Though the Great Neoliberalism Debate of 2011 now seems like yesterday’s news—probably because it is—the second-quarter GDP estimates that were just released should bring us back to where that debate began: with a question about what is the “single best thing” the government could do to create jobs and stimulate the economy. In case you haven’t heard, things suck: almost no growth at all.  As all the commentary makes clear, the major problem is low consumer demand and falling government spending.  People aren’t spending the money they don’t have; businesses aren’t spending the money they do have; government is not spending the money it could have. As all the commentary makes equally clear, there is a solution: government action on […]

In an excellent piece about Obama’ s troubled relationship with his liberal base, Ta-Nehisi Coates hints at something I’ve long felt but have yet to see discussed in print: Obama has been much praised for the magnanimity he shows his opposition. But such empathy, unburdened by actual expectations, comes easy. More challenging is the work of coping with those who have the disagreeable habit of taking the president, and his talk of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” seriously. Among the pundits and the polite, there’s no greater virtue for a political leader than to break with his base and embrace some point or principle of the opposition. In practice, at least since the 1970s, this has meant Democratic […]

In my first year of grad school, I read Naming Names, Victor Navasky’s study of the blacklist in Hollywood. That, and Michael Rogin’s The Intellectuals and McCarthy, made me a permanent junkie for all things McCarthy. The blacklist was a shameful episode in American history, but it had its bright spots.  One of them was Kirk Douglas, who helped break it by insisting that the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo receive the screenwriting credit for Spartacus.  The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is now honoring the 94-year-old Douglas with its Freedom of Expression Award. Douglas discusses his experiences with Spartacus—as well as being Jewish in Hollywood—here.  Best quote from Douglas: “I always fasted on Yom Kippur. I still worked on the movie […]

Anders Behring Breivik, the guy who’s confessed to the Norwegian terrorist bombings, doesn’t just have ideas about multiculturalism and Muslim immigration (in case you haven’t heard, he’s not crazy about either)—though you wouldn’t know that from the media coverage, which focuses almost exclusively on Breivik’s identitarian interests.  Breivik also has a fair amount to say about capitalism and its critics.  In his lengthy manifesto, he proffers opinions about Naomi Klein (dislikes) and Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (likes). He also seems more than passingly familiar with some of the leading figures of conservative thought like Roger Scruton. I haven’t had time to immerse myself in Breivik’s statement—it’s 1500 pages!—but from the bits I’ve read, it’s clear that there’s more here […]

The head of Chicago’s public schools, Jean Claude Brizard, says that he “applauds” Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision to send his kids to private school. Okay, I get that this is politics and he can’t openly criticize the mayor. But applause?  How about “It’s none of my business”? Or “no comment”? And how does Brizard square that applause with this? It’s really his decision and I don’t think anyone should question what he’s doing for his family and every parent should have that choice. Okay, so if the mayor’s choices for his kids are off limits, why should we applaud them? Why not, you know, maintain a respectful—and judgmental—silence?

Will Wilkinson is awfully confident that the labor movement doesn’t have a future in America because…Americans don’t want it to have a future in America. Now, if you ask me, the combination of continually increasing global competitiveness and the peculiarly individualistic tenor of American public opinion makes the prospect of revitalising organised labour exceedingly unlikely. Organised labour still has plenty of fight in it, and no doubt it will win some important battles in the coming months and years. But the war is long lost, I’m afraid. No matter how hard the left claps for Tinkerbell Local #272, she’s not getting up. Well, I didn’t ask him, but he did ask me.  In a Twitter exchange, where I said to […]

Left critics of neoliberalism—or just plain old unregulated capitalism—often cite Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration “There is no such thing as society” as evidence of neoliberalism’s hostility to all things collective. Neoliberalism, the story goes, unleashes the individual to fend for herself, denying her the supports of society (government, neighborhood solidarity, etc.) so that she can prove her mettle in the marketplace. But these critics often ignore the fine print of what Thatcher actually said in that famous 1987 interview with, of all things, Woman’s Own.  Here’s the buildup to that infamous quote: Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families… It’s that last phrase (“and there are families”) that’s crucial.  […]

“You know, there really is something magic about the marketplace when it’s free to operate. As the song says, ‘This could be the start of something big.’” (Radio Address, April 24, 1982) Or, as the other song says: Cold late night so long ago When I was not so strong you know A pretty man came to me Never seen eyes so blue…

Those of you following this discussion between me, Matt Yglesias, and Mike Konczal, need to check out this post from Doug Henwood. It not only cuts through a lot of the fat, but it also takes us in a completely different, unexpected, and difficult direction, raising fascinating questions about the petit bourgeois origins and dimensions of the politics of inflation.  Doug is my rabbi in all things economic (though, sadly, we part ways on matters musical).  Check it out, comment there, here, everywhere. To my astonishment, this debate, or a spin-off of this debate, seems to have been kicked upstairs.  Way upstairs.  As in Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong upstairs. Update (July 18, 12:30 pm) And now the boys—and, seriously, […]

