Has the tide turned?

Another bit of evidence: the post-Newtown push for stricter gun laws. When was the last time a Democratic president or presidential candidate lead from the front on a hot-button social issue? It was the case for decades that Democratic politicians ran away from social issues or took them as a cue to demonstrate their independence from their hippy base (tell us again, Governor Clinton, about all the executions you oversaw and how abortion should be rare and that the speakers at Jesse Jackson’s conference are the REAL racists), but things seem to have changed quite a bit in just the last couple of years (months, really).

in Australia and other English speaking countries, a large slab of the right wing gets its talking points from the US Republican bubble, via the Murdoch press,

You can say that again. It’s always jarring to hear a (UK) Conservative politician proposing a policy that seems to have come completely out of nowhere in the context of UK politics, and realising that, of course, he’s received it fresh from the great Transatlantic Bullshit Conveyor.

prof. quiggin I think that there is a worldwide shift to the left in many ways. there is pressure in east asia for an expanded welfare state, the leftward turn in latin america and the death of the washington. I also think its a more pragmatic leftward turn. europe is different – but then again europe differs in general

“I’m tempted to suggest that if the Overton Window is moving left, it’s because it’s run up against the rightward edge of reality and bounced off.”

This. Not a forced retreat, but a pause, just as a matter of self-preservation.

“prof. quiggin I think that there is a worldwide shift to the left in many ways. there is pressure in east asia for an expanded welfare state, the leftward turn in latin america..”

I’m not sure where this global leftists turn is tbh. There might be pressure for an expanded welfare state in East Asia but isn’t that just a (for a want of a better word) natural pressure that’s going to develop in any fast growing economy? It doesn’t have to materialise let alone be tied to any long lasting leftist movement. Is there really a turn to the left in Latin America, or more a move to the centre? (I don’t know, I’m just asking) What about the political movements that have done well after the Arab uprising, most of which are religiously conservative, middle class and pro business, although they might be more responsive to the peoples demands. So perhaps rather than being part of a global leftist revival a lot of these elites have just become more responsive to their citizens? Which is good, of course, and in same ways a turn to the left but….
Personally I’m seeing more libertarians these days, goldbugs and Austrian schoolers. The tide might be turning but it’s still gonna drown us, make no mistakes about that.

I remember reading many similar articles to the OP in the mid ’90s when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were the poster boys of the “turn to the left”. Just sayin’.

What John is saying certainly is consistent with things like polling evidence and the overall tone of the political debate. I wouldn’t underemphasize the shock of losing an election that conservatives felt confident that they would win – literally until election day, when the fantasy world shattered around them.

Whites in the South really do have voting patterns different from those nationally, and they always have. There has just been a switch from a regional Democratic party after the Civil War to a regional Republican party in the modern era.

This is related to a different pattern of immigration and some degree of internal sorting. The Deep South has had less external migration than other regions. Much internal migration has tended to make it more conservative – e.g. older retirees heading to warmer climates, or people unhappy with the increasingly liberal culture of the northern states. The religious map in that article is a pretty good marker of a distinct culture as well.

However these trends are moderating. The parts of the South that are getting a lot of people moving there – Florida, Virginia, North Carolina – are changing politically pretty rapidly. The same thing is going on in Georgia and Texas, although delayed. It’s the backwater country – Missisippi, Alabama, SC, Louisiana, Appalachia – that are really becoming reactionary; neither gaining population nor tolerance of the other.

Sentiments like those sound like socialism in the US context, and increasingly in the British one (the difference is that you can say ‘socialism’ in the British context without spitting on the ground).

And apparently now you also can type socialism on CT. Now that’s progress!

Last thing – not that I’m looking to contradict what your saying Marc, really. I dont have a clue one way or the other. And thanks for clarifying.
I’d just be sceptical of Linds simplifications, but what you’re saying makes a lot more sense

Tod Lindberg’s article seems to have emerged from an odd situation akin to someone reading early Daily Kos, being deep-frozen, and then emerging to read news articles about Obama’s reelection. Perhaps because it’s from the Hoover Institution, the article shows no real understanding of how much “Left 3.0” needs the GOP in its current form in order to stay together. Obama and the Democrats more generally take every opportunity to undercut what used to be known as the netroots — as with Obama’s distinctive style of “prenegotiation” — and the main reason that the left looks unified is because the only alternative is what looks like cartoonish evil. If the GOP did not obligingly supply a new candidate every few months to talk about whether rape was really rape, Democrats would not have to fall back on childishness like saying that drone assassinations would be horrible if Bush was doing them but are OK because Obama is a good man. Or that banksters trying to destroy Social Security is wrong, but when Obama attempts it, it’s just a ten-dimensional chess tactic. In particular, Left 3.0 appears to have completely missed Occupy, which like it or not was inexplicable if the left was happy in the Democratic Party.

I’m afraid I’m with Phil, Mao and Niall. And it’s pretty hard to get excited with any “progress” when we have a Democratic President who actually takes pride in pointing out that all of his policies used to be Republican ones not very long ago.

I wouldn’t break out the champagne just yet.

Sure it’s great that we’re seeing some moderate Rs throw in the towel. Some of them might even start voting our way as the extreme Rs take over their party. But their extremists are even happier than you and I are that their moderates, RINOs as they would call them, are giving up.

That’s our side’s real adversary right now, the other side’s extremists. I would absolutely not take for granted that our side has won any lasting victory just because their side is probably going to be putting up even more radical extremists as their candidates. To seal the deal with an electorate that is never going to be paying enough attention to public policy to side consistently with anything but clearly, empirically proven, better results, our side has to actually produce empirically proven better results.

We got in with the trifecta in 2008 because there had been an economic and financial disaster on the other side’s watch. But instead of putting in a clear alternative, and correct, policy response to the disaster, we split the difference between stimulus and austerity, and went with a stimulus package that the people who believe in stimulus told us was going to be inadequate to produce obvious, clear improvement. As a result, we lost the House to the extremists in 2010, and that has spooked our side into agreeing with them that, yes, austerity is the way to go. We may not end up with austerity as disastrously extreme as they would impose if they held the trifecta, but austerity light is shaping up to be what our side is going to agree to, and thus be held responsible for when it produces the completely predictable further economic disaster that it will produce.

I’m not popping any corks until our side wins an election on stimulus, puts stimulus into effect, and stimulus works. Were that to happen, yes, we would probably see a repeat of the generations long dominance by our side that we saw with FDR and beyond. But we haven’t even got to step one of that 3-step program. We blew our best chance in 2008-2010, and we may well have lost the tide.

“I’m not popping any corks until our side wins an election on stimulus, puts stimulus into effect, and stimulus works. Were that to happen, yes, we would probably see a repeat of the generations long dominance by our side that we saw with FDR and beyond. But we haven’t even got to step one of that 3-step program. We blew our best chance in 2008-2010, and we may well have lost the tide.”

Politics doesn’t work by winning elections. Politics works by gaining intellectual hegemony. The Labour Govt of 1945 in the UK only won one election but it didn’t really matter. It gained the intellectual “upper hand” and set the parameters of the political conversation until 1979. Same wıth FDR in the US although there he did win three elections, Wasn’t important. What was important was that between 1933 and 1981, the American Govt, be it Democrat or Republican stayed within FDR’s basic intellectual framework of Keynesianism and regulation.

Thatcher and Reagan changed the conversation. They changed the framework within which politics took place. And no one since then has seriously challenged the parameters of the debate that they argued within. What we have seen since then is micro-movements (a tiny step to the left here, a small movement to the right there) within that framework. Obama hasn’t even tried to break out of that framework and it’s pretty clear that that is because he doesn’t want to.

I strongly agree with Hidari 11 and 25.

We just went through a huge, explicit struggle related to raising tax rates on the wealthy. We’re going through a current budget impasse on the same grounds, and it’s popular. These items would have been out of bounds for twenty years, since the 1994 Republican wave in Congress spurred in part by the Clinton tax increases on…the wealthy.

We’re talking about things – gun control, gay marriage, marujuana legalization, economic inequality – that were regarded as fringe obsessions or were issues that the right used as weapons. They’re now liabilities, and the conservatives have no coherent answers. If this isn’t changing the conversation, what would be?

“rf; you can come to my wife’s next family reunion if you think Lind is oversimplifying”

I’d honestly love to, but couldnt afford the fare at the moment. Though if it’s a standing invitation..

“That’s our side’s real adversary right now, the other side’s extremists. ”

Glen Tomkins @ 23 has a wrong analysis. The other side’s extremists are the only thing that’s preserving the current Democratic Party. If they weren’t there, it would become apparent that Democratic Party leadership doesn’t want to “[win] an election on stimulus, puts stimulus into effect, and stimulus works”. They’re just as beholden to oligarchy as the GOP is. If the extremists on the other side didn’t exist, then the DP would have to fall back on the Blue Dogs again to stop what they need to have stopped.

And I don’t mean the above flippantly, I really don’t know..

“But their extremists are even happier than you and I are that their moderates, RINOs as they would call them, are giving up.”

That is because they are hyperpartisan nincompoops who don’t seem to care that they cost the Republicans election after easily winnable election. Bringing on the right wing extremists is evidence in FAVOR of a leftward shift, at least where practical power is concerned.

