Furious agreement, parts II and III

It used to be said that despite the sublime oratory of Eugen V. Debs from his front porch in Terre Haute (or “Terry Hut” as the locals like to joke) and the millions of votes he received (even while in prison) America never developed a true Socialist party nor movement proper “due to the ready availability and low price of beef-steak.”

As to using “the power of government” to solve “real social problems” ? Well, we had LBJ’s “War on Poverty” and we’ve had successive Presidents declare government’s “War on Drugs” and we sure can see how well that’s turned out, can’t we? Of course I suppose, like insane people who keep on doing the same thing and expecting different results, those on the left still think that simply redoubling the effort is all that is needed. More tax money and more social programs, yeah, that’ll do the trick. Why is it that home schoolers win most of the spelling bees while $14,000.00/yr/pupil worth of tax dollars spent on students from the D.C. public schools never seems to produce any winners?

And speaking of “coherent” social policy. If the auto industry is “bailed out” with Federal tax-dollars, let’s see if some of the stringent “strings” attached being proposed by the left include labor taking big cuts in salary and pension/medical packages as well as proposed management changes in order to compete with non-union foreign competition. Let’s see just how “coherent” these proposals really are–or if the people that contributed $80 million to get Obama elected will be shielded from any pain by a Democrat controlled Congress.

John, just to demolish your furious agreement (I and II) that America being center-right is not even wrong:

Really, America is now left of center-right, but also still a little bit to the right of the center, and to be more precise about it, is right in the center of what’s left when you ignore everything that’s either center-right and to the right of center-right, or in the center and to the left of center.

Admit it, your argument is now a smoldering ruin. I’d continue bombing but it would only make the rubble bounce.

“we are, compared to most developed countries, a bit more religious, free-market, and nationalistic in orientation”

Ranesh Ponnuru of The Party of Death was never spot on about anything, and never will be. We are, compared to most developed countries, an empire. So of course we’re more religious, “free market”, and nationalistic than they are. That will go away as the empire does, which is happening in 3,2,1…

Well, as I’ve believed for sometime, saying that the US is a center-right country is basically correct. What gets left out is that the current incarnation of the Democratic party is, basically center-right. The current incarnation of the Republican party is authoritarian kleptocrat.

That’s not how the media potrays things these days, of course, but looking at the world, or (at least with economics) even at US politics before the right-wing media domination that began 20-25 years ago, it’s clear. The average democratic politician probably thinks like Brad Delong or Paul Krugman, not exactly big fans of socialism.

But I gotta think Will is basically getting religion here. I’m something of an economic conservative, but even a hard core libertarian like Milton Friedman seemed to think that in a modern rich society, the welfare state was inevitable, and the goal was to make it as small, efficient and as little disempowering/disincentivizing as possible, not to demolish it. Even though I’m anything but a fan of state control, it’s appeared to me for quite some time that out-and-out social democracy as practiced in much of europe is strongly preferable to the kleptocracy that has prevailed under modern republicans.

A true classical liberal agenda doesn’t appear politically feasible, and the morality of those who would try to shade that direction incrementally purely by attacking support for the poor is very questionable. In fact, it seems clear that the whole venture (as practiced by movement conservatives) is really a sham, designed to make sure that as much money gets funneled to or kept by the already rich as possible, with really no concern whatsoever for moving the country in the direction of classical liberalism or the welfare of the country as a whole.

Laissez-faire = socialism for the rich, markets for the rest of us.

It strikes me that the comparison with other developed countries always leaves out the very distinctive American structure of strong states. This makes it seem like the U.S. is much less invested in government intervention than is actually the case – rather, the government interventions are distributed differently. In France or Norway, the central federal model of government holds to the extent that the departments really are subordinate as policy makers – but this is simply not true in the U.S. New York State has a lot more influence over the way the citizens of New York state deal with the “government” than, say, Paris has over the way the citizens of a Norwegian fylker deal with the “government”.

Perhaps the country that is closest to the American model is Canada, but because there are relatively few provinces, they do not skew the way the state functions in the same way that American states do.

I’ve been reading up on Minnesota’s Farmer Labor Party, which ran the state 1930-1938 and had Socialist, Communist, and Trotskyist influences. The most persuasive explanations for its demise are 1.) WWII, which split the party and 2.) partial co-option by Roosevelt at the national level (and more generally, the difficulties involved in practicing socialism within one state in a federal system).

Positively, the reason why the FLP was as successful as it was is probably that in 1920 or so 70% of its population was foreign-born, in Northern European countries with strong Socialist movements.

Anyway, it should have been Minnesota’s Floyd B. Olson who you apologized to rather than Debs or Norman Thomas. (Trivia: Olson was Scandinavian but grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and spoke Yiddish. Even more trivia: some of the Jews he knew were mobsters, and some believed that he was implicated in one or more gangland killings.)

recall the young OMB director from Reagan’s first term, David Stockman, who came in wanting to cull “weak claims, not weak claimants” from access to the federal teat, and quickly found out that it was not going to work that way. He spoke at length to the Atlantic’s William Grieder and got “taken to the woodshed” by Reagan.

I think you’re all being too hard on Ponnuru. To understand what he means you have to realize that a bunch of conservatives and Republicans (and Newsweek) have been saying that the US is center-right (relative to the current US political spectrum, where the Republicans are right and the Democrats have centrist and left-wing elements) and that, consequently, Barack Obama better watch how he governs–if he tries to push a liberal agenda, there will be a revolt and his presidency will be in ruins. Ponnuru responds that, while there is a valid sense in which the US is center-right, the sense in which it is yields no warning about governing liberally. Indeed, the congress and presidency could be extremely liberal for the next 20 years and the only sense in which America would be a center-right country would still obtain. This seems to me to be both (a) a point that can be assessed as being either true or false and (b) a point that is true.

