PMC Commentary

To the left: Stop helping the right

Krugman asks:

[I]sn’t there something odd about the fact that businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment?

And he answers, Of course not.

[W]hy should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more.

Krugman's Q&A is performed in the honorable service of ridiculing the right's economic quackery about taxes and regulation as the cardinal restraints on business expansion and new hiring. Naturally, coming from the quackery factories of such riveting minds as Rick Perry's and Michele Bachmann's, this wholesale propaganda has convincingly flooded the shallow intellectual ponds of the GOP base and has more than a few independents under tides of delusional water, too.

This much we know, and Krugman is right to assail those Republican pols and their aiding and abetting "conservative policy intellectuals" who "are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation ... but bears no relationship to reality."

Yet it's not just Republican pols and conservative, ahem, intellectuals who are priming the pumps of mass delusion. To wit, I couldn't begin to count the number of progressive pols and fellow activists I've watched on cable shows, pounding the news desks in outrage about corporate America sitting idly on $2 trillion-plus, when it should be prying a crowbar into its overstuffed wallet to hire, hire, hire.     

Hire whom? To do, exactly, what? As Krugman (routinely) acknowledges, "what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back."

Corporate America and Western Christendom's new savior -- small business -- aren't charitable, fraternal, or patriotic organizations sweating out the spiritual welfare of our little Cities on the Hill. They are cold-blooded, bottom-line outfits who will hire new employees when and only when consumer demand dictates new hiring.

Hello? This is Econ 101. Hell, not even that. It's high-school "Introduction to Business"; it's middle-school "Primer on Logic," if there were such a thing, which there should be. And America's corporate fat cats, sitting high atop their mountainous $2 trillion in cash, are most assuredly laughing their corpulent but logical asses off at outraged progressives who demand they hire in the abject absence of demand.

The fundamental solution to unremitting economic sluggishness is, of course, government as the demander -- spender -- of last resort. But that's another Krugman column. In today's, I just wish he had at least mildly exposed the macroeconomic preposterousness of progressive outrage at corporate cash-hoarding, which is merely the microeconomic nature of the beast. Until the left rejects misplaced anger and diagnoses the problem properly, it's only abetting the right's silliness.

A blast from 1854

In 1854, the new Michigan Republican Party wrote nobly in its platform:

[I]n view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of republican government, and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will co-operate and be known as Republicans until the contest be terminated.

Given their 21st-century luminaries -- Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and a host of similar grovelers before the New Aristocracy -- shall we conclude the contest is terminated?

A personal update

Yesterday, nearly all day -- and absolutely all afternoon -- I was virtually incapacitated with grief.

Fetal, in bed, lights out, curtains drawn, Kleenex, agoraphobic, sedated. Then my 12-year-old daughter came home from school. I (practically) crawled to the dining room table, where together we sat down.

She shot me a look, like, "Papa, I need you. You can't do this. Mama is gone and goddamnit I need you. So slap yourself out of it, you self-absorbed ass, because I need you."

God how I love that child. Out of the mouths of babes and all that. Today I'm better. Today, anyway, I'm better -- thanks to her extraordinary strength and silent honesty.

The Tea Party: proving the Founders right

Gail Collins celebrates the fraud of modern American democracy:

[T]he current fiscal year ends this weekend.... Congress is on vacation. So in order to get us through the gap, the Senate passed yet another spending bill, this one to keep things running for four days.... It now goes to the House, where in one of those parliamentary thingies ... the bill is supposed to be passed on Thursday in an empty chamber.

If a single representative [i.e., Tea Partier] shows up and objects, the four-day funding bill is dead and the government shuts down this weekend. 

Ever lower, goes the bar.

The Founders, for whom the Tea Partiers protest their immense respect, questioned if a large republic could long survive, given its more expansive opportunities for breast-thumping demagogues, narrow-minded nitwits, and, in general, petty jackasses of all stripes. And now the Tea Partiers, whom the Founders would have simply protested, are proving them right. 

Indescribably offensive

This, from Gov. Christie last night, is indescribably offensive:

Now ... President Obama prepares to divide our nation to achieve re-election. This is not a leadership style, this is a re-election strategy. Telling those who are scared and struggling that the only way their lives can get better is to diminish the success of others. Trying to cynically convince those who are suffering that the American economic pie is no longer a growing one that can provide more prosperity for all who work hard. Insisting that we must tax and take and demonize those who have already achieved the American Dream. That may turn out to be a good re-election strategy for President Obama, but is a demoralizing message for America. What happened to State Senator Obama? When did he decide to become one of the "dividers" he spoke of so eloquently in 2004?

