The Democratic Party and the Left

We are not even through the mid-terms and the hand wringing over 2016 has already begun. Ted Rall proves that it is not just the psychopathic, knuckle-dragging right who has given up on even the possibility of standing united as Americans. At Some Point, Progressives Need to Break Up With the Democratic Party, a great way of saying "Happy Birthday America!" This almost rote lament that our leadership class is pretty much right wing and extreme right wing is rather trite in this thirty third year of the Reagan Revolution. Money being the only standard of value in American politics, cash is speech, cash is votes, cash buys legal power, cash buys everything and everything is for sale. Usually this lament that Democratic presidents are bought is followed by some variation that "change comes from below" or at least to concentrate on local politics. Not here, Rall implores "Progressives" to dump the only non-insane American political party and become absolute pariahs because Democrats don't listen well enough.

The first fallacy asserted is "[t]raditionally, Democrats were pro-worker... Democrats cared about the poor... Democrats aren't supposed to invade sovereign countries for the hell of it... Democrats want single-payer healthcare" and ticking off reasons Hillary Clinton is not interested in these things. Traditionally? I'm afraid history does not back this up. When exactly does this tradition start? Should we start at the beginning? The Republican Party started by Thomas Jefferson and other slave-owners was pro-worker? Okay, when the Jeffersonians became the Democratic Party did they start to care about the poor? Was Andrew Jackson breaking tradition when he conquered Florida (thanks a lot for that by the way Old Hickory)? How about when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines into Da Nang? Or the Dominican Republic? Or when Woodrow Wilson joined the Allies as an Associate Power during the Great War? I suppose it is true that Truman was shot down by the AMA when he tried to get single payer healthcare, and the Taft-Hartley Act basically destroyed the right to organize over his veto, but Truman also broke up strikes and spied on labor organizers out of fear of communism.

These are just a few examples but there are many more. I am not citing them to bash my party, nor to dismiss Rall as a crank but in the real world of American politics there is no purity. Ideology changes over time, tradition is shifting sand for anyone calling themselves "Progressive" to try and anchor an argument in. Tradition is for conservatives, not the idiots and corporate shills who call themselves conservatives, but real ones. We have never really had a conservative tradition here either. The Democratic and Republican parties are shades of liberalism and capitalism. Progressives were urban reformers with technocratic ideas to make elections more democratic, government more professional, the economy more efficient, and the populace more educated... a century ago. The story goes that after decades of right wing demonization of liberals and liberalism, the left re-adopted the identity of progressives to dodge the label.

Should we instead adopt the Chomskian model that there is one business party in America with two wings? Rall seems to think so when he states "Progressives... are like a kid with two rotten parents. The dad drinks and hits him; the mom drinks less and hits him less. The best call is to run away from home -- instead, most children in that situation will draw closer to their mothers." American political mythology holds that like Richard the Lionheart, Good King Kennedy was betrayed by Bad King Johnson and America was betrayed by Evil King Nixon. And this is a story that even many frothing conservatives believe to the point of being quite schizophrenic about Jack Kennedy, waxing nostalgic about when Democrats were the good guys. But as Richard Bradley noted in his book on the subject, the John Birch Society and southern conservatives generally thought Kennedy was a traitor and a wimp.

Posted around Dallas, November 1963

Here's the thing, Democrats try to be the president of the United States. Republicans, at least since Reagan, are only presidents of big business and right wingers. It is nearly impossible to represent all three hundred million Americans coherently. So Democratic presidents listen to the loudest voices. It is not right, or correct, or even good in any definition, but that is what we have. Republicans divide and conquer, then serve their corporate masters openly. Democrats take their friends for granted and then try to appease the special interests. Yeah it sucks for committed liberals, yes we keep getting burned but there is just as little option today as there was when Samuel Gompers first committed labor, i.e. the broad working class, to supporting the Democratic Party over building an actual Labor Party like what exists in many European countries. But even then, does the Labour Party in the UK represent the needs of British workers anymore? As it was in the 1930s, today the right is on the march. If we could somehow unplug the average angry American male from fox news or talk radio it might be possible to reach them on some level, but until those freaky old people die off not much realistically will change. There is no running away, we either get Mom to sober up and leave Dad or he will keep beating us both.

