Ideological Orthodoxy And Saint Elsewhere

Matt Ygleisas made a great point earlier today when he highlighted a throw away sentence from a Washington Post piece about how difficult it really is for the modern GOP to actually enact new policies. As the piece inadvertently points out basically their ideological orthodoxy is hemming them in:

As they cast about for ideas, Republicans are struggling to find policies that match the simplicity and gut appeal of such Democratic proposals as raising the minimum wage without violating core conservative principles by increasing spending or interfering with market forces.

As Yglesias then quips, "Many of us in America are struggling to find weight loss strategies that don't require us to spend more time at the gym or eat less food. It turns out to be challenging." This is precisely right. As long as the GOP refuses to spend money or "interfere with market forces" (whatever the hell that's suppose to mean) they aren't going to have much success coming up with economic policies that appeal everyone not in the 1%.
The logical solution here is to dump those orthodoxies, but I don't real see any evidence of that happening at all. Oh well.


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My writing over at the Good Men Project has been taking up most of my blogging time as of late, so if you want to read more of my stuff I'd suggest heading over there. I'm not planning on shutting down Longwalkdownlyndale in the near term however and I hope to be able to post more in February. In the meantime here's three of my most recent pieces:

Obamacare is actually not going away.

Hillary Clinton is conintuing to pick up major wins in the invisible primary.

And my take on why the coverage of the State of the Union is often so bad.

What Does It Mean To Be A Public Intellectual? And Saint Elsewhere

The recent media fiasco everyone is talking about Twitter was one that hit the trifecta of race, cable news, and the question of who is "America's foremost public intellectual." Basically Melissa Harris-Perry got in big trouble, that is people got mad at her on Twitter, after she made fun of Mitt Romney's grand kids while guest hosting a show on MSNBC. She ended up apologizing which makes sense, racial humor about a politician's grandchildren is "over the line" when it comes to American political culture.

But that wasn't the end of it, the whole apologizing incident caused another row after The Atlantic's Ta-nehisi Coates wrote about her and called her "America's foremost public intellectual." And Politico's Dylan Byer's went to Twitter (the best place to debate the subject of who America's foremost public intellectual is of course) to say "Ta-Nehisi Coates's claim that "Melissa Harris-Perry is America's foremost public intellectual" sort of undermines his intellectual cred, no?" This provoked another Twitter war, and it does seem unfair to me to criticize Coates's intellectual credibility because he disagrees with you.

But then again the whole fight struck me as being pretty silly, mainly because nobody defined their terms. Coates seems to think that all "intellectuals" must be academics or something, and that their CV's not their impact propels them to greatness. He argued Harris-Perry wins because:

Ph.D. from Duke; stints at Princeton and Tulane; the youngest woman to deliver the Du Bois lecture at Harvard; author of two books; trustee at the Century Foundation. I made this claim because of her work: I believe Harris-Perry to be among the sharpest interlocutors of this historic era—the era of the first black president—and none of those interlocutors communicate to a larger public, and in a more original way, than Harris-Perry. 

I suppose I should take the time now to say I had never heard of her until Coates wrote about how screw up on cable news.

Maybe that just means that I'm an idiot, or an uneducated philistine, but I think there's something more here, namely how detached from American society and actual politics academia has really become. I bet few regular people have ever heard of her, no matter how good her CV is. But that's just because few people follow academics!

A better way to look at it would be to look for "people who write stuff that has a big impact." Under that definition it's not really clear what impact Harris-Perry has actually had. The bogus study sited by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff (published in their book!) which has been totally debunked was used an intellectual justification for lots of the austerity policies we've seen all over the developed world. By my definition that's a whole lot more important than anything anyone at the Tulane history department has done, because the effects of impoverishing whole nations matters more in the course of millions of people's lives and world history than being a trustee at the Century Foundation.

But maybe I'm just an idiot, since Coates doesn't really explain what she did and why it's important I'm sort of in the dark. Personally though I think if you are going to charge out with a huge sweeping statement that basically says some Tulane academic is more important than, oh I don't know John Nash, whose ideas about Game Theory underpinned the creation of the entire modern financial system that crashed in 2008-2009 creating the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression as well of much of the modern study of economics (as well as being used in "computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, politics and military theory") well then I need more than she wrote two books.

