Darb's post is a showcase for what might be his best quality as a writer: self-awareness and awareness of others' positions. He really understands his critics on the right and left.

I think he is correct to absolve himself of concern trolling because he really is part of the same intellectual project as the center-right types.

I wonder if I am correct in reading Darb as issuing an ultimatum -- both to his center-right interlocutors and to himself. "If you can't bring yourself to publicly acknowledge a few pieces of basic reality, then I'm going to have to admit that we aren't working together toward the same set of intellectual goals."

Failing to require a #nevertrump litmus test seems wise.

Is this saying the opposite of what it's intended to mean? Or is Brad's point that in this case being wise is a bad idea?

Darb and Nick avoided any ugly, inflammatory language, but heebie came right out and used the n-word: neoliberal.

I am enough older than heebie to have been a witting fan of Clinton's approach. My generation remembers that the alternative was Bush/Quayle or stuff that was even worse. And hey, properly functioning markets really are a great boon to civilization! Like Elizabeth Warren, "I am a capitalist to my bones."

Even today, I'd take shitty middle-ground compromises in a heartbeat, if they were on offer. What Darb is in the process of realizing, I think, is that even his pals in the center-right have prior commitments that negate the possibility of a meaningful meeting of the minds on public policy.

The only option for decent people now is to win -- or lose.

That's two options.

And hey, properly functioning markets really are a great boon to civilization! Like Elizabeth Warren, "I am a capitalist to my bones."

Obligatory reminder that Warren was a registered Republican right up to 1996 - so, effectively, a Gingrich Republican - because she didn't think that the Democrats had enough faith in markets.
Alex the Yorkshire Ranter makes a very good distinction here between three sorts of right-wing politician: the pro-market, the pro-business and the pro-wealth. http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/26/pro-market-pro-business-or-just-pro-wealth/

2: I'm thinking the emphasis in that sentence was meant to be on the word "seems," and some transitional language is missing between that and the next thought.

Here's my rewrite:

Failing to insist on #nevertrump seems wise, but isn't. Admittedly, a nevertrump litmus test is unlikely to lead to power and Fox News. But it is the right thing to do.

Maybe Darb will come by to clarify.

I am also a couple of years older than Heebie and remember being excited about Clinton at the time, and have occasionally defended him since (in limited ways). I still think that one of the most important things about Clinton as a president was how rarely he used fear as a motivator and how much his political energy was about improving things rather than protecting against attack. But I think the quoted paragraphs are a good description of why Clintonism doesn't matter politically at this point.

I think part of what's going on here was that a consistent problem with Clinton-style neoliberals was that they were reflexively suspicious of anyone an inch to their left -- not only did they think they could work with the Republican grownups, they thought the only grownups they could work with were the Republicans. I never understood what the driver behind that was, but it seems to have faded.

I never understood what the driver behind that was, but it seems to have faded.

There was a strong cultural movement in the '70s and '80s toward tolerance, and a stronger backlash that put Democrats in danger of becoming a permanent minority.

After a dozen years of getting the shit beat out of them, Democrats believed they needed to look to the right to assemble a governing majority. This seemed so reasonable at the time that liberals and minorities themselves largely bought into it. And let's face it, Obama came from this tradition, too, so it's not like it's some kind of weird ancient history.

5: That's an enlightening post. I haven't read that blog, but will now.

>>>Obama came from this tradition, too

Yep. And his repeated failed attempts to find another adult in the room with whom to compromise probably killed off any lingering enthusiasm for neoliberalism among a lot of people (like me).

Me too.

So I disagree with 9. It wasn't a chiefly a question of political tactics. It was a question of what they believed. The New Democrats really believed that the failures of Communism, and of Social Democracy in the 70s, showed that society fundamentally had to be re-organized around markets and limited government to work. Like this is what Obama said about Reagan, and I think Brad De Long and the Rubin wing would have agreed wholeheartedly:

"He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people just tapped into -- he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/21seelye-text.html?module=inline

They were much more afraid of breadlines, stagflation, and "Third Worldism" than they were of Gordon Gecko, heightening inequality, and precarity, because they thought that the former were worse problems. They looked to their right for collaboration more than their left because they agreed with them more on diagnoses and propposed solutions.

Unless I go Paleo, I'll never be afraid of bread lines.

I tend to agree with 9.last. I'm old enough to remember just how far out in the weeds the Democrats were and how "liberal" was a dirty word in the early 90s. Even if the Clintonists were also true believers, it's hard to blame them for trying something different after getting stomped on for so long.

After a dozen years of getting the shit beat out of them

And this understates the extent of the beatdown. Carter won to a great extent because of Watergate. The last time before that? 1964. We're talking a quarter-century of GrOPers beating the shit out of Dems; no wonder the DLC was ascendant, and distrusted anybody to their left. I think people today have forgotten what it was like to be down so far, that the man who destroyed "welfare as we know it"[1] could be a liberal lion, loved and respected by Dems all over.

Thank goodness those times seem to be past.

[1] Delong linked to an article (https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2019/02/25/how-welfare-reform-has-had-a-negative-effect-on-the-children-of-single-mothers ) just yesterday about how the children of mothers enrolled in those "welfare to work" programs fared worse on objective measures (school attendance, drug use). He had a remarkably pithy (for him)[2] way of assessing that article: "No sh--". And this, about a Clinton policy.

CB, these conversations almost demand over-generalization because there are always a lot of things going on at once. And the thing you describe certainly existed and was important.

But I think it misses the heart of the matter. The quote you cite -- which doesn't say a thing about politics or bigotry -- is, in my reading, Obama's effort to reckon with the politics of bigotry.

Note that even read literally, Obama is defending big government. He is merely coming out in favor of accountability. This is not just what the quote says, but it also reflects his program -- most obviously, the fiscal stimulus and Obamacare.

Here's what Obama knew but couldn't say about Reagan: "He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, government had failed to entirely maintain white supremacy. I think people just tapped into -- he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of white people running things that had been missing."

Obama knew the Reagan coalition was about two things: Promoting white supremacy and transferring money to rich people. You are no doubt aware of Lee Atwater's explanation:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Obama wanted to validate the feelings of racists without validating actual racism. So he adopted Reagan's frame and tried to use it to his advantage. Reagan himself used to talk about what a swell guy FDR was.

15, 16: These kids nowadays, they don't understand how rough we had it.

The 70s were a different time. Everybody was poor, but not economically secure.

Not economically insecure.

Very much enjoying this exchange, 13 and 16.1 are both good. Definitely I think part of the foundation for "third way" ideals' popularity (overlooking the despicable reality of the actual organization) was east bloc change.

I get where pf is coming from in 13, but I think it's overstated as written. A more nuanced statement that doesn't look at ricism in isolation :

The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia
They want to go back as far as they can ...
Even if it's only as far as last week
Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards

And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes
Riding to the rescue at the last possible moment
The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse

The performance is fantastic as well, studio version more thoughtful than the live version.
lyrics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSOp507HJMA
Thanks to C carp for mentioning this song previously

Disagreement about ricism and the corrolary unstated assumptions about breadism arte of course at the root of today's American political impasses.

Whereas the touchstone of Eastern European thinking is the suffering inflicted by flaxism and milletism.

eastern bloc collapse
And western bloc evolution. Unformed thoughts, but the collapse of Bretton Woods and migration to increasingly unregulated international finance must have had an effect on Democrats' thinking. I'm curious also how the successes of Japan and Germany were perceived in the US, whether as triumphs of market capitalism or of (state-led?) technocracy; and whether the 1980s American recovery relative to those countries was attributed by Democrats to Reagan's supposed state-shrinking (as I think they did) or to the Volcker rate hike and the Plaza devaluation (what actually happened, AFAIK).

"one of the things I was excited about, during the 2016 election, was that the political opinions of white men were no longer the sole center of gravity of the Democratic party."

I don't think this framing really works. The black political figures that have gotten traction post Clinton presidency: Obama, Harris and Booker are deeply in the centrist tradition that is going out of fashion. There was just no way for someone in the Jesse Jackson political tradition to get the prominence that the black centrist figures got. This is going to be a problem going forward for a little while.

Unformed thoughts, but the collapse of Bretton Woods and migration to increasingly unregulated international finance must have had an effect on Democrats' thinking

Nope.

I'm curious also how the successes of Japan and Germany were perceived in the US, whether as triumphs of market capitalism or of (state-led?) technocracy; and whether the 1980s American recovery relative to those countries was attributed by Democrats to Reagan's supposed state-shrinking (as I think they did) or to the Volcker rate hike and the Plaza devaluation (what actually happened, AFAIK).

There werer many many think-pieces explaining why the Japanese would defeat us. A lot of this was anti-unionism - in Japanese corporations, management and labor are all one happy family.

26. continued -- yes, of course, the U.S. recovery in the 1980s was generally attributed to Reagan. Just as the fall of the Soviet Union happened because Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the wall.

Like this is what De Long was writing in halcyon days of Clintonism (1999):

"Nevertheless, the neoliberal program is the only live utopian program in the world today.

Opposition to neoliberalism on the left seems to call for a return to effective autarchy. But if there is one lesson from economic history over the past hundred years, it is that there has been one decade -- the 1930s -- when economic autarchy was the road to relative prosperity, while there have been nine decades in which the more open to trade a country's economic policy, the faster has been economic growth. Opposition to neoliberalism on the left seems to call for a return to state control of the economy -- to the pattern of Peronism or of the PRI -- in the hope that this time the state will be not the tool of elites with little concern for development and growth but instead the faithful servant of the interests of the masses.

That is not very likely. The state can be the servant of the people only if political democracy is well-established, and not always then. To place one's chips on the maximization of the power of a not-very-democratic and not-very-developmental state does not seem a promising path for either democratization or successful industrialization. It seems to embody a remarkable unwillingness to learn from world history since the end of World War I, and an ideological-blinded refusal to ever mark one's beliefs to market."

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2018/12/delongs-principles-of-neoliberalism.html

22: At one time, I didn't approve of the use of ricin on one's political opponents, but Trump has turned me into a ricist.

28: This seems to be mainly about "the periphery" -- especially countries in which democracy was not well-established.

It seemed that the key was political democracy. With stable political democracy -- in France, in Italy, even in Spain after the fall of Franco -- social democracy could work and achieve great successes. Without political democracy it seemed that the chances of success were low (unless somehow the poorly-understood foundations of East Asia's low corruption could be duplicated). And it also seemed that the prospects for achieving stable political democracy on the periphery were rather low.

Not entirely off-topic: did pseudo centrist billionaire coffee man get drowned out by laughter finally?

31: No, he just went to Cleveland.

"I couldn't be more excited this evening," said Sari Feldman, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, by way of introduction. "When I learned that Howard Schultz agreed to come to the Cuyahoga County Public library, I almost choked on my Starbucks coffee. Everybody who knows me, knows that isn't true because I wouldn't waste one drop. I'm known for my love of my Starbucks. He has an exceptional story as an entrepreneur and it reads in many ways like the quintessential American dream, yet his unique commitment to corporate social responsibility is perhaps what most differentiates his success."

https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/news/local_news/howard-schultz-speaks-of-childhood-starbucks-and-nation-at-parma/article_2e2c5316-3b25-11e9-96cd-5bf7400e5c5b.html

Did Ohio move it's primaries into January?

Maybe Shultz finally realized independents don't run in primaries.

