Personally, I LOVE Marco Rubio's proposed legislation. If enacted, it would wipe out the existing legislation put through by Republicans and signed by Dubya that explicitly BARS shareholders from holding C-suite types accountable. But I guess when you have no interest in what your proposed laws actually do, you can just make and break the rules as you go along.
He's... not that bright, if we're honest. He thinks he's holding his own with the big bullies, and it's sad. We'll see if he can replace the NRA as a donor, but he's never gonna be president.
I've read that no corporation has ever been penalised on the basis of not living-up to the 'for the public good' I've read (second-hander that I am) is officially part of…corporate charters?…the laws creating incorporation?
If that's so, giving it some teeth might be a good idea…until the wrong government makes 'for the public good' mean 'for America!nism and against critical race trans-wokefare'.
Spot on. It really does boil down to 1) the silo effect of social media, where everyone consumes their own “news” from their own preferred outlets, so persuasion is unnecessary; and 2) the conservative elites’ realization that their base doesn’t care about policy as long as their perceived “enemies” are suffering worse than they are. The elites can enrich themselves and their donors out in the open so long as their message is Own The Libs.
When I left the Army in '84, I ended up around a bunch of Reaganites, being unaware of the sea change the USA had undergone while I was stationed overseas. The only thing more ardent than their devotion to Ronnie was their heroic consumption of drugs and booze, one thing I could relate to at the time. The downside was having to listen to them spout mung like the stuff you just quoted. I parted ways with them some time later with absolutely no regrets.
Let’s all remember that short-lived game show: “Name a Conservative Program That Worked.” Even with multiple categories (War, Economy, Crime, Poverty, Drugs, Infrastructure, Healthcare, Education, Race) the average contestant dropped out within 5 minutes, muttering “Geez, I got nuthin’!”
Best thing ever- so much win! From " poncy proseur pitching his pseud style" to " Evil Carnies"
I haven't had time to look up " Mencius Goldbug" and I may not because I like the sound of the words so much I worry the definitions may disappoint compared to my ( so far) wild conjecture.
A couple of corrections though, minor things really. I believe the current convention is to always preface Bill Bennett's name with
" Degenerate Gambler" and I believe David Brooks has moved on from salad bars to plumbing the depths of his research assistant's hot ass.
People with ridiculous pseudonyms being taken seriously by meatheads in the blog era ("read this post by the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler!") was one thing; ridic pseuds being elevated by the Claremont Institute is -- well, come to think of it, it's the same thing.
It's looking likely we may have to strike to finally get some form of equity at my school, and I always go to these union meetings & see Econ & Business professors & want to shake them. "You know we're here because of the things you're too chicken shit to say."
And then I remember I'm a literature prof: 75% of us would aver in all sincerity that Shakespeare writes "universal" truths while James Baldwin is "niche."
Eh. The veneer of civilization is thin and barbaric pressures erode said veneer and there’s the GOP and here we are.
As for the intellectual presentations, as it were, it was a marketing thing because there was a need for the conservatives — outliers of sorts back when WFB and company were making their bones — to appear Sober and Serious. The need for that now is completely unnecessary. They’ve had a lock on the mainstream media since the late 70s or so, and the part of the base not supporting the GOP for personal wealth doesn’t give a shit about any effete intellectual stuff.
So. No need for Serious Policy Thoughts. Pretty much that simple sorry.
Civilisation: it has many fewer fans than people who say they are. People who know very little history of how people have lived don't understand so much of the bad stuff it helps them avoid but still have to live with its strictures.
On the other hand, say 'civilisation' but mean 'my raceʼs ascendancy' frees-up your Id to be its own bad self in its defence, since your (if correctly seen) bad behaviour can't make you be 'uncivilised'.
If Shapiro's brain pills worked, he'd lose his audience. Though if they're toxic he will too, which makes me want to say they're just sugar pills, but the last couple years have taught me these fuckers prefer them to be toxic.
And since when do lesbians love Madonna? She's bi, at best, and GC lesbians like Camille fucking hate bi people almost as much as they hate trans people. Paglia's a divide-and-conquer gay, too. Fuck her. (Mind you, bi women aren't into Madonna much, either. They handed us her and said "Look, representation!" and I thought, yeah, so was Herb Baumeister. You might, in fact, be surprised by the assumption that serial killers are usually bisexual, but it's an actual thing I've been lectured on by lesbian lovers.)
Anyway, last night I was watching the twitter Marxists quote Jonah fucking Goldberg's Liberal Fascism at people to explain why liberals suck. (I'm a liberal because Molly Ivins was a liberal, and there's only so many things I can make my brain do at this age, and I'd rather concentrate on labels I use that hurt people, not whether "progressive" is better than "liberal". (I say "bi" too, despite howls that I'm a bigot by pan people. It means the same thing, you twerps just got a dictionary instead of a queer history book.)
It was easily a half-dozen far left people explaining that we're trying to genocide everybody because liberalism only pretends to be better than Trumpism. Pardon the fuck out of me. *I*'m not the one quoting Jonah Goldberg.