But then again maybe that's just a round about way of saying the work of academics matter little in and of themselves, what matters is what happens once their ideas come out of the stuffy confines of their seminars and tomes and into the world of big business and politics.


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Here's some links from my work at The Good Men Project:

Former Secretary of Defense’s New Memoir Shows Depressing Lack of Context.

Attention Liberals, Here’s How It’s Done.

Our Shrinking Prison Population.

North Carolina’s Unemployment Experiment.

The Tories And Saint Elsewhere

Paul Krugman made an excellent point in his column today about David Cameron's tenure as British Prime Minister. Basically after taking over in 2010 the new Conservative government imposed harsh austerity on Britain in attempt to "trim their way to growth." The results where spectacularly bad with the British economy is still smaller than it was five years ago. Now that the economy is finally starting to grow again, all be it at a very slow pace. As a result David Cameron's Tories are claiming vindication after half a decade of failure. Krugman pointed out that claiming victory now is a lot like the old Three Stooges gag where Curly bangs his head against the wall:

Economies do tend to grow unless they keep being hit by adverse shocks. It’s not surprising, then, that the British economy eventually picked up once Mr. Osborne let up on the punishment.

But is this a vindication of his austerity policies? Only if you accept Three Stooges logic, in which it makes sense to keep banging your head against a wall because it feels good when you stop. 

Yes, exactly.

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Over at The Good Men Project I had a number of posts recently. I talked about our failed embargo against Cuba, how Republicans are open to new revenues when they are called "fees," the silliness of trying to depoliticize Nelson Mandela, the annoying GOP tendency to see outrages at every funeral attended by Democrats, Rick Santorum's attempt to bring back the death panel myth, and how Paul Ryan is a lot like those German nihilists from "The Big Lebowski."

Time's Person Of The Year And Saint Elsewhere

So the Pope got named Time Magazine's Person of the Year and there's a lot of talk about whether this is a "good" or "bad" choice. The choice sort of makes sense to me, the Pope is important and moving the Catholic Church away from doctrinal questions about regulating human (largely female and gay) sexuality and instead addressing things like social inequality and poverty will probably be important in the long run.

But honestly Time's list has always struck me as being pretty goofy. Sometimes they seem to try and pick "the most important person" that year, sometimes they seem to want to pick "the person(s) we should all try and be like", and sometimes they pick intangible patriotic concepts for some reason like "The American Fighting Man" or "Middle Americans." Heck they even come up with really silly ideas that aren't really people at all like "The Computer." And some people on the list I had to look up because I had no idea who they were like like Pierre Laval.

Basically its a silly list that tends to grow sillier as the years go on, picking the Pope is a vote for trying to make the list less silly, but it's not like it actually matters or anything.


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Over at The Good Men Project I talked about how the minimum wage will likely be a big issue in 2014 and how shows like Scandal and House of Cards gets conspiracies in politics all wrong.
 

Celebrities Behaving Badly And St. Elsewhere

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a nice post up riffing off of an Andrew Sullivan post about Alec Baldwin being a bigot. I honestly don't really follow celebrity news so I didn't realize all the things that Baldwin has in fact said. And yes I would have to agree with with both of them and say that from what I've read yes, Alec Baldwin has behaved in an abusive bigoted way and I really wish so many progressives wouldn't jump up to defend him.

Having said that I do want to say that I find these kinds of posts to be a bit frustrating. Rather than using the events as a spring board for say talking about the phenomena of racism and homophobia, a lot of authors go down the rabbit whole of writing a lot about how a certain person is terrible. And while I'd agree that Alec Baldwin has behaved in a terrible manner in the past, I don't think you can get a whole lot of mileage in the whole social change realm out of proving that one person (one celebrity even) is awful. Sadly enough, the world is full of terrible people.

Ta-Nehisi goes a little further and expands onto some important political points:

One need not believe that LGBTQ human beings are equal to support their right to marry, any more than one needed to be an anti-racist to support abolition, or an anti-sexist to support women's suffrage. There any number of self-interested reasons to support the advancement of civil rights.

