The Fiscal Cliff and Congressional Dysfunction

From David Boaz, at Cato:

Annual federal spending rose by a trillion dollars when Republicans controlled the government from 2001 to 2007. It has risen another trillion during the Bush-Obama response to the financial crisis. So spending every year is now twice what it was when Bill Clinton left office, and the national debt is three times as high. Republicans and Democrats alike should be able to find wasteful, extravagant, and unnecessary programs to cut back or eliminate. And yet many voters, especially Tea Partiers, know that both parties have been responsible. Most Republicans, including today’s House leaders, voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, the Iraq war, the prescription drug entitlement, and the TARP bailout during the Bush years. That’s why fiscal conservatives should look very skeptically at the “fiscal cliff” and “grand bargain” proposals, most of which promise to cut spending some day—not this year, not next year, but swear to God some time in the next 10 years. As the White Queen said to Alice, ”Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.” Cuts tomorrow and cuts in the out-years—but never cuts today.

If the “dysfunctional” fight that has sent us to the edge of the fiscal cliff finally results in some constraint on out-of-control spending, then it will have been well worth all the hand-wringing headlines. But that doesn’t seem likely. The problem is not a temporary mess on Capitol Hill and not a mythical default; it’s spending, deficits, and debt.

The entire political class is the problem, but again, the first order of business is getting the Democrats out of power.

Fiscal Cliff: $536 Billion Tax Hikes Over the Edge; Recession Risk

At IBD, "Fiscal Cliff: $536 Billion In Tax Hikes Over the Edge":

Even for those who aren't afraid of heights, peering over the fiscal cliff may be dizzying. The plunge in after-tax income that would occur in a worst-case scenario likely would put the economy back in a deep recession.

Yet a peek over the edge now seems unavoidable, at least according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

"It looks like that's where we're headed," Reid said in a Senate floor speech on Thursday.

So here's what the view looks like. The fiscal cliff is composed of $536 billion in 2013 tax hikes, the Tax Policy Center says.

The biggest tax hikes would be an end to President Bush's 2001 and 2003 income and investment tax cuts and President Obama's 2 percentage point payroll tax cut.

But that's just the beginning. Nearly 90% of households would face an average tax increase close to $3,500.

The fiscal cliff also would trigger roughly $115 billion in automatic spending cuts.

More at the link.

And at Instapundit, "COMMENT OF THE DAY":

“For ten years we have been told that the Bush tax cuts applied mostly to the rich. Now it is imperative that we extend them further or the middle class is going to take a big hit.”

Progressives suck.

Fiscal Cliff Reveals Long-Term Partisan Divide

Following up on my report yesterday, "America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption."

Here's Ronald Brownstein, at National Journal, "The Fiscal Cliff's Greatest Threat Is to American Unity":

The real issue in the frantic final flailing over the fiscal cliff isn’t whether Washington can balance its books. It’s whether blue America and red America are capable of, or even interested in, mediating their differences. The evidence is growing more discouraging.

Across almost every front, the process of pulling apart that has reshaped the political landscape over the past generation appears to be accelerating.

At the national level, President Obama and Mitt Romney mobilized almost mirror-image coalitions. Over 40 percent of Obama’s votes came from minorities; nearly 90 percent of Romney’s votes came from whites. Obama won three-fifths of voters under 30; Romney won more than three-fifths of white seniors.

Compared with Democrats, Republicans since the 1980s have been a more ideologically homogenous party that is more resistant to compromise—as last week’s rejection of House Speaker John Boehner’s fiscal “Plan B” demonstrated. (Electoral incentives help explain that imbalance: Because self-identified conservatives outnumber liberals among voters, Democrats in most places need to carry more moderates to win than Republicans do, and that creates greater pressure on Democrats to compromise.) But after an election in which Obama won despite historic deficits among the blue-collar and older whites that once anchored the conservative end of his party’s coalition, ideological cohesion is rising among Democrats too.

Consider the profile of Obama and Romney voters that Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz traces in an upcoming paper. In the Election Day exit poll, three-fourths of Obama voters said that government should be doing more to solve problems, while over four-fifths of Romney voters said that it is already doing too much. More than four-fifths of Obama voters wanted to maintain or expand his health care law, while nearly nine-in-10 Romney voters backed its repeal. Three times as many Obama voters as Romney voters supported legalizing gay marriage.

This same pulling apart is evident in the states. Eighteen states—what I’ve called the “blue wall”—have voted Democratic in at least the past six presidential elections. After November’s ballot victories in Maine, Maryland, and Washington, seven of them have now authorized gay marriage and six others have approved civil unions or broad domestic partnership rights for same-sex couples. Depending on how legislative or court fights unfold, it’s conceivable that California and New Jersey, two blue-wall states, could approve same-sex-marriage ballot initiatives by 2016. Meanwhile, virtually every Republican-leaning state has barred gay marriage.

Similarly, 14 governors have agreed to join the expansion of Medicaid that represents one pillar of the Obama plan to cover the uninsured; Nevada’s Brian Sandoval is the only Republican among them. Almost all Republican governors also let the deadline pass earlier this month without establishing the online exchanges that comprise the other big coverage expansion. Even after Obama’s victory eliminated the possibility that his health reform bill would be repealed, Republican governors are continuing what amounts to a sit-down strike against it.

This centrifugal tendency is now embedded in Congress’s DNA. As split-ticket voting has declined, fewer legislators in each party are elected, in effect, behind enemy lines (by voters who usually prefer the other party for the White House).

Michael Franc, vice president for government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, correctly observes that because of that dynamic, during a confrontation like the fiscal cliff, most legislators are more likely to face demands to stand firm than complaints about inflexibility. “When everybody goes back home, I don’t think they are feeling the heat from their constituents” for failing to reach agreement, Franc says. “If anything, they are hearing the opposite. So ... there’s no rational political incentive to back down.”

There's more at that top link. Brownstein concludes by lamenting the nation's "fraying sense of common purpose." Actually, that's not what the data are telling us. All those constituents back home in the red districts don't want America moving further into the socialist orbit, becoming a Sweden, or worse, a Cuba. The Democrats cling to power with a coalition of dependents. The Democrats welcome all manner of hard-line socialists and collectivists into their midst. And the president himself leads the morally bankrupt intransigence in government. It's all about punishing the successful demographics in the name of fairness. Screw these people. Republicans need to stay strong against the onslaught.

PHOTO: The White House Flickr page.

America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption

The January/February issue of Foreign Affairs is now available online. I just finished reading Fareed Zakaria's marquee essay, "Can America Be Fixed? The New Crisis of Democracy." While I disagree little on the problems we face, I differ substantially on the remedies he identifies. (And my respect for the man has plummeted over the years amid his increasingly predictable progressive sensibilities, but especially of late because of the allegations against him this year of plagiarism, for which he acknowledged and apologized for publicly, with permanent damage to his reputation.)

The article is gated but a quick summary and block quotes are sufficient for the purposes here. Zakaria sees the fiscal cliff stalemate as a signal of our political immobility. The gridlock we're facing means that the political establishment once again is delaying needed reforms on some of the biggest problems facing the country, most notably for Zakaria infrastructure and entitlements. The fatal flaw of the piece is that Zakaria's a hopeless advocate for expanding the size and scope of government. He actually offers an excellent discussion of the entitlement problem, but he refuses to see any role for markets and for the possibility of scaling back government commitments. His biggest problem is on infrastructure. Again, while he puts his finger on the problem quite deftly, he ignores some facts that make his case problematic --- one of the biggest being the fact that the U.S. spent nearly $1 trillion in "infrastructure" and "investment" in the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus legislation, and the country has virtually nothing to show for it in terms of long-term economic growth. Indeed, the administration's stimulus was a crony capitalist boondoggle that will likely be repeated again and again if the so-called investments Zakaria proposes are to indeed become public policy. In any case, some key block quotes. Here's a bit on the problems identified in the paper:

As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge -- the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century. The focus in Washington now is on taxing and cutting; it should be on reforming and investing. The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve....

