What makes you think non-white folks are jumping all over themselves to vote for Democrats or progressives at all? If it turned out that way it'd be a big plus, but that's hardly a lock. Until the Republicans hung themselves with their own immigration rope, they were doing quite well thank you with Hispanics and making inroads among younger African-American voters.

As for the "Black freedom struggle", yes, that was a dominant issue in the 1960's - 40 years ago. Perhaps we can adapt to the intervening history and allow that other factors are important in shaping present political perspectives?

Posted at September 3, 2007 10:40 AM in response to The Bulldozer and the Big Tent

Like it or not, but Buckley/Reagan/Norquist/Gingrich advanced a set of principles.

1) Build
Democrats also believe that society (and thus government) has a key role in building the future, from building actual infrastructure to restraining destructive behavior to making decades-long investments. To be a full-throated Democrat, you have to be comfortable with a certain base level of societal engineering. Since LBJ, we have not been able to achieve consensus on what build means for national security. Even so, when we all examine our laundry lists of priorities, this is where the bulk of tax dollars go: infrastructure and society-building projects. Republicans believe that centralized plans always get it wrong and that individuals and businesses ought only to be bound by property rights.

2) Fair
We hold fairness as a central political goal - that all people should have a fair shot at a good and dignified life, no matter where they live, what they drive or what language their parents speak, and that people need help and supports to accomplish this. We never exactly agree on how much help is right, or who gets what when, but we all agree that society (and thus government) should help people. This is a little controversial even among people who believe in it, but it rarely amounts to nearly as much money as 1). Republicans by contrast basically believe that this help is inducement to laziness and that people ought to help themselves.

3) Think
At least since the 60s, if not well before, Democrats have been the party of thinking. We seek to understand reality so that we can build fair plans that work and can be improved upon. We (and especially the intellectuals dominating the blogosphere) run the risk of getting happily wrapped up in the complexities and being unable to articulate simple points. By contrast, Republicans believe in bending reality to their will to achieve moral certainty.

Over the last 30 years Republicans have consistently flipped our principles on their head to define us negatively:
Build turns us into the socialist authoritarians who want to sacrifice people's lives to government decision-mking, fair turn us into the enablers of the lazy and parasitic in society, and think shows us as spineless pussies who prefer to noodle over things than take strong stands.

They will always use these arguments against us, but only they gain force when we can't define ourselves. So intellectual or not, Gitlin's book and the drive to come to agreement on collaboration of movement and party and on the best articulation of principles is something we need to keep working on.

Posted at September 3, 2007 10:29 AM in response to The Bulldozer and the Big Tent

I want them to take a vigilant, ideologically enlightened, critical view of politicians and of each other.

This appears to be your real beef, and the rest is au jus. And you sure would appear to be lining up behind the old anti-institutional activist stance beloved of the Old New Left - question authority, institutionalism bad, fight-fight-fighting good. I don't buy it. Democrats in general are witheringly critical of our elected politicians, and tepidly loyal to our party. As Bill Clinton once put it, "Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans just fall in line" and that kills us. One of Markos' stated goals (and evidently a tacit goals of most of the others) is to develop a party identity. This means being somewhat uncritical of the party for the most part.

As for what the blogs bring, I think Atrios put it best when he noted that the progressive blogs gave liberals a common storyline after years of fragmentation. That kind of shared story and identity is a key ingredient for political movements. That the blogs provide that and focus energy around it a profound improvement for those of us on the left.

All that said, I'm with you that breathless blog triumphalism and is just as annoying as any other kind of breathless futurism and definitely deserves to get beat on. The blogs no more run American politics than does my grandmother, and the preening stance that they are is counterproductive.

Posted at May 11, 2007 3:22 PM in response to NOTROOTS

That's just it. Sometimes people's deeply held belief do offend you or me or someone else, but to broadly label them offensive doesn't work at all.

There are an awful lot of people who, for better or for worse, have a lot less clarity about the issue of sexism that you do - except that it doesn't enter their "sphere of irreparably wrong" enough to drive them away from the Catholic church altogether. But that's not to say they necessarily endorse sexism or believe that God created women to serve men. Particularly since what they draw from the Catholic church and practice personally is often a lot more about tradition and continuity with the past and with community than with particularly noxious dogmatic stances.

