What's Wrong With The GOP

It's not a lot of fun being a Republican Party leader these days.  Between being rejected at the polls last November and the never ending series of calamities that are befalling the GOP on Capitol Hill (think Sandy aid, Fiscal Cliff, Plan B and now their cave on the debt ceiling) the party just doesn't seem to be working very well.  In looking at this dysfunction political scientist Jonathan Bernstein recently pointed out two points that show the GOP is suffering something more than just poor leadership:

What sort of serious, substantive policy initiatives like this could Republicans push on their side? There isn’t anything. And that’s the crux of their problem.

The core of the GOP agenda remains the Ryan budget, but that had very few specific cuts and the numbers never actually added up. They certainly could continue trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but they’ve long since given up on offering a replacement.

Republicans, that is, don’t actually have a program with popular items that they could run on and then pass if they won. After all, they didn’t run on their Medicare program in 2010 and 2012; instead, they called anyone who accused them of cutting Medicare a liar and instead ran against Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare. What exactly is the GOP equivalent, just in terms of swing-voter popularity, of Lilly Ledbetter or SCHIP right now? Beating up on Planned Parenthood?

And he right, there is a shockingly large policy gap between our two parties these days.  Questions about how to create jobs or improve the lot of the middle class constituencies that decide presidential elections are answered, if they are answered at all, with the same boiler plate of tax cuts and de-regulation that conservatives have been preaching for over 30 years now.  Not only do these policies have poor track records over the last 20 years but they are also unpopular with the American electorate who do support things like higher taxes on the wealthy. 

Bernstein was writing to point that the conservative commentator Phillip Klein had actually been on to something when he suggested that Republicans could learn a lot from how Democrats acted after they won control of both houses of Congress in 2006:

[I]t’s worth looking back at the Democrats’ strategy following their takeover of Congress in 2006. Despite their strong rhetoric, they ultimately caved to President Bush by agreeing to continue funding the Iraq War. This generated a forceful backlash among their base, but it also enabled them to continue running against Bush’s handling of Iraq, rather than allowing Bush to change the subject to “Democrats don’t care about our troops.” 

During this time, Democrats also pushed legislation that furthered their agenda — including an expansion of the children’s health care program SCHIP (which Bush vetoed) and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (which Republicans blocked in the Senate). Both bills were quickly passed and enacted once Obama became president.

Klein is right that this is a better model than threatening to destroy the world economy if you don't get your way, but his commentary betrays another problem with the GOP.  Saying that Democrats "ultimately caved to President Bush by agreeing to continue funding the Iraq War" strikes me me as simply a new Green Lantern Theory of politics, call it the The Green Lantern Theory of Congress.  According to this theory the only thing that accounts of Congress's inability to change national policy, in this case the Iraq War, is a lack of Congressional will.  Like the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency this theory is simply not grounded in the reality of how of system of government works.  The reality is that because of the Constitutional designation of the President as the Commander in Chief of the military, the President enjoys broad latitude in the use of force internationally.  Furthermore the legacy of American involvement in two World Wars and one Cold War in the most violent century in the history of human civilization has curtailed Congresses role in foreign policy as well.  So even if the Democrats wanted to end the war in 2007 they couldn't, not because of a lack of will power, but because that not how foreign policy in the US works.  Looking at Klein's Green Lantern Theory of Congress things like the debt ceiling fight suddenly make sense.  The problem is that the GOP is trying to force policies on the nation while it only controls one half of the legislative branch of the government.  The idea that the exists some way to do this, rather than accepting that the realities of divided government entail compromises and a limited agenda, results in doing things like threatening to destroy the world economy unless your demands are met.

These two structural factors, a lack of concrete policy prescriptions and the unfounded belief that political actors are only constrained by their lack of will go a long way at explaining why the GOP has become so dysfunctional, and why it will continue to be so.  

New Words!

