

SoV the term “boy” when used to refer to an adult male is degrading. It was used extensively over the last 100 years in the South by white people to degrade a black man. A simple google search may help you realize why it is inappropriate to call an adult male, particularly one who may be black, boy.

“How do you know he is male? Or even grown up?”

I don’t but Sebastian seemed to take offence at the term and a reasonable person would ratchet back as opposed to doubling down.

I believe my point about SoV employing faux logic and retreating to demands for apologies as a retreat from the particulars in a discussion is now adequately demonstrated.

I have to admit it is quite an effective well-poisoning tactic for him. We aren’t even talking about how wrong he was when he was shrilly demanding an apology over his incorrect assertion (that means “statement logically contrary to evidence”, SoV) that djw was assuming the conclusion.

And please. First time you’ve ever heard of “boy” being used in that manner? I’m pretty sure no one is going to fall for that. You could have claimed that you didn’t *mean* it in a racial dog-whistley way. But to pretend you’ve never even heard of it? Whatever.

SoV I agree with you whenI think you are right and I disagree with you when I think you are wrong. You seem to have developed a persecution complex to go with your already lovely personality.

“Care to speculate on whether or not he’s black, btw?”

Nope. You keep right on digging though.

Geo, please…. The opacity of the Internet being what it is, how do you expect me, trained in Italy, and unable to see your hands, to respond to this juicy morsel being trolled ahead of me. But okay, if I must: If Nader is the messenger, I feel justified in shooting him, for reasons which are far too subtle to trot past the rational guardians of CT. (And since the Internet is indeed opaque, let everyone rest assured that I mean this expression of anti-Naderian hostility solely in the metaphorical sense.)

Geo, I just don’t see in Nader and his tattered white nag what you see in him. If policies were really our concern, we could just tack a picture of Marx or Keynes or Jesus on a stick and elect one of them. At least we’d have the pleasure of knowing we had the real thing.

Harold, I probably should have said If policies were really our only concern…. My point isn’t a subtle one. Cults of the personality can be based on all sorts of baggage, including superior policy recommendations, but the bottom line for me is that while Nader’s policies may have evolved, the man himself seems to have shriveled.

Even if that weren’t so, a person who starts out by styling himself a consumer advocate isn’t exactly the person I would consider the best qualified to articulate and defend the principles that are dear to me. In any case, anyone who ends up thinking of himself as Someone with a capital S has already lost any claim he might have had on my attention, no matter what conventional political wisdom tells us.

“Tattered white nag”? Did you look at the platform I linked to? It’s exactly what a President — any president, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Nader or Rich Puchalsky or you — should do. It’s roughly a million times better than the Democratic Party platform. That fact is approximately 99.99 percent of what should matter in any discussion of presidential politics, now or in 2000. Are we really going to descend — here in this lofty empyrean of rationality that is Crooked Timber — to discussing personalities?

Geo, If personalities didn’t matter at all, I’d certainly prefer not to discuss them, but in fact they do matter. Whether they matter enough to be of primary concern in a system as corrupt as ours is a matter of opinion, and I’m not sure myself how much sleep I’d be willing to waste over the personality differences between one American politician and another. (Even the nutcases aren’t always nutcases, but the script is always dedicated to obscuring whether they are or aren’t, which — like it or not — makes us all theater critics.)

Still, I’m willing to go this far: If a person’s behavior seems to belie his principles, it seems to me that we have a right to question just how committed he is to those principles, and just how effective he can be in advancing them. That’s the sense in which I find it hard to understand why anyone would bother trying to make the case that either Gore or Nader should be considered part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.

