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

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...)

sorry, but i think Ellen Willis is a bit full of shit here. she pretty much admits as much at the end where she accuses the Dems of using culture war rhetoric to gloss over their switch from New Deal economics to their current Wall Street-friendly ball-sucking.

She doesn't accuse them of that! She wants them to embrace the culture war & drop the appeals to working class solidarity, since "the middle" in America doesn't care about that, but seems to be pretty interested in Reagan's vision of freedom.

I'm not sure this is a good plan! But it brought into focus for me a way in which a politics based on the freedom of pleasure isn't so far from what the GOP has been offering---and which in the past has bewildered me along Thomas Frank lines. Willis' idea is: don't think of it as an economic calculation; it's about values more broadly. You on the left are saddled by guilt over values you could very well embrace and thereby transform the politics of this nation into something that would make people's lives better, in a way that they would want, instead of in a "eat your vegetables" way exemplified by the Thomas Frank attitude.

I'm glad Willis is on my side:

If an ambivalent public hears only one side of a question, the conservative side, passionately argued—if people’s impulses to the contrary are never reinforced, and they perceive that the
putative spokespeople for feminism and liberalism are actually uncomfortable about advancing their views—the passionate arguers will carry the day. Why would anyone support a movement that won’t stand behind its own program? But the left did not learn the obvious lesson—that to back away
from fighting for your beliefs on the grounds that you have no hope of persuading people to share them is to perpetrate a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the contrary, the appeasers could see in their defeats only a confirmation of their pessimism.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm8gnqDJkx1qctok2o1_500.jpg

irl lol

so apparently palin fanboys are tampering with wikipedia's 'paul revere' entry, because they love america too much baby

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/38678_Palin_Fans_Trying_to_Edit_Wikipedia_Paul_Revere_Page

didn't little green footballs used to be a hardcore conservative site? am i remember that wrong? because now it's all articles about how sarah palin and climate change deniers are crazy. what happened there?

he got off the conservative bus about a year and a half ago

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_Ways_With_The_Right

thanks!

Wow, for reals? I forgot that guy existed because he was so nutso. Is that Tennessee neo-conservative dude still neo-conservative? Glenn Reynolds?

cool, bloggers thinking of clever ways to call sarah palin an idiot is a meaningful niche that really needed some new blood

http://i.imgur.com/sci5t.jpg

heh

not a 'shop, btw: http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/fox-news-uses-tina-fey-photo-sarah-palin-rep

loll

hahahaha nice

there are totally obsessive palin fans on the blogs who pay super close attention to all this stuff, because everyone is out to get her, and the latest media outlet they think is out to get her is.. fox.

i think he stopped but on several occasions last year i noticed the shep making a reference to tina fey PEW-PEW-PEW (with gestures) when introducing stories about palin

there are totally obsessive palin fans on the blogs

o god stop reading them before you go insane/lose your will to live

The Republican Prez candidates of 2012 are making the mid-late 80s 7 dwarves look like the founding fathers by comparison. Criminy half of them either work or have direct ties to Fox. What a bunch of losers.

stuff posted on political blogs doesn't make me angry for the most part. it's a relatively tiny group of people after all. it's like a sport to them. if they want to get all worked up about palin they are free to do that, i don't care

tbh i heard romney's campaign kickoff speech today (cspan radio replays.. i still geek out about politics by listening to the sunday talk shows on there) and it was pretty solid, i thought, mostly focusing on economic issues that doubtless will resonate with a lot of people. i disagree with his policies (and accusing obama of apologizing for america is pure BS) but he seemed to be a relatively decent candidate, qua candidate.

so what i wonder is, if it'll be like 2004 and we'll have a bit of a free-for-all and then the powers-that-be in the party will somehow make sure that we wind up with romney or pawlenty so the GOP doesn't drive off a cliff, instead only losing respectably.

sure they're free to do it, but does it never worry you that people sufficiently (technologically) advanced to read and comment on blogs buy into such things? and what good does it do you to read them?

(i am perhaps easily depressed by such things; i have asked ilx user ghost rider how he refrains from going insane in his work)

i think a lot of it is just theater, drama, people who are bored and agitated and blowing off steam. the actual business of government is slow and boring. this is a feature not a bug, probably.

i'm fascinated by politics as theater, but it's not good for the country to have our politics affected so much by the fact that many people choose politics as their preferred form of sports entertainment. then you get people elected who've basically come up through the wwe and think they know it all and aren't interested in learning how to actually govern.

i have some (presumably) intelligent friends whom i was around when palin was announced as vp candidate in 2008. i had never heard of her. but ppl (who surely knew no more about her) were crowing about what a coup it was exactly like it was sports.

and i was like, ok whatever, until three months ago i noticed one of them having a license plate that said WHOJGALT and learned another was a birther. it is totally a sports thing, which is yet more depressing to me.

Here's what has me depressed about reaching an agreement on the debt limit (not that this is surprising, but just having it spelled out on the front of the Washington Post reinforces how eh this is):

This orthodoxy is now woven so deeply into the party’s identity that all but 13 of 288 GOP lawmakers in Congress have signed a formal pledge not to raise taxes. The strategist who invented the pledge, Grover G. Norquist, compares it to a brand, like Coca-Cola, built on “quality control” so that Republican voters know they will get “the same thing every time.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/among-gop-an-ironclad-anti-tax-orthodoxy/2011/06/02/AG90SgJH_story.html?hpid=z1