Is there a new crisis of democracy? Certainly, the American public seems to think so. Anger with politicians and institutions of government is much greater than it was in 1975. According to American National Election Studies polls, in 1964, 76 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "You can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time." By the late 1970s, that number had dropped to the high 40s. In 2008, it was 30 percent. In January 2010, it had fallen to 19 percent.

Commentators are prone to seeing the challenges of the moment in unnecessarily apocalyptic terms. It is possible that these problems, too, will pass, that the West will muddle through somehow until it faces yet another set of challenges a generation down the road, which will again be described in an overly dramatic fashion. But it is also possible that the public is onto something. The crisis of democracy, from this perspective, never really went away; it was just papered over with temporary solutions and obscured by a series of lucky breaks. Today, the problems have mounted, and yet American democracy is more dysfunctional and commands less authority than ever -- and it has fewer levers to pull in a globalized economy. This time, the pessimists might be right.

And here's the key bit on "infrastructure investment":

If the case for reform is important, the case for investment is more urgent. In its annual study of competitiveness, the World Economic Forum consistently gives the United States poor marks for its tax and regulatory policies, ranking it 76th in 2012, for example, on the "burden of government regulations." But for all its complications, the American economy remains one of the world's most competitive, ranking seventh overall -- only a modest slippage from five years ago. In contrast, the United States has dropped dramatically in its investments in human and physical capital. The WEF ranked American infrastructure fifth in the world a decade ago but now ranks it 25th and falling. The country used to lead the world in percentage of college graduates; it is now ranked 14th. U.S. federal funding for research and development as a percentage of GDP has fallen to half the level it was in 1960 -- while it is rising in countries such as China, Singapore, and South Korea. The public university system in the United States -- once the crown jewel of American public education -- is being gutted by budget cuts.

The modern history of the United States suggests a correlation between investment and growth. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government spent over five percent of GDP annually on investment, and the economy boomed. Over the last 30 years, the government has been cutting back; federal spending on investment is now around three percent of GDP annually, and growth has been tepid. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence has noted, the United States escaped from the Great Depression not only by spending massively on World War II but also by slashing consumption and ramping up investment. Americans reduced their spending, increased their savings, and purchased war bonds. That boost in public and private investment led to a generation of postwar growth. Another generation of growth will require comparable investments.

The problems of reform and investment come together in the case of infrastructure. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country's infrastructure a grade of D and calculated that repairing and renovating it would cost $2 trillion. The specific number might be an exaggeration (engineers have a vested interest in the subject), but every study shows what any traveler can plainly see: the United States is falling badly behind. This is partly a matter of crumbling bridges and highways, but it goes well beyond that. The U.S. air traffic control system is outdated and in need of a $25 billion upgrade. The U.S. energy grid is antique, and it malfunctions often enough that many households are acquiring that classic symbol of status in the developing world: a private electrical generator. The country's drinking water is carried through a network of old and leaky pipes, and its cellular and broadband systems are slow compared with those of many other advanced countries. All this translates into slower growth. And if it takes longer to fix, it will cost more, as deferred maintenance usually does.

Spending on infrastructure is hardly a panacea, however, because without careful planning and oversight, it can be inefficient and ineffective. Congress allocates money to infrastructure projects based on politics, not need or bang for the buck. The elegant solution to the problem would be to have a national infrastructure bank that is funded by a combination of government money and private capital. Such a bank would minimize waste and redundancy by having projects chosen by technocrats on merit rather than by politicians for pork. Naturally, this very idea is languishing in Congress, despite some support from prominent figures on both sides of the aisle.

The same is the case with financial reforms: the problem is not a lack of good ideas or technical feasibility but politics. The politicians who sit on the committees overseeing the current alphabet soup of ineffective agencies are happy primarily because they can raise money for their campaigns from the financial industry. The current system works better as a mechanism for campaign fundraising than it does as an instrument for financial oversight.

In 1979, the social scientist Ezra Vogel published a book titled Japan as Number One, predicting a rosy future for the then-rising Asian power. When The Washington Post asked him recently why his prediction had been so far off the mark, he pointed out that the Japanese economy was highly sophisticated and advanced, but, he confessed, he had never anticipated that its political system would seize up the way it did and allow the country to spiral downward.

Vogel was right to note that the problem was politics rather than economics. All the advanced industrial economies have weaknesses, but they also all have considerable strengths, particularly the United States. They have reached a stage of development, however, at which outmoded policies, structures, and practices have to be changed or abandoned. The problem, as the economist Mancur Olson pointed out, is that the existing policies benefit interest groups that zealously protect the status quo. Reform requires governments to assert the national interest over such parochial interests, something that is increasingly difficult to do in a democracy.

Every now and then we see a new story on some collapsed bridge tragedy or massive urban flooding from busted water mains or broken levees, and on cue progressives start wagging their fingers about how we've got to start spending on infrastructure. I don't research this area but my regular reading on the politics of the stimulus isn't very reassuring. The administration's push for "investments" was mostly about the Democrat politics of job creation, and that didn't turn out so well. Conn Carroll has a good example, "$787 Billion in Stimulus, Zero Jobs “Created or Saved”." And while Zakaria's obsessed with government spending as "investmnent," there's little in the record of the last couple years that recommends doubling-down on it. See Romina Boccia, "New Stimulus Plan Same as the Old: Spend, Spend, Spend." And notice while Zakaria minimizes the corruption inherent in "infrastructure" spending as possibly "inefficient and ineffective," the facts of the past few years are devastating to his case. See Veronique de Rugy, "Stimulus Cronyism." And Michelle Malkin, "Obama's $50 Billion Union Infrastructure Boondoggle."

The United States is not some developing country that's going to be eviscerated by "draconian" spending cuts or devastated by some horrible "austerity package" that leaves the poor to fend for themselves. That's Krugmanite scare-mongering. We need to unleash the natural dynamism of the American economy. To put it as plainly as possible: We need robust and sustained economic growth, in the 4 or 5 percent range. We need to increase incentives for private investment. We need to reduce regulations and taxes on business job creators. And we need to rely on the system of federalism to shift real infrastructure investment from the federal to state governments. This isn't rocket science. The solutions to America's economic problems are self-evident. And the political crisis is largely one of a dramatically changed American electoral and political demographic. As the population base of the Democrat Party comes to increasingly favor policies of dependency, the productive, working sectors of the economy are required to bear a heavier load to keep everything afloat. Tea party Republicans, bless them, are resisting higher taxes because they know that'll be more of the same. As noted here yesterday, President Obama's not interested in fixing our politics or avoiding a recession should we go over the fiscal cliff. He's obsessed with punishing the most productive members of society in furtherance of his class warfare agenda of reducing inequality and promoting social justice. As long as we have one party that is objectively uninterested in growing the economy to create a rising tide that lifts all boats we will continue to have a crisis of political immobility. The electorate can fix the problem by choosing a government not fatally infected with cronyism and corruption. Both parties are implicated, although getting the Democrats out of power is the first order of business. We need to restore our faith in liberty and markets and unleash the innate innovation and dynamism of the individual. Our crisis is one of big government. Obama hasn't even been sworn in for a second term and its already clear that the public was duped in November. We must keep on with the hard work of real reform, which is what the tea party has represented, smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Without that we'll continue to stagnate and ultimately perish like the beached whale on the sand at Barbra Streisand's oceanfront estate.

BONUS: Zakaria dismisses the late Samuel Huntington's work in this report from the '70s-era Trilateral Commission: "The Crisis of Democracy." But our prospects for reform would be immeasurably greater if had more voices like Huntington's a less of those like Zakaria's.

ADDED: Linked at Blazing Cat Fur and Lonely Conservative. Thanks!