Piketty and the absurdity of limits

The other day, contributor to this page Kewaskumite and I were discussing Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He had already finished it while I am still in the process of reading it, so the discussion was a bit one sided. However, Piketty explains his purpose and states his prescription fairly early in the book so I was aware of where Mr. K was going with his thoughts. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds because Mr. K's mind works about one hundred times faster than mine. Piketty roots much of his analysis in history, so I have a little edge there, and states that much of the problem in economics today is the gross inequality of wealth and income. His prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth because the core of his argument is that even a minute discrepancy in the rate of return on capital over the overall growth rate of the economy brings an ever-increasing growth in inequality.

But what Mr. K wanted to talk about was the future, where some of these trends we see in the news are heading and what can be done about it. Like Piketty I will give away the conclusion up front. On economic terms at least, Mr. K and I are on the same side but he is a math teacher, not a gloomy historian therefore numbers are what he looks at while I look more at (especially the dark side of) human nature. Mr. K's contention is that inequality has gone about as far as it can go in this country, even with the amount of money being dumped into elections, there is just very little left for the plutocrats to take. Also, the plutocrats will be spending an inordinate amount of money hanging on to their ill-gotten gains through bribing politicians, spending on propaganda, and through physical and cyber security. I contend that we have barely scratched the surface of how far down we can go.

Colorado may have struck gold by legalizing marijuana, but nationally the prison-industrial complex is still steaming ahead a ever-increasing speed. Matt Taibbi may have gone around the far-left bend in claiming that the Obama administration is worse than dubya where white-collar crime prosecution, but it is hard to argue with his premises. Or that the rule of law is now a fiction, as he contends in The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap where laws and punishment apply good and hard to poor Americans, while the rich and corporations can pretty much get away with anything. Power is everything, money is numbers on a computer. We have reached a point where no level of depravity is out of bounds. The top story in my circles this week was corruption in the Supreme Court, five of the Justices threw shame and common decency to the wind and decided that a corporation can flaunt the law and scientific reality if it feels so inclined, opening up new vistas for abuse by the powerful.

How many commoners can the powerful throw in prison? Well, privatized prisons have every incentive to push for ever more punitive laws. As do prison guard unions. as do "law and order" politicians. Will we see debtor's prisons for the unfortunates who fall behind on their student loans? If the outpouring of vitriol against mortgage relief by proto-teabaggers after Obama's election detailed in Pity the Billionaire, a better question is how have we lasted this long without them? The private prison industry has adopted the business plan of arms makers by citing operations in rural congressional districts, bringing jobs and diluted popular representation with them. Like the 3/5s clause in the constitution that counted slaves for political representation in congress, prisoners housed in rural districts increase the political power of right-wingers there without any threat to unseat them. Lots of authoritarian states then increase the antidemocratic tide by never allowing felons to vote again.

With the full-court press against women, teachers, non-christians, and anything that even smacks of liberalism succeeding despite a Democratic administration, to say there is a limit to how much harm the children of darkness can do seems almost naïve. I mean there must be a limit somewhere to how much damage can be done, this is just one instance that makes "the land of the free" Newspeak of the vilest order, but I cannot find where those limits could be.

Windy City Sea Monster

I have been blogging from the red depths of Washington County, Wisconsin for just over 8 years now. I will be relocating to Chicago, Illinois at the end of the summer. It is possible that this change of scenery will allow for a change of title. Some have told me that "Gloomy Historian" is off-putting, it does however have the attraction of being original. Googling it brings me up first, then references to other projects I have stuck my nose in, finally famous historians seen as gloomy. So at least I don't have much living competition, but it could be that GH is a stupid title to begin with. I may be gloomy in outlook, but does that accurately describe the other contributors to this blog? Is there a more inclusive way to express the mission?

On to Chicago. Maybe I am just gloomy because I have spent practically my whole life around closed minded, mean spirited rural folk. This will be the first time the Kraken calls a big city home. What will this experience bring? I began this blog in large part out of frustration, I could not find a place to express myself. Civil conversation was just a joke around here, it was "their way or the highway." If you did not agree with the hard right, you kept your mouth shut. It has not improved and now it seems, practically the entire internet is also this way. The only thing worse than one troll showing up to disrupt a conversation and start screeching, is having them actually be the majority.

