On Innovation and Inertia
As a rule, I don’t take part in discussions about what I write, and the reason for that is, while I love to hear from readers and almost always write back (unless a letter leads me to fear it will end in my taking out a restraining order), I don’t love the fight. I’m not a provacateur by nature, and I don’t wake up every morning with an agenda or an ideology to which I want to convert everyone else. I spend time with people who interest me; I tell the best, most honest story I can; and then I put it out there and let other people debate its validity or idiocy it if they feel like it. That said, this is a great forum, and I want to thank the commenters who’ve engaged me on the book; I’ve spent hours these last few nights, staying up late after watching the Yankees (who are in the playoffs, I might add), trying to answer as many of you as I can. I’ve also found a lot to think about, predictably, in Mike and Ted’s and Ed’s posts. You all may not appreciate everything they have to say, but these are some smart guys who care a lot about their party and their country, and I admire that.
The post I want to address, though, as succinctly as I can, is Mark Schmitt’s very thoughtful critique.
First, I appreciate very much Mark’s giving “The Argument” an open-minded read and recommending that everyone go out and get it. (He does not get a cut.) I think he really saw the book as I intended it—as a gripping and important story. Also, he is exactly right that a story like this one captures a snapshot in time, and that’s what I was trying to do—specifically, the two years between Elections Day 2004 and the end of 2006. Another volume would almost certainly reflect an entirely different moment that is well underway as I write, and I hope someone will write it. Just not me.
Second, let me say that I accept Mark’s apology, and I appreciate it. A lot of people say things they probably regret online, but very few ever say so. That was a cool gesture.
If I understand his critique, I don’t think we fundamentally disagree about the importance of a progressive argument for the future. We both acknowledge that there's a process through which a movement finds its voice and articulates some large and defining ideas. It sounds like our main point of departure, and one on which reasonable people can certainly disagree, is where on the continuum this movement actually is. Mark seems to think that the conversation is already pretty deep and pretty vibrant and that I underplay the significance of some of the innovation going on. I would content that the intellectual conversation, apart from all the tactical dicussion about message discipline and framing and voter databases and whatever other miracle cure is in vogue this week, is really pretty paltry and uninspired. So, at the risk of diverting more attention away from the narrative at the heart of the book, let me take up just a few of his specific points here.
It’s interesting to me that Mark cites, as an example of big forward thinking, the CAP proposal on poverty. Now, I address this reluctantly, because I like John Podesta a lot, as readers of the book can probably tell, and I couldn’t have more respect for some of the people over there. John and I have a few differences of opinion, and for all I know he may be right on all of them. I think they’ve done very good work on a tax plan and on some education stuff, too. But when I look at the same CAP poverty plan that Mark is touting, I see a shining example of exactly the inertia that I’m talking about on the left as a whole. The CAP panel of experts, populated almost entirely by Baby Boomers who entered politics in a completely different era, retains as its premise the singular idea that people are poor because they lack money, and if you give them money they won’t be poor. In all the proposals mentioned by the panel, the sole concession to 30 years of scholarship and experience in antipoverty policy is the idea that people should work in order to receive benefits, and this is treated as a kind of huge innovation, even though most Americans have long considered this a matter of common sense.
In fact, a lot of the most serious thinkers on antipoverty policy—and not conservatives, either—will tell you that we know a lot more about cyclical poverty than we did 40 years ago, and one thing we know for sure if that economic empowerment, while an important aspect of addressing it, isn’t very useful without intensive efforts to change what social scientists call the “choice infrastructure” of people’s lives. (A quick example: a mother wants to attend a parent-teacher conference, but she loses wages if she does, and so there is a reverse incentive to do what will ultimately help her child.) Barack Obama, for one, has shown a lot of interest in the Harlem Children’s Zone, which represents a seriously innovative and comprehensive approach to attacking poverty from birth. Mayor Bloomberg is experimenting with some ideas borrowed from developing countries, including paying that mother to go to the parent-teacher conference, so that she doesn’t have to worry about the lost wages. To read CAP’s report, you wouldn’t know that any of this was happening. I find that very disappointing, because there’s an opportunity here to move beyond the last century’s framework for intractable issues like poverty, and this generation of leaders—and this is true on both ideological ends—just can’t seem to get their heads around it. This is the kind of thing around which a truly vibrant intellectual left could build an entirely new argument—and may yet. But right now, there doesn’t seem to be much capacity for acknowledging that old approaches may be insufficient to current problems.
(Someone will, inevitably, ask me about John Edwards in this regard. I already wrote 8,000 plus words on Edwards and poverty, which you can read here, if you like.)
On Social Security, this isn’t part of the book, beyond the one line Mark cited. But since he raises it, I think he creates a false choice when he asserts that anyone who would suggest Social Security isn’t perfect would necessarily end it. You see this a lot; it’s a subtle way to shut down discussion. In fact, my question here is very simple: if you were to sit down and design a progressive retirement program today, for today’s economy, would it look exactly like Social Security did in 1932? That is, would you finance it on the backs of wage earners, while leaving wealthy investors unscathed? Would you punish the self-employed (who didn’t even exist in the 1930s)? Would you guarantee benefits for the wealthiest Americans while people who earned wages all their lives get just enough back to stay above the poverty line? Of course you wouldn’t. (And before someone reminds me of what Franklin Roosevelt said about the need to invest the wealthy and middle-class in the program's benefit structure, let me gingerly suggest that what Roosevelt said in 1932 may not be entirely relevant to conditions in 2007.) But progressives will not even allow this conversation about modernization to happen, so fearful are they that any acknowledgment of societal change around retirement security will inevitably lead to privatization.
That may be a good political strategy—I don’t know. But it’s not up to the intellectual standards of our grandparents, who rose to meet the challenges of the industrial age, rather than telling everyone that farm era policies were plenty good enough, thank you very much. And it underscores the great tactical victory of conservatism (which I also discuss in chapter nine), which is having succeeded, through their relentlessness, in trapping liberals in this box where they feel they can only protect existing programs, rather than find ways to improve or replace them. As Andy Stern says in the book, “We’re so weak that we think that if we have a big idea, we’re going to lose.”
