Not Your Father's Liberalism
Well, maybe everything does look like a nail to me. I know no more about environmental politics than any other reasonably well-educated lay person. To me, “Break Through” is an interesting example of what I have been writing about elsewhere at TPM, which is an effort to set forth the philosophical underpinnings of a policy position. The policy, I take it on faith from the excerpt, is that the United States government should invest $30 billion a year for ten years or a total of $300 billion to develop clean fuel technologies. Pretty soon, to quote Everett Dirksen, we’re going to be talking about real money.
Money can come from two places: debt and taxes. The authors seem to be suggesting debt (they write, “Democrats have come to believe, erroneously, that it was President Clinton’s 1993 Balanced Budget that caused the economic boom of the 1990s.” (B, 260.) If the Democrats “abandon deficit reduction and fiscal parsimony,” as the authors recommend, there is, do doubt, another $30 billion a year in borrowing the federal government could do to invest in the authors’ research proposal. In his contribution to this book club, Ross Gelbspan suggests an international fund of $300 billion -- ten times the size of Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s -- to provide “affordable clean energy to all developing countries.” Who can be against that? Although it is starting to sound a little like cold fusion.
In support of their strategy, the authors do something unusual in public policy debates: they try to articulate a philosophical and sociological explanation for why we need to avoid hard decisions like raising the money through taxes. Their story is that modern American history has been a trajectory toward greater and greater individualism, real material prosperity and an insurmountable aversion to sacrifice or limitations. Accordingly, Americans will only follow a philosophy of individual accomplishment, material success and the promise of, say, cold fusion. If you try to tell Americans the real story of their class interests in, for example, economic security, as in The Matter with Kansas, and the need for common sacrifice to avoid boiling together, they will just write you off as a wine swilling coastal liberal and continue to vote Republican. All the constituent parts of the Democratic party are whinging special pleaders. Hence, the romantically named Apollo Fund.
Some quibbles with their foray into the history of philosophy: Franklin Roosevelt was not a radical revolutionary. Most of his programs like Social Security had been tried in various European countries since Otto von Bismarck. Every time a feminist tries to defend women’s control over their own reproduction now hanging on the good will of one very conservative Supreme Court Justice, Anthony Kennedy, it’s not some short-sighted special interest. Social movements do not depend on people feeling generous because they are enjoying material prosperity: the French Revolution, Marxism, Progressivism, the New Deal.
These are serious errors. Stripping the philosophy of its weird or ignorant parts, however, a lot of Break Through is a refreshing effort to change the frame of the discourse. I applaud their willingness to say that the Kansans figured out they had enough material stuff, so they decided to flex their muscles by imposing their religion on the rest of us. I commend them for telling a largely liberal audience that shouting New Deal slogans in an ever louder voice is not going to overcome the social attitudes carefully constructed by three decades of conservative individualistic ideology. I even applaud the ambition and optimism of their Apollonian vision, although it sounds a little like Dionysus to me. Why not throw $30 – or $300 --billion dollars of the future generations’ money at an optimistic attempt to crack the most threatening material development in recent history? If we win, it’s cold fusion. If we lose, well, we were going to boil or whatever anyway.
Linda, if your participation in this thread as well as in your own means we're going to be seeing a lot more of you at TPMCafe well... then this is a good day, indeed.
S&N do have language in their favor and the way they're talking (optimism and achievement) is really appealling. By the end of this book club we'll have a good sense of whether or not their rhetoric is up to the task. I suspect it isn't.
I suspect that we're facing an existential crisis, the kind that demands the shared sacrifice and pulling together that you allude to in your discussion about liberalism's principles.
You brought up Apollo and Dionysus but there's very little of Nietzsche's Overman in S&N. Instead, they're the digitized dudes of the 1990s. They're approach is the Venture Capital approach and they have all the lofty language down. They want to have it all. Someday we'll see them on the board of a socially conscious investment fund, talking about "doing well by doing good."