Pundits and even academics who should know better often possess what Nietzsche called “high-speed intestines.” They process too fast. Generalizations such as the bit about America being a center-right country may or may not have some valid historical justification, but mostly they simply reflect the life experiences of 40-year olds whose horizons barely encompass the Reagan Revolution. The old set of eternal verities will soon be replaced by equally short-sighted alternatives as economic catastrophe creates a large crop of lefties until something else happens.

“Why is it that home schoolers win most of the spelling bees while $14,000.00/yr/pupil worth of tax dollars spent on students from the D.C. public schools never seems to produce any winners?”

I’m unclear on what you think this proves. First, homeschoolers can dedicate as much or as little time to a certain topic as they like. Some parents dedicate an awful lot of time to rote memorization of spelling in order to have their children do well in spelling bees. Without some measure of their overall knowledge or skills, this is meaningless. Second, by citing the “$14,000/yr/pupil” figure you seem to be claiming that homeschooling produces these results at a fraction of the cost. If, however, one considers the opportunity cost of homeschooling, I doubt that it is substantially cheaper.

I should have said Shockley didn’t discredit himself in physics.

Larv

I was just stirring the pot somewhat. As a beneficiary of public education whose Mother taught for 26 yrs at the elementary level and her sister 32; and having grown up on a teachers college campus with a professor Father I am hardly one to say that public education is worthless or that money (i.e., good facilities, of which campus Lab schools have aplenty) doesn’t make a difference. Having said that however, one has to admit
that endemic big city corruption (here in New Orleans they recently found 32 million! had been siphoned off in payroll to deceased people scams. etc.) and student discipline and teacher competency problems seem politically insurmountable. Improvements to this where they have been tried anywhere in the nation seem to achieve results that are marginal at best and at great cost.

You know there is a school of thought in administrative and bureaucratic decision-making theory advanced by a French sociologist whose name escapes me now that some organizations are so far gone that any improvements only make them more “efficiently ineffective,” and that the best thing is to blow them up and begin anew. I sometimes think that is true in the case of public schools –inner city ones anyway–the guy just may be right.

I might also make the provocative statement that the problem is mainly one of Democrat
control. The last sixty years have seen the school boards and City Hall of every major city east of the Mississippi controlled by a solid line of Democrats–the first thirty white ones, the second thirty black ones. Perhaps it’s time to try a different sort of people.

professor fate

As one who is mildly dyslexic and whose son is severely so afflicted, I hear you. As far as the well to do resisting giving money to poor people is concerned, that’s EXACTLY why the SS system was disguised as a retirement system for middle class people. As FDR is said to have stated: “Any program exclusively for poor people will forever remain a ‘poor’ program,”

J Thomas

“The GOP comes to mind…..”

Sadly, ruefully, I must admit worse things could to happen to the GOP in it’s present form.
As the old saying goes: “They said, ‘cheer up, things could be worse’ and so I did, and sure enough, they got worse….”

virgil:

“Why is it that home schoolers win most of the spelling bees while $14,000.00/yr/pupil worth of tax dollars spent on students from the D.C. public schools never seems to produce any winners?”

I went through the DC public schools system, and I think I’ve done okay according to the standards any school system might set for its alumni: post-graduate degrees in law and engineering from top-5 national programs, etc. Several of my friends from high school are similarly situated.

Let me guess: you live in the DC suburbs, right? Fairfax? Potomac? And you commute into the city every day and leech off the services and infrastructure paid for by taxes on DC residents, right? Must be nice to have a subject population just over the District line who subsidize your lifestyle but don’t have a vote in the Congress that controls their budget and their taxation.

Or are you one of the carpetbaggers who’ve moved into the city in the past ten years now that it’s white “safe” enough to do so?

I understand your point, and only an idiot would deny that the DCPS has some major probolems, but in my experience it’s a better idea to focus first on the outright theft of resources in a system before turning to other sources of inefficiency. But of course, outlets like the Washington Post like to beat the “irresponsible black people who can’t manage their own schools” drum to distract everyone from the suburbanites looting the city’s coffers in broad daylight.

Ah, I thought, a challenge — can I interpret “center right nation” so that it makes sense to warn Democrats that the USA is a center right nation ? I must find a definition of a center which isn’t well to the left of any point to which the Democrats might overstretch.
OK how about the point X where the fraction of Republican representatives to the left of X is equal to the fraction of Democratic representatives to the right of X ? Not ideal. By that definition the center moved right in 2006 and 2008 as moderate Democrats beat moderate Republicans in swing districts, but it will do well enough to make the claim “America is a center right nation” even wrong.

The claim then becomes that more US citizens self identify as Democrats than as Republicans, their views on policy are to the right of X. I am quite sure that this is not true — on tax progressivity, the minimum wage, universal health insurance, environmental protection, the war in Iraq, should government do more, and does the government have a responsibility to take care of people most citizens are to the left of X. On the death penalty (if you assume that Democrats who claim to support it are lying) and AFDC (if you remember what it was and who was President when it became TANF), due process rights and overwhelmingly creationism vs natural selection most US citizens are to the right of X. In other words, if the Democrats abandone decades old policy positions, they might end up too far left for the median voter.

By my definition the USA was a center left country from at the latest 1996 through the present except maybe for a year or two after 9/11. However, I thought, with great effort and in a spirit of bipartisanship, I can interpret Republicans claims so they are meaningful albeit false.

Then I read this
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/20/boehner-center-right/

BOEHNER: … I think the Congress is still a center-right Congress.

OK back to the drawing board.