StephenKMackSD's Blog

The full cast of characters of the potent mythology of the current Republican Party are front and center for Mr Douthat's essay titled 'A Time for Choosing', posted November 3,2012. A profligate Federal Government that spends more than it takes in, the retirement of the baby boomers, the attempted, but not fully realized, austerity, government spending at 25 percent of GDP, in 2009. This as introduction to the Republican's ever ready 'painful policy decisions'. These 'painful policy decisions' do not apply to a Wall Street glutted on obscene profits. All this is completely predictable, including this attack on Scandinavian Social Democracy, that needs full quotation:
"The European model of social democracy has its virtues, but it has always depended on the wealth created by American laissez-faire. As a recent economic paper entitled “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?” points out, it’s easier for smaller countries to afford a more “cuddly” form of capitalism if big countries like the United States are driving global economic growth. And the price of a permanently larger government — in growth lost, private-sector jobs left uncreated, breakthroughs forgone — is much higher for a country of our size and influence than it is for a Sweden or a France."
Mr. Douthat will never cease his war on the menace of socialism, but that 'American laissez-faire' that Mr. D. mentions was the Marshall Plan wedded to the Roosevelt New Deal, the actualized 'Third Way' of the, now, forgotten debate of some years past, at least in the New Democratic camp. And by all means don't forget the burden of all those old folks deftly renamed as 'protected clients'. This opposed to the young 'productive entrepreneurs'. When has the Republican Party done anything for the young?
Mr. Douthat confines his argument for Romney/Ryan to the economic sphere, which renders this re-write of our contemporary economic history, through the Douthat lens as predictably myopic and completely one dimensional.
Political Cynic
             

The full cast of characters of the potent mythology of the current Republican Party are front and center for Mr Douthat's essay titled 'A Time for Choosing', posted November 3,2012. A profligate Federal Government that spends more than it takes in, the retirement of the baby boomers, the attempted, but not fully realized, austerity, government spending at 25 percent of GDP, in 2009. This as introduction to the Republican's ever ready 'painful policy decisions'. These 'painful policy decisions' do not apply to a Wall Street glutted on obscene profits. All this is completely predictable, including this attack on Scandinavian Social Democracy, that needs full quotation:
"The European model of social democracy has its virtues, but it has always depended on the wealth created by American laissez-faire. As a recent economic paper entitled “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?” points out, it’s easier for smaller countries to afford a more “cuddly” form of capitalism if big countries like the United States are driving global economic growth. And the price of a permanently larger government — in growth lost, private-sector jobs left uncreated, breakthroughs forgone — is much higher for a country of our size and influence than it is for a Sweden or a France."
Mr. Douthat will never cease his war on the menace of socialism, but that 'American laissez-faire' that Mr. D. mentions was the Marshall Plan wedded to the Roosevelt New Deal, the actualized 'Third Way' of the, now, forgotten debate of some years past, at least in the New Democratic camp. And by all means don't forget the burden of all those old folks deftly renamed as 'protected clients'. This opposed to the young 'productive entrepreneurs'. When has the Republican Party done anything for the young?
Mr. Douthat confines his argument for Romney/Ryan to the economic sphere, which renders this re-write of our contemporary economic history, through the Douthat lens as predictably myopic and completely one dimensional.
Political Cynic
             

Decided voters/undecided voters
Political insiders/political outsiders
High information voter/low information voter
Political skeptic/political believer
Wise Athenian/Colosseum mob (a historical miss)

Along with these binary opposites, the very stuff of the Structuralist intellectual endeavor, comes a certain convenient myth: The bipartisan back and forth of political negotiation: not any kind of reality, in the Republican mindset and the very real political obstructionism since the defeat of 2008. Although Mr. Douthat's argument falls to ruin, without this comforting bit of rhetorical legerdemain. We might just call it what it is, a rather scandalous but necessary untruth! Here is a salient, indeed instructive, example of Republican concern over the vote, in one state.
"The Secretary of State of Ohio, Jon Husted, has apologized to the U.S. District Court Judge who ruled against him last week. The Judge, Peter Economus, ordered Husted to reinstate the three-day “early voting” days and hours, which Husted had eliminated as a supposed confusion-eliminating measure. Husted, however, brazenly defied the judge’s order, telling all Ohio county voting officials to ignore the ruling until the order was heard by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals – a Republican-leaning court."

