I love the spectacle of icons of upper middle class “liberals” putting a foot down and not allowing any more of what most people would consider liberal. We see it a lot in The New York Times. And these days it usually has to do with attacks on Bernie Sanders. It’s also been fun to watch conservative outlets say nice things about Sanders. It’s two sides of the same impulse. The “liberals” don’t want to see Sanders win the primary because they think he will lose the general election. And the conservatives want Sanders to win the primary because they to think he will lose the general election.

There is a difference, of course. The conservatives are pure in not wanting to see Sanders win the general election. The “liberals” claim that they would be fine if Sanders won the general election; they just don’t think he can. But they are as freaked out about Sanders winning the general as the conservatives are. In other worlds, the “liberals” aren’t actually liberals; they are moderates — and when it comes to economic issues, they are conservatives. I wish that the would just admit to it and stop pretending.

The most recent attack comes from Ana Swanson at The Washington Post, Why Denmark Isn’t the Utopian Fantasy Bernie Sanders Describes. In it, she says, “For whatever reason, Scandinavia countries just seem to do it better — an idea that supporters and critics label ‘Nordic exceptionalism.'” That’s curious because I’ve never heard of these countries referred to as utopias and I’ve never heard the term “Nordic exceptionalism.” Sanders uses the example of Denmark primarily to show that the word “socialism” isn’t scary and it doesn’t indicate the Soviet Union or China. He does, however, point out that they do some things better than we do.

So basically Swanson makes up an idea that no one is talking about and then goes about beating it down. The point — just like Clinton’s argument that Denmark isn’t the US and oh so many conservatives who claim that it is easy for Norway to do well when they don’t have a bunch of underachieving minorities — is just that America is exceptional and that we don’t have anything to learn from any other country. Since Norway has its own problems, we can’t learn anything from the way that it does things right. This is the most lame form of apologetics — and one designed to do what our press seems always determined to do: allow America to continue to stagnate.

Most of the article is an interview with travel writer (!) Michael Booth. And it is an attack on the Nordic economy, because this is The Washington Post, after all, and so everything is about the budget. Dean Baker took all that apart, Socialism in Denmark May Push Employment Rates Down to US Levels, in 25 Years. Booth made the point that the employment rate in Denmark is going down (because of the budget deficit, of course). And indeed, for people between the ages of 25 and 54, the employment rate dropped 5 percentage points as a result of the 2008 economic crisis. Of course, the exact same thing happened in the US.

Currently in Denmark, 82% of people between the age of 25 and 54 are employed. In the United States, 77% of people between the age of 25 and 54 are employed. So the Denmark is closing the gap — very slowly getting as bad as the US. And that is due to Denmark changing to act more like the United States. What Sanders is saying is that we ought to do some things more like Denmark is doing. But The Washington Post is more interested in vilifying the whole country so that we continue to be a country of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs.

But there is some useful information in the article. Here is what it really comes down to for Booth:

So if we provide universal access to healthcare and a fairer tax system, we will get an impenetrable language and awful food. How the causation works, I can’t say. Maybe we shouldn’t listen to travel writers when it comes to economic policy.

[1] He’s wrong about a number of things. The taxes in Denmark are not the highest in the world, or even in the EU. If the cost of living is high, it must be because people want to live there. And if they are chasing foreigners away, it can’t be that people are staying away from this hellhole.

I hate to bring up Logicked, since I have very negative memories of dealing with him previously in the comments. But unfortunately, at his encouragement, I subscribed to his YouTube channel and have thus been made aware of his more recent videos. His style of arrogance is great so long as it comes with humor — the thing that originally attracted me to him. But of late, there is no humor — just his arrogant rants that show all the depth of thought that I’ve come to be very used to from the libertarian community.

His most recent video is “Response to Steve Shives on Bus Etiquette.” I’m not even linking to it nor am I going to embed it. I know that many readers around here already subscribe to him, so they have probably already seen it. It has to do with a sign on a train that tells people not to stare at or masturbate near women. I think most people will admit that such a sign is silly. Men who masturbate on public transit are generally insane. But reminding men that what they think of as harmless fun can be seen as threatening to women is probably a good thing — for women and men.

But Logicked takes the positions that women are not an oppressed minority because there aren’t laws against them. This is an argument that I’ve been hearing from libertarians for decades. Logicked may not consider himself a libertarian, but he fits the mold. What’s more, he strikes me as very much like people who call themselves “independents” but somehow always manage to vote Republican. If that’s your thing — pretending that you are such an individual that you can’t be labeled — so be it. But let’s consider this argument in a different context.

Avik Roy claimed that we have equality of opportunity in this country because there aren’t explicit laws against people having certain kinds of jobs. In other words, as long as we don’t have a caste system, we have equality of opportunity. One child grows up without proper nutrition and a substandard education and no social connections. Another child gets the best possible nutrition and medical care, the best schooling and access to the greatest achievements of humanity in the arts and sciences, and a huge inheritance and access to dozens of rich people who can provide jobs and venture capital. These two children have equality of opportunity because there is no law saying that the poor child can’t be CEO of HP.

Logicked makes the argument that we shouldn’t single out male on female abuse because, hey, men get abused too. They are equal before the law. Well, yeah. They are. But is it really the same? I use public transit a great deal. There are a lot of scary people on the bus and the train. But I’ve only ever seen men crowd women and come on to them in vulgar and implicitly violent ways. And I say this as a man who knows very well that women can abuse men.

Throughout the 20th century in the south, the lynching of black men was a major issue. From 1882 to 1968, 539 black men were lynched in Mississippi. Does it matter that during that time 42 white men were lynched? Would we look at a man in 1950 complaining about people making a big deal of the lynching of black men because white men were being lynched too? I don’t think so. I think people would see that man as the racist apologist that he clearly was.

