I was watching an interview on Democracy Now! with Kevin Phillips from a couple of weeks after the last presidential election. Phillips is an interesting guy and he is always worth listening to. But he said something that really stood out to me. He noted that America was a nation in decline. This is a big issue to me that I almost never hear anyone talk about.

Where I see America’s decline most clearly is among the rich. These people demonstrate a “circle the wagons” mentality. That’s what all the tax policy is about. The rich seem to have gotten to the point where they don’t think they will get richer because the nation is getting richer. Instead, they just want to take a larger and larger slice of the economic pie. That’s how you get rich in a dying empire.

What’s really important here is that this belief in the decline of the nation is self-fulfilling. Over the last 40 years, we have given the rich a larger and larger share of the economy. This has effectively decimated the middle class. So while we are still a very wealthy nation we have become a kind of banana republic. Of course, instead of having banana plantations, we have a financial industry. That makes it worse! At least you can eat bananas. Most of the financial industry is useless even regarding its already dubious purpose of moving capital around.

The other important aspect of this is the income inequality. Increasingly, we have the very rich and we have the poor. In as much as we have a middle class, it is made up of the remnants of our once unionized work force. For a very large segment of the modern American work force, it might was well be the late 19th century. There is no 40 hour work week when you work 3 jobs. There’s no overtime. There’s no benefits, even at companies that offer them because you don’t work enough for that particular company.

And we are declining in the most horrible way possible. We are constantly told that we don’t have enough money to provide for the poor or have universal healthcare or a clean environment. But we do have enough money for corporate welfare. We do have enough money to lock up cannabis smokers. We do have enough money to cut the taxes of the rich. And note this because it is very important: spending money on the things that our rich overlords tell us we can’t afford would make our country and our economy stronger. And the things they say we can afford are the primary causes of our national and economic decline.

Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “If you work hard and play by the rules, this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything.” Pretty much the same thing has been said about every politician during my lifetime. But I haven’t seen any of them do anything about it. It is patently false. Obama hasn’t even tried to do anything for the labor movement. Why would he?! New Democrats don’t believe in that old economy stuff. They think if everyone would just teach themselves computer programming, everything would be fine.

But everything will not be fine. That’s because the rich have given up on America. They are just consolidating their gains. And their politicians have given up on America too. The only ones who haven’t given up on America are the poor. But no one listens to us. When the Occupy movement started, the media yawned. “Just a bunch of liberals.” But when the Tea Party movement started, the media celebrated. “A bunch of old people backed by the rich pushing for lower taxes on the rich!” That was something “new” and worth reporting!

And that’s our country in decline: the only things that matter are the things that matter to the rich and that’s because the only people who are ever listened to are the rich. This is not democracy. This is not freedom. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be a joke.

Earlier today, Jonathan Chait wrote, Republican Reformers Stop Being Polite to Tea Party, Start Getting Real. Seeing that title, I jumped right in. I was prepared to savage any silly ideas that Chait had about Republican reformers and where they do or do not fit into the conservative movement. But that title was just about as inaccurate as it could be.

The article summarizes two articles in the most recent issue of National Affairs magazine. One by conservative hacks Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner. And another by AEI’s Michael Strain[1], who I will admit has shown himself in the past to not be a total idiot and nutjob. As Chait describes it, the “Prague Spring for the mainstream” conservative intelligentsia. And then he spends the rest of the article showing how it is nothing of the sort.

The problem is that being a conservative in any capacity is a really well-paying gig. No one is going to threaten his cushy job at AEI in the name of fixing the Republican Party. But even if one were so inclined, they would quickly figure something out that I’ve been talking about for years: the Democratic Party is the conservative party. So if these people really want to reform the Republican Party, they have to pretend that the Democratic Party is something that it is not. Chait puts it perfectly:

He then goes on to note that it isn’t that Republicans don’t have actual policies that they are vigorously pushing. It is just that they are the most vile policies imaginable that no conservative apologist could countenance. This is the Wonderland that conservative intellectuals live in. If you talk to them (And I do!) about their policies, they will tell you about how they are good for the poor. This is where Paul Ryan gets all the hammock garbage. The reason that people are poor is that the government is giving them too much! But when you step out of Wonderland, it gets hard. Poor kids go to school hungry. Poor kids get worse educations. Poor kids die at a much higher rate than rich kids. Well, the conservative intellectuals don’t want that, so they stay locked up inside Wonderland where all children are equal and have a good shot at the American Dream.

What’s most important to me in all of this is that these would be reformers aren’t just spewing out their Wonderland message of the perfect conservative policy. They are also reinforcing the beliefs of the reactionaries that Obama and the Democrats are secret communists trying to destroy the nation. And these “Republican reform” articles (it’s a genre) are always peppered with these distortions about the Democrats that reinforce what the Tea Party crowd already believes.

