US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

...yes?

Republicans like to go with this we can't have "uncertainty" nonsense when they want to criticize evil Democratic socialism, but they're perfectly happy to create uncertainty in regards to their proposals on Medicare, Medicaid, debt limit issues, US government spending bills & shutdown of the government discussions.

this is a really good point

from tpm:

Paul Ryan was chased by a protester waving a giant Bible and decrying libertarian author Ayn Rand on his way out of the Faith and Freedom Conference, a social conservative gathering in DC where he delivered a speech on his budget.

"Why did you choose to model your budget on the extreme ideology of Ayn Rand rather than the faith of economic justice in the Bible?" the blond, 20-something male asked. He said he wanted to "present" Ryan with a Bible to teach him how to help the "most vulnerable."

Ryan talked to reporters briefly and signed autographs for fans, largely ignoring the protester.

Oh, I'm sure Ryan believes in the New Testament and Ayn Rand!

omg

please have more ppl chase Republicans while waving Bibles, I need the lols

i am pretty meh about drum usually, but his reaction was exactly my reaction- when you talk about potential regulation impinging your growth projections, you gotta be specific in some way. i've had too many discussions about impending socialism and rights infringements where my question "ok, what regulations have been added that have cost you recently, or what type of exposure is reasonable in the offing?," is met with outraged sputtering.

its kinda like when someone is really pissed about something someone else did, and you ask "what are the actual damages here?" and they just explain how the whole thing is _wrong_, and someone should pay.

xpost

I wonder what his grand ideas to save the economy are other than low business taxes and little regulation

no one is proposing "little regulation", that's just their rhetoric. republicans are proposing regulatory regimes that favor big established players. they have no problem with regulations like: IP laws that essentially benefit the companies who can invest the most in legal fees; prohibiting cities from offering services that compete with private companies; making it nearly impossible to build low-income housing anywhere ... basically, anything that sets up barriers to entry and protects the established order.

considered as a whole, there is effectively no difference in the amount of regulation republicans and democrats are advocating for. it's just a question of whom the regulations will benefit. it pisses me off that we've ceded this part of the argument to them.

i really hope weinertweet becomes a Gen Y euphemism for accidentally publicizing private things

The perils of gerrymandering.

Right: as always, take conservatives at their word: they want to conserve the power of those they favor.

I want to start a thread about the ideal of freedom the GOP offers to make their preservationism appealing to those who currently have little power, based on an excellent article by Ellen Willis I read recently, but it's Friday & I dunno how well it'll go. Plus I should probably read Nixonland before wading too deeply into this topic...but Willis is definitely onto something.

euler, on your putative thread i would wonder how the gop (foxnews-limbaugh spectacle)'s success at projecting its own specific weaknesses (soft on terror, financial goats, epistemological closure) onto those silly libs factors into Ellen Willis's thesis about the gop's successful sale of their ideal of freedom to those who have little power, if that makes any sense

Thanks a lot stubborn Obama:

from Huffington Post re Obama meeting with Dems yesterday. Congressman Waxman urged him to fight-

The president has heard the complaint before. Democrats have accused Obama repeatedly of ceding too much ground to the GOP, especially on health care and the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. But attendees said the critique appeared to rub him the wrong way on Thursday.

"He was a little testy with the Waxman question. Essentially, Mr. Waxman was urging him to fight more," one legislator said. "The president reminded folks that he's the president sitting in that chair and he knows how to negotiate."

Obama also told the assembled Democrats not to count on more fiery rhetoric from the Oval Office.

"He said, 'There's a difference between me and a member of Congress,'" another lawmaker said, paraphrasing the president as saying: "When I say something the markets react, all of society reacts, other countries react. I've got to be careful with what I say. I can't just say it for brinkmanship. I've got to say it in a way so that I get what I want said, but I don't upset markets and so on."