China's National People's Congress May Boast More Millionaires and Billionaires Than Any Other Legislative Body on Earth

An amazing piece, at the Wall Street Journal, "Defying Mao, Rich Chinese Crash the Communist Party":

When the Communist Party elite gathered last month to anoint China's new leaders, seven of the nation's richest people occupied coveted seats in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

Wang Jianlin of Dalian Wanda Group, worth an estimated $10.3 billion and the recent buyer of U.S. cinema chain AMC Entertainment Holdings, took one of the chairs. So did Liang Wengen, with an estimated fortune of $7.3 billion, whose construction-equipment maker Sany Heavy Industry Co. competes with Caterpillar Inc. Zhou Haijiang, a clothing mogul with an estimated $1.3 billion family fortune, also had a seat. As members of the Communist Party Congress, all three had helped endorse the new leadership.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

China has been grappling of late with political and social tension over its murky policy-making process and its growing income disparity. The party has been especially sensitive this year during the leadership change about revelations about fortunes amassed by the offspring of political leaders, known as "princelings," by leaders of state businesses and by other politically connected people. Many ordinary Chinese blame high prices, poor quality food and pollution on guanshang guojie—meaning, roughly, officials in bed with businessmen.

As political families move into business, private tycoons are entering the political sphere—although precisely what is driving that isn't clear. Other Chinese business leaders have cultivated relationships with party chiefs without entering politics themselves. But the Journal's analysis showed that people appearing on Hurun's rich list who also served in the legislature increased their wealth more quickly than the average member of the list.

Seventy-five people who appeared on the rich list from 2007 to 2012 served in China's legislature during that period. Their fortunes grew by 81%, on average, during that period, according to Hurun. The 324 list members with no national political positions over that period saw their wealth grow by 47%, on average, according to an analysis the firm ran for the Journal.

The contradictions of communism. The Chinese political system is one of the world's biggest ideological frauds going. It's all about keeping the elite in power and suppressing the slightest bit of opposition to the regime.

"Free To Be...You And Me" and History

Marlo Thomas's pathbreaking record album Free To Be You and Me turned forty last month, an anniversary that has occasioned a fair amount of reflection online and elsewhere.  Slate ran an interesting three-part series about the making of the album and its legacy.  Yesterday, NPR's Weekend Edition featured a story about Free To Be...You and Me. Comedians Rob Kutner and the Levinson Brothers have even issued a parody album in celebration of the anniversary.

But there appears to be surprisingly little scholarship on Free To Be...You and Me.  There's a good chapter on it by Leslie Paris in the Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (2011).  And Lori Rotskof and Laura L. Lovett have edited a collection of essays on Free To Be entitled When We Were Free To Be: Looking Back on a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made, which was published by UNC Press last month (and which, I should add, I haven't had a chance to look at).

The relative lack of attention is surprising for at least two reasons, the first of which is probably obvious to those of you who were born in the Sixties or Seventies.  Free To Be...You and Me, first as an album and later as a book and tv special (both of which followed about a year-and-a-half later in early 1974), was a major part of early-to-mid 1970s children's culture. The album sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The book was a best-seller and a winner of an American Library Association Award.  The TV special won an Emmy and a Peabody.*  The songs, stories, poems, and skits associated with Free To Be in its various incarnations have since become major objects of nostalgia for many in my generation. It was one of the first CDs that my wife and I bought our kids, as much a necessary import from our childhoods as Where the Wild Things Are or Goodnight Moon.

The second reason for my surprise for the relative lack of scholarly attention given to Free To Be is of more particular interest to readers of this blog.




As the historiography of the U.S. in the  last third of the twentieth century has ballooned in recent years, one common, emerging narrative thread is the notion that the left won the "culture wars," while the right won the battle over political economy. Often, these two developments are seen as two sides of the same coin.  Indeed, in its strongest versions, there's a kind of dramatic irony to this tale: the right (or at least some major piece of it) is surprised that neoliberalism cannot serve as a bulwark for traditional values, as all that is solid melts to air before it (to steal one of Andrew's favorite phrases of Marx); but the left (or at least some major piece of it) is equally surprised to discover that racial, gender, and, most recently, sexual liberation does not undermine The System or create a world of greater economic egalitarianism.

Whether or not one accepts this as the big story of the end of the (first?) American Century (and I go back and forth as to whether or not I do), Free To Be...You and Me would seem to fit such a narrative fairly well.  It marked a moment in which the Seventies were emerging out of the Sixties and helped achieve a series of fairly significant cultural changes that still fell very much within the context of consumer capitalism.

The album, book, and tv show were the product of an extraordinary moment of second-wave feminist activism.  As Leslie Paris points out, during the first years of the 1970s, a number of feminist organizations set about studying the content of children's books. Their concerns grew out of a conviction that much sexism flows from what children are taught about gender roles. What they found was that children's books tended to feature many more boy protagonists than girl protagonists. And that the boy protagonists tended to be much more active in the world at large.  Girls sometimes started stories as "tom boys," but by the end they tended to adopt more "normal" female behavior patterns (a story type that feminist critics identified as "the cop-out").  While Marlo Thomas describes her conception of Free To Me...You and Me in much more personal terms (she was disturbed at the books that her niece was reading and unable to find better alternatives in the bookstore), in fact she was part of a larger movement. Indeed, Thomas was close friends with Gloria Steinem and Free To Be...You and Me was co-created by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, an editor at the still-young Ms. magazine, which had. by 1971, already become involved in the effort to publish "stories for free children."**   As a second-generation major television personality--her father was Make Room for Daddy star Danny Thomas and she had just had her own hit with That Girl-- Thomas was able to bring an amazing set of entertainment stars to the project, including Alan Alda, Harry Belafonte, Carol Channing, Mel Brooks, Diana Ross, Rosey Greer, Shirley Jones, and Tom Smothers.

In addition to being a quite successful intervention in children's culture, Free To Be was also part of the larger spread of feminism into the American mainstream. Two important things ought to be noted about this. First, many of the album's messages about gender roles and gender stereotypes were quite challenging in the early 1970s.  For examples, "William Wants a Doll," which appeared on the album, worried executives at ABC television because, according to Thomas, they feared that it "would turn every American boy into a homosexual." Thomas had to fight for its inclusion in the tv version of Free to Be.***

Secondly, as Leslie Paris notes, Free To Be is very much an example of liberal feminism. Its chief concern is fighting sexism and gender stereotypes. Its message is deeply individualistic; all children, boys and girls, should be whatever they want to be....and can be if they simply embrace their individuality. Though it suggests a kind of joyful racial and class egalitarianism, at its center is a traditional, heteronormative vision of the family.  "William Wants a Doll," emphasizes that William is, otherwise, "normal," and that his desire to have a doll is reasonable precisely because he may be a father someday.  Indeed, "William Wants a Doll" is  prominently mentioned, for just this reason, in the negative review that fran pollner gave the album in off our backs, arguably the single most important radical feminist journal.  "Nowhere are free and loving relations between two girls or two boys depicted," wrote pollner, who suggested that the album was aimed entirely at straight, middle-class women (and women-to-be).****

One might also note that absent from Free To Be...You and Me is any very clear sense of an antagonist, beyond sexist individuals.  One of the great goals of the Sixties' New Left had been, in Paul Potter's phrase, to "name the system;" Free To Be...You and Me doesn't even attempt to do this.  There's very little sense of what one might need to do, beyond consuming the album itself,  to achieve, in the words of its opening, title song, a land where "every boy...grows to be his own man" and "every girl grows to be her own woman."  Indeed, the song simply suggests "it ain't far to this land from where we are" and "the time's comin' near" when we'll achieve it.  Indeed, the entire album is almost relentlessly upbeat and nearly utopian in tone.*****   

We might, indeed, put Free To Be...You and Me in the broader context of the kind of hopeful, earnest liberalism regularly produced by the U.S. entertainment industry, from the social problem films of the Thirties and Forties, through the Fifties and Sixties films of Stanley Kramer, to the sitcoms of Norman Lear in the 1970s and The Cosby Show in the 1980s.  What was new, however, with Free To Be, was its feminism and its focus on very young children.

