a challenge that started with the appropriation by the left of the “reality-based” label pinned on us in Karl Rove’s famous interview with Ron Suskind…

A slight correction. The article was about Karl Rove. The phrase in question came from an interview with an anonymous Bush administration insider. This matters because it wasn’t approved messaging of the kind that Rove would have condoned, it was the uncensored thinking-out-loud of a Bush conservative.

That at least is my recollection; if I’m mistaken, please let me know.

True enough, but recognizing evil — be it lesser or greater — is an easy task compared to doing anything about it. Forgive my genius for stating the obvious, but the willingness, even the ability, to think your own thoughts is eroded by contact with the sheer mass of the status quo. Matt Y certainly hasn’t gotten any stupider since the Serious People welcomed him to the club, and I doubt it’s what Digby used to call the cocktail wieners available at their table that’ve turned his head. It’s far more likely to have been access to the greater resources available to him to advance his own cause — or so certain kinds of self-deception might have persuaded him, as they’ve persuaded others.

Self-censorship in those surroundings is both insidious and demoralizing — see Aaron Swartz for an extreme example in our own time of what happens when you resist it — but remaining outside those surroundings can be terminally isolating. People in the past who’ve refused the fawning, the largess, and the corruptions of adoption by the Serious, those we remember, anyway, have tended to write books, which, after several generations or so, have eventually been incorporated into the sum of human self-knowledge. To delay your own gratification until you aren’t even around to benefit from it, though, isn’t very attractive to today’s whiz-kids, who probably think originality — and genuine clarity — is either a) a commodity, or b) overrated. A pity.

Consider for a moment the Broderization of CT’s bête noire, Matthew Ygelsias. I can remember when I read his blogposts with frequent pleasure at having my IQ boosted a point or two by his thinking aloud. Now, he just spins out neoliberal rationalizations for various complacent attitudes and pet peeves, just like the brain-dead denizens of the Post and Times op-ed pages.

JQ, in the OP, was optimistic about an acknowledgement of inequality from one of the professional libertarians feeding at the wingnut welfare trough at a conservative Washington think-tank. I was made pessimistic this week, by conservatives accusing liberals of hypocrisy for the failure to criticize Obama’s architect of murder-by-drone as state policy. It doesn’t require a new dictionary or new language, to recognize that Mr. Lesser Evil is evil — just the stomach to tell the truth in the plain old language, even if that means falling out of cadence, or facing a harsh reality.

” By contrast, the approach of the right, exemplified by bjk is to look for talking points to support predetermined positions and to resort to snark when the evidence goes the wrong way.”

The Reality Based community only enjoys a 4% advantage over the Faith Based communty.

And that gap may just exist because Obama was such a better candidate than what’s his name.

This is the principal reason why it seems fair to me to call David Broder or David Brooks a moron. It’s not that either of them is (or in Broder’s case, was) actually a moron; it’s that they’re stupidly comfortable wearing the medals that other people have earned.

This is why I never became one of the juicebox mafia even though I was, in recollection, a big time early adopter of a number of things from the late nineties and early 2ks. Being able to write well is a skill I really admire. Especially having gotten through Valente’s A Dirge For Prestor John.

As far as the thread topic goes, the twining of “status” and education serves as a lodestone. As always, what tended to matter was defined by what was fashionable to matter. Pierre Bourdieu made an entry with the idea of “doxa”, but it goes quite a bit further than that. If one examines Wendy Doniger’s history through the lens of Hindu myths and people’s participation in their spread, one sees that part of what unifies people is the uncertainty over what truly matters, and not what people could see and test for themselves. In this sense, science and reason has always been peripheral to the tying together of societies. Anxiety is central, and anxiety is what people argue over, not on the shape of the world. However, you can’t be anxious about anything if you’re not even sure of who you are (and how real). Therefore, fashion supplies the essential mirroring act throughout the web inside a social unit. Kierkegaard might have railed against this inauthenticity, but it is human to insist that your humanity is just like the humanity of the people who matter to you.

If everyone flies by the star of their own personal meaning of death, how do they seek freedom in anything other than fiction? How can any rock have a real meaning in comparison to the feeling that you’re an momentary accident? If one bends down in a direction, purely to contemplate some stone or other, it had better have a story. If a rock or any other real thing must have a story, how do you choose which story? Vote the same way as everyone else? Why? Or just for the guy with that nasty sword and gesturing in a threatening way? Everyone lives in a sea of promises, oxygenated by praise, and seeking vivid capture of success, avoiding the grip of disappointment, and escaping the jaws of failure.