Finally—and man, is this running on—let me quickly address this point about conservatives not having any new ideas. This is a commonly expressed objection to what people like Rob Stein and Andy Stern say about conservative ideas; critics always answer that the conservative movement had little more than old ideas and a new way to distribute them. I don’t think that’s right. Look, principles remain constant over long periods of time. The liberal principles that animated the New Deal—fairness, equal opportunity, opposition to concentrations of power—are just as relevant today as they were then. So too have the conservative principles of less government intervention and individual liberties remained more or less the same. What conservatives did quite well in the era after Goldwater was to apply those principles to the emerging challenges of the moment: deindustrialization, anxiety among the white middle class, failing schools and communities, uncertainty in the world. Their argument was that intrusive government had contributed to all of these problems by devaluing individual responsibility and throttling free enterprise, and that it had made the country less safe by declining to stand up for those same values abroad. There followed from this a series of new reforms that made up the modern conservative agenda: supply-side economics, school choice, workfare, missile defense, etc. Conservatives applied enduring principles to a modern argument, and to deny them that is to risk badly undervaluing the role of an argument in building sustainable majorities.
This has been a great exchange—and in fact, it’s precisely the kind of exchange I was hoping might result from “The Argument.” So thanks for taking part. I’ll look forward to reading more as the week comes to a close. I may not get time to answer all the comments, but I will try.
Matt,
I would suggest that if you want to avoid the slings and arrows of angry NetRoots "insurgents", you spend more time writing excellent passages like this:
These are the kinds of concrete examples of "new ideas" which critics of your work tend to find lacking, when you state that the Democrats suffer from a lack of new ideas; and they at least point towards what you might mean when you say the Democrats need a new overall "argument" to reflect more recent thinking on how government should intervene in society.
Note that there is considerable controversy in developing countries over the issue of paying people to attend things like parent-teacher conferences, personal development plan sessions, HIV education workshops, and so forth, since it often means that participants have no real ownership of the process and are only interested in collecting the fee. Though it's obviously fine if payments are set properly to reimburse participants for lost work time.
ADDENDUM: Your July piece on Edwards from the NYT Magazine also does a good job of categorizing the three camps of thought on inequality and explaining where Edwards fits into this -- sort of an enhanced Rubinomics, one supposes. But on the persistence of cyclical poverty issue, I think you're handicapped by the fact that you're a campaign journalist at an objective news source rather than an advocate. It seems to me that you basically have this one clear thing which you wish the Democratic Party were doing better -- revising its vision of government's role in society to more clearly reflect a modern social-science appreciation of incentives and choices; but you're prohibited from actually laying out how you would do that because you're supposed to be a reporter, not an advocate. And so what you wind up offering is a critique of various Democratic candidates for failing to offer your preferred ideas, without laying out clearly enough what your preferred ideas are.
Also, reading your Edwards profile, I couldn't help but think back to Nicholas Lehmann's early, and as it turned out unbelievably wrong, profile of not-yet-candidate George W. Bush in the New Yorker in 1998. The thing with these candidate profiles is, the meat of the story is always the part where they try to cut against expectations. And what drives Democrats nuts is that this effort to cut against expectations winds up showing us that Democratic candidates haven't really thought very clearly about poverty, or live in big houses, or worked for hedge funds; whereas in the profiles of Republicans, we find out that they're not actually all that dumb, or that they actually have done some things for the poor, or that they speak a foreign language. I mean, I kept wondering what this profile would have looked like if it had been addressing Fred Thompson's ideas about poverty and inequality in the globalized post-industrial economy. You couldn't have written it; there's nothing there to write.
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone
September 27, 2007 4:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
"I’m not a provacateur by nature, and I don’t wake up every morning with an agenda or an ideology to which I want to convert everyone else."
As a netrooter, or citizen with a computer, I now know that in addition to being the seed of Satan I am also a provocateur,on a mission from God.
Thanks.
September 27, 2007 5:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Right. Let's stipulate that. Now let's do the same for Markos. What bothers me , and I suspect others ,is what I sense is the implication of that statement , and of much of Ed Kilgore's piece :your supporters are smart guys who care a lot about the country (OK I agree) and that's not true of your opponents.
There's lots of ways to San Jose . I'm perfectly ready to agree that Mike , Ted and Ed may well have policies that are better than , say , Markos but I do not agree they are smarter , more patriotic or (pace Ed ) less inclined to be "haters" than he.
September 27, 2007 6:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think, flavius, that he just meant that though you may disagree with them they're still smart guys who care about the same things you do.
September 27, 2007 6:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The singular idea that people are poor because they lack money, and if you give them money they won’t be poor." That to me is the kind of straw man that drives liberals crazy and is why I have such little inclination to read Bai's book. I'd have thought that liberals were big on such issues as affordable housing, health insurance, a decent minimum wage, economic growth that sustains a decent wage for all rather than just corporate profits, and all the other factors that create, sustain, or put people at risk of poverty and maybe needing a crummy handout.
We may note that welfare programs tied solely to employment did not work as well as promised once the Clinton boom ended, because there aren't always decent jobs to be had, especially (as Matt himself notes) for single mothers. And in fact there's a lot of perfectly respectable discussion of the data on this these days in mainstream economics. So there will be situations in which, yeah, people need money. But I'm sick of Matt's alternation between vague claims for a new, third way and caricatures of the old.
But glad to hear Matt welcomes criticism, so long as it amounts to apologizing for criticizing him.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
September 27, 2007 6:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Matt Bai belongs to the last of the dying (we hope) breed of insular pontificators. He doesn't want to discuss his book. He's claims he has no ideological bias. That's not how things work any more.
If he doesn't want to discuss his book then he should have declined the invitation to TPMcafe.
I claim his biases are well known. They are discussed frequently on other forums like DailyKos. Pretending to be neutral when one obviously isn't either means self delusion or mendacity. Unwillingness to debate your positions indicates fear that argument will reveal the weakness of one's points or a belief that one is in such an exalted position that one doesn't have to deal with the riffraff.