I think that is spot on, but unfortunately Sullivan basically writes up a giant Alec-Baldwin-Is-Awful-And-Liberals-Should-Stop-Carrying-Water-For-Him type polemic and then debates some emails he says he got from liberals trying to carry water for Alec Baldwin (this is one of Sullivan's more annoying tendencies, he picks emails that "make the other sides argument" instead of actually engaging with the other side head on). And I'd agree this is an important argument to make! But the conversation could be so much more than that.

This will probably blow over, just like Mileygate and Imusgate and our periodical Tom Bernardgates here in Minnesota and, well this list could go on for pages. Maybe if enough people make enough of a stink we can get MSNBC to discipline Baldwin, or at least make him take some anger management classes or something, but the reality is Miley is bigger than ever (and probably right now is thinking of ways to outdo it in her next VMA appearance) and Imus and Bernard are still on the air and so on and so forth.

Which I think is a shame, because we could be having an interesting conversation about what it means to be homophobic, but instead are getting a lot of debate about how someone is a jerk.



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Over the past two weeks at The Good Men Project I've been writing up quite the storm, well the usual two posts per week. But you should still go read them! I talked about why a hypothetical president Hillary won't change Washington all that much, I also highlighted how awful Ted Cruz's dad Rafael is, I talked about why the 2013 elections don't tell us much about what will happen in 2014, I also did a Veterans Day post about the legacy of the Iraq War (this was a bit out of my wheelhouse, but I was really pleased with the outcome), and today discussed the future of Obamacare (it's not going anywhere).

Read them all!

On Politics (And Russell Brand)

I had two pieces up at The Good Men project recently that were sparked by current events but really just touch more on my ideas about the nature of democracy. In the first I’m talking about why Terry McAuliffe is probably going to be the next governor of Virginia. And what drove me to write it is how McAuliffe’s impressive performance is being mocked by liberals all over the internet who seem to see him as a Clinton/plutocratic stooge. I’d hardly call McAuliffe my political role model, and yes he is winning in no small part because the GOP nominated a unreconstructed bomb-thrower who really, really wants to bring back Virginia’s unconstitutional anti-sodomy laws, but I think there’s some more to this than that.

Simply put a lot of liberals and progressives throughout the Obama years have treated complaining/criticizing the powers that be in the Democratic Party as being action. But while that sort of things can be fun and seem like political action, they really aren’t. McAuliffe was easily beaten in a three way Democratic primary back in 2009, but now he’s on top. Why? Well because he actually did the work necessary to win in 2013 while progressives in Virginia couldn’t find anyone to run instead of him. We could be electing a much different Democrat this year in Virginia, someone more like Tim Kaine, but since a lot of liberals didn’t do anything in this race we won’t be.

Good progressives don’t get elected into high office because they’re nice, when they win they do so because a lot of people worked really hard to get them there.

The other piece is about Russell Brands latest political diatribe(s). I personally think this type of “revolutionary” rhetoric is pretty pointless all things considered. And I basically lay out my reasons why in the article and comments, so go check it out if you want to see why calling for total revolution is silly if you can’t even be bothered to vote. But if you want a simpler version of it I’d just say something along the lines of this: when you call for a “revolution” do you mean literally a revolution as in an actual overthrow of the state? Or do mean a figurative “revolution” as in a lot of political and social change? If you want a literal revolution I will say that you will almost certainly fail and a lot of people will get killed in your attempt. And even if you succeed the order you create in the aftermath of destroying the old one will probably be worse. Even revolutions that go well, like the American Revolution, have problems. Our revolution gave us independence but it also resulted in slavery being legitimized in the Constitution, which in turn almost certainly assured the Civil War. So yeah, in "The Game of Revolutions" even when you win, you lose.

If you mean a figurative revolution, like say the expansion of marriage equality in the last five years, well then you mean an organized political movement to change laws and things like that, which means you need to engage in politics, which means you need to do a lot of hard work. Voting is just the start of that and if you can't even be bothered to do that when you start calling for revolution you are just acting like an all around clown.

