We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

[vinoveri]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

In 1936 FDR said:

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."

Astute observation by FDR (was this before or after the election)?

The lesson in today's world is watch what they do, not what they say
Obama Slams 'Fat Cat' Bankers
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...73152465089651

[Mn_Mark]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

OK I read through the Thomas Frank piece and my take is that he is frustrated that the Left is focused on primarily identity group grievances and is not focused enough on "the movement" - which I interpret as meaning Marxism, but which can be more gently alluded to as "strong labor unions" and the like.

Yes, I can imagine that a real ideological Marxist would be frustrated that a generally free-market worldview has prevailed, whether Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, or Obama are in office. We could argue about why that is, though I suspect a large part of it is the fall of the Soviet Union and the sight of delighted former East Germans and East Europeans flooding into Western Europe to experience their first taste of stores with shelves full of affordable, various goods, something like real freedom of speech and thought, and so on. [I took Russian language lessons from a Russian immigrant lady in the early 1990s. I asked her what she thought the first time she got here and looked around. She said the first time she walked into a grocery store and saw all the heaps of affordable, various fresh produce she burst into tears of sadness over the way her people had gone down such a dead end. She had a degree in economics from a Moscow university.] In addition to communist China discovering that by adopting relatively free markets ("socialism with Chinese aspects" - haha) they could bring more hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in one decade than they could in half a century under communism. Etc etc - in other words, the world gave communism a good ol' college try for the better part of a century and it sucked badly. That's a big part of the reason that "the movement" is struggling.

But what confuses me - and maybe the lefties on here who thought the Thomas Frank article was really good could explain it to me - is what exactly do Thomas Frank and other "movement" lefties like him really want? The article was very vague about that beyond their desire to see labor unions stronger. If you had to describe what you and they want - not what you DON'T want, i.e. "FIRE" or "crony capitalism", etc - what is it that you want? Is there a label for it already? Is that label not "socialism"? If it's not socialism, what is it? Or is it really socialism, except you don't like that word and want to find a word that hasn't been discredited?

And I am also very curious to hear what the lefties who comment here think of Venezuela. Wasn't Hugo Chavez talking just the kind of stuff you guys like to hear? All about the importance of the worker, the badness of the financial elite, the need for equality? Didn't Chavez talk - and implement - just about exactly what you lefties want? Sean Penn and the other lefty media figures seemed to like the guy a lot. So when you see Venezuela collapsing just as us right-wing free-market types predicted it would, what do you think of that? Does it shake your faith in leftism, or do you just tell yourself that it is the big business capitalists in the US and around the world who undermined the Venezuelan revolution and caused it to fail? I'm genuinely curious.

[Woodsman]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

I wish more people would internalize this.

There's an assumption here that FIRE is not ideological, least of all in the anti-egalitarian terms outlined in the posted article. I could not disagree more and I find it incredible that there is controversy about this. The ideological frame employed to champion the original FIRE enabling acts was rooted in the laissez faire free market language of the right. The Rosemary's Baby we call FIRE was birthed by the GOP, with a right leaning New Democrat managing the delivery. That's a fact of history.

Recall that the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act was a GOP creation from the start and that it was a center left Democrat who warned it would result in banks becoming "too big to fail" necessitating a bailout by the Federal Government (John Dingell). And it was a center-right New Democrat president flanked by a center-right Democrat treasury secretary that made it the law of the land. And since 2008 it is the right that is resisting efforts to reinstate the law.

I fail to see how forcing ourselves to forget the facts of history improves our understanding.

PS- It'd be an interesting experiment to see if we could have conversations without anyone once uttering the terms left or right. Just debate ideas with regards to whether or not they will work. In another thread I posted some ideas about education reform. jk responded with his thoughts (which I agree with) of why they wouldn't work, but he didn't apply any labels of left or right.

Why should we avoid the terms left and right? They're not possessed of some black magic or evil spirit. When used correctly, the terms convey a great deal of information about the subject. And when used incorrectly, the terms convey even more information about the assumptions of the person misusing them.

We are humans. We label and classify. It's what we do. Why should we abandon that most basic of human practices when it comes to discussion of politics? We are not bound by a left/right frame, but rather bound by an inability to use the terms accurately and without emotional appeals. Rather than describe a describe a particular point of view or the details of a specific approach or event, we use them as rhetorical clubs or political swear words. But sending the terms down a memory hole does not seem to be the best way to go about setting ourselves straight.