32 We suck, peep.

Reagan didn't just win, it was a wipe out. And the re-election was a wipe-out too. That's where the voters were, for good or ill (and mostly ill). Clintonism was a necessary step leftward, and was a near-run thing, helped by the ongoing rubble-ization on the right (Buchanan) and the unseriousness of a selection of right adults (Perot). And immediately subject to a very effective attack from the right, changing the House for the first time in several decades. People who act like there was some sort of materially lefter possibility between 1992 and 2000 strike me is as simply delusional. Actually make that 1992 to 2016. Where we are now is that the right is being actively discredited, because the values they say they represent -- which are where a whole lot of people still are -- are actively rejected by the Criminal-in-Chief and his enablers. At the same time, they are killing the very concept of Republican adulthood, because everyone on that side has to choose between being on the Trump train or being completely out.

I'm currently involved in an effort to get some minor legislation passed. Guess what: without my Republican senator, it isn't going to happen. It doesn't matter how Left anyone wants to be, the power to block legislation is real, and continues to require, right now, in 2019, compromise towards the center.

For people not actually trying to get legislation passed, obviously there no reason to suggest compromise with any Republicans. And every reason to condemn it.
Darb is right about where we are. Where we're going to go is anybody's guess. The forces of reaction and backlash aren't gone. As Yggles has argued, we're actually pretty likely to have a Republican Senate in 2021. OK, maybe it's 50/50. It's not 70/30 our way. Right now we can all hope the this isn't going to be the case, and that we can condemn the very idea of bipartisanship without reservation.

Where does this leave us? I haven't looked at the Senate map for 2022 -- maybe that's when we get GND type legislation. I wonder if the folks that are driving the bus (and Darb is right that the time of the centrist has passed) are going to keep it up. Hope so.

I haven't looked at the Senate map for 2022

It's the same as 2016, of course, so potentially some good pickup opportunities for Dems depending on the national mood. No really difficult seats to defend. Of course it all depends hugely on what happens in 2020.

@30: It may be about the periphery, but that hardly matters. The Rubenites and those ideologically simpatico spent the 90's/2000's injecting their political economic wisdom directly into the heart of the periphery through all manner of IMF and World Bank programs, and generally annihilating even the barest semblance of regulation on capital wherever and whenever they could. They were doing the same goddamn thing in the US and Europe it just took longer for the effects to become manifest.

And who knows, or cares, what Clinton believed- he's a politician - but Delong and the rest of the Ruben wing were exactly who they said they were.

They were carrying the economic torch of Reaganism. Iow, neoliberalism from front to back and nothing else in the middle.

It's the same as 2016, of course, so potentially some good pickup opportunities for Dems depending on the national mood.

Feingold again! Last chance!

A few scattered thoughts:

(A) to me, the clear break in US politics is 2010-2016, when it became absolutely clear that there was no benefit to trying "win win" anything with Republicans on any issue whatsoever and it wasn't even worth the effort to try and peel off a few votes to get legislation actually passed. As always the biggest villain is Mitch McConnell. Before 2010, sure the divisions were clear but if some kind of compromise WAS possible that would be a way more effective way of actually accomplishing policy goals. But it wasn't to be had and that's never coming back, in which case "fuck it we're going socialist" seems like a perfectly practical position in a way it didn't before.

(B) it's underrated how much the current mood is a gap between differences in rhetoric, tone, and political approach versus an actual difference in policy goals. If your plan is "make the US into Denmark" it is absolutely accurate to describe this as either "I want derregulation plus an active social safety net, universal health care and high taxation to pay for evidence-based social programs and public-private partnerships" or as "I want socialism." Most mainstream 90s slightly left of center Democrats would have said, if describing the policy universe they'd want with unfettered political capacity, something like the former; now more and more mainstream Democrats say something like the latter. But they say it way more aggressively and call it socialism. I am not saying there are no differences in desired substantive policy for mainstream Democrats but they are absolutely dwarfed by differences in tone, rhetoric, and willingness to mention go-for-broke unlikely-to-succeed plans as opposed to more constrained rhetoric and tone. For the reasons for the change in tone, see (1).

(3) the exception that bizarrely proves the no-conpromise rule is criminal justice. Probably the main thing (at least one of the top three things) Republicans from 1970-2013 successfully ran on was being "tough on crime." This was also the one area where Democrats absolutely conceded. They knew they had to concede in order to win elections. For all the talk of neoliberalism criminal justice was WAY more of a fully conceded area by the Democrats; there was big daylight between the economic/environmental/regulatory programs of the parties in even 1995, but little daylight at all on crime. Now, weirdly, this is the one area where it seems like bipartisan progress can be made, in the direction of good. What this says other than lower crime and more white crime means a better criminal justice system, I dunno, but it's interesting and weird that the signature absolute "conservative" concession of Democrats in the 1990s now has something of a bipartisan consensus for reform.

(4) People who talk about Clintonism now forget how conservative the Democratic congresses in the 1990s were. In 1993 Clinton tried for universal health care AND a carbon tax to fight global warming and both were rejected by a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. Southern Democrats like John Breaux still dominated the party; Jim Wright was Speaker of the House, etc etc. Some of this stayed true through 2008-2010, where Lieberman and Ben Nelson, etc, were prominent Democrats. Congressional Democrats arguably didn't truly become even solidly Clinton-liberal until 2010. The sheer newness of a solidly uniformly liberal (even neoliberall!) national Democratic party seems to somehow get forgotten in current thinking.

Criminally Bulgur @ 28: Yes, Delong was a card-carrying Rubinite, a neolib, and even right up to the fricken '*eve* of the Financial Crisis, he was preaching that they understood how to manage the economy, that we were in a "Great Moderation", and all sorts of other ... claptrap. I think the Financial Crisis really did for those beliefs of his. He switched to a different research program, and started paying attention to different things. And it's showed in his writings and his policy prescriptions: he's manifestly not such a neolib, and honestly, I think that he's pretty damn "social democrat" these days. There's probably been other influences on his thinking than "reality smacking him upside the head", but really, I think it was that episode, that changed him.

It's a pity that people like him won't be the "loyal opposition" of the Refounded Republican Party. Instead, it'll be Max Boot, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin (if we're lucky -- if not, it'll be Shitler's proteges, sigh).

I see what you did there.

I'd appreciate elaboration on 41.3. I've read in the past that law and order was something Bill Clinton claimed for himself and was a contributor to his success.

Mossy, I suspect Fabius Maximus' point in 41.3, is that Clinton sure felt he had to work for that "tough on crime" merit badge. Remember how during the campaign he had to fly back to AR to execute Ricky Ray Rector? Rector tried to commit suicide, giving himself a lobotomy in the process. But Clinton still had to make sure he was executed. Law-and-order was that much of a weak spot for Democrats back then.

I thought it was Northerners who had to swing the blade themselves.

Who wrote 36?

Sounds like Charley.

45: I think I get it. I understood Fabius' "concession" to mean Democrats just didn't run on law and order issues, but on re-reading it makes more sense that, as you say, they continued to compete, but only by adopting the Republican position as their own. I would still appreciate elaboration on how exactly that came about, and what bipartisan consensus for progress Fabius sees.

That, like the Sista Soulja thing, was a pander to racism. (L&O, used in those decades, was always and only about race.) Clinton understood that to do any of the good stuff, first you have to win.

I'm glad that 'fuck it, let's go socialist' is a winning message in some polities. Maybe a lot of polities. I don't think it's a winning message where I live, not statewide anyway, and so we have a dilemma: if something like 20% of Dems want to go with it anyway, and their candidate doesn't win the primary, what do they do in the general? We're going to be running the experiment in 2020 as we pick challengers to our Republican senator. Is the race so hopeless that we may as well just nominate a socialist, and take our loss? Would doing so help keep the coalition together for the gubenatorial race -- which is a must win for us in a way that the Senate race really isn't?

The difference between getting 40% of the vote statewide and 49% (sufficient to win, with various third parties on the ballot) is disconnected from issue positions, but based on personal qualities. Authenticity and folksy charm. Maybe even the right unicorn socialist could make it, but that's such a steep hill to climb, that one would expect to already know the person with the right personal qualities.

47, 48 -- Yes, sorry. My office computer doesn't approve.

Welfare reform is likewise something that Clinton claimed as his own initiative. He criticized the bill that ultimately passed and could have vetoed it, but he ended up accepting what Congress gave him.

The politics of the 1994 crime bill are described here. Wikipedia is here.

Here is the vote. You'll see some prominent black names opposed, but a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for it. Crime was a big deal back then in part because there was a lot more crime.

So Clinton doesn't come out of this looking great, but he was a product of his time. One place where I think he was really unjustly maligned is on gays in the military. He campaigned in favor, took steps to make it happen, but Congress rebelled and we ended up with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Which, of course, was a disaster, but it was a backlash against Clinton, not something Clinton initiated. Here is a good description of that.

The vast majority - an estimated 87% - of the country's prison population is housed in state prisons.

52: Thanks.
L&O, used in those decades, was always and only about race.
1960s-90s? Were Democrats ok with Republican crime policy because their base was still racist enough essentially to agree with it? How much rising crime from the 1960s was real, as opposed to reporting and fearmongering?

54.2: Just looking at murders in the U.S. there were 9,100 in 1960, 16.000 in 1970, 23,040 in 1980, It stayed at about that level through the 1980s and early 1990s and then started to decline.

So, yes, crime was genuinely rising.

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

It turns out crack isn't very good.

54. The indispensable Wikipedia has the answer to your question. Note especially the nice little chart on property crime and the homicide rate by race.

So fear of crime in the early '90s fed a racist narrative, but crime was correctly understood to be a growing problem. Kevin Drum blames a big part of it on lead exposure, but that wasn't part of the public conversation at the time.

I've been enjoying Snowfall.

57: You people are the best. Those graphs are super interesting. Also in this connection I enjoyed A Most Violent Year a lot.

(They shot the derelict-buildings bits in Detroit because NYC doesn't have any derelicts left apparently.)

I didn't mean to suggest that the crime wasn't real. But I think the nationalization of the issue, creation of sentencing guidelines to keep sympathetic judges from not throwing the book at poor minority prisoners (eg federal guidelines and state 3 strikes laws), etc etc was driven by and pandering to the same people who think there are no-go zones in places like Missoula Montana. Or, tbh, Washington DC. Crime isn't spread uniformly, but even in bad places, the whole no-go thing is just so far overblown, among racists and the I'm-not-a-racist-but-you-have-to-admit-there's-something-there types.

Anyway, I keep on about crime because the authoritarianism studies show that lots of non-authoritarian people become authoritarian when scared, for which reason I think the rise in your murder rate in the past couple of years is something you should be taking very seriously, and figuring out how to square with BLM.

A reason in addition to all the dead brown people, I mean.

A blind man can see today, and could see in 1992, that the death penalty as actually implemented in the US is bad bad bad. Clinton isn't stupid: he made sure the guy got executed at the right moment because there were a whole lot of votes at stake.

Virtù.

Faker.

I wanted to elaborate a little on 15 and 16. It's a little difficult to convey the general level of liberal despair in the US circa 1990. At least Trump had to cheat his way into the presidency, and it's only unusually good luck on the economy that has kept him in the Oval Office. Broadly speaking, people really hate the guy and there is plenty of reason to be hopeful that the pendulum is going to swing back. (And plenty of reason to be terrified, of course.)