I mean it. I cannot even begin to describe the effrontery of Christie's struggling, cynical, demonizing and, in the end, demoralizing bullshit.

It simply leaves one speechless. For three years President Obama has been ruthlessly besieged by the most unethical, most disingenuous, most predatory, most divisive political opposition since the Old South's Slavocracy, and yet there can stand one of its leading lights to denounce Obama as the real "divider."

The Republican Party deserves Chris Christie, and Chris Christie deserves the Republican Party. Both are beyond description, in that both are indescribably offensive.  

Checking the patient charts

Updating oneself on the Republican presidential campaign first thing in the morning is like reading overnight patients charts at a psychiatric ward.

They said, did, what?

Really, and though today's reports are, in their own way, striking, they're also relatively mild ... considering.

Rick Perry, for instance, has just sailed through some of the roughest political weather a candidate has ever rained-danced on himself. His lead over Romney has been cut at least in half; he's proven himself -- for a white guy -- incredibly inarticulate; and he's quite literally (see "SNL") become a national joke. Hence, says his spokesman, "We’re not going to change what we’re doing." Good call.

Chris Christie, the leading non-candidate candidate, who succeeds leading non-candidate candidate Mitch Daniels, who succeeded leading non-candidate candidate Sarah Palin, "didn’t give a definitive yes or no to the people who came to hear a sold-out speech" at the Reagan Library. He did, however, say last night that we mustn't become "a country that places comfortable lies ahead of difficult truths." That the Republican audience cheered that line is a real puzzler, since it only suggested that Christie is thinking about leaving the GOP.  

Meanwhile, Dana Milbank, via the Daily Beast's reporting, reports on Herman Cain: " 'Some people want to say there’s still unhappiness with the field. That is bullfeathers!' The article noted that the candidate was drinking wine — in the morning." Well, hell, no wonder Cain can fire up a crowd; he himself is lit -- and wouldn't you be if you were running behind the likes of a Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry?

And I see there was another Palin tease, so called because in the GOP, being a non-candidate candidate is as good as being a candidate. "As for her own plans," reports Politico, "she gave no indication, acknowledging that 'for logistical reasons, decisions do have to be made. You have to get your ducks in order.' " This is called giving "no indication"? Palin is saner than the press.

I haven't tracked down the other patients' charts yet, but Newt Gingrich was ideating another Big Idea, no doubt; Rick Santorum was quivering with latent delight over beastly man-boy love associations; Ron Paul was reverentially drooling over the economic harmony of the 19th century; and Jon Huntsman was struggling to achieve 2 percent popularity. And Mitt Romney, I'm sure, simply sat in the corner, surveying the field and preening himself as Lord of the Ward.  

One doesn't know whether to be appalled or amused. That "wine -- in the morning" thing sounds like a pretty good and decisive remedy, though.

Good Will Huntsman

Finally, incontrovertible statistical evidence that the Republican Party is nuts:

CNN, which is hosting a [GOP presidential] debate in Las Vegas on Oct. 18, has ... said candidates must reach an average level of support of 2 percent in three separate polls by news organizations published since Sept. 1. [Jon] Huntsman has reached 2 percent in two polls, but has been at 1 percent in the rest.

If he doesn’t reach 2 percent in a third poll by Oct. 16, Mr. Huntsman will not be on the stage.

We probably shouldn't begrudge CNN its qualifying druthers. After all, it can't allow just anyone to debate on its stage for the world's most powerful office; for heaven's sake, such free-for-all liberality would only distract from Michele Bachmann's noted lucidity, or Herman Cain's love of Nines, or yet another of Newt Gingrich's fffffundamental lectures on the media's responsibilities, or Rick Perry's struggle with syntax.

On the other hand, CNN, in a daring effort to break out of its third-rated cable status, could decide to stage a debate among the party's actual conservatives, although that would mean Jon Huntsman, on stage, alone, for two hours.