So when we’re talking about Overton Windows, we’re talking about what people are allowed to *be*, not really about what policies are part of acceptable discourse. What embodies the frames of the Overton Window tends to be praise and validation. The fixation on the deficit and the incorrect use of the household debt scenario is fundamentally about corralling people’s sense of the norms, and the preservation of stability that sticking to those norms are suppose to effect. It’s not just about securing Pete Peterson some more wealth, but also a way to reconnect a certain elite to the broad sector of society, same as any priest-king in the ancient world, doing a fertility rite. The fixation of education as a visible means of social mobility is intended as a reassurance to the populace that society is fair. Whether that education is useful or not–to the person’s inner life, to the person’s utility to the society around it, or any other use, is secondary to the creation of the sense that the world can be made known, and can be made fair. To have usable skills, one generally has to live life, according to the needs of the self and the people around themselves. A passive reception of education, no matter how much actively furious the ingestion of knowledge, cannot make anyone more powerful. Any power that you have, is usually power that others let you have, and for that, you must live for others, no matter how selfish you are. An education can make you weak, if you cannot seem pliable to others who fear…whatever

If education might almost be besides the point in terms of profitable skills, why do we fixate on it for things it cannot provide? Fashion. And like the fashion of perfumes, it can date you far more than you could bear, if anyone were to comment on your taste. So, would internet classes be the next big thing? Nice, new certificates? Nah. ‘member, it has to be something that you can be *praised* for, that when you mention it to others in your circles, the light of their eyes changes in the a way that pleases you. That marks you as a someone, inside a secure web of promises. A technology that makes people ever *more* anon is not going to catch on, even if it had policy merits–at least without leadership carefully showing how they use and like it and give power to those that also use it.

If I had my guess, where I think is the future, is where Tedra Osell might be found, worming her way through the technical difficulties. Homeschooling (past postsecondary education as well), and the use of the Internet to connect like-minded students such that they can coordinate learning and be useful to one another. I think it will be some flavor of that.

As for politics, well, that’s defined by the biggest easy slice of the voting public, and promises will be made in *that* language. That’s why you see Obama do and talk about things in a deliberately incorrect manner. I do think that the impact of the Republican collapse in terms of social legitimacy has a chance to send the momentum of US society on a slightly different track.

You really should collect these phrases somewhere. There’s a zen quality . . .

It seems to me that it is deeper than status considerations. The new industrial state of the 1950s and 1960s really did need technical and managerial expertise. That demand was an extension of the needs of an ever more organized industrial, mass-economy, for a literate, numerate and technologically savvy populace, stretching back into the 18th century. Progress was public education. And, upward mobility was not a zero-sum game; it was an expanding middle-class, satisfying the aspirations of parents to send their kids to college and a better life. The core, though, was that increasing productivity was tied to the increasing use of expertise in bureaucracies, public and private. There was a need for people, at a range of middling levels, who could make the great machines of a decentralized industrial economy work, who could make law, science, municipal regulation, the bureaucratized economy and technology work. It wasn’t about certificates. As Henry Ford purportedly said, the question of who should be boss is like the question, who should sing tenor in the choir; the answer must be, the one, who can actually sing tenor. It wasn’t about status, per se. The automobile industry could explode across the American landscape, because there were lots of people, ready to be competent auto mechanics or traffic cops, gas station managers or insurance agents. It was possible to organize licensing and registration and traffic laws and highway construction.

Sometime in the 1980s, the American economy passed some sort of inflection point, and the demand for middling expertise began to dry up. The concern at the top to ensure that the Great Machine was run competently was attenuated. Probably it had something to do with the explosion in CEO compensation. A pattern of disinvestment/deregulation emerged, public and private, and gradually accelerated. Debt peonage and certificates is just the end-game, of a broad process of disinvestment, which has been blithely unconcerned about whether the economy qua machine worked well, or worked at all, for 50% or 80% of people.

