In Reinventing Political Culture, I argue that there are four components to Barack Obama’s project in reinventing American political culture: (1) the politics of small things, using new media to capture the power of interpersonal political engagement and persuasion, (2) the revival of classical eloquence, (3) the redefinition of American identity and (4) the pursuit of good governance, rejecting across the board condemnations of big government, understanding the importance of the democratic state. I think that there is significant evidence for advances on all four fronts. The most difficult in the context of the Great Recession was the struggle for good governance, but now the full Obama Transformation, responding the Reagan Revolution, is gaining broad public acceptance.

The election was won using precise mobilization techniques. Key fully developed speeches by the President and his supporters, most significantly Bill Clinton, defined the accomplishments of the past for years and the promise of the next four. Obama’s elevation of the Great Seal motto E pluribus unum (in diversity union), defining the special social character and political strength of America, has won the day. And now, the era of blind antipathy to government is over.

The pendulum has finally swung back. The long conservative ascendancy has ended. A new commonsense has emerged. Obama’s reinvention of American political culture is rapidly advancing. The full effects of the 2012 elections are coming into view. The promise of 2008 is being realized. The counterattack of 2010 has been repelled. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, right in front of our eyes, and we should take note that it is adding up. Here is some evidence taken from reading the news of the past couple of days.

It is becoming clear that Obama’s tough stance in the fiscal cliff negotiations is yielding results.  The Republicans now are accepting tax increases. Signs are good that this includes tax rates. A headline in the Times Friday afternoon: “Boehner Doesn’t Rule Out Raising Tax Rates.” A striking shift in economic policy is apparent: tax the rich before benefit cuts for the poor, government support for economic growth. The Republicans are giving ground. The grand bargain to avoid the fiscal cliff will represent a major change in policy, with broad public support.

Boehner is talking tough but is gathering support of his party to enable a deal on President Obama’s terms, the Times reports in another story. The Republicans will support now what Boehner negotiates.

Even Rand Paul is supporting Harry Reid’s proposal in the Senate to increase taxes on the rich, albeit with a professed assurance that this will hurt the economy and in the long run hurt Democrats. Rand’s ideological conviction enables him to politically act. He pretends to know that taxing the rich will ruin the economy and be good in the end for libertarian Republicans such as himself. But note: he is accommodating to the new commonsense as he expresses a conviction that in the long run it will end.

Shockingly, following the same pattern, Ann Coulter, the extreme right wing Fox commentator, scandalized her host Sean Hannity by maintaining that Republicans support Obama’s tax proposals. Rightists are recognizing that the winds are pushing left.

And the far right is moving to the margins. Witness Boehner’s demotion of four Tea Party Republicans from choice committee assignments in the House of Representatives , and Jim DeMint, the Tea Party Senator, choosing exile at the Heritage Foundation, as its president, over completing his term in office, a luxurious exile worth one million dollars a year.

There are also more creative Republican responses. Rising stars in the Republican Party, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, gave speeches to a Jack Kemp tribute dinner, which emphasized the need to address the concerns and needs of the less advantage. I think that David Brooks reading of the significance of this is on the mark. There is a new “Republican Glasnost,” an openness to ideas, beyond trickle-down, ideas that could positively affect the life chances of the vast majority of the American citizenry, ideas that recognize positive government roles, that address the concerns of the less privileged.

The age of the attacks on big government is over. The times are truly changing. The New York Times today, under the headline “Obama Trusted on Economy,” reports on a Heartland Monitor Poll, finding broad support for Obama’s economic policies, with little support for  the Reaganesque Republican approach. The age of debate about good government has begun in an America that is becoming more comfortable with and confident of its pluralist identity, with more citizen involvement, and in which eloquence and intelligence matters. The election mattered.

On a more sober note: I don’t think that all is well in the Republic, that we are entering a new era of good feelings, that the President has the answer to all challenging problems. On many issues, the environment, national security, privacy and citizen rights, education and poverty, I think his policies and programs are wanting. I agree with the many leftist criticisms of Obama found on the left. But I think now is the time to push for corrections, with a chance to achieve them. As Obama himself said once, he has to be pushed to do the right thing.

I also think that the ideological polarization of the American public and its leadership is still a very serious problem. I wish the Tea Party were a thing of the past, but I fear it isn’t, and I hope the Occupy Movement will more practically engage in our pressing social problems, but I worry that it may not. It needs to work on speaking American, as Tom Hayden once put it in the 60s, stop dreaming about utopian visions, anarchism and the like, that make no sense to the broad American public, and address the incompleteness of the Obama transformation in ways that the public can understand and support. The emerging commonsense makes this possible. Obama has moved the center left, which has long been his project. The task for leftists is to move it further, engaging their fellow citizens.

It’s a great, but not a flawless, movie. Steven Spielberg, the King of Hollywood, and Tony Kushner, Angels in America author, teamed up to create an illuminating and entertaining snapshot of the icon of American democracy, Abraham Lincoln, and of legislative politics. The artistry is impressive, as usual for Spielberg, and Kushner. Politically, it raises interesting questions, provoking important debates: a work of art, not a polemic.

The opening battle scene was striking and gruesome, though reminiscent of Spielberg’s early works: hand-to-hand combat, less mechanized than in Saving Private Ryan, with the interracial struggle emphasized. As in Schindler’s List, the human tragedy is compactly presented. The great moral outrage in Schindler, the ferocity of the anti-Semitic genocide, was graphically depicted in the clearing of the ghetto scene. It was at the core of the film and its greatness (despite its problematic Hollywood wrapping, “happy end” and all that, as I argued in my essay on anti-Americanism). I think Spielberg was trying to do the same in this battle scene, though with less success. The interracial struggle for justice and its brutality were there to see, but because the battle somehow didn’t engage as the ghetto scene did, critics, Kate Masur and Corey Robin, among many others, have noted that African Americans appear in the film merely as on-lookers in a story about their liberation.