It started out with someone who claimed it as divine revelation, as far as I can tell. By the time it got to me, it was a plural with a SJW bio (someone I follow because so far they seem like decent people, at least the presenters do) dropping the book cover as about three people trolled hard, possibly sincerely, and assorted other people mocked them and agreed with them and the second or so person was explaining earnestly about Jonah's tome. I feel like there were block quotes or page images or something, but I have since fallen down the rabbit hole of violently pro-vax LGBTQ fascists who demand benevolent dictatorship like they have in Sicily.
I mean, make it an elected monarchy and we'll talk.
I wasn't stoned, so I guess this is a psychotic break, because you people wouldn't run a reality that badly, right?
Wow, that Wilson quote about how the Laffer Curve is probably bullshit is really something. Good catch, Roy!
These guys were playing with things - the lives of the poor, the full faith and credit of the United States government - that they didn't really care about. If some poor folks starve, or the government goes bankrupt, who cares? What good are the poor, and who needs a government anyway?
We imagine history is driven by great passions or strongly held ideas, but I'm starting to think one of the most powerful world-historical forces is simple don't-give-a-shit.
The thing is depending on what you mean by the Laffer Curve being bullshit you could be right or wrong. The idea behind the Laffer Curve is correct -- there has to be a tax rate at which revenues are maximized, that has been known since the 14th or 15th Century. The rate Laffer chose was way wrong and in fact the tax rates at the time were well below the maximizing tax rate. So Laffer what he got right wasn't novel and what was novel was wrong. Of course the Republicans were using confirmation bias to get an argument for what they wanted to do, not trying to maximize tax revenues
That's right, Jordan Ellenberg made this point in his book How Not to Be Wrong, pointing to some idiot National Review writer who was asking, "Why should the United States move toward Socialism when Sweden is moving away from it?". But if there's some revenue-maximizing optimum, that's exactly what you'd see, countries adjusting up or down depending on where they think they are in relation to the optimum (with emphasis on the word "think') Ellenberg was amused that even people who write for the National Review couldn't understand the Laffer Curve.
Well, for people making gigantic amounts of money, the Kennedy tax cut to a top marginal rate of 70% (from ninety-something) would come close. (I like saying that I want a tax cut: Kennedy's.)
The top personal rate went from 91% to (after one year, as I read it) 70% (over $180K); I didn't see anything there about a top total rate of 40%. Plus-duckspeakwise I'd like to see our current rates reduced to that.
Trivially, the U.S. should move toward Socialism when Sweden are moving away from it whenever the net-return on Socialism has a local maximum between where the two are. (Note: Sweden in fact did move that way for a few years, then stopped well short of our distance from Socialism in that notional space.)
This was just fucking excellent, both parts. One of the most astute and succinct explanations of the rise of Trump dementia came from one Roy Edroso: "The Republican rabble has always been ready for a true shitheel to step up..."
So, having debased everything else, it's no surprise that Trumpism -- so devoid of substance it doesn't even deserve an "ism" suffix -- has undermined what conservatives call "intellectual" now to the point where the fascist whackjobs of the Claremont Institute and their lunatic rants are what passes for policy discussion. (Remember Michael Anton's "Flight 93 Election" insanity got him a top advisor position in Trump's pinky ring junta. Not to mention I have as many degrees in economics as Larry Kudlow.)
Unfortunately, the New Rite has transitioned from the lip service veneer of respectability of bygone conservative intellectuals to the stupidist of fascist conspiranoia and magical thinking. As Roy so deftly describes, even the bogus ideas of the poncy poseurs and shitty thinkers have been so devalued we are living in a Homer Simpson timeline, and it's downhill from here.
Yeah this. It's like a contest on "what's the most outrageous bullshit we can get the rubes to believe?" (Currently Build-Your-Own-Coup is leading Bullshitcoin by a length at the quarter pole--still a ways to go yet)
So true. "Read a couple of thousand words about a bunch of conservatives who are either dead now or in the assisted-living center" doesn't sound like fun, but Roy, through sheer talent, MAKES it fun.
A related topic I'd really like to understand better is the near-total collapse of confidence experienced by traditional liberals that enabled the rise of these "conservative" "intellectuals" (And yes, that's a PAIR of bullshit quotes I'm using there).
Lines at the gas station, a relatively brief period of stagflation, the bankruptcy of New York City and a lost Presidential election and millions of highly educated people simply decided to throw up their hands and let the right wing take over for a while. "Gosh, I guess ideas we've believed our whole lives that have benefitted millions of people just don't work now, let's give the whole show over to Milton Friedman and see what he can do."
Why? Is there any historical precedent for such a thing?
When you put it that way, it sounds like in the 70s we had just the merest hint of a Weimar crisis -- with double-digit rather than quintuple-digit inflation -- and instead of going straight to Hitler we began a 40-year march toward same. Which one could argue!
Thirty years ago I spoke to an historian on some call-in show. He said America was in no danger of becoming Weimar 'because weʼre in no danger of mass starvation'. I replied 'Weʼre used to so much more than they are: what if people can' t buy new T.V.s?'. These days I'd change that to 'white people' and 'houses' but the principle is the same: people feel less attachment to civilisation if they feel they're not getting the return on it they felt they were promised.
