Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

FIGHTING WORDS

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Matt Taibbi: “Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat.”

Will: “At a bus stop in Surda an angry young man with a Palestinian flag on his T-shirt throws a rock at me and misses. Outside a pizza joint in West Jerusalem an angry young man with an orange ribbon on his backpack throws a bottle at me and misses.”

Geoffrey Stone: “A democratic society must protect itself against violent attack, but it cannot do so by preventing its citizens from hearing even sinister criticism that defends the use of violence.”

Katha Pollitt: “Exposing the constraints on women’s choices, however, is only one side of feminism. The other is acknowledging women as moral agents, trusting women to decide what is best for themselves. For [Feminists for Life] there’s only one right decision: Have that baby.”

THE WEEK IN, UM, ME

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Just got back tonight from a great week in Cali with the mishpuchah. Turns out that jellyfish aren’t fish, there were no birds at Alcatraz, and “Half Dome” isn’t particularly dome-like (though it is particularly awesome).

“But enough about your vacation,” you say, “how about your sprawling media empire?” Funny you should ask.

Just kidding.

Absence of a sprawling media empire notwithstanding, I am happy to report that Josh Marshall, in a valiant effort to give me something to do this summer that (unlike learning to drive and speak Spanish) doesn’t fall under the category of “Finally getting around to what everyone else did in high school,” generously asked me last month to be a Research Fellow over at TPMCafe. I’ve been working with a great group of folks over there on the Auction House, our attempt to keep up with the many-splendored series of scandals surrounding The Hammer and his tools. It’s been a blast so far, and I’m sure will continue to be. My first Auction House post, a look at DeLay and Abramoff’s sketchiest mutual friends, went up last week. Think of it as (with pretty insincere apologies to fellow Akiba Hebrew Academy alum Mitch Albom) Six People You Don’t Meet in Heaven. Check it out.

GOING WEST

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Most years in my family, we talk about going somewhere we’ve never been before on vacation and then go to the Jersey shore instead. This time, looks like we’re actually following through on the plan to head out to San Francisco for a week. More from me once we get back, including some good news about a new project.

Peace.

NEAR-VICTORY HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS

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Democrats got the closest thing to a surprise electoral victory we’ve had in a while on Tuesday when Paul Hackett pulled over 48% in the most Republican district in Ohio. Understandably, spin machines on all sides have been in overdrive in the week since to claim vindication in the results. Case in point: Ed Kilgore’s claim that Hackett made it to 48% because the unreconstructed liberals in the “netroots” were willing to face facts, eschew their litmus tests, and let Hackett run with the kind of centrism the DLC has been shopping around the country:

The best sign, IMO, is that all this excitement was generated on behalf of a candidate nicely tailored to a “red” district, whose policy views probably were at odds with those of a lot of the folks generating the excitement and the cash. And I gather the national groups and bloggers involved in Hackett’s campaign let the candidate and his staff call all the important shots.

Reading Kilgore’s take, you’d think Hackett was a regular Zell Miller – or at least a conservative Democrat, emphasis on the conservative, like Ken Salazar. It makes good copy if your organization is devoted to pulling the party away from the left: in a sudden fit of reasonableness, the liberal fringe recognizes reality and gets behind the centrist candidate who can win. Trouble is, Paul Hackett is no Ken Salazar. Don’t take it from me – check out his website. He bucks the party on guns, but otherwise, he’s in or to the left of the mainstream of the House Democrats. Not only is he resolutely opposed to Bush’s social security privatization scheme, he takes the step most Americans support but too many Democrats are afraid to talk about: calling for an increase in the cap on the payroll tax (hear that suggested by the DLC recently? Didn’t think so). He condemns outsourcing, and rather than echoing GOP rhetoric about “big government,” he exposes it for the sham argument that it is. And on perhaps the signal issue of the campaign – the war in Iraq – he stands well to the left not only of the DLC of a significant chunk of the Democratic party in the House. If not for his being a veteran, one would expect the DLC to respond to his rhetoric opposing the decision to go to war with the usual hand-wringing about the party’s flagging credibility on national security.

