The second post down is kind of awesome.
Cole's basically what I want out of a Republican: a willingness to let one's decency overcome one's partisanship. He has said cruel and unfair things about Dems over the last few years, but he's not more committed to the Republican Party than he is to his epistemic system, and that system isn't so different from mine.
Sadly, if he were going the other way (I didn't leave the Democrat party, the Democrat party left me!) he'd have a writing gig at Slate, or a book deal, or a slot on cable TV. But everyone knows that the only people who would leave the Republicans for the Dems are teh lib3ral Boosh haterz.
It sounds like he's similar to Markos and his conversion 14 years ago- veteran, former staunch Republican who both voted and volunteered for campaigns but who thinks the party was taken over by crazies.
I think Cole represents a larger constituency than many people realize. I've said it before, but the Democrats' #1 strategy should be branding the GOP as the party of religious fanatics.
I remember way back in the early days of Daily Kos when John used to comment there. He'd mix it up, but not unfairly. It was cool to watch him and Billmon get into it.
4- Careful, you're going to end up as an example in a future Amy Sullivan article.
SP: are you the same SP I see commenting on Egypt-related blogs?
Not that I know of, but I did take Ambien a couple times and who knows what I did under the influence.
On one hand, it would be great if Cole represented a large number of voters. On the other hand, the guy is a seriously socially liberal English professor who is only now -- after 6 years of Bush -- turning against the Republicans... and he's not even a party-hack type.
Makes me think that party ID is tremendously important and slow to change... and that "swing" voters who move around from election to election are basically the uninformed who don't pay any attention.
What I found reassuring about his rhetorical turn is its confirmation of the gist of what I've been thinking. From time to time I worry that I'm as insulated from non-Party narrative as, say, Hugh Hewitt is, and when I hear Cole saying these things it's a little bit of independent confirmation that, yes, the administration is f'ed up.
re 9, it's sort of interesting that Schiavo was the tipping point.
"the guy is a seriously socially liberal English professor"
whoa whoa. This is John Cole we're talking about, not Michael Bérubé, he of the doubled accents aigues.
JC is a military vet who has a good, healthy streak of redneck in him. It's true that he is libertarian on some social policy, but that mostly means "get big government out of my bedroom", which has traditionally been a conservative stance as often as a liberal one.
I mean--the fact that he is an English prof means he can read, and that's a good thing. But it does not immediately brand him a latte-sipping Volvo driver.
(I like the guy, by the way!)
When clicking through Balloon Juice, be sure to catch this comment from proud American Robert Fredson.
11: Yes, that some of us rifle and chainsaw owners can read and write and also despise the current pack of idiots in power enough to vote against them shouldn't be taken as embracing the left.
This is a marriage of convenience, thinking it's true romance will make for a stormy two year shack-up.
And will someone please tell Kerry to put a sock in it until after 2008? By now he should have known Rove would turn "I don't like fuzzy stuff" into "Kerry wants to kill kittens".
I'm not denying that it's a problem, but why is it a reason for telling Kerry particularly to shut up? No matter which Democrat is talking, Rove's going to spin them as a kitten-eater. It's not a matter of picking spokespeople who won't get irrationally attacked, because that's not possible.
The press continues to infuriate me.
It's good, though; one more reason for pundits to ignore the shenanigans behind the curtain when the Republicans miraculously hold on to power on Tuesday. "This Kerry incident really tipped the scales!" Fucking humps.
Because no one's sure Kerry has the verbal dexterity or the charm to pull off an appropriate response. Basically, Kerry should be the fourth guy off of the bench, and whenever those guys are trying to make (or remake) a name for themselves, things go badly for the team.
11: just trying to state things in as stark terms as possible.
Cole's a lifelong Republican who voted for Bush in 2004 and now sounds indistinguishable from Atrios. At the same time, his substantive views have changed very little -- there's a reason his comment section has always been mainly "liberal" or whatever.
I'm on Team STFU Kerry myself. Of course, remarks will be spun regardless, but our good friend Senator Kerry has a knack for rhetorical clumsiness that serves up the raw materials needed to contruct a big gaffe. He could have said, for example, "if you don't, you end up like the President: stuck in Iraq" instead of "If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq." Same joke, different outcome.
Be sure to check out Derbyshire defending Kerry and the predictable response, e.g., here and throughout the Corner. From a reader: "Just admit you want to have a gay marriage with John Kerry." Sweet.
Derb has his points. I still disagree with him about almost everything important, but he does come up with these moments of saying what he actually thinks, rather than what's useful.
I love the Derb. Not as much as I love 16 year-old girls, but still, love.
I can't help feeling a little sorry for Cole. Party loyalty has never been as important to me as it seems to have been to Cole, but a Democratic party as criminally corrupt and incompetent as the Republicans are now would still be hard for me to watch. But only a little sorry because I also can't help thinking "You voted for Bush twice and only started thinking they were nuts over Terry Schiavo?"
Makes me think that party ID is tremendously important and slow to change
I know plenty of smart, fine people--some of them family--who will concede how badly the Republicans have fucked things up and who will still turn away any suggestion that they maybe, vote differently, with a joke or a pained look. That's what boggles me.
Puts the meaning of "party membership" in an actual authoritarian society (instead of a merely aspiring one) in a new light.
Yes, much love for the Derb. Saying that he's the best of the Cornerites is faint praise.
I hear he wrote a decent novel, too.
Agree with ogged and FL. Derb and I disagree about most things, but with him, at least, I can understand what he's talking about. We live in the same world, or pretty similar worlds. With the rest, it's pretty close to word salad.