The closest I can get is from the other side, when the Liberal Party in the U.K. renounced laissez-faire and started doing something for people who it seemed would always be without property—though not fast enough to keep from being eclipsed by Labour.
In the U.S., the general wisdom is that the shift was associated with the Southern Strategy's extension to 'white ethnics' and lower-middle class whites. This is essentially the claim that the people you describe didn't so much throw-up their ('our' if I'm honest) hands and admit their ideas were bad as much as plaintively saying 'Guys? Guys? where the fuck _are_ you people?' and they yelled back '_I_ am Alex P. Keaton, and so is my wife!', not noticing that they'd already been crucified….
Yes, the rise of Clinton was definitely about chasing after votes that the Democrats had previously thought of as theirs (the White working class, even in the South). But at the same time, my impression is of a general lassitude among liberal intellectuals, as if defending the ideas of LBJ and FDR just wasn't worth the bother, or would mark you as hopelessly out-of-date, and so was dangerous to your career.
I think Democrats thought the old regime of trading power was still in effect through Bush the Lesser, though the theft of the 2000 election should have been a four-alarm wake up call. Hell, the Clinton impeachment was a declaration of War, and most Democrats treated it as a Clinton character flaw. Biden clearly understands the new rules, but likely has his own reasons for not going medieval on Republican asses. I keep hearing echoes of that Thomas Moore speech in A Man For All Seasons about cutting down the forest of laws to get the Devil.
If you're thinking about the late '60s/early '70s as when people believed anything OTHER than fascist bullshit in this country, maybe. The '50s were all about conformism and McCarthyism. The '60s were, for the most part, still a whole lot of performative destruction in service to anti-communism. The '40s gave us a brief break from the 1930's rising tide of American Nazism. The '20s saw the FBI rounding up and deporting "reds" (defined as "liberals we don't like").
America has always been the Land of the Free as long as you're not TOO different or TOO concerned about the poor.
My pet theory is that WWII was a sort of "End Of History" moment for Americans. The Good Guys finally and completely won, America stood triumphant on the rubble, looked around, and said "well, that's done: let's move to the suburbs, have some kids, and then I'm gonna take my boots off". In other words, Americans decided they had no need or use for Politics. They were content to let the 2 parties trade power back and forth, and things would be fine forever.
Then a couple of things "happened". The former slaves said we'd like our 40 acres and a mule now, p!ease. And the children of those vets who grew up in a perfect world discovered the joys of Dionysianism. These 2 things drove conservatives, who worship rigid hierarchy above all else, insane. Republicans, still smarting from the aftereffects of crashing the world economy the first time, grabbed their chance and embraced the idea that rejection of the post-WWII culture and hierarchy was the original sin that would destroy America. They rode that horse til it died, then got off and started dragging it. There's nothing left but the the harness and some bones, but it's the foundational myth that drives American Conservatism to this day.
Reagan taught it to loosen up by doing coke and wearing bright red ties, but the old story is there in Douthat's mumbled prayers and Dreher's paranoid visions. In Trump's vision of American Apocalypse and "only I can fix it". In "Jews will not replace us" and Proud 3% militia boys with their dreams of Liberal Hunting License permits.
Oh yeah, precedents. Maybe Weimar Germany? Except their collapse was reality-base and ours is virtual, only happening on (some) media. Our original sin of Slavery explains a lot of it, but there's almost a desire for some apocalyptic "final" showdown all over what used to be called the 1st world these days. What drives violent opposition to a benign vaccine for a deadly virus? Is Kali worship due for a comeback?
Judaism, Islam, some varieties of Hindu and even Buddhist thought have apocalyptic trends, though in the latter two cases you might get another chance in a few trillion years.
Where Christianity is unique is in it historical near-certainty that whatever flavour the proponent is espousing is the _only_ alternative to eternal torment worse than anything they might do to prevent it. This gives them tremendous calculus-of-pain licence, e.g. if only one witch gets saved by burning for a few minutes that's saved an infinite amount of burning on their part later…. I also think it drives them crazy enough that conquering the world is the only way to still The Fear. (Note that Islam is no slouch at conquest, and I'd say their belief in 'us or Hell' comes the closes to the Christians.)
Very well-put, and I agree, except that I think the 'Sixties were at root not about enjoying Dionyseanism but at first about not being afraid all the time and not understanding how far you could fall if you screwed-up—this allowed [at first just white] people the feeling that they could get away with experimenting and taking it Dionysy, but also at least some somewhat older people not putting the hammer down on all that nonsense ab initio.
For a generation of black G.I.s, 'Wanting to be treated like men' had a lot to do with having shot[ at] white men in the Army, being treated even worse than previously when they came home in uniform, and black participation in the mandated-desgregated defence industries leaving black families with enough money that major corporations started to want to sell to them, and so starting vaguely or explicitly to give a shit about them. (Pepsi evidently groomed a generation of black executives and middle-managers, mostly for other firms, who started as salesmen for them…Coke weren't having it for years, but eventually were important in trying to make Atlanta's transition to integration as smooth as possible.)