A more fundamental problem is that if there really were such a thing as a reasonable Republican, he would not stay one for long. Think of Michael Strain. If he really believes in what he claims to believe in, he fits much better in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. But if he became a Democrat, he might lose his job at the AEI. I’ve wondered the same thing about Norman Ornstein, who is also at AEI. But I put him in the same category as David Cay Johnston and Bruce Bartlett: people who align with Republican ideals but don’t seem to vote with the party anymore. But Strain is much younger without the enormous reputations of these three men. So he has to be careful.[2]

But I have some advice for him and others like him: stop trying to be reformers. You’re only making things worse.

Afterword

Look at that picture of Strain above. He looks like a nice young man. He’s welcome in the big tent of the Democratic Party. I know that the two of us would be on opposite sides of the tent. But I’d welcome him. I doubt he’s much more conservative than Obama.

[1] Be careful. This is Michael R. Strain. It is not the Louisiana Republican Michael G. Strain.

[2] Generally, reform is for the older, so Strain is actually showing more bravery than most people in Washington.

This is a good segment from The Young Turks, about another MSNBC “scandal.” What happened was that Melissa Harris-Perry had some comedians on her show and they made a joke about the Romney family. Immediately, there is a freak out in the right wing media. The comedian then apologized and Harris-Perry apologized again and again and again. What’s interesting is that there is literally nothing to this. And the fact that Harris-Perry feels the need to beat herself up publicly, just shows how successful the right has been at working the refs.

Jimmy Dore is great in this segment because he totally calls it: this is false equivalence. Now, whenever anyone on MSNBC says anything that ruffles a single feather on the right, those on the left are equating it with the really vile stuff that is said on the right. This isn’t an MSNBC problem; this is a liberal problem. For all of their awful behavior, at least the right wing is loyal to itself. The left wing throws its own people under the bus for the smallest of causes.

Where I disagree with Dore is that Harris-Perry wasn’t over-apologizing because she isn’t smart. She was over-apologizing to protect her job. Given that both Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir were fired over minor things, there is no reason to believe that MSNBC wouldn’t have turned on her as well. And notice, these two guys were fired, but when Phil Robertson says the vilest of things about happy blacks before they were allowed to vote, nothing happens to him.

I have gotten used to the mainstream media bending to the whims of conservative outrage. But this is totally out of hand when the supposed liberal cable channel (that I no longer watch because of the firing of Bashir) allows itself to be worked the same way. Have you noticed that very little has been said about Sarah Palin’s outrage about Bashir and then her great defense of Phil Robertson’s free speech rights? Come on liberals. Grow a fucking backbone. We’re fighting this war of ideas on the conservatives’ terms. So even when we win, we lose.

Check out the segment; it is really good:

Because of a bit of a mix-up, I happened to read David Brooks’ yearly discussion of the Sidney Awards, The Sidney Awards, Part 1. There is nothing quite like reading David Brooks or Thomas Friedman or oh so many other major newspaper columnists to make a writer feel good about himself. With Brooks, one gets a beautiful combination of lazy thinking, boring prose, and intellectual pretense. And all of this comes together perfectly when Brooks discusses work by people who can actually think and write reasonably well without undue pretense.

In this collection, he tries to figure out if there is more to humans than just a bunch of electrochemical processes going on in the brain. Brooks is clearly divided on the issue. The religious part of him wants to think that there is something other-worldly about humans—that soul that’s gonna go to heaven and party until forever never comes. But the political part of him wants to think that humans are just a special kind of resource that businesses use to bring products to market. Having read him for years, I know where he comes down on all this. Profits over Prophets. I’ve never met a big time conservative who wasn’t perfectly clear on that issue. Profits over Prophets.

Does Science Explain All?

He starts by discussing two opposing essays by Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier. Brooks refers to them as “two intellectual heavyweights.” Well, he got that half right. Pinker is an intellectual heavyweight. Wieseltier is best described as a prominent fight promoter. These two guys tackle the question of whether science can or rather more correctly could some day tell us everything about everything. I haven’t read the articles and I have no intention of doing so. It would be hard to find a more boring question to think about. But the way that Brooks writes about the articles is so shamelessly biased as to be comical:

That’s a knockout for Wieseltier, don’t you think? Of course, there are a couple of problems. One is that, in fact most believers take Scripture literally. A 2004 CBS poll found that 55% of Americans think that God created man literally as it says in the Bible. That’s not “few,” that’s “most.” This is the number one weapon in the arsenal of religious apologists. Well, no one really believes that nonsense! But of course, they do. And when they are all alone, they encourage each other to think that nonsense. But that’s a minor issue. Let’s get to the big problem.

