US Politics Mega-thread - Page 611

‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.

A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.

But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.

The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.

Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:

I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.

You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.

Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.

Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:

If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.

Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.

There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.

Something’s not quite right there.

The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.

(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)

The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.

Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.

But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”

(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)

Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.

The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.

Beyond Words about Words

....

‘Socialist’ Is the New ‘Libertarian’
The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire.

A large part of our political discourse consists of arguing about the meanings of words: Republicans should support the Affordable Care Act, Vox-style lefties argued, because Obamacare is a “conservative” program. (The three most important words in political economy are: “Compared to what?”) “Racist” and “sexist” mean whatever the Left needs them to mean at any given moment, as do “extremist,” “radical,” “risky,”and “reckless.” (The Trump administration has some ideas about fuel-economy standards; what are the odds the New York Times editorial section, that inexhaustible font of clichés, will denounce them as a “reckless scheme”? Approximately 100 percent.) Republican thought leaders, in between the ads for gold coins and doggie vitamins, denounce as “socialist” everything from Hillary Rodham Clinton to the USDA to preschool programs.

But cut them some slack: The Democrats don’t do much better on “socialist,” the magic word of the moment. Senator Bernie Sanders sometimes calls himself a socialist, and every now and again he hits on a genuinely socialist theme, but his particular blend of yahooistical union-hall nationalism, nostalgic corporatism, and central planning went by a different name back in the 1930s. Most of the young Democrats calling themselves “socialists” do not talk very much about socialist ideas at all, instead being smitten with Northern European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark, which do things differently than we do here in the United States but which are not socialist in any meaningful sense of that word. Ironically, the rhetorical project of conflating the welfare state with socialism seems to have been as successful on the left as on the right.

The American Left doesn’t seem to follow very closely the Nordic states it claims to admire. Beginning in 1991, Sweden embarked on a decades-long campaign of privatization and reform that made the scholars at the Heritage Foundation envious. It sold off state-owned enterprises and interests in the liquor, pharmaceutical, and banking sectors, expanded private alternatives in health-care and retirement programs, eliminated state monopolies in pharmacies and vehicle inspections, and much more. This began under a center-right government and continued with a reduced scope under the Social Democrats, who stopped short of privatizing the Swedish postal service and state-run utilities. Denmark is a country with a long history of free trade, strong property rights, and liberal labor markets. Most of the Nordic states have no legislated minimum wage; as in the case of Switzerland, they generally rely on industry-by-industry labor agreements that vary greatly by sector. They are different in many important ways from the American model, but they are not socialist.

Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, is among those taking this Democratic talk of “socialism” more or less at face value. He writes:

I’ve been fretting lately about the state of mind of America’s capitalists. All these socialists coming out of the woodwork must have them in quite a lather. So I write today with some friendly advice for the capitalist class about said socialists.

You want fewer socialists? Easy. Stop creating them.

Every once in a while in history, cause and effect smack us in the face. The conditions under which the czars forced Russians to live gave rise to Bolshevism. The terms imposed at Versailles fueled Hitler’s ascent. The failures of Keynesianism in the 1970s smoothed the path for supply-side economics.

Mr. Tomasky writes with remarkable self-assurance. (Surely there was a bit more to the rise of the German National Socialist Workers party than the Treaty of Versailles.) But he hits on the fundamental thing: All this talk about socialism isn’t about socialism. It’s about the status quo, and an old-fashioned rhetorical stratagem long employed by the Left is to equate every ill in every Western society with “capitalism.” (But set that aside for the moment.) Mr. Tomasky writes:

If you were a person of modest or even middle-class means, how would you feel about capitalism? The kind of capitalism this country has been practicing for all these years has failed most people.

Yes, it’s given us lots of shiny objects to gush about. A smartphone that can display slow-motion video is a wonder. But an affordable college education, though perhaps not a wonder, is a necessity for a well-ordered society.

There are a few obvious shortcomings to his line of argument here, and not just that history has seen many well-ordered societies that had little or nothing in the way of university education. Mr. Tomasky isn’t making quite the point he thinks he is: Those nifty smartphones are the product of the part of 21st-century human endeavor characterized by free enterprise, free markets, private investment, etc., that we call capitalism. Education, for the most part, isn’t. In the United States, the state university system is a social enterprise, one generally based on state ownership of economic assets such as land or, in the case of my alma mater down in Austin, mineral rights. It’s as close to a socialist program as we have, and all the would-be socialists are complaining about it.

Something’s not quite right there.

The real world is always more complicated than political rhetoric of Mr. Tomasky’s kind, which relies on absurd oversimplification to concentrate its emotional energy. Conservatives often scoff that socialism simply “doesn’t work,” but the state-dominated enterprise that is the American system of higher education is the envy of the world. Its main financial problem is the fact that its innovative and enterprising managers can always figure out a way to soak up whatever great roaring streams of money that government shunts in their general direction.