Maybe it'll even work. But it doesn't help us have as conversation that goes, "Hey everyone, I know taxes suck but we need to fund a new energy initiative or we're doomed. It's a little pain now for some joy later." S&N very cleverly avoid that discussion by promising we can have it all. I'm skeptical.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 8, 2007 6:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'll echo Destor in appreciating the prospects of your returning often. I have even a more sunny and optimistic scenario the American people are sure to love. We promise such little growth in government that it'll cost only $10. We send this to N/S, so that they can set aside part of a closet and call it their own cold fusion lab. Won't make any difference, after all, that the lab isn't larger. It's still just the prospect of cold fusion.
And then we get onto joining together to clean up the planet, knowing that a lot of immediate costs fall on some nasty businesses with factories that deserve it, so that we have a healthier planet for children and so they won't have to pay all the costs. That message actually did work when it came to pollution, after all. People don't like to hug trees, except maybe on their own property, but they do kinda like their kids to have a future. The Erin Brokovich type is still the only liberal hero that guarantees to play in Kansas.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 8, 2007 6:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why not put $30 billion into a national fund to invent a cure for poverty and not do anything to help poor people until we "find the cure" ?
This makes about as much sense as N & S's premise.
October 8, 2007 6:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I want my absudity back. The know-nothing side of the chattering class has stolen it and uses it for evil.
I'd like to see that $30 billion put into advertising the electric car with blacktop-embedded solar charger.
A handful of LED lamps will light your house on 1/10 the energy. So yes, you can light your life with solar- or how about a high-tech hand crank?
But the extraction industries own your Congressmen, Senators and President, apparently too many corporate boards, and certainly too much media.
Breakthrough technology: Soon there will be a bullshit detector and the mines in which we presently bury a few Americans per year will be turned into adventure parks, Children will get less asthma and require less healthcare, and those rough, outdoorsy 'Sportsmen for bad government' would have some mountains and forests left to stomp their machismo. (But their cars would be nearly silent.)
October 8, 2007 8:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I love the phrase "I want my absurdity back."
It's enough to make you really believe that the oil exploration and production companies have subverted new technologies and that we'd have mass transit in every major city and a water engine if not for their manipulations.
Alas, conspiracy theories tend to be only convenient explanations for why the "absurd" is not reality.
There is no conspiracy.
But we could still be doing so much better.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 8, 2007 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
You know, if those liberals got over screaming about a petty interest-group issue like health care, they might get somewhere. Americans don't want to hear they might lose their coverage or get sick. That's so negative, and Americans are optimistic.
Put it in terms of an issue Americans (here in the Beltway) really relate to, like Section 308.23.45 of the tax code. Get slogans that us new idea people like Bai and all can handle. Innovation! Ideas! Investment! Let's promise not health care, but a massive spending program to find new technology so that human beings are immortal. It'd render health care obsolete.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 8, 2007 9:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
John makes an excellent point... if lofty, optimistic rhetoric is what people want, how come there's no lofty, optimistic language in our laws?
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
October 8, 2007 9:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
No conspiracy, just a federation of like-minded individuals doing what they feel is right: Nothing. As Mr. Paul might say, they may be very, very sincere, but stonewalling the enviro lobby means keeping old technologies on life support and obsolete jobs on the clock in parts of the country where there is no economy but the local resource.
Here's a breakthrough technology for you: 'Moving forward back to coal,' which I think is a straight quote from Bush.
I applied my new Bullshit Detector and discovered the blue state I live in has a belt of coal along the western margin, which people can get paid money to go underground and bring out. You can work at the Universities or get a miner's hat. Coal is a door into electoral-votes-rich PA, and politicians certainly see that.
Same in places with lots of trees and no industry but logging. More tree cuttin' means more jobs. So anti-environmentalism has a net benefit for politicians, and the workers do the work fighting the enviro lobby.
And then the agro lobby got their share of the extraction pie by putting food in the gas tank- all that real estate from coast to coast covered in nothing but corn and military bases now dedicated to burn-it-up technology.
