Month: March 2010

Jonathan Raban's "At the Tea Party" in the New York Review of Books (courtesy Matthew L.) is generally excellent but especially relevant to me. Anyone who has undergone an ideological conversion at some point in life – particularly the right-to-left kind – will empathize with the author's discomfort and inner conflict throughout the piece. I am familiar with the lonely feeling of being in a crowded room and realizing that everyone around you is absolutely out of their goddamn mind. And I strongly suspect that a lot of conservatives look at the carnival freakshow that is the Tea Party and know exactly what that feels like.

The conservative movement has always had an image problem.
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Previously (pre-Gingrich and "Contract with America" era) the problem was that "conservative" conjured up images of old, well-heeled white men in a country club sipping 40 year scotch in cashmere sweaters. The ideological faces of the movement were people like Safire and Buckley, pretentious stuffed shirts who fancied themselves intellectuals. True, there was a lunatic fringe – Father Coughlin, the Birchers, McCarthy – but mainstream conservatism tried to keep it at arm's length. Now the driving intellectual force of the movement is a gaggle of AM radio nutbars; Father Coughlin is back but this time the elected officials are groveling at his feet. And the new image of the average conservative has less to do with country clubs than with trailer parks, NASCAR infields, and barely literate adults in histrionics and stupid hats.

Raban does fail to note that the Tea Party Convention, with its $600 registration fee and multi-weekday format, does not provide an accurate cross-section of the movement. Of course the attendees will be retirees with money to throw around.

Who else would have the time or money to blow on such a circus?

But even in this overwhelmingly homogeneous group he notes a clear dividing line between, for lack of a better term, the sane and the batshit crazy.
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There are people in the audience who exchange silent grimaces with their spouse or friends when Tom Tancredo goes on his anti-immigration tirade and proposes a "civics literacy test" for voting or when Joseph Farah of World Nut Daily gives his boilerplate "God is American, and where's the birth certificate?" sermon. Half the room cheers like mad, getting the bile-fueled entertainment for which they came, and the other half wonders "Who are these people and what the hell am I doing here?"

Educated conservatives realize, for example, that 25% of the electorate is going to be Latino in a couple of decades and Tancredoism will guarantee indefinite minority status for the GOP. They realize that the insane birth certificate crap is just the update version of, as Lee Atwater (Reagan's version of Karl Rove) said:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger"

Conservative or not, any reasonably intelligent person knows exactly what the "birther" crap is – and more importantly, how damaging it is to the cause. Raban highlights the serious schism between people who do and do not get that. I don't know where conservatism goes from here, but I know where a lot of individual conservatives are going if the Glenn Beck legions manage to consume the GOP entirely.

Boy, you can't open the paper these days without seeing something about how irrevocably fucked California's finances are. With a budget deficit approaching a staggering $40 billion dollars, it's worth noting that not only is their deficit the biggest in the country in absolute terms but also as a proportion of state GDP. That's pretty impressive given that California's economy is bigger than all but a handful of countries.

In my line of work, "Raiding the UCs" is a very real phenomenon. Faculty have seen salaries slashed by 20% (with talk of more cuts to come) while students have experienced dramatic tuition hikes – although it's fair to note that in-state tuition before the hikes was far lower than in most states. The recent cuts come on the tail end of a 15 year trend that has seen the university system's share of the state budget halved. With too many obligations and not enough money, it would make sense that cuts to a vital sector like education would be indicative of cuts across the board.

Oh.

Lost in the budget debate is the fact that California spends nearly 10% of its annual budget on the Department of Corrections. Eight billion dollars. Let's see that with the zeroes: $8,000,000,000. This is, of course, in addition to other money spent on law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Such figures look reasonable only in comparison to a trainwreck like Michigan, where a mind-blowing 22% of the state budget is spent on warehousing the poor in prisons.

We can re-hash all the usual, obvious, and valid culprits – "guideline" sentencing, mandatory minimums, three strikes, a vast social underclass deriving minimal benefit from the state's aggregate wealth – but we'd say nothing new.
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The more important questions is how prison systems, and California's in particular, can absorb the coming increase in crime concomitant with an extended period of double digit unemployment. At a time when every agency needs to get cheaper, the CDC must continue to get bigger (and inevitably costlier) to provide a convenient dumping ground for society's expendables.

This problem is fascinating because like the Federal budget there is no reasonable move that doesn't make the situation worse. California can start paroling more people.
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With no jobs available even for Californians with clean criminal backgrounds, we can imagine how few ex-inmates will find an "honest" living and how high the rate of recidivism will be. It can adopt different sentencing guidelines, which is politically unlikely and will provide only gradual long-term relief.
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They can simply stop arresting and/or charging so many people, but that too is politically infeasible and may ultimately lead to increased crime levels. They can, as publications as mainstream as Time have noted, formally surrender in the War on Drugs and legalize weed. I will believe that when I see it (although I don't entirely discount it as the budget situation gets progressively more desperate). They could simply slash the budget, which may not be realistic given the high fixed costs of the system and the current levels of overcrowding/understaffing.

Spending twice as much on prisons as higher education should prompt some soul searching.
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I won't hold my breath; in all likelihood the status quo will be maintained and the share of the budget devoted to corrections will continue to increase. Devoting one of every ten tax dollars to locking up the poor is understood as the cost of doing business in a state and society that choose to solve the problem of a persistent underclass the same way it deals with trash; that is, by collecting it in cities and shipping it out to the middle of nowhere to be buried under a mountain of other garbage, never to be seen or thought of again.