Andrew Sullivan once had a good thread about words with no equivalent in the English language.  Personally I've always thought American political vocabulary was a bit meager, so here are my proposed words to broaden the online conversation.  Feel free to leave your own in the comments!



Contravesty: A media sensation that purports to inform the public about a controversy but makes a mockery of the issues and/or view points involved.  Coverage of people tweeting about Andrew Briebart's death is a classic example.

Disasterporn: A news story that massively overinflated the danger of a natural disaster or other event.  British media coverage of snow often turns into diasterporn.

Hackdit: A pundit who's public presence largely consists of trying to win arguments on television.  A pundit who doesn't even write columns or blog posts.

Luntzism:  The belief that by using certain words or phrases conservative politicians can make unpopular policies popular.  Created by GOP pollster Frank Luntz in the 1990's.

Newt: A charlatan of a colossal and historic scale.


Sexberal: A liberal who largely focuses on issues of gender and sexuality while ignoring things like economics, foreign policy or climate issues.

Sully: To melt down in public about a purported political disaster that fails to materialize.  Named after The Great Andrew Sullivan Freakout of 2012.

Uncle Leo: A public intellectual or pundit who ascribes legitimate political or policy differences to anti-Semitism.  Named after the character Uncle Leo from Seinfeld who attributes food he doesn't like in restaurants to the chef being anti-Semitic.

Wonkabee: A want to be wonk, a person who puts on a persona of expertise but is not in fact an expert.

Zundit: A pundit who will never leave the national spotlight or be fired no matter how wrong their predictions or poor their behavior.

Don't Know Much About History (Part of a Series)

One of the things I find fascinating about the internet is that it's treated as a universal good.  People assume that because it allows the spread of information and views as never before it must be some sort of universal improvement for knowledge and democracy.  But there's a flip side to this; misinformation and pig ignorance can be spread like never before as well.  Andrew Sullivan (I don't know why I'm picking on him so much right now but he deserves it) recently made the bizarre claim that China could have become a western style democracy in 1912 if only some guy didn't get assassinated: "Hopes were dashed when Song Jiaoren, leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party and a believer in "Jeffersonian ideals and admiration for Britain’s Parliament," was assassinated."

I am currently reading Barbara Tuchman's great book "Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-45" a great book about this period in Chinese and American relations told through the lens of the life of Joseph Stillwell a American solider who worked in China off and on during this period, eventually rising to command all allied forces in China, India and Burma in 1944, giving him a rank equal to then Generals Marshall and Eisenhower.  One of the main points of the books is that turning China into a Western style democracy after the overthrow of the last of the Qing Emperors in 1911 was an impossible dream. Something that was a doomed to failure as it was in South Vietnam a half century later ("Stillwell" was published in 1970 and in no small way was an attempt to add some context to why the American effort in Indochina had failed.)   Sullivan is highlighting an article in The Economist that swings from statements that sound like racial explanations for the troubles China faced at the beginning of the most violent century in human history: "The Chinese people, long yoked by Confucian tradition and insulated from Western influences, may have been unprepared for the radical terminology of liberty."  And then goes on to explain how since this assassinated fellow read various thinkers from the British Enlightenment (John Stuart Mill! Adam Smith!) and some French dudes he could have led China to a new glorious age.

In the second chapter of "Stillwell" Tuchman points out that turning China into a perfect democracy had roadblocks that Enlightment literature didn't explain how to overcome while describing the American reaction to end overthrow of the last Emperor:

Others, stirred to enthusiasm by the Revolution's promise of liberal, Western, parliamentary ideas, were more optimistic.  "We thought high and noble thoughts," wrote on American trader, "about China and the new era that was dawning."  This was the attitude, on the whole, of the American public which wanted to believe what the missionaries were always promising, that China, of the 400,000,000 was about to transform itself into that desirable and familiar thing, a democracy.  That the 400,000,000 were a people 70 to 80 percent illiterate, who on the average had no milk and virtually no other animal products in their diet, who had no sanitation, no running water, no privacy, no electricity, no vote, whose industry was still 90 percent handiwork and whose transportation was still largely conducted by human muscle, was not considered, if considered at all, incompatible with democracy.  When a rebel leader in Hankow, out of Oriental politeness which believes in telling people what presumably they want to hear, said to reporters that "the object of our revolt is to make the Government of China like that of America," nothing could have seemed more natural to American readers.