(I remember reading a summary of a Pat Buchanan book in which, beside his thinking we should have stayed out of the Second World War to begin-with—'Not our fight!' he _says, though of course I have my suspicions that he wished we'd been on the other side of it—he further went on to say that beside it being a waste of our lives and treasure that it induced all those horrible social changes the rest of us celebrate or mostly.)
The Dionysian line was a feeble attempt to boil down several historical and social trends into a joke. The 1-2-3 punch of Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles was a clue that something was trying to be born. None of it was predetermined, but the co-opting and collapse was inevitable. A dream, like life, wasn't meant to last. Hunter Thompson wrote the elegy it deserved in Fear And Loathing In Law Vegas.
Buchanan was a man ahead of (or far behind) his time. He knew there was an audience.for American Fascism but had no way to connect to it or inspire it. I would argue a majority of Americans simply want things to Stay The Same, and for many of them (mostly the well-off) fascism is an acceptable option, since it panders to their desire to avoid Politics, and the conflict and work it requires. Always remember that people who believe in Ideals and a Better World for everyone are a minority.
The most prominent New Deal program. Social Security, survived Reagan, as did the most expensive LBJ-era program, Medicare. Universal benefits develop a base of support that makes them indestructible.
But liberal intellectuals of the 60's and 70's who argued for other anti-poverty programs didn't actually need these programs themselves, which made it easier for them to step away from the fight, and also easier to portray them naive do-gooders out of touch with hard realities.
A strength of modern-day movements like BLM is that the most prominent voices are people who actually have some skin in the game, who aren't going to walk away from the fight no matter how tough it gets.
'Well, it makes so much sense, who could be against it!?', which as is often the case translates to 'This has been very good for me and people like me, and even people for whom it hasn't been good but have Good Values _must_ approve of it as well.'
See: communities of white Rust Belt racists for whom Trump has been—they _feel_*—the best thing ever, and so assume that our lot have either been paid to claim we think otherwise or are just plain Satanic.
*To which I don't say 'Fuck your feelings.' but more like 'Fuck you for feeling that way.', which is probably just as useless, as one of the keystones of their thought is 'I can not be better.', one reason they love a man who's had so much freedom than they and is, if anything, worse.
One big difference is the disappearance of the centre-Left pseudo-consensus that had Eisenhower on its right and Kennedy on its left—or maybe that's reversed—Keyneseanism, enough welfare and other schemes to keep people from starving 'but not enough to remove the incentive to work' (that is, 'letʼs preserve the fiction that we need people to continue to have jobs and, more importantly, bosses'), foreign adventurism without nuking anyone, civil rights with the goal of letting Negroes be just like white people.
This pseudo-consensus, as regressive as it seemed to some and seems to more now, was very definitely to the left of (say) Robert Taft and Russell Kirk, and much as we'd like to believe that people who disagree with us are stupid, it's not so, so some people believing to its right became intellectuals and it could even be refreshing to test your ideas against theirs—it also, I have to admit, felt safe because these guys were fringe figures.
But ever since The Rot Really Set In, that is to say January of 1981, the consensus shifted to where they were or close enough for mass suffering. This meant 0.) they weren't funny any more, and 1.) the ascendancy that Wilson celebrated, much as in a right-wing parable, encouraged laziness and attracted dumber sorts looking for a buck who might just as easily opted to have been liberal intellectuals in 1965.
Slightly off-topic, but the intellectuals at the Bulwark finally learned about Jonah Goldberg what the rest of us already knew for years; he's an idiot. This revelation provided us with the quote of the week from Mona Charen: "It’s hard to see what Goldberg is talking about." Always.
Personally, I LOVE Marco Rubio's proposed legislation. If enacted, it would wipe out the existing legislation put through by Republicans and signed by Dubya that explicitly BARS shareholders from holding C-suite types accountable. But I guess when you have no interest in what your proposed laws actually do, you can just make and break the rules as you go along.
He's... not that bright, if we're honest. He thinks he's holding his own with the big bullies, and it's sad. We'll see if he can replace the NRA as a donor, but he's never gonna be president.
I thought it might be the left equivalent of the Texas abortion law. We could all start ideological bounty hunting.
Has he written it in such a way that it only applies to woke areas or can right-wing moves also be accountable-ized?
I've read that no corporation has ever been penalised on the basis of not living-up to the 'for the public good' I've read (second-hander that I am) is officially part of…corporate charters?…the laws creating incorporation?
If that's so, giving it some teeth might be a good idea…until the wrong government makes 'for the public good' mean 'for America!nism and against critical race trans-wokefare'.
Well if they make or sell any product that eventually effects the public, they can probably claim they are working for the public good
Spot on. It really does boil down to 1) the silo effect of social media, where everyone consumes their own “news” from their own preferred outlets, so persuasion is unnecessary; and 2) the conservative elites’ realization that their base doesn’t care about policy as long as their perceived “enemies” are suffering worse than they are. The elites can enrich themselves and their donors out in the open so long as their message is Own The Libs.