Pinker is not talking about finding beauty in the chemistry of the paints used by an artist. He’s a cognitive scientist. When he says that science can explain everything, he’s talking about understanding the chemistry that goes on in the brain. Why does one painting cause the brain to release endorphins while another does not? I don’t know if Wieseltier is presenting this “chemistry of the paint” strawman to knock down, but Brooks sure is. And that’s where he leaves it.

If two intelligent people were going to discuss this kind of thing, they wouldn’t be talking about a human’s reaction to art. They would be talking about whether humans could ever understand why the universe exists. And by the way: it is possible that there is an answer to that question. I believe that certain findings of math indicate that some day we will be able to prove that such a question is beyond the power of a machine that is limited to the perfect intellectual potential of the universe. In other words, it might be possible to prove that nothing can ever fully explain itself. If Pinker wants to write a book about that, I’d be interested in reading it. I’m not sure Wieseltier is even capable of understanding the question. And I know that Brooks isn’t.

Do Elephants Have Souls That We Can’t Bother Defining?

Brooks next discusses Caitrin Nicol’s essay Do Elephants Have Souls? All I can tell from what he wrote is that Nicol thinks elephants do have souls, but isn’t really clear on what souls are. I don’t know what the big deal is. To me, the soul is the essence of a person. It is what I think I am that is distinct from the environment that I live in. But for religious folk like David Brooks, it is far more difficult. And his difficulty with the word takes him back to his unfair discussion of the Pinker-Wieseltier debate. But I don’t think it is just Brooks’ problem.

He quotes Nicol as writing “when we talk about it, we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved.” Really?! That’s award-winning writing? Because I don’t think the eyes are the windows to the soul, I don’t think people bare their soul except in the sense that they always do, I don’t usually refer to music as having soul, unless I am referring to the music of the 1960s and 1970s that combined R&B with gospel music. I don’t think we all mean more or less the same thing. Most of the people I talk to think the soul is something that lives in the body and goes up to heaven when they die. I don’t think that at all. I’m sure that elephants have souls in the sense that I understand the term soul. But it doesn’t seem like Nicol and Brooks are clear enough on the term soul to say anything at all about elephants.

Did Aaron Swartz Die Because He Was Too Free?

It seems that Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a “brilliant” profile of Aaron Swartz. That may well be. But clearly, Brooks has an ax to grind when it comes to the question of the brilliant and depressed Swartz. Brooks callously observes, “He began writing big books or starting great projects, but he usually didn’t finish them.” Well, I guess that’s one way of saying that he was an idea guy. He was Frank in “Frank, Frank turned the crank; Joe, Joe made it go.” But you could just call him a loser who didn’t finish what he started. Less than a year after his tragic suicide, I guess the “loser” definition is the reasonable choice to explain Swartz. He uses the story to argue in favor of structure and not allowing those kids too much intellectual freedom. No mention is made of a government “justice” system gone wild, pushing an already fragile “soul” over the edge. But who needs those details when Brooks has an important story to tell about the evils of freedom and the uses really smart people put that freedom to.

Can Interviews Reveal the Ghost in the Machine?

Finally, we get to Don Peck’s essay about better ways to hire people to become corporate cogs, They’re Watching You at Work. The old ways of hiring are not working. I have no trouble believing that. “In one study at Xerox, previous work experience had no bearing on future productivity.” What’s more, people are hired more for how they get along socially with the existing staff than anything else. (This isn’t how Brooks puts it, because he doesn’t think that deeply.) Now I guess some companies are making people play video games so they can get the perfect employee with “a strict work ethic but a loose capacity for ‘mind wandering.'” Brooks tells us that it won’t matter if you went to Harvard or Yale. Of course, Brooks doesn’t like this idea at all. He thinks the analytics can’t work because there is something special in there that you just can’t test for. So these video games can’t find that special Brooksian “soul” but graduating from Harvard or Yale or (Brooks’ own school) the University of Chicago can.

I can tell you one thing. If these computer analytics do take hold in corporate America, they will only be used at the end of the interview process. Management will first make sure that you are the right kind of person. If you are black, they will make sure you are the right kind of black. You know the drill. And then they will do a background check on you to see if you’ve ever be arrested for possessing half a joint. And then they’ll run a credit check to make sure yours is at least in the high 700s if not a perfect 850. And then they’ll give you their little analytic test. But at that point, who really cares? They know you’re the “right” kind of person and you’ll fit in fine.

It’s possible that there really is a “ghost in the machine” of us humans. David Brooks really wants to believe that. At the same time, all of his political philosophy just wants to treat humans like they are cogs in the business machine. Like most conservatives, the idea that humans are special and deserve dignity and respect is just dogma you recite for the hour or so per week when you go to your holy institution. The rest of the time, the world is a social Darwinian nightmare where the weak get eaten by the strong because that’s what really matters. Humans are really important in the mythical afterlife. But in the real here-and-now, humans don’t matter a bit.

Profits over Prophets.