Hence, when one bible-thumping whale named ginny maziarka and her colleague in self-righteous hatred mary weigand decided they did not like some things in the library that had absolutely nothing to do with them, the librarians basically stood alone. They had no case of course, but that didn't stop this dynamic duo of dipshittery from demanding books be removed, relabeled, sections of the website taken down, etc. Why? Because they were bored apparently, and demanded fame. A diverse metropolis tends to laugh at morons like this, but here? The frenzied teabaggers whipped up enough hatred against the reality-based conservatives running the city to replace them with troglodytes as brain-damaged as they are. Now, we have a library board member who openly wears a pistol on his hip to meetings, and even to preschool Christmas programs. God I wish I had taken pictures of that to post. When the populace is not a sea of stupid, guys like matt stevens do not get near public office.

And "they" say that big cities like Chicago are corrupt? Our Fourth of July parade yesterday featured a slathering, drooling tribute to the dropout in chief running our state. I really hope a picture of that narcissistic monument to failure surfaces. It was pretty sickening to see such shameless self-promotion on the Republic's birthday. So kiss my scaly ass West Bend, I will not miss you in the slightest. Or your concealed carry museum.

Thoughts on Uninformed Arrogance and Political Health

Sometimes it pays to have expert acquaintances. A very insightful Doctoral Candidate from UWM whom I know through Facebook recently published this excellent analysis of Uninformed Arrogance in the contemporary United States drawing on his extensive research of the French Revolution of 1789. I was familiar with a few historical understandings of this phenomenon, notably Isaac Asimov's oft-repeated quotation that: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” [emphasis in the original] Anyway, I hope this post helps further our understanding of why it is so hard to discuss anything of importance with some people.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, French historian, Hippolyte Taine, published a three-volume work on the French Revolution.  One of the questions he explored was why the Revolution had descended into chaos and violence.   A large part of his answer centered on the way in which the Enlightenment manifested itself in French culture.  According to Taine, throughout the seventeenth century France had developed what he called a “classical spirit.”  Taine defined this “classical spirit” as the belief that an “honest man,” without the need of specialists, had an “inner light” that could lead to sound conclusions in the search for truth. Moving into the eighteenth century, this intellectual populism coupled itself with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on metaphysics and abstraction. Taine suggested that this coupling formed a new kind of epistemology, one he called la raison raisonnante.  With the language of metaphysics and abstraction, its pretenses were lofty, but in reality it ignored complexity and lacked vigorousness.  Indeed, it was “powerless,” he said, “to fully portray or to record the infinite and varied details of experience.”  Yet the popular Enlightenment championed it.  The result was that influence shifted in a strange way.  Instead of a lifetime of study, and the respect and deference one earns from it, all one now needed was a salon or a pen to pontificate legitimately and be taken seriously on the most lofty of topics, including and especially politics.  Non-experts quickly became the experts, and those who chose to follow them did so with confidence and enthusiasm.  The political world fell under the jurisdiction of the arrogantly uninformed, according to Taine, and France marched inexorably toward chaos.       Taine’s scholarship has always challenged me to consider whether contemporary America has been infected by a form of la raison raisonnante.  Consider the following:

• A minor celebrity with no training in medicine is certain that her views about inoculation are superior to the medical community’s conclusions. Result: helps popularize a fairly successful movement against vaccination, which threatens the return of formerly eradicated diseases.

• Countless individuals with no training in science are adamant that evolution has no evidence and the scientific community is too brainwashed to know it. Result: science has to fight to stay in public school classrooms.

• Many with no knowledge of science refuse to accept the scientific consensus on global warming, thus placing their opinions above those of the scientific community.  Result: strong presence in congress of those who deny the science and slow governmental response to the problem.

• Many who have never closely studied history confidently assert interpretations at complete odds with expert consensus.  A result: Christian nation movement and its denial of church/state separation.

     Following Taine’s critical lead, perhaps American populism coupled with the spirit of radical Protestantism has developed and distributed a form of la raison raisonnante.  American Protestant values, which hold that any individual can interpret divine revelation for themselves and then are free to act confidently and authoritatively on it, certainly have had an effect historically on how Americans see the world and their place in it.  In some cases, however, there is an element that takes it to a different level.  Hovering in several places around this nexus of populism and radical Protestantism is fundamentalism, the kind that sees every problem as fundamentally solvable by the Bible. In this world, sociology, political science, economics, foreign policy, and every other area of knowledge that we draw on to help guide the nation therefore become an extension of theology--not the deep theology of dedicated and life-long scholars who draw on the wisdom of the ages; rather, the shallow, “proof-texting” theology of certain “honest men” who simply possess an unverifiable “inner light” and who are therefore, it is believed, without the need of special training or education. The result is that in certain circles, many very important areas of knowledge are under the jurisdiction of non-experts, ones that oftentimes believe their opinions to have divine sanction.  And those who choose to adopt the opinions of these non-experts do so with confidence and enthusiasm.
       This phenomenon cannot help but have a negative effect on the maintenance of a democratic society.  While most of the above nonsense has made it into politics or even legislative discourse, perhaps a greater threat is longer term.  When important historical knowledge has been modified, when the meaning of the Constitution and of the Country has been distorted, when pseudoscience has affected education, and when economic and foreign policies have been guided by a type of thinking that “ignores complexity” and “lacks vigorousness,” a rational and free society, one guided by law and pushing towards justice, can not be maintained. 
    