Of course, if Paul Hackett hadn’t been a veteran, it would have been a very different race. But if all Kilgore means is that liberals conceded to pragmatists by getting behind a veteran, then the obvious question is whhere he got the idea that liberals in their hearts of hearts would rather have men and women in Congress who’ve never served in war. Maybe by reading all those DLC memos about how the Democratic party has no credibility on national security.

Bottom line is, if Paul Hackett had tanked, we’d be hearing from the conservative wing of the party about how his unreconstructed liberalism failed to resonate with mainstream voters. Making Hackett out to be an extreme left-winger would certainly be less of a leap for them than it was to make one out of John Kerry or Al Gore.

FIGHTING WORDS

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(The first in an intermittent series of round-ups of progressive thought from print and on-line media, with hopes of better contenting the pro-block quote and anti-block quote blocs among our readership)

Jo-Ann Mort: “the fact is that in progressive circles, where it’s considered unacceptable to be racist, homophobic,anti-environment or anti-feminist, it’s been okay to cross picket lines, look down on service and blue collar workers, and frequent anti-union businesses and purchase anti-union goods.”

Matt Yglesias: “Every once in a long while, there comes along a brave white person — employed by other white persons, writing primarily for an audience of white people, in a country dominated by white people — with the courage to demand that national policy be shifted in a manner more favorable to the interests of white people.”

John Lewis: “Some Americans believe that when the founding fathers declared this a democratic republic, our task was done. But democracy is not a state, it is an act.”

THE OTHER SIDE OF ROE

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One of the more interesting points William Saletan makes in Bearing Right is that as long as a sizeable number of Americans believes neither that a woman has a right to choose nor that a fetus has a right to life, we’ll continue to see employers, judges, parole officers, and others pushing policies which should trouble those who believe in either – policies which deny pregnant women who want to carry a fetus to term, or women who want to retain the ability to get pregnant in the future, the chance to do so. The case studies Saletan explores show that when the issue is mandatory abortion, pro-choicers and “pro-life” activists have generally been united in defending a woman’s right to choose birth, though in cases where the issue is mandatory sterilization, “pro-life” organizations have too often stood with those who would take away a woman’s or man’s reproductive autonomy, whether permanently or for the duration of coercively-implemented injections.

The ultimate line of legal defense for women told that sacrificing the chance to have a child is the cost of a job or a parole is that much-maligned but nationally popular decision, Roe v. Wade. One of these women is April Thompson, who is suing Piedmont Management Associates for firing her over her decision to remain pregnant:

According to the lawsuit, when Ebert found out Thompson was seeing a fertility doctor, she told her she was “worried that she was trying to get pregnant.” “If you get pregnant, you will have to move because I am not putting up with any babies around here and you also won’t have a job,” the lawsuit says Ebert told Thompson. “The guys and I do not even hire single mothers because of the problems. I know you have some great delusion that you will be a great mother, but you won’t — you can’t even take care of your dog.”…According to the lawsuit, when Ebert found out, she demanded that Thompson get an abortion.

April Thompson is a poster child for the centrality of privacy and workers’ rights to the pursuit of happiness this country promises. And her case represents the danger of a jurisprudence which would elevate an ostensible “free contract” right to sign away your personal freedom over individual rights, and the judgment of the state over the bodily integriy and autonomy of the individual. It reminds us why, if John Roberts still sees Roe as “unprincipled jurisprudence” and scoffs at a “so-called right to privacy,” and plans to remain the “go-to lawyer for the business community, then America deserves better than John Roberts on the Supreme Court.

PROGRESSIVE POPULISM

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Having suggested what I think are some of the very different concepts in play in the dominant discussion of populism, and argued that one that’s ubiquitous in those discussions – prejudice – is out of place, it’s only fair that I take a stab at setting forth what the concept of populism is that’s in play when I call myself a populist and urge the Democrats to take on the mantle and meaning of populism. I won’t bother to argue that the conception of populism I’ll put forth here is somehow more real or historically accurate than the others floating around. What I feel strongest about when it comes to how use the word itself is simply, as I said yesterday, that the conflation of populism and prejudice by economic elites is deeply disingenuous, reflects a deeply entrenched class bias, and underpins a long-term campaign to mark the majority unfit to govern and its criticism of corporate power rank demagoguery.

That said, here are a few of the contentions which I think underpin a progressive populism:

The contention that a healthy economy is one in which the benefits of growth and prosperity should be shared and spread across society.