Ronald Reagan, a rightwing buffoon, had won political office in two landslides. In early 1991, George HW Bush was polling at 90% approval. Mario Cuomo (a huge figure in Democratic politics whose only major failure was as a father) didn't even bother running. Jesse Jackson likewise sat out the election after having run twice. Nobody thought Bush could be beaten, and there was a sense that to have any chance at all, Democrats had to unify. Clinton unified the Democrats.

It didn't have to by a Pyrrhic victory. Nationally, he left the Democrats and the liberals in good political shape and Al Gore would have been a fine president.

(Though it has to be said, Clinton's neoliberalism also planted the seeds of the 2008 crash, and it is easy to see Gore being as passive as GW Bush in preventing that.)

67 last -- I think a lot of Gore, but really this is a counterfactual for which we have nothing real to go on. I think we also can't know what difference a re-elected Democratic House majority in the 1994 mid-terms would have meant for Clinton's neo-liberalism. Too many Clinton 92 voters stayed home in 94, many to punish him for not achieving enough, and a lot of the upside potential was lost.

Not to repeat myself like a Cato, but I always feel like the point in 41.4 is weirdly overlooked. The Clinton administration couldn't get proposals for universal health care and a carbon tax through a *majority Democratic congress* in 1993-94, and got a tax increase through IIRC by a single vote. The Clinton administration was to the left of the median *Democratic* politician in 1993, not the other way around -- making it hard to blame them for moving the party to the right. It's not too surprising that after that experience and the loss of Congress in 1994 and trying to swing for the fences he opted to try and get smallball improvements through lesser legislation and tempering Republican bills (sometimes for the much worse, like welfare reform).

I remember a maddening editorial in The Economist in 2000 when they endorsed Bush over Gore. A big part of their reasoning was the idea that something was going to go terribly wrong, and they didn't want Gore because he'd meddle too much and try to fix it instead of just letting the invisible hand burn itself on the hot stove.

got a tax increase through IIRC by a single vote

I believe so, yes.

Discussions of Clinton's "neoliberal" policies should not neglect Greenspan's using monetary policy as a cudgel to enforce his policy demands.

69: Something related to that was what I was trying to poke at way back in 7. That is, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the Clintons and their ilk were as left as they could be given the political constraints at the time. But they were really bad about either making rhetorical space for anyone on their left to not get dismissed as wacky, and also bad at substantively pushing left when there was opportunity. I don't know if politicians who were better about that sort of thing would have gotten better policy results in the 90s, but I think they would have done some good between then and now.

I have a memory from 1992 of this well-informed cynical man (a philosophy professor!) arguing that actually Clinton was more right-wing than Bush. I remember thinking that this was just stupid. And certainly Bush would not have tried to pass universal health care. But in terms of actual results --I think it's hard to say.

Nonsense. Clinton totally balanced the budget. Real right-wingers never do that.

I think you were right, it really is stupid. The thing that gets left out of that sort of calculation is the actual executive branch stuff -- who are the agency appointees, how are the agencies getting run. And on that sort of thing, pretty much any Democrat beats any Republican hands down overall, even if there are occasional glaring failures like reappointing Alan Greenspan. They're just appointing from a pool of left-of-center people who want to do government work, who are going to do better work than the alternative possible Republican appointees.

Genuine question: what exactly is the charge against Greenspan? The exposures that were exposed in 2008 developed partly under his watch, but AIUI the Fed didn't actually have a mandate to take any steps to deal with them.

76: Yes, but to argue against myself -- would a Bush Administration have "ended welfare as we know it"? In that case, Clinton did hire left-of-center people and a few of them quit in protest.

72: I don't want to be too dismissive of C. Bulgur's point: The neoliberal aspects of Clinton's program were enacted as much out of conviction as political expediency. Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers weren't accidents, and they weren't primarily a function of pandering to the Right. I guess my defense of Clinton is that neoliberalism actually looked like a pretty good idea at the time.

73: I'm inclined to cut Bill more slack here, but it does involve some tough counterfactual judgments. How much further left could Bill have pushed the general dialog and concrete policy? Not much, is my guess. But substantively, I am compelled to concede that his policy accomplishments were limited at best, and that over eight years, he only modestly moved the rhetorical line. (It's really hard to overstate the level of public and media scorn for the views of marginalized folks in 1992. This was still Reagan's America, rhetorically. In 2000, it was really Clinton's America, with even W making noise about human decency on the campaign trail.)

I remember folks running the "no difference between Republicans and [Clintonite] Democrats" play in 2000. Turns out there was a difference!

Mossy, I think there are a number of charges against Greenspan. The two that stand out for complete "he's a tool, he is" to me:

(1) back in the 80s Greenspan goes before Congress and testifies that we need to raise FICA (Social Security) taxes in order to prepay for the Boomers' retirement. Reagan cuts income taxes around the same time. The combined effect is a regressive change in who pays taxes. Combine that with the government running deficits, and there was no net "savings" to "prepay" anything.

(2) Fast-forward to Dubya's time, and Greenspan is arguing that the surplus is dangerous (gosh darn it, we might run out debt to repay!), and hence we need to cut taxes. Insane.

I'm sure there was much more, but these two instances of tool-dom really harsh my mellow.

77: This is super vague -- I don't remember specifics at all -- but I remember him as a strong source of pressure to cut spending because debt was unsustainable, and then cut taxes once deficits were down. The impartial, objective economist's voice for "it is never, under any circumstances, economically responsible to fund the welfare state."

Yes, but to argue against myself -- would a Bush Administration have "ended welfare as we know it"?

With a Gingrich congress? Yes. (the specifics would have been different, and it would probably have been better in some ways but I think the overall answer is yes).

It's also important to remember that Welfare reform was one of the signature failures of the Clinton administration -- one of the moments in which they looked bad both at the time and in hindsight. But if you're going to compare to a hypothetical Bush administration you also have to ask whether Bush would have achieved the successes of Clinton (expanded EITC, balanced budget, peace in Northern Ireland . . . )

83: But Gingrich would never have become Speaker if Bush was elected!

84: I assume you're arguing for the cynical view, rather than presenting this as something you personally believe.

I don't know that Gingrich would have become speaker in 1994 without Clinton (and the health care proposal) to run against, but I think the South was clearly in the process of switching from electing conservative Democrats to electing Republicans and that would have happened with or without Clinton.

85: It seems plausible to me, but at some point these hypotheticals start seeming stupid to me. I know that I started it.

You do have a good point that with the Democrats losing the Solid South, the Republicans were bound to gain control of the House sooner or later.

It's a bit worse than 81.1: IIRC, the extra payroll taxes were diverted to the general fund for the remainder of Reagan's term, rather giving the lie to the notion of "prepayment" being the motivation there.

87: Where was the lockbox????

The lockbox leaves the United States Government with dangerously large amounts of money, leaving little for private investors who will probably jump out of windows or something.

(I had no idea I had the ability to hold grudges for so long.)

So Greenspan talked a lot of shit, and on those grounds you can criticize Clinton for retaining him; but all the policies people are talking about are fiscal, not monetary, and Congress and Clinton, not the Fed, are responsible for them.

ISTM Clinton's main opponents for the 1992 Dem nomination were about as neoliberal - Brown, Tsongas. (Brown has a different image now, but he swung with the tide over his career.)

Yeah, 1994 seemed like a single moment but it was also a sort of punctuated-equilibrium moment in the turn of the South away from Dems, which had been happening more slowly for a generation (mostly racist Southern Democrats already elected did not switch parties personally, but their younger peers started out in the GOP).

The main actual sins (in retrospect) of Rubin and Summers were (I think) their encouragement of deregulation of the financial services industry. That was bad. But that was not an issue of obvious salience to almost anyone at the time -- e.g., there was no serious contemporary leftist mobilization against the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. And it wasn't extremely clear that this was even a big problem until after the crash happened 2008, since that particular form of crash surprised effectively every single person around the world.

In the 1990s, the politically salient (maybe different than important) Rubin/Summers policies were (a) balancing the budget and (b) NAFTA and free trade agreements. Deficit reduction seemed to make sense on the merits and as a way of shoring up capital to spend on future left-wing goals. At the time there was essentially zero chance of getting left-wing deficit social spending through Congress, even with full Democratic control, and there wasn't a recession/depression need for deficit spending, so balancing the budget felt like a no-brainer and to make good economic Keynsian sense. Free trade is even now the part of neoliberal agenda that seems OK with a broad swath of the left (maybe just because Trump is pro-tariff). Did this move the US towards being Denmark? Maybe not, but it wasn't a step in the other direction, and at least plausibly was setting up the preconditions for moving the US to being more like Denmark.

Greenspan weighed in heavily on the decision in 1993 to raise taxes and balance the budget. That wasn't super great but really it was his support of the Bush tax cuts that feels worse, to me.

Rubin/Summers/Bill Clinton used extreme pro-market rhetoric (but not as extreme as contemporary Republicans!). That was itself a problem, maybe a big one. But decoupling that rhetoric from policy substance (and differentiating that from the actual policies sought in today's "socialism) is not always easy or obvious. It seemed rhetorically plausible as a left-ish like move at the time, maybe that's just an excuse. The tendency to rhetorically close off the left flank seemed more plausible at the time (for rhetorical reasons) but as Lizardbreath says might have been the worst thing they did. But it's hard to know how much that mattered.

Maybe this is a pointless exercise and we should all just forget the 1990s and be glad that we're in a different political era for Democrats. Albeit sad that we're in a different political era (and have actual left-wing Democrats) because there is no hope of compromising with half of the country, which is fascist and insane. I don't know.

Nothing a scorched earth war to the death can't fix.

Maybe this is a pointless exercise and we should all just forget the 1990s and be glad that we're in a different political era for Democrats. Albeit sad that we're in a different political era (and have actual left-wing Democrats) because there is no hope of compromising with half of the country, which is fascist and insane. I don't know.

Side note, I'm fairly convinced that this is an important element of the explanation of the current political era.

Let's start with political competition. In her new book Insecure Majorities, [Frances ] Lee argues that this era of close competitiveness, in which the parties are constantly losing and regaining congressional majorities and White House control, is an aberration. For most of American history, one party or the other has been comfortably dominant. The Republican Party ran American politics for most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Democrats were dominant in the post-Depression era.

...

Lee's argument is that close competition, where "neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority," breeds all-out partisan combat.

When one party is perpetually dominant, the subordinate party has reason to cooperate, as that's the only realistic shot at wielding power. Either you work well with the majority party or you have no say over policy, nothing to bring home to your constituents.

You can think of a politician's political priorities as running roughly in this order:

1. Win reelection.
2. Win the majority.
3. Influence governance as much as possible.

Governing comes third not because politicians are cynical, though they often are, but because you can't govern at all if you don't win reelection, and you can't govern effectively from the minority. Even so, if winning the majority becomes impossible, then the priorities look like this:

1. Win reelection.

2. Influence governance as much as possible.

Indeed, in this ranking, priorities one and two work together because you're likelier to win reelection, at least in past eras in American politics, if you're bringing money home to your district and can brag about bills with your imprint on them. But for those priorities to work together, you have to cultivate a very good relationship with the majority party. You can't be engaged in an all-out effort of obstruction and sabotage.

But when winning the majority becomes possible, the logic of that cooperation dissolves. If you're signing on to the majority's bills, and bragging about the provisions you added to their legislation, then you're part of their reelection strategy. If you're keeping the majority from passing anything, and making sure people are fed up with the state of Washington, then the voters are likelier to make a change.