I was deeply impressed by the clearing of the ghetto in Schindler’s List and the battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. These are cinematic high points, great moments in the history of film. They are difficult to watch, though impossible to turn away from. The opening scene of Lincoln is not as compelling. Perhaps because it so directly quotes from the Ryan battle scene: strange how it is that art doesn’t work the second time around. I think this is at the root of the political criticism of the movie. If the scene had worked, the criticism would not have made sense.

On the other hand, the film accomplishes more than its strongest critics and supporters maintain. Its political strengths are connected to its artistic accomplishment. It asks questions in engaging ways, avoiding simple answers to complex problems. It illuminates the dilemmas of enduring the tragedies of the social condition (more on this in future posts), showing how dilemmas sometimes can be overcome with creativity. The film does not provide simple formulas about the tension between idealism and realism, moderation and radicalism, fact and fantasy. I think this is Lincoln’s greatest strength.

David Brooks of the Times and Al Hunt, at Bloomberg, loved the film. As mainstream commentators of American politics, conservative and liberal, they particularly appreciated the realistic account of how things get done in official politics.

Brooks:

“The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way.

It shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.”

Hunt:

“It’s the best movie about Washington politics I’ve seen…It brilliantly captures him doing what politicians are supposed to do, and today too often avoid: compromising, calculating, horse trading, dealing and preventing the perfect from becoming the enemy of a good objective.”

I agree with these judgments, but also think they miss important points. Politicians acting forthrightly on high principle provide the bargaining capacity of the tough realists – in Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens for Abraham Lincoln. And high-principled social movements, definitive elections and significant military action set the stage for realist deals – here the abolitionists, the re-election of Lincoln and the union victories of the Civil War.

It is the need for a broader focus that concerns radical critics of the film, such as Aaron Bady, at Jacobin.

“Lincoln is not a movie about Reconstruction, of course; it’s a movie about old white men in beards and wigs heroically working together to save grateful black people.

…It is about the triumph of a political compromiser, and it argues that radical change comes about by triangulation, by back-room deals, and by a willingness to forego ideological purity.”

Bady maintains that “slavery was already all but dead by the time Lincoln got around to declaring himself an abolitionist.” On the battlefield and throughout the countryside a new status quo had already been established. The amendment was a formality. The passage of the Thirteenth amendment was a mere confirmation in law what had already happened in society. Mere?

I think Bady misses the artistic point, as he makes a perfectly reasonable political one. The tight focus, it seems to me, is presented not because Spielberg and Kushner are proposing that this is where the real political action is, but because this focus brings us in, gives the viewer a sense of intimate participation in a turning point in American history, through an aesthetic experience. Hunt, Brooks and Bady confuse art with politics, with a political theory or interpretation. They miss the power of Daniel Day Lewis’s brilliant performance.

The film successfully paints a cinematic canvas, which suggests multiple political responses, inviting discussion about politics then and now. The film enriches experience, providing an intimate knowledge of a time, place and people, in the way only a film can. This is to be found in the details of the film. An alternative reality is created through art: the performance of Day Lewis, the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, along with the directing of Spielberg and the writing of Kushner, down to the fine details, including, the most surprising, the sound.

I actually agree with Hunt, Brooks and Bady, along with Masur and Robins about the politics of the film. It is a wonderful depiction of the interplay between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of ultimate ends, as Max Weber would put it, and as Brooks and Hunt applaud. The films narrow focus on gritty official politics, on the other hand, leaves out a great deal, including the importance of social movement and war, and the agency of African Americans, as is highlighted in responses of Robins, Masur and significantly the great historian of the era, Eric Foner. The accomplishment is that this artwork inspires an audience to discuss these issues, about emancipation and about the politics of our times.

My note in this regard, despite the liberal, conservative and radical takes: in a functioning democracy the legislative arena doesn’t make social change but confirms change that is forged elsewhere. Think civil rights, gay rights, women rights and, of course, workers rights. Major social change, on the other hand, needs the official politics to ratify, institutionalize and protect the social change. There is nothing in the film that denies this. Think Martin Luther King Jr. and LBJ as partners, and realize this film is the equivalent of one that focuses on LBJ. Which is more important? An interesting discussion, an interesting film.

A final observation on Spielberg as an artist: I think his children and family movies are his unambiguous best, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. They create complete imaginative worlds that engage and are believable. Fantasy and story, and their technics are in harmony. The power of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln, along with The Color Purple, Amistad, and Munich is that they use Spielberg’s capacity to imagine worlds to connect us with history and pressing social problems. As a result, we get inside history, we live through history, in a way that only film can provide. By getting details right, or at least giving us a sense that they are right, we experience history. This is the magic of art, the magic of Lincoln, which explains its appeal. But there are dissonant notes. Sometimes sentiment gets in the way of historical engagement. Hollywood happy end is a problem, but, in my judgment, not a fatal one. It is a great, but not a flawless movie.

A dozen years back Goodman David Brooks entered the cultural pantheon through an oddly incisive book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The title charmed as Brooks asserted that a new generation of elites was upon us. Living well – not political clash – was the best revenge. What Brooks recognized and what Mitt Romney missed was that aesthetics mattered as much as economic interest in establishing political culture.

I think of Bobos when I assay the broadsheet of Brooks’ current employer, The New York Times. One can count on the editorials of the Times to embrace the most progressive respectable position: the stance of the established Statist elite. And one can count on the adverts in the Times to inspire the warm glow of Veblenian pecuniary emulation. I think of Bobos, too, when I peruse the New Yorker or even such ostensibly apolitical, but fully progressive, sources such as Time Out New York (or, from my prairie perch, Time Out Chicago).