The contention that a just economy is one in which working people exercise a meaningful voice in the conditions and rewards of their work and in economic policy within and between nations.

The contention that basic human freedoms and opportunities are universal rights, across lines of race, sex, class, and nation, and not provisional privileges.

The contention that the ability of individuals to connect the conditions and challenges of their own lives to those of others, and to their political ideals, has the potential to propel progress.

The contention that policy and democracy both suffer when certain sets of experience are driven out of public discourse.

The contention that for a politician to seek out and fight for more votes is not the moral equivalent of seeking out and fighting for more dollars.

The contention that a willful compact to preserve individual rights by entrusting certain decisions to more insulated institutions is different from and preferable to the unauthorized handover of decisions to enfranchised elites and experts.

The contention that the political victories which last are the ones with popular mandates.

POPULISM IS NOT PREJUDICE

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A week ago, I took a shot at teasing out six of the concepts in play in the dominant discourse about populism in the US: progressive economics; direct democracy; trust in crowds; democratic legitimacy; prejudice; and economic focus. The responses I got suggest that some folks read what I wrote as a stab at defining what populism is, or even advocating what it should be. I’m sorry for the confusion; I don’t think those six components at all represent what populism is or should be.

In particular, I decided after some consideration to include prejudice on the list not because I see prejudice as an intrinsic feature of populism or even a common corollary to it, but because recognizing the explicit or often implicit argument that populists are bigots is crucial to understanding the way populism is generally discussed in the media by people who are themselves, not coincidentally, members of elites.

Truth is I don’t think there’s anything particularly bigoted about populism, anymore than there’s anything particularly bigoted about democracy as a system of government. I do think that the tendency of elite pundits, be they Joe Klein or Paul Krugman, to associate populism and prejudice is itself worthy of explanation, much like the stock movie moment where we recoil in extra horror because the guy with glasses and a degree is taking out his torture instruments (“But he’s a professional! How can he be acting like a brute?”). As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, in Fear of Falling, about the elite’s discovery of a working class onto which to project its own anxieties in the wake of 1968:

This discovery ocurred at what was for many middle-class intellectuals a time of waning confidence and emerging conservatism. Professional authority was under attack; permissiveness seemed already to have ruined at least one generation of middle-class youth. And so, in turning to the working class, middle-class observers tended to seek legitimation for their own more conservative impulses.

In tweaking Martin Lipset’s “Working-Class Authoritarianism” thesis, Ehrenreich draws (inter alia) on the work of Richard F. Hamilton, who found that it was the wealthy and well-off who sparked trends like lynching in the American South. Hamilton found much stronger support for Nazism – the specter which inspired a generation of intellectuals to fear mass movements – among “wealthy urbanites and rural gentry” than working-class Germans. That’s not to dispute that the spread of noxious bigotry amongst majorities in comparatively democratic countries is a chilling warning against putting too much faith in the wisdom of crowds. But it is to say that there’s no reason to entrust a narrow elite to better steer clear of atrocity than the rest of society. The scariest effect of the credulence in the “Working-Class Authoritarianism” hypothesis is less an exaggeration of the prejudices of the majority than a blindness to the prejudices of the minority.

It’s difficult to enumerate, let alone count, the levels of outrageousness in Grover Norquist’s comparison a couple years ago between Nazis singling out non-Aryans for murder and the American electorate singling out the extraordinarily wealthy for a tax on the transmission of extraordinary wealth between generations. But a weaker version of his argument undergirds an unsettling amount of the pundits’ discourse on populism: The impulse of a majority to demand more from a minority is always bullying, always bigotry, no less so when the minority in question is those who have colossal fortunes to pass on than when the majority in question is Jews or Blacks. Such a hypothesis seems to inspire Joe Klein’s argument earlier this summer that America faces a struggle between a

Party of Sanity, representing the pragmatic centrism of the business and professional elites, and a Party of Passion, representing populist anger about outsourcing, illegal immigration, social permissiveness and Bush’s overseas activism…there appears to be a growing market for a moderate version of “America First” populism, which has been represented in recent presidential elections only by extremists like Pat Buchanan and Dennis Kucinich. The outlines of this product are well known: more restrictive trade and illegal-immigration policies, a “bring the troops home soonest” foreign policy and a more conservative view of social issues like abortion and gay marriage…[populists] agree on neo-isolationist, nativist and protectionist issues…Populists of both strains tend to believe that the system is rigged by dark and powerful forces that prevent the little guy from getting ahead, which means they tend to be angry…In the end, the only plausible path out of the current morass is for the Party of Sanity to regain control of the political process from the partisans now running it into the ground.