It’s interesting — if the experience is not repeated to often — to see what rightists think of the Left. In the case of Lindgren, everything further out than the Bismarckian ‘social democracy’ (capitalism- and imperialism-preserving Welfare state politics) seems to fade into a dark haze where anarchists, socialists, communists and who knows what else run together like distant gray cats in the dark. I concede the gray cats cannot win elections and therefore may be considered insignificant, but on the other hand they do think things that are different from what the Right, the ‘center’, and the soft-of-but-not-really Left of the Democratic Party agree upon, which might make them interesting to someone. Or not, I suppose; it would depend on what one was interested in.

Lindgren is correct in noting that the Democratic Party has been far more successful in controlling and destroying leftist radicalism than the Republican Party in controlling and destroying rightist radicalism, a set of phenomena that might reward closer investigation. The Democrats’ success has enabled their party to move ever rightward ideologically, displacing the Republicans and driving them into the wilderness of fanaticism where they now find themselves. As Rich Puchalsky notes in #33, this success, if it goes far enough, may create problems of its own.

I think the Republican Party is heading for the junk heap of history; it’s alienated women and young people—how can it last? The process seems likely to be a split in the Republicans, with the less-radical faction forming a coalition with the Democrats and the more radical faction being maneuvered into screaming irrelevance. This, I claim, has already begun. The resulting Democratic coalition is going to be dominated by the combination of conservative Democrats and Wall Street Republicans. “Centrists.” Conservatives, in other words, just not screaming radical right-wingers.

The question that comes up is will a new party move in on the Democrats from the left? It seems likely, though it will be very difficult. Such a party would have the support of young people and women.

But…a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. The Koch Brothers, ALEC, the SPN, all that. This group may be heading for the junkheap of history, but they’re going to take a while getting there, and do a lot of damage on the trip.

33: Puchalsky is wrong. What is interesting is that the plutocrats don’t really need the Republican Party anymore. The Democratic Party has moved far enough to the right, to the right of Reagan, on economic issues and has such complete dominance over its base by the skillful use of the social and identity issues that there is no conceivable pressure from its left. They don’t even need Blue Dogs. Watch Warren, she will talk, and then vote with Obama, Wall Street, and Big Energy.

The Democratic Party is very close to achieving LDP (Japan) level stability in politics and policy. Resistance is futile.

My sense of politics is that it creates changes in the lifesyles of the great mass of the people, and so far, on most fronts, Idont see that in the US.There is a nice article in the NYT about a sort of emblematic moment in Obama’s political effect on us. The Justice department made a big deal about not prosecuting the banks for systematic fraud and perjury re their faux documents submitted to the courts these last four years. In return, they got assurances of mortgage forgiveness. Low and behold, we got that mortgage forgiveness – for second mortgages. For first mortgages, though, the foreclosure machine hums on. Now, on the margins, maybe it is better to be homeless and not owing that seccond mortgage. But you are still homeless. I think it is better to admit something: the Bush administration has had more influence on the way Americans live than any other administration since LBJ. We are living in the second decade of Bushism, so to speak. Bushism crossed with Obama’s nudgery.

I thought Freddie DeBoer had one of the best comments on this recent frisson of liberal Democratic optimism:

My friends! I’m cool with you arguing that liberalism has an inexorable demographic advantage that, coupled with conservatism’s seemingly permanent lunacy, will guarantee you electoral victory and thus control of policy for decades to come. I can also tolerate, I guess, your learned helplessness, which compels you to play a defensive game where you concede 90% of what conservatives want before you even start arguing, and through which you excuse all kinds of failure and unhappy outcomes. What I dearly wish is that you would stop arguing both at the same fucking time.

In response to Hidari, I think Obama has done a lot of stuff, really, but none of it should be giving hope to liberals and progressives. The legal and economic foundation has been laid for a change in politics, but it is the institutional foundation for authoritarian corruption and economic decline. The decision to give immunity to banksters, while pursuing whistleblowers and disrupters (e.g. Aaron Schwartz) with vicious determination, was a hugely momentous choice. It has saddled us with a financial sector, like a metastasizing cancer, which is driving everything, and in very, very bad directions: vulture capital disinvestment, for-profit prisons (and the highest incarceration rates in the world), for-profit health insurance and for-profit medical care (subsidized heavily by Obamacare!) and the highest medical care costs in the world, for-profit public education (on-line certification and college cum debt peonage), declines in home ownership, the fracking boom, etc. The increasing emphasis on Intellectual Property in U.S. economic policy is another symptom of this general support for the worst kind of parasitic rentiers, against the clear needs and interests of the vast majority.

Climate change and peak oil are underlying, capital facts, which would dictate that the coming decades would be difficult periods, in which genuine “progress” would be a hard sell, at best. We really do need to completely re-think economics, to take account out the implications. (Brad De-Long’s straight-edge-on-graph-paper projections of increasing wealth forever are stupidity, not liberalism, and certainly not economics.) Having a tiny minority grab all the resources, for “adaptation”, while throwing most of the population under the on-coming bus, is the worst possible course, but it is the course, we seem to be choosing for ourselves. We ought to treat high unemployment and the fracking gas, as a last opportunity to invest in radically changing the energy basis of our economy: building a rail network and reviving our canal system, and installing a base of renewable power generation and things like that. Instead, the best liberals seem to be able to manage is uninspiring and empty talk of “stimulus” spending. It is not stimulus we need to be spending on, people, it is a feasible future for humanity, and if posterity is to have one, we’d best be quick about it. When the natural gas is gone, and that won’t take long, we will not have the physical ability to transform the economy — the natural world will be eroding beneath our feet, and down we will tumble.

The decline in the American economy is already continuing apace. The decline in wages, which has been substantial under Obama, even as the super-rich continue to take everything, is undermining the mass-economy in a way that will profoundly affect some American icons. JC Penney will probably go bankrupt this year. Wal-Mart is starting to come apart at the seams, as their “investments” in low-prices erode their same-store margins below what is sustainable. Cable television and telephone (DSL) companies are in serious trouble, as the ceiling on monthly charges are started to decline with household income. I don’t have much sympathy for these corporate behemoths, but de-stabilizing corporate icons will have a knock-on effect on people, who are feeling pretty de-stabilized by change and decline.

The unresponsiveness of the political system and the Democratic Party in particular to the pain that is widely felt and to the evidence of increasing corruption in the economy is going to combine with generational change, to create some real disruption in the Democratic Party and in the non-partisan mass movement politics. Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of people are going to find out how authoritarian the U.S. has become — it is no longer a “free country” — and the plutocracy has more than adequate means to bottle up protest and reform, both. Violence will rise, and rise, and rise. And, a crash will come — in six years or ten or twelve, but the economic course of rapid disinvestment combined with natural decline due to climate change and ecological collapse and overpopulation and fossil fuel depletion means that we are running off a cliff, we are caught in the currents of a river running toward Niagara.

“Yeah, uneven and combined geographical development. Try David Harvey.”

I didn’t mean to imply monocausality Bob, (is that a word?), or to not deal with Random Lurkers question, I just can’t even begin to articulate the extent to which I don’t know the answer. And when I’m on topic, I guess it’s worth noting that the US’s ethnic classifications make absolutely no sense as is (I think lupita mentioned this in the last thread) So I guess making Southern whites an ethnicity in the context of the incomprehensible anarchy of the system as it stands is really just much of a muchness

@44: I think that by the beginning of the 1960s the U.S. ruling class had decided that the existing racial-caste system would lead to Balkanization and civil war, so they decided to get rid of it regardless of the fact that it was supported by a great majority of the White population, that is, the people who could vote. Orders were, so to speak, given, and when necessary, those who had to fall upon their swords did so.

@ 44 and @51

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n13/david-runciman/what-if-hed-made-it-earlier

A quote from “Left 3.0”:

There are, no doubt, a few aging radicals who still dream of sweeping the whole capitalist system away and starting over. But never in the history of the Left have such views been so marginal. Once the vanguard of the Left, the radicals are now its pets.

If one subtracted the anti-capitalist left from the Latin American left, very little would be left. No political party in the 3rd world that supports opening US military bases on its soil and its capital markets to Western banks, taking loans from the IMF, sending troops to Iraq or Afghanistan, boycotting Cuba or Iran, and collaborating in rendition programs, is considered leftist at all. On the other hand, opposing all of the above actions, no matter how religious or socially conservative, does place one on the left. More in line with its original meaning – anti-monarchist – the global left is anti-American hegemony.

If US politics does shift to the left, what effects will that have elsewhere?

Given the meaning of left in “Left 3.0”, a shrug with a plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

From Michael Lind’s article:

White Southerners tend to see themselves as “pure” Americans, “real” Americans, “normal” Americans.

If so, they are like Latin Americans who, despite the African slave trade and immigration from all over the world, do not self- identify or identify others as “Lebanese-Mexican”, “African-Dominican”, or “German-Argentinian”. The French are the same in rejecting hyphenated nationals.

mpowell @ 54

I should try to be clearer and more analytical. There are many cross-currents at work, here.

As far as Peak Oil is concerned, I think we are on a kind of global plateau, reinforced in the U.S. by the whole frakking thing.