In the U.S., it is conventional wisdom that public education, even at a primary level, is, increasingly, an abject failure. Some of this is plutocratic propaganda and some is the age-old belief that the youth are going to hell in an handbasket, but some is real enough. I don’t know where to look for objective measurement. In the 1950s or 1960s, many ambitious people could expect training in corporate or government jobs, where they might spend most or all of a career. That investment complemented secondary and tertiary education, which could, therefore, be generalist in its focus; public education prepared someone to be trainable, to acquire and exercise expertise inside the bureaucratic, marketplace, or professional machinery. It seems to me that for-profit issuing of certificates is just an attempt to profit from short-circuiting both sides of that scheme of investing in what we know call, human capital.

The problem is that this thirty-year policy of disinvestment is running the economy off a cliff, where Wily Coyote looks down and sees no superstructure under him anymore. And, it won’t just be the lights going out at the Superbowl.

What’s really sexy is being able to get other people to accept complexity wholly into their minds.

It’s a bit like quicksand, isn’t it? The mocking and hyperbolic rhetoric — an attempt to break free from the suck of the conventional wisdom and/or of the cant of the ideologues — just seems to drag one deeper into the muck. (shah8 take note: suck-muck, click-clack-one-track, this could get out of hand really fast)

Every phrase quickly becomes laden with emotional resonance, in the context of the partisan dialogue, and it becomes really difficult to even identify what the big questions actually are, when the answers to which we cleave come pouring forth in the Ping-Pong rally, to which we are accustomed.

Mark English: the hyperbolic rhetoric (about the recent “intellectual collapse of the political right”,

I have to admit that I read that rhetoric in the OP as projection. The political left collapsed long ago. As an historical matter, the emergence of co-ideologies of libertarianism/neoconservativism on the one hand, and neoliberalism (American dialect) on the other, in the late 1970s, reflected a debasement of the foundations of the intellectual houses of both conservatives and liberals/social democrats, establishing a weird symbiosis between the two, which keeps reality at an apparently mutually agreed, great distance, for left, right and center.

I think JQ’s determination to embrace reality, and look for factual truth, is sincere and genuine. If I didn’t respect his integrity, I wouldn’t bother to comment. That’s not the issue — stated, just so we’re clear.

Mark English: . . . ideologically alien comments are tolerated rather than welcomed, and that this is “our” website (note the “we” in “we have … won the battle of ideas”), and we have not set it up to have our fundamental assumptions questioned

The principals at CT should get more credit than they do, for undertaking the work of moderation. It is one thing if frequent commenters sometimes disdain an interloper, but it is the posters, who must exercise judgment in truncating pointlessly provocative and repetitious thread hijacks, to keep the whole place from falling apart. It requires a lot of unrewarding work by the principals.

That said, just stopping the ritualized, runaway action-reaction cycles isn’t enough.

JQ in the OP, uses the metaphor of the Overton Window to stand in for the stale dialectic of libertarian-neoliberal discourse, and suggests that facts might subvert the alternate reality manufactured by this dialectic. It made me think of Neo in the first Matrix movie; does he take the red pill or the blue pill?

It seems to me that Arthur Brooks is offering the blue pill of trollish concern about inequality, alongside a ritualized acknowledgement of the pieties of the neoliberals about the role of education in legitimizing inequality (see Brad DeLong for abundant examples). So, my judgment on this differs from JQ’s more optimistic take. I see it as well within bounds of the established dialectic. That Brooks is making this concession, while selling the latest phase of the plutocratic plan to cash-out of the public goods investment in education, just confirms me in my view, for what little it’s worth.

If some — left, right and center — together took the red pill, and slid from our behind-the-looking-glass world of mutual projection, into reality, and started talking from there, what would that look like? Really try to imagine that discussion, outside the ideological boundaries of our accustomed, virtual-game partisan contests. Try to imagine mutual observation of the structure of power in action, without the fierce, compulsive effort to narrate the spin.

I think political economic reality, right now, is really ugly and depressing, and that, more than anything, keeps most of us reaching for this brand or that of blue pills. That’s what the stale ideological battles are about — beyond the wish of the plutocrats to keep the sheep in separate pens, that is — we’re arguing about which brand of blue pill is to be preferred, which set of illusions to cling to.

Factual, objective reality is impinging on our shared, cultural consciousness in movies and television shows about political conspiracies and vampires-werewolves-zombies and the impending apocalypse. Reality is coming to us in waking nightmares of popular culture and the gun violence of the news cycle, not the smarmy sales tactics of a professional grifter like Arthur Brooks. When the Looking-Glass/Overton-Window breaks for real, screams will follow the tinkle of broken glass.