Perhaps a bit of introspection Mr. Bai?
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
September 27, 2007 7:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for this, I appreciate it. A couple of quick points. First, I don't think I'm handicapped by working at the magazine--in fact, I feel very free to offer my analysis and I feel like we have the best, most informed readership there is. I think you're mistaking my own role as a journalist for some kind of external restraint. I've always believed it's my job, and an important one, to ask the right questions. It's not my job to answer them--that would be arrogant and distracting. And so, yes, I have repeatedly, in different ways, asked Democrat to reconsider the relevance of some 20th century approaches to government. But I don't have my own, better agenda, and I don't think it would be helpful or appropriate for me to try to play that kind of leadership role, especially since I have no investment in the party itself. My loyalty is to my readers, who deserve some answers from their leaders, not from me.
Second, I take your point about the narratives that often drive political profiles, and it annoys me too, but I don't think it's fair to apply that to me and certainly not to the Edwards piece. You can't constantly claim to want long policy pieces, instead of horse race articles, and then complain when the long policy piece doesn't just trumpet your brilliance. In the case of Edwards, that was a very fair and sober assessment of his program, which is ambitious and laudable, but which I think suffers from some of the same flaws as the CAP approach. The stuff about the house and the hedge fund was very low in the piece and given very little attention. I don't think my recent piece on Giuliani and terrorism followed the familiar arc you describe, either.
Anyway, thanks again for reading and responding.
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September 27, 2007 7:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, Derek, i'm glad we've got that straight. I figured as much.
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September 27, 2007 7:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe some people imply that, Flavius, but I never have. In fact, I have repeatedly made the point--and it's all over my book--that I greatly admire and applaud people in the Netroots who care about their country enough to make themselves heard, and I think what they've accomplished is amazing. I think it's great for democracy--I wouldn't have helped moderate the Yearlykos debate if I didn't. Is everyone in the Netroots idealistically motivated or engaged in a constructive way? No. I make that clear, too. But neither are a lot of people in Washington or, Lord knows, in my business. I happen to think that Michael and Ted And Ed have all chosen to devote themselves to a kind of public service, as has Markos, and they deserve our thanks and respect, whether we agree with them or not. That's how I come to any conversation about politics.
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September 27, 2007 8:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Unless I'm mistaken, I'm doing more discussing of my book in answering these comments than anyone else has here in a while. Someone needs to do some introspecting, but I don't think it's me. Thanks.
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September 27, 2007 8:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
.
sPh
September 27, 2007 8:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
The next time you accuse me of being a provocateur I wish you could at least spell the word correctly.
September 27, 2007 8:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Unless you are simply relaying other peoples' questions, your preferred answer is often implied by your question. For example, asking Democrats "to reconsider the relevance of some 20th century approaches to government" definitely implies that you think at least some of their approaches are outdated. You may be right but please don't pretend that the implication isn't there. You are either insulting us or deceiving yourself.
September 27, 2007 8:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, well, maybe I should just put it this way: you obviously know vastly more about both the Dems and the Netroots than an average person could hope to who hasn't spent the past 2 years reporting on the subject. And you're a fantastic narrative writer. But a lot of people had a common reaction to some of the stuff you wrote earlier this year, which was that you were decrying a lack of "new ideas" on the Democratic side without explaining what on earth you meant by that; and it really wasn't clear, in those articles, what you meant. And that sounded very much like a familiar old conservative critique of the pre-Clinton, pre-DLC Democratic Party. Had you instead simply concentrated on the kinds of issues you do find more important in the post-industrial 21st-century economy, and why these concerns really ought to be picked up by Democratic candidates, you would have encountered many more open ears. And on the issue of reportorial detachment...I grant you a lot of room there, but you have to acknowledge that it's crystal clear, in your Edwards piece, that you like the Rubin stance and dislike the Reich one. I don't think one reader in a thousand would come away with any other impression. So I think it just might be a better idea to more specific with what you mean by "20th-century economic policies" and why exactly they're not suited to 21st-century realities.
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone
September 27, 2007 8:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
September 27, 2007 8:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Anyone who refers to themselves with the I word 40 times in the first 5 paragraphs is more interested in themselves then in discussing ideas.
September 27, 2007 8:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I really wish you would address a basic assumption you make, that I see absolutely no direct support for: that major innovation is required for Democrats to achieve desired ends.
As it is, you really sound like nothing so much as a dot com venture capitalist hawking the future where everything changes, everything!
I'm sure some policies now implemented could use some important tweaks. And, without a doubt, national health care is an absolutely basic change that will improve our lives immensely; indeed it's very hard to argue that it isn't the single most important thing we could introduce that would have the greatest positive effect on the most people.
But national health care is really a pretty old idea. Explain to us why we should care about "innovative" ideas that will likely have far less impact than this old idea? Why should your breathless concern about innovation distract us from what really matters?
And your focus on innovation is misplaced in other important ways. Let's grant that the Conservative movement came up with a large number of "innovative" ideas. Well, how did they all turn out? I think that in the vast majority of cases, they were egregious failures. Why invite such stupid novelty?
September 27, 2007 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Matt, very nice response. Two quibbles:
Your ceding the value "individual liberties" to the conservatives really shows how far the conservative reframing has gone. Individual liberty has always been part and parcel of fairness, opposition to concentrations of power, and equal opportunity. The only part of the left standing against individual liberty has been the Marxist sects, which have never been part of the American liberal traditions as exemplified by Jefferson and FDR. I'd guess if you've read Lakoff you didn't go as far as to read Women, Fire & Dangerous Things, or the work of his colleagues in Cognitive Linguistics, to understand that - if they're right - framing isn't tactical, isn't a gloss or a veneer, but rather is at the very core of what makes us cognitively human. A politics which ignores what we are, including how our cognition works, is necessarily shallow. So if we have new science with fresh insights about us in this area, shouldn't progressives embrace it, rather than pretend, like the conservatives, that scientific understanding should have no role in contributing to the political sphere?September 27, 2007 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
The weakness in your approach is that you think you represent some sort of new thinking or some set of fresh ideas because you aren't a boomer. I'd simply remind you that there's nothing new under the sun. The key to makihg policy and implementing it in our system is to win successive elections at the legislative and executive levels that allow the adoption and implementation of the policies you favor. Until that happens, this kind of dispute is little more than an academic excercise.
