Normalcy isn't a real word and it definitely won't work

This morning I came across a very interesting conversation within the Democratic family. As Driftglass and Bluegal always like to say, the debates occurring now in Primary season are a family discussion. This is how it always goes during Primary season, there are a thousand or more points of view within the big tent of the Democratic Party and it takes a while to settle things down to just a few. The problem is when these conversations become arguments and the partisans within each group get entrenched and bitter. While the Republicans are almost entirely authoritarian at this point, RWAFs in the base and social dominators in leadership and wannabe leadership, the Democrats are not without authoritarians of the left-wing variety. Whereas right wing authoritarian followers prize conformity and obedience to power along with aggression against any out-groups, left wing authoritarians prize perpetual rebellion and individualism. Bernie bros and Naderites are the classic cases and they did plenty of damage with their purity tests and privilege of saying "let the Republican win, that will show 'em." Obviously it is a scale, there aren't hard and fast delinations marking each group. But each family fight has the potential of setting off LWAs and forming schisms within the party that can ruin elections.

So I have to try and temper any remarks because I don't want to fan a spark into a schism or empower LWAs at all. First and foremost, as I have mentioned before, I don't take positions in Primaries because the worst Democrat is always better than the best Republican. We have a pretty good group of competent, experienced candidates with good ideas that will all represent the Party and the non-insane majority of this country well. Joe Biden is the candidate at the heart of this conversation. It starts with Brother Charlie Pierce's column from August 26, arguing that Biden is the "return to normalcy" candidate with great similarity to Warren G. Harding. Rick Perlstein upped the ante by stating:

Ah, our very own James Buchanan: the rocky-steady candidate of experience, promising to bring back all that yummy, yummy normalcy. I'm sure it will all work out swell, just like 1856-60.

Now, both Harding and Buchanan are consistently ranked among the worst presidents this country has had in our history by professional historians. Personally I rank James K. Polk higher in the awfulness chart for waging an aggressive war of conquest against Mexico based on lies that empowered southern slave owners into forcing their demands for more slavery and more oppression onto the rest of the country. Maybe because the parallels with Dubya and Cheney's contempt for the rule of law and empowering the worst people in the country to shit all over democracy are just too strong. In my reading of history, Polk doused the country in gasoline with his splendid little war and gave boxes of matches to authoritarian slave owners. Sure, there was a short interregnum with Whig presidents (Zachary Taylor, hero of the war with Mexico then Fillmore) where the country could have gone in another direction but the same kind of normalcy set in once Franklin Pierce (no relation to Charlie, that I know of) took office. Pierce was a doughface, actually the poster child for doughfaces, who wasn't going to do anything about slavery because he saw the abolitionists as the problem.

There is no going back. WWI changed the country in many, many ways. Though Harding and his successors tried to go back to the federal government doing nothing and retreat from internationalism, the world and much of America did not really cooperate. Similarly, Buchanan just tried to ignore the simmering divisions and violent trends with a lighter touch on the doughface identity. But even an experienced, long-serving politician like Buchanan could not sweep things away by inaction, simply hoping that not making waves could patch things up so we could go back to arguing over tariffs and internal improvements instead of slavery and expansion.

So, no amount of hoping a Joe Biden could patch things up after doughfacedonny goes away will suffice. There is simply no going back. And according to FiveThirtyEight Biden's lead is shrinking, so it's possible that the issue of having to hash out who is right in their comparison won't persist into Primary season. I like and respect both Charlie and Rick, and I'm on board with their basic premise that trying to campaign on the return to normalcy will probably be a disaster. No schism here, if Biden gets the nomination I will obviously vote for him but then immediately go back to organizing and working to defeat authoritarianism. Even if that means watching Diamond Joe lead with his face into republican baseball bats.

When Journalists Blow It.

I mostly, really like NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. His reporting is solid, he really cares about human rights and well-being, and generally his politics align with my own. But today he wrote a column called When Liberals Blew It that dives into a very difficult subject and threatens to reopen some (still unhealed) wounds in the America outside of fascism.