I don't happen to agree with a lot of the church's position on contraception and abortion. But I'd be hard pressed to want a debate with my more conservative Catholic friends over whether they really truly think women should serve men, because it'll end up in a fight over absolutes where nobody changes their opinion. Most people I've met just don't view the subject in that high-stakes a light, and if what we as liberals want is to encourage pluralism, then perhaps we ought not try take up the debate in that fashion. Doubly so if we're hoping to engage them on issues I also care about and where we do agree: opposition to the death penalty and war, justice and help for the poor, etc.

Posted at February 21, 2007 11:59 AM in response to Criticizing religions that have offensive beliefs

(Apologies in advance for the wordiness of this post)

Your points are fair that the beliefs are and ought to be subject to debate. That's what it means to have differing views.

But there is a space where people simply cannot debate or even really examine their beliefs. At risk of of simplifying or misrepresenting your beliefs, you believe in a bedrock way, that denying women the right to choose whether or not to have a child is wrong in a fundamental human rights kind of way. Not negotiable, no ifs ands or buts; a firmament of sorts. If I were opposed to abortion being legal I could debate you all I like, but to change that set of beliefs would really involve changing your worldview rather than you conceding particular points. But there are boundaries to that firmament - not everything is non-negotiable or outright wrong. For most religious people, religion itself helps define those boundaries.

The wrongness of some things is so clear to everyone (murder is wrong, random imprisonment is wrong, etc.) that there's little debate about how the law ought to work. But the wrongness of other things is a lot less clear, so within society can either debate those things amongst ourselves, try to assume power to force our view, or pretend there are no differences.

The boundaries of right and wrong are what is not being adequately respected, and at issue here. I would say liberals subscribe by and large (and practice somewhat less) a view of tolerance - we can agree on some wrongs that need to be addressed, and for the others we just figure out how to compromise and/or live with the things others are doing that we think are wrong. In a word, pluralism. Liberals sometime mistake this for secularism, and that's a mistake. Reaching this compromise does not require separating debate from faith, but rather finding the ways one's faith can coexist with the conflicting elements of the faith of others

That's how I read Ed's comments, and it tends to be what I think about. You apparently believe in a much more black and white view of sexism than many others do, which puts you at odds with those who either don't thing it's a wrong, or put it within the sphere of "debatably wrong" or "it's complex".

That's your right of course, but to move from there to saying that the Catholic church's teachings are anti-human rights because they fail to acknowledge sexism as the black-and-white wrong you see it to be is a strong charge. I would hate to say it's out of bounds, because that's just stifling, but it's hard to see how that will work in a pluralist framework. Catholics attach a lot of value beyond the literal to the teachings of the Catholic church, so to suggest that their teachings are ingrained with a deep wrong doesn't open much room for public debate, and can well offend people. The title of this post, for example, appears to frame things that way by leading with "[wrongheaded - sic] religions with offensive beliefs". That's approximately where I have to check out - I don't think that framing of the debate is productive, no matter how many other equivalences exist, and it basically moots the other good arguments you're making.

Posted at February 21, 2007 9:51 AM in response to Criticizing religions that have offensive beliefs

It truly does. Not only is there the chance that a Democrat will get to work with a surplus or balanced budget, but it was a big part of restoring the public's trust in Democratic fiscal prudence. Leaving the country with a surplus is the best thing Clinton ever did for the party, and unlike the endless triangulation and yammering about the middle, this really got through to voters.

To be successful over any sustained period, Democrats have to reassure people that government can be a responsible and effective vehicle to use society's resources to solve pressing problems. The entire run of Republican power has been based on the demagoguery that government is incapable of spending money wisely. Now that the Democrats are in a position to distinguish Republican squandering and theft of tax dollars from restrained and effective government spending, they must hammer that distinction home. Nothing does that more clearly than PAYGO.

Posted at January 23, 2007 6:57 AM in response to Does PAGO make sense?

Your point is very well taken, Daniel. But what stands out to me in Reed's argument is precisely what I hear from an investor friend who has lived in China for nearly a decade.

He constantly remarks on how much more dynamic the Chinese economy is than ours, how people are willing to work harder and risk more than Americans are. Some of that is the natural consequence of our wealth - it's not risk-taking to work 22 hours a day in the US, it's a dumb undervaluation of leisure.

They key dots Reed's trying to connect are between well-functioning markets, long-range planning and active government participation in keeping markets healthy. But if we are to build consensus for any policy prescriptions to do just that, we have to show people how and why we are suffering from ossification in the American economy.

That's a rather tricky political endeavour: the counterculturally-tinged anti-corporatism of the old "New Left" seems only to arouse cynicism, not passion for healthy government action, while the business-is-good stance of the DLC doesn't project enough mastery over business. Democrats somehow need to project the message that we want to bring corporate profits and control back into line, not drown it in the bathtub or dine out with it.