These journals are committed to the goals of redistribution of income, environmental sustainability and ecological responsibility, and rabid, compulsive consumption capitalism. Perhaps there is no inherent contradiction between caring about people and caressing things, but the sections of the paper rarely seem as one. Recently in the Sunday Review, the Times’ editorialists promoted more regulations on health care and financial services, a more welcoming immigration policy with support for new arrivals, and one of their columnists, Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahmbo’s brother, Ezbo) is in high dudgeon about companies providing the wrong snacks for their employees (“an additional serving of potato chips every day led to a 1.69-pound weight increase over four years”). The mandarins of the Times did not comment on sea levels or climate change, but wait.

Along with these exhortations, the Times also delivered a posh 156 page Style Magazine: a testimonial to Ferragamo, the Ritz, and the Caymans. The best of living if living well is the best of life. The two sections as juxtaposed represent the Bobo paradox: a commitment to increased state involvement to achieve justice and collective betterment and a commitment to free-market consumption to achieve status recognition and personal desire.

Yet, re-reading Bobos in Paradise inspires the belief that, like any anodyne composite, social commentary should come with an expiration date. Following Calvin Trillin’s mordant observation of the shelf life of new books, this expiration date is likely to fall somewhere between milk and yogurt. Brooks recognizes the cultural changes among his elites (he embraces his inner and outer Bobo). The desire for omnivorous perfection trumps all. This will lead, he believes, to a twenty-first century political age in which the bohemian 1960s merge with the bourgeois 1980s in a triumph of triangulation. This makes David Brooks all smiley-face. He proclaims that successful politicians “seek a Third Way beyond the old categories of left and right. They march under reconciling banners such as compassionate conservatism, practical idealism, smart growth, prosperity with a purpose” (p. 256). He avers, “Thanks in large part to the influence of the Bobo establishment, we are living in an era of relative social peace. The political parties, at least at the top, have drifted toward the center. For the first time since the 1950s, it is possible to say that there aren’t huge ideological differences between the parties . . . Bobos have begun to create a set of standards and mores that work in the new century. It’s good to live in a Bobo world . . . . they have the ability to go down in history as the class that led America into another golden age .”(p. 268, 270, 273)

How Y2K; how September 10^th. Brooks trips on the prognosticator’s fallacy: what emerges today, will grow in the future. But in 2012 American politics the third way has been overtaken by ways one and two. As our politics divides and fragments, the culture of consumption proceeds apace.

The Bobos have seen their trust erode and trust funds bounce back. This ideological strain has taken root, most dramatically among progressives, who, according to research, are less given to personal charity than their compeers. (For conservatives consumption poses no moral challenge and tithing is Godly). For Bobo progressives enforced compassion and unfettered consumption are yoked virtues. Both for more established progressives (the Times and the New Yorker) or for aspiring ones (Time Out magazines), the front of the book and the back of the book operate in an uncomfortable, but economically necessary, synergy. The encomiums to buy evermore are often enough at odds with the editorial content, but the editorials depend on the slickly depicted products, both those presented in paid advertising and those aspiration goods promoted by journalists. That the contradiction is unspoken is essential to its power.

As we gaze from the bloodied political fields of 2010 and 2012, we chortle at Brooks’ belief in a moment in which those like him, whether Democrats or Republicans, will merrily rule without much concern of the consent of the governed. Elites often believe that their path – the first way, the third way, or the highway – is inevitable. But elites should not sleep well when their power ignores the unwashed. These masses pressure their representatives to stand firm and even elect their favored tribunes, both the Occupiers, not (yet?) invested in Times Style conspicuous consumption and the Tea Party whose consumption tastes are more Wal-Mart than Patek Philippe. Brooks spies an emerging golden age of elite consensus: how’s that workin’ out for you?

Just about all observers seemed to agree that the Democratic Convention, with the speeches by Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton highlighted, was an unqualified success, especially when compared to the Republican convention and the speeches of Ann Romney, Congressman Ryan and Governor Romney. Post convention polls and political events confirm this assessment. A narrative was set up by the Democrats, establishing expectations for the President and the Governor, and in the past couple of weeks, they each have been following the Democrats’ narrative, suggesting electoral success, with the prospects for a strengthened Obama Presidency. The political conventions were significant theatrical performances. The Democrats had a hit, apparently with lasting effects.

Romney the unsteady parochial plutocrat, who doesn’t understand the daily struggles of ordinary Americans or the complex and difficult global challenges: witness the private Boca Raton fundraiser and the response to his response to the crisis in Egypt, Libya and the Muslim world. Obama the elegant warm leader, carefully calibrating American response to the crisis in North Africa and the Islamic world and understanding the concerns of “the middle class,” a man who responds to the Romney gaffes with well timed amusement and understated criticism.

But Obama’s acceptance speech received mixed reviews. It was judged to have missed the mark, by the left, right and center, and has been overlooked as it contributed to the convention’s success. The criticism came from all angles: not enough specifics about how the second term would differ from the first, on the one hand, too much like a State of the Union address (i.e. too policy oriented, not inspirational enough) on the other. And then there was David Brooks, who truly irked me, complaining that Obama lacked a clearly identifiable singular political project that would define his second term as healthcare defined his first.

The responses indicated to me less about critical judgment of the President’s address, more about the conflicting expectations Obama faced and, I believe, successfully addressed. This was substantially represented by the false choice Brooks asserted Obama had to make: focus on environmental degradation, economic growth and social justice, or fiscal responsibility and tax reform. This would clearly be bad politics and weaken governing prospects.

Jeffrey C. Alexander’s gets to the point in his piece today at The Huffington Post, though I think he exaggerates a little:

Voters do not decide whom to vote for by weighing their objective costs and benefits. They are not calculating machines, but emotional and moral human beings. Searching for the meanings of things, they want to make sense of political life, working out a grand narrative of where we’ve been, where we are now, and where we’re going in the future.

