Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”

A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”

A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added to personal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.

Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.

—Alfie Kohn
Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning”

There has been much talk about Dylann Roof who apparently killed nine people at a Bible study being held at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Many on the left want to call it terrorism and think that it is a sign of hypocrisy that it isn’t. I am highly sympathetic to that complaint. But I find myself coming at it from the other side. “Terrorism” is one of those words that describes nothing. Its use only serves to separate the world into the good people (us) and the bad people (them).

In the 1980s, I remember that the US press had no problem referring to those fighting against the government in the Salvadoran Civil War as “terrorists.” Meanwhile, those fighting against the far more legitimate Sandinista government in Nicaragua were “freedom fighters.” We see the same kind of thing today with countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The former is an ally, so the best gloss is put on everything it does. The former is nominally an enemy, so the worst gloss is put on everything it does. This isn’t surprising coming from the US government. Why it is that our “free” press goes right along with it has always been something of a mystery to me.

It may be just an extension of what Alexis De Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” We believe in the freedom to dissent — as long as no one really exercises it. I have long wondered if we don’t continue to have a nominally free press only because our press is in fact as compliant as Pravda. And that takes us back to the word “terrorism” and its magical properties.

Since I was a little kid, I’ve thought that terrorism was the use of violence to keep people in a constant state of terror and thus make them compliant to the political will of those using the terrorism. I looked up the word on Merriam-Webster, and that is more or less what it says: “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.” But this definition is extremely problematic because by it, the United States is the biggest terrorist group in the world. The people in Afghanistan who have drones constantly flying over them are indeed — and very explicitly — being terrorized.

And it isn’t just the United States. Modern warfare has changed. Look at the following table from the documentary War Made Easy.

Civilians have always been killed in war. But now, war is not even primarily about two armies fighting against each other; it is about two countries (groups, whatever) fighting against each other. Most people just want to live their little lives, but if they live in the wrong place, war comes to them. And that is terrorism — pure and simple.

I don’t really think that Dylann Roof walking into that church and killing people is an act of terrorism — as horrific as it was. But I also don’t think that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s shooting spree in Ottawa was terrorism either. And I certainly don’t think all these FBI created “crimes” are terrorism. They all just seem to be disturbed people doing the kinds of things that disturbed people do. But that doesn’t mean that I’m complaining about calling Dylann Roof a terrorist — because he certainly qualifies better thant Zehaf-Bibeau, who no one in the mainstream media had trouble calling a terrorist.

I’d like to get rid of the word “terrorist.” All it does is clarify what side we think any criminal is on. And in the current American context, it is patently racist. If Dylann Roof were a Muslim, people would be calling his murders terrorism. Maybe in the final analysis, people would change their minds. But the calculus is clear enough: a violent Muslim is by default a terrorist, even if he is really just a confused crazy person. Labeling something “terrorism” doesn’t tell us anything about it — except that a Muslim was involved.

Carola Conces Binder wrote a very interesting article over at her blog Quantitative Ease, Another Four Percent. The reference is to Jeb Bush’s claim that he’s gonna rev up the economy to 4% growth. He got this number from a brainstorming session at his big brother’s “institute.” Brainstorming is a nice word for it. A more accurate word would be BS session. It’s the kind of number that is pulled out of the anus of one animal or another. But why 4%? Why not 6%? Or 40%? Or a Googolplex — if we are just making it up?

Well, there is a reason for it. The economic growth rate under Obama has been 2%. So why not double it? It isn’t totally out of the question. Certainly we saw growth near that level during Clinton’s presidency. But that was largely fueled by the stock bubble. Matt Yglesias, for one, is not impressed, Jeb Bush’s 4% Growth Promise Is 104% Nonsense. He pointed out a few things. First, since 1980, the average GDP growth rate has only been 2.7%. And it has never been as high as 4% for an entire president’s term. And perhaps most disturbing for Jeb Bush is that under his brother and father, the growth rate was only a bit more than 2%.