In other words: Resenting Jews, resenting immigrants, resenting homosexuals, resenting obscenely wealthy CEOs who drive a global race to the bottom by downgrading, devaluing, and firing the employees whose work makes their wealth possible – what’s the difference? (As Sesame Street used to teach, “One of these things is not like the other ones…”) In Klein’s worldview, anger is unseemly, and there are lots of angry people (he offers Feingold and Brownback as examples), who thus have more in common with each other than with the saving remnant of non-angry, eminently reasonable “business and professional elites” with everyone’s best interest – even that of all those angry people – at heart. And why should we trust this elite with the masses’ well-being? Because the masses are hateful, just like all masses always are – remember Pat Buchanan?

Trouble is, what if there are indeed some powerful people out there with massively more power to set the terms of “the system,” however defined, than the rest of us, and with – dare I say it – interests of their own which may not represent those of most Americans (some might dare call those interests “dark”)? What if that elite is indeed making it harder for “the little guy” to carve out a dignified and rewarding life for him or herself? Might it be that this guy – be he feeling angry, hopeful, or otherwise – has better options at hand than entrusting his future to Joe Klein and his army of Sanity?

LABOR ROUND-UP ROUND-UP

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Are we meta, or what?

Nathan Newman’s labor news round-up brings together stories on the implications of the AFL-CIO split, its local impact, future organizing opportunities, state law, and the international movement.

The Bellman’s zwichenzug followed up that round-up with a labor blogging round-up of his own, bringing together a range of views on issues from the historical meaning of the split to open-source unionism to the UAW’s endorsement (this site makes it in there too).

Now that the cries of the people (both of them) have brought the reign of the ubiquitous block-quotes to an end on this site, I’ll just plead with you, kind reader, to follow those links.

CULTURAL CRITICISM, LEFT AND RIGHT

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A series of dust-ups in the media about the media this summer – from the flap on Kos about an ad with women mudwrestling to Jon Stewart’s arguments with Bernard Goldberg, Zell Miller, and Rick Santorum about whether the culture has coarsened – has gotten me thinking about the different ways liberals and conservatives consider and critique what’s in the movies and on TV.

One clear but too-often-obscured distinction is between criticism and calls for censorship. Rick Santorum gets at this in his book when he insists in his book that “If it’s legal, it must be right…it must be moral.” If one accepts Santorum’s frame – which is also Catherine McKinnon’s – then the question of what should be in the media and the question of what should be censored from the media are – at least in particularly agregious cases – mapped onto each other. Too often, progressives answer other progressives’ media criticism as if it were an implicit call for censorship, rather than as the “more speech” which the left has traditionally and rightly seen as the answer to bad speech.

Liberal and conservative approaches to media criticism are also distinguished by choice – or at least prioritization – of boogeymen from amongst sex, violence, bigotry, et al. And, arguably, by the question of how much we should care at all.

But related, and – I think – more interesting – is a distinction I haven’t seen discussed: Is the problem what kind of behaviors and images are shown on TV, or what kind of ideology is advanced there? Do we care what the media exposes or what it endorses? By asking the question and making the distinction, I guess, I’ve already pegged myself in the liberal camp that says that the distinction is a meaningful one and that what’s endorsed is a more worthwhile ground for consideration or condemnation than what’s exposed. That’s not to say that it’s possible to present images or actions with neutrality – only that it’s possible to present the same ones with a whole range of meanings and judgments.

If we’re concerned about sex, we can worry about whether sex happens on TV or we can worry about whether the sex on TV is portrayed as a good or bad (or healthy or unhealthy, or cool or uncool) thing. If we’re concerned about sexism, we can worry about whether people are portrayed being or acting sexist on TV or we can worry about whether that sexism is presented in a favorable light. In each case, I’d say that if you see the thing as an evil (my take: sexism is, sex isn’t), your time and energy is better spent worrying about how good or bad that evil is portrayed to be than about how often it appears on the screen.