Well, perhaps weighing costs and benefits plays some role. But clearly, a good believable story, addressing costs, benefits and interests (think jobs, taxes and healthcare), given by an appealing statesman, is extremely important. People imagine a relationship with a potential leader and their linked fortunes, and decide which way to go.

As Alexander put it about Romney:

With Obama’s help, [the] Romney-character emerged as Bain ‘Capitalist,’ the quarter-billionaire who won’t tell us about his taxes and parked his hidden money offshore. Romney may have brain power, but he lacks symbolic soul. His character signifies self over community, a glad hander who’ll tell us what we want to hear, not what he deeply believes.

In contrast, Alexander continues, the President presented himself in a new sober role: “At least for now, Obama can no longer be a hero, but he can be represented,” indeed he successfully presented himself, “as working heroically for our side.”

Brooks and the other pundits misjudged Obama, as they didn’t seem to appreciate the method to his apparent madness, a cool speech in the middle of a hot political environment. Performing his political persona, revealing his character, showing the electorate and the world his serious authoritative stance in very trying times.

I listen to Obama’s speeches with a deep appreciation. If he makes a rhetorical move that I didn’t expect and don’t at first understand, I start by questioning myself, not him. Such, for example, was how I listened to his inaugural address. Commentators judged it to be a downer, below Obama’s campaign norm. Sitting in my community center with friends and neighbors, I also was a little disappointed. But looking back, it was the properly sober speech for sobering times, pointing to the very real difficulties ahead, rather than celebrating victory and imagining dreams. He understood the situation we are in and spoke to it in persuasive ways.

This is exactly what he did in his convention speech. He understood that the warmth of his personality was portrayed by his wife. That the policy debate, celebrating what he has accomplished and contrasting his program and its seriousness with that of his rivals, was expertly presented by Bill Clinton. Indeed that all different facets of the Democrats program and appeal were represented in a wide variety of speeches about woman’s rights and dignity, a truly diverse view of American citizenship and rights, concern for veterans and national defense (this not always to my liking) and much more. Obama revealed his character, his sound judgment, his understanding of the situation we are in, as individuals and as a nation. Review the speech and see how well this was done. It’s interesting to me to note that on YouTube over three and a half million people have viewed the video, suggesting that many are deliberately re-considering the speech.

We have just experienced the season of gifts, a moment at which images of plummy consumption dance in our heads. And I had a gift in mind. A magazine, or perhaps, a certain website.

I am a serial reader, and, sometimes, a reader of serials. As the Deliberately Considered audience knows – because I have admitted in cyber-print – I have ogled Glenn Beck: less as harassment or flirtation, and more as an imagined discourse. I promiscuously read conservatives and progressives – and others in left, right, and libertarian venues. I live by The New Yorker, I conserve the Weekly Standard, I reason with Reason, and Mother Jones is Mom. However, I have long regretted that I cannot get a daily dosage of civic nutriment in a single journalistic bowl. I hold to a somewhat eccentric contention that there are smart liberals (neo- and old-timey, pink and pinker), conservatives (neo- and paleo-), progressives, reactionaries, socialists, libertarians, and more. Is my generosity so bizarre?

It has been argued that one of the fundamental problems in American political culture is that citizens tend to read narrowly. Those who consider themselves conservatives will not squander their lives reading liberal intellectuals, and the same is true of liberals, should they even admit to such a creature as a conservative intellectual. The divide between red and blue is as evident in the library as in the voting booth. This argument was made most compellingly by the ever diverting Cass Sunstein in his 2001 book, Republic.Com. Sunstein argued that we feel comfortable in segregated domains of knowledge in which:

“People restrict themselves to their own points of view – liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazi, neo-Nazis.”

People reside in gated communities of knowledge. This is what the sociologist David Maines, referring to epistemic divisions between blacks and whites, described as racialized pools of knowledge. Our pools, suitable for private skinny dipping, are political. But if we are truly interested in the play of ideas, this chasm is a dispiriting reality. Of what are we afraid?

On the empirical side, there has been debate as to the validity of Sunstein’s claim as applicable to blog sites, at least according to a research paper by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. They discover that many political junkies are omnivores, reading widely.

But, putting aside web freebies, on the organizational side the argument seems more compelling. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s argument, if confirmed, applies to blogs like Deliberately Considered, but perhaps less to paper-and-ink magazines, where one must place one’s money where one’s politics is.

And so each week I open my copy of The New Yorker with a weary expectation. Yes, as they explain, it is the best magazine in America. Yet, it is surely predictable. Recently, Hendrik Hertzberg weighed in on Newt Gingrich (back when he was the front runner, in a piece entitled “Alt-Newt”) and, surprise!, he doesn’t think much of the former speaker. The New Yorker has not been kind to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, or Herman Cain either. Also, The New Yorker won’t embrace Ron Paul, and someone is surely generating cold thoughts about Rick Santorum. Newt, we are told, is lousy writer, a hypocrite, and more of a megalomaniac than most potential presidents. Hertzberg’s essay is beautifully crafted, and it is not false as much as it is unanswered. There are those who write with glee and panache against the current incumbent, not only from the left, but from the right. But subscribers will never hear them. Then there is The New York Times whose stable of columnists range from (mostly) deep blue to light purple. Neither David Brooks nor Ross Douthat, thoughtful men both, are movement conservatives. William Kristol was chased off the reservation by patricians with pitchforks. Would one red-meat conservative violate the Gray Lady? Perhaps The Atlantic comes closest to this model, but the distance is still real.

What I wish for is a journal that is committed to excellence with ideological generosity. Perhaps there is not an audience for such a venture, despite the suggestion of Gentzkow and Shapiro, but I fantasize that Bill Buckley and Max Lerner could share a page. Charles Krauthammer and Frank Rich, too.