Is there something about the people of China that is incompatible with Democracy?  Of course not, no more than Germany or Japan is, but transforming a society from something other than a modern developed state into a democracy takes more that admiring the British Parliament and reading Montesquieu.  That is to say, it takes more than "One Great Man."  Especially when that state is the largest in the world, with huge chunks of it taken over by colonial powers, other chunks ruled by warlords and no functioning central government.  Sullivan was initially a huge supporter of the Iraq War, you'd think he at least would have learned this by now.

Negotiating and Training

In the wake of the "fiscal cliff" tax deal that was just passed in Congress a lot of liberals (as usual) are mad at Obama (as usual).  The basic argument goes like this: if Obama was better at negotiating he would get more of what people on "the left" want, unfortunately he's weak and/or stupid as so he keeps giving away the store.  The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates made this typical argument. 

This argument reminds me a lot of what the Bush Administration and the Iraq Hawks said when they talked about "training" as a way to solve Iraq's problems.  It became apparent to me that "training" didn't mean so much teaching Iraqis how to deal with known tasks security personnel or civil servants would have to perform, like how to shoot a machine gun or how to search a house, but rather something else, something almost mystical.  I'd define training as the Bush people used it as "A magical process in which Iraqis are turned in to American military personnel, civil servants and police officers." That is they constantly thought that they could teach Iraqis not just how to fight or provide security better but could teach them to fight for the type of society that Americans would prefer to see in Iraq.  Training would somehow make Iraqis ignore sectarian divides; focus on the betterment of the nation as a whole rather than the group, tribe or family unit and it would teach them to respect the rule of law.  Of course this didn't work very well.  Iraqi leaders stole money meant for rebuilding their society (western contractors did a lot of this as well.  Soldiers used their military training to form death squads and kill other Iraqis.  Everyone ignored things like the rule of law and even the execution of Saddam Hussein turned into a bizarre cell phone video of people cheering for Muqtada al-Sadr, the extremists cleric the US Army had labeled a terrorist.  The failure of "training" to turn people in different societies into Americans who would behave like Americans (or how we thought Americans ought to behave) goes back a very long way in our history.  It's happening in Afghanistan as you read this, it was a hallmark of the American experience in Vietnam, a huge part of our failures in foreign policy in Latin American in the 20th Century and a feature of our failed effort to support the Nationalists in China from the Revolution of 1911 to the triumph of the Communists in 1949.  Training is simply no panacea for political and social problems.

Unfortunately liberals seem to be treating "negotiating" just like how so many American strangers in a strange land treated "training."  A lot of very intelligent liberals seem to be arguing that the reason Obama cuts deals that they don't like is because he's somehow "bad at negotiating."  To be sure, most people who make this point, like Coates, don't really define their terms or explain what they mean very well but what they seem to be arguing is that there does exist a way for Obama to get Republicans to agree to Democratic priorities and vote for Democratic policies, Obama just doesn't know how to do it.  Or can't do it well enough  To start with this is a very problematic way of thinking about the Presidency in general and seems to be a version of what Political Scientist Brendan Nyhan calls "The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency".  Nyhan was writing in 2009 about liberal anger over the death of the public option and how lots of liberals blamed it on Obama, not the fact that a number of Democratic Senator's decided they were opposed to it:

What he identifies here is nothing less than a Green Lantern theory of the presidency in which all domestic policy compromises are attributed to a lack of presidential will. And, like the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics, this view is nonfalsifiable. Rather than learning from, say, the stimulus vote that Obama faces severe constraints in the Senate, liberal GL proponents have created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower.