I’m personally fed up with GDP growth as a measure worth caring about. Our economy works very well at growing. But it does a terrible job of distributing the rewards. And the power elite understand this. When John Cochrane discussed whether 4% growth was reasonable, he brought up the 11 million undocumented workers. Why? Because that would increase GDP. We aren’t talking per capita GDP here. The idea is just to get more wealth in the economy overall. The power elite know that this means they will get a cut of it. The median income can slip further and further down, but their incomes will go up and up.

Binder noted the real reason that 4% was picked, “Let’s face it, we have a thing for nice, round, kind of arbitrary numbers.” In fact, Jeb Bush himself said, “It’s a nice round number.” And this seems to be the state of economic analysis at this point. She mentioned another “nice round number” that has no basis in reality: the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target. This is a number that Alan Greenspan apparently just pulled out his (or some other convenient) anus. But it is now taken as though it were brought down off Mount Sinai on clay tablets. Yet in the late 1960s, we had a great economy with inflation in the 4% to 5% range. But the economy was only good for workers, so I guess it doesn’t count.

Economists have a lot of complicated and elegant theories about the way the economy works. And some of those theories have the benefit of even being correct. But when it comes to economic policies, all these theories are used for is to justify wild guesses that the power elite grab hold of. I’m sure that Jeb Bush can find an economist who will build him a model that shows that if he just cuts taxes by the right amount, we will get GDP growth of 4% per year for a decade. But it’s all just done for the personal gain of the powerful. It’s religion — faith based policy. And heretics like me who think our inflation target ought to be double what it is aren’t burned at the stake. We are just ignored. Because obviously we are wrong. All the smart and knowledgeable people know that the inflation target must be 2% — that’s what defines who is smart and knowledgeable.

So why shouldn’t Jeb Bush pull out 4% growth as what will happen if he becomes president? It’s no less grounded in reality than any of our other economic policy.

Lydia DePillis tried to get to the bottom of a question, Why NAFTA Passed and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Failed. She noted that nothing had really changed in terms of the arguments for and against the two deals. The only real answer she comes up with is that there was a procedural difference: the fast-track authority was long done on NAFTA — before it was negotiated. So it was just a matter of voting for it or against it. I think it is simpler than that.

The 1992 election was widely misinterpreted by both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are to this day convinced that they lost because Bush raised taxes. The Democrats were for a time — and to some extent still — under the delusion that Clinton won because he turned right and had his “Sister Souljah moment.” So there was a feeling that conservative policy was the right way to go — or at least the wave of the future. That just isn’t true anymore. I think that even the Democratic Party establishment is waking up to the fact that the New Democratic movement was bad for the nation and ultimately bad for the party.

Here’s the question that people are starting to ask: why vote for the Democratic Party when its unofficial slogan is, “Not as bad as the Republicans!”? If the Republican Party hadn’t become so horrible, the Democratic Party would be doing major soul searching right now. And even as it is, a whole lot of Democrats are wondering what it matters to win elections when the playing field is so shifted to the right that even a conservative measure like Obamacare required herculean effort and passed only with Democratic votes. The American voter is pretty messed up, but almost no one is in favor of having two political parties as fully owned corporate subsidiaries.

I think most people are where I am regarding these matters, No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed. Are trade agreements good for the economy? They appear to be. But they aren’t that good for the economy. They create modest growth. But this is nothing compared to the enormous disruption that they create. And the kicker is that people see no correlation because economic growth and job or wage growth. That’s because there is none. Over the last 40 years, we’ve seen the economy manipulated so that it exists for the benefit of the rich — and the rich alone. What do trade deals have to do with the lives of workers — other than making them even more insecure?

The only thing that is surprising is that our elected officials listened. But it makes sense. They too have been worn down by ever more trade deals. Trade deals are for centrist Democrats what tax cuts are for Republicans: things that are done because they will supposedly create jobs but never really do. A lot of people have wondered why Obama is so all fired up about the TPP. I think this is why. It isn’t rational. He just “knows” that this trade deal is good for the economy in the same way that George W Bush just knew his tax cuts were good for the economy.