90: Greenspan's monetary policy was a contributor to the Great Recession. Interest rates were incredibly low in the runup to the crash, putting banks in a position where they wanted to find ways to employ essentially free money and investors willing to bend the rules in order to get a little extra interest. Further, Greenspan was a lifelong advocate for financial deregulation, including the signature Clinton era failure: the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. He also talked up adjustable rate mortgages and other sketchy products that facilitated the purchase of houses people couldn't afford.

But the Federal Reserve doesn't just set monetary policy; it regulates lending. Greenspan's Fed was responsible for the non-policing of the deceptive lending practices at the heart of the housing bubble. Greenspan couldn't imagine a situation where banks would deliberately make bad loans, and he found meaningful oversight unnecessary.

76: And this is far more true than people are remembering: Clinton nominated a LOT of solidly left people, many of whom were destroyed by a hackish press, evil Republicans, and timorous Democrats. You can argue whether he should have fought harder for Guinier et al*, but my point is that, contra the narrative of today, Clinton was seeking to populate his administration with a broad spectrum of Democrats.

Also too, Clinton was faced with an incredibly weak bench from which to choose: with only 4 years of Democratic administration in the previous 24--and a weak, flawed admin at that--he struggled to populate the agencies.

*I can't recall other names, but one example in particular I remember because he was a prof of my sister's (OK, I was able to figure it out: Anthony Lake); he was a veteran of the Carter admin, was distinctly left on foreign policy, and while he was head of the NSA, the GOP blocked his nomination for CIA, and he was damaged in the public eye early on by various controversies.

94: Sure, but OTOH the long-term minority can get desperate and willing to do anything to regain and retain power, which I've seen argued about the post-New Deal Republicans. A loyal opposition locked out of power long enough may become disloyal. I think you really need more than one centrist party occupying positions mostly acceptable to most people, such that one can have regular turnover of governments without total reversions of policy.

95: Makes sense.

I hate Greenspan as much as anybody, but I think everybody's missing the one good--and really important--thing that he did: he held the line on interest rates in the mid-'90s, when the conventional wisdom was that the unemployment rate had reached its "natural low", and therefore any further growth would lead to inflation. This wasn't just dishonest criticism from the right; Greenspan was out on a limb, and the result was 2+ more years of robust growth and the only period of sustained, broad-based wage increases since 1973. The economy of the late '90s was the best of the past 45+ years*, and AG deserves a lot of credit.

He had goaded Clinton into balancing the budget, and to his credit, he kept up his part of the bargain (he had promised that, if the budget was moving towards balance, he'd keep rates down). Which made his heel turn for the Bush tax cut all the more wicked.

*unlike the Bush economy, it wasn't really propped up by the bubble that eventually ended it: the dot-com bubble was paper wealth with very little broader impact on the economy. Which is part of why the recession that followed was pretty mild

97: I can't really think of examples of the GOP in the era of New Deal dominance doing anything disloyal? I mean, many of them were awful, the Southern Strategy was evil, and Nixon was Nixon. But the first part is just normal, the second part I don't think had to do with being in the long term minority*, and the third part I don't think deeply implicated the GOP (as evidenced by the fact that he was forced to resign, because he no longer had the votes).

Their current treasonous streak I think stems from fear of becoming an entrenched minority, not from being one.

*that is, I think they would have absorbed resentful whites whether in the long term minority or not; why wouldn't they? There was a vague pro-civil rights set of GOP values, but not a very strong one. They'd take KKK support in the '20s when it was on offer, frex (when they were dominant, PS)

Welfare reform was pretty politically salient - I remember Molly Ivins at least acknowledging that vetoing it could hurt Clinton for re-election.

101: yes, but it might have killed Mickey Kaus, so it would have been worth it.

101: yes, but it might have killed Mickey Kaus, so it would have been worth it.

Hadn't Clinton already vetoed an earlier Welfare Reform bill?

He vetoed other versions with harsher provisions like chopping Medicaid on top of AFDC.

100: Loyal opposition isn't the best frame for the concept. By disloyal I don't necessarily mean treasonous, I mean disregarding of constitutionality, of the right of one's opponents to contest elections and to govern if elected. That clearly describes the Republicans at least back into the 1990s, based on Iran-Contra I'd guess even further. In that period obviously the Republicans weren't a locked-out minority, but exactly as you say a winning minority trying to entrench itself. IIRC the argument I saw* was that that unconstitutional attitude was born of desperation in the postwar period. How well that holds up I don't know enough to contest. In general though I think the principle is sound: a polity permanently locking out a substantial minority is storing up trouble.
*I think from David Kaiser.

(TBC, if the minority are goddamn Nazis, lockout it has to be. But it's still storing up trouble.)

a polity permanently locking out a substantial minority is storing up trouble.

There's a continuum between, "every election is competitive, and the controlling party can change at any time and for small reasons" and "the political minority is permanently locked out of power."*

I take the excerpt to be arguing that there are obvious problems with a case in which the political minority is permanently locked out, but there are also problems with the "every election is competitive" and that the most stable situation (which is not the same thing as "best situation") may be one which in which party control changes slowly; with one party being in power (broadly speaking) for 12-20 years at a time.

Having written that, it also seems like an unlikely equilibrium in the contemporary world. I feel like various changes in technology, culture, etc, push away from those sorts of slow-change balance of power.

* I wonder if Japan's LDP represents an example that's close to the extreme of "power never changes hands" while still retaining functioning democratic norms? I'm not an expert, but wikipedia says, "By the early 1990s, the LDP's nearly four decades in power allowed it to establish a highly stable process of policy formation. This process would not have been possible if other parties had secured parliamentary majorities. LDP strength was based on an enduring, although not unchallenged, coalition of big business, small business, agriculture, professional groups, and other interests. Elite bureaucrats collaborated closely with the party and interest groups in drafting and implementing policy. In a sense, the party's success was a result not of its internal strength but of its weakness. It lacked a strong, nationwide organization or consistent ideology with which to attract voters. Its leaders were rarely decisive, charismatic, or popular. But it functioned efficiently as a locus for matching interest group money and votes with bureaucratic power and expertise. This arrangement resulted in corruption, but the party could claim credit for helping to create economic growth and a stable, middle-class Japan. "

But that was not an issue of obvious salience to almost anyone at the time -- e.g., there was no serious contemporary leftist mobilization against the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. And it wasn't extremely clear that this was even a big problem until after the crash happened 2008, since that particular form of crash surprised effectively every single person around the world.

Vaguely amusingly, the one person who was not at all surprised was my Dunning-Krueger brother, who started at Behr-Stearns in the mid-90s and was predicting this exact scenario in great calamitous (spot-on) tones from around 2000 on.

Since 2008, he has continued to sound this one solitary alarm (and the debt being too high), so he's a little bit of a broken clock. Environment, inequality, gerrymandering, etc: those are problems but they pale in comparison to the perpetually looming bubble burst. Stay safe!

I mean, he's not exactly wrong, but he's myopic about it.

A lot of the commentary on the financial crisis really shows that liberals will not take their own side in an argument. Saying both parties are responsible for the financial crisis sounds so wise. And yet it happened under the Republicans, just like 9/11 happened under the Republicans, and the S&L crisis happened under the Republicans. Derivatives markets functioned fine until the Republicans, but we end up blaming the derivatives markets rather than the Republicans.

107: Comity; your excerpt didn't to me indicate the 12-20 year cycle, which seems reasonable.
107*: Sounds like the definition of corporatist, not democratic - the interests of all major groups are represented well enough to prevent a breakdown, but the representation isn't mediated by elections. AFAIK there were no significant parties other than the LDP during its hegemony, so it wasn't a lockout situation.

OK, so Clinton, Rubin, Greenspan, Reagan - we've concluded that it's impossible to imagine any more left-wing policy outcomes than what actually happened over the past 50 years. How about better results in terms of the political environment, or respect for the legal process?

It was in the back of my mind at the start of the thread, but 105 put it at the start of my mind again. If I have to pick out one event from recent history that really could have fixed or prevented this timeline, it's Ford pardoning Nixon. It never would have been easier, or more important, to show that the president isn't above the law and party shouldn't be put before country. And now 45 percent of the country are committed Republicans and 80 percent of them are convinced either that Trump has done nothing wrong or Democrats have done things just as bad.

Who knows, though, I'm sure people who were alive back then have different opinions.

And Iran-Contra. The start of a really amazing positive feedback loop of conservatism and devastation.

I think nearly everyone who can remember the 80s is dead.

That's just the fever talking.

Comity; your excerpt didn't to me indicate the 12-20 year cycle, which seems reasonable.

The 12-20 year estimate was my own interpretation, and that's a good question, I'm not sure how she would characterize as a long or short period of time between transfer of power.

In terms of corporatism, the other example I know of is Mexico's 70 years under the PRI. No civil wars, which by local standards admittedly was a triumph, but otherwise not so great.

If I have to pick out one event from recent history that really could have fixed or prevented this timeline, it's Ford pardoning Nixon. It never would have been easier, or more important, to show that the president isn't above the law and party shouldn't be put before country. And now 45 percent of the country are committed Republicans and 80 percent of them are convinced either that Trump has done nothing wrong or Democrats have done things just as bad.

This seems wrong to me. 90s Republicans put country before party when trying to impeach Clinton for using is wrong when covering up his oval office blow job?

I don't think the majority of the country knows one way or the other whether Nixon was pardoned. They think he got impeached, which means kicked out, which means punished, end of story. No subtleties about resignation or impeachment vs. conviction or whatever. I bet most of them are hazy on how to resolve whether Clinton was actually impeached, since they don't remember his VP taking over.

If I had to pick a pivotal moment, I'd gently encourage Reagan not to shred the Fairness Doctrine.

112: As I said in the Brexit thread, democracy is a problem in a nation of shitheads. I keep coming back to Hunter S Thompson:

How long will it be before "demented extremists" in Germany or maybe Japan, start calling us A Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? "No comment"? And how would the popularity polls react if he just came right out and admitted it?

There's no particular reason to suppose that Donald Trump is the worst thing that would gain support from, say, 40 percent of the population -- or 60 percent if something genuinely bad happened on the watch of liberals.

The Nixon pardon may well have cost Ford the election. And I don't think you can really say that Nixon got off the hook -- there is deterrent value in removal from office. Yeah, the son of a bitch should have gone to jail, but in a country with democracy-like attributes, one necessary condition for avoiding the election of crooks is the desire of the populace to not have crooks for leaders. When people elected Nixon, they pretty well knew who he was, just as they did with Trump.

More Thompson:

But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization. . . involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation." That ugly description of Nixon's staff operations comes from a New York Times editorial on Thursday, October 12th. But neither Nixon nor anyone else felt it would have much effect on his steady two-to-one lead over McGovern in all the national polls. Four days later the Times/Yankelovich poll showed Nixon ahead by an incredible twenty points (57 percent to 37 percent, with 16 percent undecided) over the man Bobby Kennedy described as "the most decent man in the Senate."

"Ominous" is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Martin Bormann.

119: That's a very good point. A far-left college professor of mine used to argue with me about that. He was sure that the only thing holding back a flood of leftist commentary was the Fairness Doctrine.

It was great that Nixon cared enough about history to hire so many people named Klaus.

If I had to pick a pivotal moment, I'd gently encourage Reagan not to shred the Fairness Doctrine.

