Two pieces from the Washington Post. First David A. Farenthold writes,
The biggest pieces of Sanders’s domestic agenda — making college, health care and child care more affordable — seek to capture these industries and convert them to run chiefly on federal money.
Sanders obviously understands that health care and education are the New Commanding Heights.
Second, Dana Milbank writes,
It’s a sign of some clout that Warren has Litan’s hide, and Weiss’s, and Summers’s. But if her party answered to the people rather than its donors, she’d have many more.
If you combine Sanders and Warren, what you get is socialism combined with demonization and intimidation of anyone who does not support left-wing views. This is the country that the Democratic left wants to live in?
After 6 and a half years of Obama, you have to ask this question?
I am torn. My reptilian brain thinks “I have little affection for Sanders or Warren, but then I also don’t have any affection for the people they’re currently going after, either: Obama Administration flacks, Hillary Clinton, Larry Summers, etc, so good huntin’, people!”
Then my mammalian brain thinks “ugh, our Insider class does pretty much stink, so I don’t mind their being raked over the coals now and again by some populist firebrand, but why does it seem like they’re only ever assailed by people who are even worse, like Trump, Warren, Sanders, etc? Why, oh why, can’t we have a better populist?”
What’s sad is they are demonizing allies. Brookings is left. Summers is left. Clearly they don’t want honest expert advice. They want yes-men (and -women).
Not the point of the post, but this drives me nuts: “making X, Y and Z more affordable.” No! What rubbish! We deserve better, more critical journalists. Under such plans people will pay indirectly rather than directly. But I suppose this is a hopeless fight.
This is why I am not sure progressivism is really a third axis. It is really just the subset of conservatism that would be described as sectarianism. Sectarians out of power look like egalitarians, but in power, they are just…sectarians.
You can add housing and housing finance to the list of activities the sectarians want to push into the public sphere. In places like Manhattan and San Francisco, you can only build residential real estate that progressive locals say you can build. They quite proudly complain when residential real estate brings in the wrong kinds of people.
Yes, this is exactly the country the Democratic left wants to live in because they are confident that the reaper will never come for them. Foolish but confident.
We had one. Ron Paul. But it seems you have to demonstrate vehement ignorance or people mistake you for an insider.
Side with Summers against Warren because she is probably lying about their interaction in order to exaggerate her shocked, SHOCKED! discovery that there are insiders.
Yeah, we knew there are insiders. It’s not an excuse to be an ignorant, naive, nihilist.
“…. capture these industries and convert them to run chiefly on federal money”
I doubt that’s actually the intent of Sanders and his supporters. I suspect it’s more like “Make America a place where very poor individuals can get the best possible education and health care despite their lack of income.”
Can we imagine an alternative? Let’s suppose today we walk into a major corporation and notice that all the high level executives are graduates of Harvard and other Ivy League schools, while Iowa State and California Polytechnic grads generally top off as medium level engineers. We might imagine some social transformation in which graduates from Old Miss are as apt to be CEOs as those from Yale, or in which the bulk of Harvard Business School end their careers as Human Relations functionaries and accountants. Think of the savings in federal education spending! Yet I suspect most conservatives would consider this possibility ten times as terrifying as Sander’s socialism.
Maybe but have you ever seen a progressive talk about the Federal takeover as a bug?
In the link Sanders literally says the government is us. He doesn’t even recognize the possibility of these as a takeover.
Then one can only assume Sanders and his supporters have willful ignorance as you never get the best of anything when government takes over an area.
Here is Milton Friedman explaining in relation to socialized healthcare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=VPADFNKDhGM#t=280
But Gammon’s law is applicable to education, child care, any area of endeavor taken over by government.
I think a lot of people are inherently distrustful of price signals and view them as nuisances that are tolerated because there’s not a way to make them disappear. Sort of like small cold that sticks with you for a long time that you just can’t shake.
So basically if things were going well we wouldn’t have them at all.
So to them rhetoric about public ownership moves you closer to the ‘good society’ because the whole point is to mute them and make way for more community, which to them is the true currency of the civilized world, if only all that pricing stuff would get out of the way.
So to answer your question, yes, that’s what a lot of them want.