If one already knows that one knows, such a project is fundamentally misguided. Why read the wrong along with the right? However, for those of us who embrace independence, uncertainty and confusion are thrilling. A magazine that is neither red nor blue but multi-hued is a gift most devoutly to be wished for. It is not only that we wish to read clever writers, but we need to imagine a rainbow of clever ideas. Under my tree, I imagine a magazine that I cannot predict before opening the cover: a periodical of intellectual astonishment. A journal that is generously considered.

Let us pretend that we might be persuaded, and then read accordingly.

In my last post, I argued that Occupy Wall Street had clear, present and positive goals. I made my argument by focusing on one part of the New York occupation, the Think Tank group. I highlighted its principled commitment to open discussion of the problems of the day, based on a radical commitment to democracy: social, cultural and economic, as well as political. This is serious business. It can be consequential as OWS figures out ways to not only speak in the name of the 99%, but also in a language that the 99% can understand, so that it can respond and act. I promise to analyze directly the challenges involved in a future post.  But I’ve been working hard these past weeks, and don’t have the energy to do the hard work required. Today, I feel like something a bit lighter, and will be suggestive and less direct about the big challenges, reviewing the Republican Presidential field, and some other more comic elements of the present political landscape in the United States in the context of the opening that OWS has provided.

Commentators broadly agree: the Republican field for President is weak. The likely nominee, Mitt Romney, appears to be cynical to the core. Making his name as a reasonable moderate Republican Governor of Massachusetts, he is now running as a right-wing ideologue. Once pro-choice, he is now pro-life. Once for government supported universal health insurance, now he is violently opposed to Obamacare. Once in favor of reasonable immigration reform, now he is an anti-amnesty radical. David Brooks, the conservative columnist we of the left like to quote most, supports Romney with the conviction that he doesn’t say what he means.

After Romney, things get even stranger. If these people mean what they say (and I think they do), we are in real trouble, because one of them could be the next President of the United States, insuring its decay as the global power. Perhaps this is a reason for radicals to support Republicans? But then again, this was the reason for the socialist radicals to support Hitler in the thirties.

Bachmann, Perry, Cain and now Newt Gingrich have successively led the national polls over Romney. They are increasingly outrageous as the true-believing candidate. Bachmann seemed to be so uninfluenced by the facts that she burnt out. Perry seemed to forget who he is, or at least who he claims to be, one too many times. Cain not only conveniently forgot about his history of serial sexual harassment. He appeared to not have ever known much about the world beyond his motivational riffs and his slogan for his 999 program. And now the American blowhard-in-chief, Newt Gingrich, is back, appearing as the last man standing. Said to be the intelligent conservative, filled with innovative ideas, thinking that he is always the smartest guy in the room, his willful ignorance is stunning.

About the Arab Spring:  “People say, ‘Oh isn’t this great, we’re having an Arab Spring,’” he said. “I think we may in fact be having an anti-Christian spring. I think people should take this [assertion] pretty soberly.”

About the most significant danger facing America:

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,”  Gingrich said. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

And in a report today, on the grey non-partisan Congressional Budget Office: “a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”

These are but a quick sampling, brought to you thanks to the remarkable power of Google. “A Little Red Book of Gingrich” would be pretty funny if he remains an outsider, but that such a pillar of wisdom could become the candidate of a major political party, not to imagine President Gingrich, is truly horrifying.

The poor quality of the Republican field is, I think, not just a consequence of a chance collection of unqualified and undistinguished individuals. It is, rather, a manifestation of a deep crisis in American political culture. The Republican Party has become a bastion of know-nothing ideological true-believers. The Reagan revolution has become radicalized. Christian conservatives, market fundamentalists and nativists (ascendant in response of the election of Barack Hussein Obama) each demand ideological purity. The contradictions among these fundamentalist positions, and the tension between them and factual reality, guarantee that the serious and the responsible need not apply. The only way they can is by hiding their more sober qualities. This is Brooks’s hope for Romney.

Obama and the Democrats are not so constricted, but they have been profoundly and negatively affected by the ideological madness of the right. Given a polarized public, Obama has tried to work with Republicans and the results have been mixed at best, outraging his supporters and critics on the left, perplexing his previous supporters in the center and even on the right (e.g. Brooks and Company). The Democrats have not distinguished themselves in addressing some enduring and profound problems the American public faces. This is where I think the significance of Occupy Wall Street comes in. It helped to put forward some stark facts about the American social condition, concerning the issues of inequality, the structural restrictions on social mobility. It opened public discussion about these and other outstanding issues concerning social justice, providing the opportunity for debate and action. Thus far, it has been very successful.

But I am worried as I look around the blogosphere and as I look at some demonstrations close to home. Some attached to the OWS movement want to push it in a direction that will assure its insignificance and destruction. They would rather play at revolution than work for significant social change. While they dream of and chant slogans about “smashing capitalism,” something that makes no sense to the American public at large, and among serious economists and to most serious social and political scientists as well, they may fail to seize the day.

In the absence of Occupy Wall Street, such sloganeering is quaint and comic, a tragedy of the twentieth century repeating itself as farce in the twenty first. But because there is a real opening right now for significant change, there is the danger that we may face tragedy yet again in the form of a lost opportunity.

Now is the time when control over corporate excesses may be a real possibility. Now is the time when links among significant social forces, including labor unions, feminist movements, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian rights movements, environmental movements and the like, and indeed, the Democratic Party, could move a broad public. The unions, especially, are social organizations that have the institutionalized power to address the concerns raised by OWS. The unions need the energy and imagination of OWS, as OWS needs the power of the unions. Now is the time that Barack Obama can be pushed to be the president he promised to be. The Democratic Party is the political force that can put an end to the party of the American Tragedy, the GOP in its present configuration, so strikingly revealed by their leaders who would be President of the United States of America.