Over the course of the 1970s, the kind of anti-stereotyping message that was found in Free to Be became quite common in American children's culture. You might remember, for example, this PSA produced by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Carter years:

Throughout my years in elementary school in the Seventies, I remember being taught that sexism and racism were evils, and that they were caused by "prejudice" and "ignorance."  Where prejudice and ignorance came from was never made very clear.  And the implication was that knowledge itself could cure prejudice and ignorance, which made the stubborn persistence of prejudice, ignorance, sexism, and racism somewhat mysterious.  All of my peers certainly heard NFL star Rosey Greer sing "It's Alright to Cry," but as an occasionally emotionally fragile young boy, I knew damn well from personal experience that, in fact, it was not socially alright to do so. 

It's interesting to note that, following off our back's initial negative review, Free To Be...You And Me showed up over the next several decades in its pages as an object of bitter-sweet nostalgia, a key feminist text of the early Seventies that was nonetheless inadequate.  "We knew there was more to being lesbians than playing 'Free to Be You and Me' at three a.m.," wrote Sally Sheklow in a 2003 article, "but we didn't know what to do."******

More pointedly, Marilyn Webb, one of off our back's founders, tallied up the successes and failures from the vantage point of 2005:

When my daughter was born, her generation was socialized as we never were. They were supposed to be tiny feminist soldiers in training, raised on Free to Be You and Me and expected to move right through that glass ceiling. All the while, they were also supposed to understand the treachery of American arrogance and global capitalism. But today we have George W. Bush, not socialism, Condoleeza Rice, and repeated attacks against legalized abortion, national health and childcare, and the planned destruction of Medicare, whose benefits are proportionally greater for older women since we live longer than men. Yes, we opened female doors: to Little League, to medical and law offices, and to the U.S. Senate. But most American women still have to work--as I did, by the way--and still not for equal pay. And all but the rich still also have only shaky options for childcare.*******

It's somehow fitting that, two years ago, the album's title song, shorn of any transformational political message whatsoever, was very effectively used in a back-to-school Target commercial.  Whatever else Free To Be...You and Me accomplished (and I think it accomplished a fair bit that was good), it can still very effectively be used to move product, especially to the generation that initially consumed it.

[UPDATE 12/11: I realize that I had forgotten to add a citation for the pollner review of Free To Be when I originally posted this yesterday.  I've just done so.]

_________________________________________
* Leslie Paris, "Happily Ever After: Free To Be...You and Me, Second-Wave Feminism, and 1970s Children's Culture" in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature (Oxford, 2011), 520.

** On "Stories for Free Children," see Margaret B. McDowell, "New Didacticism: Stories for Free Children," Language Arts, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan. 1977), 41-47, 85.

*** Paris, 531.

**** fran pollner, "free to be...," off our backs, Vol. 3, No. 6 (February/March 1973), 19.

***** Lest you think I'm being unfair asking a children's book to be anything but relentlessly upbeat, let alone to suggest a systemic, political antagonist, compare Free To Be...You and Me to Dr. Seuss's 1971 environmental classic, The Lorax.

****** Sally Sheklow, "Blast from the Past," off our backs, Vol. 33, No. 5/6 (May-June 2003), 32.

******* Marilyn Webb, "Giving Birth and Birthing off our backs: one of the founding mothers of oob talks about motherhood then and now," off our backs, Vol. 35, No. 5/6 (May-June 2005), 23

Walter Williams: Free Market Morality

Via Astute Bloggers:

“You Can’t Say That”: A Reply to Michael Fisher

Author: James Livingston

[Editor's note: Here is Fisher's original review. - TL]

I

Since I started writing Against Thrift in 2009, the typical response from my liberal and left-wing colleagues has been “You can’t say that!” I’ve heard it a hundred times by now. They mean it. They assume that consumer culture is, at best, the place where bad taste, bad faith, and bad manners rule with the permission of advertising—it’s redeemable only by recourse to the suspicious methods of cultural studies—and is, at worst, the place where conscience, commitment, and even common sense go to die. When I was a fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library three years ago, one of my colleagues responded to the description of the project by saying, with no trace of irony or humor, “You’re the Devil.”

The book has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, but not in the New York Times or The New Republic. It’s been reviewed in Bloomberg Business Week, but not in Dissent, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, or The Nation. Meanwhile I’ve written book-related op-eds for mainstream publications like Wired, the LA Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and been interviewed by NPR stations from San Francisco to New York. The last radio interview I did, however, was with John Batchelor at WABC, where his talk show colleagues include Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

How to account for this discrepancy? Is it a clear Left/Right divide, or just a difference between academic and middlebrow discourse? My argument on behalf of consumer culture makes no sense in the absence of my argument for a redistribution of income and a socialization of investment—and vice versa. Conservatives like John Batchelor and Leftists like Sasha Lilley at KPFA/San Francisco have grasped the connection between these arguments, and have responded with reasoned aplomb rather than astonishment. So the question becomes, Why is the liberal, academic Left so uniform in its views of consumption that its reflexive response to my defense of consumer culture is exasperation and dismissal (“You can’t say that!”), if not horror and disgust (“You’re the Devil”)?

You could say it’s a trade book with an incendiary title, so what’d you expect? Of course the middlebrow radio stations and the mainstream newspapers would pay attention—they need as much “provocative” content as they can get to attract listeners and readers—but you can’t expect serious journalists, intellectuals, and academics, typically liberals who are necessarily suspicious of finance capital, to entertain an argument that takes the universalization of exchange value (a.k.a. commodity fetishism) for granted, and that meanwhile treats advertising as the last utopian idiom of our time.

In these serious parts, it goes without saying that commodities are the enemy of the spirit; that consumer culture privatizes our experience and infantilizes our desires, thus precluding local community as well as progressive political action, not to mention the salvation of our souls; that advertising, the advocate of mindless consumption and the enemy of plain speech, puts everything up for sale, including our very souls; and that consumerism is clearly the most dangerous threat to the environment.

II

Actually, it doesn’t go without saying, and that fact raises a different question: why do we need to keep repeating ourselves? The same thing gets said over and over, as if hundreds of clerics were transcribing one master text—as if the critique of consumer culture is a reaction formation that has finally become a repetition compulsion. From Max Horkheimer to Paul Goodman, from David Riesman to David Potter, from Stuart Ewen to Juliet Schor, from Benjamin Barber to Jackson Lears, from James A. Roberts (an earnest marketing professor) to Kalle Lasn (the editor of Adbusters and a crucial inspiration of Occupy Wall Street), and—while we’re at it—from Robert Samuelson to David Brooks, the refrain never changes. It goes like this: Americans are the pliant products of a social pathology specific to the extremity of capitalism; they’re the willing subjects and the passive objects of a consumer culture induced by advertising and enabled by debt.

Like Christopher Lasch, who claimed thirty years ago that consumerism was the material condition of what he named the culture of narcissism—it was no longer an occasional personality disorder—these writers repeat the refrain because they assume it’s self-evident. Barber, for example, knows that his readers are already familiar with the master text, and so he never bothers to make an argument in Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007); instead, he reintroduces Lasch to an audience that might have forgotten him and proceeds directly to the requisite hyperbole: “Lasch’s account of narcissism resonates with much of what I will portray as the new capitalist ethos of infantilism. The ethos animating postmodern consumer capitalism is one of joyless compulsiveness. The modern consumer is no free-will sybarite, but a compulsory shopper driven to consumption because [sic] the future of capitalism depends on it. He is less the happy sensualist than the compulsive masturbator, a reluctant addict working at himself with little pleasure, encouraged in his labor by an ethic [not ethos?] of infantilization that releases him to a self-indulgence he cannot altogether welcome.” (51)

