I’m keeping this domain in my backpocket just in case I have use for it sometime in the future — but if you’re trying to read my work, head over to Jubilee, my full-time haunt.
Austerity On The Run
April 24, 2012 By
I wanted to flag this before it became too much Old News. Andrew Sullivan, still a self-described conservative and a tireless deficit hawk, has looked to the events in Europe and concluded that austerity — at least for the time being and in a democratic context — simply doesn’t work:
I don’t like this conclusion. I start from the belief that government should run surpluses in good times so that they can have some fiscal lee-way for stimulus in bad times. Readers know I deeply oppose government debt outside of structural investment, i.e. unsustainable entitlements and unsustainable empire. But if premature or excessive austerity actually deepens debt, as seems to be happening in Europe, then the equation changes.
I guess what I’m saying is that if this US election is fought around amnesiac discontent at an incumbent during tough economic times, then Obama will lose. Which is why Romney’s strategy appears to be entirely that argument. But if the choice is between drastic European-style austerity on Romney lines, with the burden carried primarily by the poor and working poor, and Obama’s emphasis on more long-term structural cost-cutting, infrastructure investment and more revenue from the rich now, then the equation shifts.
I may be wrong, and it doesn’t thrill me, but my bet is that the West is moving leftwards for pragmatic reasons. And that America will not be immune. Pendulums swing, and the long free market period of 1979 – 2007 is giving way to a more government-based management of the unintended consequences of the right’s initial success and subsequent over-reach.
Providing some hard news proof of Sullivan’s theory is a new story in the New York Times about Germany’s PM, Angela Merkel. More than any other individual, Merkel is the face of austerity today; and as the Times notes, after more or less three years of calling the eurozone’s shots, it’s increasingly looking like she soon may find herself the odd-woman-out at EU sovereign pow-wows:
With political allies weakened or ousted, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s seat at the head of the European table has become much less comfortable, as a reckoning with Germany’s insistence on lock-step austerity appears to have begun.
“The formula is not working, and everyone is now talking about whether austerity is the only solution,” said Jordi Vaquer i Fanés, a political scientist and director of the Barcelona Center for International Affairs in Spain. “Does this mean that Merkel has lost completely? No. But it does mean that the very nature of the debate about the euro-zone crisis is changing.”
A German-inspired austerity regimen agreed to just last month as the long-term solution to Europe’s sovereign debt crisis has come under increasing strain from the growing pressures of slowing economies, gyrating financial markets and a series of electoral setbacks.
Spain officially slipped back into recession for the second time in three years on Monday, after following the German remedy of deep retrenchment in public outlays, joining Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte handed his resignation to Queen Beatrix on Monday after his government failed to pass new austerity measures over the weekend.
The political upheaval drove stock markets on the Continent sharply lower, with Germany’s DAX index finishing the day down 3.4 percent. The sell-off in Europe dragged American indexes down around 1 percent. A survey of European purchasing managers showed an unexpected plunge in confidence this month.
The Netherlands, a staunch supporter of the German position, became the latest European country forced into early elections by the European crisis, just one day after the first round of presidential voting in France raised the possibility that the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, would be unseated by his Socialist challenger, François Hollande, in a runoff election.
As the Times goes on to note, this doesn’t mean that austerity, like war, is over. But it does mean that a strain of conventional wisdom that has had a vice-like grip on Western elites for decades may finally be reaching its end. It’s little consolation to the more than 50% of Spanish youth searching for work; but it’s a decent harbinger for the future. And for Europe today, that’s no small thing.