The piece I posted I believe is helpful toward that end inasmuch as it is a self-critical analysis of the left by someone of center left orientation. I though that if we examined the criticism from their own perspective we could come to a better understanding, but that does not seem to be the case. Our loss, I think.

You all are free to do what you wish, but no, I won't stop using the terms and applying them as accurately as I can. And neither will I stop pointing out when I think they are used to distort and conceal. Sorry if that upsets anyone.

[Woodsman]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

... I'm genuinely curious.

Sorry mn, I don't believe you are sincere. Your comments are evidence enough and I don't see the point in trying. Maybe go to marxism.org and see what those fellows can do for you.

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Mark, it's useless to argue with leftists. Communism and Socialism have always been utter failures.

The American Financial Crisis was caused by government collusion with unregulated FIRE interests (some regs were there but not used. Glass Steagall should not have been overturned). True free market economies without government cronyism will produce the best living standards growth for all.

But we must rid ourselves of the Demo/Repub axis and their alliance with special interests. This can only be done with a New Majority Party without input from the corrupt political system we have today.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

There's an assumption here that FIRE is not ideological, least of all in the anti-egalitarian terms outlined in the posted article. I could not disagree more and I find it incredible that there is controversy about this. The ideological frame employed to champion the original FIRE enabling acts was rooted in the laissez faire free market language of the right. The Rosemary's Baby we call FIRE was birthed by the GOP, with a right leaning New Democrat managing the delivery. That's a fact of history.

I think it is fair to say that the movement towards deregulation freed the financial industry in some respects to engage in excesses that led to the 2008 (an ongoing) crisis.

But I don't think the problem is that there are people who want to get rich and will do it by using public money to backstop their gambling if they can get away with it. The problem is the government backstopping them, guaranteeing them, bailing them out. They should have failed a long time ago. We should probably have had a sharp recession back in the 1990s to bankrupt the firms making bad loans, etc. Instead a mindset developed that the Fed, and the government, can prevent any more deflations or collapses or panics from happening through wise management of monetary policy and the economy, rather than letting that sometimes-chaotic free market operate as it naturally does.

The left-ish people blame the financial crisis on "unfettered" free markets. Their diagnosis is that there was too much freedom, and not enough fettering. They are believers in the wisdom and ability of government, so when something goes bad their instinctive analysis was that there was too much freedom and not enough government.

But there's always going to be greed and over-exuberance and I believe there's always going to be economic cycles. There is no way to create a world without economic cycles. All that you do when you prevent economic crashes by stepping in with government bailouts is put off the crash until it will be even larger and more catastrophic.

It's like preventing forest fires - if you keep preventing the small, regular fires that clear out the accumulating dead wood, then you eventually get a horrific fire that goes way beyond anything that is normal. The "leftist" approach to that would be to blame the forest for making all those dead trees and say that clearly even more strict forest management is needed, and that the problem was the people who loosened the efforts of the fire preventers and allowed the deadly conflagration to start. No; in reality the problem was the people who thought they could prevent all forest fires through well-meaning but ignorant intervention in natural ("free market", you might say) processes that have cycles of their own that cannot be overcome without making them worse.

[Woodsman]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Mark, it's useless to argue with leftists. Communism and Socialism have always been utter failures.

The American Financial Crisis was caused by government collusion with unregulated FIRE interests (some regs were there but not used. Glass Steagall should not have been overturned). True free market economies without government cronyism will produce the best living standards growth for all.

But we must rid ourselves of the Demo/Repub axis and their alliance with special interests. This can only be done with a New Majority Party without input from the corrupt political system we have today.

It's useless to argue with people incapable of nuance, regardless of their ideology. As useless as knee jerk reactions and loaded emotional language, never mind a perspective that is para-historical and more akin to faith or psychological transference. I speak of course of such mythological beasts as the "true" free market economy and a Crony Free™ government run by human beings in all of known human history.

As for the reality of a "New Majority Party", we've yet to see if such a beast is worthy of a proper noun.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Mark, it's useless to argue with leftists. Communism and Socialism have always been utter failures.

The American Financial Crisis was caused by government collusion with unregulated FIRE interests (some regs were there but not used. Glass Steagall should not have been overturned). True free market economies without government cronyism will produce the best living standards growth for all.