Much of your critique is, in the end, really just disputing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and it exemplifies what is often wrong with Democratic politics in genereal and that is that folks with lots of brains tend to overintellectualize and become absorbed by their own brilliance and their excellent ideas fail utterly at communicating effectively with the broader public and thus fail to become reality. This is true whether they are new/fresh ideas or old ones. Intellectuals have a hard time communicating with the real deciders: voters. It doesn't matter if we win or lose the intellectual battle with the right, it only matters if we beat them at the polls. This luxurious past time of intellectual critique does none of us any good without winning elections and to do that you have to speak to the people on their terms about things that matter to them.
The minutae of social policy amongst left wing intellectuals is of precisely zero value to us in winning elections and actually weakens us because it puts on display this geeky, discussion that only a very small number of very important people care about and their votes wouldn't elect an alderman in a medium sized city. Keeping focused on this kind of thing only keeps the left more isolated from the person on the street who we need to be on our side. The Republicans have built many a successful electoral effort against precisely this kind of thing the past 40 years.
Democrats have always done best when they address the issues that concern regular people in ways regular people understand. That's where our focus needs to be and that is really what makes the netroots so vibrant and effective. You can't just be smart, you also have to be street smart. There are plenty of intellectuals who are a part of the netroots, but it is implicitly understood that you have to be willing to be a streetfighter if you really want a shot at implementing anything no matter how brilliant it is.
September 27, 2007 9:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, of course, I would never argue that the questions aren't pointed and based on my own, subjective analysis. I guess what I'm saying is that I believe the contribution of the writer is in the questions he settles on and decides to ask, not in answering them. I certainly wouldn't suggest my work has no point of view, no. I was just addressing the specific suggestion that I should present my own political alternative. Hope that clarifies. Thanks.
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September 27, 2007 9:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, we are discussing my book here. I guess I could have referred to myself as "the author," if that would make you feel better. Or should I say: One supposes one could have referred to the author by another name.
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September 27, 2007 9:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Please, Emma, do you honestly claim that there's something unfair or unbalanced about raising the suspicion that old approaches - especially when those approaches have not on the whole succeeded - might be improved or even bettered? Do you really believe that it weakens our habitual approaches to freshly consider them? Can't good approaches be strengthened by giving them new and careful consideration? Isn't the very definition of "conservative" to be opposed to reconsideration of old approaches? So you're upset because he isn't conservative enough?
September 27, 2007 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, oleeb, you're right that there's nothing new under the sun, and this is a point of view I hear a lot--that, as someone put it in responding to Mark's post yesterday, first you win, and then you get to be good, not the other way around. That's just not my reading of history nor my experience in politics. As I said in my initial post, I think elections over the longer term turn on ideas, not the other way around. There's an interview with Bill Clinton in my book where he says the same thing. But smart and reasonable people can and do disagree on this point, and it's certainly a debate at the heart of the book, and I thank for for weighing in on it.
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September 27, 2007 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Here's my problem with the old "the world is different in 2007" argument -- it's different, but in ways that a lot of New Deal policies (primarily Social Security) were meant to deal with.
In 2007, most people are responsible for saving for their own retirement and they have to pick the investment vehicles. Risk has been shifted to the individual. So you need Social Security as one small part of a retirement portfolio that has no risk other than the stability of the US government and it should be universal both in terms of who pays and who receives benefits. Matt can suggest different funding machanisms (lifting caps, creating a Social Security capital gains tax...) but those are cosmetic changes. The fact is, it's a New Deal program that is more necessary now, in the age of risk, than it was when it was created.
What was the spirit of the New Deal, exactly? I'd sum it up as "The government will step in for the good of society when business and private interests fail to provide for the common good." Isn't that the kind of thinking we need, now more than ever, in an era of stagnant wages and deep personal risk from cradle to grave?
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
September 27, 2007 9:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Because the conditions in the country aren't static. If they were, you certainly wouldn't need innovation for innovation's sake. But the larger story of American politics--and of the Democratioc leaders that I'd guess you greatly admire--is that they saw society changing in fundamental ways, and they changed government to keep up. Healthcare isn't a new idea, but the same proposal you might have made in 1960, when employers could be expected to provide all of the benefits a family might need for the duration of a career, wouldn't be sufficient to the challenge today. So that's why we aspire to innovate, even if it often happens slowly or fitfully or amid great controversy. That's why our political system exists--to innovate in ways that improve the country.
Thanks.
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September 27, 2007 9:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, whit, and these are excellent questions.
First,I think you're right, individual liberty probably isn't the best term to have dashed off in the middle of the night. Perhaps individual responsibility or the paramount rights of the individual would have been more accurate.
Second, oh yes, I have all of those books, actually. and I don't reject framing as having political value. I think lakoff has made a very important contribution, and what he often says isn't so far from what I'm saying--he calls it "narrative," and I call it "an argument," but the two are closely related. What I'm reacting to are people who use Lakoff's work to advance the argument that winning campaigns is all about language and framing and not about the substance of your ideas. Lakoff himself refuted this on page 23, I think, of his little elephant book, when he says that liberals sometimes make the mistake of thinking they lack words, when what they really lack are ideas. That was Lakoff talking, not me.
Thanks for these.
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September 27, 2007 9:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Did you actually read my post?
September 27, 2007 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
We don't disagree very much here. What often happens when the nuclear subject of Social Security comes up (damn that Schmitt for raising it!) is that people say exactly what you're saying: "Well, OK, I grant you that we could tweak a bunch of things about how the program is financed and how it pays out, but that doesn't mean we need a new program." I agree. This is a semantic difference. If you modernize the program to make it more equitable for the self-employed and for the people who pay in the most and who end up needing it the most, then I don't care if you still call it Social Security or if you call it an entirely new program. Either way, you're innovating and adapting, and that's a good thing.
