Politics

by publius

David Brooks wrote a good column yesterday criticizing the GOP’s excessive anti-intellectualism. It’s a bit whitewashed, but I still commend him for writing it. Anyway, the Brooks theory goes something like this — the GOP’s criticism of narrow aspects of elitist liberalism has morphed into a broader hostility against the educated classes as a whole.

In short, conservatives told educated people to go away, and they have. Brooks writes:

[The GOP] has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

Well, that’s part of it. But it’s not really what’s driving educated people away. If you asked 100 educated “liberal elites” why they would never even consider voting Republican, it’s not because those mean conservatives told them to go away. It’s not even economics. It’s the social issues. For many liberals (myself included), the dealbreaker is the enthusiastic and nasty embrace of social views that we find repellant and stupid.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s nothing about college that necessarily makes you a better or even smarter person — drunker, maybe, but not better. Instead, college forces you — often for the first time — to experience diversity. Many Americans meet their first gay friends in college. Or maybe they develop their first true friendships with people of different ethnicities or religions or ideologies. I, for instance, was quite fascinated to learn that not everybody in the United States celebrates Christmas — Rosh a Whata? (I was equally fascinated to learn that some families celebrate it with adult beverages — next life, Catholic).

Anyway, once you’ve had these experiences, it’s beyond disgusting to see, for instance, the rabid gay-bashing of 2004, or the immigrant-bashing of 2005, or the “Barack Hussein Obama” business, or the audacity of an idiot vice presidential candidate claiming that Obama “pals around” with terrorists — you know, people who murder Americans. Urban educated Republicans don’t even try to defend this garbage, but instead are embarrassed by it — probably far more than they publicly acknowledge. Sometimes, though, the embarrassment spills out — see, e.g., David Brooks and David Frum.

In short, the GOP has made an unholy alliance with the mob — and now the long-term debt is coming due. And they deserve it. After all, it’s not that the GOP establishment merely tolerated them, or treated them like the crazy uncle you basically nod at but ignore. They’ve been riling them up — feeding the hate. They’ve based campaigns on things like gay marriage and immigration and terrorist appeasing. They go on the Rush Limbaugh show, and validate his venom. They tell people who don’t have time to learn otherwise things like giving mortgages to poor minority families caused the housing crisis (Daniel Gross has the appropriate response to that — essentially, “it’s not risky to lend to minority families, it’s risky to lend to rich white people.”)

And you know, it sort of makes sense. If I thought Obama was a Muslim terrorist communist committing perpetual voter fraud, I might get mad too at the prospect of an Obama presidency. And so that’s what you have — a lot of angry, proudly uninformed conservatives out there. And they’re not going away.

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by hilzoy

I’ll be liveblogging the debate as soon as it starts.

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by publius starbursts

I’m ecstatic that McCain’s health care plan has taken center stage on the campaign trail. It’s a debate worth having. Unlike the juvenile nonsense we’ve endured for most of the campaign, it’s a truly substantive political debate — one that illustrates the deeper philosophical differences between the candidates and their parties. It also illustrates — to me, anyway — an important theoretical flaw with conservative economic ideology.

For fellow non-health wonks, I heartily recommend Ezra Klein’s accessible post summarizing the central problems with McCain’s health benefits tax. The nickel version is that the problem isn’t the tax itself, but the tax’s structural effects upon the health care market. McCain’s plan would essentially create a world where individuals are tossed out on their own, with little bargaining power and even less information.

In other words, the tax is bad even we assume it’s completely revenue neutral. Let’s pretend, for instance, that McCain’s tax doesn’t really cost you anything. Let’s pretend the proposed tax increase on employer benefits is completely offset by tax credits and higher wages. Let’s even pretend that the tax credit is pegged to inflation medical costs (McCain’s is not, so the credit becomes worth less and less each year).