Just substitute "negotiating" for "lack of presidential will" and you got a pretty good description of what's wrong with these arguments.

Negotiating skills matters of course but things like the Constitution, the agendas of political parties and purposes political leaders set for themselves matter a lot more.  Anyone who still thinks the problem is negotiating skill needs to watch this clip from Game of Thrones Season 2 a dozen times until it sinks in.  In it the younger brothers of the dead King Robert are both trying to succeed him and become King.  It might help on the margins if Stannis (the bald guy) was less ornery, if Renley (the younger brother) didn't mock his brother and if Lady Catelyn Stark was a "better negotiator" (she's the woman trying to broker an alliance against their common enemy.)  Ultimately the problem is both of these men want to be king and there can be only one king, no amount of chummy small talk or flattery is going to change that.

The funny thing to me is that while so many people have been criticizing Obama John Boehner has declared he won't ever negotiate with Obama again.  Does that sound like the actions of a man who thinks he just "rolled" the president?        

The Tyranny of Protests

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak recently announced that he won't be seeking a fourth term in office.  After I read the news I headed over to the troll capital of Minneapolis politics (the Minneapolis Issues Forum) to see how people reacted and was of course greeted with the typical trolling you'd expect by people who have never liked R.T.  One "thread," of one post, struck a chord in me when a fellow named Dean E. Carlson announced the upcoming press conference and said "If you hurry, you can go down there are heckle him."  So that's it, after 12 years of non-stop rage and anger at a very popular mayor his political opponents are reduced to posting on message boards inviting people to go to a press conference and yell.  That is all the greens and anti-Rybak leftists have left in them, going to a press conference and yelling at strangers they disagree with.  I came to a realization today while driving to target to buy some consumer goods at knock down prices: far from becoming a revolutionary way of enacting social change for progressives, the tradition of public protest has become a terrible trap that limits progressives ability to achieve their political goals.

Political protests in this country go back to the Boston Massacre and beyond.  Indeed you can trace the idea of complaining to public officials as being both a sacred right and a political tool to enact change back in our political lineage all the way to the Middle Ages and the Magna Carta.  But here's the rub, public protests have never been a substitute for politics of a more traditional sort.  They have always been simply a political tool in an organizer's toolbox that can be used to do things.  Things like get your cause publicity or build public pressure against decision makers.  At the same time, they have limitations and drawbacks.  Mass protests can drain organization's or movement's resources as they take a lot of planning and organizing to pull off.  It took hundreds of thousands of sandwiches to feel the attendees of the famous March on Washington (it probably cost a lot to rent the sound system).  Imagine what else it cost and took.  Protests can also be very difficult to control, just as a big march can show your movement has power a small march shows you to be weak, irrelevant or the worse of all political afflictions: ridiculous.  In addition, as you see over and over again anyone can attach themselves to a protest and if they behave badly they make your whole movement look bad.  Even if they had nothing to do with you.

I'd argue, something changed during and after the 60's and since then public protesting has become to be seen by many progressives as a means unto itself.  With the questioning of power and authority in the 1960's protesting seemed to become a replacement for all politics.  The British film maker Adam Curtis found a great documentary made about the elections in Britain in 1966 where you see this new style of politics emerging.  But it was a funny and strange kind of politics, people were mad, and so they yelled at their political leaders, but they were increasingly mad in a strange disorganized fashion.  Curtis points out that:

In the film you can see both an old Britain and fragments of the new Britain that was emerging side by side in the audiences.  Empire Loyalists shout about the betrayal of Rhodesia and the loss of the last bits of the empire, while in the same audience - towards the end of the film - you can see early examples of British counter-culture. Long hair - but still beatnik, not hippie, fashion - with the slogan "Anarchy - don't vote, Anarchy don't vote". 