The Green Lantern Theory Of Congress And St. Elsewhere

With the shutdown in full swing now is a great time to look back at Matt Yglesias's old idea of the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics. Yglesias coined the idea back in the Bush days to point out the absurdity of the conservative claim that the only thing limiting America in foreign policy was a lack of willpower. In 2009, political scientist Brendan Nyhan pointed out an emerging liberal Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency where Obama could get things like a public option or a much bigger stimulus if only he tried harder. Both cases where of course widely off the mark about how the world works and what is in fact possible.

House Republicans seem to have created a Green Lantern Theory of their own in recent years. Call it the Green Lantern Theory of Congress. Under this theory Congress can force Obama to agree to gut his own healthcare bill and do all sorts of other things as well, as long as they demonstrate a sufficiently strong iron will. Alas this theory doesn't seem to be doing any better in the real world than Bush's one about the Middle East. 




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Over at the good men project I talked about how shutting down the government is a goldmine for some conservatives, how the "New Hillary" is turning into the same "Old Hillary" (at least in the press's eyes) of yesteryear, and weighed in on the ongoing food stamp wars.

The Problem With Economic Debates And St. Elsewhere

I really liked Jonathan Chait's look back at the "resolution" of all those debates economists were having over the last few years.  As he sees it, and I'd have to agree, a whole slew of conservative ideas about economics were proven completely false by events over the past few years, with the biggest one probably being the claim that government austerity will lead to growth. But this hasn't resulted in conservatives and their intellectual leaders changing their theories about how the economy works or embracing new policies in practice. Instead they simply don't bother to defend their ideas anymore. Meanwhile the demands for more austerity have, if anything, gotten louder:

Meanwhile, however Republicans resolve their long-term vision debate, they have coalesced around a short-term vision. It is to repeal Obamacare without a replacement, maintain short-term austerity, weaken labor laws, loosen financial regulation, and defend every tax deduction enjoyed by the affluent. I don’t see how this policy mix could be remotely defended in light of actual circumstances. Almost nobody on the right seems to want to defend it. But nobody seems interested in placing even the slightest pressure on the Congressional party to alter its stance, either.

I think that sums it up almost perfectly.

I guess one of the core problem here is that the discipline of economics is still gripped by the ideal that it should aspire to be a value neutral technical science, like chemistry or something, while the bigger political and moral questions about what we want an economy to do are ignored. But of course those questions don't go away just because you choose not to answer them. So instead of creating a value neutral scientific system of economics we've created a system where actors with political goals, like weak labor markets or less state involvement in market outcomes, can pretend to be value neutral "experts" using whatever argument they can find to advocate for a conservative policy agenda that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich and power from labor to capital. It's a huge problem for economics, I don't see many people addressing it.




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Over at The Good Men Project I wrote about why Obama should take his case about strikes in Syria to Congress, dismissed the silly idea that recent events vindicated Mitt Romney somehow, talked about how incredibly shallow much of the media coverage over the crisis in Syria has been, and looked at the future of gun control in the wake of two recall elections in Colorado.

AIPAC And St. Elsewhere

A big question to think about when it comes to the political reality of potential strikes in Syria is the solidity of public opinion opposing them. As far as I can tell there are no major organized interests backing the opposition even if it is the majority of public opinion. But there are influential groups supporting intervention, for example AIPAC is planing a full court press supporting intervention starting Monday. It will be interesting to see what happens considering there is normally so little daylight between AIPAC and most Republicans, and Democrats for that matter. Historically organized groups beat big trends in public opinion when it comes to squeezing Congress, so it will be interesting to see if that holds true. At the very least, Obama will be in for a tough sell when it comes to convincing Congress, which strikes me as being a good thing.


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Over at the Good Men Project I talked about Maine's kooky Republican governor, why Chris Christie can't afford to skip Iowa and how terrible the GOP still is at reach out to minority voters. You should read those pieces and like them on the facebooks and such.