Kleptocracy and Idiocracy, plus spite.
Kleptocracy + Idiocracy + Spite = Kakistocracy
I'm still trying to make KEKistocracy happen.
When I left the Army in '84, I ended up around a bunch of Reaganites, being unaware of the sea change the USA had undergone while I was stationed overseas. The only thing more ardent than their devotion to Ronnie was their heroic consumption of drugs and booze, one thing I could relate to at the time. The downside was having to listen to them spout mung like the stuff you just quoted. I parted ways with them some time later with absolutely no regrets.
They sounded like James Q. Wilson?
Yes, only with a bong.
The Roots Of Libertarianism!
"Spout mung like mung sprouts"
The anarchist I used to know was absolutely strident about giving Reagan credit for ending the cold war.
Let’s all remember that short-lived game show: “Name a Conservative Program That Worked.” Even with multiple categories (War, Economy, Crime, Poverty, Drugs, Infrastructure, Healthcare, Education, Race) the average contestant dropped out within 5 minutes, muttering “Geez, I got nuthin’!”
Voter suppression?
Implementing and maintaining a massive upward transfer of wealth and mass impoverishment. Worked pretty well, still does.
Best thing ever- so much win! From " poncy proseur pitching his pseud style" to " Evil Carnies"
I haven't had time to look up " Mencius Goldbug" and I may not because I like the sound of the words so much I worry the definitions may disappoint compared to my ( so far) wild conjecture.
A couple of corrections though, minor things really. I believe the current convention is to always preface Bill Bennett's name with
" Degenerate Gambler" and I believe David Brooks has moved on from salad bars to plumbing the depths of his research assistant's hot ass.
Seriously- this is brilliant.
I googled the Moldburg, and you're right, it was a disappointing experience.
Sometimes just the sounds of a word are good enough. When the sounds of the words and the meanings are in sync you get poetry.
People with ridiculous pseudonyms being taken seriously by meatheads in the blog era ("read this post by the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler!") was one thing; ridic pseuds being elevated by the Claremont Institute is -- well, come to think of it, it's the same thing.
Jane Galt...
Well, plumbing the depths of his research assistant's hot arse at least makes _sense_.
It's looking likely we may have to strike to finally get some form of equity at my school, and I always go to these union meetings & see Econ & Business professors & want to shake them. "You know we're here because of the things you're too chicken shit to say."
And then I remember I'm a literature prof: 75% of us would aver in all sincerity that Shakespeare writes "universal" truths while James Baldwin is "niche."
So fuck us as well.
To paraphrase the great poet Homer... J. Simpson: "To Academics! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."
Eh. The veneer of civilization is thin and barbaric pressures erode said veneer and there’s the GOP and here we are.
As for the intellectual presentations, as it were, it was a marketing thing because there was a need for the conservatives — outliers of sorts back when WFB and company were making their bones — to appear Sober and Serious. The need for that now is completely unnecessary. They’ve had a lock on the mainstream media since the late 70s or so, and the part of the base not supporting the GOP for personal wealth doesn’t give a shit about any effete intellectual stuff.
So. No need for Serious Policy Thoughts. Pretty much that simple sorry.
Civilisation: it has many fewer fans than people who say they are. People who know very little history of how people have lived don't understand so much of the bad stuff it helps them avoid but still have to live with its strictures.
On the other hand, say 'civilisation' but mean 'my raceʼs ascendancy' frees-up your Id to be its own bad self in its defence, since your (if correctly seen) bad behaviour can't make you be 'uncivilised'.
If Shapiro's brain pills worked, he'd lose his audience. Though if they're toxic he will too, which makes me want to say they're just sugar pills, but the last couple years have taught me these fuckers prefer them to be toxic.
And since when do lesbians love Madonna? She's bi, at best, and GC lesbians like Camille fucking hate bi people almost as much as they hate trans people. Paglia's a divide-and-conquer gay, too. Fuck her. (Mind you, bi women aren't into Madonna much, either. They handed us her and said "Look, representation!" and I thought, yeah, so was Herb Baumeister. You might, in fact, be surprised by the assumption that serial killers are usually bisexual, but it's an actual thing I've been lectured on by lesbian lovers.)
Anyway, last night I was watching the twitter Marxists quote Jonah fucking Goldberg's Liberal Fascism at people to explain why liberals suck. (I'm a liberal because Molly Ivins was a liberal, and there's only so many things I can make my brain do at this age, and I'd rather concentrate on labels I use that hurt people, not whether "progressive" is better than "liberal". (I say "bi" too, despite howls that I'm a bigot by pan people. It means the same thing, you twerps just got a dictionary instead of a queer history book.)
It was easily a half-dozen far left people explaining that we're trying to genocide everybody because liberalism only pretends to be better than Trumpism. Pardon the fuck out of me. *I*'m not the one quoting Jonah Goldberg.
(Twitter Marxists would be better off printing out Cleek's Law and taping it to their computer monitors.)
Someone's quoting Jonah Goldberg besides me? Huh, never thought I'd see the day.