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September 27, 2007 9:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
People talk about the difference in time between FDR and Lincoln. But many of the ideas that FDR's team developed, including Social Security and Medicare, were first explored by Otto von Bismark's team in the 1880 time period as they struggled with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution - and specifically the danger that communist-type movements posed to their society. So it was at least 30 years between that point and the 1930s when Harry Hopkins & Co. got to work, yet they found that one way to address the social fear that was driving Americans toward communist and fascist parties was... Social Security and Medicare. Seems that not much had changed since 1890. And you are fooling yourself if you think global trade wasn't an issue in the 1930s, 1890s, and 1840s: it was.
Today American citizens are feeling great fear due to economic dislocation, including fear about retirement and medical care. And we are being told that we must "rethink" Social Security and Medicare. Forgive me if I have a bit of distrust on that front, particularly when Greenspan (who engineered the looting of Social Security) is now running around saying he didn't tell the truth from 2000 to retirement. Although we don't have active communist or isolationist parties at the moment, as far as I can see key answers to the dislocations of globalization are... Social Security and Medicare.
sPh
September 27, 2007 9:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, elections turn on ideas, but not on intellectual obsessions with detail and nuance. It's the big ideas that count.
The average person wants to know what you're for, what you represent and so on. They don't want to hear long, intellectual treatises and all the nuances about anything. I'm a big believer in ideas, but frankly unless the brainiac is willing to join us in the trenches and do what needs to be done I don't see him as part of the solution. The folks who consider themselves the smart guys among Democrats tend to like to watch and comment on the battle and then expect to be given the keys to the exectuive washroom after the smoke has cleared.
My experience in politcs and in reading history is that we need to quit being so damned smart and start being good at winning elections. Rove is a fucking moron who couldn't complete college but everyone thinks he's a smart guy because he knows what is necessary to win. Way too many intellectual Democrats for way too many elections have preferred to be smart rather than victorious. Our country can't afford that anymore.
We need to be taking our core principles as Democrats and translating them into ideas and positions regular people get--not after they've poured over the details of policy which they never, ever do but right now as soon as the words come out of the mouth of the candidates. Regular people want to know if you have programs that work or not. If they work, the details aren't important and if they don't work they want em scrapped and put something else in place.
Like plenty of others out here in the blogosphere, I've got an education from fine eastern institutions of higher learning that I'm happy to put up against anyone's, but it's that elitist, intellectual business that sinks our ship every time. I'm tired of losing and find much more innovation and fresh ideas among the rabble than elsewhere.
The 06 elections were won in the trenches, with money pouring in from the net and with ideas and positions that were in opposition to what the smart people in Washington and New York were comfortable with. Our intellectuals were not the key to victory and won't be in the future. The idea that won in 06 was that we were going to stand up and fight for what we believe and call the lies and crimes of the Republicans lies and crimes. The "Had Enough" song tv ad was a better, more effective idea than I've seen out of any think tank in 30 years!
September 27, 2007 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think he was agreeing with you, not accusing. Just b/c he disclaimed being a provocateur does not make the rest of us or the netroots provocateurs.
September 27, 2007 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure Markos would really disagree with such a statement.
September 27, 2007 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are ambuscading a bit here.
On the one hand you say:
“it should be universal both in terms of who pays and who receives benefits.”
On the other hand:
“Matt can suggest different funding machanisms (lifting caps, creating a Social Security capital gains tax...) but those are cosmetic changes”
I suggest that Matt’s funding changes convert the SS system from a universal, shared sacrifice system to a means tested safety net system. A fundamental philosophical change, not at all “cosmetic”.
September 27, 2007 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your response.
I do, though, think that your argument still runs to nothing deeper than the generalization that "things aren't static". Well, certainly some things change, but in what relevant ways aren't things static? How profoundly significant are the new things we must address, as opposed to old problems?
Again, take national health care. While you're certainly right that the correct solution now might have differed from a correct solution all the way back in the 1960s, probably most important features could in principle have been introduced back in that era, as indeed they already had been in Europe. I'm sure that in Europe the systems of national health care have evolved over the many decades since their introduction, but nothing was nearly as important as the fundamental idea of national health care itself.
I simply repeat that I can't think of ANY problem facing our nation that will affect as many people on so important a basis as national health care. It's an old problem; it mostly admits of pretty old and well tried solutions, as the industrialized democracies in Europe demonstrate.
We should NOT be distracted from hitting as hard as we can on this issue by any stripe of, well, neophilia.
And, to address a related issue, the need of Conservatives for "innovative" ideas (abject failures though they have proved in practice) is pretty obvious. For their entire program to succeed, they must rip apart the pre-existing "welfare state" they despise. Radical ideas require innovation to find a foothold. Democrats, instead, are in an evolutionary, not revolutionary, mode. The one bold change they must introduce, national health care, happily has a long history of proven success in other countries across the world.
What Democrats need most basically is the implementation of good ideas, not of new ideas.
September 27, 2007 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
What do you think of Jon Chait's new book and the idea that the GOP has been selling snake oil in the guise of the idea of the Laffer curve and supply-side economics? If they are selling popular but fraudulent ideas, how does that impact what their opposition can and should do?
Also, how much do you credit things like the Southern Strategy and race-based appeals to conservatives to their success in being able to implement far less popular (or at least less well understood) ideas? It seems a plausible alternative to the unified theory of conservative victory through superior ideas for 21st C. governance. Or the power of talk radio and an alternative media apparatus for that matter.
Also, what about the polls that show that many, many Americans believe things that the GOP says that simply aren't true? There are many, many examples in every topic, from taxes (who benefited from the Bush tax cuts, who will face the estate tax), to foreign policy (Saddam attacked us on 9/11, we found WMD), to the details of basically every possible domestic policy.
September 27, 2007 11:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Matt,
You've told us a couple of times that levity in political journalism is just dandy and excuses what would otherwise be problematic. You were defending your provocative line on Clinton and Obama's MoveOn votes that "[y]ou might say they voted for it before they voted against it." Your defense seems to be that, hey, the argument I was sorta making may be false, but I think it's funny, so no big deal.