Or we could denounce liberals, Democrats and play revolution. That would be pretty funny if it weren’t so serious.

Figure 1 shows the extraordinary reallocation of national resources from the bottom 80 percent of the population to the top 1 percent, while those in between (81^st-99^th) have, as a group, shown no change in their share of total income.

FIGURE 1

Source: CBO Report “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007”

Not surprisingly, over the last three decades many households in the bottom 80 percent have faced sharp declines in their standard of living as the costs of health care, higher education, food and energy have risen far faster than the wage check. The result has been the accumulation of unprecedented levels of mortgage, credit card, and student debt.

I have argued that the roots of the economic crisis can be found in the shift in economic thinking and public policy toward free market fundamentalism in the 1970-80s, which fueled the rise in debt, financial instability, and extreme inequality. We’ve seen a toxic mix of financial deregulation, evisceration of protective labor market institutions (like collective bargaining and the minimum wage), a political system corrupted by campaign contributions, and an increasingly polarized education system that performs poorly for most of those in the 80 percent and terribly for the most disadvantaged communities.

But this is not at all the conventional wisdom. Rather, it has become widely accepted that the government is the root cause of the economic crisis of 2008-11 and the decline in living standards for the vast majority. The problem in this conservative vision is too much regulation, too much taxation, too much encouragement of home ownership for low-income families, and government workers (who take too much for themselves in wages, benefits and job security). And worst of all is fighting the economic crisis with deficit spending. Incredibly, many leading academic economists have lent support to this free market fantasy, which of course has the causation between unemployment and government spending exactly backwards.

In the free market vision, extreme inequality is not the real problem. It is government spending and regulations, and reducing both would induce employers to generate jobs, workers to get off unemployment benefits, and students to invest in their own education (as public spending for education is cut back). Mainstream economists have long been fixated on supply side solutions to inequality and low pay. It is a natural part of the package of free market orthodoxy: more education makes people more productive and in competitive labor markets workers get paid what they’re worth (otherwise known as their “marginal product”).

A good example of this free market vision can be seen in David Brooks’ recent column in which he argued that the “right” inequality to worry about is not what’s going to the top 1 percent, but instead it is the “chasm between college and high school grads.” And we get much more than just higher incomes from more higher education. As he put it: “Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.”

Unfortunately, while college grads may, on average, have higher scores on all these good outcomes, it seems unlikely that an increase in college degrees would have any effect on any of them. Let’s say we increase in the 6-year graduation rate for Bachelor’s degrees from about the current abysmal level of 55% (see below). Should we really expect to see less smoking, less obesity, more social trust and more words spoken to children?  Actually, given the costs and benefits of college attendance spelled out below, we might reasonably expect these outcomes to worsen, as recent graduates with modest incomes realize that they are unable to pay off their  mountainous student debt.

So what is the payoff to getting a college degree? We can start with Figure 1. Since 30 percent of the population over age 25 had college degrees in 2010 (Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics: 2010, table 8), not many college graduates could have been among the top 1 percent of winners.

Figure 2 provides a view of the timing of the growth in inequality at the top. Saez shows that all the action at the top has taken place within the top 1%, whose share of total income rose from about 14% in 1993 to 23% in 2007, and then declined to about 21% in 2008, as the financial system nearly collapsed.

FIGURE 2

Nothing like this sort of take-off in inequality appears in the earnings data organized by educational attainment. Figure 3 shows that real earnings for those with only a college degree rose modestly in the 1990s and not at all since (in 2007 dollars).  At the peak of the last business cycle, in 2000, the average college graduate wage was $25.86 and increased to $26.40 the next year. Six years later the college wage was $26.51. Measured from 2001 to 2007, the Bush “boom” increased the average college wage by a full 11 cents.

It is true, as Figure 3 reports, that average wages have been much higher for college than high school graduates. But while the average college graduate earns about 1.7 times more than the average high school graduate, this ratio has remained unchanged since 1998: the payoff to a college degree stopped increasing over a decade ago.

The share of young people (25-29) with a college degree rose in the 1990s, but this measure of rising educational attainment has been flat in the 2000s: 29.1% in 2000, 29.6% in 2007 and 31.7% in 2010 (Department of Education: Digest of Education Statistics: 2010, Table 8).

But while many more students have sought post-secondary degrees, the reality of low wages for recent graduates and high costs of schooling have produced dismal graduation rates. Students entering a four-year college in 2003 had a graduation rate of just 55.5% six years later. Even worse, community colleges offering a two-year Associate’s degree report a three year graduation rate of just 29.2% for the 2006 entering class (NCHEMS Information Center, from Department of Education data).

The fact is that many students do not complete college, perhaps partly because they are pretty good at weighing the benefits and costs. Figure 3 graphically illustrates the tiny payoff to going to college and not finishing a four-year college degree. On average, the wage increase from “some college” over a high school degree was $1.85 per hour in 1998, $2.03 in 2000, and $1.92 in 2007.

FIGURE 3

Real Hourly Earnings by Educational Attainment, 1979-2007 (2007 dollars)

Source: Economic Policy Institute

If we succeed in getting more students out of college with diplomas, nearly all will get paid far less than the average college graduate (since they are younger and will come from the lower part of the high school performance distribution). Figure 4 compares the median annual earnings for high school graduates in 2010 with the average annual earnings of those in the 1^st quartile of the college graduate earnings distribution (those with earnings in the bottom 25% of earnings for all college grads). The increase for undertaking an additional four years of schooling is $5,600 for women and $4,850 for men.

Ignoring the complications of discounting, let’s say it cost $10,000 per year in tuition and related costs, and opportunity costs of $25,000 (foregone earnings, at slightly below the median high school graduate rate). Let’s further assume she won’t need to bear any costs of student loans (an entirely unlikely scenario – generally only possible for those whose parents are in that top 1%…).

