Above Politics

“I don’t want politicians who are ‘above politics,’ any more then I want a plumber who’s ‘above toilets.’”

(Ta-Nahesi Coates)

Aristocratic Anarchists

“The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

(G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday)

If You Wish Upon A Star

Just came across some amusing observations about libertarians, anarchists and other utopian visionaries in a blog post by Belle Waring. A quote that conveys the main idea:

"Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such "services" in old New York and Tokyo, medieval tax-farmers, or a Lendu militia. (In general, if thoughts of the Eastern Congo intrude, I suggest waving them away with the invisible hand and repeating "that's anarcho-capitalism" several times.) Nothing's happening but a buzzing noise, right?

"Now try it the wishful thinking way. Just wish that we might all live in a state of perfect liberty, free of taxation and intrusive government, and that we should all be wealthier as well as freer. Now wish that people should, despite that lack of any restraint on their actions such as might be formed by policemen, functioning law courts, the SEC, and so on, not spend all their time screwing each other in predictable ways ranging from ordinary rape, through the selling of fraudulent stocks in non-existent ventures, up to the wholesale dumping of mercury in the public water supplies. (I mean, the general stock of water from which people privately draw.) Awesome huh? But it gets better. Now wish that everyone had a pony."

Humor, Censorship and Self Censorship

I try to be reasonably clear where I stand on public issues, but to speak to the substance of policy outcomes instead of relying on ad-hominem arguments. The truth is, that focusing on policy issues frequently comes out as dry as sand. Makes it hard for people to focus.

Sometimes a bit of humor makes the point clearer and also easier to swallow. Unless the humor descends into a mean sneer.

I was a bit taken aback today when a friend of the republican persuasion concluded that I have been too hard on republicans lately. I admit I've been paying attention to the republican debates and find it hard to say anything positive, especially about their economic views. Or their foreign policy views either, for that matter. Still, I don't want to descend into invective. If I oppose a particular policy, I have reasons. Problem is, the reasons may seem a bit Wonky. And I don't for a minute believe that every republican swallows every line put out by the candidates.

I have mentioned before that about sixty-five years ago I tried my hand at a bit of satire. I worked on an underground newspaper at Ole Miss that criticized the state's policy of segregation. That was a dangerous thing to do, but I thought it important enough to take the risk. I've never regretted it.

Doing satire well is a challenge. Sometimes the target of the satire believes you are on his side. Sometimes it just becomes mean. But in a repressive society it may be the only option. I'm out of practice and haven't tried it much lately.

All of this came to mind today when I read the account in the New York Times magazine section of the uses made of humor, satire, puns, visual jokes and other creative efforts by Chinese dissident cartoonists. They use the internet to pierce the efforts at thought control by Chinese authorities.

Read the article: "Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke." The article also calls to mind the successes of Czech cartoonists in using humor to satirize life in Communist Czechoslovakia. But this isn't just a problem in communist countries. Authoritarians everywhere seem to lack a sense of humor. It is often said that liberals have no sense of humor either, but that isn't accurate.

Class Warfare

The clearest comment I have heard on the "class warfare" issue was by Elizabeth Warren, who is runniing for the US Senate in Massachusetts.

The video of her explaining why wealth should be taxed is plain, clear and to the point. Worth watching.

http://youtu.be/htX2usfqMEs

We Don't Need a Praetorian Guard

The Wall Street Journal quotes presidential candidate Rick Perry as explaining that his run for the presidency is motivated by the desire to make sure service members have a commander in chief they can respect. When queried, Perry explained:

"If you polled the military, the active duty and veterans, and said ‘would you rather have a president of the United States that never served a day in the military or someone who is a veteran?’ They’ve going to say, I would venture, that they would like to have a veteran.”

"The president had the opportunity to serve his country. I’m sure at some time he made the decision that isn’t what he wanted to do."

Perry's remark is not unlike a remark made by the late Senator Jesse Helms that if President Clinton visited the troops in North Carolina, he'd better bring a body guard with him.

Both of these remarks are at odds with the strong tradition in this country that members of the military have no special role in partisan politics. That's why military officers, like civilian officials, take an oath not to the particular president who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but rather an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. No one should understand this more clearly than a person who has served both in the military and in high public office.

Regrettably, charges that a particular candidate or incumbent is disloyal are as old as the Republic. During the Adams administration, Federalists accused Thomas Jefferson and his followers of disloyalty. Those charges led to the infamous "Alien and Sedition" laws. One result of these laws was the imprisonment of certain journalists who supported Jefferson.

The charge of disloyalty against democrats reached a low point in the 1884 campaign of republican James G. Blaine against Grover Cleveland. A few days before the election, a minister at a religious gathering with Blaine present charged democrats with being "the party of rum, Romanism and rebellion." This alliterative remark probably cost Blaine the New York vote and the election.

That didn't keep republican supporters of Hoover from resurrecting the remark in the 1928 campaign against Al Smith. It didn't hurt Hoover in 1928, but didn't help him in 1932.

Charges of disloyalty, however expressed, have become a regular staple of republican campaigns.

