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James Fallows notes that inequality makes the illusion difficult to maintain, but insists it’s worth believing in the American Dream all the same:
In these circumstances, does it make sense for America to maintain the ideal, or myth, that we are a middle-class society? I believe it does, even though this concept may make it harder for us to perceive or discuss the nation’s genuine and growing inequalities. It remains worthwhile, because most of the elements of middle-class identity encourage traits America needs.
….
[T]o be middle class is to believe that any goal should be within reach. Success takes effort, and it depends on luck. But a long string of ascents from middle-class-or-below origins, from the Wright brothers and Henry Ford a century ago to Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor in our day, suggests a possibility rare in other societies. We are better off believing that this is still the American way.
Y’ask me? If the Horatio Alger myth of rags-to-riches is all the American Dream’s got going for it, well, it’s in trouble. Because for every Jay-Z there are countless failures or never-trieds, people in circumstances both comfortable and dire. And the one-in-10-million who ascends to unfathomable levels of wealth, she’s still just one out of 10 million. That’s a shitty deal.
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So Paul Krugman got a little pink in his latest column:
The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.
Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.
And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?
I hope not; I’d like to believe that ideas and evidence matter, at least a bit. Otherwise, what am I doing with my life? But I guess we’ll see just how much cynicism is justified.
So there you have it, the New York Times, proclaiming class struggle across the land!
It’s definitely a little weird seeing this in the staid, bourgeois pages of the Grey Lady; her audience tends to be on the wealthier side, after all. But inequality has gotten so extreme that even a goodly chunk of the New York Times’ audience can justifiably feel that they’re on the outside, looking in on — or rather up at — the economic party being enjoyed by the select few.
Earlier in the column, Krugman cites a new paper by Bartels, Seawright, and Page which found that the wealthy’s policy preferences diverge considerably from everyone else’s. They tend to care first and foremost about the deficit — and their preferred solution is cuts, cuts, and cuts; to Medicare, to Social Security, to Medicaid. It’d seem odd if it weren’t mirrored in every way by the national dialogue, where the wealthy’s priorities masquerade as the national interest.
If this doesn’t sound like many people you know — or if you yourself are lucky enough to be financially secure, but still don’t particularly yearn for the return of social contract circa 1896 — it’s probably because you think you’re what the authors would consider “wealthy.” But when they say wealthy, they mean wealthy: the average wealth for those the study categorized as wealthy? Fourteen-million dollars.
And that, friends, is how you get the New York Times to sound like a gateway drug to Pravda. (Except, y’know, not really.)
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If we’re being jaded realists, this is totally believable. But if we pretend we still believe in the whole equality-fairness-democracy thing, this is unbelievable:
In a quick and unanticipated session on Thursday night, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution that would allow the Federal Aviation Administration budget flexibility to stop furloughing air traffic controllers.
The measure, approved by unanimous consent, came just days after forced unpaid leaves for controllers began, delaying thousands of flights — 876 flights were delayed on Wednesday alone, the FAA said. Titled the “Reducing Flight Delays Act of 2013,” the resolution provides the Secretary of Transportation the power to transfer up to $253 million in pre-existing funds to “prevent reduced operations and staffing” at the FAA.
Senate Republican aides were quick to note that the resolution would not change the $637 million reduction in the FAA budget mandated by sequestration. Instead, it would allow for the cuts to come from programs other than the operations account, 70 percent of which is devoted to salaries. One top aide said airport improvement program funds would likely be used to stop the furloughs. The bill only says that the money will come from “grants-in-aid for airports.”
The bill still has to pass the House of Representatives, though it’s likely that chamber will approve it. A House vote could come as soon as Friday. After that, the measure will go back to the Senate for approval (for procedural purposes) and then to the president’s desk for his signature.