Under this scenario, she’s got $140,000 invested in her college degree ($35,000 x 4). If her payoff is the average one ($5,600), it will take her about 25 years to break even.

This simple example illustrates the reality that the payoff to getting a college degree isn’t so obvious, given a labor market paying low wages to almost one-third of all workers and costs of education that are rising far faster than the overall inflation rate. This helps explain not just the dismal graduation rates mentioned above, but also why the percentage of 25-29 year olds with a college degree or more has hardly budged over the last decade (29.1% in 2000, 29.6% in 2007, and 31.7% in 2010; Department of Education, (Digest of Education Statistics: 2010, table 8).

It will take some radical institutional changes before we get to a more egalitarian and productive economy, as Brooks would have us do. We would need substantial reductions in the incidence of low pay and the burden of post-secondary education costs on less well-off families. Progressive change requires reversing the inequality revealed in figure 1: let’s start by giving back those 10 percentage points of national income to the bottom 80 percent of the American people. One critical step is to reduce the incidence of low pay without reducing job opportunities. Some say this is not possible, but France has shown that it can be done. I’ll make that case in the next post.

FIGURE 4

Median Annual Earnings in 2010 for High School Graduates and Average Earnings for College Graduate in the 1^st Earnings Quartile (Usual weekly pay X 50)

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

]]> http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/11/college-degrees-not-the-answer-to-extreme-inequality/feed/ 4 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2010/11/on-facebook-real-everyday-life/ http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2010/11/on-facebook-real-everyday-life/#comments Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:58:02 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=897 Last week, DC contributor Robin Wagner-Pacifici commented on how Facebook and other social networking sites have changed the language of social interaction. (link)

I find that the change in descriptive language about social connections that she observes is more in the eyes of the beholder than in lived experience. Life continues as before, full of human connection, with new tools to carry out the same processes.

When Facebook was founded in 2004, I was a senior in high school and accepted early to college with the prerequisite educational e-mail address to join Facebook’s earliest members. As a member of the Millennial Generation (defined by the Pew Research Center as Americans born after 1980), I am a member of the first class of college students not to ever go to college without Facebook. In fact, I had Facebook before I even graduated high school, and I “met” my dorm-mates months before my first week of school.

That means I never made a college friend that I didn’t connect with online. I never dated someone without looking at their online profile. I also never had a boss or a professor who couldn’t look me up and see what I was about. When I graduated last year, mid-recession, I was warned to “take those personal details offline.” Take them offline? I never thought it was a private space. They were never there.

I’ve observed, in my life, my work in publishing and my research in sociology, that with each passing year, the social worlds of young people are increasingly entrenched in social media. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t use the word entrenched at all. The rest of my generation, particularly those who had Facebook as high school freshmen (or even earlier), learned who they were while using Facebook. Not because of Facebook. Our lives are lived in and through social media, as they are lived in and through face-to-face interactions.

Imagine how the milestones of adolescence are changes (or exactly the same) when lived out in a world wrapped up in Web 2.0. Your high school chemistry club calls meetings on its Facebook page. Your . . .

Read more: On Facebook: Real, Everyday Life

Last week, DC contributor Robin Wagner-Pacifici commented on how Facebook and other social networking sites have changed the language of social interaction. (link)

I find that the change in descriptive language about social connections that she observes is more in the eyes of the beholder than in lived experience.  Life continues as before, full of human connection, with new tools to carry out the same processes.

When Facebook was founded in 2004, I was a senior in high school and accepted early to college with the prerequisite educational e-mail address to join Facebook’s earliest members.  As a member of the Millennial Generation (defined by the Pew Research Center as Americans born after 1980), I am a member of the first class of college students not to ever go to college without Facebook. In fact, I had Facebook before I even graduated high school, and I “met” my dorm-mates months before my first week of school.

That means I never made a college friend that I didn’t connect with online. I never dated someone without looking at their online profile. I also never had a boss or a professor who couldn’t look me up and see what I was about. When I graduated last year, mid-recession, I was warned to “take those personal details offline.” Take them offline? I never thought it was a private space. They were never there.

I’ve observed, in my life, my work in publishing and my research in sociology, that with each passing year, the social worlds of young people are increasingly entrenched in social media. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t use the word entrenched at all. The rest of my generation, particularly those who had Facebook as high school freshmen (or even earlier), learned who they were while using Facebook. Not because of Facebook.   Our lives are lived in and through social media, as they are lived in and through face-to-face interactions.

Imagine how the milestones of adolescence are changes (or exactly the same) when lived out in a world wrapped up in Web 2.0. Your high school chemistry club calls meetings on its Facebook page. Your first boyfriend asks you to go steady via a Facebook relationship request. Your most embarrassing high school moment? The unflattering photo posted of you after your first big spring break trip.

Facebook didn’t create these moments, and the social fabric isn’t tearing at the seams. Regular life happens online all the time for these teenagers. They aren’t referring to their school cliques as networks, but still as friend groups. David Brooks may have used different terms for his analysis, but that doesn’t mean that language is carrying over into everyday life.

I say these things to both comfort and caution: the language of relationships isn’t going anywhere. It’s just growing in complexity and variance. As a sociologist, this poses myriad questions to the expected changes in the way this generation will become adults. The change to collective memory alone: These “networks” are instant archives.

Facebook and other social networks aren’t just changing the way older generations think about social relationships.  They also, more fundamentally, are providing a medium through which a younger generation is growing up, revealing the way we now live.

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And this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece titled, “The Crossroads Nation,” that illuminated something about the networked-world phenomenon that I hadn’t clearly seen before. The column’s ostensible topic is the capacity of America to be the most globally networked nation for the 21st century and thus Brooks advocates an economy built on continued digital integration.

Bland and unassailable as a premise (satisfying both more left-leaning infrastructure-building advocates and more right-leaning champions of individualistic success stories)the interesting thing about Brooks’ column is a subtle shift that occurs in the way it narrates human relationships.