But we must rid ourselves of the Demo/Repub axis and their alliance with special interests. This can only be done with a New Majority Party without input from the corrupt political system we have today.

+1

Agreed that the financial crisis was caused by government collusion (for decades) that enabled businessmen to take gambles underwritten by the public via their cronies in the government. People WILL seek to make money - quick, easy, fast money, preferably obtained by someone else taking the risk. That's human nature. It cannot be legislated away. It cannot be controlled by government. If you try to grow government big enough to control it, it infiltrates government and you get "bought" politicians who do as big business says, or else you get crooked Latin American "big men" like Chavez or mobster oligarchs like the Russians. The flaw in the thinking of lefties is that if you just put them in control of the government, they are ideologically pure and will prevent the government from being used for the profit of the few. But any time you centralize power like that, smart, ruthless men will take control of it.

So as I see it the choice is basically between a sort of crony/mobster/oligarch government like I mention above, or else as free a market as possible, which will be ruthless and occasionally have sharp panics and corrections that burn out the dead wood. Either the power is held by government oligarchs who use the guns of government to force you to do as they wish, or the power is held by tycoons like Rockefeller. I'll take the tycoons. Our efforts would be better focused on having a very small, limited government that only protects property rights and has so little other power that there is little there worth buying or corrupting. Tycoons tend to turn to philanthropy and their fortunes tend to dissipate in the next generation or two anyway. When you can't point a gun at people to force them to do what you want, then you have to turn out products that they're willing to buy, like Rockefeller driving the price of kerosene down to the point that the average man could afford to light his home in the evenings and have more leisure time.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

But we must rid ourselves of the Demo/Repub axis and their alliance with special interests. This can only be done with a New Majority Party without input from the corrupt political system we have today.

I don't think the problem is with the political system, and I don't think a new party would solve it. A new party would be subject to the same forces the existing ones are subject to.

I think we have the problems we do because of the prevailing zeitgeist, the prevailing worldview - the egalitarianism inherent in the "all men are created equal" concept. I think we are playing that idea out to its logical conclusions. The tendency of the last several hundred years has been to extend equality deeper and deeper into society. For example, we're currently eliminating traditions that go back to the origins of humanity and extending the idea of marriage to homosexuals, in the name of equality. In the area of economics, the egalitarian goals of the 19th century Marxists and 1930s progressives have been implemented to a large extent, from socialist pension systems to socialist education systems and health care systems, etc etc. Racial quotas and racial preferences for non-whites have been implemented in the name of equality. The moral worldview underlying the modern world is egalitarianism, the idea that "equality" is a moral good and "inequality" is morally wrong.

That egalitarian moral worldview is going to have to play itself out before anything changes. The problem is that life itself is not egalitarian. Our deepest instincts for self-preservation and to "go forth and multiply" are not egalitarian. There is almost no instinct in any life form (except possibly insects) that is actually egalitarian. So when you try to impose egalitarian ideals on a fundamentally Darwinian and non-egalitarian life form like human beings and human society, you get all sorts of inefficiencies and perversions and opportunities for corruption like the financial crisis. The ideal society works in harmony with the true nature of life, which is Darwinian and competitive and not egalitarian. But we love the seeming moral beauty of the egalitarian ideal and we are going to keep butting our heads against reality until at some point (as happened to the Communists in the 1980s-1990s) reality bites us so badly that we reevaluate our fundamental moral worldviews. Either that, or we are displaced by other peoples more in tune with reality.

So all that is just to say that I don't think the parties matter. It's the underlying worldview that is the problem.

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Tycoons need to be controlled and punished if they are dishonest or cheat. Also monopolies in all forms need to be broken up, whether in business or ones that try to stop competition at the local level like charter schools.

The TBTF banks should have been broken up and their assets redeployed to solvent, well managed regional banks at the end of the AFC.

I scratch my head when the left and media demonizes honest businessmen, who finally reach after decades of toil $10 million or more in wealth, but turns a blind eye to the Clinton's and Al Gore reaching $100 million in a few years; or Pelosi, Boxer and Reid gaming the system for their wealth.

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

"As useless as knee jerk reactions and loaded emotional language"

"We are all right-wingers now"

[Mn_Mark]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

Tycoons need to be controlled and punished if they are dishonest or cheat. Also monopolies in all forms need to be broken up, whether in business or ones that try to stop competition at the local level like charter schools.