Brennan Center for Justice: Because of Super PACs, Many Americans Less Likely To Vote
April 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I’m on the record finding the most troubling aspect of the Citizens United ruling to be the majority’s insistence that allowing unlimited independent expenditures on elections will not diminish the public’s faith in their electoral process. Considering that Americans are overwhelmingly unsatisfied with their government — and that a full 80% think Congress cares more about special interests than the public at large — this assertion seemed to me to be naïve, bordering on insane. As Justice Stephens wrote in his dissent, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
Now comes a study from the Brennan Center on Justice, showing that a significant number of respondents to a recent poll claim that the influence of Super PACs reduces their likelihood of voting in November:
One in four respondents in the poll said they’re less likely to vote in elections this year because of the growing influence of super-PACs. That percentage climbs among those earning less than $35,000 a year (34 percent) and those with only a high school education (34 percent). “The perception that super-PACs are corrupting government is making Americans disillusioned, and an alarming number say they are less likely to vote this year,” Adam Skaggs, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s democracy program, said in a statement.
And this is what’s so dangerous about entrenched inequality — more and more, society’s economic “winners” make the rules, which not incidentally happen to be increasingly in their favor. As voters have to devote more of their time and energy to just staying afloat, many, understandably, disengage from the political process altogether. Legitimacy in the eyes of its people is arguably the most precious asset any government has. It’s something the Justices ought not have taken so lightly.
Wage Labor And Working Women
April 24, 2012 By
Enough time has passed since Hilary Rosen’s comments about Ann Romney having “never worked a day in her life” set-off a (thoroughly manufactured) firestorm, I think we can sift through the junk and determine whether there’s anything in the ash-heap worthy of discussion. For the most, the answer is an emphatic no. (Certainly, as far as actual electoral consequences go, this pseudo-scandal will no doubt prove even less significant than Wes Clark’s equally over-hyped comments in 2008.) But there’s a sliver of something worth talking about hiding in the rubble — especially once we take into account Mitt Romney’s recent bragging over his demand that mothers on welfare, no matter how young their children, get real jobs.
Katha Pollitt gets to the heart of it; it’s about class. My emphasis:
[I]t is not really possible to disengage domestic work from its social, gendered context: the work is valuable if the woman is valuable, and what determines her value is whether a man has found her so and how much money he has. That is why discussions of domestic labor and its worth are inextricably bound up with ideas about class, race, respectability, morality and above all womanhood. You can talk all you want about equal parenting; nobody is raising his son from earliest childhood to see as the most important job in the world being a stay-home father dependent on a high-earning wife. Nobody says to men in college, “You can be a physicist, or you can be a homemaker—it’s your choice!” …
We talk about employment or staying home as a matter of choice, which obscures what it takes to make that choice: money and a mate. Do books praising the stay-home life ever suggest that if it’s really best for children, the government, which supposedly cares about their well-being, should make that possible for every family? The extraordinary hostility aimed at low-income and single mothers shows that what’s at issue is not children—who can thrive under many different arrangements as long as they have love, safety, respect, a reasonable standard of living. It’s women.
She’s right, but there’s another central element worth highlighting: the unconscious influence of a vulgarized Protestant ethic. Expected gender roles are almost inextricably tied-up in all of this, of course, so don’t imagine that I’m trying to run a Slate pitch past ya; but while my instinct tells me people like Romney would prefer a “traditional” gendered division of labor in every American home, I’d also guess that these folks would be a bit more reassured if someone — anyone — was working. It’s the idea of children being raised in a family unit without being told every day the purpose of life is labor, that’s what some see as unnatural. Mostly unspoken, of course, is the assumption that the children of those on public assistance most especially need this example; how else will they counteract the lazy and irresponsible habits they’ve inherited from their parents?
It’s one of the most ingrained and unshakeable assumptions in American life, the idea that a life cannot be worth living unless it is significantly devoted to labor of some kind. Liberals accept this implicitly no less than conservatives. It’s not the same as believing life should be devoted toward goals and ambitions, either — one could live in a manner dramatically removed from the 9-to-5 routine most Americans know and still be fairly characterized as living with purpose. But tied up with the idea that life should be in some sense hard (or at least not too easy), and that a hard life is one in which the necessities of living are not an afterthought, we have an aversion to any role model who doesn’t socialize children in a way that prepares them for wage labor.