Could you make the general argument for your viewpoint on the "levity excuse" rather than merely pronouncing it ex cathedra? As you may have noticed, many people disagree with you. The press routinely elevates the trivial or even outright falsehoods under the banner of levity. To channel Bob Somerby, if the press hadn't spent much of 1999-2000 pushing light-hearted -- and often false -- trivia (earth tones, Love Canal, Love Story, inventing the internet, etc.) we wouldn't be in Iraq today and we'd be in a much better position on energy independence, the environment, fiscal balance, etc. Or think of Edwards' campaign today where the central issue had been an utterly trivial -- though at least true -- story about a haircut. You apparently disagree, but I don't think that being funny that way is OK.
To be clear, I am not against humor. I'm a big fan of Bob Somerby and he after all is a comedian. I am against using humor as an excuse to promote bad arguments and false or trivial facts. Humor does not wash away sins, not in my book anyway.
September 27, 2007 11:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
The problem is what the other side does in response. They want to end Social Security, and they won't be static. That was the whole thing with "privatization."
If your innovations and adaptations open the door to funding changes by lifting the cap or an additional separate tax, or if you don't give Social Security to millionaires and take it away from being universal, and if any of these changes allow the GOP to start chipping away and eventually kill Social Security, which has always been the goal of a core group on the right, then that's most definitely not a good thing.
September 27, 2007 11:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
this notion that "big ideas" are needed by the democratic party drives me nuts.
i don't think it bears much relationship to how politics works in this country -it's more of
- "here's what I want to see done"
or
"here's what I think should not be done"
or
"here's somebody else's dumb-assed big idea".
"big ideas" usually come from individuals or small groups who are intensely partisan.
but political policy in american is a very large-scale social process that is only barely manageable in the best of times.
barely manageable, that is, unless you have the political clout that george bush had from 2002 to 2006.
the bush's administration's "big" ideas?
- war to gain control of an oil producing country
- minimal participation by the extremely rich in paying for gov't services
- corporate control of large swaths of the federal regulatory system
- letting social security funds gamble in the stock market, with the consequence of either making the market unpalatable or making it too tightly regulated to work properly.
and then there was newt's "contract with america" - bogus "big ideas", ideas with a profound sound and little substance.
when bill clinton dealt with the "welfare problem" i don't recall he treated the solution that his admin and the congress came up with as a "big idea", but rather as a negotiated step forward from the current situation arrived at after a lot of input from a lot of people and organizations.
i would argue ,
spare me (and this country) from "big ideas" ,
let's just deal with the obvious problems we face - in the short medium and long runs - and see what we can agree to do together to meliorate those problems.
- getting out of iraq
- increasing federal gov't income, and stabilize expenditures to the extent feasible
- exercising tighter societal/gov't control over corporations, including their political conduct and their speech.
- finding ways to get water to cities
- finding ways to store energy more efficiently
- finding ways to generate non-carbon energy.
for these problems we face, there probably is no "big idea' associated with any of them.
"solving" any one of this list of problems will involve many leaders, both parties, and years of political negotiation,
and many, many new insights and approaches which will appear in context not pre-hoc.
i don't know its history that well, but i would be really surprised if the new deal could be described as the result of a few "big ideas" which roosevelt and the democrats had prior to taking office in 1932.
my guess is that the "big ideas" of the new deal are more ex-post facto historical observations than pre-existing ideas in the minds of the president and his administration.
even john maynard Keynes work in economics was not a big idea but a life time of scholarly work whose relevance slowly became evident to the new deal and gov't control of the economy/
"big ideas", to me, sounds alike a great rhetorical playground,
a playground where those inclined can perform democratic imitations of newt gingrich, or dick cheney.
spare me from those types of foolish, egotistical politicians their public ideas.
so, in summary,
the democratic party does not need "big ideas" to succeed,
it desperately needs the capacity by its leaders
to articulate and educate americans about the PROBLEMS we face.
"big problems" get precedence over
"big ideas"
in my version of sound public policy debate.
September 27, 2007 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I just don't see how the "Charlie Brown football" problem can be ignored. The past 8 years have shown conclusively that the Radical Right does not negotiate in good faith, starts working on undermining any agreement the minute before the ink is dry, and simply cannot be trusted. How exactly is discussion of the format of Social Security supposed to get started when I (and millions of Americans) have exactly zero trust that there isn't a hidden agenda to loot and then terminate?
sPh
September 27, 2007 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is excellent Emma.
May I push the envelope a little further? I would like Matt Bai and all like-minded individuals to say which, if any, of the twentieth century approaches to government they still DO find relevant. Does Bai actually have any common ground with "traditional" Democrats, or is this just hostile carping?
When Bai says, he "loves the scene" where Andy Stern says
he is taking sides, and he's being disingenuous when he says he isn't. And so, I'd like Bai to answer some questions about "twentieth century politics" and their continuing relevance or lack thereof:
- Is egalitarianism and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor important? Given that the poor and middle class vastly outnumber the rich, how can Democrats best position themselves on these questions, both morally and politically?
- What role, if any, can labor unions play in answering the above question and how should Democrats relate to them?
- Are the gains of the Civil Rights era worth protecting or are attempts to do so inevitably the counter-productive conceits of has-been leaders? Is it important for Democrats to fight organized efforts of Republicans to suppress the Black vote? And how best to do so?
I can go on and on here, but my basic point is that those who, like Bai and the people he admires, would argue that twentieth-century politics are irrelevant, are really doing little more than making excuses for their own inability to deliver anything meaningful to the people they want to represent, and instead of continuing the fight, define success down to what they think they can achieve.September 27, 2007 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
"modernize the program to make it more equitable for the self-employed"
You seem especially concerned about SS taxes for the self-employed which is perhaps understandable for an author but how inequitable do you think the taxes are? The nominal rate for both self-employed and other-employed[?] is currently 15.30% and the effective rate only has a spread between them of 1.09%, 15.30% versus 14.21%.(1) Unfair, yes, but not drastically so. It should be an easy fix to split the difference.