The TBTF banks should have been broken up and their assets redeployed to solvent, well managed regional banks at the end of the AFC.

I scratch my head when the left and media demonizes honest businessmen, who finally reach after decades of toil $10 million or more in wealth, but turns a blind eye to the Clinton's and Al Gore reaching $100 million in a few years; or Pelosi, Boxer and Reid gaming the system for their wealth.

Amen to that. It is a disgrace that a liar, perjeror, lout, and (allegedly) rapist like Clinton can cash in to the tune of $100 million because of his government connections (without having earned an honest dollar in his life, to my knowledge) and actually still be considered the "grand old man" of the Democratic party! Invited to make speeches, etc! This perjurer who was disbarred and disgraced the office of the presidency like he did. Unbelievable.

As far as controlling tycoons goes, I believe that as long as they respect people's property rights then there is nothing wrong with driving a hard bargain. We could try to prevent monopolies, though I have seen arguments that monopolies eventually fail on their own anyway. OPEC certainly fell apart. The danger is that as soon as you give the government enough power to tilt the playing field, the rich will buy government influence in order to tilt the playing field their way. I'd prefer a very strict social norm of respect for property rights. A very limited government with a very clear and strong set of social norms behind it: protect property rights, enforce contracts, and otherwise butt out.

But ultimately there is no ideal solution, if your ideal is fairness and equity and niceness. Because fundamentally we are Darwinian creatures competing for survival and there's just nothing fair, equal, or nice about that. There are always going to be people who are smarter and more ruthless and competitive and they are always going to get into power.

[Penguin]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

But I don't think the problem is that there are people who want to get rich and will do it by using public money to backstop their gambling if they can get away with it. The problem is the government backstopping them, guaranteeing them, bailing them out. They should have failed a long time ago...

The left-ish people blame the financial crisis on "unfettered" free markets. Their diagnosis is that there was too much freedom, and not enough fettering. They are believers in the wisdom and ability of government, so when something goes bad their instinctive analysis was that there was too much freedom and not enough government.

And a true political conservative in opposition to your position (and that of those "left-ish" folks you despise) would recognize that the system has shown again and again that it will not operate as you wish: unfettered and unabbeted at the same time.

What you propose is an excuse, a pretext. A reason to not take prudent steps to rectify a design flaw in capitalism. What you propose would take a political establishment composed of men and women who possess Herculean strength of character and and an impeccable ethical framework. In case you, and others who propose we take away sensible regulation in favor of market discipline, have not noticed we aren't exactly swamped with the type of politician who can make this happen. And the political system we have allowed to evolve doesn't exactly fall short on offering temptation to kickback, graft, and corruption.

I have heard more than a few who consider themselves dyed in the wool conservatives echo your sentiments. And I have heard these talking points issued by politicians and opinion shapers across the right of the spectrum. You're being used. The people who actually craft these talking points know very well that they cannot work in the real world. But any discipline administered would interrupt the looting and cannot be allowed.

Will

[vt]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

And there aren't design flaws in communism and socialism?

No, what is needed is reasonable regulations where people are punished, impoverished, and sent to jail. Polycrooks on the left and right get away with crimes you and I would go to jail for. Where is the independent media in this? Mia or paid off.

Until those on both sides of the spectrum are demanding equal total justice for all, we are stuck the the muck.

[Penguin]

Re: We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP money captured everything

And there aren't design flaws in communism and socialism?

No, what is needed is reasonable regulations where people are punished, impoverished, and sent to jail. Polycrooks on the left and right get away with crimes you and I would go to jail for. Where is the independent media in this? Mia or paid off.

Until those on both sides of the spectrum are demanding equal total justice for all, we are stuck the the muck.

Of course those other systems have design flaws. Big ones. Fatal ones. But so does capitalism. And advocating of a return to policies already shown to be deeply and irreversibly flawed is not conservative, it is stupid... unless of course you already know it won't work but are interested in making profit from the looting. And that's my point, it is high time that the adults in the room say enough. We've seen more than enough already to know that 100 years hasn't altered the human nature. This stuff still doesn't work.

Let the children sit around in the coffee bars debating Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Time for the adults to name this anarchist lunacy for what it is, an adolescent masturbatory fantasy.

As for both sides demanding equal and total justice? I agree. My contention is that identity politics short-circuits this mechanism. And further that it does so from both the right and the left of the political spectrum.... many may disagree. I still believe it to be true though and have for years.

Will