Sound familiar? Of course it does. Benjamin Barber, a political theorist by training, holds an endowed chair at the University of Maryland, and, according to the flap copy on his book, he “consults with political and civic leaders throughout the world on democratization, citizenship, culture, and education.” James A. Roberts is a professor of marketing at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; he’s not a communitarian critic of capitalism, and he’s never been to Camp David. But in a new book called Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy (2011), he explains the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic goods, cites Jean-Paul Sartre on the meaning of life—I am not making this up—and then reproduces Barber’s boisterous critique of consumer culture in prose that would put a ferret to sleep: “Compulsive buyers are preoccupied with the importance of money as a solution to problems and as a means of comparison. Like status consumers, they make purchases in an attempt to bring into balance the discrepancy between their identity and the lifestyle projected by various products. . . .But as compulsive buying becomes more severe in an individual, and more prevalent in our society, it causes serious personal, interpersonal, and social problems.” (102-3)

Is this strangled prose a kind of plagiarism? If I were grading Roberts, I’d have to consult my university’s guidelines under the heading of “permissible paraphrase.” But then I’d have to bet on a source, and what could I exclude from the database? Barber, a likely source, isn’t the author of the master text—his renunciation of argument is evidence of his own borrowing—he’s just another cleric with a pornographic imagination and a strong prose style. But if it’s not plagiarism, what is it, what do we call this borrowing? Is Barber’s purple prose convincing because it works at the level of rhetoric, where close observance of the conventions, speaking of pornography, permits but also requires the occasional flourish, that moment when the argument is completed not by reference to evidence but by the athletic effect of a perfect metaphor or a quick cut?

These plaintive questions, which I ask without irony, boil down to just one. Why do we—academics, journalists, artists, intellectuals, writers, editors, readers—take the master text for granted, so that the typical response to my argument on behalf of consumer culture is, “You can’t say that”?

III

Michael Fisher makes the question quite poignant in his smart, funny, and friendly review of my book. He has of course borrowed from the master text transcribed by Barber, Roberts, et al., knowing that the original was written, once upon a time, by high-brow fugitives from mass culture and learned critics of its industrial apparatus. But he has tried to translate that text, to transpose it into a new key, where we might read and listen differently. He’s not just reiterating; he’s riffing.

Fisher deftly summarizes the economic argument of Against Thrift, and, like most of the comrades on the Left who favor the idea of redistribution in the name of equality, he finds it convincing. But, again like most of the comrades, he labels it “hard-boiled” and “descriptive,” as in dispassionate and reportorial—as if my disagreements with every other explanation of the Great Recession are unimportant, as if I hadn’t chosen to argue against the conventional wisdom on the role of consumption in economic growth, as if my description of the current crisis (or any other description, for that matter) is not already an analysis with an accompanying policy agenda.

Fisher then makes a slow turn, from what he calls my “descriptive argument for why consumer culture is good for us” to what he calls the “normative argument.” At this point, the equally ancient distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods makes a timely appearance, and it hereafter serves as sturdy rhetorical protection against the intellectual intrusions that follow. At the gates of hell, these metaphysical niceties have always served as prayerful homilies: when nothing else abides and your soul is at stake, you can always console yourself by writing a footnote to Plato. Ask P. G. Wodehouse.

“Thankfully, Livingston is not one to shy away from ambitious intellectual tasks (he likens himself to Galileo early in the book). In ‘Part Two: The Morality of Spending,’ he unveils his normative argument for consumer culture’s goodness, this time with respect to our souls, and tries to re-designate consumption, instant gratification, and instinctual satisfaction as intrinsic moral goods.”

Or do I? Is my language a “subtle pragmatist’s trick”? It is true, I have no patience for metaphysics. I’m a pragmatist through and through, and so I don’t see how any description of any phenomenon excludes or postpones a normative argument—that is, an actionable attitude toward the object of knowledge. I also don’t see how a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic goods holds up under the condition we call modernity, or post-modernity, when the universalization of exchange value (“reification”) is complete. But I do show that it is only in the neighborhood of consumer culture—at our leisure, after hours and at play—that we learn to treat each other as ends in themselves rather than means to the ends of our incomes or careers. In this sense, I show that what comes of buying, using, and sharing goods is better for us than what comes of producing goods under the sign of alienated labor. It beats working.

Instant gratification or instinctual satisfaction—and how, pray tell, would we gain access to our instincts?—can’t be an “intrinsic moral good” in these terms, and I never claimed either was such a good, because we can’t know anything’s value, moral or otherwise, except in retrospect, as a moment in an unfolding semiotic sequence. In other words, value, moral or otherwise, is like truth: neither can be known until exchanged, unless represented. Here is how William James put the proposition: “Day follows day, and it contents are simply added. They are not themselves true, they simply come and are. The truth is what we say about them.”

And yes, it is true, I suggested in the introduction to the book that Galileo was my hero because he wasn’t a deep thinker, just a radical empiricist looking to demonstrate the new facts made visible by his telescope. It was my clumsy way of choosing history over theory. I said that “the telescope at my disposal compresses time rather than space,” and hoped readers would, as a result, understand the obvious limits of the project rather than attribute inordinate ambitions to its author. But I now want to make those ambitions clear, because no review of the book, including Fisher’s, and no interview about it, not even at Pacifica Radio, has yet revealed the scope or the implications of the argument.

IV

I wrote this book in the hope of allowing us to see that consumption is the proper goal and the necessary limit of production. When it has been or becomes this goal and limit, the use values that consumers want can contain—not displace—the pursuit of exchange value, of wealth in the abstract. Money and credit, accordingly, can become means of exchange, not ends in themselves: the formula for capital (M-C-M*) can then give way to something like simple commodity circulation (C-M-C), something closer to the archaic yet real and pleasurable circuits of gift economies.

This seemingly utopian urge—this hope of mine—is actually validated by the measurable trends of recent economic history, the last hundred years of development. We can make consumption the goal and the limit of production. But to do so, to accept and act on my economic argument, is to interrogate what we mean by “character.’ The structure of our moral personalities is at risk in that interrogation, because the realization of desire we call “spending” and the deferral of gratification we call “saving” are both emotional achievements and material accomplishments. Max Weber and Sigmund Freud understood this social-psychological congruence, and tried, accordingly, to itemize the historical conditions of an ascetic or anal-compulsive character type that could systematically and happily abstain from the pleasures of the world. On the wings of the Owl of Minerva, they were explaining the Cartesian ego at the very moment of its dissolution.

It’s time that we followed their example—it’s time that we tried to itemize the historical conditions of new character types and the moral (not to mention political) horizons that become visible from their standpoint. But how? My procedure in Against Thrift was to begin with the economic history of the last hundred years as an indispensable preface to a defense of consumer spending and consumer culture. Redistribution was the least of my goals—it was just the first step, I thought, toward the imagination of a moral universe in which repression, denial, and delay of gratification are no longer the foundation of the social-psychological structure we recognize as “character,” and, consequently, in which any fixed boundary between inner self and outer world (the central conceit of modernity, according to Nietzsche) is erased.

So let me retrace my steps.

Private investment out of profits is an unimportant source of growth, and so the pursuit of profit as such is, as Keynes put it in 1930, a “somewhat disgusting morbidity.” It follows that the forced savings or deferred consumer choices that corporate retained earnings represent are worse than pointless, they’re destructive. It also follows that we don’t need to keep decisions about our future in the hands of those who think that the bottom line is a larger sum of exchange value—rewarding CEOS and traders with lower taxes and higher profits is a recipe for economic and moral disaster.

Let me put it as plainly as I can. The members of the investing class—we used to call them capitalists—are now as superfluous and superannuated as the European landed nobility had become by the late 18th century. They’re good for deep background, baroque settings, and self-parody if you want to write a novel or make a movie about a civilization that has already expired. Otherwise they don’t matter. Otherwise we need to get on with a future that excludes them except as public servants, as “humble, competent people, on a level with dentists,” according to the Keynesian designation of economists. We begin by redistributing income away from the 1%, toward the 99%.

What then?

We socialize investment because we need to—because we need to redefine profit to include the social consequences (the “externalities”) of investment, including the environmental consequences, and because the pattern of economic growth can no longer be determined by the insatiable needs of those who honestly believe that more money in the bank is the purpose of life and the insignia of success. That means we take responsibility for the future, or rather that we stop sacrificing the possibilities and pleasures of the present to a future held ransom by our own deference to an archaic economic model and an outmoded character type.

