| Brooks, to his credit, sort of recognizes this in a column today.
But he offers absolutely no exhortation to do anything about it. Just weakly laments institutional decline. Because Obama seems to have designed his entire presidency around stroking David Brooks' intellectual vanity, that matters.
I'm sure republishing this breaks some kind of rule here, but I stupidly posted first over the holidays, and it made little impression. Someone was nice enough to recommend it in Quick Hits. So I'm trying again. I think it's still relevant. Here goes:
What if the economic collapse – and bank bailout – had occurred in the fall of 2005 instead of the fall of 2008?
This question occurred to me again when I read Ed Kilgore’s superbly thought out analysis of substantive intra-left ideological and strategic differences. I was particularly struck by his take on hidden majorities:
Other progressives strongly believe there is a "hidden" majority in the electorate that favors a more progressive direction. Now "hidden majority" theories, usually based on the assumption that most nonvoters would turn out if given starker choices of candidates and platforms, have always been popular among ideologues of both the Left and Right; in fact, it's rapidly becoming a dominant view among conservatives. As it happens, most of the limited empirical research on the subject suggests that nonvoters think pretty much like voters in most elections. But it's hard to prove a negative, so "hidden majority" theories will always persist.
I think there is a majority – not hidden at all -- that lends legitimacy to every conflicting claim in that paragraph.
It’s the majority that prefers not suffering to suffering, that finds avoiding pain preferable to feeling it. That’s why big majorities both support the services the federal government provides while opposing the taxes that pay for them. It’s why Republicans with a straight face scream about saving Medicare and cutting taxes. It’s why we whine about the debt while never doing anything about it.
As long as our politics never consist of choosing between Medicare and taxes, these contradictory majorities never need resolve themselves.
Well, no shit, you pedantic jerk, you might say.
And you would be right. But it doesn’t make this any less important a factor in thinking about where we are.
The answer to why Barack Obama isn’t FDR lies less with his Burkean temperament, love of Goldman Sachs, or hatred of hippies than it does the number three.
Quite simply, the country didn’t get to suffer under three years of full-on Great Depression Hooverism prior to Obama’s election. Conversely, while allowing for my possible ignorance of certain historical facts, it seems highly unlikely that FDR would have been FDR if the Depression had started at the very end of Hoover’s term, rather than the beginning.
During Hoover’s term, government made a choice to behave in a way we’d call conservative today.
As a result, or at least concurrent to that choice, powerful private economic interests and institutions collapsed, and actual suffering exploded across a broad spectrum of the public.
Politically, demand for help grew, and resistance to change fell. Thus, the New Deal.
But none of those things could have happened without the others. Choice, suffering, and change are inextricably linked.
My dad once told me a story about his father’s take on FDR and the Depression.
Granddaddy was about as non-ideological a person as you’ll ever meet, but he became an FDR loyalist. Why? “All I know,” he said, “is when Democrats got in, people started to eat again.”
Whatever the literal truth of that, the sentiment is pretty clear and much more powerful than any brilliant policy argument we wonkish types will ever make. In his very useful 20 health care questions post and follow up, Nate Silver wrote:
9. If the idea is to wait for a complete meltdown of the health care system, how likely is it that our country will respond to such a crisis in a rational fashion? How have we tended to respond to such crises in the past?
And This is one of my less pertinent questions -- I certainly haven't seen this argument raised by either MM or JW although I have seen it in places. For the record, I think it goes without saying that politics are very dynamic and unpredictable in crisis situations. If you examine the collective response to recent cataclysms such as 9/11, the financial meltdown, and global warming, it has been a little scary for progressives.
I disagree about the pertinence of this question. And it’s funny how Silver shies away from its implications both while asking it and then deciding it’s not important.
“How likely is it that our country will respond to such a crisis in a rational fashion?” is very weak rhetoric for someone ostensibly calling for the preservation of our dominant institutions – despite their self-destructiveness. Maybe because it doesn’t involve numbers and rational graphs, Silver can’t really contemplate it.
But let's be clear, the country responded to the suffering of the Great Depression with the New Deal.
Many have called the Senate health care bill a “bailout” for the insurance industry and taken flack from people like Matt Yglesias for using rightwing rhetoric.