Prompted by this post from Mike Konczal, Matt Yglesias has weighed in again on our debate about what the government should do to create jobs. But it turns out that’s not what we’re debating.  What we’re really debating, says Yglesias, is monetary policy: specifically, whether the left should care about it. Yglesias thinks we should, and I gather I’m supposed to think we shouldn’t. Instead of confronting the real impact monetary policy has on jobs, inequality, and so on, I, like my brothers and sisters on the left, have allowed my “romance with the idea of the Works Progress Administration,” the misty water-colored memory of New Deal “social solidarity” and “public investment,” to blur my thinking about what would actually […]

Mike Konczal, whose blog Rortybomb is must reading on the economic and financial questions we’ve been talking about here, has a thoughtful post on my exchange with Matt Yglesias.  Konczal argues that the left needs to think hard about monetary policy and not assume fiscal policy will take care of all of our concerns.  I’ll be responding, but very curious to hear your thoughts. Update (11:10 pm) Prompted by Konzal’s post, Matt Yglesias has yet another response to our exchange. Again, I’ll be writing something about this in the next few days, so all thoughts are welcome.

Matt Yglesias sent me two emails last night in response to my critique of his proposal that the government should decrease unemployment by increasing inflation targets. In the first email, he writes: You’re attributing views to me I don’t hold. I was asked by the Atlantic for one idea, and I didn’t want an idea that would need to go through congress. So I said the Fed should set a higher inflation target (as FDR did: http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/president-sets-a-price-level-target-in-a-depression-fdr-1932-edition/) which I think it should. But this is hardly the only thing we can or should be doing. The government should be borrowing money and spending it on public works (http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/11/265850/real-interest-on-government-debt-is-negative/) and the federal government should be giving fiscal support to state and local […]

In response to the question “What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?” Matt Yglesias writes, “The best step to create jobs and boost the economy would be for the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee to announce a plan to target inflation at 3 or 4 percent.” In a follow-up post, he’s even more emphatic: “The actual single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation” is “adopt a higher inflation target.” I’m no economist—the worst grade I got in college was in Econ 101; the professor was a newly hired economist by the name of Ben Bernanke—but I would have thought the single best thing the government could do to create jobs (and […]

This post from Jonathan Rauch—no, not the one where he complains about the blogosphere spirit of “Roman gladiatorial entertainment”—is just a fistful of crazy. According to Rauch: If you wanted a simple criterion to demarcate America’s enemies, you could do worse than ask a single question: Is this country, movement, or ideology antisemitic? Since at least the 1930s, the Axis of Evil and the Axis of Antisemitimism [sic] have been basically congruent (imperial Japan and Asian Communism being the major exceptions). “Simple” is the operative word here. Let’s start with those exceptions.  Imperial Japan occupied a not insignificant portion of America’s attention during World War II.  “Asian Communism” produced the only wars America fought, officially and semi-officially, between 1945 and 1991. […]

A new book about Proudhon sets out to prove his dictum that property is theft by selling for $125.

If you’re Tolstoy, you get to: Say that Shakespeare was a dreadful playwright. Tell Chekhov he’s worse than Shakespeare. If you’re Chekhov, you get to: Be told by Tolstoy you’re worse than Shakespeare. Be Chekhov.

As a follow-up to my earlier post on David Frum, it occurs to me that I overlooked one additional peculiarity in his use of the word “constituency.” (Just as a reminder, this is the comment from Frum that sent me into such a tizzy: “[Obama] issued no public call to constituencies like the financial industry to bring pressure to bear on the issue.” I know, I know.  Political theorists can work themselves up over the durndest things.) Not only does Frum assume the banks are Obama’s constituency. He also assumes the banks are the natural constituency in a debate about the national debt because they are the ones—perhaps the only ones—with an interest in how that debate turns out. It’s […]

Ever since I read Dwight Macdonald’s essay “Masscult and Midcult”—in Andrew Ross’s excellent undergraduate seminar on intellectuals and popular culture, which formed the basis for his equally excellent book No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture—I’ve known better than to complain about the literary tastes of the mainstream media. But this list (h/t Michael Busch) of what the staff at the New York Times Magazine considers to be “the best fiction of all time” brought me up short. It’s not just that the staffers had a lengthy debate as to which was better:  Lolita or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Nabokov v. Chabon?  Really?)  Nor is it that they were debating which of these two books is the finest novel […]

This statement from David Frum is one of the more honest sentences in journalism I’ve read in some time. Analyzing Obama’s bungling of the debt crisis—having failed to back the GOP into a corner, Obama is now hoping for a best-case deal in which he gets massive cuts in Democratic programs with not much in the way of tax increases—Frum writes: [Obama] issued no public call to constituencies like the financial industry to bring pressure to bear on the issue. Reading along, noting those strong declarative terms—issued, public, call, constituency—you think Frum is going to say something like: Obama “issued no public call to constituencies like the labor movement” or Obama “issued no public call to constituencies like the elderly.” […]

I agree with much of what historian Michael Kazin has to say about Obama here.  But this notion, which we often hear from Obama defenders, puzzles me: For all his talk about “winning the future”(and his undeniable intellectual gifts), Obama seems to think that solving immediate problems is the key to political victory. In fairness, the economic collapse has provided a surfeit of crises that must be addressed, and quickly. But, from the Great Depression until the great stagflation of the 1970s, Democrats dominated national politics by balancing crisis management with the building of a multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition tied together both by such programs as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and Medicare, and by expressing a generous ideology […]