Jesus H. Christ — are you **really** going to pretend that the WaPo can function as any kind of useful gauge of the dreaded Left? If so, I suppose you were equally gullible a few years ago, when the WaPo was clucking about how The Young People Nowadays all routinely perform oral sex on each other, or at least when they’re not preoccupied with their constant sexting. Because the WaPo **knows** so much about Da Youth, oh yeah.
The WaPo and its resident courtier Milbank have turning Big Smear tactics on ‘unserious’ people for about 20 years, now. Perhaps the readers of this site have memory problems, but **I** remember when the WaPo mocked and belittled any prominent critics of its precious Iraq war. Further, while the WaPo certainly isn’t a high-quality organization any more, it has outsized influence, and functions very well as a mouthpiece for factions that **already** exert a helluva lot of your dreaded “control”.
By the way, I found your site from a link at Thoma’s “Economist’s View”. Normally he links better quality stuff — i.e., sites that don’t use the WaPo as some kind of authority. At least now I’ll know better than to waste time here.
How did I know from your first word you were new? Well, it was the word you used which told me you didn’t understand anything here.
“This is the country that the Democratic left wants to live in?”
It is exactly the same country we had 12 years ago (as anyone who tried to prevent the Iraq disaster can tell you) sans “freedom fries” and with the rich paying something nearer their fair share. It bothering you probably says more about your motivations than about the Democratic left’s shortcomings.
“as anyone who tried to prevent the Iraq disaster can tell you”
And who was that? If your answer is something like “Sanders” and “Warren” then no, it isn’t the useless Democrats from 12 years ago, which is the entire context that you aren’t understanding.
“which is the entire context that you aren’t understanding.”
The entire context is, people who rejoiced while it was Republicans doing the intimidation, now feign a distaste for such behavior when it comes from the left.
Everyone who dared criticize the amok which took over the country back then was tarred and feathered by a fascist-like Administration still riding the 9/11 hysteria and its lapdogs. Mainstream Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, decided to play it safe instead of risking their political careers. The time to care about people being intimidated by intolerant bullies was 12 years ago. Now Americans are just voting to learn who will be the ones doing the intimidation for the next four years, and Warren has as much right as anyone else to brandish the whip.
I take this as a rhetorical question to try and make mainstream elite democrats, who would not be comfortable admitting that they side with Socialist bullies, a little ashamed of not speaking up against them and of belonging to a party increasingly characterized by those types of characters and behaviors.
However, I think the accurate and unfortunate answer is ‘yes’ for a good portion of Democrats, and the reasonable, enlightened and moderate folks for whom the answer is ‘no’, still have no desire or ability to resist it.
Which raises the question as to why that should be, which I think is the most important question about social-psychological dynamics of our era, especially since it could give us some insight into how the near future will unfold.
Please allow me to speculate a little on it.
The answer to that question, I think, is a combination of the one given by Schelling 55 years ago in The Strategy of Conflict (officially respectable source) and Auster (officially very non-respectable and infamously irascible source) starting about 15 years ago but here’s a summary of the idea.
The Schelling component is that in any kind of complicated game or bargaining / negotiation process (a category of which the perpetual open-contest of ideological jostling of modern politics is a member), and even with explicit communications, if the participants are to concert, they often do so on the basis of recursive and reflexive cross-expectations similar to what would emerge in coordinating a solution to a tacit circumstance without communication.
These solutions tend to be characterized by a psychological ‘special magnetism’ related to simplicity, prominence, common conspicuousness, uniqueness, and non-ambiguity which will likely reflect shared values and usually take the shape of already well-known established precedents.
One consequential manifestation of this process in the context of political or ideological bargaining seems to be a very ‘low bandwidth’ in terms of the low number and high level of abstraction of major principles. Too many principles, and they could too obviously contradict each other. Too much detail, and there are suddenly too many ‘degrees of freedom’ which creates too many possibilities and makes mind-reading guesses too unlikely, with too much to lawyerly argue about.
This is related to the role that simple, instinctive norms of ‘common sense morality’ play in coordinating social interactions and setting boundaries on behaviors in any situation of a conflict of interests. The evolutionary social psychologists would say that this is the adaptive reason moral sense evolved (or ‘prevailed’) in the first place, but the mental tendency seems to be vulnerable to ‘hijacking’ by ideological movements that demand social arrangements that are no longer adaptive in our modern circumstances.