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/12939816-federal-judge-orders-ohio-sec-of-state-to-personally-explain-defiance-of-orders-to-stop-voter-suppression

Mr. Douthat's essay reaffirms his status as apologist for a Party, not just deeply committed to a self-serving political nihilism, but to active subversion of republican principles and practices, not to speak of defiance of the law.

Political Observer

   

This essay by Ross Douthat titled Washington Versus America is a history of a selected income and social strata of Washington, D.C.: this might even be considered , in a moment of literary charity, a 21st Century revision of Henry Adams’ Democracy: An American Novel, in miniature. A defuse and self-serving history of the lawyers,politicians, hucksters, pundits and other political riff-raff, that have arrived since Mr. Douthat, himself, arrived in Washington D.C., ten years ago. These are the central actors in the historical melodrama that Mr. Douthat constructs, although it is really a travelogue with some vague geographical references, a record of an intimate, yet distant acquaintanceship. Somehow, Mr. Douthat accomplishes this impossibility.
“When I moved to Washington, D.C., in 2002, you could sense that the nation’s capital had turned a corner after decades of decline.”
This is based on what empirical evidence? Ten years of living in the city, rather than an intuition upon arrival, a simplistic question and observation, at best.

“No doubt there were boomtowns in the 19th-century Wild West that changed faster than D.C. did over the ensuing decade.”
Another sweeping bit of historically inflected melodrama, coming from the prolific Douthat imagination.
It might even be a ‘Free Market’ success story!You might just simply title this the rise of the governmental technocrats.
But then Mr. Douthat switches tracks and draws his descriptive metaphors from the movie The Hunger Games, it provides a bit of rhetorical lift and ballast, not to speak of bloat, to his thought. After this long meandering introduction Mr. D. comes to the point:
“For Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, what’s happened in Washington these last 10 years should be a natural part of the case against Obamanomics. Our gilded District is a case study in how federal spending often finds its way to the well connected rather than the people it’s supposed to help, how every new program spawns an array of influence peddlers, and how easily corporations and government become corrupt allies rather than opponents.”
Should it surprise that six of the first of the ten years of Mr. Douthat’s residing in D.C. was under the Bush Restoration. A bit of partisan shading absent from Mr. Douthat’s cautionary tale of the inherent evil of Government and by association his antagonist/protagonist President Obama.
“The state of life inside the Beltway also points to the broader story of our spending problem, which has less to do with how much we spend on the poor than how much we lavish on subsidies for highly inefficient economic sectors, from health care to higher education, and on entitlements for people who aren’t supposed to need a safety net — affluent retirees, well-heeled homeowners, agribusiness owners, and so on.”

‘Inside the Beltway’ and the ‘poor’ are here featured as objects of contempt transformed into objects of concern in the Market oriented thought of this Conservative’s self-serving rhetoric. The ‘poor’ are the absent witnesses of the rise of the revitalized technocratically controlled city.
“There’s a case that this president’s policies have made these problems worse, sluicing more borrowed dollars into programs that need structural reform, and privileging favored industries and constituencies over the common good.”
Sluicing,borrowed dollars,structural reform,privileging favored industries,favored constituencies: Mr. Douthat is never far from the Free Market economic cliches of the Republican Party of 2012, and it’s master strategist that great ‘legislative entrepreneur’ Rep. Paul Ryan. The mention of the ‘common good’ is a bit of political nostalgia, adding not content, but a necessary nod in the direction of an obliterated, not to say abandoned precept of a compromised Republic.
At this point, Mr. Douthat can’t resist the temptation of gently chiding candidate Mitt Romney:
“But this story is one that Romney and his party seem incapable of telling. Instead, many conservatives prefer to refight the welfare battles of the 1990s, and insist that our spending problem is all about an excess of “dependency” among the non-income-tax-paying 47 percent.”
That Mr. Romney is perhaps the most clueless, maladroit candidate to be nominated by the Republicans in living memory: that thought,conveniently does not occur to Mr. Douthat, or at the least, he is guarding his conservative credentials, with a self-serving political tact. With the preliminaries out of the way, Mr. Douthat issues his final two enlightening paragraphs:
“ In reality, our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.
When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.”
The paternalism that seems absent to Mr. Douthat is being exercised by himself, in apology for the mentioned exploitation.