As far as U.S. global economic hegemony is concerned, I think the U.S. is doing quite a good job of running on fumes, the fumes in question being intellectual property claims, and the role of the dollar in world commerce and the U.S. as a supposed “safe” haven. (As an erstwhile economist, with a knowledgebase from the 1970s, I look on in horror at the professional incompetence amply demonstrated by our leading economists; the inability to devise a currency system for Europe or China is absolutely amazing. MMT is a kidnergarten version of Abba Lerner’s functional finance — almost absurdly simple-minded, but the height of intellectual sophistication compared to what is on offer from even comparative “good guys” like Olivier Blanchard at the IMF.) When the U.S. was a competent and responsible hegemon, with a policy-competent elite, it might have stepped in and organized a new global system, but it doesn’t have that kind of power, professional competence (Larry Summers? really!?) sense of responsibility. And, besides, the U.S. financial system, despite its manifest defects and toxic potential, benefits from the anarchy, at least in the short-run. The anarchy tends to feed a financial plateau to go with the energy plateau, and makes kick-the-can-down-the-road policy more feasible.

The U.S. financial system is parasitic. That is, it is in a completely dysfunctional dynamic equilibrium, where, instead of doing what a financial system should do, it is relying at the margin on the cash flows generated by artful disinvestments and from usury and fraud (e.g. ponzi schemes). As long as China and Europe are in various states of breakdown — and China’s breakdown is just getting started; things are about to get very, very ugly there over the next two or three years, politically and economically).

Things are coming together to stabilize things for the U.S. elite, but the U.S. economy will continue to be eaten from below. Manufacturing will grow, but at much lower wage rates, so that a new mass economy, at a much lower level of income is being created, and a load of usury and fraudulent exploitation is being imposed on top of that economy, which depresses welfare further. Much of the elite is engaged in “exchange” with the masses, in which the elite offer toxic deals; the economy is switching in character to the kind of extraction economy that characterizes the third world. As lupita aptly reminds us, in that context, the “capitalist” elite is the absolute, implacable political enemy; the politics of class warfare are really the only politics, which is appropriate to the circumstances.

Anger at the bottom is going to fuel greater and greater political violence, much of that political violence will be initiated from above, as it already. The U.S. incarceration rate and Obama’s enthusiasm for the new “rule of law”, stripped as it has been, of habeas corpus and due process, (not to mention the coming rules on IP, which will strip people of the right to be anything but a helpless, voiceless peon) should be extremely alarming. The far-sightedness of the plutocracy, in for example, stripping people of bankruptcy protection on mortgages on their primary residences (but not, secondary residences — we have to protect those rich enough to have a mortgage on a vacation home or a pied a terre), has become a regular feature of our politics, reflecting both the power of a nearly homogenous sense of interest among the elite, and the complete powerless of the “99%”. Anyway, I digress.

The point is that I see a plateau stretching out over many years, being undermined by social and economic trends underneath. Increasing political violence and declining legitimacy will be part of that “plateau” experience. And, it will come to an end in a Minsky Moment that goes well beyond the merely financial, to encompass panic about the state of environmental depletion.

It is terribly sad. A few moments thought is about all it takes to see that, say, the Keystone XL pipeline is completely wrong. Obama will do it anyway. Because Obama is evil. Maybe, not personally evil in the sense of a mythic Hitler, maybe, but the nexus of our evil, nevertheless. And, at the moment, Democrats of good will, as stupid as it is, are in love with him.

lupita @ 55: Given the meaning of left in “Left 3.0″, a shrug with a plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

A lot has been made of the extent to which the liberal (American meaning) left has silenced more radical voices, leaving itself with no leverage vis a vis the right. Chris Hedges has made this point, along with his observations about the meaning of war, and about the gradual decline in liberal institutions, as a powerbase for left-of-centre, reformists. Hedges makes the point that this has left American politics with an inadequate safety valve, as pressures and dissatisfaction grows from the suffering below. I agree with all that.

I will say, in addition, that a lack of imagination across the whole spectrum of the left, liberal and marxist, seems to me a serious problem. We are on the lee side of the Industrial Revolution’s energy and enviromental peak, and too few are thinking about this seriously, so far. Some have began, but they are far from dominating, as they must, as these problems dominate, whether we acknowledge them or not.

The American blogospheric center-left (and I say this as a tempermental moderate and philosophical American liberal), is a bad joke. Figures like Scott Lemieux, Brad DeLong, Mark Kleiman or Mark Thoma are not really liberal, and to let them demarcate the left-side of the Overton Window means even the dead cat bounce that make JQ in the OP optimistic, goes nowhere. Even Paul Krugman, whose integrity I greatly admire, is, in fact, a neoliberal, who ought to represent the extreme right of acceptable discourse, not the left. We are very far from “reality-based” even when not in the Obama delirium.

Damn you all.

A source of unlimited free energy will be invented in the next 5 years. Its blueprint will be leaked to the press and published, despite the oil companies effort to suppress it. Also, a replicator of all objects. And also, a means to travel across the galaxy, instantly. And an elixir of youth. So there.

rf @ 62 It is an hypothesis, more than a thesis. I’m not going to defend it, and will happily join anyone in the search for disconfirming evidence. So far, I can say, “cute dog” and “nice family”, and after that, I’m coming up empty. I don’t count the discovery of 11-dimensional chess, and the my jury’s still out on Obamacare; ymmv.

I think this is putting the cart before the horse. It treats “politics,” wrongly I think, as an autonomous sphere of political professionals and intellectual debate.

It seems to me that the necessary and sufficient condition for a “shift to the left,” in the US and elsewhere, is a greater capacity for self-organization by the popular classes. When a critical mass of the majority exploited & excluded by the current system are able to disrupt its operations — by collectively withholding their labor or compliance in general — then concessions will be made by the elite. The intellectuals and politicians will follow.

Politics in the narrow sense does have a role — but only in facilitating disruptive protest from the bottom, and consolidating its gains afterward.

In terms of the current moment, I do think the wave of new left governments in Latin America are a positive sign — they suggest that states in the periphery can once again be vehicles for mass mobilization in a way they largely ceased being during the period of neoliberalism. I also think the decline of racial politics in the US, to the somewhat doubtful extent it is happening, is also potentially very positive, but only insofar as it removes an obstacle to potential popular movements here. Whether the resulting opening will be taken advantage of is another question.

Bruce Wilder 02.22.13 at 10:38 pm @ 56:
‘I don’t know what your evidence is, that a “great majority” of the “White population, that is, the people who could vote” supported “the existing racial-caste system”. …

I was born in 1939 and grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in suburban New Jersey and in New York City. Just about everyone I knew as a child or an adolescent, other than some Jews and ‘Italians’ I met in school, vigorously maintained explicitly racist opinions. By ‘racist’ I do not mean ‘prejudiced’, I mean political racism: there are races, some are better than others, the better ones should be privileged over the worse and rule them. That began to change around 1960, especially among younger people. Polls I saw reported in newspapers comported with my personal observations.

I have a somewhat different view of the ruling class than you do, but as I have had mostly only indirect contact with its members and their hangers-on, I don’t have a lot of good evidence about it. In any case one of the necessary powers of any ruling group is an ability to limit access to information and to distort and pollute what does get published. So I must speculate. It seems pretty likely to me that by the 1940s the r.c. had evolved a consensus that the racial caste system was incompatible with the world-imperial role it envisioned for itself and began to carry out. Hence, for instance, the integration of the armed forces by Truman in 1948.

The total radicalization and lunacy on the right does not compensate for the lack of integrity, leadership or coherence on the (democratic party) left, although it translates into some electoral losses for the delusional right.

Sebastian H@68: “We are talking as if Reagan won just the south. He won EVERYWHERE.” True. But I think that had more to do with Reagan being a media president. Since the advent of television, I think, popular Presidents have been as much performers as executives, maybe more performers. Think of JFK, Reagan, Clinton, and now Obama. I think maybe this is a problem to look at: image has always held precedence over substance in politics, but in our time even more so. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a reply of the fall of the Roman Republic.

Sebastian:

“The consensus really didn’t deal well with stagflation.”

Note that the Chicago School didn’t, either. It relied on (a) f@cking over the majority of the labor force, (b) OPEC. weakening a bit, and (c) not actually producing good econo ic growth in the developed world, but pretending to.

“Public works and unions really did have ugly hotbeds of clear corruption.”

And the right replace that with flat-out neoliberal looting.

” Public education really was super crappy in many places which have improved dramatically since the 1970s.”

And was improving before then, as well. What changed was that people started caring about how the bottom 25% were educated.

It does seem this pre 1980’s nostalgia is going a little far though. There might have been more social mobility, greater economic equality and a general better life for the white working class unionised worker, but was it really that much better for anyone else? As Tim Worstall likes to point out the rest of the world was certainly poorer and this was undoubtedly, in part, a result of the introverted, paternalistic, parochialism of the time. A lot of these communities we now so admire were stifling and dictatorial, as were a number of the Unions. Did Henry Ford not all but run his employees lives? Society, church and state would excommunicate or lock up unwed young mothers, orphans, (or anyone with preferences outside the norm in underfunded, unregulated psychiatric hospitals) communities were much more intolerant of immigrants and minorities. More people were dying in armed conflicts and in famines.
Of course the reasons for that are complex but it’s in part due to the paternalism needed to maintain the unholy state, union, corporate, community alliance. Having your union, boss, state official or neighbourhood bore run your life is not particularly appealing. The present is still much better than the past. No doubt about it.

Barry, you’re arguing that the reaction didn’t end up better than what it was reacting to. I’m perfectly ok with the argument. But pretending that what it was reacting to didn’t exist is bad history and worse is likely to keep us from learning about how to avoid untrue problems. .