But I don’t think it’s rhetoric at all. I think it’s quite literally the truth. The health insurance industry is little different than the newspaper industry.
It’s an unnecessary middleman supported over the years by an irrational and increasingly unsustainable subsidy from private and public employers, which it uses to pay doctors and hospitals at rates it can’t afford without further gouging its subsidizers. Do nothing, and insurance companies will wither just like newspapers because employers – including those who are self-insured – will stop providing funding for care. Doctor pay and hospital fees will come down as a result as they lose their best customers, the hordes of teachers and mid-level corporate managers that form the basis of what’s left of the middle class.
Yes, this is without question a bailout. The insurance companies know it.
In fact, I think if Harry Reid had simply called everybody’s bluff and made senators vote much earlier, there’s no chance that some combination of LieberNelsonSnowe wouldn’t have mustered 60 votes.
The institutional insurance industry isn’t about to let the senate vote against its continued existence, even to indulge Joe’s pique. The fact that this didn’t happen sooner actually leads me to believe that there’s some additional deal in place that will show some kind of artificial flattening of premium growth while we wait for the full bill to take effect. The insurance industry doesn’t want this repealed.
(The dynamics unleashed by Brown's election obviously call this into question.)
So anyway, the question is not whether it’s a bailout, the question is whether this bailout is worth it?
The same question applies to the financial bailout. Was it worth preserving the wealth and power of the institutional finance industry – which does run the place – to prevent the type of suffering that would lead to real change?
In both cases, I don’t know. How can you know?
But I do think Obama’s election and administration represents the last stand of the modern middle, if you think of the middle not in left or right terms, but in terms of institutional preservation.
As long as he has the option of working toward policy goals through the existing reservoirs of power, Obama will use that option.
The question becomes, can these institutions, whether they be the banks, the military and its contractors, insurers and providers, telecommunications companies, or the U.S. Senate, deliver enough prosperity and fairness or will their institutional venality consume them and the country, leading to the type of collapse and suffering that enables basic change?
And will that change be the New Deal, or Charles DeGaulle, or fascism, or anarchy, some other combination of strangeness we haven’t named yet?
Was the New Deal worth the Great Depression? Was the post-war order worth World War II? We never seem to ask those questions, and maybe they’re so unanswerable as to not be worth asking.
But they don’t go away. It’s sort of like the “No blood for oil” line. Make that “no blood for how we live,” and it changes the equation somewhat.
It took $4 gas about six months to destroy the Hummer culture. But at what cost? The mortal wounding of GM and Chrysler? The city of Detroit? The UAW’s benefit structure? It seems like an awfully Pyrrhic progressive victory.
And yet, it fundamentally changed the way we look at energy in the country, at least for a while. Suffering and change. We’re at a point in history where our institutions are preventing the complete collapse of our standards of living while steadily skimming a percentage off the top and concentrating it in the hands of the people who control them.
The political “middle,” which, of course, has nothing to do with being somewhere between the left and right, sustains this – consciously or not – through the force of the anti-suffering majority I talked about before.
In my adult lifetime, the entire politics of the “middle” has revolved around avoiding choices that have major consequences for the institutions that control the massive flows of money that support modern American life.
Medicare’s not going anywhere. Nobody’s willing to risk a banking collapse. And tax that other guy. I don’t see how that can continue much longer. I find myself sympathetic to the burn it all down instinct. Or at least to using the threat of burning it all down to get better terms.
In fact, the failure to do that is my greatest objection to Obama at this point.
It’s true that these institutions undergird much of what we recognize as daily life in this country. There is no question that allowing them to fail would bring powerful human consequences. It’s also true that these institutions – including a 60-vote senate -- carry the implicit power to blackmail. That makes them enormously difficult to effectively challenge politically unless they’re flat on their back because of their own failures.
Those are sane, legitimate reasons not to challenge them. But it’s another thing entirely to trust and admire them against all visible evidence.
Obama does seem to trust and admire them – and the Ivy-mafia people who run them. That’s a problem. And all of that combined provides powerful disincentive to do much beyond propping them up and trusting that the elite men and women running them to recognize that their interests and the nation’s are aligned. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that’s a dubious bet. |