It started out with someone who claimed it as divine revelation, as far as I can tell. By the time it got to me, it was a plural with a SJW bio (someone I follow because so far they seem like decent people, at least the presenters do) dropping the book cover as about three people trolled hard, possibly sincerely, and assorted other people mocked them and agreed with them and the second or so person was explaining earnestly about Jonah's tome. I feel like there were block quotes or page images or something, but I have since fallen down the rabbit hole of violently pro-vax LGBTQ fascists who demand benevolent dictatorship like they have in Sicily.
I mean, make it an elected monarchy and we'll talk.
I wasn't stoned, so I guess this is a psychotic break, because you people wouldn't run a reality that badly, right?
Contemporary liberalism is highly overrated.
Wow, that Wilson quote about how the Laffer Curve is probably bullshit is really something. Good catch, Roy!
These guys were playing with things - the lives of the poor, the full faith and credit of the United States government - that they didn't really care about. If some poor folks starve, or the government goes bankrupt, who cares? What good are the poor, and who needs a government anyway?
We imagine history is driven by great passions or strongly held ideas, but I'm starting to think one of the most powerful world-historical forces is simple don't-give-a-shit.
The thing is depending on what you mean by the Laffer Curve being bullshit you could be right or wrong. The idea behind the Laffer Curve is correct -- there has to be a tax rate at which revenues are maximized, that has been known since the 14th or 15th Century. The rate Laffer chose was way wrong and in fact the tax rates at the time were well below the maximizing tax rate. So Laffer what he got right wasn't novel and what was novel was wrong. Of course the Republicans were using confirmation bias to get an argument for what they wanted to do, not trying to maximize tax revenues
That's right, Jordan Ellenberg made this point in his book How Not to Be Wrong, pointing to some idiot National Review writer who was asking, "Why should the United States move toward Socialism when Sweden is moving away from it?". But if there's some revenue-maximizing optimum, that's exactly what you'd see, countries adjusting up or down depending on where they think they are in relation to the optimum (with emphasis on the word "think') Ellenberg was amused that even people who write for the National Review couldn't understand the Laffer Curve.
Sweden doesn't hit the revenue maximizing rate as far as I am aware. That rate is ~70% total tax rate. The US has never really been close
Well, for people making gigantic amounts of money, the Kennedy tax cut to a top marginal rate of 70% (from ninety-something) would come close. (I like saying that I want a tax cut: Kennedy's.)
I believe during the Kennedy years, the top earners paid under 40% of their income in taxes, and there was no FICA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1964
The top personal rate went from 91% to (after one year, as I read it) 70% (over $180K); I didn't see anything there about a top total rate of 40%. Plus-duckspeakwise I'd like to see our current rates reduced to that.
Trivially, the U.S. should move toward Socialism when Sweden are moving away from it whenever the net-return on Socialism has a local maximum between where the two are. (Note: Sweden in fact did move that way for a few years, then stopped well short of our distance from Socialism in that notional space.)
This was just fucking excellent, both parts. One of the most astute and succinct explanations of the rise of Trump dementia came from one Roy Edroso: "The Republican rabble has always been ready for a true shitheel to step up..."
So, having debased everything else, it's no surprise that Trumpism -- so devoid of substance it doesn't even deserve an "ism" suffix -- has undermined what conservatives call "intellectual" now to the point where the fascist whackjobs of the Claremont Institute and their lunatic rants are what passes for policy discussion. (Remember Michael Anton's "Flight 93 Election" insanity got him a top advisor position in Trump's pinky ring junta. Not to mention I have as many degrees in economics as Larry Kudlow.)
Unfortunately, the New Rite has transitioned from the lip service veneer of respectability of bygone conservative intellectuals to the stupidist of fascist conspiranoia and magical thinking. As Roy so deftly describes, even the bogus ideas of the poncy poseurs and shitty thinkers have been so devalued we are living in a Homer Simpson timeline, and it's downhill from here.
Yeah this. It's like a contest on "what's the most outrageous bullshit we can get the rubes to believe?" (Currently Build-Your-Own-Coup is leading Bullshitcoin by a length at the quarter pole--still a ways to go yet)
I'm betting on "Get 'em to fight each other down at Tractor Supply for the last remaining tubes of horse paste."
Repeating myself: Wm Burroughs on how there's no need to improve the product when degrading the customer is so much easier.
Quite good!
So true. "Read a couple of thousand words about a bunch of conservatives who are either dead now or in the assisted-living center" doesn't sound like fun, but Roy, through sheer talent, MAKES it fun.
A related topic I'd really like to understand better is the near-total collapse of confidence experienced by traditional liberals that enabled the rise of these "conservative" "intellectuals" (And yes, that's a PAIR of bullshit quotes I'm using there).
Lines at the gas station, a relatively brief period of stagflation, the bankruptcy of New York City and a lost Presidential election and millions of highly educated people simply decided to throw up their hands and let the right wing take over for a while. "Gosh, I guess ideas we've believed our whole lives that have benefitted millions of people just don't work now, let's give the whole show over to Milton Friedman and see what he can do."