Against a sitting President, Reagan won 46 out of 50 states and beat Carter by a hair under 9% of the popular vote. For reelection he won 49 states, and swept up 18% more of the popular vote than his opponent. That was the nation as a whole reacting to something and it wasn’t just busing. And it didn’t just happen in the US, it happened all over the Western world, even places without a history of slavery in Mississippi.

There is a reason the new left is not rushing back to the 1960s, but we seem to have lost sight of it.

Anyway maybe we’ve drifted too far off topic. Has the tide turned? Maybe. But I’ve seen too many false hopes to get excited yet.

William Timberman@24: I just read that thing. Wow. Um, climate change?

Bruce Wilder@59: you underestimate the impact of technological and environmental change. We are going to see—I think I can say this with confidence now—a shift back to smaller-scale manufacturing; the economies of scale of mass production in many goods are falling away. At the same time, climate change. No, let me repeat that, CLIMATE CHANGE. And (see above) “the plutocracy” isn’t aware of any it, as far as I can tell.

Maybe it is time to stop talking about politics and start talking about environment.

Salient@78: big beaky grin.

Damn those Swedes for reacting against their 1960s consensus and substantially reordering things in the 1980s and 1990s because they hate contraception!

Sebastian – huh? “HUD really was destroying inner cities and replacing them with even worse disasters based on liberal planning.” No, what destroyed inner cities was a policy of suburbanization that was justified in terms of scattering the population in the event of nuclear war, plus an FHA policy from the thirties to the fifties that was very actively anti-black (for instance, refusing to guarantee loans in subdivisions that did not have covenants banning sales to black buyers), which only began to be practically overturned in the mid to late sixties.
Liberal policy – that is, anti-apartheid policy – came, alas, too late to save inner cities in the sixties and seventies. Apartheid does have a cost.

= = = plus an FHA policy from the thirties to the fifties that was very actively anti-black (for instance, refusing to guarantee loans in subdivisions that did not have covenants banning sales to black buyers), = = =

See _Crabgrass Frontier_ for details of this shameful episode in US history. What is perhaps worse in a civic sense was the FHA/HUD’s program of tracking down and destroying all documentation of that program (and as many of the maps as they could find) during the 1960-1970 time period (shades of destroying the evidence of torture in 2006-2008).

Cranky

Cranky@88: thank you. One does not even have to go so far; every week of the campaign just past brought some new right-wing Republican saying something foolish and misogynistic. Misogyny was part of what cost the Republicans the election. It is hard to write even a conservative feminist platform that does not include some liberal elements, so women are pulling the national consensus moderately to the left.

Worldwide, the emancipation and the empowerment of women is a big driver of the current reactionary movement. It’s so big, in fact, that it’s hard to see — that the reactionaries are “masculinist” and anti-feminist goes without saying. Hyper-masculinity and anti-feminism were also major elements of 20th century reactionary movements.

Since this blog has a global reach, I would be interested in hearing from some Scandinavians on anti-feminism in their conservative movements.

What I am really anxious about is how we will respond once global warming makes its presence uncomfortably obvious. This will probably happen outside of the time window for reasonable projections of the political arena (ie, more than 20 years)

Wrong. Look out your window, if you are in the NE US. Global warming is costing society at least 10s of billions a year right now, and I predict will cost 100s of billions a year within the next 5 years. The ways those costs (and who pays) impact economies, societies, politics are barely being glanced at. Declining growth, lower rate of profit, and declining real wages are a good place to start. Authoritarian and oligarchic governance are likely.

The lack of urgency is disgusting and contemptible.

We seem to be indiscriminately mixing two or three things together. I’m not trying to defend where the rebuplican party has ended up at all. It is sbsolutely a mess that is risking serious and long lasting damage to the country. But trying to read where it is now backwards in time as if what exists now is all that existed then (usually with the argument that it was all *really* the same, but is just exposed now) is going to seriously skew your understanding of the last thirty years and why things ended up here.

The Republican Party has indeed always had racists and anti women figures. And that isn’t good. (Though the Democratic Party has its gross offenders as well, see especially certainly Bill Clinton who exposed a lot of “we believe women” feminists as completely willing to sell out to charm and winning). But to write off Reagan’s enormous wins, and the enormous pull back of nations across the world from the 60’s and 70’s liberal consensus, as just expressions of racism and misogyny is ridiculous. And it is exposed as ridiculous when you see that it happened all sorts of places–including places without the awful racial history of the US and without the virulent misogyny of the current Republican Party.

I’m not saying that racial and misogynist critiques are invalid. I’m saying that they aren’t explanatory of the republican successes. There were worldwide reversals of the liberal technocratic movement BECAUSE the liberal technocratic movements seemed to be fucking a bunch of things up.

Now you can definitely argue that many of the policies implemented ended up being less successful than advertised and sometimes worse than what they replaced. I have no argument with that. But the argument that Reagan crushed Carter and then smashed Dukakis into a bloody pulp across 49 states because because because RACISM and WOMAN HATING is just self delusional. Reagan articulated a critique of the then current liberal consensus that *resonated*.

If the Republican Party falls apart, and we can only hope, it will be because it failed to deliver better than what it was critiquing, and then had to fall harder and harder back every election on nasty brutishness which eventually turns too many people off.

But that isn’t the same as deluding yourself into thinking that the critique was crazy, or racist, or anti woman, and that things were hunky dory otherwise.

If Southern rednecks are an ethnicity, then given some of the comments here I’d argue they seem to share more than a passing resemblance to their leftist radical cousins. Both groups seem to share a predilection for piety (#59 “Obama is evil”), a penchant for apocalyptic prophecy (#91 “Authoritarian and oligarchic governance are likely,”) and a sense of pessimistic futility (#43 “Resistance is futile.”)

If ya’ll are correct, I think I’d put my money on the rednecks. They act out their alienation by buying guns, stocking up on canned goods, and joining militias. Which is, if we are surrendering to a grinding necessitas of decline, probably the logical reaction.

As for myself, I still have hope for civilization. And so moderate leftist consensus building seems a pretty smart thing to do, even if it so often disappoints.

“I still have hope for civilization”

Oh we’re all doomed Lawrence. But it has little to do with who voted for whom in in the 80s

I’ll be down gator wrestling in Louisiana for the apocalypse

World was in turmoil, where was Jesus now?
He was down in Mississippi, behind a mule and a plow
…
The war wasn’t too bad, down in the South
Jesus cooked good barbecue, the kind that burned your mouth
People’d come from miles around for just a little taste
But most of ’em wouldn’t make it ’cause of that nuclear waste
But if you survive this nuclear holocaust
Come down to Mississippi for some of that Jesus Hot Sauce.

–Root Boy Slim

Thanks JP.
A question, did root boy slim steal fat boy slims stage name, or vice versa? Also there’s a good deal of gator talk in the comments in that link, so I’m onto something here, right? It’s not just a lazy caricature?

BW @ 91: I don’t mean to indicate that I don’t think global warming calls for urgency, but even $150B/year is only 1% of US GDP. That doesn’t threaten our social fabric or economic ruin. It just makes it very stupid that we aren’t doing anything about it. Perhaps I am mistaken and this will get significantly worse within the next 5 years, but it is a very difficult thing to predict and I’m not aware of any climate scientists making predictions this specific. If we are at the point that there are 10 hurricanes doing Sandy like damage within 10 years, I will consider myself to have been proven wrong. I would almost regard that as a good thing, because feeling the impact of global warming in the United States in a very costly way much earlier in the game leads to at least a chance of reducing carbon emissions sufficiently to avoid some of the severe long term consequences that we will almost certainly experience on our current path. But you are right that one likely result is actually authoritarianism and oligarchy. That is why I am somewhat hopeful that crisis can be averted until our political climate has absorbed what I am hoping are the death throes of the Republican party. I would agree with you that wealthy interests currently dominate both parties, but I actually think this will be much more difficult if the Republican party is finally spent as a political force and people are not constantly forced into a lesser of two evils choice game.

The parts of the South that are getting a lot of people moving there – Florida, Virginia, North Carolina – are changing politically pretty rapidly.

Except that state politics in all three is now dominated by a GOP that took advantage of the 2010 election to gerrymander themselves into a decade of control. NC in particular is embarking upon at least two years of rapid, radical wingnuttery, with the state’s mini-Koch (the heir to a discount supermarket fortune) as the de facto budget director under a bidness-friendly governor and a legislative supermajority that has a century of scores to settle.

Might be a dead cat bounce, but it’s going to stink for a while, because the “new South” will be governed at the state level by radical wingnuts who see the next few years as their last chance to lock in the “old South”.

@105

“Except that state politics in all three is now dominated by a GOP that took advantage of the 2010 election to gerrymander themselves into a decade of control. ”

Gerrymandering is a fragile thing.

People move, die, change their minds, etc.

Oh, gods, climate change denial.

The reason there aren’t accurate predictions is that accurate predictions are not possible. We know there are “tipping points” — points after which climate will change drastically and irreversibly. We don’t know where they are. The longer climate change goes unchecked, the more likely we are to reach one or more of them.

We are on track for 6°C (that’s 11°F) of warming in this century. If this trend is unchecked, the result will be catastrophes of biblical proportions. The balance will tip. The cost numbers posted here are low by a factor of at least three and the changes won’t be gradual; they’ll be drastic: a series of hard blows, rather than a slow steady buildup. We’re talking angry sky-god stuff: flood, storms, famine, drought. Take a look at this David Roberts video (it’s only 15 minutes) for an overview.