It’s The Base, Stupid
April 24, 2012 By
Mark Kleiman thinks the recently announced decision by Gov. Romney to give the commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University is a mistake:
[Romney] needs to convince moderate swing voters that he’s not in fact a wingnut but has merely been playing one on TV
The post is sarcastically titled, “Moving to the center.”
As far as moving leftward goes, this would indeed represent a bizarre and conspicuous blunder by Team Romney. But, again, I must repeat: the election of 2012 will be decided by base turnout, not middle-of-the-road undecided voters. The country is so politically divided and ideologically polarized, few people truly live their political lives in that nebulous middle. What’s more, although there are more registered independents now than ever, data and anecdote suggest that few of these voters are actually independent. (For example: me! I’m a registered independent, and there’s as much chance I vote GOP as Ted Nugent delivering Obama’s second inaugural address.)
More often, independents are quite firmly on one side or the other:
But exactly how independent are the self-styled independents?…Research over the years suggests that most independents are what John Petrocik, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, calls “closet partisans.”
“We talk as though these people are strongly susceptible to the short-term influences of campaigning and the economy, and that they are a massive swing bloc in the electorate,” says Petrocik, whose research helped lay the groundwork for the influential 1992 book The Myth of the Independent Voter.
“For the most part, none of those things are true,” he says.
What’s really important in a close election, then, is making sure your partisans take the time to vote (and, ideally, are engaged and excited enough to do some campaigning on your behalf of their own). Independents aren’t entirely nonexistent, of course, and you will need to be at least palatable to a low-information and non-ideological voter. But that’s icing; if your base isn’t excited, you’ve got no cake.
Considering the profound ambivalence most Republican die-hards feel about Romney, speaking at Liberty U — and his recent, comically paranoid pandering before the NRA — makes more sense. Although anti-Obama animus will be Romney’s best friend in this regard, he still needs to make the right gestures and kiss the right rings. Most undecided voters won’t be paying politics no mind at this point, anyway.
(P.S. I don’t think Kleiman is stupid.)
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A Base Choice
April 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Ron Brownstein combs through the first batch of real-deal 2012 polls and finds that the demographic make-up of those polled is almost entirely determinative of the winner. Obama’s more or less got the same coalition in place that won him 2008, but his margin of error is considerably smaller than it was 4 years ago:
Even with their modest variations, these four surveys paint a similar picture. Obama is largely holding the minority and college-educated white womenwho comprise two pillars of the modern Democratic base (along with young people.) But he is facing erosion among blue-collar white men and struggling to maintain even his modest 2008 support among the two swing quadrants in the white electorate: the college-plus white men and non-college white women.
For the moment, that division of allegiances is enough to provide Obama an overall advantage (he would lead slightly even in the Gallup track if the minority share of the vote was adjusted to its level in 2008). But it’s not enough of an edge for him to breathe easy-and the fact that most of the white electorate is resisting him at least as much as it did in 2008 suggests he may never entirely get to such a comfortable place before November, even if he remains ahead overall.
Data like this leads me to find the ongoing referendum-or-choice argument happening in the blogosphere — primarily between Ed Kilgore, William Galston, and Sean Trende — to be even sillier than one might think on first blush. (The whole referendum/choice thing is obviously a proxy argument over whether or not Obama will win reelection; and it’s one of those especially silly proxy arguments that political junkies engage in from time to time, usually when there’s nothing better to yap about.) Because, for all of our talk about independents and our built-in assumption that there’s some large bloc of voters who haven’t decided yet, the election will pretty much be decided by which side’s loyal voters actually turn out.
That’s one of the reasons why Republicans nationally have put so much effort into combatting the phantom menace of voter fraud; and it’s one of the reasons why the Obama campaign has adopted a more partisan and combative posture. The President and company understand that they need to get people who are choosing between voting Obama or not voting at all to come out and vote — that’s how they win. Full stop and end of story.
People Talking