Political Observer

 

David Brooks little missive to candidate Romney is a mild scolding,
for being so stupid as to so forthrightly argue, in front of a
private dinner of supporters his flagrant class and political
prejudices, about a large number of Americans. But no regular reader
of Mr. Brook’s essays can miss, unless through willful ignorance or
bad faith, that the first three paragraphs of his column are a defense
of that very position: which places Mr. Brooks squarely in the Romney
political corner. And merely confirms my conviction that Mr. Brooks is
a two bit moralist who can’t pass up an opportunity to lecture both
the candidate and his readers. No journalistic opportunity should be
wasted. And the title of the essay ‘Thurston Howell Romney’ is pure
pop culture reference that sets off this propaganda:
“In 1980, about 30 percent of Americans received some form of
government benefits. Today, as Nicholas Eberstadt of the American
Enterprise Institute has pointed out, about 49 percent do.
In 1960, government transfers to individuals totaled $24 billion. By
2010, that total was 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for
inflation, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown by more
than 700 percent over the last 50 years. This spending surge,
Eberstadt notes, has increased faster under Republican administrations
than Democratic ones.
There are sensible conclusions to be drawn from these facts. You could
say that the entitlement state is growing at an unsustainable rate and
will bankrupt the country. You could also say that America is spending
way too much on health care for the elderly and way too little on
young families and investments in the future.”
“Entitlement” is the code word for dismantling both Social Security
and Medicare and the notorious voucher system that will be the Free
Market successor to these two very successful programs. It is a
reiteration of the Mr. Brooks program of ‘entitlement reform’: it is
his tiresome ideological obsession.
What Mr. Romney and other Republicans believe is that the American
nation is divided into ‘producers’ and ‘drones’ a Randian principle
last articulated in a national context by the Political No-Nothing
Alan Simpson, co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, on Social
Security:
“We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits!”

But here in the last of the quoted paragraphs is the ‘sensible
conclusions to be drawn from these facts.’ Ah, the indispensability of
the Brooks moralizing political rhetoric: we are headed for disaster,
repent or ye shall know the wraith of my poorly argued economic
determinism. It’s almost theological in it’s reach! But the real
loathsome political hypocrisy awaits: ‘ You could also say that
America is spending way too much on health care for the elderly and
way too little on young families and investments in the future.’ Mr.
Brooks is not concerned with the ‘elderly’ or with ‘young families’ or
‘investments in the future’, it’s still about a contemporary and
retrospective defense of the failed and failing ‘Free Market
Mythology’, the only real idea of American Conservatism, in it’s
various iterations. If you are like me, after so much
self-congratulatory and self-affirming chatter, it begins to annoy and
irritate, until we reach the final paragraph:
“Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things
because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of
cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a
depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement
reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?”
‘Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential,but when will
the incompetence stop?’ Here is the essential ‘truth’ of Mr. Brooks’
essay and mild scolding of candidate Romney.
Political Cynic

“Why did God put Barack Obama on this earth?”

A question filled with promise in a branch of Christian theology called eschatology, but certainly not in a political essay by Mr. David Brooks, the doubtful might ask, if they weren't regular readers of his commentary. You, as reader of my thoughts, might say eschatology concerns the four questions: death, judgment,heaven and hell: my assertion leaves the question of God's purpose as blank as Mr. Brooks' sentence. How can anyone speculate on God's purpose with any degree of believability? Except perhaps theologians, but can you name a contemporary theologian? Or are these questions left to television preachers who fill the air waves with ponderous, self-aggrandizing chatter, heavenly garnished with admonishing scriptural references. Not to be out done by theological pretenders, Mr. Brooks opens his latest essay with a question of political theology that is unanswerable. The whole point of this opening sentence is to establish in the readers mind his moral seriousness, and to legitimize his standing as a pundit worthy of public attention. This in quest of shaping public debate about political issues.