It’s time to get working on it. Now, not later, because if we don’t stop increasing CO2 emissions in the next 10 years, and begin reducing them thereafter, we will not have time.

Now let’s go back to talking about politics. But not for too long, because if spend too long politicking, there will be no civilization left to govern.

We’re on the Titanic, we’ve sighted the iceberg, but not only is our rudder too small to allow us to avoid the collision, we’re still arguing over whether we need to turn yet.

And thus the problem will be solved.

112-113: or we’re on an incredibly big ship which is incredibly slow to turn and maybe we are fucked because, whether we turn too late or we turn too quickly, we will always sink – and there is only a life boat for 1% of the passengers. Luckily, whilst there is abundant evidence that we should turn, there is as of yet no evidence that we have to risk turning so quickly as to endanger the very processes that have a possibility of making life on the ship bearable. True, if the turning will remain this slow, it is a matter of time before all of the evidence will show conclusively to the 1% that they need to go for the life boat.

“Unlimited growth is fundamental to capitalism. Therefore, nothing serious will be done about climate change”

There I have to disagree with Anarcissie. Fixing climate change involves replacing huge amounts of both infrastructure and “personal” consumer goods: in other words, a large new market for capitalist growth. If capitalism required unlimited growth, and we were ruled by capitalist interests, then they’d be welcoming this societal re-tooling effort. But we’re not: we’re ruled by an oligarchy whose concern is not capitalist growth, but preserving and solidifying current power relationships. That’s why, similarly, they favor austerity rather than Keynesian stimulus which would actually lead to growth. That’s pretty much what you said about “the short-term interests of the present ruling class”, but those interests have nothing to do with capitalism or growth per se.

Anarcissie in 116: since the ruling class in 1900 was heavily invested, financially and emotionally, in horses and buggies, therefore their replacement by motor cars was impossible. Do you really back Exxon, BP and Peabody against GE, Siemens and Yingli, who are planning to destroy them with ever-cheaper wind turbines and solar panels? Have you looked at what’s happening already in the Australian electricity market?

106: Well, it’s hard to get data and do the calculations, but right off the bat I found around 100+ billion (Fed, state, local) for Sandy and 10-30+ billion for the 2012 drought.
How much overtime for snow removal over the last three Northeastern snowstorms. How much downtime for production and retail from the summer thunderstorms and winter snowstorms? How much more electricity costs (AC) for average family budgets?

Timeline Extreme Weather Events 2012

I would guess, and it is only a guess, that we may have reached 1/2 a trillion in AGW costs in the US alone in 2012. And it is my gut feeling, based on the wild underestimation of extreme weather events, that we will get them faster and accelerating. We will see.

2) And even more important, although these costs also have “economic benefits”…rebuild New Jersey? Jobs!…in our current low-growth low-inflation low-tax austerian plutocrat regime, these costs will be zero-sum, they will be paid for by reducing services and jobs, especially gov’t jobs. This, besides being an immediate tragedy, will add additional hard-to-calculate costs as schools don’t get built, bridges don’t get repaired, the electric grid doesn’t get upgraded.

Hard to assess? Absolutely. All attributable to AGW and extreme weather? Certainly not. Dismissable as not happening or a factor at all? Get serious.

Global corporate capitalism growth can easily be replaced by global corporate steady-state declining-state feudalism.

There’s one interpretation of Malthus, which is what might be called the “soft-landing” version, where the population simply approaches a fixed limit.

Doesn’t happen that way. We don’t rise ever more gently to a plateau. Nor do rise and fall form a symmetrical bell curve.

The alternative, realistic scenario takes into account congestion effects, depletion effects and the intensifying tragedy of the commons. The fall is much sharper and much faster than the rise. The 300 year rise of the industrial revolution has been a gentle hike up grassy knolls; what follows from here may well be a rappelling down rocky cliffs without ropes.

The concentration of wealth and power means a policy of dis-coordinated “adaptation”, which makes things worse overall and for the vast majority. The fundamental natural bases of productivity and wealth will be falling away at an accelerating rate beneath our feet. The ocean ecology will collapse. Production of fossil fuels (coal, tar sands) will get dirtier and yield less and less net energy. The ground water will be poisoned. Etc. Sooner or later, someone will embark on a policy of radical human population reduction, probably just ahead of Mother Nature, to free up diminishing resources for the use of the 1/10th of 1%: the ultimate extractive economy.

DelRey @ 106

There’s no upside, no happy scenario, except where humans manage to constrain themselves fairly radically, to reduce GHG emissions and other assaults on the environment.

If the uncertainty is whether the ecology collapses by 2045 or 2055, that’s hardly a reason to throw up one’s hands, or delay, waiting to see what develops.

Rich Puchalsky 02.24.13 at 3:55 pm @ 117:
“Unlimited growth is fundamental to capitalism. Therefore, nothing serious will be done about climate change”

‘There I have to disagree with Anarcissie. Fixing climate change involves replacing huge amounts of both infrastructure and “personal” consumer goods: in other words, a large new market for capitalist growth….’

Sure, and so does waiting until a lot of destruction occurs and then finding opportunities in the chaos and misery for profit. Indeed, both are already happening. But the fundamental principles of capitalism will not change, and they will be applied to whatever conditions and situations eventuate as long as capitalists dominate our culture and our politics. One of those principles is growth without limit.

As for steady-state feudalism, I don’t believe in it. In the histories of feudalism I have read (European Middle Ages, mostly) there were constant struggles for survival, accumulation, and power. Changes like the appearance of states in the modern style were slower than in capitalist industrialism because they reflected less energetic means (agriculture rather than industry) but they were continual and ubiquitous. After a sufficiently broad catastrophe, you could get a long-term depression under fascist or monarchical rule, but sooner or later the rulers would be at one another’s throats, and then it would be time for new weapons, new industries, new loans…. just like last time around.

I’m sorry, but the line of reasoning in 106 is perniciously wrong, and possibly catastrophically so. It is this: we don’t have a perfect readout on what will happen; so, we don’t need to do anything drastic about it.

UNCERTAINTY IS NOT OUR FRIEND. (I haven’t typed anything in all upper case for decades). The fact that there is a range of predictions about the costs of AGW is irrelevant; the decision about what to do must be driven by the worst plausible scenario. Otherwise, we are betting that the worst case won’t occur. Considering that the worst case is an apocalypse, this is making a bet that we can’t afford to lose. Not taking drastic action requires a certainty that is not available.

People buy fire insurance even though a fire in a particular building is quite unlikely. As William Nordhaus puts it, we can’t be making bets; we need to get out of the casino.

I believe that if we view our times as the death of an era and the birth of the next, we will be better able to prepare in a manner that would be less catastrophic for humanity as a whole.
lupita

I believe this is the money quote. Without the paradigm shift in worldview entailed by that sentence, we get bogged down in short term gains/losses, and concerns that the burdens and benefits won’t be evenly shared.

@Hidari

And thus the problem will be solved.

I kinda liked the original better, probably because of mentally inserted commas:

And this, the problem, will be solved.

@EqualToJake

1 – no new right wing initiatives were successfull, such as abortion restrictions, tax cuts for the wealthy, etc.

Sort of true nationally, but a disquieting number of right-wing initiatives were successful at the state level. The right just hasn’t been initiating most of its most noxious stuff in the U.S. Congress, so it’s not surprising or reassuring that they’re not achieving many victories there. Actually, trying to engage in regional party politics over the past few years made one thing abundantly clear to me: When you elect a Democrat to the White House, you get four years of kingmakers rerouting their money and energy into state government, where it is, depressingly, far more instrumentally effective. So a lot of the political/institutional losses we incur either go unnoticed outside our home states, or only get brief attention and superficial exclamations of solidarity (which our opponents can safely ignore, dismiss, or gainfully spin as outsiders meddling in their state’s affairs). Our opponents get more mileage per dollar spent, and our nonregional allies are too busy fighting for their 1/50th to help us out. But I also think this might be why a lot of lefties cut Obama so much slack: as a federal stopgap, inertia is on his side; a lot of the time we’re not fighting on his turf, so we’re not fighting with him.

2 – the big external problem was the recession. The right wing solution was austerity and looser government regulation, the left wing solution was stimulus and tightened regulation. The left wing solution was implimented.

Tightened regulation? … Where?

To be honest, I don’t think either of those characterizations is correct. The Republicans in Congress wanted to rescue the banks and slash all various marginal tax rates, the Democrats in Congress wanted to rescue the banks and slash various marginal tax rates and also maybe somewhat stabilize the automotive and construction industries. (But this is probably quibbling over minor semantics; you’re right to say it was the Congressional Democrats’ solution that got implemented.)

3 – one existing area was moved to the left, healthcare. The right opposes increased government rules in healthcare, the left supports it, and it was moved to the left.

Hm. I honestly have no idea what “increased government rules” means.

4 – in the other existing areas where the left doesn’t like the current setup (drones, torture, guantanimo, etc) things were left as they are.

Can you see, hypothetically, how this could be patently painfully unacceptable to someone of “the left” regardless of whatever is improving/steady elsewhere? We’re not competing for points scored, distance moved, or number of policies implemented. We’re trying to protect people from the consequences of state brutality (institutionally imposed suffering), as well as state indifference to interpersonal brutality and brutal circumstances (institutionally preventable suffering). That is probably the only reason I care much about politics — it’s certainly the only reason I care enough to put time and energy into it.