It's worth pointing out that the supposed preference of veterans for veterans didn't help George McGovern, Jimmy Carter (1980), Michael Dukakis, Al Gore or John Kerry. Nor did lack of military experience seem to hurt Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Most importantly, our Constitution doesn't award any special role for veterans in selecting our presidents. They don't need a special role. They are Americans.

Action

"Do something. If that doesn't work, do something else."

Jim Hightower

Moderation

"There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos."

Jim Hightower

(You don't have to be from Texas to get this, but it might help)

New Ideas

About this time in every election cycle, we begin to hear candidates, pundits and observers talking about how we need "new ideas."

The belief in new ideas isn't universal, though. Or even belief in novelty of any kind. For example:

"9  The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 1:9

At least in human affairs, the preacher who wrote that book seems to be right. The more familiar you are with history, the more it appears that every so-called new idea is just a revamping of some idea long known to humankind.

Even so, if the idea is something you have never heard about, it seems new.

Yesterday's New York Times had an article lamenting not just the paucity of new ideas, but the shortages of any ideas at all. Neal Gabler, senior fellow at the Annenberg Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California writes of The Elusive Big Idea. Gabler observes that not only do we no longer have big thinkers, our best new ideas seem trivial. He attributes the problem to a surfeit of information, readily available over the internet, which paradoxically crowds out thought and ideas.

The economist Jared Bernstein takes issue with Gabler. At least in the field of economics, Bernstein contends, ideas have been suppressed by a confluence of wealth and power.

"The financial crash of the 2000s revealed a confluence of many powerful and socially disruptive forces: levels of income inequality not seen since the dawn of the Great Depression, stagnant middle-class living standards amidst strong productivity growth, solid evidence that deregulated markets were driving a damaging bubble and bust cycle, deep repudiation of supply-side economics, and most importantly, even deeper repudiation of the dominant, Greenspanian paradigm that markets will self-correct." Despite the evidence and the warnings of economists, Bernstein continues, "And yet, at least from where I sit today, we let the moment pass.  Far from a debate over a new paradigm, our national political economy discussion is bereft of ideas, leaving us mired in recession as we self-inflict one economic wound after another.  Forget new ideas—we can’t seem to correctly apply the old ones!"

Why is that?  Bernstein explains: "Why did we squander the opportunity?  Not because there’s so much information on the web.  It is, at least in part, because the concentration of wealth and power blocked the new ideas from a fair hearing."

Third Party Nostrum

Last months' distressing dispute over the manufactured issue of the debt ceiling has inspired some pundits to fall in with the "third party" nostrum. The latest to join that particular bandwagon is the New York Times' Tom Friedman in a recent column.

The newest wrinkle in this third party scheme is a nationwide primary over the internet.

Friedman seems to think we need a more moderate party. I think a major part of our current problem is that the political process is both dominated by and beholden to monied (especially financial) interests. Moderation won't help that.

As for primaries, they're already pretty open. I think they are a large part of the problem, along with the visible decline of the journalism profession.

A contributing factor for much of the present confusion is the left/right/moderate typology. There are better models of the real political word. One such model is found at The Political Compass, which describes political views on an x-y plot, adding an additional dimension to the usual left/right straight line. Check it out at politicalcompass.org. Take the survey and see where you stand. You might be surprised.

A different approach is taken by the Pew Center for The People and the Press. After every presidential election the Pew Center (and before the the Times Mirror) conducts a detailed survey and provides the results in a report titled Beyond Red vs Blue: The Political Typology. The most recent report, released May 4th of this year, finds that the public is more doctrinaire at each end of the ideological spectrum, yet more diverse in the middle than it has been in the past. The typology, the fifth since 1987, sorts Americans into cohesive groups based on their values, political beliefs and party affiliation.

The most recent survey divides the public into nine groups, one of which, the "bystanders," don't bother voting at all. Of the others, twenty-five percent fall into mostly Republican groups, forty percent fall into mostly Democratic groups, and thirty-five percent fall into mostly independent groups. If we had elections based on proportional representation, the eight groups (other than bystanders) might form the basis for roughly the same number of political parties.

The Pew site offers readers the chance to take a quiz to determine their personal typology. Give it a try.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Or: The Rooster

V.P. Ferguson was, to say the least, an unconventional student.

He arrived at the University of Mississippi from Columbus in the early 1950's and became a legend in his own time. He was especially renowned for a touch of irreverence. He was said to have hung a copy of Sallman's Head of Christ on the wall in his dormitory room, but replaced the eyes with a doll's glass eyes that were wired to follow a visitor as he moved about the room.

A talented musician, V.P. organized a dance band, whose jazz repertoire included a version of "The Little Brown Church" and other jazzed up hymns, arousing disapproval in some circles.

One year, V.P. was upset that the University increased dormitory rent. He refused to pay the rent, instead pitching a tent nearby. One morning, he arose just before official sunrise and put his trumpet to his lips. Just as the sun peeked above the horizon, he played a rousing fanfare, and announced to the gathered audience: "and now, courtesy of V.P. Ferguson, I present - the Sun!"