There's lots of private-sector money in play already to encourage innovation. This year we got the iPhone, and Google is giving away free satellite images of your neighborhood. Meanwhile, last-century's fuel, gasoline, doubled in price overnight. Demand constant, supply pretty constant, price doubled. At every gas station, too. Those doubled profits at Exxon are resources to be spent in keeping things the same. We know where the $30 Billion goes- industry dedicates it to environmental misinformation and business dedicates theirs to toys. The public has to do it with public money.
The global economy can correct this misdedication of resources soon all by itself, just like free-marketerrs predict. But it will be catastrophic if we wait and watch it happen on their terms, waking up one day with no gasoline left and no rain. Now, when we HAVE solar and we HAVE undevelopable land and windmills, we HAVE LED lighting, the only fuel we have to run the economy is stuff we dig up and burn, and that's because people own that stuff and want to keep things as they are as long as possible for whatever reason.
Energy is important, and we're not moving forward because resources are dedicated to perpetuating the current technology. The environment is important, but we're not moving forward because some people have a stake in the status quo and people at large can ignore anything (like geese that no longer migrate). New technologies need oxygen.
October 8, 2007 11:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
In my opinion there are two serious mistakes we can make with global warming. One is to continue as we are and look for the free energy to show up just in time to avoid serious consequences. The other is to invest all of our spare change into stopping the production of greenhouse gases hoping to get it stopped just in time to avoid serious consequences.
I think the winning approach is to prepare for the inevitable warming of the earth - get prepared for the rising sea level, for the loss of productive agricultural areas, and for the extreme weather phenomena sure to come.
But, also to work very hard to stop the release of greenhouse gases, primarily CO2, into the atmosphere. As bad as the consequences are certain to be, they will be far worse if we continue down the path we are now on.
I see action on the reduction of greenhouse gases front, but little or none on the preparations needed for what will inevitably happen.
Hoppy in Sacramento
October 8, 2007 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
What is the subject of this post? Hyperlinks have a purpose. I don't expect to have to Google "Break Through" to understand what is going on. And I don't what to take part in a discussion limited to Beltway cognoscenti.
October 8, 2007 7:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a lesson to be learned from today's physics Nobel Prize announcements. The prize is based upon the discovery in 1988 of a new natural phenomena called giant magnetoresistance. It took only a decade for this discovery to be commercialized and lead to the introduction of all sorts of compact, high performance electronic devices. The lesson is that there is still lots about the natural world that we don't know yet.
The way to find out more is to support basic research. What passes for research today is mostly applied research, not basic. The big labs like Bell Labs and RCA labs which did basic research no longer do so. Funding at universities is also increasingly aimed at projects that can be quickly commercialized, with the universities getting a cut of the revenue.
The one area where we know the least is fusion. There are only two approaches being worked on currently. They are both in the engineering phase and are proving highly complex.
I've proposed several times that we create an international program to support basic research in controlled fusion. The Apollo Fund is too small, too localized and too caught up in technology. I would prefer to see a program that is more like $300 billion per year. This would be an international effort. It's affordable. The US, alone, spends $500 billion on militarism each year and what of lasting value do we have to show for it?
The idea would be to fund hundreds of small to medium-sized research programs that would look for new fusion mechanisms. There was some hope that an effect called sonofusion might be something, but it is now in doubt. Even so, the experiments were done, literally, on a table top and cost almost nothing. We can expect that 99% of the ideas won't pan out, but we only need one.
I understand the power of the energy sector, but they aren't fools, they know that the resources are running out. For every Exxon that wants to make as much now and to hell with tomorrow, there is a BP who hopes to transition to new sources in the future. If a new fusion phenomena is discovered it is most likely that it will be the present energy firms that will be the ones to commercialize it.
By spreading the costs and the efforts internationally there should be less strain on any individual country and it should also reduce the fears of future energy monopolization.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
October 9, 2007 3:27 AM | Reply | Permalink