I wonder what would have happened if Dukakis has won in 88 (let's imagine that he never took the ride in the tank and, just for the sake of imagining a happier past, the Bush hadn't signed off on the Willie Horton ad). Like Clinton a fairly centrist Democrat, but with a very different temperament.

I think in practice Iran-Contra was much worse than pardoning Nixon, but also the latter was a precursor to the former, so....

But yeah, Nixon himself left office, and his henchmen went to prison. I'm not certain that jail time for Nixon really would have altered subsequent events, except insofar as it made harsh prosecution of everyone involved in I-C more likely.

There was a very funny series of Doonesbury strips about a draft evader who got the terms of Ford's two most prominent pardons confused.

112.1 I don't think Reagan's election was inevitable, and thus don't think that any of the reaction to it was inevitable. I blame the Iranian students. And the same media that has called Sen Clinton a harpy for 30 years acted like Reagan was some sort of cowboy hero.

There was a chance in 79-80 to pick a different future, at the time obvious to all and sundry. For a variety of reasons, a decisive slug of people balked.

For a variety of reasons, a decisive slug of people balked.

And since then, the majority has made good choices. Hooray!

If aliens ever contact Earth and somehow reach me first, I'm going to get them to write "Make Better Choices" on the moon in letters legible from Earth. Maybe this goes in the other thread.

I think in practice Iran-Contra was much worse than pardoning Nixon, but also the latter was a precursor to the former, so....

This exactly.

124: I think in practice Iran-Contra was much worse than pardoning Nixon

Yes, and does not lead to comforting thoughts about the current AG of our fair country.

The underlying organization on the right of the anti-abortion movement and the Federalist Society (1982) were key elements as well.

The Federalist Society in particular need to be demonized to hell and back. Ku Klux Klan for smart people. Judicial terrorism.

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Speaking of rule of law, props to Canada.
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Brad Delong interviewed about the post: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sanders-left-brad-delong

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Firesale.
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More from Delong: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/passing-the-baton-the-interview.html

Here's me: We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.... Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney's health care policy, with John McCain's climate policy, with Bill Clinton's tax policy, and George H.W. Bush's foreign policy. And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they f---ing did not.... While I would like to be part of a political coalition in the cat seat, able to call for bids from the left and the right about who wants to be part of the governing coalition to actually get things done, that's simply not possible...

Dayy-um.

What's notable about 135 compared to 133, is that when Brad reprints the interview he doesn't spell out his offensive language. Still a neoliberal at heart!

I think Darb is right about the general point. I can't say anything about his motives, or those of Rahm F. Emannuel, for example, but I think the idea that they were trying to appeal to the Republican figureheads is hyperbole. To get legislation passed, you have to get the 60th senator. That was true in 2009, it was true in 1993, and it's going to be true in 2021. For that, you need to be in a position where that senator isn't afraid that his 50th percentile voter isn't going to be convinced by Even the Liberal NYT, or some such, that the senator has gone communist. I don't think the fact that Republicans didn't join in supporting the policy doesn't show that the approach was a failure, because the point was always getting something enacted, and you're always going to need the votes to get that done.

This hasn't changed.

I agree that it's time to let the Left take responsibility for putting together policies and coalitions.

In 2019 and 2020, obviously, nothing passes without half a dozen Republican senators. And they have to be willing to do more than just vote for a bill, they have to be willing to get McConnell do agree to allocate them floor time. The recent public lands bill, which is a big deal, shows that we can't and shouldn't write off the possibilities where they exist. I suppose the same can be said, and was above, about the criminal justice thing. On a whole bunch of stuff, I guess the only option is to shrug and say 'well, we'll just have to wait.' Which, if you're not going to get 6 Republicans is all you've got.

133: That's a good interview. I think DeLong hasn't quite figured out the problem with neoliberalism. He seems to regard it as a political failure (no buy-in from the right), as opposed to a problem with substantive policy goals. Or maybe that's merely the thing that he finds most interesting to talk about today. Or maybe he just defines neoliberalism differently than I do.

Things like NAFTA and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act are, I would argue, central to neoliberalism if the term has any meaning at all. I get the feeling that DeLong would like to present those policies as concessions to the right, offered in exchange for better economic policies -- and the right reneged. That's ahistorical. So-called "market-based solutions" were sold by neoliberals as an affirmative good on their own.

Darb's description of the politics of the situation is hopelessly naive:

Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney's health care policy, with John McCain's climate policy, with Bill Clinton's tax policy, and George H.W. Bush's foreign policy.

Romney and McCain, particularly, are not people who would have advocated Obama-like policies in those areas had they become president. GHW Bush was repudiated by his party, and Clinton was reviled by Republicans.

To the extent Romney and McCain misrepresented their policy goals, they were transparent liars. There is zero chance that President McCain would have advocated for climate sanity, and it's a mortal lock that Romney would have worked to screw up the health care system further.

138.2: He still seems to think market-based solutions are best -- at least potentially --

If you can properly tweak market prices, you then don't just have one smart guy trying to design a policy that advances an objective -- you have 30 million people all over the country, all incentivized to design a policy

Darb:

We need Medicare-for-all, funded by a carbon tax, with a whole bunch of UBI rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies. That's the best policy given the political-economic context.

Here's my edit to the second sentence: That's the best policy given the political-economic context.

That said, Darb declined the opportunity to crow about Obamacare, which is a legit neoliberal triumph.

140: I'm generally onboard with the principle that he's articulating here -- just like Elizabeth Warren in 3 above. But the neoliberals are suckers for a rightwing framing device that asserts a dichotomy between markets and government -- more government equals less reliance on markets.

In fact, functional markets of any scale at all are a creation of government.

139: I'd be kinder about Darb than you seem to be about this. He's not saying he would have voted for the composite Romney/McCain/Clinton/GHWB if that candidate had been on the ballot so he had to settle for Obama. The way I read that part of the discussion, he's saying that Obama's policies in each of those areas were centrist or even center-right by any reasonable definition, and it did him no good when it came time to get them through Congress or make the case for them publicly, so the value of centrism for its own sake should be revised (i.e. down to roughly zero). That sounds right to me.

Also, it's petty, but I'm enjoying using "neoliberal" freely in this thread. We've got a Clinton appointee using the term to describe himself and his preferred policies a dozen times in interviews and blog posts over several days, with reference to specific policies, and saying that the neoliberal approach is flawed! It's very, very appropriate! The socialists didn't just win the right to lead the Democratic Party, they won the right to use the word "neoliberal"!

I thought Brad's article was admirable, but I was a little puzzled at how a Clinton appointee, from the era of Newt Gingrich as speaker and so on, held onto the idea that Republicans were partners in good faith for policy negotiation as long as he did. They haven't been at any time in my adult life.

I thought Brad's article was admirable, but I was a little puzzled at how a Clinton appointee, from the era of Newt Gingrich as speaker and so on, held onto the idea that Republicans were partners in good faith for policy negotiation as long as he did.

I think that some of that is faux-naivete -- that he's implicitly saying, "in a naive view you would expect X to happen, and it didn't." But some of it is genuine. I was looking for some of his past posts on the subject and found this from 2012 in which he writes (emphasis mine).

Otherwise the Republicans when I got to Washington at the start of 1993 decided that they were going to adopt the Gingrich strategy: oppose everything the Democratic president proposes, especially if it had previously been a Republican proposal and priority.

That is not a strategy that would ever be adopted by anybody who wants to see their name written in the Book of Life.

But Gingrich found followers.

And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen's chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole's chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal, so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.

That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I today remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994, but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan (and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins).

As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice's book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second. And so they erased their names from the Book of Life.

And in all of this back in 1993-4, it really didn't help that various Democratic barons--Boren, Kerrey from Nebraska, Moynihan, a bunch of others who are not spoken of for their names are Unwritten--thought at the time that their principle task was to teach the Hick from Arkansas that he was not boss.

Then came Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Then came George W. Bush--installed, as I said before, by the mandate of the median voters Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. Bush's priorities were: (i) tax cuts for the rich (which attracted the support of "centrist" Democrats); (ii) an unfunded Medicare drug benefit, Part D, that also busted the budget and seemed designed more for drug companies than for Medicare beneficiaries (partisan); (iii) to casually and thoughtlessly bust the budget and undo all the budget-balancing work we in the Clinton administration had accomplished (partisan); (iv) o child left behind (bipartisan), (v) the war on Iraq (bipartisan); (vi) the deregulation of finance (which attracted the support of "centrist" Democrats; and (vii) a big right wing push for social security privatization that was purely republican, but that never passed because the Republicans shied at the jump.

We seemed to have returned to normal politics.

To get legislation passed, you have to get the 60th senator

Only given the filibuster.

142 -- I usually find myself nodding in agreement to pf's comments, but this one strikes what sounds to me as a false note. I don't think of the issue as whether functioning markets can/would exist without government -- of course they wouldn't. More to the point, markets are very bad at selecting for policy goals. ISTM that it is the recognition of that that is at the heart of the difference between a neoliberal (there, I said it!) approach and libertarian/glibertarian/conservatism. Rather, it's the recognition that the market is a powerful force, which you can either try to harness towards a policy goal you want, or can ignore and let it interfere with your attainment of a given policy goal. Drug prohibition is a classic example where the market defeats fiat power of government. It's not that individual drug dealers don't get arrested, they do. But the policy of prohibition is a failure because the preferences of millions of consumers creates what is, at the societal scale, an irresistible force. The same can be said, obviously, of the prohibition on child pornography. So, your basic neoliberal is fine with saying we're not going to let the market just pick the goals, and some policies are so bad, we really are going to fight the market all the way to the end.

Would a single payer system with (a) crappy payment to doctors/nurses and (b) well thought out, in the aggregate, limits on what would be covered (eg no liver transplants for 85 year old alcoholics) give rise to a black market? Is it worth the risk of finding out? I say yes, but we have to be realistic about the facts of demand and ability to pay, and the secondary efffects, if any, of that black market.

Private preferences and resources will continue to exist in the 'socialist' era were might be heading towards. Harnessing the market towards your goal allows you to leverage private preferences/resources towards accomplishing your policy goal. Suppressing the market means you'll be swimming against the tide.

_ limits on what would be covered (eg no liver transplants for 85 year old alcoholics) _

I'm pretty sure specifically that is the case in our current 'free market' system. Lots of people aren't eligible to get transplants. And I'm not sure why you think that uncovered services would plausibly be prohibited rather than just not covered -- the UK doesn't have a black market for private health insurance, it's perfectly legal.

NMM to Luke Perry.

Did somebody else get Larry Hagman's liver when he was done with it?

"Would a single payer system with (a) crappy payment to doctors/nurses and (b) well thought out, in the aggregate, limits on what would be covered (eg no liver transplants for 85 year old alcoholics) give rise to a black market? Is it worth the risk of finding out? I say yes, but we have to be realistic about the facts of demand and ability to pay, and the secondary efffects, if any, of that black market."

There is socialized medicine in a lot of countries and these issues are not really a big problem as far as I can tell. We don't really have to worry about it.

Brad is one of my favorite people, but I've got to say I don't really understand his theory of politics, either historically or in the present/going forward.