It's rather strange to look back at these sorts of events, shouldn't the beatniks and Empire Loyalists be yelling at each other not their MP's?  Joseph Strick, the man who made the film, introduces the film and takes the typical view of the 1960's (the same type of view that would make baby boomers Time's Man of the Year in 1966) where he sees it as an invigorating new form of democracy.  Looking back I can only see confusion.  In addition, looking at this film I am stuck by how the chaos in the audience doesn't weaken the politician at the podium, in this case Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, it only makes him look like the only reasonable person in the room.  Richard Nixon would use this kind of dynamic to get all the way to the White House two years from when this was filmed.

You can see the same dynamic at work in the whole short lived Occupy movement.  For a brief shining hour a lot of progressives saw the whole Occupy thing as a great liberal hope to change America, but it of course failed (not to rub it in but the Occupy MN website hasn't been updated since May).  It failed because the people that made it up consistently opposed any sort of political decision making.  They refused to make choices, refused to build organization and demanded everything operate by consensus.  Which means nothing got decided on, indeed for all the publicity it got I still don't know what they really wanted.  In short they imagined a sort of anti-politics, a politics that wouldn't have to deal with things like compromise, or collective decision making in a timely fashion.  But it's not possible to have an unpolitical politics at all.  In fact in Minneapolis the place of the "occupation" and the targets of their wrath seemed just plain strange to me.  They occupied Hennepin County Government Plaza which meant their main target was an organization that had no control over what they were mad about (Hennepin County doesn't control the political economy or monetary policies of the Unites States).  Matt Yglesias pointed out:

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has, along with the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Philadelphia, been one of the major centers of damaging hard money politics in the United States. These are the people loudly arguing against Ben Bernanke from the right, pushing for a slower economic recovery and a policy dynamic that’s even more favorable to creditors and more hostile to debtors and the unemployed. I don’t really know anything about the Hennepin County government, but it’s just not possible that they’re at the root of any major national or international problems.

Exactly.  Even the people that were being protesting couldn't have helped even if they wanted to, while the people who were causing the problems were spared public protest.  Such is the strange logic of protesting.   

A political strategy that focuses on heckling or protesting as ends in an of themselves, rather than means to an end, won't work.  To make matters worse, if you go down this path you will only exhaust yourself and your allies with little if not nothing to show for it.  Rather than being a way to transcend the boring and difficult work of having lots and lots of meetings, building a political structure or making decision that not everyone will love the protest has become a terrible trap that keeps progressives from enacting real social change and we progressives would do well to remember it.

   

Gone and then Forgotten

Back in the dawn of time, the spring of 2012, noted conservative commenter, "activist" and person-who-yelled-on-cable-news-alot Andrew Briebart died while taking a stroll in his posh neighborhood in LA.  The internets went aflame, especially that most profound tool of logical argument since St. Thomas Aquinas sat down with quill and parchment: Twitter.  Matt Ygelsias, the liberal blogger and author whose great blog on Slate you can find on the right side of this page, wrote something that perhaps was not of the highest order of expressing sympathy for the dearly departed.  He tweeted:  “Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.”  That might sounds a little harsh, but Matt explained why he said this later on blogging heads.

The argument I think Matt makes is that  Briebart might have had a private life where he was (by all accounts) a loving husband and father of four children, but he also had a public life where he was a very mean person, and he made a lot of money by being mean and hurting other people.  I'm not going to go through all of the bad things Briebart did, but if you don't know about them, here's one.  In addition to ruining people's lives for fun and profit, Briebart contributed nothing to our national debate, indeed for someone who was displayed as a symbol of mean people on the "left" saying mean things about him he wasn't exactly a nice guy in public.  He divided Americans against other Americans, again for fun and profit, and said things much worse that anything Matt Yglesias said.  I didn't have to describe what he looked like for you to know who I was talking about in that video, it was rather apparent.  I would also say that while it might be a personal tragedy for people who knew him personally that he died, the public figure that left the stage should be held accountable for what he did.

This week we had another death of a once major political figure and it looks like it is being overshadowed by a sense of important national loss.  Any debate about what he did, why he did it and why that might be wrong is being stifled by a sense that it is wrong to speak ill of the dead.  But I'm going to speak ill of him.