Even under these assumptions, the plan is still flawed at its core because of the way it restructures the market. As Klein explains, the effect of the tax increase is to cause employers to drop benefits, thus forcing employees into the individual market. The tax credit has the same effect — even individuals without employer coverage will start buying individual plans. In short, the vision of the McCain plan is a system consciously premised upon an “individual” market that is subsidized by taxes and tax credits. Klein, however, explains the problems with elevating individual markets to be the foundation of our health care system:

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by hilzoy

Ezra is absolutely right to say that our failure to respond in any coherent way to the economic crisis is a deep political failure:

“This is a failure of politics. Like with global warming, with health care, with the national debt, with immigration. It is further proof that we have a calcified political system incapable of responding to either long-term threats or short-term crises. The electoral and partisan incentives have made actual action too dangerous and rendered obstruction everyone’s easy second choice. And in politics, you just about never get your first choice. And so the Republicans killed this bill. Without their cover, the Democrats couldn’t save it, because politically, they couldn’t take ownership of it.

It’s easy enough to imagine a society running atop a stable economy even when it has an unhealthy politics. And it’s simple enough to see how an unstable economy can be calmed through concerted action by an effective political structure. But an economy in chaos and a political system in paralysis? What happens then?”

Good question. Our dysfunctional politics places some good options off the table, makes others much more difficult to implement than they would be otherwise, and prevents us from adopting those decent options that remain to us. Consider, for instance, Brad DeLong’s suggestion that we “go for the Swedish plan.” I think that if we can’t get a bill passed this week, we should do exactly that. But it would be a lot harder to implement here than it would there, and not just because our problems are much larger, and in certain ways more complicated.

More below the fold.

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by publius de rothschild, non-elitist

Like Hilzoy, count me as a reluctant supporter of the once and future bailout plan. I’m not crazy about helping scumbags who play dice with our universe. But I’m not crazy about a financial meltdown either. So scumbags it is.

I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending that I have expertise in this area. I do hope, though, that there may ultimately be a silver lining — assuming of course we avoid the “Lord of the Flies landing.” My hope is that the financial crisis — coupled with the equally mammoth health care and energy crises — will cause Americans to fundamentally rethink the role that government plays in our lives. Assuming we don’t all crash and burn, my hope is that the crisis will usher in a true progressive revival — a widespread political recognition of government’s importance in people’s lives.

I’ve long thought that the greatest ideological barrier to a new progressive era is people’s loathing of government. Regardless of how much people actually benefit from government services (e.g., clean air, free school), they detest “big government.” The Reagan ideological hegemony depends upon people’s knee-jerk resistance to regulation and government solutions. Even Clinton and Blair’s victories were defensive in this respect — they explicitly ran against “big government” and helped validate the criticism.

To be clear, I’m not anti-market. I love me my markets. It’s just that markets are utterly incapable of meeting the great challenges of our day.

Markets have failed — spectacularly failed — to create a decent health care system. An obscenely high number of Americans lack any insurance whatsoever with no relief in sight from any GOP policy. And if you have a preexisting condition, tough. Liberty demands you die bankrupt.

But the failures go well beyond health care. Markets have also failed us on the energy front, proving unable to deal with the externalities associated with burning carbon. Our transportation system is in shambles — we should be building new rail lines between all major cities. As for our electricity grid — go ask the good people of Houston how their 1920s-era electricity infrastructure is holding up these days. Markets have also failed us on the broadband front — we have one of the worst systems in the post-industrialized world.

And last but not least, let’s not forget our beloved Masters of the Universe. As the last few weeks have illustrated, financial markets operate upon foundations of trust. The markets, however, have proven utterly incapable of securing that trust. Instead, government has had to step in to secure these foundations again and again. In fact, the most damaging action of the last few weeks was the one time we tried to flex our free market muscles by letting Lehman die, which triggered a panic.

In short, the past few years have shown that Reaganism simply doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work is because it’s flawed at the conceptual core. Given the challenges we face, government must be part of the solution. Government must become cool again.

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