The GOP's messiah ain't comin'

The Hill recaps the GOP's modus operandi:

It’s been the recurring theme in the race for the GOP presidential nomination: A candidate enters with a splash, then quickly fizzles, leaving Republicans clamoring for a new white knight to hurtle them into the White House.

This should not surprise. In any party that fancies itself a revolutionary party -- in the GOP's case, as a nihilistic hit squad whose ideological sights are set on the national tumors of the Great Society, the New Deal and, for all we know, the Pendleton Act -- such instant furies, disappointments, realignments and holy visions of fresher prophets are to be expected. For revolutionaries are not only an excitable bunch; they are highly competitive and even cannibalistic when it comes to the purity game.  

As political revolutions go, America's 18th-century standard was a tame and relatively conservative one. Nonetheless we witnessed neighbor against neighbor, aristocrat against aristocrat, most in the service of outdoing one another in revolutionary fervor. The French soon converted the American standard into an appalling bloodbath -- Pssst, did you hear about Citizen Ribbit's latest apostasy? -- which the Bolsheviks later eclipsed in crimson piety, the Chinese dwarfed in scope and scale, and the Cambodians reduced to unspeakable lows.  

The Republican Party's current ideological cleansing and internecine carnage are of course but Lilliputian comparisons to real revolutions, although, as noted, the party doesn't fancy itself that way, and neither does its fanatically symptomatic mania differ in theory and embryosis from the real thing. They are Robespierres, without Trotsky's brilliance. And they have yet to find their One.

So, as the The Hill observes, "[M]any Republicans are openly musing about if only [New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels would get in the race." Yet, plainly, each would face his or her own Bachmannesque or Perrylike fate.

Christie, for instance, would perhaps take another, more publicized swipe at the crazy Birthers. Goodbye Christie. Palin's oil-cash redistributionism would reemerge as the gubernatorial socialism it was. Goodbye Palin. And Daniels might again suggest the worst possible crime: that conservatives should be polite. Goodbye, so long, it'd be curtains for Daniels. 

In short, the intraparty slaughter has to stop somewhere, sometime. At some point Republicans are going to have to hold their noses and nominate at least a class-D ideological felon. I think we all know who that is. What hurts Republicans most is that they know and detest him more than the rest of us.

Label conflation

Today, E.J. Dionne reissues the fundamentally conservative case for what has passed for the liberal case against the death penalty:

Don Heller, who wrote the 1978 ballot initiative that reinstated the death penalty in California, explained in the Los Angeles Daily News why he had changed his mind. "Life without parole protects public safety better than a death sentence," he wrote. "It’s a lot cheaper, it keeps dangerous men and women locked up forever, and mistakes can be fixed."

For years, Andrew Sullivan has passionately, logically made the conservative case for what has passed for the liberal case for marriage equality.

Increasingly, since the Reagan era, it has been liberals who have made the conservative case for fiscal responsibility; and, increasingly, since George W. Bush's neoconservative era, it has been liberals who have made the conservative case against U.S. military interventionism.

As well, it is liberals -- again, not contemporary conservatives -- who have have argued the genuinely conservative case on behalf of traditional safety nets such as Social Security and Medicare, two irreplaceable strands of our institutional fabric; in other words, core conservative values.

So I ask you (yeah, yeah, I know, again): What else might a contemporary liberal be called?

A quixotic question

In today's NY Times, literary theorist William Egginton unwittingly exposes the weakness of his defense of Cervantine irony in the rational battle against "a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality":

[I]f the fictional worldview allows for ... manipulation [by politicians and the media], it also gives us the tools to fight back — tools Cervantes already developed at the dawn of the modern age....

When [Stephen] Colbert pushed his [2006 Correspondents' Dinner] act to its extreme, roasting Mr. Bush and the Washington press corps in their presence ... [he] used irony to sever his audiences’ conflated identities; the discomfort and hilarity of his act stemmed from our watching as fictions that had blurred into truths were expertly extracted and revealed for what they were.

But to what effect? -- that is, to what lasting effect?

A mere four years later a quixotic, delusionally motivated electorate installed a neo-Bushian House whose blurred untruths make the George W. Bush administration's "fictions" look like laudable exercises in High Logic, which themselves were the (seeming) culmination of 40 years of intellectually disingenuous butchery. One can understand a subsequent generation's forgetfulness, yet in this 21st-century instance many of the very same people who so deeply suffered at the incompetent hands of Bushism turned right around and re-empowered a kind of Bushism-squared.