By that measure, successfully outmaneuvering Republicans in the U.S. Congress to obtain small/partial/incremental improvements feels a lot like successfully maneuvering to avoid getting run over by a car: it’s something to be relieved as hell about, sure, but not something you’d go out to dinner to celebrate. (Not to mention we experience the maneuvering in excruciating slow motion.)

So the zero-sum model just doesn’t tell us anything meaningful. It’s the mirage of pools of information. It’s a way of looking at an aggregated trend line tending monotonically downward, and deciding to measure our success by how small we can make the first derivative. Maybe part of your point was that zero-sum models obfuscate a lot of really shitty conditions suffered by a substantial minority of people, by painting over them with marginal gains for other populations, or that zero-sum models tend to exonerate state officials from moral liability for most of the suffering they willfully cause, permit, or ignore by giving them venerating them for a selective few successful initiatives.

If so: good point. In a zero-sum setting, when a politician’s misdeeds are brought up in criticism, and their success advancements are brought up in response, that’s a natural and expected way to indemnify them. (They’ve done a few remarkable things for us! They’ve scored us points!) Obversely, when a politicians’ successful advancements are brought up in praise, and their misdeeds are brought up in response, that’s taken to be a slight on, or dismissal of, the advancements themselves.

Which makes sense, from a zero-sum point-scoring point of view: the former is an example of trying to prevent an ‘own goal’ and recover lost status points from the opposition; the latter is an example of asserting a claim to more status points. Our favored politicians become the composite sketch of their few successes, and opposing politicians become the composite sketch of our many failures. Evaluating our representatives with a zero-sum metric is a pretty good mechanism for excusing any need for introspection or remorse on their part, as well as any responsibility we have to challenge or censure them. (So long as Obama is fighting against them, it doesn’t matter how well he is fighting for us.)

It’s really just a matter of how we characterize our opposition. Viewing them as passive obstacles puts the onus on us for advancement. This is one of those counterintuitive truths that really really feels like it ought to be the exact opposite of true. Shouldn’t we acknowledge the agency of our opponents? Well, no, not while evaluating the responsibilities, efforts and accomplishments of ourselves and our allies. Which I guess could be the tl;dr of this comment:

tl;dr We shouldn’t acknowledge the agency of our opponents while evaluating the responsibilities, efforts and accomplishments of ourselves and our allies. Zero-sum game/points/maneuver thinking encourages the opposite of this, so it’s a bad and misleading system for evaluating

A radical near-term reduction in GHG emissions would impose dramatic costs, by increasing the price of energy.

From that IPCC report:

There is high agreement and much evidence that mitigation actions can result in near-term co-benefits (e.g. improved health due to reduced air pollution) that may offset a substantial fraction of mitigation costs.

There is high agreement and much evidence that all stabilisation levels assessed can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are either currently available or expected to be commercialised in coming decades, assuming appropriate and effective incentives are in place for their development, acquisition, deployment and diffusion and addressing related barriers.

This doesn’t prove you wrong or anything, it just illustrates a problem with using qualitative adjectives like ‘radical’ and ‘dramatic’ to discuss quantitative science.

There’s no serious basis for the prediction that “the ecology will collapse” by the middle of the century. A radical near-term reduction in GHG emissions would impose dramatic costs, by increasing the price of energy.
I’ve never been among those who say that “ecology will collapse”, but agricultural productivity could, and in a world on nine billion souls, that could have some seriously deadly consequences. Now maybe you wouldn’t consider say a 30% reduction in output a collapse, but given a world that struggles to feed itself, its going to create some serious stresses. Would you care to have to force the rich world to give up meat, in order that the poor of the world don’t starve?

I don’t think we are fighting over a radical near-term reduction in GHGes. Aren’t we fighting over whether we should continue to build more fossil fuel infrastructure, and let the old infrastructure be replaced with something else as they reach there natural industrial lifetimes. Then the question becomes, is the new sustainable tech more costly than rebuilding the old. We also need to factor in the externalities of resource depletion and environmental degradtion into the equation. Because of the very long half-life of CO2, those externalities have a very very long temporal tail.

No serious estimate of the cost of stabilizing the global climate exceeds 5 per cent of world income. Any serious estimate of the cost of 3 or 4 degrees of warming is well above that.

This is the only substantive part of your comment, and it is yet more unsubstantiated assertion.

But even granting your numbers, the world of 2100 will likely be very much more than 5 per cent richer than the world today. Expecting people in 2013 to make a large economic sacrifice so that the people of 2100 will be even richer than they would otherwise be isn’t likely to attract much support.

Expecting people in 2013 to make a large economic sacrifice so that the people of 2100 will be even richer than they would otherwise be isn’t likely to attract much support.

So, I should be jealous of my not yet born great-grandkids? It would be so horrible, if my efforts made their lives better than mine! Life would be so unfair, if my generation wasn’t at the civilizational Apex*, able to look down on all who came before, -or after!

* I suspect this may well end up being the case. But, I consider that to be a profound tragedy, not a triumph.

A “rational evaluation of risk” apparently says that we should do an experiment that we don’t know the result of on our one planet, as opposed to spending a few percent of world income on useful products. And this experiment, by simple radiative physics, is sure to have *some* worldwide result — we just don’t know exactly what the result will be.

That’s crazy irrationality by any standard.

@David #18:

“It’s important to note that, to the extent such a shift is occurring, its happening because of what people are doing. The shifts are happening in areas where agitation is happening.”

zomg this

I think we can update Piven and Cloward’s estimation, ‘a placid poor get nothing; but a turbulent poor sometimes gets something’, to include the people formerly known as the middle class.

The Overton Window has certainly shifted leftward, and not just because of a re-bound against the rightward edge of reality. We just re-elected an African-American president, legalized gay marriage with votes, not lawsuits, and expanded the places committed to legalizing pot.

What matters now is @Hidari’s point #37, which is what anyone in power does as a result. I’m less despairing than Hidari on this point, in part because for some of these issues talking is action (gay marriage is speech acts all the way down), but for policing issues like the War on Some Drugs, speech merely changes the opportunity for action, which, given the current administration’s shitty track record on human rights issues generally, is certainly not automatic.

” There is something that I’ve never understood about the right-wing approach to environmental issues. They adopt a terribly skeptical view of science when it’s inconvenient to corporate interests. They also have a mystical devotion to the market. But yet they combine this with utter certainty on the economic ruin of the most minor assessment of external costs and a complete lack of faith in the ability of their sacred markets to respond efficiently.”

It’s simple – they’re lying. Read ‘Merchants of Doubt’ for a start, or Krugman’s columns. One of the lessons I took from ‘Merchants of Doubt’ was that being repeatedly proven devastatingly wrong is not a problem for people pushing ideas which are useful to the elites.

DelRey@134:

“See the IPCC report you yourself cited. The projected temperature increase by 2100 under the highest IPCC SRES emission scenario (A1FI) is less than 4°C.”

The Fourth Assessment is five years old; we’ve outstripped the original projections, partly because nothing has been done to restrain emissions. In addition, the climate system is responding more quickly than calculated in 2007; there may be some positive feedbacks beginning. (At which point I am tempted to run into the street screaming.) Apocalyptic rhetoric might be more appropriate. But here is the problem: if I use apocalyptic rhetoric, you dismiss me as “alarmist;” if I use moderate language you say “Nothing in the reports supports the apocalyptic rhetoric or predictions of catastrophe by climate change alarmists.”

Either way, you do not listen.

“The cost numbers posted here are low by a factor of at least three” “Yet more wild, unsubstantiated assertion.”

Ahem. Look here.

“There’s no scientific basis for attributing Sandy or the 2012 drought to climate change. ”
See Hansen et al., “2012: Perception of climate change.”

I also like these more accessible paragraphs from one of Hansen’s letters:

Global warming is expected to intensify climate extremes: (1) Warmer air holds more water vapor, and precipitation occurs in more extreme events. ‘100-year floods’ and even ‘500-year floods’ will become more likely. Storms fueled by water vapor (latent heat), including thunderstorms, tornadoes and tropical storms, will have the potential to be stronger. Storm damage will increase because of increased flooding and stronger winds. (2) Where weather patterns create dry conditions, global warming will intensify the drought, because of increased evaporation and evapotranspiration. Thus fires will be more frequent and burn hotter.

Observations confirm that heat waves and regional drought have become more frequent and intense over the past 50 years. Rainfall in the heaviest downpours has increased about 20 percent. The destructive energy in hurricanes has increased (USGCRP, 2009).—James Hansen, “It’s a Hard-Knock Butterfly’s Life“

There is, I would say, an overall error in evaluating climate change in numerical costs. It implies continuity; that the economy that is paying these costs will remain much as it has been. With the vast migrations and perhaps mass deaths that significant climate change implies, this is not the least likely.

It is you who are making the unsubstantiated assertions and I would like to know why. It is not like this matter has not been studied; there’s been about 30 years of work on the subject (if one goes back to Arrhenius, over a century), the science is well established and the economic impacts are moderately well-understood, as much as the impact of “and then the goddess unleashed a can of whup-ass on us” can be understood. Why do you come into the discussion and make statements that are already known to be wrong? It is not like the information is unavailable, and it is not like it is hard to discern the scientific consensus in this area, if one is willing to do some digging.