It means that we stop saving for a rainy day, and stop assuming that the inner-directed, anal-compulsive character is normal and, dare I say, normative.

Notice that our obligation to future generations is enlarged, not diminished, by this commitment to, and in, the present. But notice, too, that when we stop saving for a rainy day because we can, we have already begun to reconstruct our “character” in ways that move us beyond inner-direction and anal compulsion. In this sense, we have already begun to move beyond Protestant Christianity—that old work ethic—as the “deepest moral resource” of our everyday lives. So yes, of course, we have already begun to redefine individualism, the very nature of our selves, as soon as we ask who and what we’re saving for.

V

That’s what Against Thrift is about, this ongoing, incomplete, still inarticulate movement toward a new moral universe made navigable by the passage beyond what Marx and Marcuse called the realm of necessity, where hard work and emotional sacrifice add up to the cause of character and the price of civilization. Either way, in retrospect or prospect, it’s not a pretty picture—the future I sketch looks like hell itself according to Michael Fisher—but either way, we don’t have much of a choice in the matter. We can treat the differences between these pictures as moral possibilities that are real historical events and thus empirical problems, or we can continue to copy from the master text, which simply denies that consumer culture contains any possibility worth contemplating.

Fisher is of course correct to suggest that I am uninterested in “lasting salvation”—who except a dead man can tell us what that means?—and to label Christian faith as the moral adhesive of the civil rights movement. But I would insist that my godless project is in keeping with the social origins and import of this faith, indeed that it aims to complete what religion (and, in its own fashion, advertising) can only attempt. In the beginning, the criterion of need—from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs—regulated the disposition of the church’s economic, emotional, and doctrinal resources: you were your brother’s keeper, so charity wasn’t a choice. But as the church became a going concern in the post-republican, Hellenic world, the criterion of need became politically problematic. In the absence of ways to deliver the goods to everyone—in a world dominated by disease, hunger, and poverty—this criterion became local or eschatological, either the creed of communities that had withdrawn from the larger society, or, what is practically the same thing, the ideological correlate of faith in an impending apocalypse.

We still inhabit a world dominated by disease, hunger, and poverty. But withdrawal is not an option, not anymore, because we know how to deliver the goods to everyone: we know that scarcity, whether economic or emotional, is socially contrived and culturally enforced. We’ve long since solved the problem of production; we haven’t even begun with the problem of consumption because we’re so afraid of what it will cost us in the currencies that underwrite our “character.” We can finally afford to be our brother’s keeper—we can live by the ancient criterion of need, and, in doing so, we can live up to the original challenge of Christianity. We don’t yet know how because we’re still too afraid of the material abundance that enables consumer culture.

My purpose in writing Against Thrift was to lay these fears to rest—or rather to explain them, to myself among other adults made anxious by the extremities of very late capitalism. Michael Fisher understands that, I think, because he has refused to merely reiterate the master text that has allowed so many smart people to say the same thing about consumer culture without thinking, and without evidence. He never falls back into the parental moment when “You can’t say that” sounds like the appropriate response to bad taste, bad faith, or bad manners. Still, his review would suggest that I have only inflamed our fears of the future. That makes me nervous.

Occupy Wall Street: The Culture Wars of the “New Class”?

In January of 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, I gave my first public talk on the culture wars, research that was relatively new to me at that stage. In the talk, I discussed the politics of higher education in the 1990s through the lens of conservatives like Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, and Lynne Cheney. In the Q&A that followed, an audience member whom I will call Liberal Academic Superstar asked me some version of the following question: “In light of Obama’s historic victory, which ushers in a new era of liberalism, and in light of the financial meltdown, which ushers in new intellectual priorities, isn’t all this talk about conservatives and culture wars quaint, even outdated?” Flabbergasted, my response was something to the following effect: “Just wait.”

At the time, I believed Liberal Academic Superstar’s question was incredibly stupid. I still do, and my guess is that if Liberal Academic Superstar could actually be persuaded that he or she in fact asked that incredibly stupid question, say, if he or she was caught on video and made to watch his or her performance, then Liberal Academic Superstar would be quite embarrassed, given all that has since transpired. And yet, despite its stupidity, I have given a great deal of thought to that question. So, if nothing else, it was a productive question and I am glad to have been asked it. (Granting him or her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this was Liberal Academic Superstar’s purpose? Na…) It has forced me to think about what has changed since the heyday of the culture wars (the early 1990s), and what remains of the culture wars. It has given me time to reflect on the “Passover Question”: Why are the culture wars important as a topic of historical research? I had assumed their importance went without saying. But nothing that serves as the subject of a book, especially a history book, should go without saying.

Conservative reactions to the Obama presidency and the economic crisis brought discussion of the culture wars back into fashion. The Birthers and the Tea Party screamed, “don’t forget about us culture warriors,” even if the coordinates of the Obama-era culture wars did not map neatly onto the Reagan- or Clinton-era culture wars. But I want to argue that another phenomenon, even more recent, and from the opposite end of the political spectrum, can also be understood through the lens of the culture wars. Or, at least, the culture wars help us understand the varied responses to the phenomenon. I’m talking, of course, about the riveting and important Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS).

A few weeks ago, ubiquitous blogger Matthew Yglesias wrote a short post, titled, “The Economy as Culture War,” where, in tantalizingly brief fashion, he made the case that “economic policy debate in the United States is in part just another culture war issue.” On the one hand, Yglesias contends that a genuine clash of economic interests drives the divide between the private-sector business class and the public-sector knowledge class. He describes this as “a kind of bitter feud between businessmen and the kids they went to college with who didn’t go on to become businessmen. What did they do instead? They became teachers or doctors or nurses or professors or lawyers or scientists or nonprofit workers. And they fight with each other in part because of genuine economic clashes of interest. The businessmen tend to be targeted for tax hikes, while the people they went to college with tend to actually capture some of the public sector expenditure streams.”

But on the other hand, Yglesias qualifies his analysis of the economics behind the clash that is driving OWS with the type of insight that is often used to explain the culture wars. He argues that if either side were objective in their pursuit of rational economic interests, they would realize that a healthy economy needs both profit and non-profit enterprises. But people tend to be irrational: “Layered on top [of rational economic interest politics], I think, is a raw gut-level dislike — both kinds of people think the other kind of people are clueless about what really matters in life.” “The business coalition sees the service coalition as composed of useless moochers, and the service coalition sees the business coalition as greedy bastards.” So Yglesias is extrapolating from the Thomas Frank “what’s the matter with Kansas” model of understanding the culture wars. Frank’s well known thesis, oft critiqued, goes as follows: cultural or religious conservatives often voted against their own economic interests due to their irrational obsession with the culture wars, to which Republican politicians cynically lent rhetorical support as they attended to more important matters, such as rewriting the tax codes in favor of the economic royalists. To his credit, Yglesias does not merely think conservatives are irrational. He seems to be painting everyone involved in the great economic debates as somewhat irrational. But more to my point, the reason Yglesias seems to think economic debates play out in culture war terms is because they emit elements of the irrational. Culture wars equals irrational.

Beyond trading on recent punditry tropes, Yglesias’s understanding of the culture wars, whether he knows it or not, also echoes the “new class” analysis innovated for a post-1960s American context by early neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Midge Decter, among many others. Moynihan first used the term “new class” in writing about the “education lobby” in a 1972 Public Interest article (prefiguring Yglesias): “The social legislation of the middle third of the century created ‘social space’ for a new class whose privilege (or obligation) it is to disperse services to populations that are in various ways wards of the state.” Similarly, take notice of the following long quotes from an Irving Kristol article, titled, “Business and ‘the New Class’,” published in the Wall Street Journal in 1975:

What is commonly called a “bias” or an “animus” against business is really a byproduct of larger purposiveness. There are people “out there” who find it convenient to believe the worst about business because they have certain adverse intentions toward the business community to begin with… These people constitute what one may simply call, for lack of a better name “the new class.”