Returning to Daniel's original comment, despite our staggering debt and colossal waste of defense dollars, our many advantages can last us a long term, and certainly allow us the time to make profound changes gradually. Since that takes time, we can only hope that the Dems are ready to organize for the long term.

Posted at December 20, 2006 2:43 PM in response to Ben Bernanke and the Qianlong Emperor

Max, can you give us a little more (possibly even a full post) on the subject of labor force participation? I'm not an economist, but from what I read on the web and see here in Pittsburgh, there's a large off-the-books component of rising wealth and income inequality that has to do with people losing higher-paid jobs and refusing to take lower-paid jobs or giving up on employment in general. To my mind, this is where the gaps in education and dislocation assistance hit hardest, not in short-term unemployment figures.

Has anyone calculated the contribution of this effect to income inequality? An even more sophisticated version of this would be to look at underemployment and classify it into non-participation or long-term unemployment vs. temporary lack of full employment. Any words of wisdom?

Posted at December 12, 2006 9:04 AM in response to The Five Boxes of Populist Economics

If your comment is primarily on the tone of the post, I can understand your reaction - I find that the esteemed Ms. Warren's much-appreciated zeal for bringing to light these issues and other threats to middle class economic security sometimes prompts her to describe things in more dire terms than the full picture may suggest.

But I think you do yourself a disservice by ignoring this passage:

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of families that took on huge mortgage debts based on the ephemeral peak values of their properties. In effect, they cashed in on the housing boom without cashing out. As Ed Smith Jr., the chief executive of Plaza Financial Group, a mortgage brokerage firm near San Diego, said, “So many people picked up their homes, turned them upside down and shook them like a piggy bank.”

The withdrawals have been so big that the average household in Boston now has slightly less equity in its home than it did in 2000, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com that took inflation into account. That's a lot debt, and whether the mortage broker eats some and the owner the rest, that loss has to be reported in the books and represents a loss of wealth somewhere in the system. And the only reason that the loan holders are willing to take that kind of loss is that they have generally passed a lot of the risk on to the Maes and/or the securities market. So there are a lot of layers you have to peel back to see what's really going on.

The other point to consider is that a fundamentally speculative real estate market (you can't lose money on real estate... they're not making any more land) causes people to ignore the size of the transaction fees they stand to lose. If your closing costs add up to some $6000-$10000, even if you ignore negative equity and the interest you don't get back, and you end up only losing the closing costs in some kind of forced refinancing deal, that's a pretty big hit for most middle class families, similar to totalling the car without any insurance coverage. But a speculative market and cheap mortgages cause people to ignore these costs and risks because they "pay for themselves". Except that when you turn them back into real money, they put a serious dent in people assets.

Posted at December 6, 2006 3:01 PM in response to Fake Numbers Mute the Sound of the Housing Crash

I agree that some technological leaps are not out of the question - nanotechnology is really moving rather quickly now, and with some decent investment, fuel cell and nancarbon energy research could probably move relatively quickly as well.

However, there are downsides to disruptive technology, and we haven't even dealt that well with the last round of disruptions. We have done litle to provide adequate education to get a big swath of workers around the corner from the industrial economy to the information economy, which has pushed a lot of middle class families into low-wage jobs, early retirement, or marginal levels of employment. Even more thorough penetration by existing technology (e.g. any sort of improved efficiencies in record handling and claims processing in the medical industry) would throw a lot people out of work. While the specific technologies named may have long-term employment-creating effects, they are sure to provoke futher dislocation (e.g. a switch to noncarbon fuels would involve massive restructuring in the energy industry), and those workers would need to be absorbed. We are not dealing well with current disruptions and are ill prepared to deal with future ones. To my mind this means we need to consider measures that slow the pace of economic change, from temporary trade barriers to regulation slowing the entrance of these technologies into the economic mainstream, so that we can better deal with the consequences of that change for workers.

All that said, I find it very hard to believe that disruptive technology can completely save us from some seriously bad fiscal underliers of our economy, from risky mortgages back by implicit trust in a bailout to deficit spending to a negative savings rate. And the weaking of the climate for science and science education in this country makes it more likely (though this is still less likely than not) that the big winners of new technology will not be in the US
So we may catch a break from technology, but we still need to fix a lot of our deficient practices.

Posted at November 25, 2006 4:23 PM in response to The Red Queen's Money