The difference now is that Democrats are capable of learning. And they saw that this was not just — or even primarily — a trade deal. The thing is larded up with special deals for industries that are going to increase profits but not jobs. No one thinks that if Lionsgate can sell The Expendables for he next 70 years in Vietnam that more films will get made. At a time when the Democratic Party is finally waking up from its long neoliberal nightmare, yet another trade deal just doesn’t make sense. If NAFTA seemed like the future to the Democrats in 1993, TPP definitely is the past in 2015.

For liberals, there is a long history of thinking that surely the Republicans will have to change their ways. They have a very unpopular platform and seem only interested in funneling money to the rich. There is almost no rational basis for their policies, so they have cast aside science for a kind of postmodern mentality where reality is whatever they want it to be. And this has morphed into a proto-fascist belief in “might makes right.” Remember the Bush administration idea that 50% plus one vote gave them legitimacy to do whatever they wanted? Surely, we liberals have thought, they cannot continue on like this and win elections!

Now we are hearing rumblings within the conservative moment that if the Republicans don’t win the presidency in 2016, the party is dead. There will be a civil war in the GOP that will tear it apart. Liberals tend to be more cautious. We’ve watched this before. For one thing, if the Republican Party came out in favor of torturing kittens, it would still manage to get 40% of the vote. That just seems to be built in. Still, Brian Beutler seems cautiously optimistic that the Republicans might change if they lose in 2016. I’m not.

The problem is that there is a disconnect between the micro-scale and the macro-scale. What is good for any one politician is not necessarily what is good for the party that she represents. It is interesting that the divide between these goals should be so much greater in the Republican Party than it is in the Democratic Party. But I don’t think it is hard to construct a narrative about why it is so. The conservative movement went through a long period of defeat. For four decades, the closest it came to the presidency was Dwight Eisenhower who wasn’t much more conservative than Adlai Stevenson who the Democrats ran against him. It bears repeating: Republican economic policy is not popular.

With the Democratic Party’s turn toward civil rights in the mid-1960s, the Republicans saw their chance. This is the basis of Richard Nixon’s southern strategy: get people to vote against economic policy that, all else being equal, they would hate — all in the name of saving their culture. The Democrats have never done anything comparable. It’s ironic that identity politics is a label placed on the Democratic Party, but the party has never used identity to get people to vote against their own class interests. It is the Republican Party that pushes the “real America” — incidentally, the places where very few people live — as an identity to policies that these people don’t generally agree with.

Brad DeLong wrote an amazing essay at his site, What About Today’s Republican Party? He highlighted the way that former California governor Pete Wilson got a second term by demagoguing against Latinos in the state. He did this, even while knowing that demographic changes in the state would soon make that position toxic. And now we have a state that in 1988 voted for George HW Bush by over 3.5 percentage points is now at just about a super-majority of Democrats and the idea that the state would vote for a Republican president is outrageous.

DeLong thinks the turning point was Newt Gingrich, who thought that he could demagogue his way to power and then govern the normal way but for the interests of the rich and powerful. Of course, that didn’t work. Once you set up that kind of situation, others are going to use it against you. As DeLong put it, “But then he found that his allies who did not care about governing could use his willingness to strike bipartisan deals — and his problems with his zipper — to bounce him out as well.” Now I think this all goes back a lot further, but the idea is the same.

After the 2012 election, there were many Republicans who thought that the party needed to reform. If the party loses in 2016, we will hear the same voices. But the party will have the same problem in 2016 as it did in 2012. If it becomes a “reasonable” pro-business party, it will have no base of voters. So it will continue to push forward with its white resentment strategy. At some point, it will find a winning coalition. But I suspect that will have more to do with the Democrats making a mistake rather than the Republicans suddenly getting creative.