Needless to say, this is quick fix for the FAA is occurring in large part because it’s elites who are feeling the “pain.” At least that’s what common sense — and political science — would say. As Larry Bartels has found, Congress basically only listens to economic elites; they couldn’t care less what working or lower class folks think. So, boom, a bill is rushing its way to the president with more urgency and speed than any other I can think of during the Obama presidency. Seriously. Can’t think of one.
Next time you hear a big pro-austerity type (or the president!) go on about how the pain will be widespread and shared by all, that the wealthy and elite will have to sacrifice just the same as the rest, keep this in mind as something of a case-study. There will be pain, sure; but it won’t be for everyone. Not for long, at least.
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If Matt Yglesias sneezes you can bet there’s going to be a chorus of left-of-center tweeters ready to unleash a tidal wave of vitriol and scorn. So go ahead and guess how ugly things got yesterday, and remain today, after he wrote this:
It’s very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where 87 [since revised to 238] people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.
I think that’s wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.
If you don’t feel like guessing, here’s an example:
Being a talentless hack who makes money by shamelessly propagating the highly remunerative Washington neoliberal consensus is easy: anyone can do that, and regularly they take that *fistpump* to the bank. But inuring yourself to the horrific conditions in which many people live while justifying those conditions with an incoherent mishmash of social darwinism, willful ignorance of how colonialism led to the abject poverty of “third world” countries and an arrogant tone that would make Dawkins proud, well, that’s just a masterwork of callousness.
But tell us how you really feel!
More seriously, I also did not like Yglesias’s post — but not for the reasons I’m seeing cited by most of his critics; he’s racist, he hates poor people, he thinks it’s OK for people to die so his clothes can be cheaper, etc. All of that is far more a response to the social signalling inherent in Yglesias’s response, his lack of performative empathy, than it is to what he actually wrote. What he actually wrote is in fact rather banal.
Yglesias basically makes the usual argument about development, industrialization, and the tradeoffs necessary between equality, safety, and wealth. To cut to the heart of it, albeit somewhat crudely, you could repurpose the argument like so: Awful things happened to workers in America during the Industrial Revolution, but considering the skyrocketing wealth and standard of living that happened, too, it was overall for the best. That may be callous, flippant, and rationalist to a fault — but it’s not racist and it’s not a precursor to drinking a goblet of orphans’ blood.
While fending off assaults on Twitter, though, Yglesias made an argument that, to my eyes, undermines his whole position. His interlocutor, after commending Yglesias for not wanting to be a dog rapist (don’t ask; it’s Twitter), says, “[A]wesome, we’re achieving common ground. This is how consensus is built. Next up: unsafe worker conditions are bad everywhere.” To which Yglesias responds:
The problem with this answer — and my more-libertarian readers are going to be amused to hear me, a liberal, say this — is that Yglesias assumes the laws of Bangladesh are the product of the whole Bangladeshi people, that the people who died in that disaster were involved in their country’s decision-making process just the same as the elites. This is nonsense. It’s arguable that no democracy, anywhere, is fair or true enough to accurately say it represents the will of its people, writ large. What’s less tenable is to claim that a developing nation — one in which institutions are dysfunctional enough to allow such a disaster to occur — is a land where the common people are autonomous and free.
Put simply, it’s really, really difficult for me to envision any scenario in which the people who died in that building’s collapse can accurately be said to have made their decision to work there on their own, without the presence of individual and systemic coercion. And as long as that coercion is in-place, it’s obtuse to talk of those dead in Bangladesh as anything other than victims of an immoral status quo.
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Loathe as I am to link to POLITICO, this is an interesting report on North Dakota freshman Senator Heidi Heitkamp and why she voted against Manchin-Toomey. If we take Heitkamp at her word (and I know of no reason why not to) it sounds like a textbook example of how the enthusiasm gap plays out in-practice:
Heitkamp said that she may have “disappointed” many, but she heard an outpouring of opposition back home that she couldn’t ignore, forcing her to cast a critical vote against the plan.