Health Care Costs and St. Elsewhere

The slowdown of health care inflation is one of the most under-appreciated stories out there right now. Matt Yglesias had a good summery earlier today and made the really important point that health care cost inflation is in many ways a self fulfilling prophecy. If big companies think that health care costs are going to keep skyrocketing they are going to invest in a higher number of larger and more expensive hospitals. If they think the curve is being bent by policy now, or because future policy makers will work to bend it they will stop planing and building so many larger and more expensive hospitals. In essence the perception of reality becomes a reality, if enough of us believe it. The same way that if enough of us think the economy is going south and act accordingly, that's exactly what it does.


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Over at the Good Men Project I talked about how I don't think Jesse Jackson Jr. should be treated as a hero; problems with the Republican's "replacement" for Obamacare; why Rick Santorum is not going to be the GOP nominee in 2016 and the curious phenomenon known as the conservative information feedback loop.

Mitch McConnell and St. Elsewhere

 It's pretty amazing that Mitch McConnell is doing so poorly in a lot of early polling. After all Kentucky is a pretty red state. He has plenty of time to try and turn it around, I imagine we are in store for a lot of super pac ads calling his opponent a crypto-Muslim socialist terrorist. But few people have done more to screw up our government in recent years, and a Senate without McConnell would be fairly amazing to behold.



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Over at the Good Men Project I talked about what the demise of the THUD (transportation and housing and urban development) bill in the House tells us about the state of the GOP. I also wrote about how to go about  ending the NYPD's controversial Stop and Frisk policy.

Weinermania and St. Elsewhere

One of the things I find interesting about the Weinermania scandal that has overtaken New York is how little reporting is being done on the actual mayor's race. Instead we get a lot of armchair psychiatrist speculation on why Weiner does crazy things. It's not very helpful. It's a good reminder that because so many news reporters, producers, bloggers ect. live in the New York Area and their are several major local tabloid papers there, the goofy stuff they are obsessed with becomes national news. Which is a pretty big bias when you think about it.


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Over at the Good Men Project I had an article about how liberals should go about influencing Obama, Liz Cheney's decision to run for the Senate and some great pieces of news for Obama that slipped under the news radar.

Zimmerman Trial And St. Elsewhere

Since we are into deliberations in the George Zimmerman murder trial I guess I should get my prediction in so I can be proven wrong. Most of the legal analysts out there think Zimmerman will walk, and I have to agree. The basic argument for acquittal was made quite well by Dan Abrams at ABC:

As a legal matter, even if jurors find parts of Zimmerman's story fishy, that is not enough to convict. Even if they believe that Zimmerman initiated the altercation, and that his injuries were relatively minor, that too would be insufficient evidence to convict. Prosecutors have to effectively disprove self defense beyond a reasonable doubt. 

Which is incredibly hard if the only living witness to the events is the accused. Hence all the focus on the foam dummy and such. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz put it even more bluntly as: 

Remember, it's monumentally irrelevant who's morally guilty here, Whether or not Zimmerman was a racist and racially profiled and shouldn’t have been doing it and didn’t listen to police, that's all irrelevant in Florida law.

Add in the fact that some of the prosecution's witnesses were darn right harmful to the prosecution's own case and I think you can see why I see a likely acquittal.

Not that I necessarily agree with such a verdict, but it's what I see happening. The fact that Zimmerman likely stalked and murdered Trayvon Martin isn't the same as that being proven beyond a reasonable doubt in that Florida courtroom, which after all the the major question before the jurry. Having said that juries are notoriously impossible to predict so anything could happen. I assume this blog post will sink the S.S. Zimmerman just so the universe can prove me wrong.


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Over at The Good Men Project I talked about why a GOP strategy that ignores minority voters is bad for them and the country and talked about the potential comebacks of Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. You should go read them and then like them on facebook and such.

Happy Birthday and St. Elsewhere

I should probably take some time to acknowledge the one year anniversary of longwalkdownlyndale. While far from the most famous blog on the internets, we have seen some impressive growth since my first post about football and John Roberts. Hopefully this trend will continue and much like health care costs becoming 100% of the economy by 2050 longwalkdownlyndale will one day become 100% of the internet. Thanks to everyone who reads my posts and feel free to comment and share and stuff.


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Over at the Good Men Project I have a post up about new trends emerging in the Supreme Court and another one on why a Hillary "coronoation campaign" in 2016 would be bad for the Democratic Party.  Feel free to check them out.