Mr. Brooks moves from his momentous question of God's purpose for Mr. Obama to a self-serving yet totally preposterous reductive historical/political retelling of the Republican obstructionism since 2008.This selective retelling, a specific form of pragmatic Conservative amnesia, is the central leitmotif of the Brooks political narrative and it's clumsy revisionism. Mr. Brooks presents President Obama as a singular political actor, as if he was alone without political antagonists. This reflects the demands of rhetorical purpose rather than political reality. But the real motive of Mr. Brooks essay is to offer unsolicited political advice to President Obama. Three choices are offered by Mr. Brooks (he only sees three viable options for the President) for the next big crusade: global warming, reforming broken Capitalism, and Simpson-Bowles. The part on broken Capitalism is the most surprising, while still appearing within the bland mainstream vocabulary of 'reform':

“Second, broken capitalism. Obama could go before the convention and say that there has been a giant failure at the heart of modern capitalism. Even in good times, the wealth that modern capitalism generates is not being shared equitably. Workers are not seeing the benefits of their own productivity gains.

Obama could offer policies broad enough to address this monumental problem. He could vow to strengthen unions. He could promise to use federal funds to pay for 500,000 more teachers and two million more infrastructure jobs. He could cap the mortgage interest deduction, cap social security benefits, raise taxes on the rich, raise taxes on capital gains and embrace other measures to redistribute money from those who are prospering to those who are not. He could crack down on outsourcing and regulate trade. He could throw himself behind a new industrial policy to create manufacturing jobs.

This agenda wouldn’t appeal to moderates, or people like me, but it’s huge, it’s serious and it would highlight a real problem.”

I agree with everything but the Social Security cap, this almost qualifies as good advice!

On Simpson-Bowles: repair broken Capital and reinstate a vigorous Glass-Steagall designed for the 21^st Century, while the country has a real debate about the deficit, not the carefully managed politics of the Neo-Liberal consensus of Simpson-Bowles.

Political Observer

Here is a more reality based description of Mr. Ross Douthat's notion of 'policy entrepreneurship', of some weeks ago in his NYT column, and it's relevance to Paul Ryan as Republican Budget Guru:
"Mr Ryan is often called author of the Republican budget. Actually, he is author of the Republican budget resolution. The definition matters. First, budget resolutions aren’t legislation. They set broad spending and revenue totals to which the appropriations and oversight committees are supposed to conform. Since resolutions by their nature skimp on detail, Mr Ryan could set out sweeping changes to taxes and spending without the scut work of having to explain where they come from. Apart from his Medicare voucher programme, Mr Ryan’s resolutions contain little practical information that can actually be turned into law. His tax reform plan can be reduced to a tweet: "reduce 6 marginal rates to 10% and 25%, close loopholes. Total revenue = 18-19% of GDP."
Second, budget resolutions are nowadays largely irrelevant. A budget resolution takes effect when the Senate and House pass the same version. They haven’t done so in years. Mr Ryan blames that on the failure of Senate Democrats to cooperate, an argument that is only partially right. I  addressed it here. Suffice to say, budget legislation these days does not come from budget resolutions but from omnibus appropriations bills, continuing resolutions, and cliff hanger deals such as that hammered out between the administration during last summer’s debt ceiling impasse. The budget committee chairmen have been bystanders."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/08/paul-ryan-vice-presidency?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/americasnextprimeminister
Although G.I.'s blog at the Economist is full of the markers of mainstream journalism, political cliches and platitudes, it still manages to be very informative and enlightening.
Political Observer
  

David Brooks never tires of telling his readers that he takes the mean, the rational political/moral position, in regards to the antagonists that he creates in all his essays. In addition, today, he admonishes the hyper-individualist Republican Party, while reminding the reader, by means of a short list of the failures of the Democrats, that he is that rational center, or at the least it's arbiter. His re-description of the root of American virtue being greed is part of the self-serving myth of the Free Marketeers. You know the usual cast of characters, Friedman,Hayek,Mises, and the high priestess of the cult of greed Ayn Rand. The opening paragraphs are Brooks as moral/political revisionist:

“America was built by materialistic and sometimes superficial strivers. It was built by pioneers who voluntarily subjected themselves to stone-age conditions on the frontier fired by dreams of riches. It was built by immigrants who crammed themselves into hellish tenements because they thought it would lead, for their children, to big houses, big cars and big lives.