That’s why the fixation on nudity on TV is doubly conservative – conservative for the contention that human sexuality is what media consumers should be guarded against and conservative for the concern over the naked image itself rather than the social meaning with which it appears. Sure it’s easier to keep a tally of naked breasts than of positive portrayals of behaviors you think are negative, but the tendency of right-wing critics to go for the former approach seems to be about more than convenience. And that approach – grouping together breasts shown breast-feeding, breasts shown in an intimate moment between spouses, and breasts shown on a child being molested – leaves them looking that much more like middle-schoolers.

Among the problems with an approach to media criticism which fixates on what viewers are exposed to rather than what they see endorsed is that it lets pass all kinds of social meanings which are problematic but not explicit. Whatever your values, your chances of seeing them spread in society are affected more by G-rated movies than Playboy.

WHERE ARE THE CATHOLIC WORKER POLS?

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As Matt Yglesias observes, the relative absence of economically liberal social conservative politicians isn’t based on any lack of voters with that set of views. Michael Lind has an interesting take on it in Up From Conservatism. I still don’t know where he got the idea that the number of Americans “who sincerely believe both that abortions should be outlawed and that there should be further massive tax cuts for the rich – is quite small” (maybe he’ll explain it over at TPMCafe). But setting aside Lind’s questionable demographic premises, I think there’s some truth to his argument that the scarcity of politicians who are socially conservative and economically liberal is related to the scarcity of members of the American elite, however defined, who are what Europeans would call “Catholic workers,” libertarians would call “authoritarians,” and Lind would call “national liberals.” Self-identified libertarians, on the other hand, are much better represented amongst the elite than amongst the American public.

FROM MISERY, PAST POVERTY

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Spurred by this Washington Post profile in which National Labor Committee Head Charles Kernaghan describes the sweatshop workers for whose rights he advocates as seeking to move “from misery to poverty”, Matt Yglesias makes the classic anti-anti-sweatshop/ anti-anti-child-labor arguments:

people who don’t have sweatshop jobs are miserable. So miserable, in fact, that the terrible conditions in sweatshops are better than their best other alternative. Closing down the sweatship option would seem to just force everyone to stick with misery…as long as the alternative to sweatshops is what anti-sweatship activists concede to be misery, then people will want the sweatshop jobs and it’ll be mighty hard for rich country liberals to stop corporations from making them available.

The assumptions Matt seems to be making here are the same ones for which Richard Rothstein took Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman to task last spring in Dissent. First is the idea that somehow Charles Kernaghan, the National Labor Committee and company are pushing Nike and company to pack up and leave the countries in which their agents are operating sweatshops. Put simply, they’re not. Neither is United Students Against Sweatshops, for that matter. The call is for basic working standards and fundamental human freedoms. The call is for codes of conduct which would be applied around the world, with wage standards based on local costs of living. As Keraghan tells the Post right after describing the aspiration of many in the third world to move from misery to poverty,

he gets angry when he recalls what a worker told him in Bangladesh: “If we could earn 37 cents an hour, we could live with a little dignity.” (As opposed to the 21-cent hourly wage that barely staved off starvation.) Another Bangladeshi worker told him of being smacked in the face by her boss when she worked too slowly. “It just destroys me,” he says.

What’s going to push that worker’s wages up from 21 cents towards 37 cents? Conservatives and neoliberals would have us put our faith in the free market’s grace in rewarding increased productivity with higher wages for low-wage workers as employers compete for the best sweatshop workers. But as Rothstein reminds us, that’s not how the story went in our own country. How did sweatshop workers in this country improve their working conditions and bring themselves real economic freedom? In part through judicious use of government to enshrine common labor standards in laws of the kind the anti-anti-sweatshop crowd tell us would condemn workers of the third world to eternal poverty. And in part through collective action of the kind for which workers around the world are fired or murdered. The anti-anti-sweatshop critics who insist that the eager workers of the third world are being victimized by misguided do-gooders from the first world might better expend their energies advancing the rights of those workers to stand up for themselves and for each other without fear of retaliation. That, incidentally, is exactly what Charles Kernaghan is doing.