Asked about polls showing more than 90 percent of voters supporting expanded background checks, including back home, Heitkamp doubted that was truly indicative of public opinion. She compared the polls to her improbable Senate win showing her down double digits to Republican Rick Berg just weeks before Election Day.
“That wasn’t true either,” she quipped.
I was skeptical of that poll, too; but mainly because I’m skeptical of any poll result that’s at once so surprising and so obviously prime grist for propaganda. (I’m most assuredly not Nate Silver.)
But even if the poll is flawless and a true representation of North Dakotans’ views of expanded background checks, that number — 90-plus percent — is still a big red flag; when support is that widespread, it’s also usually paper-thin. And, again assuming the poll is correct, it sounds like the 10 percent of North Dakotans’ who opposed Manchin-Toomey were a hell of a lot louder.
That’s the thing about American democracy; it’s not a show of hands, but rather a system through which organized people can enact change. You know that overused saying, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”? Well, never-ever-ever doubt that a small group of committed Americans can dictate policy. Indeed, it’s the only thing that can.
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If you haven’t seen it already, do check out this interactive graphic from the New Yorker, which measures the median income of every stop on every line throughout the city. Here’s my line and stop — lowest in Queens! Too proletarian to quit, y’all.
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Alec MacGillis takes a subtle shot at a Jonathan Chait post I recently praised, and upon reflection, I think he’s right.
While praising former Chief of Staff Bill Daley’s recent jeremiad against the four red state Democrats who voted against Manchin-Toomey, MacGillis writes that “[s]ome liberals still seem inclined to cut the Gang of Feckless Four a lot of slack.” The link goes to this single Jonathan Chait post.
As a brief reminder, here’s the essence of Chait’s argument:
You’re not going to win reelection in Arkansas by compiling a Chuck Schumer–esque voting record. You need to pick your battles. Red state Democrats need to cast votes against their party sometimes, or else they’ll be replaced by somebody who will vote against it all the time. That is a moral argument, and while it can be taken too far, the Senators in question are not taking a terribly unreasonable stance. As Politico reports, one Senator told the administration, ‘Guns, gays and immigration — it’s too much. I can be with you on one or two of them, but not all three.’”
If you’re picking your battles, background checks are as good an issue as any to lay down. For one thing, as I’ve suggested, guns loom disproportionately large in the political world of red state Democrats. Guns are the way they signal home state cultural affinity, giving themselves a chance to get their economic message heard. Their A rating from the National Rifle Association is powerful shorthand. And yes, the NRA is crazy and partisan, and was opposing a bill it used to support and that most Republicans support. But none of those facts overcomes the blunt reality of the A rating’s political value.
What’s more, this particular gun vote was an especially good time for Democrats to defect. None of them cast the deciding vote; it fell six votes shy of defeating a filibuster. The bill was already a compromise of a compromise, something that would have stopped a tiny fraction of gun crimes. Even if it passed the Senate, it faced steep odds of passing the House, where it probably would have died, been weakened further, or even turned into a law that weakened existing gun laws.
But MacGillis, who reports popular backlash against New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte, is right to skip the savviness and get right to channeling the voters’ anger. And for the first time in a long time, it looks like that outrage is grassroots and real:
[T]here are signs that the reaction against the vote will be stronger than what has followed prior setbacks for the cause. First, of course, there was the angry cri de coeur from Gabby Giffords. On Friday came spontaneous protests around the country at district offices of senators who voted no. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has set up a number for people to text so they can be patched through to the office of a senator who went the other way. “In years past when we lost on a vote, we had to generate [reaction], we had to push people,” says Brian Malte, the group’s director of mobilization. “This time it’s just directing it to the right place. It’s ‘I’m so angry, what should I do?’”
However, my praise for MacGillis’ piece doesn’t mean I find Chait’s argument any less persuasive. I think the above Chait blockquote captures, more or less, the explanations these senators are telling themselves and close confidants. And they’re good explanations! But they’re not excuses — and it’s reasonable for voters to demand more.