America has always been defined by this ferocious commercial energy, this zealotry for self-transformation, which leads its citizens to vacation less, work longer, consume more and invent more.

Many Americans, and many foreign observers, are ambivalent about or offended by this driving material ambition. Read “The Great Gatsby.” Read D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.”

Call this what it is, a breathtakingly cartoonish re-write of the American ethos. But perfectly engineered to appeal to the ever shifting American Zeitgeist. One could simply wonder at the utter shallowness of these paragraphs, except that print propaganda functions not as history, but as an attempt to shape public debate by rhetoric alone, having no allegiance to that trivial practice of history.

“If you believe, as I do, that American institutions are hitting a creaky middle age, then you have a lot of time for this argument. If you believe that there has been a hardening of the national arteries caused by a labyrinthine tax code, an unsustainable Medicare program and a suicidal addiction to deficits, then you appreciate this streamlining agenda, even if you don’t buy into the whole Ayn Rand-influenced gospel of wealth.”

After the failure of the Free Market to deliver the goods, as advertised over nearly a generation, the new intellectual hobby horse of the Conservatives and Neo-Liberals has been the deficit. Not jobs or debt relief for home owners, or even another much need economic stimulus to prod that economy back into life, nor any other pressing economic issue. Because the Republicans have blocked any attempt to improve the economy hoping that their political nihilism will doom President Obama in the coming election. Ms. Rand's gospel is not a gospel of wealth but a gospel of unalloyed, unapologetic greed, just to set the record straight. The paragon of Brooksian virtue at the Republican Convention was Condoleezza Rice. Here Mr. Brooks celebrates the virtues of a wider more inclusive civic patriotism:

“The wisest speech departed from the prevailing story line. It was delivered by Condoleezza Rice. It echoed an older, less libertarian conservatism, which harkens back to Washington, Tocqueville and Lincoln. The powerful words in her speech were not “I” and “me” — the heroic individual. They were “we” and “us” — citizens who emerge out of and exist as participants in a great national project.

Rice celebrated material striving but also larger national goals — the long national struggle to extend benefits and mobilize all human potential. She subtly emphasized how our individual destinies are dependent upon the social fabric and upon public institutions like schools, just laws and our mission in the world. She put less emphasis on commerce and more on citizenship.”

Let me state my prejudice forthrightly: Ms. Rice spent her moral/political capital long ago. Who can take her seriously but the Republicans of this inauspicious political moment?

“Today’s Republican Party may be able to perform useful tasks with its current hyperindividualistic mentality. But its commercial soul is too narrow. It won’t be a worthy governing party until it treads the course Lincoln trod: starting with individual ambition but ascending to a larger vision and creating a national environment that arouses ambition and nurtures success.”

The problem with the Republican Party is not it's hyper-individualism but it's obsession with political purity, destructive political nihilism, it's allegiance to a theology of male power and and an unbridled and unapologetic capitalism: The Tea party, Grover Norquist, Christian Fundamentalism, Bain Capital and Paul Ryan.