Mike and many others have commented on the watered-down Senate version of the Consumer Financial Protection Act – does anything come out of the Senate unworthy of the adjective "watered-down"? – courtesy of Chris Dodd. Krugman commented that no regulation at all is preferable to something that creates the appearance of regulation but accomplishes nothing. This legislation is representative of, well, the entirety of the post-Election 2008 period. As I expected the Great Savior and his colleagues in Congress have been unable or unwilling to do anything except cut taxes (again), hold some hearings to no effect, and hand out money to banking conglomerates.

Policy preferences aside, the most disturbing aspect of this is how completely disillusioned the millions of people caught up in Obamania must be. Yet another generation is broadsided by the reality of our political system and the functional plutocracy in which we live. Another vast segment of the population will respond to politics with a shrug and, "It doesn't matter." And they will largely be right, of course. It is difficult to blame Obama, though. His election is just the latest in a long list of events we've tried to turn into the Great Collective Victory we've been seeking since the end of World War II.

Robert Putnam made himself famous arguing, with considerable empirical support, that the WWII generation was oriented toward society differently than generations that followed. The catalyst was the great national coming-together (or at least the believable myth thereof) that defined America during the War, the overwhelming focus on a single goal that we actually accomplished. Everybody felt like they pitched in and everyone basked in the collective glory of victory. Hey, remember when we all banded together and kicked Hitler's ass?
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Me too. That sure was awesome.

It is safe to say that the ensuing 70 years have been a continuous effort to re-create that experience. For conservatives this has manifested itself in a procession of increasingly silly and costly military conflicts. After a frustrating draw in Korea the national crisis of masculinity ("Aren't we a bunch of pussies if we don't have a big war like Dad did? What kind of men will we be without our own War Stories and VE Day?
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") drove Baby Boomers into the Vietnam War, which was as successful as it was glorious. By the 1980s they were so desperate that they were reduced to declaring the invasion of Grenada a huge military victory in an effort to salve their wounded sense of self. We followed that with a drubbing of Iraq in 1991 – replete with Hussein=Hitler imagery in spades – that ultimately accomplished nothing except to make lard-assed suburban white guys feel better about themselves. But it didn't even do that. Deep down, no matter how hard one squints it's not possible to make Grenada look like Normandy or Iraq like Nazi Germany.

Liberals, on the other hand, have attempted to find the Great Collective Victory in a series of "wars" on social ills – racial inequality, poverty, pollution, and so on. They also tried to rally behind a peace movement that failed to impact the waste of blood and money in Vietnam. They've thrown themselves into a series of increasingly futile political saviors – presidential candidates like McGovern, Mondale, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and countless people in lower offices – to no effect.

That changed in 2008. Obama's election over the forces of Bush-era evil was the great collective We Did It!

moment. Everyone pitched in an shared in the elation of victory. It didn't take long for reality to settle in.

It's unnecessary to state how patently ridiculous the idea of separate "collective" victories based on ideology.

Even in the face of an economic crisis that could very well qualify as the second Great Depression when all is said and done we are unable to do anything but divide ourselves and argue. Lacking political leadership there's no cause behind which we can unite except for nearly unanimous agreement that recessions are Bad and we sure wish someone could do something about it. So we'll continue grasping at straws, squinting, and trying to convince ourselves that we have collectively slain evil like our grandparents did back in dubya-dubya two. And once reality sets in and our delusions of having defeated the Enemy fade, one generation after another will wander away a little more disillusioned than the last. Absent victory we will do as losers always do, growing bitter, angry, and unwilling to risk experiencing defeat again.

In news that can't be interpreted independently of my arrival just a few short months ago, Georgia is the latest state to reach budgetary armaggedon. Having already gotten $265 million in rather draconian cuts out of the state university system, the state legislature yelled "Surprise!" and flying drop-kicked us in the nuts by demanding $300 million more. Just to be clear, that's over half a billion in cuts from higher education in a state that is one city away from being Mississippi. This is going to necessitate closing entire campuses, eliminating entire departments, and firing tenured faculty – not to mention jacking up tuition, although part of the problem is that half of our students aren't paying anything anyway (why make white people in the suburbs pay tuition when we can send their kids to college for free with money taken from poor people?)

The last round of cuts hurt, bringing furloughs, layoffs, and paycuts. This round will be fatal, especially for people like me who are untenured and easy to fire. These decisions are always made with the maximum of highly public hand-wringing and boilerplate monologues about how we had to "make some really tough choices" (the judges would also accept "tightening our belts" or "making sacrifices" for full credit).

This is at best a serious misrepresentation of the political choices being made and at worst, not to mention more likely, it is a bald-faced lie. There is nothing remotely "tough" about the choices Georgia and the other states in similar financial predicaments are making.
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This is, by any reasonable understanding of the motives and incentives of elected legislators, the easy way out. Raising taxes would be a tough choice. Making in-state students pay tuition (or at least pay a few tax dollars into HOPE rather than funding it solely out of the Lotto) would be tough.
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Cutting money-losing athletic departments from universities would be almost suicidal in this state.

The state legislature is doing none of these things; they barely have the balls to whisper them in private let alone propose or vote on them. Instead they choose to beat up on the schools, gut public transportation, and eliminate services that mostly benefit the poor. In the context of modern American politics this is the very definition of the easy way out.
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Aside from disagreeing with this course of action ideologically and politically, I resent the phony emotional agony with which our elected officials make such easy and expedient decisions. What I would like to hear is one legislator saying "Hey, in this hillbilly backwater we don't dare touch taxes.
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But our dedicated base of rubes will be perfectly happy to see us hack away at fancy book learnin' and the buses that poor Negroes use in Atlanta." It makes no difference in the practical outcome, of course, but I prefer to hear some honest commentary while I'm getting fucked.