Did you know that prior to 1984 the self-employed rate was the lesser of the two? Who was President in 1984? Not a Democrat. An even more interesing question is who headed the commission that recommended the 1984 changes to the Social Security? Hint: He very recently wrote a memoir about his life and times at the FRB. Surprised? I was. Why would a libertarian, a Randian even, support changes that would have a significant negative impact on entrepreneurs? Mindboggling.
------
For every $100 you earn, your employer pays $7.65 in addition to the $7.65 they deduct from your stated wages. Excluding other taxes and benefits, your effective wage is $107.65 of which $15.30 is paid to SSA and $92.35 to you. $15.30 divided by $107.65 is 14.21%.
September 27, 2007 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for explaining that, Emma Zahn. I had thought the self-employed effectively paid the same SS as others by paying the usual employee portion plus the employer portion. But you're right there's a correction that comes about in the denominator so that the self-employed are in fact paying a slightly higher rate.
September 27, 2007 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's no contradiction in what I said. I support making some minor modifications to funding social security but I don't support cutting benefits to anyone, regardless of their wealth.
Oh, and the word "ambuscading" doesn't mean what you think it means.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
September 27, 2007 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
sPh,
You are exactly right when you say the right cannot be trusted!
We cannot work with these people and if anyone still thinks we can I don't think there's much hope for them. The way to start implementing the policies we know the nation needs is first and foremost by completely crushing the Republican Party and I'm not talking about one time. I'm talking 1932 style! They need to be crushed for years--decades and not allowed up off the floor. That is what FDR and the Democrats did to them. They didn't get on their feet for nearly 50 years! It's the only way to deal with them. But that means when we whip their asses we should no longer play this idiotic game of "let's all get along" as we did in 1976 after Watergate, and as we did after Contragate, and as we have done since those swine tried to get rid of Clinton for a blowjob. No, the next time we have them down we need to keep kicking them, we must find a modern equivalent of the bloody shirt and don't stop waving it until we die! I think George Bush and his radical gang of incompetent thugs and criminals could be the ticket, but it will require ceaseless repetition and reminders to the people about exactly who and what the right wing really is.
September 27, 2007 1:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
The fact that all of the "reforms" Matt Bai list in the following passage:
with the exception of "workfare", which was implemented by a democrat, have been either discredited (supply side economics; missile defense) or have provided at best break-even results (school choice) speaks to the irrelevance of The Argument's argument.
It seems to me deeply pointless to contend that the failure of democrats to articulate their agenda in the manner that the right promoted this list of reforms and the ideas behind them is anything but a point in their favor.
In the media environment in which voters live these ideas (which more or less amount to "don't try to improve society with the government" and "military supremacy is awesome") hold sway despite the fact that they are wrong.
Clearly, the success of this body of ideas (moreso in terms of economic thinking, which is what we're really arguing about) as a meme is real and cannot be ignored in the center-left's efforts to improve the quality of life of the nation's citizens but it cannot be denied that the success of these "modern conservative" arguments in the playing field in which the center left must submit its ideas pretty much ties their hands before the game has begun in terms of making the "argument" that Matt Bai is calling for.
Given the existing environment, the center left must either discredit the meme or tell prettier lies. Given the impossibility of making an "argument" that is reality-based, principled, and more appealing than the supply side chicanery of the right--do not regulate the economy and everything will magically get better--Matt Bai seems to be calling for the latter.
So I have no problem with Democrats and public representative of the center left pushing the idea that theory that informs Fox news and CNN level economic, domestic policy, and international relations commentary and reporting is wrong and harmful and at the same time attempting to improve government policy and programs without dismantling them.
Matt Bai talked somewhere or other about the need for the center-left to recognize that the environment to which they need to apply their ideas is not static, that old solutions to old problems will not work for new situations. While this is not an a priori truth, to the exent that it is true, the center-left's policies are not inconsistent with the idea.
For instance, Hillary Clintons newhealthcare plan is different from her oldhealthcare plan. I remember various amounts of openness, especially among leftward economists, about raising the SS retirement age and reducing the benefits level such that SS financing would be sustainable for something like 75 years, ie three quarters of a century. Democrats understand the importance of trade.
If some marginal dem presidential nominee started calling for an exact recreation of new deal era policies, all of the leading democratic presidential candidates would jumpt at the opportunity to contrast their ideas with those of the marginal candidate. Are any democrats calling for a return to the new deal? No. They're not. Perhaps they are calling for the reinstitution in the public consciousness of the idea that the citizens of a nation are capable of acting by means of transparent and honest government to improve their lives and solve or eliminate problemsin the hope that such reinstitution would give them the political opportunity to act on the idea. Is Matt Bai saying that this idea is wrong? That the forty years of studies on poverty alleviation he cites discredits this idea? If so, I doubt he's right, but it's certainly not the case that center and left of center thinking hasn't progressed while maintaining some good and sturdy principles.
So, as far as I can tell, the left has an "argument" that may not be ferociously novel but at the very least hasn't been applied in a while. It's certainly not an argument that has been proven wrong or irrelevant. Based on the list of reforms I quoted above, the only self-identifying body of public figures I see adhering to long discredited and outdated ideas (even among their own intellectuals) are republicans.
In light of that contrast, I come to question why Matt Bai would spend so much time thinking in print about why democrats can't get their intellectual house in order, as opposed to republicans. Perhaps its because the idea that they are pleases him.
I'm not saying it's true, I'm just saying it's a question that I find interesting.
September 27, 2007 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, not the word I was looking for, so much for expanding my vocabulary.
You have to admit that there is a tension between the natural Democratic instinct to soak the rich to pay for benefits for the masses and the shared sacrifice model that requires a painful, regressive flat tax to fund benefits. Many people seem to like to have it both ways, proposing ways to make the funding more progressive without changing the program to a safety net system which may be a more suitable and less painful to address the risk mitigation that you identify as required today. I guess I put you in that camp.
September 27, 2007 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
.
That you automatically reach for the Radical Right's caricature of the philosophy that underlies many Democratic Party policies is telling one way or the other.