As for the present/future, he seems to assume that doing or advocating for more left/"socialist" (i.e., Northern European Welfare State) things will be immediately immensely popular and that there will be big, obvious, immediate political dividends from doing so. That seems weirdly naive for him. There's no clear reason to think that imposing the Green New Deal or Medicare for All or whatever will be immediately politically successful in electoral politics in a way that Obamacare or whatever wasn't. I'd like this to be the case, but I just don't see it. Major transformations of huge sectors of the economy will displace people who are risk-averse and leave them unhappy; some of this can be mollified with straight-up payoffs but not all of it. When presented with referendums or chances to actually do (e.g.) massive health care transformations, even people in Colorado and Vermont and California vote overwhelmingly no. To be clear, to my mind, that's NOT a reason to avoid passing the torch to the left or to avoid running on or passing big-deal policies. Whether they try "neoliberalism" or "socialism" Democratic control of politics will be shortlived. And if you can't make a deal with Republicans no matter what, might as well try and go for broke in the rare moments when you have full control of the government, because what's the realistic alternative? But if the Democrats do that in 2021-2022, there will almost certainly be a Republican congress in 2023. Brad seems to be imagining a bigger immediate electoral political payoff from "socialist" than "neoliberal" policies and the evidence for that actually being true is ... not there.

As a matter of history, I think his story seriously underplays how conservative, centrist and constrained as a matter of both substantive belief and belief about political self-interest the Democratic party was in the 1990s-2012. Remember, the great failing of this period was Bill Clinton failing to get universal health care and a carbon tax through a Democratic House and Senate. That wasn't caused by Republican failure to play along; it was caused by the fact that there were many, many conservative Democrats. In the 2009-10 Obama Administration, while there were way too many moves that were concessionary (less forgiveably so than Clinton, given the climate) the main people Rahm Emmanuel et al. were trying to conciliate were centrist Democrats like Lieberman and Ben Nelson. I think the need to placate centrist Democrats, rather than a naive belief that Republicans would play nice, was the main political argument for what we're calling neoliberalism -- although party of the strategy was certainly that you could enact more lasting achievements by peeling off a few Republican votes on significant bills.

His picture of both past and present politics doesn't really reckon with where the likely marginal passing votes are or were for getting Democratic party legislation passed, which is the key question, so it's an odd framing.

142: "In fact, functional markets of any scale at all are a creation of government."

And also a creation of the society underpinning both of them. Not to mention its history. We've got close to two dozen post-communist states in and around Central Europe, and boy howdy are there differences, even if a lot of them have governments that are formally similar.

Khodorkovsky was a big wheeler-dealer when he was a Komsomol, and not suddenly as a result of Gaidar's reforms, just for example.

148, 151 -- It's easier to design a functional system from scratch than to transition from one to another. Single payer countries can pay nurses a lot less than we do, not require them to have 4 year degrees, and all sorts of other things that make a single payer system work. We already have nurses with 4 year degrees and student debt incurred to get them, and so the transition has to figure out how to place them.

I'm all for the goal. Hand-waving away the vested interests of millions of people isn't very effective politics, at least not in a bunch of jurisdictions.

(I just had this argument with my wife, who wants to get rid of private health insurance -- for good reasons! -- but dismissing the hit to be taken by union workers who gave up money, for decades, in return for health coverage as just another bunch of privileged whiners doesn't strike me as politically astute. At which point the politically astute thing for me to do is shut up.)

152 I'm totally making this up, but I can imagine that your task of getting Lieberman and Nelson to sign on to your bill becomes monumentally easier if you end up getting Dole or McCain to sign on to it first. It's not because centrist Dems are in thrall to particular Republicans, but because the median Nebraska/Florida voter is thought to be more flexible if their guy joins a bi-partisan initiative, rather than just going along with Nancy Pelosi and That Black Guy.

146 Sure, the filibuster makes it hard to enact things, but also makes it hard to repeal them. You really want to gamble on continuing control of the Senate? You risk trading Medicare for All for Medicare for None.

The epicness of your fuckedness truly is thing to behold.

The epicness of your fuckedness truly is thing to behold.

Thank God For Mississippi Brexit

dismissing the hit to be taken by union workers who gave up money, for decades, in return for health coverage as just another bunch of privileged whiners doesn't strike me as politically astute

Walk me through in what sense union workers are taking a hit if there's publicly provided health insurance? When there wasn't, they negotiated contracts where they got employer health insurance. If there is public health insurance in the future, they'll negotiate different contracts. What do union workers lose out of this deal?

So you're assuming a perfectly efficient labor market?

Their hard-earned place in line.

Yeah, the assumption that once the cost of paying for employees' health insurance is lifted from employers' shoulders, they will pass that savings on to workers in higher salaries has struck me as a bit optimistic in the past.

That may be an optimistic assumption, but even if it doesn't happen, I don't see how the union workers are worse off. Their salaries aren't going to drop, they'll still have health insurance -- the only changes are (1) now everyone else will have health insurance as well and (2) the money that employers used to use to buy them health insurance is in employers hands and can possibly be bargained for.

Anyway, since the health insurance was a deduction to the employer and salary isn't, I assume at least that tax savings will be lost to the extent that labor captured any of it.

Actually, the money the employers used to paying to insurers they'll likely be paying in payroll taxes instead. I think that's how a lot of single-payer systems are funded.

But still, this comes out to publicly provided health insurance not being a gain for anyone who now has stable employment with benefits (not sure why Charley was talking about union workers particularly). Am I missing the argument for how those workers are giving something up? If there is one, I'm definitely missing it, but I don't think there is one.

Another point, which is more broadly applicable, is the assumption that the health care provided will be equivalent. While relatively few Americans have such plans, truly gold-plated American health care plans genuinely do provide a level of care that's better than the quality of care available in e.g., Canada. Particularly given the psychological fact that people tend to be particularly mad about change making them worse off, that would likely be an issue for union workers who are lucky enough to have gold-plated plans. More broadly speaking this is an issue for a substantial number of well-off people. Care has to be rationed somehow, there aren't unlimited doctors, a MFA system will be trying to save money, and so there simply will be wait times, etc. that some Americans -- the current winners in the current system -- aren't used to. Of course there's every reason to think that a MFA/single-payer system could, for the system as a whole produce better results more cheaply. And the real benefit of not being threatened with losing care by switching jobs is huge (though less obvious to people who might not be thinking about switching jobs). But there are a very good number of Americans (how many exactly of course depends overwhelmingly on details) whose quality of care would likely decline relative to an existing gold-plated plan. That's a political reality-- even if not a good long-term policy reason for avoiding a switch to MFA.

165: My understanding is that the question was whether we should get rid of private health insurance (which is not the same providing public health insurance for everyone). Plausibly you could have medicare available for all, but union workers could still have the fancier private health insurance, they negotiated for.

166, 167: The one time I forget to preview...

166: Okay, that's finally something I understand. We're talking about the population of people who currently have insurance that they're actually specifically attached to, and who would be afraid that the publicly provided insurance would be worse, and who don't have any fears of losing their current insurance for something worse than even the publicly provided insurance.

Describing that population of people as "union workers" as if union workers generally fell into that category seems weird to me, and describing it as taking away something they paid for in the past for decades also seems weird (that is, at the time they were paying for it, they got what they were paying for. The suggested policy would be not allowing them to continue to pay for it.) But it's at least comprehensible.

And of course, it's a comprehensible fear -- calling it a comprehensible concrete injury seems to beg a whole lot of questions.

When the NHS was set up back in the 1940s, the government overcame resistance from doctors by throwing money at them: "I stopped their mouths with gold," said Nye Bevan. The result of this approach was that socialised dentistry was always and still is half-arsed, and ophthalmology is entirely private. But nobody ever attempted to shut down private medicine in the UK. After additional pensions, medical insurance is the commonest perk offered by companies to managers, as ISTR we've discussed before. For "non-essential" treatments, such as joint replacements, where NHS triage puts you well down the priority list, a lot of middle class people go private. The dirty secret is that often their experience is worse than going on the NHS, and the private hospitals kick you back into the public system ASAP for recovery.

The serious problem the USA would face that the UK didn't in 1948 is that we never had a mature insurance system for everything before the war. It was an unholy mix of insured treatments, charity hospitals and GPs fiddling their accounts so as to avoid poor patients getting evicted (if they were lucky). But the only serious lobby was the quacks, who are now entirely committed to public health.

If just anybody can afford medical testing, it takes some of the prestige out of getting a camera stuck up your butt when you turn 50.

154

The actual existing unions are in favor of single payer. https://aflcio.org/resolutions/resolution-6-making-health-care-all-reality

169: Wondering if Carp is thinking less about union workers with gold plans than about union workers whose contracts provide them with health insurance in (pre-Medicare eligibility) retirement? Not common these days, but still a thing. I can imagine some remorse at having traded money over many years for an anticipated benefit that's rendered superfluous by intervening events. (Not to suggest it's a strong point against MFA. It's in the nature of deferred benefits like that that sometimes you end up overpaying for them, e.g. if you die earlier in retirement than you expected to.)

I'm going to need some time to reconfigure "MFA" as anything but "Master of Fine Arts."

I usually find myself nodding in agreement to pf's comments, but this one strikes what sounds to me as a false note.

Yeah, you and I are very simpatico on this stuff.

I don't think of the issue as whether functioning markets can/would exist without government -- of course they wouldn't.

Markets vs. government is not the issue. It's the successful rightwing framing of the issue. This is how neoliberals get roped into something as stupid as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Sure, Darb et al know that markets must be regulated, but when it comes to specific instances of regulation, they can be suckered into framing things (as Darb does in the interview) as central planning vs. markets.

Something like MFA would certainly make my healthcare worse, partly because I have a good healthcare plan, but mostly because there's such an extreme doctor shortage in my region as it is and I can't imagine how bad it would be if everyone could go to the doctors. (Of course I'd still support it anyway, but I think it's reasonable to think that it'd be worse than the status quo ante for people with reasonably good healthcare.)

Actual existing unions were also in favor of Walter Mondale, but that didn't prevent plenty of the membership from going with Reagan.

I meant both categories of health insurance union members have bargained for.

I'm in favor of having a plan that covers everyone. I don't think anyone is being foolish, though, by being afraid that it's not going to be as good as what they have now, and won't have continual pressure from the right. In the real world, the folks that want to make cuts to Medicare just lost their House majority like 60 days ago. Will they never get it back? How much do you want to bet?

Our coalition includes a bunch of people with health care under the current system. If you can credibly reassure them that they aren't going to either get less or pay more, than the thing will fly. Up to now, though, the details have been murky. Getting more for less polls well, as a concept.

176 That framing also comes from a lot of the opposition to 'neoliberalism.'

Just as long as we can all agree on boycotting Israel.

179: Also true and just as wrong! I am a union supporter because I believe in markets.

It's very difficult to have effective labor unions without direct government intervention, so under the current framing -- as you say, by both sides -- unions are incorrectly regarded as an intrusion on the operation of the marketplace.

Unions, like antitrust laws and so many other government interventions, help free up markets to operate efficiently, even as they constrain the behavior of market participants.

Functioning markets are created by governments. They do not come into being in any other fashion.

178: You're equivocating between "People who now have health insurance and are not afraid of losing it in the current system [I haven't figured out why you're talking about union members specifically] aren't foolish to worry that Medicare for All might make things worse for them," and "I, CharleyCarp, believe from what I know about the facts of the matter that people who now have health insurance will be worse off under Medicare for All." I think there are pretty good reasons to believe that people who now have health insurance won't be worse off under Medicare for All. If you wanted to talk about those reasons for yourself, I could try to convince you.