(Question: What do you imagine would happen to the price of a Honda Civic if the federal government gave every young person in the country ten grand and a subsidized loan that could only be used for the purchase of a Honda Civic? My guess is that the price of a Honda Civic would go up enough to accommodate all the money that was on the table.)

The K–12 education system is an almost exclusively government-run enterprise, too, and it, on the other hand, is a mess. What’s the difference between the low-performing K–12 system and the world-beating higher-education system? There are of course many factors at work: College professors enjoy higher social status and (often, not always) more generous compensation than do eighth-grade art teachers, and the standards for becoming one are (often, not always) higher. But certainly consumer choice is among the most important factors. Students have a choice about where they go to college, and they take their money (public and private) with them wherever they go. Outside of a few cranks such as me, nobody talks very much about fully privatizing K–12 education in the United States. Instead, what most conservative reformers emphasize is introducing consumer choice into that social enterprise, making K–12 more like college in terms of its economic incentives. There isn’t really a socialism-vs.-capitalism aspect to that. The real underlying issue is what the Nordic reformers sometimes call “marketization,” bringing choice, competition, and accountability to state-dominated enterprises that once had been monopolistic, with all the dysfunction and woe that goes along with that.

Capitalism vs. socialism? In American politics, that’s a case of words about words, and very little more.

But we love to fixate on exciting words. For a moment during the presidency of George W. Bush, virtually every figure on the right was denounced as a “neocon,” a term poorly understood by the majority of the people who use it. “Republican” and “conservative” weren’t good enough. Even the Buchananites whose distinguishing feature is their intense hatred of neoconservatives found themselves denounced as “neocons” from time to time. As George Orwell noted in the case of “fascist,” the word came to mean nothing more than: “I hate you.”

(Or, often enough in the case of “neocon,” nothing more than: “I hate you, Jew.”)

Do you know what the word “libertarian” means? Our friends over at Reason magazine define libertarianism as the creed of “free minds and free markets,” and there are a few of us old-fashioned ideologues who more or less hold to that. But what the word “libertarian” really means in the majority of cases is: a person who is culturally on the right but understandably embarrassed to call himself a Republican. Hence a great many self-described libertarians rallied in 2016 to the cause of Donald Trump, who is — love him or detest him — something close to the opposite of a libertarian, a man whose instinct is toward government intervention in practically everything, an admirer of Joe Arpaio at home and Vladimir Putin abroad.

The two major U.S. political parties mirror one another to an almost comical extent. Both of them are institutionally dominated by relatively moderate and somewhat dusty specimens of the American ruling class, and both of them are emotionally dominated by a relatively small activist base that hates its own party establishment almost (that’s the key: almost) as much as it hates the guys on the other side. The tea-party movement was never about giving the bird to the Democrats: Hating the Democrats was a given. The tea-party movement was about giving the bird to the leadership of the Republican party. Ask the more perfervid Trump admirers who the real Enemy of the People is and they’ll say it’s Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

The same dynamic plays out on the left: I spent some time covering Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and there were a few true believers convinced that the grumpy Muppet from Vermont was just what the republic needed. But many of them simply could not stomach the prospect of pulling the lever for someone named “Clinton” again and lining up behind some triangulating, difference-splitting, corporation-friendly, deal-making, bipartisan-leaning, Davos-frequenting gazillionaire. The angriest partisans on both sides don’t want to work on structural reforms to K–12 education: They are engaged in a tribal contest the aim of which is to humiliate the other side. Lincoln was the Liberator, Reagan the Great Communicator, and Trump the Great Humiliator. Jon Stewart became the most beloved man on the American Left because he has a talent for humiliation, not because he’s a great wit or because he has original and insightful ideas about public policy.

Beyond Words about Words

....

On August 12 2018 05:25 Introvert wrote:
There was a well timed essay the other day at National Review that talks about this confusion over words. There aren't really a whole lot of socialists, just as there aren't that many real libertarians, but we still use these words, and both sides rush to them when needed.

I'm only posting the first half, you should have to click the link.

On August 12 2018 06:14 IgnE wrote:


written by the author of the helpful primer: the politically incorrect guide to socialism

williamson says, "this isnt about politics, its about aversion to risk." ah ok then, so whats politics about?

Beneath the tribalism, the underlying energies on both sides of the political divide are status anxiety and risk aversion.

There are ways for conservatives to address those risks that are consistent with our political philosophy and our values. But we often fail to make the case, because we often fail to account for the intensity (and the distribution) of the risk aversion among those who see the world differently than we do.

Which brings us back to socialism, and to Mr. Tomasky. Those who are genuinely interested in the underlying dynamics of American politics — either for the pragmatic purpose of winning elections or for the quaint purpose of trying to make this a better place to live — must begin by understanding that what is convulsing these United States is not an ideological conflict. It is not a philosophical conflict, and it is not a contest of visions and transcendent values. Not one American citizen in 20 has anything like the intellectual preparation and inclination to engage in such a contest. This is a case of rational ignorance, inevitable as death.