"Causation is difficult to tease from correlation."

Well, he's right about that. Causation is what scholars such as historians primarily concern themselves with. Journalists report facts in a timely, objective fashion and columnists try to give some context and meaning to events, but it takes a lot of time and research to get to the bottom of causation. When your life and livelihood are dedicated to following along with the tide of events you simply do not have the time to really understand the lines of causation. I am sure a serious commentator like Kristof tries very hard to fill in the blank spaces by researching scholarly work when he is able. I will return to this issue after presenting some of the information in his column.

'Blowing it' refers to the backlash faced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report, on a subject he was actually a recognized scholarly expert in, in March, 1965 as part of the Johnson administration's Great Society program. Yes, it is always remembered as the statement on the breakdown of the African-American family but it was part of a real effort by the federal government to improve people's lives. Remember that? A time when government actually tried to address social problems? I know it sounds hard to believe in our age of rampant corruption and distrust, but it really did happen. The report is remembered as a moralizing, racist denunciation of the African-American community, blaming their poverty on absent fathers.

I want to make this less than a book-length post so I will stay away from Moynihan's actual findings. But here's the bait and switch, Kristof titled the column "When Liberals Blew It" but his first line is that fifty years ago "Democrats made a historic mistake." Democrat does not equal liberal, it doesn't now, it didn't then. As the fascist right is always pointing out, the Democratic party (in the south) had fewer votes for the Civil Rights Act than the GOP. The Southern Democrats supported segregation and Jim Crow, etc. There are liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats and so on. The political parties in America are coalitions, not uniform ideological robots. This is especially true in the Democratic party, as any history textbook will tell you. The New Deal coalition that kept reform going for a generation after FDR's death was made up of northern workers, African-Americans, conservative southerners, and academics to name a few. They did not all get along.

The second problem is that Kristof only cites one critic that could be called a liberal, Floyd McKissick, who Kristof says was a prominent civil rights activist. I know this is only a column for the NEW YORK TIMES and not some piddly academic journal where you have to cite all evidence, but come on there had to be one more point of view you could cite. It is not convincing to say "Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist" and leave it hang. This sounds a little like the twitterati of today who read an inflammatory headline and jump into action.

Then thirdly, Kristof writes:

The taboo on careful research on family structure and poverty was broken by William Julius Wilson, an eminent black sociologist. He has praised Moynihan’s report as “a prophetic document,” for evidence is now overwhelming that family structure matters a great deal for low-income children of any color.

 This statement caught my eye as a little fishy. Especially after reading through some of the comments that Kristof completely misrepresented Wilson's scholarship. And sure enough, if you click on Moynihan's name you are treated to the man's obituary in the Times, which states:

Though savaged by many liberal academics at the time, it is now generally regarded as "an important and prophetic document," in the words of Prof. William Julius Wilson of Harvard.

Kristof does link to a primary source for Prof. Wilson's quotation, but falls short on the context. His exact words were:

"Moynihan’s study of the relationship between poverty and family structure, famously known as the Moynihan Report, is, as I noted in a recent article in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, an important and prophetic document.  It is important because it continues to be a reference for studies on the black family and the plight of low-skilled black males.  It was prophetic because Moynihan’s predictions about the fragmentation of the African American Family and its connection to inner-city poverty were largely borne out, and since 1990, social scientists and civil rights leaders have echoed his concerns about black make[sic] joblessness and the need for social policies that would address their skills deficits and change behavioral responses that emanate from severe employment constraints." (emphasis mine)

This is lazy journalism bias of the kind (Senator) Al Franken took to task in his book
Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them along with the getting there first bias that it seems Kristof was trying to accomplish. The lazy bias is "why look at the original source or do your own analysis when you can simply look at what someone else wrote yesterday." Or in the case of the Moynihan quotation, twelve years ago.

So, to Mr. Kristof, I appreciate what you were trying to do with this column but there are some real mistakes. In future columns maybe we can actually get to the substance of the Moynihan report, what we have done about poverty, why this was not actually the reason or spot that Liberals blew it and so on.