Obama could pull this one out of the fire. It depends on whom he is running against. Romney is going to have a very difficult time in the general election because nobody knows exactly what he stands for. On the other hand, Obama can at least construct the narrative that he has been sandbagged by the Republicans (true), because Congress is a coequal branch, and the President doesn’t always get everything he wants. At the same time, the Dems can roll footage of Romney back to the beginning of his career, standing on both sides of every issue, so I honestly don’t see how you can win, being Mitt Romney. If Obama adapts Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election campaign (very high unemployment, the Depression, of course) he could squeak by. He would have to start saying things like, “Social Security is not in trouble and the young workers in this country have been whipped up into an unnecessary fright.” However, if Rick Perry gets the nomination, which looks like a long shot at present, I would expect a much closer election, possibly again going into the Supreme Court to be decided. At any rate, Obama’s base will be coming back home. Indeed the main emotions against Obama, on the Democratic side, are almost finished. This is because motions only last about 3 months, and then you are able to make the U.S. public to feel the exact opposite of what they felt before. We see this happening all the time. I call it Lee’s 3-month rule of political emotions. The last straw for most Democrats (not all, I admit,) was the Debt Ceiling Debate, a ridiculous passage in U.S. history in which Obama of course had finally to capitulate to the Republicans, because a default was out of the question. But he should have done so with a great deal more fustian and fireworks, and so this episode made his entire base of supporters very annoyed. (Obama’s other major political mistake was also in rhetoric: he should have explained the virtues of health care reform publicly, before the 2010 election. The Repubs would still have won big, but not by as much.) Well, take note that the debt ceiling was passed on August 2, and that was almost 3 months ago. So we are due for a cessation of emotions presently, or more properly a transmutation of those emotions to other annoyances.

Is Nader or Gore more likely …

FWIW, I recognize that it is now 2011 and not 2000. Just being rhetorical.

I really don’t care what Nader’s personality is like. He deserves credit for challenging the auto industry on safety and he did effect big changes there. In the 1980s and 90s he showed prescience in being the only person talking about the abuses of the banking industry, to which Gore and Clinton so eagerly prostituted themselves. He did not deserve to be manhandled by the DNC, whom I gather now have very bad consciences (rightly), and therefore leap to the offensive.

Hysteria? Sorry, William, I’m baffled. He has a record, a very substantial one, about which Harold’s comment barely scratches the surface. I’ve heard him speak numerous times and read his books (of which there are quite a few), and I haven’t seen a trace of hysteria. But even if he were personally a lunatic, he has publicly committed himself to a program, a vastly better program than any other on offer by any presidential candidate. That’s what matters.

In a self-respecting democracy, we elect a chief magistrate, not a king; we vote for policies, not for persons. It’s subtly demeaning to us, really, an abdication of our citizenly dignity, even to discuss the personalities of the candidates. We shouldn’t have to trust them, any more than Wall Street has to trust Obama. We the citizenry should dictate to our leaders, as Wall Street dictates to Obama; they should work for us, as he works for Wall Street; and we should know how to fire them if they don’t carry out our wishes, as Wall Street knows how to fire a President who doesn’t carry out theirs. Away with all this talk of how they “present themselves.”

Lee Arnold, I’m not sure that an Obama capable of doing those things exists. Hr seems firmly committed to bipartisanship and hating his base.

If the Republicans can’t find a plausible candidate Obama might squeak through. That would be good for the Ds, but not really for the country, since that would be a bipartisan collapse of the political system in the midst of an economic crisis and crisis of governance.

Forget Nader, though. I agree with Timberman and Puchalsky, for the record.

geo @ 308

Oddly, I don’t disagree with your second paragraph at all; it’s the first I quarrel with. If you don’t find me persuasive about Nader, djw is both more explicit than I am and less rhetorical, and I more or less agree with his assessment. I also think that what I only alluded to in my earlier comments should be stated more explicitly here: I didn’t initiate the game that Nader is playing. To be fair, neither did he, nor did any of us collectively, although we’re all being forced by circumstance to try to replace it with something more suitable. As djw implies, that will take a while, but I think we can make a good start by recognizing it for what it is.

The crucial quality in a democratic leader, it seems to me, is a combination of intellectual and moral judgment. Unexpected things will happen, and expected ones in unexpected ways, and a lot of decisions will have to be made. I’m interested in how a political figure will do it.