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Tim Murphy of Mother Jones has a(n annoyingly BuzzFeedily structured) piece up, listing the 11 weirdest things the Tsarnaev brothers did in the moments and days after the bombs went off. You’ve probably seen it.
The thing about the list is, if it all weren’t so horrendous, it might be funny. These two sound like dumb and dumber. I mean, tell me this doesn’t sound like something out of Archer or an SNL skit:
6. Run out of cash. When Dzhokhar carjacked a Mercedes on Thursday night, he and his brother had one thing in mind: Get cash, and fast. They emptied $800 from an ATM using their victim’s PIN number, before they reached the account limit. Holding up a stranger for money suggests a woeful lack of planning on their part (they hadn’t budgeted) that helped alert them to the authorities.
7. Not understand how ATMs work. After reaching the daily withdrawal limit at one ATM, the Tsarnaevs, apparently not realizing that the machines are part of an interconnected system, decided to try their luck at two different machines. The quest to find a working ATM was how they ended up, coincidentally, at a 7/11 in Cambridge around the same time it was the scene of an armed robbery, and were spotted on the store security camera.
…
9. Stop for snacks. The Los Angeles Times reported that the hostage escaped after the brothers stopped at a gas station on Memorial Drive to buy snacks.
But, of course, the thing that makes it very much not like Archer or an SNL skit — the thing that makes it not funny at all — is that it’s real life. And in real life, the brothers devastated hundreds of families, murdered three innocents, and then shot an MIT officer full of bullet, before their munchies took the wheel.
The incompetence they displayed has me wondering how it is they pulled it off to begin with. Countless billions are spent on national security — and fear of homegrown terrorism has been fever-pitch among many politicians and bureaucrats since at least 9/11. As a country, we’ve made a lot of sacrifices of our civil liberties (though not as many as we’ve made for other people’s civil liberties) because, we believed, we’d get security in return.
The expansive growth of the national security state shouldn’t precede the first significant indigenous attack. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. So what happened? Was this the terrorist equivalent of a new chess player beating a master because her moves were illogical, unprofessional, and hard to predict? Did the Tsarnaev brothers succeed because the anti-terrorism wall’s been raised so high that the lowest terrorists can wiggle under it?
Maybe the answer is that, barring turning society into a totalitarian police-state nightmare, there’s a certain level of risk and danger inherent in an open, free society. It cannot be prevented. And unless we want to take a more decisive step into darkness, we’ll just have to live with it, as horrible and unbearable as it is.
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Check out the video above, if you can, to see Senator Durbin have a relatively congenial back-and-forth with Kansas Secretary of State (and intellectual star of the anti-immigration reform lobby) Kris Kobach over DREAMers and “self-deportation.” As you’ll see, part of the reason it’s rather civil is because Kobach lets Durbin dominate the conversation (usually the best way to keep a politician on the sunny side); but Kobach is a smart dude who lives this issue, so he holds his own, despite making what is at base a rather noxious argument.
And that argument is: people are nationalities first, human beings second. I don’t think Kobach actually believes this, but his take on what to do with DREAMers — which, remember, refers to people who are here illegally but came not on their own volition but with their parents — is callous and legalistic enough that it’s an obvious conclusion. It’s a fallacy to argue that voters always know right, but in this case Durbin is correct to note that Kobach’s “self-deportation” idea was up for referendum last November.
And it lost, badly, for a simple reason: only in the rigid, bloodless world of legal theory does Kobach’s argument that children are no different from adults, just so long as they’re both “illegals,” carry water. It’s principled, I suppose, in its way. It’s certainly logical. But it’s not, as Durbin says, compassionate. Politically, anything opposite from George W. Bush is seen as a good move for Republicans. But compassionate conservatism was a great sales pitch, the only one that’s worked for the GOP outside of appeals to 9/11 in quite some time. Republicans continuing to embrace Kobach do so at their own peril.
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