Political Observer

You have to credit Mr. Ross Douthat for the ability to produce an almost 750 word essay on the natural superiority of the Romneys, both Ann and Mitt. It looks like a long and ardent genuflection in homage to the royal couple. Mr. Douthat posits that Mormons as the new WASP elite – don't mention that the last prominent members, in American government, of that elite were the notorious Bundy brothers,although that might just put a damper on his musings.( How to locate the intellectual terrain of this essay is one of it's challenges? You might just call it by it's real name, public relations.) It could be argued that the Bundy brothers were Endicott  Peabody's greatest failure, that might be a bit controversial, there could be many more, but these brothers seem exemplary of the WASP culture that Mr. D. is in the mood celebrate. It strikes this reader as revelatory of certain usable political nostalgia for the good old days, of the invincible white male, in the age of Obama. But, no matter, Mr. Douthat does give a walk on to one of Mr. Peabody's greatest successes, the novelist and essayist Louis Auchincloss. This essay has the tone and cadence of self-aggrandizing dinner party chatter, recalled in the haze of too much wine, and in the haste of leave taking.
American Litterateur    

The cult of the worship of the blastocyst, the embryo, the fetus as constituting human life, not just it's elementary beginnings, and therefore providing a window on the perception of sacred core of humanity, has become a standard moral position, of the political irrationalism of Conservative Catholics and their Fundamentalist allies. That the moral position of the advocates of life can be succinctly described as men lecturing women on morality is reflective of paternalism, in an unapologetic form. It seems that men in the conservative world don't take seriously the moral agency of women. One can measure this lack of faith in that agency by the quality of lecture in the commentary of conservative intellectuals like Ross Douthat. His essay The Democrats’ Abortion Moment starts with a 'thought experiment' provided by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. It deserves to be quoted in full:

“Imagine, wrote Thomson, that you awoke to find yourself lashed to a famous violinist. The violinist suffers from a lethal kidney disease, and because only your blood type can save his life, his admirers have kidnapped you and looped your circulatory systems together. If you consent to remain thus entangled for nine months, he will make a full recovery. Disentangle yourself, however, and he dies.

Thomson suggested that a woman facing an unintended pregnancy is in a similar position. Her body is effectively being held hostage, and while carrying the unborn life to term might be a heroic act, it cannot be required of her, any more than you could be required to meekly accept your fate as a prisoner of the violinist.”

Professor J.J. Thomson's grotesquely cartoonish, even utterly irrelevant,'thought experiment' whether in support of abortion or not, is so much garnish to Mr. Douthat's effort to place the spotlight elsewhere, rather than squarely on Todd Akin and his Know-Nothing theology.(Note the salient fact that Professor Thomson is a woman, who uses a very sophisticated, if monstrous, analogy as a 'thought experiment' that opens Mr. Douthat's essay, proving, without doubt, that a woman is capable of demonstrable moral agency and argument.) And the hold that that theology has on the Conservative moral imagination, and by definition the Republican Party. The point of conception and the resulting fertilized egg are in that moral universe a 'person'.

Let us move to the more revelatory aspect of the politics of Mr. Douthat's essay which might be described as being an adaptation of Rovian Politics: misdirection being it's first rule. Mr. Akin's remarks about 'legitimate rape', meaning in fact forcible rape, were absolutely in line with the Republican political theology. Mr. Douthat's essay points to the Democrats and away from Todd Akin's ideological pronouncement. A net plus, in terms of misdirection, although not very effective. The second rule of Rovian politics is to attack the strengths of your opponent. One might speculate that the members of the Democratic Party believe that women are capable of exercising their autonomous moral agency, without the guidance of men: not to say that a woman would not seek the advice of someone she trusts, man or woman. One could also say that the modern Republican Party is peopled with bible based Christian Fundamentalists, among other Conservative and Christian factions. Catholics like Mr. Douthat are some of the most vocal supporters of the Republican Party, because of it's Pro-Life politics and it's exaltation of male power: a corollary of the Catholic Church's exclusively male hierarchy. Here is the last sentence of Mr. Douthat's tortured piece of maladroit propaganda, chock-a-block with the stale political/moral posturings of Conservative thought, and casting himself as the mean between the two extremes of Todd Akin, as Conservative radical, and President Obama as Left wing radical, on the issue of abortion, and framed on that burning question of the political moment, according to Mr. Douthat and his political allies:

“ Hence the dangerous (for liberals) question lurking beneath the surface of the Akin controversy. If the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri is an extremist on abortion, what does that make the president of the United States?”

Queer Atheist