This collective act of self-destruction tempts one to observe that the far right's evangelical partisanship, staggering ignorance and brutal subordination of disbelief are converting us into a nation of Sancho Panzas; but that would be unfair to the slyly observant squire, who, by Part II, confesses to the duchess, "I consider my master, Don Quixote, to be stark raving mad."

So, yet two years later again, there is again hope. But to what lasting effect?

Notwithstanding his piercing critiques, Cervantes' Spanish empire went the delusional way of Britain's, Russia's, and Rome's; all of their Sancho Panzas realized far too late that their masters were stark raving mad. They failed to take timely collective action against the madness, or just plain willful ignorance.

The GOP really, really needs Rick Perry

With Perry sinking like the Dow, a less desirable outcome's odds are rising. Rick Perry would have been the ideal nominee to sober up and thereby sever the contemporary GOP -- permanently.

If Mitt Romney wins the nomination, as is now likely, the far right, also known as the Tea Party, will scream that the party's candidate lost to President Obama only because the party failed to nominate a true conservative (which in reality Tea Partiers wouldn't know from a Bolshevik). This disgruntlement over what they'll interpret as a lost opportunity will motivate the extremists to remain in the two-party system and work to further radicalize the Republican Party, especially for 2016. Some will splinter off in 2013, if not before, yet enough could easily remain entrenched in the GOP to hold the party line farther to the right.

A Perry nomination, on the other hand, would serve up all the far-right radicalism the radicals could ever want. The above excuse-making would be invalidated. And in the bloody aftermath of a Perry-led GOP's crushing defeat to Obama, the party's moderates -- and they are out there -- would coalesce to brutally oust the extremists. Thus the creation of a more structurally cohesive Tea Party of the formal third-party species. In other words, political irrelevance and permanent obscurity.

Either route, however, poses a long-term danger to the Democratic Party. The party would weaken in the absence of a strong, unified opposition, as American political history has repeatedly shown. It will take time for the GOP to reorganize and resettle itself as a respectable party of authentic conservative grounding; and in that time the Democratic Party, too, will further splinter.

It's as plain as reading a road map.

A selection, from Tennyson

I sometimes hold it half a sin
   To put in words the grief I feel;
   For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within. 

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
   A use in measured language lies;
   The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
   Like coursest clothes against the cold:
   But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

 ***

Dark house, by which once more I stand
   Here in the long unlovely street,
   Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more --
   Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
   And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

[She] is not here; but far away
   The noise of life begins again,
   And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

I don't mean to beat you up or wear you down with this. I'm just grieving in my own way, and part of my way is to emotionally disrobe, within the bounds of 21st-century decorum -- there are, I trust, some left -- on this stage. I'm doing the best I can. I'm as skeptical of therapists as I am of political handicappers, hence my best is just me and my way; just me and mine.  

I do promise, however, that I shan't make a public or solipsistic profession of grief, as did so many Victorian mourners of a poetic mind (one of whom I so felicitously, I think, stole from this morning). Goodness, their chimney sweep or charwoman would exhaust a last, underpaid breath and the literary master would order another barrel of ink and fell another forest to pour forth a few more reams of bathos.

So bear with me, if you please. It's reader's choice, but not much from here.

Liberalism's mission

Yale professors Theodore Marmor and Jerry Mashaw provide a beautiful abridgement of the past century's fragmentation of America's national soul: 

In 1934, the focus was on people, family security and the risks to family economic well-being that we all share. Today, the people have disappeared. The conversation is now about the federal budget, not about the real economy in which real people live....

In 1934, the government was us. We had shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance have become "entitlements," a word apparently meant to signify not a collectively provided and cherished basis for family-income security, but a sinister threat to our national well-being.

And they paraphrase the recent work of Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers:

From the 1930s to the 1960s ... American public discourse was filled with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history. Over the last five decades, that discourse has changed in ways that emphasize individual choice, agency and preferences. The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.

Rodgers' endpoint delineation is of course significant: the fall and rise of Goldwaterism, which, though originally libertarian -- a valid pillar of traditional conservatism -- was in time contaminated with assorted strains of theocratic bullying, fiscal recklessness, and the hubristic hypernationalism of neo-conservatism.    