“The Crossroads Nation” column is itself constructed by way of interesting shifts in the terminology it uses to label human groupings. Brooks imagines a young person finding her voice and her metier by migrating from a small town to a metropolis and connecting with other creative individuals and groups in the process. Describing this trajectory Brooks begins with traditional words like “country,””place,” “circle,” “group of people,” and switches decisively mid-column to “networks” and “hubs.”

He concludes with a paeon to America’s network capacity: “The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.”

Brooks does not reflect on the significance of this shift, or of the consequences of abandoning these traditional ideas about social and political collectivities. But reading the column made me realize that my diffidence toward on-line social networks has something to do with this transformation in our understanding of groups.  I realized that I do not see myself as part of networks, that such a self-identification is actually anathema. Rather, I think about my life as one that is embedded in a world of families, communities, neighborhoods, workplaces, institutions and social classes.

This stubbornly off-line relational imaginary may have a generational foundation – born in the mid twentieth century I am stuck in its world of relationships. But perhaps it entails some inchoate political resistance to re-imagining myself as a node of a network, a kind of collectivity without face-to-face enduring ties or without a clear connection to a particular historical formation.

What does it mean, after all, to be part of a network? I don’t think we have even begun to answer that question.

This has led to some frustration.  He can’t talk our way out of a major economic crisis, and he has had difficulty convincing his opponents and the general public that a balanced budget is not a rational answer to a severe financial crisis and deep economic recession.  Further, he can’t convince real enemies abroad to accept American priorities, although he has improved attitudes towards our country around the world.  And even more politically damaging, he can’t convince his political opposition to work with him, when they calculate that it is not in their narrowly conceived interests.  Producing meaningful bipartisan legislation is a goal, but practical political calculation can and has stood in the way.

Now, the Story Teller is fighting back on the campaign trail.  The fight started in a speech on Labor Day in Milwaukee presenting his basic themes, as I analyzed in an earlier post. Obama then extended the themes to specific circumstances, starting by going down the road a bit to Madison, Wisconsin, also analyzed here.  He has since traveled from coast to coast delivering the message he introduced in the Wisconsin speeches.  As he gives each speech, he is attempting to rally the troops, to energize his base, but he is also presenting different elements of his understanding of the political situation and his political vision and policy actions, telling the story of the last two years as he understands and feels about it, setting the terms of our politics for the next two.

The general theme: he dispassionately explains that when he became President Americans faced a severe crisis. He had thought and hoped that the Republicans and Democrats in Washington would work together to address this crisis.  But the Republicans decided to play crass politics.  As Obama put it in his speech of October 7^th at Bowie State University, in Maryland:

They knew it would take more than a couple of years to climb out of this unbelievable recession that they had created.  They knew that by the time the midterm rolled around that people would still be out of work; that people would still be frustrated.  And they figured that if we just sat on the sidelines and opposed every idea, every compromise that I offered, if they spent all their time attacking Democrats instead of attacking problems that, somehow, they would prosper at the polls.

So they spent the last 20 months saying no – even to policies that they’d supported in the past.  No, to middle class tax cuts.  No, to help for small businesses.  No, to a bipartisan deficit reduction commission that they had once sponsored.  I said yes; they said no.  I’m pretty sure if I said the sky was blue, they’d say no.  (Laughter.)  If I said there are fish in the sea, they’d say no.  See, their calculation was if Obama fails, then we win.

But, he goes on: he and the Democrats persevered and accomplished a lot, despite the almost complete Republican negativity, highlighting how the accomplishments have been realized for his audience.

In each speech, he addresses special concerns of his audience and tries to support local candidates.  Most news reports have focused on whether or not candidates appear with him and how well or poorly his speeches are firing up the base and potentially bettering the prospects of the Democratic Party in maintaining control of Congress.  The general consensus: despite Obama’s efforts they almost certainly will lose the House, while having a good chance to maintain control of the Senate.  I have no reason to doubt this, but I think there is more involved.

Missing in the analysis is an attempt to actually understand what the campaign is about and how it is connected to the Obama Presidency.  It’s there in the words.  The live audiences hear it, but not those reading newspapers and watching television.  The variations on the major theme of the stump speech reveal Obama and his fellow Democrats principles, positions and achievements.  While the Republicans, from its Tea Party Wing to its more mainstream versions, are sticking to their theme of the last thirty years, the government is not the solution but the problem, clearly revealed in the much ridiculed “Pledge to America” (which has been quickly forgotten), the Democrats, and Obama most clearly, argue that good government can make a crucial difference.

Governing well matters in education, for example, something he emphasized in Maryland, with its Democratic Governor, Martin O’ Malley, running for reelection:

Here in Maryland, you know, understand, how important education is to our economy, how important it is to our future.  Martin O’Malley knows that, too.  His opponent raised college tuition in this state by 40 percent when he was in charge.  This is at a time when the economy was doing better.  Now, even in the toughest of times, over the last two years, Martin O’Malley froze in-state tuition, so he kept the cost of this school and other schools affordable for Maryland’s families. (Applause.)  And thanks to his unprecedented investment in Maryland’s education, as I said before, you’ve been ranked the best when it comes to public schools the last two years in a row. That’s what Martin O’Malley does.  (Applause.)  He walks the walk, doesn’t just talk the talk.

When he campaigned for the Presidency, Obama emphasized the need to reform and support education.  As he has governed, this has been a major project, a key component of his stimulus package, but recognized by conservatives, such as David Brooks, as well as liberals as a significant effort.  Now Obama is supporting the Democratic Governor of Maryland on this accomplishment. Good government can improve things.  It has improved educational opportunities and achievements.

And it has done more, which Obama has been emphasizing in his speeches around the country, which I will analyze in my next post.