@145,
A pity you didn’t read a few sentences further

I did read it. It doesn’t alter the fact that the projected costs of climate change are just a small fraction of GDP in a future world that will most likely be much, much richer than today’s world. Asking people today to make a significant economic sacrifice so that people living 100 years from now will be even richer than would otherwise be probably isn’t a winning argument.

As for costs from “non-quantifiable impacts,” they also apply to emission reduction policies. So you can’t just express those costs in terms of GDP impact either. There are also human and social costs from slower economic development — costs in education, literacy, health, life expectancy, social justice, etc.

In any cases, the 2007 IPCC report summarises older literature and does not take account of upward revisions of damage estimates.

The IPCC is intended to present the consensus scientific view regarding climate change. Its reports integrate work by many scientists working in climate-related fields — as opposed to cherry-picking individual studies that may or may not be representative or reliable, as climate change alarmists typically do. The 2007 IPCC report is the most recent one and was specifically cited by TheRaven as evidence for the alleged urgency of action on climate change. But the actual findings of the report regarding the magnitude, timescale and costs of climate change do not suggest urgency, as I have explained.

I’m not sure what you mean by “upward revisions of damage estimates” or why you think they change the basic conclusion that, even with the costs of climate change, future generations will likely be much richer than people today. Recent comparisons of actual warming with projected warming from climate models indicate that actual warming is at the low end of the model projections.

34: what China and India decide to do over the next 20 years is much more important than whatever any US government (of either stripe) will be doing. The balance is shifting extremely quickly.

The pace of change (in both those countries, as well as South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, VN etc) is simply gobsmacking – on a purely personal note I noticed a month and a half ago that they now have velvet ropes outside high end shops like Tiffany’s in the Golden Mile (Nathan Road HK). That is because the mainland Chinese are willing to line up (just like outside a nightclub) to get in to buy their $12000 diamond necklaces.

Macau as well has been totally ruined by about 38 international casinos that the tiny territory is now groaning under. USA casinos from Vegas have moved in because the money to be made from China dwarfs anything to be mopped up in Vegas – you have to see it with your own eyes.

The rise of Asia is quite simply the only real geopolitical story in town…

@Rich Puchalsky, 118, 130:

Preach it, brother!

You summed up my own view of what might be called “New World Order Feudalism” very succinctly.

Most liberals, and for damned sure, neoliberals, don’t have a clue.

The One Percent understand it very well. Their teahadi, NRA, pro-life, etc., Repug dupes are just as clueless as anybody. The power elites want to keep it that way.

It doesn’t alter the fact that the projected costs of climate change are just a small fraction of GDP in a future world that will most likely be much, much richer than today’s world. Asking people today to make a significant economic sacrifice so that people living 100 years from now will be even richer than would otherwise be probably isn’t a winning argument.

why [do] you think they change the basic conclusion that, even with the costs of climate change, future generations will likely be much richer than people today[?]

Brad DeLong, as I recall, in reviewing the Stern Review and Nordhaus’ critique of the Stern Review’s use of low discount rates, did project that future generations will be much richer. It is his wont to do so, and as common among economists as among Trekkies at a SciFi convention, and just as sensible. Such projections do not make much sense, and they are not derived from a deep analysis of what drives the industrial revolution and productivity and social welfare. I sometimes make fun of these projections, by saying that they consist of applying a straight-edge to graph paper. If only my mocking were not a painfully accurate characterization of the “thinking” involved.

John Quiggin may think that the problem is the tribal beliefs of right-wing Republicans, but I submit that the tribal beliefs of the Econ are an even larger obstacle.

Nordhaus quibbling over discount factors was singularly unproductive. Discount factors are completely inappropriate to the situation, as is the framing (which, as I recall, Brad DeLong embraced at the time) that posits action on global warming reducing growth rates, with that reduction representing the cost of action on global warming. Action on global warming will reduce growth rates, but that’s not its cost. Inaction on global warming will also reduce growth rates. There’s an envelope within which there’s no opportunity cost from reduced growth rates; that’s the point Stern was fumbling to make, and Nordhaus, without intending to do so (of that much I’m certain) obscured. The Stern Review projected that after some catastrophic threshold point — maybe around Hansen’s 2° C, maybe now, ymmv — global GDP will begin to plateau, then decline, and then, nosedive, with that nosedive accelerating to a rate as high as 5% decline per year, indefinitely.

The generation a century hence won’t be richer, and their descendants won’t have any means to repair the damage, short of nuclear winter or administering programs of (partial?) human extinction. Oh, I am so sorry, I’m being apocalyptic and alarmist, and you’ve stopped listening. I’m not saying that sort of apocalypse is realistic; I’m saying that a global economy, which has experienced another century of fossil fuel depletion, pollution, ecological deterioration, all with a population twice or three times that of the 20th century, is not going to be richer, and is not going to have better means to address the problems of global warming.

My point is not to endorse the Stern Review, which is a polemic after all, and only one assessment, but to point out that relying on a framework of analysis, in which you just assume that the economic growth of the last century will continue for another century, is unfounded. It doesn’t have to be unfounded. Economists, if they wanted to, could develop a theory of production (neoclassical economics doesn’t have one — never has — just another instance of rank incompetence). They could develop an analysis, from that theory of production, which encompassed energy, pollution and technology, including natural resource and natural environment depletion. Historians have done some of this, to show, for example, how the Anglo-American conquest of North America freed British manufacturing from Malthusian constraints (unfortunate, though, about the Irish peasants). The switch from coal to petroleum accelerated the Second Industrial Revolution, and a further acceleration in the use of energy underlay the long growth in productivity and household income in the U.S., from 1940 to 1973. So, you can pick up the threads, by backcasting, if you have the will.

Scientific and technological advance has always gotten the headlines with economists, but never much analytical attention. For the macro boys — the idiots, who gave us the GFC — it’s a residual, and they treat it like magic. You might as well ask New Guinea to send a cargo cultist to the IPCC. Physically, technological advance shows up in production as a reduction in error and waste, but it is not magic, and there are some real and severe limits to what can be achieved.

Any realistic assessment points to the necessity to radically reduce energy use: conservation is going to dominate. That’s perfectly feasible, with some fairly modest effects on living standards or personal welfare, provided we do some serious value-engineering on land-use and transportation and heating of buildings. It will be a huge undertaking, even over 30 or 40 years; the increment to the investment we would make anyway in reproducing the modern world over that time frame may be small, but that increment is a lousy indicator of what is required. Everything has to change, and the reductions in energy use, even given the best technology, may well be substantial enough to irritate: Republicans, who are mad that they can’t buy a 100 watt incandescent light bulb (loss of freedom!) are going to be really mad. I’ve seen estimates that say that if we were to try to use solar panels to generate all the electricity we get from coal and natural gas, and concentrated them in the sunniest areas of the western desert, the total area of solar panels would be greater than the total area of paved highways, streets and parking lots! Yet, come what may, if life on earth is to continue without apocalypse, we need to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity and radically reduce the use in transportation.

These are huge, huge changes. Procrastination is not a friend, here. One can talk about “risk”, but the risks are all about timing, and a lot of the timing is about when we, collectively, begin to act. The risk does not include much uncertainty about the chemistry of GHG in the atmosphere, or dissolved into warming oceans. And, it is not just about “warming”. All of the contradictory speculation about how warming, as a channel of causality, will impact us isn’t “risk”. Exactly how it will be bad doesn’t change the fact that it will bad.

And, that single channel of causality does not eliminate the context. It is not narrowly about global warming; it is about all the absurdly spiky risks associated with a population passing 7 billion on its way to 9 billion or 10 billion. (Nordhaus is pretty good on some aspects of this.) Trying to operate an industrial economy — or even a pre-industrial economy with this many people has an enormous impact on the global environment, which has not gotten any larger. Small mistakes, which the 19th century could take 50 years to correct, without consequence, will magnified by the reach of industrial civilization to billions, so that we might have less than a decade to get a hold on the spewing of toxins into the environment, or stop the extinction of a species. It is also about the implications of peak oil, and the declining net energy we can extract from our depletion of petroleum. Petroleum offers an amazing concentration of usable energy, and no magic technology is likely to match its versatility and convenience. It is quite possible that we may have to curtail long-distance air travel by jet, at least, and the American way of warfare may not survive (oh, the sacrifices!).

I agree that operationalizing welfare as GDP is a bad practice. This is a commonplace observation, but nothing is ever done.

Rethinking the national accounts can only get us so far, since they depend on bookkeeping, and the bookkeeping depends on observable transactions. Some of your examples do not make it into GDP, because they do not entail observable transactions. But, we could observe other things, just as we observe the rate of unemployment, for example.

If we’re going to get serious about the externalities driving climate change, resource depletion, environmental depletion, etc., though, we are going to have re-think way more than the National Accounts. We are going to have change the basis of our monetary system and the rent-structure of our corporate industrial system; this doesn’t get enough attention. We are well-advanced on the path away from basing the dollar on oil and suburban sprawl, but we are headed toward tying everything to Intellectual Property and the rentier claims of predatory monopolists and vulture capitalists. That’s not going to go well, and, unfortunately, it will contribute to procrastination on sensible climate change / energy action. (Mr. Lesser Evil will be approving the Keystone XL pipeline, I think, and cheerleading for fracking until the last ground water is poisoned.)

I don’t expect people will wake up to this in my lifetime, but, maybe. It would be nice to see some truth-telling on the sheer radicalness of what must be done.

Oh, and one more thing: To the point of the OP, has the tide turned?

