the only thing useful about Cillizza's blog is the insight it offers into beltway CW.

Posted at September 17, 2008 3:10 PM in response to Overstating Drudge's Influence For Fun And Profit

Goldstein often seems even more naive than the typical Mount Pleasant intern/entry level professional and this is true here. Yes, many studies suggest that children are better off in two-parent families. And, yes, because this is based on averages, it means that despite this general tendency, lots of kids are not so well-off in two parent households. The effort to promote marriage has been moronic at best. Marriage among African-Americans increased only when long stagnanted wages increased. Better family environments will come only from better economic consitions. promoting unions would accomplish more than the kind of family values claptrap promoted by Douthat.

Posted at July 15, 2008 10:30 AM in response to Gender, Jobs, and the Working Class Family

17th & Euclid is an area that still has problems, despite being near some of the most expensive parts of Adams-Morgan. Andrew Sullivan lives near by, btw. I used to live a few blocks away, myself and despite the rep, I've taken walks thru there in the evening myself.

Even someone with combat training would have difficulty using a gun properly under the conditions of a mugging. The active fantasy life of a gun nut is no substitute for real world experience.

Hope Buetler is doing okay.

Posted at July 2, 2008 5:45 PM in response to Well Known Liberal Blogger Shot In Washington, D.C.

The mid- to late 70s (when I entered the job market) were terrible. Recession, hyperinflation, the first round of jobs going elsewhere (the South and abroad). In addition, you had people from the peak baby boom years entering the job market at a time when even a more robust economy would have had trouble absorbing them. A lot of people from my cohort wound up in jobs that had not necessarily required college in the past, such as retail management. Employers took advantage of the oversupply of college graduates to change the profile of many low level managerial and technical positions. This eroded opportunity for non-grads, as well as lower the entry level possibilities for grads.

The current cohort has advantages and disadvantages that weren't present 30 years ago. With an aging population, the job market should improve over time, as boomers retire out. Given the debt load some of these people carry, the process may be slower than in past generations, but things will improve. there is no IT sector on the horizon, but the need to confront gloabl warming may create opprtunities for people with training many areas of science and technology.

After college, I worked in low level social service-type jobs, got some experience and then went back to school and got a PhD in a field with plenty of demand. This option is less possible now because of the caost of higher education and the debt that people accumulate. I left grad school with relatively modest debt and used second jobs to pay off most of the principal within 5 years. I wonder how many can do this now. I think this mitigates the value of advanced study.

BTW, many graduate degrees are a dime a dozen...education, MBAs from non-elite institutions, lawyers who don't go into big firms or corporate practice, etc.

The future for your daughter and others requires rethinking of how to fund education and the kinds of skills that will be needed. Having lived through a long, bad job market, I see reasons for hope, but I also worry that many of the avenues for advancement really have become more difficult.

the necessity of accumulating debt needs to be questionsed, but the cost of many basic things (e.g., housing in major metros, eductaion) makes it more difficult to avoid debt for people early in their professional lives.

Posted at July 2, 2008 4:27 PM in response to A Warning For Young Workers: The Up-Escalator May Be Broken

"The Iraqi prisoners must often have been not so much hurt as puzzled by the American behavior. Straight torture would have been a familiar reminder of Saddam's state but other events must have seemed surreal." Stewart still shows the same lack of empathy that's evident in his books.

'to clear out the clutter that muddles our sense of right and wrong and to identify who to hold responsible. I completely understand why you take the focus away from junior individuals like England or Graner in order to blame people higher up the chain. But the risk, of course, is that the 'higher-ups' are hard to identify or accuse with enough specificity - which shifts the blame back onto a more abstract system. This can in some sense let everyone off the hook both at the top and the bottom: rather than making both senior and junior alike share the shame of the atrocities.' There isn't much "muddle" here. And, unfortunately, we often don't go after the big guys. In this case, many of them could eaily have similar or greater positions of power in s subsequent GOP administration.

Posted at June 27, 2008 2:00 PM in response to Why is it So Easy to Accept Torture?

Krauthammer still calls himself a psychiatrists and spouts a lot of nonsense on that topic, even though he hasn't had a medical license in 25 years (I checked). It's hame that pundits aren't licensed, although that probably wouldn't stop him from shooting off his mouth in print, either.

Posted at June 13, 2008 12:53 PM in response to Krauthammer's Brilliant Advice to McCain!

The condescending attitude gets at things that Rick doesn't cover in the book (at least not so far--I'm 400+ pages in) and that, in fairness, other historians of the period miss. There was a split between liberals and labor that began in the 50s, which Tom Geoghagen has discussed briefly. It probably had to do with investigations into racketeering in unions, among other things. there's also a snobbishness about joining unions on the part of professionals and this impeded the development of teacher's unions (along with anti-strike laws directed at public employees). Unions had a blue collar tinge that bothered people--perhaps more so in the lower rungs of the middle class where people want to grasp onto whatever social status they have.

The mass movements that grew in the 60s and 70s--civil rights, anti-poverty, women, environment; none of these engaged white working class people in a meaningful way. the civil rights movement became co-opted by the old, conservative black middle class or became so dominated by extremists so that ultimately, that movement shut out the Black working class in meaningful ways.