So ideological movements that are able to garner any following rely on this mechanism to generate the kind of agreement necessary to form a coalition, and thus tend to arise out of an incredibly simplistic set of vague and abstract basic principles, with ‘the details to be worked out later’ by some kind of ‘experts’ who have ‘jurisdiction’ over such matters.
For the contemporary progressive left, that principle is essentially a social-justice universalism informed by a dogma of absolutist egalitarianism, most famously expounded upon by Rawls in his A Theory of Justice. Two people may agree on something simple and vague like ‘social justice’ but wouldn’t be able to agree on details about, say, the minimum wage or tax schedules.
These few, abstract principles necessarily reflect or contain a certain good-vs-bad worldview and thus logically imply – and naturally give rise to – a certain semi-fictional narrative about the way the human social world currently works, the way it should work (perhaps in a ‘Utopian’ vision), and who the good and bad guys are in the story. And that narrative tends to be expressed in terms of just a few core themes, symbols, ‘explanations’, recurring patterns, and words that form a ‘political language’ about which our host has added a very insightful contribution.
The progressive language leans heavily on a class-warfare framework (or identity-based variations on that theme), with the explanation that inequality is caused by exploitation on the one hand and privilege on the other, which makes everything a struggle between oppressors (bad guys) and the oppressed (good guys).
The trouble is that just like any simplistic model informed by a few empirical observations will eventually diverge from complicated reality outside of its ‘operational envelope’, any over-simplistic narrative of human social dynamics cannot capture all the complexity of reality, or otherwise it may refuse to accept some ‘ugly’ facts about that reality..
My own personal opinion (your mileage may vary) is that some of the most successful civilizations – such as the British and Roman empires – at their height were managed with a minimum amount of ideological interference with everyday politics or distortion away from more optimal or traditionally evolved solutions and were thus characterized by a special degree of pragmatic reasonableness and a commitment to the balancing of various, equally compelling interests, without everything being swallowed up by some ‘One Big Idea’.
But, if the big idea is implemented by true-believers who have gotten hold of the reigns of power in the form of naive coercive policy, it will produce lots and lots of undesirable results and unintended consequences, leading to ever more reactive interventions to attempt to remedy the problems created by the last intervention.
But all the policy implications of these novel ideologies and movements are hardly ever implemented all at once (or when they are, they tend to lead to rapid disaster). It takes a lot of work to gain power and to keep it, and if your policies bring bad results they can be counterproductive in terms of staying in charge if you have any serious threats or competitors. There is always the threat of outsiders (or ‘insidious’ influence of insiders) of the constituencies of those whose interests will be harmed by a new policy more in keeping with the movement’s purported fundamental principles.
There is also the ‘frog-boiling’ effect to consider. People can adjust to slow changes, and even lack awareness of substantial change over time and have a kind of ‘amnesia’ about yesterday’s normalcy. But if you throw radical changes at them too fast, they notice and react and stick in their heels.
One might expect this political game to reach some kind of social equilibrium in a stable balance of conflicting interests. But the implications of Schelling’s insight tells us this is impossible when there is no established authority over political ideas that can establish a ‘stable orthodoxy’, and people can thus still argue and ‘bargain’ in public about the details. If the arguing need not stop, it will always go on, arguing for more consistency with the framework.
There isn’t enough ‘cognitive bandwidth’ for people to both know and agree upon the whole Talmudic case-law of the detailed ‘solutions’ of any current equilibrium. There can only ever be the few basic, abstract, vague principles, and there will always be plenty of things to point to in reality that diverge significantly from the moral mandates of those few principles.
The trouble is that there is just no articulable, logical stopping point at some place of reasonable moderation, or some counter-vailing and limiting principle, and thus no place to really, genuinely settle the negotiations at some particular social and legal state of affairs. This is a key point. Without that natural stopping point, ambitious ‘ideological entrepreneurs’ hoping to raise their social status in games of competitive sanctimony will always find something ‘objectionable’ (in the terms of the simplistic moral framework of the principles) to leverage in a demand for amelioration.