"I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations."

seems as though obama has thoroughly internalized the 'scared manager' thesis

Re. Willis & freedom: it's a critique of the American Left's ability to make clear, let alone sell, their own ideal of freedom, contra the Right's. What it comes down to, on her view, is that the right seized the 60s' promise of freedom in a way that has proved attractive to many Americans, & the left has remained puritanical (in order to avoid being identified with 60s excesses) but has as a result failed to offer a competing ideal of freedom of its own. This seems right to me & has forced me to rethink my own puritanical leftism.The article by Willis is here. This isn't the right thread for a discussion of this issue, & I'm not sure this is the right board for it, but I'll put it out there for now & maybe come back to it here in due time.

where does that leave the libertarians

Blazing up in various basements?

I wonder if libertarianism is the one area where conservatives and liberals could hang out and not kill each other.
ie; "Legalize pot!"
"Leagliaze frenching aliens!"

I've got to say it in a way so that I get what I want said, but I don't upset markets and so on

let's have a President of Markets and then someone for us

haha

I hope Obama sctually said "and so forth" just like Reagan

^^^ was going to make a Reagan allusion but I'm already tarred as ILX's Reaganologist.

great article, euler, thanks

But in truth their lack of conviction that a majority of Americans could be won over--if not immediately, then in the long run--to a politics of equality, freedom and pleasure represented their own deep doubts about the legitimacy of those values. They were appeasing themselves as much as anyone else.

^ is her most succinct discussion of 'fairness,' which i'd say is what the left is trying to sell. the gop's 'freedom' wins the day i guess

to create uncertainty

What's more uncertain than an unregulated market?

The Willis article is one of the best things I've read on American politics in a long time. You picked out a good takeaway quote, qualmsley. As I read Willis, she's saying that the right has successfully adopted 60s talk of freedom: the freedom to own weaponry & to hunt & to protect yourself, the freedom to run your own business without interference from anyone. The GOP coopted the yearning for freedom that the 60s unleashed, & neutered its threat to their financial & political predominance. Willis' view, as I understand it, is that left has refrained from seizing other notions of freedom, such as the freedom to fuck whoever you want, without fear of pregnancy & or lynching. She suggests that the left's roots in economic populism means that its traditional "base" (working class people) are ambiguous about that latter type of freedom, sexual freedom, & that its leaders---generally straight white males---are too.

Joan Didion quoted Gingrich or Ralph Reed in the nineties admitting as such: they were taking the sixties back from the hippies.

In what text, Alfred? I'd like to read more about this kind of thing...& to get clearer on exactly what notion of freedom the right has seized. Willis is illuminating but it's only a start.

It's an essay in Political Fictions, one of the best books of the last ten years.

when I get home I'll look for it

Yeah, that sounds excellent.

when she concludes

"We need not to look to the New Deal but to a new politics, one that recognizes equality and freedom, class and culture, as ineluctably linked."

i want to support her coupling of 'fairness' and 'freedom,' but i wish she'd be more precise in describing exactly how to ineluctably link them, along with class and culture. who would be performing this? academics? yeah right. politicians? journalists? novelists? comic book writers? the miami heat? radio talk show hosts? "the people"? not being totally snarky here: i'm curious what process she'd advocate, and what agents of change she'd rep

i want to support her coupling of 'fairness' and 'freedom,'

Because they tend to cancel each other out, this is the very essence of politics

but let's keep this FDR missive handy, shall we?

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do a tall, or cannot do so well, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.

the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. :

The problem of liberalism is rather to preserve as much variety within the state as is consistent with energetic action by the government. The chief enemy of variety, and thus of liberty, is likely to be that group which is most powerful and consequently needs liberty least. In American history that group has ordinarily been (though ti may not always be so in the future) the business community. The judgment of American liberalism has been that it was best for the whole society, including the capitalists, that their power be constantly checked and limited by the humbler members of society.

I think she means people who think about those subjects, politically-minded people.