The one who actually died was Robert Bork.  If you don't know who Bork is that's okay, but you probably should read more.  The great journalist Jeff Toobin wrote what I would say is a pretty even handed review of Bork's life (okay that isn't very fair but recently a friend of mine got a job at Planned Parenthood so I bet Bork wouldn't think to highly of me either, also I know single mothers so I guess I am twice damned in Bork's book)  Toobin writes:

Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.

Yeah, that's kinda harsh, but it's also true.  Bork has two great claims to fame, number one he was the number three man in the Justice Department in 1973 when Richard Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, because Cox was linking Nixon to the Watergate break ins.  Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox, Richardson said no, so Nixon fired Richardson.  President Nixon then ordered Richardson's deputy, a fellow named William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, and the Ruck-master also said no, so Nixon axed him too.  So the President of the United States of America was essentially removing anyone from the Department of Justice who might seek to pursue the chain of evidence in the Watergate Burglary to it's ultimate genesis, that is President Nixon.  NOT TO FEAR DICK, BORK IS NOW AT THE HELM!  Bork of course immediately fired Cox.  Bork always said he did this because otherwise Justice would be "leaderless" or something, umm okay, Mr. Morality punts big time (we'll get to that latter.) 

Later Bork would climb the ladder of the Federal Judiciary until his next great moment of history in 1987 when ole Dutch Regan nominated him for the Supreme Court.  This began an epic battle that involved many factors.  Remember Regan had shocked the Democrats in 1980 when he won the biggest landslide against a incumbent President in decades AND the GOP won a majority in the Senate.  By the late 80's the situtaiton had turned.  Democrats won a huge victory in the 1986 mid-terms and many were working to try and push back against the GOP conservative agenda that had made headway in the early 80's.  Into this Bork comes, according to many of his peers a Judicial genius, at the same time Bork would say things on national televison that showed him to be a radically out of touch with American society of the the 80's, let alone today.  Which implies to a dumb as shit field organizer like me he wasn't that bright at all.  Again Toobin:

Bork gave honest and forthright answers to the questions posed by the senators on the Judiciary Committee, which was led admirably by then Senator Joseph Biden. Much of the questioning focussed on Bork’s long-held belief that the Constitution does not include a right to privacy. As one of the creators of the “originalist” school of constitutional interpretation, Bork asserted that since the framers did not use the word “privacy,” that value was not reflected in our founding document. Accordingly, he opposed such decisions as Griswold v. Connecticut, which said states could not ban married couples from buying birth control, and Roe v. Wade, which prohibits states from banning abortion. He promised the senators he would reflect those views as a Supreme Court Justice.

Indeed, while Bork was talking about Griswold-which was a case in the 60's about a then decades old law in Connecticut which made all forms of contraceptives illegal in the state, even those used by a married couple under the advice of a physician (just think about that)-he argued these types of laws were no different from laws regulating pollution from factories.  This of course was massively unpopular with the American public and so Bork went down in flames.

Bork never really recovered from this defeat.  While constantly praised as a Judicial genius by his peers, he neither taught nor wrote any thing of significance about the law for the next 20 odd years (he resigned his Court of Appeals seat in 1987 after he lost his confirmation).  Instead he started writing books in which he would condem everything about modern American society from working mothers to pre-maritial sex.  In short the political lackey from 1973 turned himself into some sort of great moral voice, or something and stuff.  Too bad their was none of that culture warrior steel to stand up for the Constitution back in'73.  Toobin again sums up what happened:

One of his last books may have summed up his views best. Thanks in part to decisions of the Supreme Court—decisions that, for the most part, Bork abhorred—the United States became a more tolerant and inclusive place, with greater freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination than any society in history. Bork called the book, accurately, “A Country I Do Not Recognize.”

Yeah I don't imagine he did either.