In my opinion, a form of la raison raisonnante plagues contemporary America.  Not sure?  Read the bumper stickers on the car in front of you.  

R. Miller

Appendix

Equality of Anger

And I admit, I've been angry too. I'm outraged by the arrogant religious sanctimoniousness of churches shielding pedophiles. I get impatient waiting on the telephone talking to yet another "menu of options," righteously indignant when crazed drivers swerve across three lanes of traffic to gain one car length, and aggravated by political gridlock and smarmy politicians. I'm easily ired[sic] when receptionists in offices or hosts in restaurants sigh loudly at my innocent request that they actually do their jobs and call the person I'm meeting or find me a table at which to eat. I'm generally not a grumpy person, but sometimes it feels that every other person is either smug, arrogant, infuriating, incompetent, or politically inane--sometimes all of the above.

These words, from the introduction of Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, told me right away that author Michael Kimmel "gets it." I'm not the only one who gets depressed looking at the smug, angry faces everywhere. Who gets frustrated dealing with the idiot teenager manning the cash register. Or the arrogant twenty something who is far too good to, as Kimmel says, "actually do their jobs." Of course, I also remember what it was like to be a self-conscious teenager with limited experience, no confidence, or anything like training, making minimum wage at one of those lousy jobs and having to deal with angry customers. We are angry coming and going, circumstances around the board are awful and intolerable. But tolerate we must, so once again into the breach of necessity we throw ourselves. Giving up is not an option lest starvation and homelessness be your goal. So the only response is impotent rage at the situation of daily life.

And I am one of the white men Kimmel describes as adjusting well to the new era dawning. I am perfectly okay with and accept that my wife makes more money than I do and is much more successful. I willingly do my share of housework and raising our daughter, I do not feel entitled to much of anything. Kimmel stresses in his book that Americans have every right to be angry, but white men in particular have got causation and correlation all sorts of mixed up. Not all of them for sure, but enough men suffer from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement" to make pretty much everyone in this country rather miserable.

It feels appropriate to begin this analysis on Memorial Day since this is a day we set aside to honor a very small population of Americans who sacrificed some or all of their right to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What they sacrificed it for is getting increasingly ambiguous but their service is absolutely not in doubt. These veterans earned their honor and should feel a sense of entitlement for what they actually did. Kimmel, however, focuses on the entitlement white men feel as inherent in their simply being born, that they take for granted. And that white men lash out in anger and rage when they feel someone else is getting their piece of the pie. Complicating matters is that these men almost always worked hard and sacrificed in some way to get where they are and whatever it is they feel they are losing, be it family, prosperity, recognition, honor, or the simple feeling of "being a man."

An important point is that Kimmel, in this book and other work, is not constructing a screed, diatribe, or jeremiad against white men, despite what it may sound like. Kimmel's book is explanatory and understanding, sympathetic but not apologizing, and not judgmental. What Angry White Men is, is a call to the men who see women, or minorities, or immigrants, or institutions felt to be privileging these groups over men; to let it go. Kimmel repeatedly asserts throughout the text that  white men who accept multiculturalism and social equality are happier and healthier than those who do not. We are entitled to dignity and justice but not privilege. We are entitled to a responsive government, to jobs that do not disappear at the whim of other white men, and the same for pensions, health care, security, and all other human rights. We are not entitled to access to women's bodies, to positions of power, or any other privilege.