This “new class” is not easily defined but may be vaguely described. It consists of a goodly portion of those college educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a “post-industrial society (to use Daniel Bell’s convenient term)… It is, by now, a quite numerous class; it is an indispensable class for our kind of society; it is a disproportionately powerful class; it is also an ambitious and frustrated class.

The “new class”—intelligent, educated, energetic—has little respect for such a commonplace (business) civilization. It wishes to see its “ideals” more effectual than the market is likely to permit them to be. And so it tries always to supersede economics by politics—an activity in which it is most competent, since it has the talents and the implicit authority to shape public opinion on all larger issues.

Based on a reading of Kristol, it’s clear that some early neoconservative “new class” thought was strictly a way to express anti-anti-capitalism. It was obliquely in this context that Lewis Powell wrote his infamous 1971 memo where he argued that the business class must meet the threat posed by anti-capitalist academics on their terms, by creating a sort of counter-academy under the auspices of the Chamber of Commerce, which “should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system.” I trace Yglesias’s characterization of the contemporary clash between the businessman and his critic—both of which display a “gut-level dislike” for the other—to this mode of “new class” analysis.

But most “new class” thought extended far beyond an analysis of any particular clash of economic interests. Much of it was rooted in Lionel Trilling’s famous examination of an “adversary culture,” mostly about avant-garde modernists—the lens through which the neocons read the 1960s. A private memorandum written by Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified how “new class” thought was shaping the coming culture wars, as refracted through the 1960s: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.” Nixon lapped up this type of rhetoric because he saw himself as the leader of the silent majority that stood toe-to-toe with 1960s adversarial types. The neocons saw Nixon in this light as well, which explained why a Democrat like Moynihan saw fit to work for him. As Podhoretz wrote (not long after Watergate, no less): “The 1960s ended… not with a revolution but with the election of Richard Nixon: Richard Nixon, who better than any single figure in American public life seemed to epitomize everything in opposition to which the adversary culture had always defined itself.”

Midge Decter nicely captured the 1960s “adversary culture” of the neoconservative imagination in her harsh 1972 rebuke of feminism, The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation. Decter argued that women had it better than ever, for example, in their newfound abilities to secure gainful employment and control pregnancy through birth control. And yet, even with such advances, or perhaps because of them, the “women’s liberation” movement objected that women were subjected to patriarchal strictures. Decter contended that women feared their newfound freedoms, because with such new freedoms came new responsibilities. For instance, if women were going to enter the workplace like men, then they had to be prepared to compete alongside men in a dog-eat-dog world that men had long grown accustomed to. In short, Decter believed that feminists wanted to shirk the responsibilities of living in capitalist America. They were adversarial to the discipline enshrined in American traditions, such as the Protestant work ethic that the mostly Jewish neoconservatives came to adore.

The importance of work ethic, Protestant or otherwise, informed neoconservative new class thinking. In this, neoconservatives led the conservative movement more generally to the type of colorblind rhetoric of individual merit that now shapes its discourse. For example, Podhoretz claimed that the new class was anti-liberal because it supported quotas to its favored groups as opposed to equality of opportunity. This “could be understood, then, as an extension into concrete social policy of the adversary culture’s assault on the ‘Protestant ethic.’” Similarly, Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian and big fan of Victorian-era values, wrote: “In its denigration of ‘bourgeois values’ and the ‘Puritan ethic,’ the new class has legitimized, as it were, the values of the underclass and illegitimized those of the working class, who are still committed to bourgeois values, the Puritan ethic, and other such benighted ideas.” Alarm over the death of the Protestant work ethic is not merely leveled against the baby boomers who violently rejected society in the 1960s. Now, the so-called millennial generation seems not to have the proper attitude towards work. Hillary Clinton’s words on the matter, as Bhaskar Sunkara writes in his generational analysis of OWS, “could have been ripped out of National Review”: “A lot of kids don’t know what work is. They think work is a four-letter word. … We’ve got to send a different message to our young people. America didn’t happen by accident. A lot of people worked really hard. They’ve got to do their part too.”

The most common conservative argument made against OWS is that the protestors are lazy, elitist ingrates who want to blame their own deficiencies on Wall Street and are looking for a government handout because they fear the responsibilities that accompany freedom. This is the argument that informs the message-based images against the movement that have gone viral (in an appropriation of a popular movement tactic). Take for instance the 53% guy (pictured just below) who advises OWS protestors to “suck it up you whiners.” His incredible sacrifices show that with grit and determination anyone in America can, well, stay afloat, without so much as health insurance, and without whining. In this he continues the fight taken up by the neocons, who vehemently defended American intellectual and political traditions, such as the colorblind rhetoric of equal opportunity, which they believed had served them well. Most neoconservatives were from Jewish immigrant families and felt the sting of discrimination growing up. Yet, such biographical barriers did not inhibit them from “making it,” as Podhoretz titled his 1967 memoir. In this context, the wide-ranging demands made by rowdy campus protestors on campuses across the country in the 1960s, such as for affirmative action, struck the neoconservatives as brazenly anti-American. Many view the OWS protestors through the same lens. This is a culture wars lens, even if not precisely in the way Yglesias maintains.

Although Yglesias probably thinks conflating economic debate with the culture wars is a way of not being an economic determinist, he is repeating the vulgar determinism of Thomas Frank by maintaining that people who don’t act in their obvious economic interests, people who act on “gut” instincts, or worse, in identity-based ways, are irrational. To argue, as I do, that the culture wars were not epiphenomenal, is not to deny the importance of economics, but rather, to point to what Marx called a “social formation” (analyzed with much skill recently by David Harvey), where culture, ideas, and economics interact in complex and unpredictable ways. As large historical forces, such as the deindustrialization of the economy that disempowered labor unions while empowering those who worked in the information economy, shaped the culture wars, the culture wars in turn reshaped the social formation in dialectical fashion. The tribal clashes that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, as brilliantly told by Village Voice journalist Paul Cowan—whose excellent 1979 collection of essays, The Tribes of America, was recently re-released with an introduction by Rick Perlstein—polarized into two great camps by the 1980s and 1990s: James Davison Hunter’s “secular-progressives” and “orthodox-traditionalists.” Even those who sought to transcend the culture wars, for example Christopher Lasch, whose work often defended traditionalism as a means to ward of the evils of capitalism, were sucked into the culture wars vortex, as feminists like Susan Faludi lumped Lasch with anti-feminists like George Gilder. As part of this polarization process, cultural conservatives or traditionalists often came around to conservative economic or anti-statist positions that would have shocked their forebears. As Leo Ribuffo shows, pro-family activists in the early twentieth century most often blamed the market for disrupting traditional life. But by the 1970s, the state was to blame, situating the Christian Right smack dab in a Republican coalition that sought to dismantle the New Deal Order.

As Robert Putnam and David Campbell argue by way of sociological analysis of poll data, in their new book American Grace, religious and political positioning are more inextricable than ever. Whereas the degree to which a person was religious in the 1950s had little bearing on whether they identified as Democrat or Republican, today it matters greatly, as the more religious someone is the more likely they are to vote Republican. Conversely, people who are conservative but not religious gravitate towards religion because they find likeminded people in churches. And the same goes for liberals who are quitting church, or atheists who are quitting the Republican Party. This polarization is a microcosm of the culture wars.