I just learned that V.P. Ferguson passed away last year in Paris, where he had lived on the Left Bank for many years as a science fiction writer.

Prediction and Governing

Last May I posted the observation that governing is prediction.

Various studies have concluded that, in general, liberals are better prognosticators than conservatives, especially if they have no law degree.

Now David Frum of the Wall Street Journal has joined the chorus.

"Imagine, if you will," Frum asks, "someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?"

The main problem I see with Frum's observation is the assumption that someone whose research and analysis of facts and trends differs from one's own is thereby an "enemy." We should all be seekers of truth, not seekers of vindication. The proof of the pudding is in the accuracy of resulting predictions.

Krugman's predictions are accurate. Wall Street Journal's are not.

Curmudgeon Status

I've been warned.

A couple of days ago during the morning status report at The Bean, one of my colleagues spoke up:

"Unless your blog posts become more emotional," he warned, "we're not gonna let you renew your curmudgeon's license."

I tried to think of a response. Finally I mumbled: "I yam what I yam."

It was a weak riposte.

Ideas and Words

"Where an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place."

- Goethe

Remember The Preamble?

When I was in high school, one of the things students were expected to do was to remember and recite the preamble to the Constitution of the United States.

Remember it? It goes like this:

Preamble

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

So how come so many conservative commentators rail against the "welfare state?" Our aspiration that the federal government promote the general welfare is embedded in our most fundamental document.

We can certainly debate how best to accomplish all the actions listed in the preamble, but so long as our Constitution defines who we are, we cannot deny the legitimacy of any of them.

Do students memorize such things any more? Or take them seriously?

Wisdom

Wisdom is a deep understanding and realizing of people, things, events or situations, resulting in the ability to choose or act or inspire to consistently produce the optimum results with a minimum of time, energy or thought. It is the ability to optimally (effectively and efficiently) apply perceptions and knowledge and so produce the desired results. Wisdom is also the comprehension of what is true or right coupled with optimum judgment as to action. Synonyms include: sagacity, discernment, or insight. Wisdom often requires control of one's emotional reactions (the "passions") so that one's principles, reason and knowledge prevail to determine one's actions.

Wikipedia

The opposite of wisdom is folly. The opposite of a wise man is a fool.

Literature

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged.
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession
with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted,
socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The
other, of course, involves orcs.

John Rogers

What is Economics?

I've been following recent disputes among academic economists in the blogosphere. Very interesting.

I think macroeconomist Brad DeLong has put his finger on one of the essential differences in approach that feeds economic disputes, as well as political disputes.

Commenting on a presentation by Robert Lucas, Jr., a noted economist of the Chicago School, who cites taxes, unions, financial regulation and the expanding welfare state as causes of the persistent depression, DeLong has this to say:

"[A]s Gavyn Davies [another economist blogger] drily notes, Lucas "seems to have ruled...out [alternate explanations] by a priori conviction, rather than any detailed empirical work."... Lucas seems to be discarding the very idea that economics, like the natural sciences, should be based on the evidence. He appears to believe that the state of the world can be ascertained by deductive logic, without ever looking out the window. That's fine, I suppose, if you believe that economics is a branch of philosophy rather than a branch of science. But it does not seem to be an approach that is likely to enable many practical improvements in the lives of human beings."

Reminds me a bit of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland: "Sentence first - verdict afterwards." And perhaps then a bit of evidence, if ever we get around to it.

But I'm afraid too many in Congress treat economics as a branch of philosophy rather than science.

Modern Anarchism

Government isn't the solution - government is the problem!

Did you ever hear that? If you really believe it, you are an anarchist.

Tea Party adherents say they believe it.

Until the pot holes on the way to work don't get fixed. Or they lose their job. Or their house catches fire.

Egotism and Music

About a month ago, the New York Times reported on a new academic study examining whether in recent years popular music has become more self-centered and egotistic. The study, by psychology professor DeWall at the University of Kentucky, examined lyrics from 1980 through 2007. The abstract described the object of the study:

"Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics.

By DeWall, C. Nathan; Pond, Richard S., Jr.; Campbell, W. Keith; Twenge, Jean M.

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Mar 21, 2011, No Pagination Specified.

Abstract

American culture is filled with cultural products. Yet few studies have investigated how changes in cultural products correspond to changes in psychological traits and emotions. The current research fills this gap by testing the hypothesis that one cultural product—word use in popular song lyrics—changes over time in harmony with cultural changes in individualistic traits. Linguistic analyses of the most popular songs from 1980–2007 demonstrated changes in word use that mirror psychological change. Over time, use of words related to self-focus and antisocial behavior increased, whereas words related to other-focus, social interactions, and positive emotion decreased. These findings offer novel evidence regarding the need to investigate how changes in the tangible artifacts of the sociocultural environment can provide a window into understanding cultural changes in psychological processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)"

I have noticed the same phenomenon in church hymns. Recent hymns seem more self-centered and far less centered on the deity.