Saturday, January 29, 2011

Kevin Baker's SOTU email

Kevin Baker's SOTU email

Responding to Obama's State of the Union address, journalist Kevin Baker sent out this email:
The real problem with Obama’s speech tonight was, once again, the historical narrative that he led off with, and that he is determined to have us believe.

That is:

Once upon a time, Americans had all sorts of really good jobs because “they only had to maybe compete against their neighbor,” and they could count on getting ahead if they worked hard, “and maybe even see life improve for their children.”

But then “over the course of a single generation, came great technological changes.” Steel mills “that had been employing thousands, now only needed hundreds of workers.” Countries such as “China and India” started “making adjustments, and teaching their kids math.”

Americans suddenly found themselves competing with the whole world, and that’s been really tough, especially since our kids have gone from best-educated in the world to only ninth. But fear not. We “still have the best innovators in the world, the best colleges and universities. We still lead the rest of the world in patents.” All it will take is a lot of education, a little social investment here and there, some strict budget-minding, and…voila! We’ll beat anyone on this planet!

Nonsense.

Well-intentioned though it may be, this whole narrative makes no sense on the face of it.

So, back in the good old days, we were the best at everything, but we did well only because “we just had to compete against our neighbors”?

Say what? Which is it? Were we the best, or were we not?

China and India sure did make changes. But of course the Chinese have been “teaching math” since long before the rest of the world knew the Americas existed, and didn’t India invent it? Were the changes so much better education, or the fact that the two countries emerged first from under Western thumbs, and then from suffocating systems of caste and communism over the course of the last couple generations?

And how DID we fall behind? I mean, while still having the world’s best universities, best innovators, most patents, etc.?

What Obama’s pseudo-history conveniently ignores is that what really changed is not Chinese students buckling down to their algebra homework, or “sweeping technological changes in the course of a generation.” What changed was government policy.

American workers have ALWAYS operated in times of rapid, sweeping technological change. They’ve ALWAYS competed with other countries, in one way or another. And they’ve generally done pretty well.

The reasons they did well included the fact that for most of our history, our government protected our industries against competition from countries with desperately underpaid labor. And because the people running the industries kept inventing new stuff, and ploughing money back into their American industries, instead of shipping their plants overseas and devoting all their time and capital to figuring out new financial Ponzi schemes.

Still, though, the old America that Barack Obama refers to used to be plagued by constant, wrenching depressions. And those old industries didn’t necessarily help people make a good living, or improve their children’s standard of living.

Being a steelworker, or an auto line worker, doesn’t INHERENTLY pay well. In fact, for many decades, such jobs didn’t pay much at all.

Then the people who did them organized themselves, and forced higher wages out of owners (who didn’t have the option of searching out child slaves abroad), and elected representatives who defended and extended their rights.

THAT’S the “magic formula” that American prosperity came out of. Innovation, education, inventiveness—sure. But also industrial policy, unionism, protectionism, real patriotism, and all those other things that Barack Obama and the whole, lovely class he hails from don’t want to hear about because they might chip away some small portion of their staggering wealth.

But without acknowledging that narrative—without letting that narrative guide our future actions, which is the whole reason to learn history in the first place—we’ll just keep butting our heads against the wall.

We can make our kids do math problems until their fingers’ fray…and they still won’t be able to compete with sweatshop dictatorships where workers make 20 cents an hour.

We can talk all we want about making social investments…and they will never be made, as long as the financial oligarchy which has severed all bonds of loyalty to this nation continues to co-opt and buy off our leaders.

But hey, in the meantime, let’s find common ground: fire all the teachers!

Saturday, January 15, 2011

The Centrist Duck Test

The Centrist Duck Test

A year-and-a-half ago, some folks thought I was bizarre for saying that Obama is an ideological centrist.

I was told back then that I was a little weird for talking about all of this "New Democrat" and "Third Way" centrist stuff, and comparing Obama's policies all of the time to the DLC's "Progresive Policy Institute" think tank policy memos.

It was relayed to me that Obama was "basically a liberal," but working within the constraints of the system in Washington, which he was sure to navigate masterfully...if I just gave him time to win 85-dimensional chess, and I withheld criticism that might turn fellow liberal Democrats into impetuous and impatient children incapable of recognizing what was good for them.

I was assured that this was the "pragmatic" way forward, and that it would all work out for the best. I was admonished that Obama surely must be a "progressive," and that, if I didn't recognize his policies as liberalism, it was because A) the secret liberalism couldn't be let out yet, lest Joe Lieberman vote against cloture, B) it was what he had to do, in order to enact some great New Deal 2.0 later, or C) it was the "most liberal" policy that could be accomplished by anyone, ever. In some extreme cases, it was edgily theorized the problem was D) that I must harbor some racist tendencies (Tim Wise's "With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck: Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal-Left" ) that caused my misunderstanding of Obama.

And, patiently, over and over again, I replied that, if it looked like a centrist, and it walked like a centrist, and it quacked like a centrist, and its policies were straight out of the DLC's think tank, and its messaging was straight out of the New Democrat Network, and its appointed bureaucrats were Clinton-ites and Rubin-ites, and if, after it was finally elected to power after an extended primary season campaigning for the votes of a liberal Democratic base, it actually said "I am a centrist"...

...then Obama is probably a centrist.

As I can see from the commentary on this thread rebutting Michael Crowley (formerly a columnist at Third Way rag "The New Republic"), I may not have to argue that point quite as hard anymore.