To the extent that non-foolish-people are afraid that Medicare for all will make them worse off, that's a political problem, but I don't see any reason to think it's an insurmountable one.

Douthat's take on DeLong

Douthat can be interesting to read because he can judiciously weighs arguments, as he does here, before coming down decisively on the wrong side.

Here is where this column goes irretrievably bad:

If Clinton had matched this cultural conservatism with decency in his private life, Al Gore would have won re-election as his heir and the larger story of the center-left might have been entirely different.

Everything that follows is nonsense.

In fact, Clinton's personal morality would have done nothing to change the 5-4 margin by which Bush won that election. That defeat cemented the set of facts that DeLong is finally coming around to recognize -- that there is nobody on the other side of the negotiating table.

182 I've specifically said I think it's a political problem. It's not insurmountable. It can be overcome with actual proposals that account for the downside risks.

I join and support you in thinking that any voters who are worried that they may be worse off if their private health insurance is replaced by public health insurance should be reassured about that, and any political strategists who think those voters should be insulted instead are terrible lousy political strategists.

But dropping the sarcasm for a bit, what do you mean 'actual proposals that account for the downside risks'? That is, any 'downside risks' aren't general over a broad class of voters like 'union members', they're specific to the details of a particular person's private health insurance, which details are often unknowable by the insured person until after they've tried to use it for something particular, and how those details compare to the proposed MFA program.

180 - is there an Ilhan Omar thread at the moment?

No, but this one seems to be politics generally, so you could say something here.

In fact, Clinton's personal morality would have done nothing to change the 5-4 margin by which Bush won that election

That's a preposterous counterfactual. It's inconceivable that the 2000 election would have played out exactly the same if there was not a scandal and Clinton hadn't been impeached. I have no idea how it would have gone down, but I'm sure it would have been different.

186 I've not seen anything yet that's really detailed enough to know that, but more fundamentally, what's proposed and what gets enacted, and then continued, is a very different thing. Let's take a simple example, a public employee in, say, New York. Currently decisions about that person's healthcare coverage are made by a set of bureaucrats in Albany who have to live with the consequences of their decisions. It may be that shifting decision-making authority to someone who has to respond to the median voter in Nebraska or Mississippi isn't going to make a difference. In a world where Paul Ryan was considered some kind of serious policy wonk, that seems to be quite the leap of faith.

I think you're being too subtle, Charlie.

I also think the concerns you seem to be raising are definitionally unanswerable. That is, you're worried that benefits will be cut by a conservative Federal government after a program is put in place? Certainly could happen and there's no safeguard that can keep it from happening. There's no safeguard against private benefits being cut either. At which point, what are we talking about?

Way too subtle.

I do get that he's saying that I specifically should worry, but not in a way that makes any sense to me.

FWIW, Robert Waldmann's take on Delong (in comments)

OK down here where no one will be reading. Come on Brad, you were never a centrist (although you did sincerely hate the Glass-Steagal act).

You fought for a payroll tax financed Clinton Care not pretend it is just forcing people to buy insurance and the subsidize some. IIRC back when Dukakis was attempting health care reform in Massachusetts Larry Summers (who was a student of Martin Fieldstein not a student of Larry Summers as we are) was going around trying to find someone who had some argument why an employer mandate was better than single payer. The nerds have long recognized the superiority of single payer and then decided to compromise with interest groups and with politicians determined to disguise taxes as something else.

Fiscal v monetary policy is only read as left vs right because of the huge stature of Milton Friedman.

I can't recall you ever supporting insurance and exchanges. There is no link between private for profit development of hearing aids and private for profit health insurance that is plausible enough to interest someone as smart as you.

I think you are using a mythical past Brad as a straw man. In any case, I never met that guy.

QED.

Republicans are too deranged to be partners in making policy. Therefore we should get everyone to give up their employment based health insurance -- whether or not the coverage was part of their consideration in taking the job -- in return for a system that will periodically be managed by people too detranged to consult about the details. What could go wrong? Why would anyone balk?

I'm a total winner under M4F -- my crap exchange policy is really bad. I'd vote for it in a heartbeat, and it would make a genuine difference in my life. That doesn't mean I think we ought to hand wave away the concerns that people with other-than-crap coverage have to say.

M4A Shit.

186, 190

One big downside risk is a chaotic transition happening in a context of widespread opposition by the current medical establishment.

Vox's explainer and some remarks here about recent improvements in insulin are an example of a treatment where a poorly implemented transition from the US today to a great system on five years will cause a lot of problems. Expressing confidence that a viable equitable system is eventually possible (I guess because Europe has longer life expectancy and the system there basically works, maybe for some other reason also?) is not enough.

This means that, like midcentury patients, people on the older formulary experience a blood sugar spike after eating -- which can lead to long-term complications -- or must dose well before eating. Doing that requires a level of planning that is not always feasible at home, let alone in professional or educational settings.

If you think your employer is too deranged to be trusted with coverage decisions, you can consider changing employment.

Further to 199, the US has substantially fewer doctors per capita than Europe. Korea and Japan both have relatively fewer and have better outcomes-- maybe there are lessons there, though there are lots of demographic and social differences. Also, in both Europe and wealthy Asian countries, typical MD compensation is a lot lower than here, as is their loan burden after med school.

With sufficient political will and attention to detail, there's probably a way forward-- I absolutely believe this. But the transition will be slow and will not be simple if it's to be implemented without causing huge problems for patients or for doctors in the US.

All this written without considering at all the fate of the current insurance payment system, money and people.

as is their loan burden after med school.

Well I can't speak for Asia, but nowhere in Europe AFAIK are you expected to do an irrelevant bachelor's degree for four years and then start med school. This strikes me as barking mad, and a good start in lowering that loan burden would be to let people start taking a 5 or 6 year medical degree straight out of high school, like everybody else.

Republicans are too deranged to be partners in making policy. Therefore we should get everyone to give up their employment based health insurance -- whether or not the coverage was part of their consideration in taking the job -- in return for a system that will periodically be managed by people too detranged to consult about the details. What could go wrong? Why would anyone balk?

This seems to treat deranged Republicans in control of the federal government as a law of nature. If M4A makes it through Congress, that means that the deranged Republicans aren't controlling things at least for the moment. And then... once there's a program in place, it's got a constituency.

I'm not saying that the argument that Republicans will try to break everything they can is nonsense -- they will try -- but it's not a matter of proposing detailed plans. They'll try to break everything, we'll try to stop them, and once the thing they're trying to break is everyone's access to health care, we can hope they won't have the voters behind them. The voters didn't like it when they tried to break Social Security.

Another twitter thread from Brad: https://twitter.com/delong/status/1103051665697955840?s=21

This is really good stuff.

It is.

Another twitter thread from Brad: https://twitter.com/delong/status/1103051665697955840?s=21

Easier to read version here: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/on-msnbc-right-now-as-always-much-more-to-say-than-i-could.html

Also good posts from Henry Farrell: http://crookedtimber.org/2019/03/05/the-transformation-of-left-neoliberalism/

And Kevin Drum: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/a-neoliberal-says-its-time-for-neoliberals-to-pack-it-in/

It was good stuff until he started responding to a never worth reading disingenuous hack whose only goal in writing was to do exactly what he succeeded in doing, namely taking a substantive line of thought and forcing it into "I didn't say that blah blah blah here's what I said blah blah blah." Only the fact that Gloss: Don'tReadThat is in the NYT makes him non-ignorable for people of a certain public standing, because to say publicly that he's not worth any response is to call down a bunch of condemnation of how one has been so owned and triggered, one is incapable of responding. Though the NYT-style version of that would use some kind of religious sounding high-minded words in place of "owned" and "triggered", which are for a different audience.

OT, except for Moby: Today I learned that 48 million Americans - 14.5% of the population - suffer from a foodborne illness every year. The figure for the UK is about 10,000 a week, or 0.9% of the population per year. I must admit I was a bit startled by that.

HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING

204: Yeah, DeLong stepped up and filled in the blanks on his first Twitter thread, which focused on politics at the expense of policy.

207: I didn't mind the Douthat side-track because DeLong handled it really well.

209: We have learned what you taught us: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

I'm curious how the Commodities Modernization Future Act (CMFA) became the excuse for the financial crisis. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with credit default swaps, or with pooling mortgages. People who held the investments to maturity didn't even do that badly -- people overreacted to how bad of investments they were at the height of the panic. If the US hadn't changed the rules, the big banks would have just moved the trading to London or elsewhere.

The recession happened for clear Keynesian reasons -- the Bush administration tax cuts overstimulated the economy, and then the Fed stepped on the brakes too hard. It became a full blown financial crisis because Republicans can't be trusted as regulators, and because Bernanke and Paulson bailed out Bear (sending the signal that there were no consequences for big banks) and then let Lehman fail (imperiling the entire financial system).

I think blaming the CMFA is convenient for people in power because if the blame is diffuse enough then no one is held responsible. Bernanke gets let off the hook even though he was the main bank regulator during the worst banking crisis in 80 years. The Bush administration gets let off the hook, even though the cowboy behavior happened on their watch. The credit ratings agencies get let off the hook, even though they were selling fraudulent credit ratings. It also has the intellectual appeal of a "deep cause" type of explanation, rather than yet another conseqence of Bush v. Gore. Plus it allows one faction of the Democratic party to settle scores with another faction.

1) It was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, not the Commodities Modernization Future Act.
2) There is definitely something intrinsically wrong with CDS if you allow people to hold them without holding the underlying.
3) Regulating CDS as insurance contracts would have (though this wasn't the intent) radically restricted the growth of synthetic ABS and synthetic CDO which definitely did have something to do with the crisis.
4) The main problem with CFMA, I admit, was that it was partly written by the awful Phil Gramm, who made sure to carve out loopholes that allowed Enron to do business in an almost unregulated way, which was not a good idea but would have been highly lucrative for the directors of Enron, among them one Wendy "Mrs. Senator Phil" Gramm.

Sorry, I should have checked. I think I have mild dyslexia.

It's easy to remember because the Commodities Modernization Future Act is about whether you can have sex with soy beans after the beans are genetically engineered to be sentient.

211: Right. The GWB administration was responsible for decades of liquid capital accumulation worldwide and permitting of junk mortgages in the US; for European banks borrowing USD overnight to finance 30-year loans; for the EU building a currency union with no lender of last resort, no common fiscal policy, and no sovereign debt guarantee. And Bernanke and Paulson didn't improvise in a period of weeks a response that prevented the total collapse of the world financial system, and restored stability to US banking within months, at a profit to the taxpayer; nor did GWB and Congress Democrats co-operate to get that response passed in the face of Republican opposition; nor did Obama and the Democratic House and Senate fail to implement an adequate fiscal stimulus, or to impose even symbolic flagellation on banking executives. Nothing diffuse, nothing structural, nothing complicated, just the Supreme Court doing its thing.

I'm curious how the Commodities Modernization Future Act (CMFA) became the excuse for the financial crisis.

I don't regard it as the reason for the financial crisis, but as a synecdoche for the causes of the crisis. Failures in the regulation of derivatives were essential to the crisis. The CFMA was one of those failures, and it reflected attitudes about market regulation that were at the bottom of all of the failures.

I think you (and Charley in 68) make a reasonable point if you think I'm over-generalizing by pointing a finger at Democrats/neoliberals. But I'm still not convinced that an Al Gore Democrat (or a Brad DeLong Democrat) would have done noticeably better than Bush/Paulson. As you point out, London would have been happy to take the big banks' business, and would have done so without violating the neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the time. I guess a regulatory race to the bottom was also a factor.