Affiliating yourself with evil, loathsome, stupid, unproductive ideas is one way to show bad judgment, and it doesn’t a lot matter whether it’s sincerely held evil desires or cynical willingness to play along with them.

Affiliating yourself with evil, loathsome, stupid, unproductive people is another way to show it. You may have good inclinations yourself, but if you get information and counsel from bad people, and if you simultaneously exclude people with a history of being right, you’re showing bad judgment now and are much more likely to make bad judgments in the future than if you were listening to better people.

You can also show bad judgment by professing good ideals about social organization and such but being personally abusive, tyrannical, dishonest, and/or incompetent. And this matters, because as a political leader you will have to administer a large organization in times of crisis. If you can’t do that well, you don’t deserve the position.

Comment is superfluous? Nader can deliver progressive bromides, just like any politician on the left. Obama said a lot of that too. But that answer makes no mention of the people who actually worked to give Nader his shot — only of abstractions.

Have you ever read the Obama 2008 platform? Global climate change, immigration reform, taxing the rich… wow, there’s a lot of good stuff there. We should all go out and vote for Obama because his platform’s so great.

It’s been a long time since Nader was a force for good in American life. He’s always been a bad manager, a leader with bad judgment about how to lead, and he long ago let that crowd out other priorities. He’s gone for grandstanding – inflicting substantial and completely unnecessary ongoing harm on people I care about, thanks to things like his crusade against certain narcolepsy drugs.

I like a lot of his platform. I like a lot more of than any platform available from a Democratic candidate with any chance at all for a good while now. But he has character flaws that would keep him from implementing any significant portion of it just as Obama does with his.

It’s one thing to grant some slack and opportunity to a young adult just beginning a career involving political power. It’s another to look at a long history and refuse to acknowledge that there’s a persistent gap between professed goals and the means a person chooses to pursue them.

Does the broad lack of support for Nader’s platform in our society figure anywhere at all in your vision of politics?

The actual constituency for that platform is obviously inadequate for political action. Obviously, it’s higher than Nader’s voteshare, but realistically it’s in the very low single digits, at best (more on a few issues). The natural constituency for those positions overlaps considerably with much of the Democratic electorate. They’d do well (in my view, and I presume, yours) to support this platform. But Nader’s approach isn’t to make any effort whatsoever to a) bring the platform to them, or b) bring them to the platform. Instead, he explicitly tells them he’s got no interest in entering into a political coalition with them, becuase punishing Democratic politicians (and subjecting the rest of us to the rule of George W. Bush) is more important.

But for you, geo, it’s the pretty words that matter, never mind the callous indifference to the actual people whose words are offered on behalf of. If something like Nader’s political vision ever has a sufficient political constituency to have a chance to be enacted, it’ll be in spite of Ralph Nader, not becuase of him.

Does the broad lack of support for Nader’s platform in our society figure anywhere at all in your vision of politics?

Why yes, djw, I’d define it as the main problem with American politics, and exactly what has to change before we can get anywhere. I assume you agree, since you say that the people ought to support that platform (or something like it), in your view (and yes, in mine). What exactly is the force of your rhetorical question?

Your point, and Antonio’s, seems to be: Nader was a terrible candidate. Therefore … what? I assume (at least I hope) you’d say: therefore, let’s find and support another candidate with a similar program. Which is perfectly fine with me. In fact, it’s what I’ve been arguing all along. Nader’s personal qualities, and his personal political fortunes, are, as I’ve said, matters of complete indifference to me. I want his program, or the equivalent, adopted. Period.

Let’s bracket the question of whether Nader was as incompent and irresponsible a candidate as you and Antonio breezily assert. I know enough about his career and candidacy to suspect that you’re both talking through your hat, but not enough to prove it. In any case, let’s leave it for his biographer to sort out and instead figure out how to get his and our program enacted. Presumably in a future thread.