Very possibly. It happens all the time. But, what difference does it make? The poor are still poor, the wretched, still wretched, the unfree, still unfree.

I am all for progressive reform. But these tedious, endless, meaningless (from the long view) swings of the ideological pendulum only serve to occult the constraining, confining, controlling, underlying structure.

JQ: I get your point.

I’m a labor activist and I’ve been a shop steward for thirty years, a negotiating committeeman, and former president of USW Amalgamated Local 7686 at Noranda Aluminum, a primary smelter in S.E Mo.

I absolutely love “Zombie Economics”. Hope you expand on it sometime, even to the extent of multiple editons over the coming years. I am sure that you’ll have plenty of material.

Keep the faith.

the bookkeeping depends on observable transactions

up to a point, Lord Copper. Regulars may recall I’m always going on about FISIM, originally ‘imputed’, now ‘indirectly measured’, but certainly never ‘observed’.

Delrey@154: And the evasions continue.

I’d still like an answer to the questions I asked at the end of 151, “Why do you come into the discussion and make statements that are already known to be wrong?” This works fairly well for the powerful in economic policy; they can silence significant opposition. But you cannot silence the storm.

What has been proven by Hansen, et al (and, by the way, if you knew the field at all, you would know that arguing with Hansen is a fruitless activity) is “Rainfall in the heaviest downpours has increased about 20 percent. The destructive energy in hurricanes has increased.” Sandy and Katrina and other storms show climate change in process.

As you know very well, no single storm can be attributed to climate change. Sandy by itself proves nothing. This is a rather sophisticated rhetorical tactic; set out something irrelevant as bait. Your use of this tactic shows that you are not simply making a mistake.

Again, why?

Oddly, the US Government has already moved to pass costs of reducing future energy needs onto the current population. I speak of outlawing incandescent light-bulbs. This move, by itself, reduces the need for an unseemly amount of power generation.
“A light bulb is a simple, often overlooked factor in most homes’ total energy consumption. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that if every household in the United States replaced just one standard incandescent light bulb with an energy-efficient one, the nation would annually save about $600 million in energy costs — enough to power 3 million homes for a year (see references 1).”
http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/much-energy-efficient-bulbs-save-3254.html

The cost consequence is in higher initial price, possible higher general price (florescent bulbs have been found to last less than the advertised lifespan + breakage costs), odd white colors (possible mental health issues), and possible mercury poisoning. The key to getting current generations to pay for future concerns is to make the cost manageable, the process simple, and involve everyone.

@172,
I’d still like an answer to the questions I asked at the end of 151, “Why do you come into the discussion and make statements that are already known to be wrong?”

The premise of the question is false. If you ask me a question and don’t get an answer, it’s probably because I think the question is trivial, irrelevant or, as in this case, stupid.

… Hansen …

Hansen has a poor track record. In 1988, he presented three scenarios for global warming, A, B and C, starting in 1984. Scenario A was his high-warming projection, B was in the middle, and C was the low-warming projection. Hansen claimed that Scenario B was the most plausible projection. Actual warming for the 28-year period from 1984 through 2012 has been at or below Hansen’s low-warming Scenario C. Hansen’s “most plausible” scenario drastically exaggerated the warming trend.

As you know very well, no single storm can be attributed to climate change. Sandy by itself proves nothing. This is a rather sophisticated rhetorical tactic; set out something irrelevant as bait. Your use of this tactic shows that you are not simply making a mistake.

You’re not very good at reading, are you? I didn’t bring up Sandy. Bob McManus did, in response to my request for evidence to support his assertion that “global warming is costing society at least 10s of billions a year right now.” He attributed the costs of Sandy (which he put at “100+ billion”) to global warming. I pointed out that there is no scientific justification for that claim, and cited the work by Pielke (part of the IPCC report) showing that there is no long-term trend in normalized losses from hurricanes.

“But a big carbon tax would impose a sacrifice on the poor in today’s society for the benefit of richer people of the future. ”

Not everyone paying the sacrifice in the present would be poor, not everyone receiving the benefit in the future would be rich, even under optimistic assumptions regarding future growth.

Making dirty energy artificially cheap by ignoring externalities is the wrong way to aid the poor–a disproportionate share of the benefits would go to the wealthier portion of today’s society (most of GDP will always be consumed by the wealthier half of a population), while a disproportionate share of the cost would be paid by the poorer half of future population (the poor will have fewer resources on hand to adapt to climate change).

If the situation of today’s poor is so desperate that it’s worth increasing future mortality, then that would justify a far more redistributionist global regime than would be tolerated by most people arguing for climate inaction. If your concern for the poor was genuine, you would find a way to help them funded by today’s wealthy rather than tomorrow’s poor.

@176,
Your analysis of Hansen’s 1988 projections ignores the Mt. Pinatubo eruption.

No it doesn’t. Mt. Pinatubo affected global temperatures for just a few years. Hansen’s “most plausible” projection has dramatically overstated warming over a period of almost 30 years.

@177,
Not everyone paying the sacrifice in the present would be poor, not everyone receiving the benefit in the future would be rich, even under optimistic assumptions regarding future growth.

People in general will most likely be much richer a hundred years from now than their counterparts today. Americans will be richer. Chinese will be richer. Africans will be richer. The burden of a drastic near-term emissions reduction policy (e.g., a big carbon tax) is likely to fall most heavily on poor people in the developing world. Those people stand to gain the most from economic development that you want to stifle with a big increase in the cost of energy.

“People in general will most likely be much richer”

Emphasis added. Projections may show that people in general will be richer, but not every individual will be richer than the average American today, unless you’re proposing some kind of global socialism.

In any event, global warming will cost probably lives, not just money. If they’re killed, it doesn’t matter how much higher their income was before they die.

“The burden of a drastic near-term emissions reduction policy (e.g., a big carbon tax) is likely to fall most heavily on poor people in the developing world.”

Nope.

“Those people stand to gain the most from economic development that you want to stifle with a big increase in the cost of energy.”

There’s enough slack our society that we could find much more efficient ways to help poor people than increasing future mortality.

@162,
Americans (and people in other wealthy nations) don’t choose to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car or hundreds of thousands on a spacious house for no reason. They buy cars because they value fast, comfortable, convenient transportation. They buy spacious houses because they value having a comfortable place to live. If you seriously think you can persuade people that giving up their cars for walking/biking and giving up their spacious houses for smaller, less comfortable ones would not be a reduction in their well-being, good luck. GDP is far from a perfect indicator of human well-being. There is no perfect indicator. But you can’t just substitute what you think people should value for what they actually do value and claim you’re promoting their well-being.

My argument about intergenerational wealth and obligation does not depend on the assumption that “every individual will be richer than the average American today.”

You said: “Nor does it justify the claim that people living today have an obligation to make a sacrifice for the benefit of much richer people in the future.” But not all of those future people are much richer. And dead rich people are still dead.

Drastic near-term emissions reductions will also cost lives, not just money

Re:”drastic”, “dramatic”, “radical” see Salient@135. Emission reduction, coupled with better development efforts, need not take any net lives in the near term (and will likely save many lives in the long term).

Emissions reduction is impossible if you demand the fastest car and most spacious house. But you fool no one by pretending it has anything to do with the interests of poor people.

Your link is a list of countries by carbon emissions per capita. I have no idea how you think that list conflicts with what I wrote about the burden of emissions reduction.

Think harder. You’ve wasted enough of my time.

I can’t believe that we actually live in a world where a big part of the discussion on climate change is “Which generation has to take a hit in economic productivity?” We are, at least in theory, adults here, correct?

As tiring and frustrating as it is to try to engage DelRey, it does serve a purpose, as John Q has said. DelRey may or may not be an individual human being acting on his own; he may well be a team at some think tank or lobbying shop, or a paid consultant. In any case, “he” is not dumb or lazy. He writes well, he’s extremely persistent, he has debating skills, he knows his audience to some degree, knows he needs to make a credible showing of caring about empirical evidence, knows better than to go too far in open ideological argumentation or in snarkyness. And the arguments he makes are in fact appealing and persuasive to large parts of the middle classes — and not just in the advanced capitalist societies. And that means that “he” is in a sense, to a substantial degree, correct in “his” claims as to what “people” care about and want. It is a profound mistake to dismiss “him” as simply a troll. “He” represents a major adversary.

Bill Barnes

“What does DelRey think he has to gain with his nonsensical “intergenerational” argument?”

It’s a way of shifting the topic under discussion from science to economics. This has been a favorite of the denialists from the beginning, since a) they never really had a scientific argument as such, b) the GOP in the U.S. and conservatives generally had staked out a lot of their public trust on economic don’t-spend issues. Through this means they can attempt to make it just another one — “The liberals say that the government should spend your hand-earned money on something, but we say we shouldn’t.” Moving the grounds to a discussion of intergenerational wealth works even if his argument is nonsensical. It gets away from their core weakness on the issue, that they are anti-scientific cranks, and aligns “doing something about global warming” neatly with all of the other conservative issues in the U.S. so that they get tribal buy-in from everyone on the GOP side.

In other words, in the U.S. context, it’s an argument that has its genesis in racism, just like everything else the right wing peddles. Lee Atwater: “You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” That’s where the rhetoric originally came from, and one of the basic things that the ex-tobacco flacks who came up with Del Rey’s rhetoric did was to link global warming to the veto power that disgruntled racists have in the U.S.