.
sPh
September 27, 2007 5:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
But when I look at the same CAP poverty plan that Mark is touting, I see a shining example of exactly the inertia that I’m talking about on the left as a whole.
I'm not really sure who or what you're criticizing for not being innovative. Is it just CAP? Or if it's "the left as a whole," how are you defining the left?
I got the impression earlier that the critique was about the Democratic party... But here it seems that the Harlem Children's Zone is being touted as an example of innovation, and Barack Obama is congratulated for showing interest in it.
But Barack Obama is one of the main contenders to be the standard bearer for the Democratic party right now. And Bill Clinton has also championed HCZ (first link). And Democrats and Republicans together are trying to replicate HCZ in Miami.
Other thing is, the current "innovative" incarnation of HCZ seems to have been funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (pdf), which according to this article, is a big ol' left wing foundation full of old school "liberal zeal," having joined the "stampede into activism" way back in the '70s.
So I don't really get how this criticism expands beyond CAP. Okay, CAP doesn't have anything to do with HCZ. Bad CAP!
September 27, 2007 5:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I should apologize for my definition quip. I didn't know what the word meant when you used it and so I looked it up. Okay, you used it kind of wrong (it means to lie in ambush) but I learned it because of you, so... guess we're both smarter now!
As to the substance of your critique: I guess we just differ here. My feeling is that if you preserve the benefits you're saying "If you worked all your life, whether you made a lot or a little, our society says thanks for your work and you're entitled to at least this." That's why I want the benefits preserved for everyone. Shouldn't our society make that promise to everybody? They all worked their butts off. Shouldn't there be some sort of minimum guaranty? If that's Social Security, I'm fine with that.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
September 27, 2007 6:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
"If you worked all your life, whether you made a lot or a little, our society says thanks for your work and you're entitled to at least this."
I like that, its a thought worth saving.
Jack
September 27, 2007 8:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
No Crust, I'm not going to make some case for humor. There was no argument in that line, and all but a handful of readers recognized it for harmless parody of the 2004 campaign that it was, and nothing more. may I suggest that there is a fine but important line between vigilance and paranoia. Thanks.
Join The Argument.
www.mattbai.com
September 27, 2007 8:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Could be . But at least in this forum there's something to be said for turning down the volume
September 28, 2007 6:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course your sentiments would apply just as easily to a safety net program: Those who work hard all their life deserve insurance that they will have some income even if their retirement plans go awry.
September 28, 2007 8:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
If I were a heartless meanie, I might indelicately suggest that your thanks for your work was the pay you received for your work.
September 28, 2007 8:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Democrats are also very good at rationalizing why the rich that they want to soak really don't deserve their wealth.
September 28, 2007 8:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Matt, I would have thought most readers interpreted that as a dig at Clinton and Obama not Kerry and/or his critics. But then again I don't share your miraculous ability to determine what "all but a handful of readers" think.
But my main point isn't your bad boy antics, which frankly aren't that bad by the standards of much of our press corps today. The big story is the outsized role light-hearted, trivial and often false banter by our press plays in our public discourse and influencing our elections. This isn't solely a post-1998 or anti-Democratic phenomenon (think for instance of the outsized role the incessant commentary about Bush Sr.looking at his watch played in the 1992 election), though it is primarily both of those things. The whole Kerry flap for example was monumentally silly. Sure he voted for one version of the bill, before voting against the other. Then again, Bush threatened to veto the version Kerry voted for, before signing the version Kerry voted against. Yet I don't think I ever saw this vital bit of context in all the endless coverage of that remark; would have spoiled the fun I guess. I gave more examples in my previous comment.
The media having fun at the expense of substance -- and often truth -- undeniably changed the outcome of the 2000 election and arguably the 2004 election. You don't need to be paranoid to see it; you just need to be paying attention.
September 28, 2007 9:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Kerry's windsurfing was used to imply that it was incongruous for someone participating in that rich man's pastime to also present himself as a tribune of the people. I happen to live a couple of hundred yards from where he was photographed . Good thing (if I were interested him watching him ) , otherwise I couldn't have reached The Point since the road was blocked by the aging pick ups and chevys of the firemen and plumbers who made up the bulk of the other windsurfers that day. Most BTW with Bush/ Cheney bumper stickers.
Probably wouldn't have changed anything if it had been accurately described. But why wasn't it ? For the matter , why did Nicholas Lehmann use the pages of the New Yorker for his almost-endoresement of Bush in 2000 ?
Does any of this connect with Matt Bai ? I think so . It's boring , unimaginative to endorse a Gore or a Kerry. Much more interesting to attack them for something or other. Love Story. Windsurfing.Whatever.Doesn't really matter. Maybe they open their soft boiled egg at the wrong end.
The devil has all the best tunes and the people who seem like fun are the ones bravely proclaiming their startling insight that the poor ought to suffer a little more . Be good for their moral fibre.
Matt Bai will not point the way to a society in which Katha Pollitt won't be able to describe a poor mother unable to treat her sick baby. Because ,guys , he doesn't care.
We're wasting time , intellectual energy and Coffee House space talking with him because he's not on our side.
September 28, 2007 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, you have access to the TPMCafe demographic studies? I would love to see them, can you post them?
September 28, 2007 7:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't have them , just made my own assessment of the majority position. I could be wrong. Maybe most of the habitues of this venue are Ayn Rand libertarians , Sam Brownbeck Republicans or George Bush supporters . Or even agree with Matt Bai.
I don't think so.
September 29, 2007 1:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for the compliment but since you are citing this comment on other threads I should perhaps add that my calculation is a "worst case" from a self-employed perspective.
I haven't prepared a self-employed tax return in a couple of decades and don't know what current IRS rules are. I don't remember if federal taxes are calculated before or after deducting Social Security taxes, in whole or part. My calculation is based on the self-employed paying the entire Social Security tax with after tax dollars -- the worst case. They probably aren't and I really should have checked before commenting. Most likely they are, as you originally thought, paying the same. Maybe there are some self-employed people reading that could quickly answer.
Hope this addendum doesn't disappoint you too much.
September 30, 2007 9:12 AM | Reply | Permalink