I assume (at least I hope) you’d say: therefore, let’s find and support another candidate with a similar program. Which is perfectly fine with me. In fact, it’s what I’ve been arguing all along. Nader’s personal qualities, and his personal political fortunes, are, as I’ve said, matters of complete indifference to me. I want his program, or the equivalent, adopted. Period.

Good grief, no! The thing that makes Nader so appalling is that he knew his position had woefully insufficient support, and he ran anyway. It’s not like if you replace Nader with a skillful and charismatic candidate he’d suddenly have 10-15X the support. That sort of thing matters on the margins. Besides, anyone who would be a good candidate because they have the political acumen and judgement Nader lacked would decline to adopt such a stupid political strategy anyway, so the creature you think we should be looking for doesn’t exist.

Look, Nader’s platform isn’t popular. The sorts of shifts that would need to take place for it to become popular have to be a lot further along before there’s any point in running a 3P candidacy. I have no idea why you think the ideal way to launch a left/progressive political movement should be lead by 3rd party presidential runs, but it makes no sense whatsoever, and there’s no theoretical or empirical reason to believe it’ll work. There are good reasons to think it will be counterproductive, though, as 2000 amply demonstrated.

Sorry, djw, I’m confused, probably terminally. I thought we agreed on the basics of Nader’s program — proportional representation, regulatory vigilance, severe crackdown on tax evasion, public campaign financing, no revolving door, card-check union elections and an end to the non-enforcement of labor law, single-payer health insurance, drastically reduced defense spending, zero funding for nuclear power and sharply increased funding for solar power, etc. etc. — and were discussing the best way to advance popular support for these things. Now it appears that you don’t agree with Nader’s platform because it “isn’t popular.” But you can’t really be saying that? Or are you saying that, because it isn’t popular, no one should try to advocate it, at least not with a third-party campaign? But how else will it ever become popular? Or should one try to advocate it within the Democratic Party? Good luck with that. Or should one simply put those goals on ice for an indefinite period? Until when?

If you have any ideas about “the ideal way to launch a left/progressive political movement,” I am (and I assume others here are) eager to hear them.

Chris Bertram @ 89:
“”@ 44 ““In country” inequality has been rising “globally”.”

Well it has certainly risen sharply in some countries, such as the United States and UK. Other countries such as France, Denmark and the Netherlands not so, or not so much (depending on how you measure).”

In 2001 Denmark was the most equal Western European country, with a Gini coefficient of 22. After 10 years with right-wing government, this is no longer the case. According to Eurostat data, they had the highest growth in inequality in West Europe, 5 points, from 2001 to 2009. The same data show that France experienced the fourth highest rise in inequality, while there was only a very small increase in the Netherlands, putting them in the middle of this group of countries.

By the way, the UK and Norway had the largest falls in the Gini coefficient. In Norway’s case, there are data showing some differences since before and after the change from a right-wing to a left-wing government in 2005. But generally, inequality has risen sharply in Norway the last twenty years, leaving the super-rich (the 0,05%) with as large a share of national income as they did before the postwar equalisation. Neoliberalism has taken its toll in Scandinavia as well.

Now it appears that you don’t agree with Nader’s platform because it “isn’t popular.” But you can’t really be saying that? Or are you saying that, because it isn’t popular, no one should try to advocate it, at least not with a third-party campaign? But how else will it ever become popular?

The innocent little words “at least not” hint that you might be starting to get it. (I’ve read some brilliant essays by the person I think you are, but I have a hard time believing that person would be so dense) Let’s try this: In order to win people over to your position, you shouldn’t do it by creating campaigns that are, in effect, an act of refusal to enter into a political coalition with the people you’re trying to persuade (and I’m not talking about Democratic politicians here but the democratic electorate). 3rd party candidates in this political system, if they ‘work’ insofar as they get a non-negligible (but still uncompetitive) votes, are much more likely to have the effect of harming their own interests, and the people whose interests they purport to promote those positions on behalf of. The more it works, the worse it works. The series of questions you pose in this comment suggests you can’t imagine any other way of popularizing these ideas. It’s certainly a tall order, and it may not be possible. But broad based leftist movements are virtually never lead by hopeless political campaigns, and 3rd party campaigns certainly never create such movements, when electoral systems create a high bar to entry through FPTP). Your position seems entirely ignorant of the relevant history here.