Why? Is there any historical precedent for such a thing?
When you put it that way, it sounds like in the 70s we had just the merest hint of a Weimar crisis -- with double-digit rather than quintuple-digit inflation -- and instead of going straight to Hitler we began a 40-year march toward same. Which one could argue!
Thirty years ago I spoke to an historian on some call-in show. He said America was in no danger of becoming Weimar 'because weʼre in no danger of mass starvation'. I replied 'Weʼre used to so much more than they are: what if people can' t buy new T.V.s?'. These days I'd change that to 'white people' and 'houses' but the principle is the same: people feel less attachment to civilisation if they feel they're not getting the return on it they felt they were promised.
The closest I can get is from the other side, when the Liberal Party in the U.K. renounced laissez-faire and started doing something for people who it seemed would always be without property—though not fast enough to keep from being eclipsed by Labour.
In the U.S., the general wisdom is that the shift was associated with the Southern Strategy's extension to 'white ethnics' and lower-middle class whites. This is essentially the claim that the people you describe didn't so much throw-up their ('our' if I'm honest) hands and admit their ideas were bad as much as plaintively saying 'Guys? Guys? where the fuck _are_ you people?' and they yelled back '_I_ am Alex P. Keaton, and so is my wife!', not noticing that they'd already been crucified….
Yes, the rise of Clinton was definitely about chasing after votes that the Democrats had previously thought of as theirs (the White working class, even in the South). But at the same time, my impression is of a general lassitude among liberal intellectuals, as if defending the ideas of LBJ and FDR just wasn't worth the bother, or would mark you as hopelessly out-of-date, and so was dangerous to your career.
Yeah, big pocketed funders hated the ideas of FDR and LBJ
To say the absolute least.
I think Democrats thought the old regime of trading power was still in effect through Bush the Lesser, though the theft of the 2000 election should have been a four-alarm wake up call. Hell, the Clinton impeachment was a declaration of War, and most Democrats treated it as a Clinton character flaw. Biden clearly understands the new rules, but likely has his own reasons for not going medieval on Republican asses. I keep hearing echoes of that Thomas Moore speech in A Man For All Seasons about cutting down the forest of laws to get the Devil.
Technically, Nixon gave the whole show to Friedman to try monetarism, which Volcker implemented in 1981 and 1982 with disastrous results
sorry, monetarism was implemented at least partially in 1971 under Nixon
If you're thinking about the late '60s/early '70s as when people believed anything OTHER than fascist bullshit in this country, maybe. The '50s were all about conformism and McCarthyism. The '60s were, for the most part, still a whole lot of performative destruction in service to anti-communism. The '40s gave us a brief break from the 1930's rising tide of American Nazism. The '20s saw the FBI rounding up and deporting "reds" (defined as "liberals we don't like").
America has always been the Land of the Free as long as you're not TOO different or TOO concerned about the poor.
My pet theory is that WWII was a sort of "End Of History" moment for Americans. The Good Guys finally and completely won, America stood triumphant on the rubble, looked around, and said "well, that's done: let's move to the suburbs, have some kids, and then I'm gonna take my boots off". In other words, Americans decided they had no need or use for Politics. They were content to let the 2 parties trade power back and forth, and things would be fine forever.
Then a couple of things "happened". The former slaves said we'd like our 40 acres and a mule now, p!ease. And the children of those vets who grew up in a perfect world discovered the joys of Dionysianism. These 2 things drove conservatives, who worship rigid hierarchy above all else, insane. Republicans, still smarting from the aftereffects of crashing the world economy the first time, grabbed their chance and embraced the idea that rejection of the post-WWII culture and hierarchy was the original sin that would destroy America. They rode that horse til it died, then got off and started dragging it. There's nothing left but the the harness and some bones, but it's the foundational myth that drives American Conservatism to this day.
Reagan taught it to loosen up by doing coke and wearing bright red ties, but the old story is there in Douthat's mumbled prayers and Dreher's paranoid visions. In Trump's vision of American Apocalypse and "only I can fix it". In "Jews will not replace us" and Proud 3% militia boys with their dreams of Liberal Hunting License permits.
Oh yeah, precedents. Maybe Weimar Germany? Except their collapse was reality-base and ours is virtual, only happening on (some) media. Our original sin of Slavery explains a lot of it, but there's almost a desire for some apocalyptic "final" showdown all over what used to be called the 1st world these days. What drives violent opposition to a benign vaccine for a deadly virus? Is Kali worship due for a comeback?
a desire for some apocalyptic "final" showdown
That is what Christianity gets you.
Judaism, Islam, some varieties of Hindu and even Buddhist thought have apocalyptic trends, though in the latter two cases you might get another chance in a few trillion years.