Between Canadians and Americans

This is not about the latest mass murderer/gun maniac Elliot Rodger. However, I posted a comment on White House correspondent and Daily Banter columnist Tommy Christopher's article on said gun maniac. Then I wanted to review a post I wrote some time ago called "It's not the guns, it's the attitude" and got a slight chill when glancing at my stats. There were several hits referred from a site called "Canadiangunnutz.com". Uh oh I thought, somebody is unhappy with what I wrote. As someone who regularly deals with the raving mob of online gun "enthusiasts," I was understandably worried. Were they ripping me apart on facts? On my analysis somewhere, simple ad hominem attacks, or making fun of my stuff generally? Or worse, were they discussing just what tortures I should endure for my crimes against the second amendment (which, as we know, is the only one that matters, and free speech is verboten)? The fanaticism of American gun nuts is well known to me, as is their proclivity to violent solutions to intimidate their "enemies."

Amazingly, none of the above. So far I have basically flown under the radar of any American gun guys. I am apparently not worth the trouble or in true Daily Me fashion, their trolls simply don't fish for small fry. I mean they do not seek out little blogspots to attack, so far anyway. Nope, Canadians have a reputation for being nice, polite, non-confrontational. And I was happy to find out that what they were discussing on this forum was not in fact 101 ways to roast sea monsters, but the link that still gets page views despite being over two years old. They were talking about Rum and the Misfits, a post I made after seeing a commercial for Sailor Jerry that had Where Eagles Dare as its soundtrack.

This incident may just be anecdotal or apocryphal, but what a difference a border can make. I just finished Michael Kimmel's excellent book  Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era and boy does it bring into focus what drives all the rage we see everyday. The Kraken will not be jumping to conclusions in the future. There are angry white men out there, there are also Americans who dig guns that are not into hate or authoritarianism.

P.S. I think I finally figured out why the Misfits were interested in having their song in that commercial. Glenn and Jerry made the news recently. Apparently Jerry Only, as the only remaining original member, cut Danzig out of some royalties and Danzig is suing over it. So Jerry, like the rum brand Sailor Jerry (get it?) probably cut a deal for some quick cash. I'm not judging you understand, anything you've got to do to make a living. Reminds me a little of another punk icon dispute; back in the late '90s Dead Kennedys guitarist East Bay Ray wanted to put the band back together and sued Jello Biafra for the rights to their song catalogue. The punk rock ethos was egalitarian and all the other adjectives that I am not really qualified to get into. It gets harder and harder to maintain that ethos the longer one lives, not surprising that these musicians are not able to stay "pure."

"Forward!" to Decline

Wisconsin is a dying state. This may sound severe, but let us explore briefly some of the evidence. First is population. The number of births in this state does not really keep track with what we need for population growth to hold onto any political representation at the national level. In terms of young and middling aged folks, the numbers moving in and out tend to be a draw. You could call this stability rather than stagnation, were this not for the fact that the only increasing part of our population is the retired and elderly. More people on fixed incomes, fewer children to educate, a declining and less diverse economic base all follow from this reality.

A less diverse economy stems from the resistance to change embedded in the local culture. Former governor Thompson attempted to address this reality in his last year before moving on to a presidential cabinet position. He called for a major investment in biomedical and genetic research along with applications of these for clinical treatment. He suggested that Wisconsin needed to change its image if we wanted to attract more investment. Popular response was swift and negative. If people do not like who we are, went the refrain, then that is too bad for them.

This attitude contributes to our current dilemma. With emphasis on factory work and family farming in an age of service sector growth and corporate farms, what hope is there for young people of talent, intelligence, or ambition? Our largest export continues to be our children. We lost our global advantage in stem cell research in the 1990s. There has been no effort to regain it. With all due respect, artisan cheese is no substitute for medical or scientific innovation. All told, our state ranks low for entrepreneurial investment and job creation. And in large measure, it is our own fault.

While the Democrats under Doyle managed to keep us in a holding pattern, the current Tea Party policy of retreat and retrenchment has proven a huge failure, only accelerating our decline. Withdrawing tax dollars from circulation has not created jobs. It has reduced money in circulation and the well-known ripple effect (known formally as the multiplier effect) means fewer dollars to demand goods and services from the private sector. Wages and demand continue to shrink.

We are left with a colonial economy where our raw materials, natural resources, and labor provide ready use for folks with cash in hand. These large investors do not reinvest in the state, but take their profits with them. They do not help with education, medical, or social needs of the populace. They do not care about any impacts on the water or air needed for those left behind. Wisconsin is a market for finished goods, simply another resource for exploitation to enhance the wealth of others.

Declining numbers among the young residents here, the stagnation in market values for homes compared to national trends, the increase of the elderly, the refusal to innovate or alter our basic economy all suggest that Wisconsin is a nice place to retire, die, or vacation. Take your pick.

--Lincoln Log