All of which is only to point out, as I have perhaps tediously done in this space, the profoundly -- and authentically -- conservative nature of today's liberalism. It is liberals who more often, more honestly employ the language of a common culture -- the "social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history." And it is today's conservatives (pseudoconservatives, actually) who seek and promote a kind of chaotic, social atomization -- a national stripped of common culture, common institutions and common history (except for that which they invent).

With fewer and fewer exceptions, contemporary conservatives see no "shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations," as did many conservatives of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and a good part of the 1960s. Instead, conservative pols are acting the socially destructive role of what George Washington, in 1786, saw everywhere in pre-Constitutional America: that of petty politicians "of narrow souls and no natural interest in the society"; "Characters too full of Local attachments and Views to permit sufficient attention to the general interest."

As I see it, President Obama's greatest challenge isn't to get the unemployment rate down to 8 percent by 2012's end, or to reset the budget in better balance, or to equitably tax a little more here and a little less there. It is, rather, to recapture G. Washington's and FDR's "attention to the general interest" -- to refill "American public discourse ... with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history."

This is an intensely conservative mission, on which only liberals seem to be.

Krauthammer is no coward

Shakespeare observed that a conscience "makes a man a coward," which I guess is why Charles Krauthammer can so fearlessly make such a fool of himself:

The authentic Obama is a leveler, a committed social democrat, a staunch believer in the redistributionist state, a tribune, above all, of "fairness" — understood as government-imposed and government-enforced equality.

That’s why "soak the rich" is not just a campaign slogan to rally the base. It’s a mission, a vocation. It’s why, for all its gratuitous cynicism and demagoguery, Obama’s populist Rose Garden lecture on Monday was delivered with such obvious — and unusual — conviction.

I'm actually embarrassed for Krauthammer. Someone has to be; he himself appears incapable of self-restraint or even the most primordial of human conscience. He sees a blank page and he simply cannot resist spewing hateful anti-Obamaism all over it.

Hateful is one thing, but Krauthammer's hate is also eccentrically untethered from any common ground of linguistic understanding. Obama is a leveler? -- a cynic? -- a demagogue? Well, then Rick Perry is a qualified climatologist, Sarah Palin a humble homebody, and Eric Cantor a bookish samaritan.

Were an Anti-Krauthammer to analyze the actual Krauthammer in the latter's Krauthammerian style, he would find it quite easy -- perhaps even irresistable -- to characterize the Post columnist as a kind of reincarnated propagandist of the P.J. Goebbels school: a man utterly vacant of ethical constraints or intellectual fairness, while bubbling over with feral prejudices and inexplicably wild hatreds.

I myself am too cowardly to insist on such an analysis, however, because somewhere in my hardening, darkening heart there still lies some remnant of a human conscience. I'll give him the benefit of doubt. Who knows. Maybe Krauthammer only writes such crap because it sells, and he's happy to sell it.

Windbag-powered outrage

All the righteous exasperation exhaled and partisan stink raised over "the government’s backing of Solyndra, which could cost taxpayers more than a half-billion dollars," is at its keenest amusement when Republicans suggest that such an enterprising debacle was merely typical, just typical, of the wholly unfamiliar, prodigiously unAmerican socialism of that suspicious Other, Barack Obama.

They've never seen anything like it, these Republican pols: all this weird, federal aid and unfunny intrusion into the holy Hayekian sanctuary of the free American marketplace. Oh God, oh dear God, what, in Heaven's name, hath Obama wrought?

Yet such abhorrence is permissible only if one is utterly ignorant of even the broadest swaths of American economic history. From Hamiltonian protectionism to Bushian Haliburtonism, the federal government has always acted either the silent or stentorian partner of the American businessman. Here, for instance, is just one chapter of federal largess through the ages, from Jack Beatty's particular Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900:

In granting land to railroads Congress bracketed off much of the map for private sale.... [T]he railroads would finance their construction by selling land along the railway corridor or borrowing against it. Until the early 1870s, the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, the Atlantic and Pacific, and the Texas and Pacific, as well as a scattering of smaller railroads, had received five times more land than homesteaders -- the Northern Pacific alone an area larger than New England.

Ah, yes, those were the days of Horatio Algerian corporate bootstraps and rugged individualism -- and humongous handouts.