Where Christianity is unique is in it historical near-certainty that whatever flavour the proponent is espousing is the _only_ alternative to eternal torment worse than anything they might do to prevent it. This gives them tremendous calculus-of-pain licence, e.g. if only one witch gets saved by burning for a few minutes that's saved an infinite amount of burning on their part later…. I also think it drives them crazy enough that conquering the world is the only way to still The Fear. (Note that Islam is no slouch at conquest, and I'd say their belief in 'us or Hell' comes the closes to the Christians.)
s/it historical/its historical/1
s/closes/closest/1
Very well-put, and I agree, except that I think the 'Sixties were at root not about enjoying Dionyseanism but at first about not being afraid all the time and not understanding how far you could fall if you screwed-up—this allowed [at first just white] people the feeling that they could get away with experimenting and taking it Dionysy, but also at least some somewhat older people not putting the hammer down on all that nonsense ab initio.
For a generation of black G.I.s, 'Wanting to be treated like men' had a lot to do with having shot[ at] white men in the Army, being treated even worse than previously when they came home in uniform, and black participation in the mandated-desgregated defence industries leaving black families with enough money that major corporations started to want to sell to them, and so starting vaguely or explicitly to give a shit about them. (Pepsi evidently groomed a generation of black executives and middle-managers, mostly for other firms, who started as salesmen for them…Coke weren't having it for years, but eventually were important in trying to make Atlanta's transition to integration as smooth as possible.)
(I remember reading a summary of a Pat Buchanan book in which, beside his thinking we should have stayed out of the Second World War to begin-with—'Not our fight!' he _says, though of course I have my suspicions that he wished we'd been on the other side of it—he further went on to say that beside it being a waste of our lives and treasure that it induced all those horrible social changes the rest of us celebrate or mostly.)
The Dionysian line was a feeble attempt to boil down several historical and social trends into a joke. The 1-2-3 punch of Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles was a clue that something was trying to be born. None of it was predetermined, but the co-opting and collapse was inevitable. A dream, like life, wasn't meant to last. Hunter Thompson wrote the elegy it deserved in Fear And Loathing In Law Vegas.
Buchanan was a man ahead of (or far behind) his time. He knew there was an audience.for American Fascism but had no way to connect to it or inspire it. I would argue a majority of Americans simply want things to Stay The Same, and for many of them (mostly the well-off) fascism is an acceptable option, since it panders to their desire to avoid Politics, and the conflict and work it requires. Always remember that people who believe in Ideals and a Better World for everyone are a minority.
'Learyʼs Fatal Flaw' is also, amazingly, one of the best parts of the Depp movie, considering that it's a paragraph of text with no action.
They assumed that the anomalous New Deal era would continue forever without any need for them to protect or maintain it.
The most prominent New Deal program. Social Security, survived Reagan, as did the most expensive LBJ-era program, Medicare. Universal benefits develop a base of support that makes them indestructible.
But liberal intellectuals of the 60's and 70's who argued for other anti-poverty programs didn't actually need these programs themselves, which made it easier for them to step away from the fight, and also easier to portray them naive do-gooders out of touch with hard realities.
A strength of modern-day movements like BLM is that the most prominent voices are people who actually have some skin in the game, who aren't going to walk away from the fight no matter how tough it gets.
'Well, it makes so much sense, who could be against it!?', which as is often the case translates to 'This has been very good for me and people like me, and even people for whom it hasn't been good but have Good Values _must_ approve of it as well.'
See: communities of white Rust Belt racists for whom Trump has been—they _feel_*—the best thing ever, and so assume that our lot have either been paid to claim we think otherwise or are just plain Satanic.
*To which I don't say 'Fuck your feelings.' but more like 'Fuck you for feeling that way.', which is probably just as useless, as one of the keystones of their thought is 'I can not be better.', one reason they love a man who's had so much freedom than they and is, if anything, worse.
s/much freedom/much more freedom/1
Well, at least it's great to know why we're doomed.
As Gregory Peck said in 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦, "At least I'll know 𝘸𝘩𝘺 I'm being murdered".
One big difference is the disappearance of the centre-Left pseudo-consensus that had Eisenhower on its right and Kennedy on its left—or maybe that's reversed—Keyneseanism, enough welfare and other schemes to keep people from starving 'but not enough to remove the incentive to work' (that is, 'letʼs preserve the fiction that we need people to continue to have jobs and, more importantly, bosses'), foreign adventurism without nuking anyone, civil rights with the goal of letting Negroes be just like white people.
This pseudo-consensus, as regressive as it seemed to some and seems to more now, was very definitely to the left of (say) Robert Taft and Russell Kirk, and much as we'd like to believe that people who disagree with us are stupid, it's not so, so some people believing to its right became intellectuals and it could even be refreshing to test your ideas against theirs—it also, I have to admit, felt safe because these guys were fringe figures.
But ever since The Rot Really Set In, that is to say January of 1981, the consensus shifted to where they were or close enough for mass suffering. This meant 0.) they weren't funny any more, and 1.) the ascendancy that Wilson celebrated, much as in a right-wing parable, encouraged laziness and attracted dumber sorts looking for a buck who might just as easily opted to have been liberal intellectuals in 1965.
Slightly off-topic, but the intellectuals at the Bulwark finally learned about Jonah Goldberg what the rest of us already knew for years; he's an idiot. This revelation provided us with the quote of the week from Mona Charen: "It’s hard to see what Goldberg is talking about." Always.