Martin Luther King was beginning to reach out in his later days, but his own movement was fraying and he was also taking on the Vietnam war, which lessened his effectiveness. Although Bobby Kennedy did not do as well among working class whites as has been remembered, his policy stances (e.g., work not welfare) clearly could have kept the old coalition together. Since then, nada. The women's movement quickly abandoned economic issues, became pre-occupied by abortion and intramural fights over what to do with lesbians and ultimately became irrelevant to working class and, frankly, middle class women. ironically, many of these women really wanted a movement that spoke for them. Trhe environmental movement has been an embarassment and like the women's movement only talks about working class or poor people as victimized abstractions, when its convenient.

I'm a PhD with blue collar roots. My blue collar distrust of middle class professionals and their ignorance about the world has, if anything, been reinforced by becoming a middle class professional. People like my peers stood by when factors closed and labor shrank. It's taken decades to recognize the importance of unions again. The economic insecurity of conservative rule is only understood because it's filtered down to the white collar middle class.

The wingnuts have been able to exploit insecurities of social location and economics that liberals have missed. It's been easy for many "good" liberals to condescend to white working people because they perceive them as having different values. That those values may be shared by, e.g., church-going African-Americans or Latinos is missed.

The condescension and the social ignorance that went with it are/were real. What has changed is that the condescension that lies beneath the faux populism of the Right also has become obvious. For things to change, liberals have to get out of their Takoma Parks and Pasadenas and actually listen to people who live in places like Macomb County, MI or Prince William County, VA. We can't just rely on demography as destiny, because there are places where African-Americans. Latinos, the young, etc. may not want to stay in the coalition. Regionally, I think there is more hope in the Northeast, Midwest, & West--there;s still some union infrastructure in tehse places and their histories of pragmatism and communitarianism aren't entirely dead. the South will be more difficult and more complicated.

Posted at May 27, 2008 1:19 PM in response to Taking the Adversary Seriously: History and Condescension

This is a variation on what professors have always done when confronted with problematic applications of their ideas--lie and distance themselves. He'll never repudiate the basic ideas or he'll do it in an arcane way in a book or article no one will read.

Posted at April 3, 2008 2:27 PM in response to Yoo: I Thought Torture Was A Bad Idea, Really I Did

Lewis is one of the very few politicians in Atlanta, let alone Georgia with any shred of credibility. Off and on, he was my Congressman when I lived in Atlanta. He beat the corrupt Maynard Jackson machine to get his seat in Congress and is very popular in Congress on both sides of the aisle. He's not impulsive or thoughtless. He's a person of real integrity unlike the highly compromised Andrew Young, the crazy Cynthia McKinney, or Georgia's hopeless and corrupt GOP leaders. His switch to Obama will have real impact.

Posted at February 14, 2008 11:27 PM in response to Civil Rights Icon John Lewis Switches Super-Delegate Vote From Hillary To Obama

"I do believe that Christians (and this applies to followers of the Jewish tradition as well) have the task of calling the world -- and ourselves -- to account in the name of higher standards than any government or economic system typically achieves. Religious people should be hard to satisfy." Nice ideal but I rarely see this in practice. there a strong Calvinist strain in Protestantism that makes so much high minded thinking seem snobbish (and often it really is just high brow snobbishness). Religious people often have been the first to identify themselves as being on "the side that's winning", certainly in Catholic and Protestant colonial outposts and, in this country, very much in Protestant circles.

Most people I've known who think about standards in a truly sincere way have been Jewish. Reform Judiasm, in particular, has set these ideals in ways that seem to become aspirational in a way that doesn't happen in Christianity.

The issue of "how to reach religious people" is a difficult one because there are so many different variations. We have had progressive thinkers motivated by evangelism, like Neibuhr. But many of the same ideal have been espoused by their contemporaries who had become ever more secular (consider Niebuhr's nemesis, John Dewey). Christianity has repeatedly countered modernism of various forms (e.g., science) and, at best, resolved itself in the most philosophically tortured ways.

people like Hitchens may have visibility on parts of the web and with a limited print readership, but I tend to think that organized atheism is pretty irrelevant in terms of how people think about faith. There are a great many people who have fallen away from active religious practice--some really don't think about religion at all. Others may be searchers who explore Buddhism or other alternatives with varying degrees of devotion. In the megachurch era, it appears that even the most evangelical of churches are more like a consumer market place than a place that really identifies with uplifting standards.

In the end, what to do with religious people becaomes a complicated question and one that cannot turn on one's own ideals or preconceived notions of what religious people are like or who they are. There is plenty of survey evidence that would suggest that once you get out of the South, the religious people we're used to hearing about (evangelicals, fundamentalists) are a declining force in the population. And in the South, the rates of divorce, eta l. aren't exactly a testimony to how they shape behavior beyond the most superficial applications of faith. Religious practice in the South is as much a status marker (a means of gaining middle class respectability in places where a middle class life is unattainable) as anything else.

Posted at February 12, 2008 11:32 PM in response to Why We Should Not Be Easily Satisfied