So Logicked notes that men are abused on public transportation too. No one questions that. His argument is either self-evident and pointless, or it is an apologia for the whiny men’s rights activists. In either case, he is no longer worth following.

I’m sure you’ve at least heard about this recent work by Angus Deaton and Anne Case that shows that middle class white people are dying younger, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century (pdf). And the direct causes of this trend are: suicide, substance abuse, and liver disease (just indirect substance abuse). But is it asking so much to cut through the nonsense? I mean, we don’t say that the cause of suicide is that people are shooting themselves or jumping off bridges. Why are people killing themselves directly or indirectly? That’s a question worth discussing.

I think that Paul Krugman is on the right track in his Monday column, Despair, American Style. What is it that our society offers to it citizens in the way of meaning? After World War II, men could get good jobs that allowed them to have fulfilling family lives. Today, doing the same thing is like hitting the jackpot. For a while, I worked the graveyard shift at a gas station, and I heard constant talk among the workers who passed through about the fantasy of getting a union job. These were hard working people who very much “played by the rules.” But those in power had given up on the “rules” decades before.

The distressed middle class makes me think of two Barbara Ehrenreich books: Nickel and Dimed, about the ridiculous state of the working poor, and Bait and Switch, about the way that corporate America abandons the middle class. A few years back, there was a study out of Princeton University that showed that making $75,000 per year made people happy. But they didn’t get steadily happier the more money they got. That amount of money was a cut off. “Researchers found that lower income did not cause sadness itself but made people feel more ground down by the problems they already had… At $75,000, that effect disappears.”

I think it is all about stress and uncertainty. When you don’t make enough, you don’t know if everything is just going to fall apart because you lose your job. Of course, I think a lot of people making around $75,000 are deluding themselves; things can and do fall apart quickly for them too; but they don’t realize it. So there is an obvious solution: take away the uncertainty. There is no reason why anyone needs to worry that they are one bad boss or recession away from losing their homes and having trouble caring for their children.

There is another aspect of the study that is just as important. This effect does not appear to be happening to Latinos and African Americans. Why? I think we need to look at Richard Wilkinson work on inequality between and within countries. I think the same thing happens inside groups within a country. African Americans and Latinos are very used to their lot in life. They have largely been ghettoized, so they don’t feel the social stigma and stress of not living up to the larger society’s standards.

This isn’t to say that it is good to be an African American or a Latino in this country, because it isn’t. But these groups have developed coping mechanisms that the formerly white middle class has not. (Or in the case of African Americans, their life expectancies have already fallen; they are 3.7 years less than they are for whites.) But the policies that will help whites live longer will help everyone live longer.

I’m not going to go into those policies, however. People who read this blog know well enough what policies I think we need. But in addition to all of these policies, we really need a revolution in the way that we think about the world. Here in the United States, we fetishize work and money. It just isn’t acceptable for someone to choose to be poor so that they can live a different kind of life. And that’s so primarily because the society largely thinks that such people are lying. “Obviously everyone wants to be rich!” And that is pretty much the only purpose that society offers to people. Our society pushes this idea ever harder even while it makes being financially successful ever more difficult. It’s no surprise that people would start popping pills, guzzling booze, and ultimately just killing themselves.

You may have noticed a lot of talk about this new paper by Angus Deaton and Anne Case, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century. It seems that middle aged people are living longer, but not white men. (I can’t say about black men, because the study didn’t look at them — but I assume it is the same for them.) A lot of people are speculating why this can be. But it doesn’t seem hard to understand at all. For people in the middle class, life really has become worse.

I know what economists say: people are so much richer today. This certainly is the best of times. But there is something wrong with that thinking straight off the top. Productivity is up. GDP is up. But wages are only barely up. And I doubt that they compensate for all the extra things that people have to buy. It’s not enough now to just buy a television and get a free signal. Now if you want anything at all, you need cable. You have to have a computer and internet now and you didn’t have to have them in the past. Is it good to have them? Sure! But now if you want to find a job, you have to have them. And that isn’t calculated in all these economic discussions of increased standards of living.

But that’s not the main thing from my standpoint. We now live in the Uber economy. People cobble together livings. When they don’t, they live in a world where they work for some company that doesn’t pay them as much as their parents and grandparents made. What’s more, they can depend upon being laid off at the slightest sign of an economic downturn. It’s kind of hard to plan for a life with kids and a house when you don’ know if you are going to have a job next year. Where is the meaning in a life like that?

Obama used to talk about creating a society where if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would thrive. He doesn’t talk much about that anymore. Instead, he talks about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and about how that’s going to improve our economy. Of course, we’ve seen our economy improve a lot over the last 40 years. But we haven’t seen the lives of working people improve. So who cares? Obama seems to be telling us something: if you work hard and play by the rules, well, you’re a sucker.

The main thing that I’ve noticed in my life is that this kind of society is one that creates great uncertainty and anxiety in people’s lives. For the first time in my life, I feel fairly secure because I’m working for a number of people. They don’t even pretend to be loyal to me. And that’s great! I’d rather know where I stand. And also, since I’m good at my work, I can be clear with them: if something better comes along, they can enjoy finding something to replace me. But most people aren’t in my position. And they shouldn’t have to be. Mediocre workers ought to be allowed to have decent lives too.

It should come as no shock that middle age workers are dying off due to stress related illnesses and suicide. We’ve created a society that doesn’t value people as people. We don’t provide them ways of finding meaning in life. And without meaning what is the point of life? I know what the conservatives and the economists will tell us: it’s all about making money. But only truly messed up people would think that. Unfortunately, they are the people who control this country.