The polarization of the culture wars, I suggest, helps us to understand the response to OWS, or perhaps more compellingly, the differences between the Tea Party and OWS, both of which were nominally anti-Wall Street. The popularity of the Tea Party could initially be partly explained by the antipathy to the Wall Street bailouts. But the Tea Party became a political force more as a conglomerate of conservative positions that tended towards austerity—towards the notion that the state could not help us out of this mess, that if anything it would make matters worse. Furthermore, the Tea Party’s anti-tax messages evinced opposition to laziness and government handouts, the sort of anti-“loser” rhetoric that fired up the traders who surrounded Rick Santelli when he lashed out at a plan to relieve foreclosed upon homeowners. Polarization also shapes the style or aesthetics of the two movements, as James Livingston has been arguing about OWS in several compelling blog posts. Tea Party activists dressed up as 18th century patriots and often talked as much about God and Country as about Taxes. OWS activists look like hippies, smoke weed, and often talk as much about the spiritual evils of consumerism as they do about anti-austerity. Style, identity, and culture: these things seem to matter to both sides as much as politics (which is not to argue that these things can replace politics, if reform or revolution be the goals). Style, identity, and culture: these things are as polarized as politics. This is the legacy of the culture wars that helps shape our understanding of the great debate taking place right now.

David Harvey’s “Mental Conceptions”

Yesterday, I finished writing up my comments on Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, which I will present at our conference in November. This was a difficult review for me to write because there are so many things about the book that sparked my intellectual curiosity. I settled on examining the epistemology implied by the book, in part because, though we’ve done a great deal of speculating about it here (see for example David Sehat’s posts on whether Rodgers is Rortyian here and here and here), none of the formal reviews have addressed Rodgers’s theoretical underpinnings to my satisfaction. I also rested my review on epistemology because, as regular readers of this blog have no doubt noticed, I am always thinking about it in relation to history and historiography.

This is not to say that my epistemological influences or interests are necessarily well rounded. As our frequent gadfly Varad pointed out in a recent post, the theories of culture and power I focus on tend to run the gamut between Marxism and its derivatives. Fair enough. In my defense, this gamut seems large when I’m trying to decipher the differences between Marx and Derrida. But I admit this might be the narcissism of small differences. Oh, well, at the risk of beating a dead, narcissistic horse, today I continue my thread about theories of culture by returning to the subject of last week’s post: David Harvey, specifically, his latest book, The Enigma of Capital (which I find a deeply satisfying read).

In Chapter 5, “Capital Evolves,” Harvey pauses from his historical dissection of capitalism (by way of Marx’s Capital) to offer up a general theory of history (by way of, you guessed it, Marx’s Capital). I find this theory worth discussing because it makes sense to me, but also because it puts into clear words the nuanced sense of culture that Harvey displayed in his classic work, The Condition of Postmodernity. I also find it worth discussing because I think its an implicit structuralist response to those poststructuralists who only see base-superstructure determinism when they see Marxism.

Harvey argues that “cultural norms and belief systems (that is, religious and political ideologies) are powerfully present but do not exist independently of social relations…” Pretty standard stuff, and not far removed from Althusser or from Marx for that matter. Harvey calls these cultural norms and belief systems our “mental conceptions of the world,” one of seven “distinctive activity spheres” that comprise the historical development of capitalism. All seven in Harvey’s words:

1. Technologies and organizational forms
2. Social relations
3. Institutional and administrative arrangements
4. Production and labor processes
5. Relations to nature
6. The reproduction of daily life and the species
7. Mental conceptions of the world

This last “sphere” of course speaks most to intellectual historians. Harvey sees all of these spheres as mutually constitutive: no one sphere dominates even as none of them are independent. "Each sphere evolves on its own account but always in dynamic interaction with the others.” So though this is a structuralist account of historical change, in that a contrived mental conception like a metaphor cannot take on a life of its own apart from the other spheres, and although it’s “total” or even “totalizing” in its sense of a social formation, which postmodernists of the world have united against, it is not economically determinist in the “vulgar” sense that economics underlies all else. More from Harvey to give a sense of how he sees this at work:

Our mental conceptions of the world… are usually unstable, contested, subject to scientific discoveries as well as whims, fashions and passionately held cultural and religious beliefs and desires. Changes in mental conceptions have all manner of intended and unintended consequences for [the other activity spheres]…

Harvey argues that we should think about the interrelatedness of these spheres as we think about an ecosystem. Parts of the ecosystem can act seemingly independent of the rest, but have consequences for the whole by way of the dialectic processes of accommodation and resistance. “The complex flow of influence that move between the spheres are perpetually reshaping all of them.” In stable societies, these seven spheres roughly harmonize. In societies in flux or crisis, there are imbalances that shakedown in unpredictable ways.

In Harvey’s conclusion, he provocatively asks if this co-evolutionary theory of social change can be projected into a co-revolutionary theory of a break. He argues it can and it should. In fact, he maintains that past revolutionary projects failed in part because “they fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different activity spheres in motion and also failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and uncertainties in the dialectal movement between the spheres. Capitalism has survived precisely by keeping that dialectical movement going and by embracing the inevitable tensions, including crises, that result.”

Some might think this all too abstract or utopian. But I like the way, as a general theory of history, it allows for the importance of structure without being deterministic; and the way it allows for (mild) optimism while also calculating heavy constraints.

Crises of Capitalism

In this lecture put to animation by RSA Animate (one of several such brilliantly animated lectures done by RSA), David Harvey explains the economic crisis of 2008 in Marxist terms. This lecture is a synthesis of Harvey's 2010 book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, where he contends, among other things, that surplus capital generates problems that will turn into crises if not solved by innovations in capital accumulation. What is the basis of the current crisis? He writes:

Labour availability is no problem now for capital, and it has not been so for the last twenty-five years. But disempowered labour means low wages, and impoverished workers do not constitute a vibrant market. Persistent wage repression therefore poses the problem of lack of demand for the expanding output of capitalist corporations. One barrier to capital accumulation--the labor question--is overcome at the expense of creating another--lack of a market. So how could this second barrier be circumvented? The gap between what labour was earning and what it could spend was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness.

It hardly takes analytical imagination to understand how we got from there to the bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing collapse of the banking system that financed it. My point here is not to say that Harvey's analysis (in this specific example) is necessarily unique. That good Keynesian Jim Livingston made a similar argument about how inequality (Harvey's "wage repression") created systemic problems (still) in need of correction. Rather, I wanted to draw attention to Harvey's work more generally, and gauge the level of familiarity or interest. I think he's one of the more lucid Marxists around (which I realize is not a large sampling).

I first read Harvey in graduate school when I was assigned The Condition of Postmodernity, which I found a brilliant combination of history, analysis, and critique. Harvey gave a total reading to an age in which total readings had supposedly been obliterated. I then quickly read some of his other books, which were more geographic or spatial explorations of capital, and also his A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which has done more to form my thinking on that topic than anything else.

I am currently reading The Enigma of Capital with my graduate students. It's a required "philosophy of history and historiography" course, and Harvey falls in the week after Marx on the syllabus. I wanted to show the students how a Marxian analysis might still apply to their world. The combination of Marx then Harvey works really well--at least, I hope it does, I'll find out more when I meet with students tomorrow night--because nobody is more familiar with Marx's Capital than Harvey. He's been teaching that text for decades. You can take the course on-line now!

Harvey integrates actual analysis from Capital into his contemporary analysis of capitalism's crises in ways that I find very convincing, or at the very least, thought provoking. Check out how Harvey quotes Marx extensively to convince his reader that the current crisis is an intensification of past processes inherent to capitalism. Here he talks about what happens when faith in credit, which is necessary to maintaining the smooth flow of capital, breaks down (Marx called credit a Protestant thing, because of the need for faith):

From time to time, however, the expectations become so excessive and the financing so profligate as to give rise to a distinctive financial crisis within the financial system itself. Marx provides a brief description in Capital: 'The bourgeois [read Wall Street], drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. Commodities [read as safe as houses] alone are money,' he said. 'But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money [read liquidity] is a commodity. As the hart pants over fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis the antithesis between commodities and their value form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction.' In the depth of that contradiction, expectations become riddled with fear (neither houses nor the Bank of England appear as safe as they were once presumed to be) and the financing becomes far too meagre to to support further accumulation.

I think this nicely sums up what happened in 2008, when the value of houses crumbled alongside the exotic financial products tied to them. The Marx quote is poetic, too, but that's not surprising coming from the first great poet of capitalism.