215: I don't know what "decades of liquid capital accumulation" means. Junk mortgages were pretty much a phenomenon of the Bush administration period. The existence of the euro prevented good policymaking (and the initial response of the ECB to the crisis was incompetent), but you don't get a sovereign debt crisis without a worldwide banking crisis that started with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

Bernanke and Paulson reacted swiftly to a crisis that they themselves caused by letting Lehman go bankrupt. Systematically important banks cannot be allowed to fail. This suggests that systematically important banks should not be allowed to exist (which you can partially pin on Clinton for reappointing Greenspan, who clearly masturbated nightly to the concept of big banks), but once you have them you're stuck with them. Plus they made it worse by previously bailing out Bear Stearns, which sent the wrong message to the industry. (I'm not clear on whether I think they should have bailed out Bear, but once they did, they should have bailed out Lehman too.)

2) There is definitely something intrinsically wrong with CDS if you allow people to hold them without holding the underlying.

Elaborate? Admittedly I'm probably in the minority on this, but I don't really see the issue in general with naked shorts (of equity or debt), though I'll grant there can be specific issues in practice.

Failures in the regulation of derivatives were essential to the crisis.

Yes and no. They were arguably essential to the details of the way it played out, but I contend the crisis would still have happened and been nearly as bad without any derivatives at all. You don't need a failure of derivatives regulation to get German SIVs investing in more subprime RMBS than the entire balance sheet of their sponsor banks. You need a failure of bank regulation.

Don't rule out herd mentality, mindless stupidity and overconfidence either. People in the industry were not just very sure that they knew what they were doing*, they were - which is worse, really - very sure that their peers knew what they were doing. And this led to really simple mistakes.
For example, the eurozone debt crisis. Now, once the euro started up, Greece and Germany shared a currency. The price of Greek government debt also rapidly converged with the price of German government debt.
Now, there is no reason for that to be the case. Greece was a poorer and much less stable country, everyone knew that. They should have been paying higher interest on their debt, because they had a higher chance of not being able to repay it. That's how debt works. But everyone in the industry simply assumed that the eurozone meant that all eurozone debt was now equally risky and so should be priced equally; there was never any questioning of this completely unfounded assumption. But it meant Greece could run up massive debts which it ultimately couldn't pay.

*You mean, "How do we avoid the normal business of securities trading, which occasionally leads to incredibly smooth and seamless takeovers of failing organisations with practically no consequences for the real economy at all?"
Give over. If we were talking about trucking, or vacum cleaner manufacturing, the question "how can we regulate this industry to make sure none of the incumbent payers can possibly ever go bankrupt", this question would seem as daft as it actually is.
...
can I have a quick show of hands lads, for whom here is this the first financial crisis of their professional life? Because AFAICT it's not as serious as savings & loans, not as serious as the Spanish or Nordic crises, not as serious as the Credit Lyonnais, not as serious as Asia/Russia 1998, probably not as serious as Mexico 1995 and arguably not as serious as the NASDAQ bust. Sense of proportion here. - dsquared, 5 June 2008

I'm glad it wasn't a bad recession for him.

But everyone in the industry simply assumed that the eurozone meant that all eurozone debt was now equally risky and so should be priced equally; there was never any questioning of this completely unfounded assumption. But it meant Greece could run up massive debts which it ultimately couldn't pay.

Shades of the Latin Monetary Union there.

218: the two things wrong with naked CDS are:
1) you get manufactured defaults. Admittedly this isn't a big problem but still.
2) it allows much less regulated bits of the industry to set up massive side bets on e.g. the property sector, making the whole industry more interdependent and thus more unstable, in a way that is not always obvious to the outside observer. You couldn't have had a synthetic ABS/CDO business if naked CDS weren't allowed, or it would have been small enough not to matter.

I contend the crisis would still have happened and been nearly as bad without any derivatives at all. You don't need a failure of derivatives regulation to get German SIVs investing in more subprime RMBS than the entire balance sheet of their sponsor banks

Interesting point. I think I'd need to defer to someone who knows more about it than me. I've got Adam Tooze's "Crashed" on order; let's come back to this after I've read it.

220: what's really remarkable about that whole thread is that everyone else on it is not a financial professional, and is making point after point that is correct and apposite, and the only financial professional in the room is cheerfully dismissing one after the other while being completely wrong.http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_8832.html

That's why we should have hung a couple of bankers.

No one we know, of course.

223: Looking back on it, dsquared's attitude had a big impact on how I view the crisis. Everybody in the industry thought that the big banks were invincible, so they were completely unprepared for a big bank to fail. I remember him saying somewhere that everyone thought the big banks were "money good" -- that their default risk was basically zero. They should never have been able to form that impression, but once they formed that impression (and bailing out Bear didn't help) it's too late. Any financial crisis that takes down one big bank threatens to take them all down.

I forgot that he actually called me a twat on that thread.

Other than fallout from Lehman as a defaulted (non-CDS) swap counterparty, I think the main area where derivatives really juiced the crisis was in reinforcing the idea that things like super senior CDO tranches were riskless, which led to all sorts of balance sheet destroying activity like liquidity puts, even if the ultimate credit losses on those tranches were mostly pretty low.

I don't think manufactured defaults are all that bad, really, other than for sellers of credit protection. The companies involved have actually benefited from them. I generally take the Matt Levine line. To the extent they are bad, it's a function of CDS design rather than regulation and any problem isn't going to be solved by a naked short ban -- the economics would generally still work if you held the underlying. It may be a moot point anyway what with the narrowly tailored payment default language coming in.

2) it allows much less regulated bits of the industry to set up massive side bets on e.g. the property sector, making the whole industry more interdependent and thus more unstable, in a way that is not always obvious to the outside observer. You couldn't have had a synthetic ABS/CDO business if naked CDS weren't allowed, or it would have been small enough not to matter.
This is the strongest argument I think, and I'm certainly in favour of vastly more transparency (eg name level exposure volumes), but it's not obvious to me why leverage is OK but not shorting.

In the US, AIG's collapse was a big contributor to the crisis, and AIG was all about CDS. A quick Google gives me this. I didn't actually know the bit about securities lending, but I think that also fits in our conversation.

The company's credit default swaps are generally cited as playing a major role in the collapse, losing AIG $30 billion. But they were not the only culprit. Securities lending, a less-discussed facet of the business, lost AIG $21 billion and bears a large part of the blame, the authors concluded.

The thing about a financial crisis is it's all about trust in the system -- the assumption that your counterparty be able to pay. That's what US regulators forgot when they let Lehman fail. At least they bailed out AIG.

(I have a conspiracy theory -- but no actual knowledge -- that Lehman, unlike AIG, wasn't sufficiently in hock to Goldman Sachs to be deemed worthy of a government bailout.)

It's probably because anti-semitism is one of the two biggest stories in British news again, but it occurs to me that I really don't think talking about Goldman Sachs as the Vampire Squid will age well at all.

Really, Matt Taibbi?
You pick out the Jewishest sounding investment bank (not JP Morgan or Citi or Deutsche, but Goldman Sachs, a name which could only sound more Jewish if it was actually accompanied by a shofar and one of those weird minor-key folk songs and had a circumflex on top of the o in "Goldman" in place of a skullcap) and you use a metaphor to describe them that combines the three biggest anti-semitic images of history, viz. the octopus-like international Jewish conspiracy; the blood-drinking Jewish child murderer; and the evil money-obsessed Jewish financier? You'd be hard put to find an anti-semitic cartoon that doesn't have at least one of those three.

And it isn't even a metaphor that makes sense in non-anti-semitic terms. There actually is a deep-sea animal called the vampire squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Its body is about the size of a tennis ball, and it doesn't suck blood. It's called the vampire squid because it has a membrane that looks like a cloak, and it's dark red. It doesn't have a "blood funnel".

My (extremely eccentric, don't take this too seriously) psychological theory of the crisis and world before the crisis is as follows. I think the arrogance of central bankers (and maybe the tippy-top CEOs of the biggest banks) was as important as the arrogance of regular bankers. Greenspan and the elite banking/regulatory community were in love with gigantic banks because a world with a few huge banks capitalism is tractable and they run it. That's why Greenspan jerked off to huge banks. Yes he and others loved rhetoric about wisdom of crowds, decentralization, "neoliberalism," etc. etc., but that was all basically a gigantic con that only ideologues and journalists professors could fall for -- if you have just a few banks, and those banks have with balance sheets in the infinite trillions, then the world economy is in fact both controlled and largely subject to the control of a few big wise men. Another way of putting it is that Greenspan (and some of the heads of the big banks) all wanted to be like JP Morgan in 1907. They wanted to be in charge of a financial system so concentrated that it could be controlled, run, and saved by a few big men. Everyone understood that gigantic balance sheet expansion/financial concentration created a risk of systemic collapse if one of the big players went down. But that system also allowed for personal heroics by men in charge, and personal control by very smart people, so if you were one of the smart people that seemed like the best thing in the world. If you think of yourself as a "Maestro" and those around you as masterminds and you get to be inc charge then of course this system looks like it makes sense --capitalism has a control point and you're it. Oh and by the way on a bunch of external indicators the world was as prosperous as it ever had been, and you caused it -- you are literally a hero, albeit a secret one. On this reading all the stuff about neoliberalism, Ayn Rand, etc. etc. was a rhetorical smokescreen that should be given a Straussian reading. Greenspan et al. saw themselves as lone heroes and philosopher-kings in charge of the world. Huge banks with huge balance sheets meant huge opportunities for personal control and -- effectively -- a planned economy. But the planning was done in secret by (in their own minds) superheroes who presented in public like mild-mannered Clark Kents.

The thing is, I can't even say they were totally wrong. If they hadn't failed to bail out Lehman they might even have been right. Bernake and Geitner legitimately did control much of the world economy in late 2008-2009 and, basically, save it, all behind the scenes from Congress and anyone else. And maybe having banking philosopher kings in charge is better than some or many alternatives. But of course they did fail to bail out Lehman, and then even after saving the world failed to get enough stimulus through, and then Europe's philosopher-king central bankers were the infinitely less competent kind, and now ten years later here we are.

[I think I was the first person here to mention the CMFA, and I apologize. I really meant to refer to it more as a synechdoche for overall deregulation and allowing/encouraging hyper-sized bank balance sheets. I don't think anything particularly evil about CDS or really any other derivative caused the crisis, although certainly a lack of transparency as to obligations was a big factor. But the main thing was that you had a tiny number of giant banks with huge balance sheets and unthinkable leverage, and something was going to risk taking them all down if one went down. I think that is consistent with (if not repeating) points that Ginger Yellow and Walt Someguy already made above.]

229: It's too bad this post has fallen off the frong page. We could finally get the Ilhan Omar thread that Tom was looking for in 187.

CMFA just sounds better than CFMA. I am going to write my Congressperson.

I wouldn't go so far as 229, but I don't think that the popularity of blaming Goldman Sachs is entirely neutral. You see more people from GS in the government because they have a notion of public service. J.P. Morgan is just as vampire-squidy, but they are more purely psychopaths, which why you don't see them in public service.

230: You can see a whiff of that attitude in dsquared's comments. We don't need actual financial markets -- we just need sensible people in charge of major institutions to take care of everything.