Another aspect of her essay is that lots of voters, especially the middle-class GOP voters who Thomas Frank lambasts for voting against their economic self-interest, don't really care about their economic self-interest that much, because, Willis seems to suggest, they're well-enough off already. What motivates them to vote is more amorphously "big picture" thinking, "meaning of life" thinking, "values" thinking: & the GOP offers satisfying values through the ideal of freedom I was describing a few posts ago.

Religion rightly isn't part of her picture at all. Listen to Bachmann & Palin & other (non-Catholic) alleged "theocrats" & you'll see how misleading that label is, as you'd expect from a media class that continues to misunderstand the nature of contemporary American religion

I think Willis would call FDR & Schlesinger the Old Left, for whom it's hard to see how to align their ~corporatism~ with the individualism of the 60s.

i think this is an auspicious moment to welcome noted legal expert chuck norris into the conversation

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357901392726150.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

touting tort reform in thomas frank's alma mater paper

Killer quote from Didion in the Amazon page for that book about who votes:

That this was not a demographic profile of the country at large, that half the nation's citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived, that the democracy we spoke of spreading throughout the world was now in our own country only an ideality, had come to be seen, against the higher priority of keeping the process in the hands of those who already held it, as facts without application.

Because they tend to cancel each other out, this is the very essence of politics

but that doesn't take into account the other two poles in her tent -- class and culture -- which can't be so summarily dismissed as canceling each other out. an innovation of hers lies in the possibility of equating fairness, freedom, class, and culture as a singular field of discussion, rather than separate fields of opposition. again, though, how? and who?

I think Willis would call FDR & Schlesinger the Old Left, for whom it's hard to see how to align their ~corporatism~ with the individualism of the 60s.

Sure, but does such a binary exist?

in the left that is?

equating "the 60s" with hippie individualism is perhaps the GOP's greatest triumph

i mean besides their valuable contributions to the worldwide compendium of racist humor

equating "the 60s" with hippie individualism is perhaps the GOP's greatest triumph

Since that individualism did mostly win out (divorce, miscegenation, anti-racism, medical marijuana, anti-conformity), it's natural for them to associate it with the indivdualism (essentially liberalism as I've always said on this board) that they favor: classic economic liberalism.

this doesn't really have anything to do with anything but I was having lunch yesterday while this grizzled old dude in a leather jacket with Blackwater patches on it was having a conversation on a giant early-90's-style cell phone. At some point, while talking about various security jobs he was flying out to work on, he said, "Everything's going crazy over there, thanks to Obama," followed by "Sure I'm voting for him! He's making us richer than shit!"

One of the points Willis made that I thought was insightful was that the GOP's embrace of individualism was not merely economic but also, well: promoting the virtues of clinging to guns. She puts it better:

Freedom, as recoded by the Reagan right, meant pursuing unlimited wealth, at least in one’s dreams, and so identifying with the rich, their desire for low taxes, and their aversion to “big government”; it meant embracing America’s mission to make the world safe for democracy; it meant license to express rage. Pleasure in sex might be restricted, but pleasure in aggression was encouraged, including uninhibited bashing of black people, poor people, criminals, deviants, and liberals.

I'll quibble: it's not just conservatives who define freedom, in part or otherwise, as the right to pursue unlimited wealth.

Haha, of course not; that's Willis' point on why thinking about left/right in America today as an economic contrast is wrongheaded.

I want to stress the "aggression" part of her thesis: the freedom to be aggressive isn't something the political left in America embraces; of course the cultural left will occasionally, & then some of us (ok, me for one!) will sniff & say "great, now we'll drive away middle America"---but Willis' point is that middle America wants freedom, might even want sexual freedom, if it were made safe: & this is the sort of politics that the left fails to embrace, in favor of faux-populist-economic solidarity, which since everyone knows is faux convinces no one. A way to read her appeal to the left: go for it on the "safe fucking in the streets" agenda: the freedom to have sexual pleasure without the fear of the past.

what about pot?

Don't let it slip away!

actually of course you're right & that's part of her view also: freedom to have sensual pleasure (of course aggression can be pleasurable too...)