Cruisin'

Alex Pareene, who writes for Salon, just wrote a great piece about his experience going on a six day cruise in the Caribbean.  It's largely about how its kinda fun, but not really that fun to do one of these things.  Pareene specifically wrote the piece to be about his own experience, he wanted to ignore the whole "what does it mean" thing:

Here is what I’m trying to avoid: smug condescension at those ugly, fat Americans who are totally unable to appreciate foreign travel unless it’s wrapped in as comfortably American a package as possible. And also: bleeding-heart liberal hand-wringing over the poor lot of the ship’s crew, the overwhelming majority of whom are from very poor nations. Both of those themes are well-worn and boring. I will, though, complain about the food.

And I'd agree that those themes are pretty boring, but I do think his experience illustrates a lot about our own society, something that is hard to notice in our daily lives but through the lens of a cruise it becomes quite visible, if you look right.

The modern ships that cruise lines operate are more than just very big boats (and they are very big, the ship Parneene was on had over 6,000 people on board, more than a Nimitz-class suppercarrier).  They are actually little floating societies that come together for a brief period of time and strangely enough mirror our own society.  The entire experience of being immersed in a pleasure bubble is only possible by the huge (hundreds or thousands) of boat employees, often from developing countries, that work in poor conditions for very little pay.  At the same time the passengers are all sold on the idea that they are equally experiencing a life of luxury but as in American society while everyone may style themselves as being equal their is still a rigid hierarchy with some people getting a even better experience.  It didn't take Pareene long at all before this set in "I envied the passengers with stateroom balconies overlooking the ocean..."  All the while the cruise companies are massively profitable and often pay little or no taxes.

The British film maker Adam Curtis wrote a great history of how this strange industry came into being, and how it's development mirrors that of modern capitalism since the 60's.  Where he points out:

As the cruise-world developed and mutated over the next forty odd years it mirrored the changes in modern capitalism - from a naive utopian belief in transforming the world - to a harsh, narrow utilitarian vision of the free market where everyone above and below decks is expected to behave as "rational utility maximizers"

And today the world of the modern cruise liners also mirrors the present structure of our global society. Millions of people live in a world where they expect the luxuries which were previously only offered to the few. At the same time millions of others around the world struggle daily to create the platform that holds that fake luxury world together.

Meanwhile the small elite who are genuinely rich and powerful float off into the distance on their own boat - and kick anyone off who dares to get drunk and call it a cruise.

It's a very good piece and you should read it.  But I realized it's not just the economics of the cruise that mirrors that of our own society.  Our own reaction to disaster looks a lot like how the elites on the Costa Concordia acted when they got in trouble.  In case you didn't hear, because you were in Antartica with your head in a block of ice, the Costa Concordia was a Italian cruise ship that sank in early 2012 of the coast of Tuscany and the whole disaster was largely caused by the Captain of this ship Francesco Schettino.  Schettino took the ship off course to "buzz" (sail close to) a town on the Tuscan coast and hit a reef, while said buzzing was going on Schettino was wining and dining a Moldovan blonde in her 20s, he then delayed reporting the fact that his ship was sinking and finally he left the ship on a life boat before the evacuation was complete leaving hundreds passengers to fend for themselves.  A more perfect allegory for how our elites behaved before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis (Paul Krugman has taken to calling the "Lesser Depression) I don't think could be written.

But there is one difference between how our elites responded to a situation they had a big hand in creating and how elites responded during the Costa Concordia disaster.  In one radio call from the Italian Coast Guard to Schettino, the Coast Guard ordered Schettino to get back on the ship and finish the  evacuation. At one point in the call, the Coast Gaurd captain, a fellow named De Falco, got so angry at Schettino's stalling that he screamed, "Vada a bordo, cazzo!"  It is difficult to translate angry Italian curse words into English, but it more or less meant "Get the fuck [back] on board!" or "Get [back] on board, for fuck's sake!"  You of course never could say something like that to Jamie Diamond, then you'd be criticizing job creators.