It’s a slippery-slope situation that will continue to try to ratchet in one direction only. Every pause or seeming cease-fire is, necessarily, merely a temporary hiatus and ephemeral modus vivendi in a long war. This is because the ideological salience of progressively more extreme positions can never dissipate, because there is simply no ‘room’ left in the box of principles that people can concert around.
That being the case, ideological movements that wish to radically alter the fabric and structure of existing society (because it’s ‘unjust’ or something) tend to keep working in an intermittent and piecemeal fashion at the margins in finding the contemporary path of least resistance to bringing social reality into accord with their politics (according to the limits of their power and legitimacy, and if the limits are relaxed, the pace will surely increase.)
But the obvious problem is what to do with the ‘temporarily too hard to change’ remaining instances of social injustice, i.e. ‘unprincipled exceptions’ to the framework principles of the coalition’s ideology. It’s not enough to simply leave them alone, because interested parties will know about the incompatibility between the reality and ideology and thus be alert to the possibility of eventual ‘rectification’. So the ideological movement must hand-wave and assert some affirmative denial that there is anything to worry about, before finally reversing themselves and implementing the rectification anyway. This is Rod Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility”.
Furthermore, to the extent their own constituents and coalition members feel the need to violate the clear implications of the ideological principles where they conflict too painfully with reality and demand too much from ordinary humans, they must even come up with some rationalization that allows for temporary tolerance of hypocritical behaviors under some socially acceptable excuse. These excuses require their own fictional narratives for support (for instance the non-null hypothesis of education), which layers one delusion on top of another.
However, the sum of all these unprincipled exceptions and rationalized hypocrisies is what makes life tolerably pleasant and society reasonably functional and non-obnoxiously intrusive and tyrannical for the average individual, who is granted a form of temporary reprieve and ‘indulgence’ to continue ‘living in sin’.
But eventually the day will come that the balance of power will shift slightly against people trying to preserve the ‘status quo agreement’ equilibrium, and then some political entrepreneur will point out this long-standing hypocrisy and tolerance of injustice, its inconsistency with good, and then demand it be eliminated, and no one will be able to point to anything within the coalition’s constrained framework of ideological principles to argue against yet another initiative.
And, as Auster said, the movement will work its mischief by eliminating the unprincipled exceptions one by one. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually life becomes increasingly unpleasant, and society works less and less well as the true believers try harder and harder to make it fit to their particular Procrustean bed. The slide ends in disaster and/or emergence of a new order under a different framework where these ‘entrepreneurs’ are no longer free to make their cases.
Looking at contemporary progressivism and its robust hold on power, and its principles, narratives, language, and values, if one accepts the mechanisms described above, I just don’t see how one could not expect them to eventually continue to move in the direction of Socialism and Intolerant Bullying of any Opposition.
Old societies were only able to survive the potential (and sometimes real) collapses implicit in similar phenomena by evolving various techniques to stabilize against these particular ideological failure modes. But many were eagerly abandoned in the zeal of the enlightenment and the spread of norms of free political expression and democracy, but without a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of the danger inherent in this system of a freedom that could sow the seed of its own destruction the minute the norms of tolerance free expression came under unrelenting and successful attack.
Our inheritance of several of these social features in the unwritten constitution of Anglo-American culture that slowed things down or occasionally reversed them in the past has now been practically exhausted and/or circumvented. So Warren-Sanders seems to be just the tip of the iceberg of an accelerating trend.
Their kind are going to do some damage to the culture and to the economy, no doubt about it. But again, there is a lot of ruin in a nation, and we can absorb a certain amount of redistribution and regulation an dead-weight loss without things getting too bad or unlivable. But the trick will be to prevent them from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and keep them away as much as possible from the foundational engines of our prosperity: innovation and markets.
Keeping them distracted on mostly orthogonal cultural matters (the more irresolvable the better) might be the best way to do this for the time being, but there will always be the danger of there coming a point where they are tempted to take things too far, and when no one will feel able to try and stop them. Especially if they can’t express an opinion contrary to the new, ever-ratcheting, mainstream orthodoxy without losing respectability and being excommunicated from polite society or otherwise having their lives ruined.