As to whether to attempt to do this within the Democratic party or not, I have no idea. Obviously, on some issues, yes. Others are obvious non-starters that’ll never happen, even with a broad-based leftist movement (PR). But that’s something we can’t really meaningfully ask until we actually get an effective movement. Perhaps the Democratic party is capture-able by such a movement (they should obviously try). Perhaps it is not.

I’m very pessimistic about almost everything these days, but I’m very cautiously optimistic about the OWS movement, in part because they do seem to be contributing to a change about how people think about economic inequality. But it seems bleedingly obvious that whatever potential this movement may have would be almost immediately short-circuited if they were to try to found an 99% party and get a candidate on the ballot. The media would have their narrative, lots of people who have a certain amount of sympathy for the movement would immediately disavow it, Democratic politicians would immediately start hippie-punching, the candidate would get a trivial share of the vote, and that would be that. It would be like going from step 1 to step 9. You’ve got a lot of intermediary steps that have to be taken before step 9 makes much sense. That they’re really hard and may not be possible doesn’t change that.

The only reason to pursue what happened with Nader in 2000 is that it illuminates that some people really have no idea what’s going on with Obama now. In fact, what Obama implicitly promised through his platform — minus the bit about PR — was that he’d take most of Nader’s platform, which is not really “Nader’s platform” but many of the perennial things that progressives agree on, and go as far as he could to implement it within the system. Everyone understands that a Democratic run can’t be all virtuous and pure like Nader always wanted to be.

Obams broke that implicit promise. He claimed that he was forced to. Well, if he’d been FDR, he wouldn’t have been forced by any of that namby-pamby political opposition; he would have found the time-honored ways of getting his party into line and they would have discovered that they held a majority everywhere.

So at this point, yes, it’s all about personality. If you think that the system is hopelessly corrupt, or if you don’t think that FDR was good enough, then Obama is meaningless. If you think that FDR was, while not perfect, pretty good in many ways, then this is Obama’s fault. Not because of his platform, but because of his personality.

My own opinion was that Obama had a brief window in which to shift the system, which is now closed. So it’s largely his fault, but the system is now hopelessly corrupt, so we might as well not dwell on it.

Henri, this reminds me soooo much of 1968. We said: No, no….we’re just getting started. Please, not Eugene effing McCarthy! Not Bobby ferchrissake Kennedy! Nothing will change! They did it anyway. And, as we all know, the Democrats went with Humphrey, and we wound up with Nixon. Forty-three years later the Democratic Party apparatchiks are still blaming us for embarrassing Humphrey, and the McCarthyites are still blaming us for being non-serious.

You had to be there, I guess. If you were, you sure as hell don’t want to be here now, blaming the Democrats for Nader, and the Naderites for Bush. djw is right, it’s our problem. It’s got nothing whatever to do with egotists in suits and the visions of sugarplums/delusions of grandeur dancing in their wee little heads.

Well, for one thing, Rich, our not an attempt at a cheap rhetorical escape from the fundamental conundrum of human organization. Generic pronouns can be useful in all sorts of ways, but one doesn’t look to them for salvation. The our in that phrase is simply an acknowledgement that any lasting progress, or solution to our dilemma will have to be a collective one, and that implies a dialectical process. Those of us who agree with geo that Nader’s stated platform is a pretty good one will have to convince enough other people that it is to make it seem a force of nature, and not a set of silly assertions about a reality no one can seem to agree on.

To do that, of course, we-who-are-already-convinced will have to bump into all sorts of other convictions, and perhaps be knocked off course in the process. No matter what folks like Steven Pinker say, the outcome is a matter for speculation, engagement and hope, not an inevitability that we can all rely on, even in general terms.