I have that same reaction to Pat Buchanan sometimes -- this is a very bad man, who is wrong about almost everything, but I recognize his universe.
27: That happens to me with Buchanan, too. Probably because, at heart, I'm almost as isolationist as he is.
Kerry is the anti-Clinton on campaigning skills. back in the day, when I read things about Clinton I was turned off, but when I saw him on TV I couldn't help but like and admire him.
Party affiliation is much harder to give up than you think, especially in a binary system. "Your" team has to have really fucked up before you can wrap your brain around voting for the guys on the other side, especially if you have spent time depicting the other side as "evil" not merely misguided. Schiavo was abig turning point, but incompetence in Iraq is bigger.
29: I guess they really are opposites. I like and admire Kerry because despite his lousy campaign skills I think he'd make a very good president. Clinton left me completely cold because I think I was supposed to somehow like him for his sheer political talent, despite the fact that he was constantly fucking over me and mine.
30 gets it exactly right.
It's instructive to read Cole's This Is No Fun post in light of the recent Cracks in the Wall series on Orcinus about how people get jolted out of following authoritarian belief systems. The jolt isn't always provided by a large policy issue, which can seem too abstract; often it's provided by an incident that graphically and concretely demonstrates to the follower that his or her leaders just aren't what they had seemed. After that point, the belief system's whole infrastructure of self-justification can easily start to seem rotten.
32: So they get jolted, and immediately go looking for another security blanket. Are they going to find one in "Think for yourself"?
Further, I'd bet it takes many incidents before they snap, cognitive dissonance sure appears to be working well for the right.
Party affiliation is much harder to give up than you think, especially in a binary system. "Your" team has to have really fucked up before you can wrap your brain around voting for the guys on the other side, especially if you have spent time depicting the other side as "evil" not merely misguided.
This is one reason why I sometimes think that a multiparty system in the US would do a lot of good in terms of reducing the degree of stupidity in this country.
But then sometimes I wonder what the effect of a Pat Robertson party would be. I'm sure it would make State Department recruiting a bit harder, for one.
This is one reason why I sometimes think that a multiparty system in the US would do a lot of good in terms of reducing the degree of stupidity in this country.
It certainly would. I sometimes wish I could move to a country where a country that vaguely shares my views exists, so I could vote for it, and it would get 15% of the vote, and then form a governing coalition with other parties that it thinks it could work with.
The best effect of this would be to see exactly how many people vote for the conservative party because of racism or insanity. Britain, France, Germany, Austria all have insane racist parties that reliably get around 10% of the vote.
When referring to insane racists a British person can simply say "the BNP lot". Whereas we have to say something like "the GOP base, you know the ones I mean. the Southern strategy people", and then moderates who vote for the GOP because they love to party but believe taxation is immoral say "OMG how dare you insult us, not all of us are like that. This is why the raving liberal party never wins." And then we have to say "The raving liberal party is no more than 15% raving liberals, based on a hypothetical system of opinion classification created by Ruy Teixeira, so you're wrong too." And nobody is happy.
Whereas we have to say something like "the GOP base, you know the ones I mean. the Southern strategy people", and then moderates who vote for the GOP because they love to party but believe taxation is immoral say "OMG how dare you insult us, not all of us are like that.
In practice, that second group is made up of six guys on the internet.
It also contains everybody who calls themself a "libertarian" but does not vote for the Libertarian party, which is probably about 1% of the population. It also contains every computer scientist or computer engineer I've ever met. America being a wealthy country, we have a lot of people who A) work hard, B) have prospered, and C) cannot imagine that luck played any role at all in their success, and therefore believe that anyone who refuses to prosper is a lazy parasite.
37: That's still not a lot. Look at Bush's approval ratings. The wonder isn't that he's down to 39%; the wonder is that 39% of Americans apparently will stand by this man no matter what. "The base," "the far right," "the Southern Strategy people" - that's them, and they make up over a third of the electorate, and over three-quarters of self-identified Republicans by most polls. Yeah, there are always the moderate center-right types and the occasional Randroid, but these people are distinctly in the minority. Outside of an Obsidian Wings comment thread, it's perfectly reasonable to use these fuckers to describe the GOP rank and file.
37. Luck is a loaded term that can be infered to mean random. There is more to it than that, and you turn off the hard working bootstrap types with words like luck. What we need to understand is how much we are benefitted by sacrifices that were made by those who came before, and the distribution of those benefits was not and is not universal or equal. How to equalize that difference becomes apolicy question, where luck should not play a part.
Luck is a loaded term that can be infered to mean random.
Whether you're born white, male, and wealthy is pretty fucking random. The hard-working bootstrap-types can learn to deal with the fact that they were dealt a pretty sweet hand or they can go whine about the mean ol' liberals somewhere else.
The wonder isn't that he's down to 39%; the wonder is that 39% of Americans apparently will stand by this man no matter what. "The base," "the far right," "the Southern Strategy people" - that's them, and they make up over a third of the electorate, and over three-quarters of self-identified Republicans by most polls.
I think a huge number of those people are more likely to vote for Republicans out of peer pressure or because they feeel more comfortable identifying themselves with that group rather than the other group. In other words, people who don't actually have any opinions or beliefs. There are a lot of them in the Democratic party too, of course.
It doesn't make rational sense to have opinions or beliefs about what the government should do anyway, if you aren't a stakeholder, so there are a lot of these people, and there's nothing wrong with being one of them. The trouble comes when they vote.
40, you're not being fair. What I'm talking about in 37 is people who worked hard and moved up in life, not people who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.
The problem is that for these people who worked hard and were rewarded, it is bad for their self-esteem to realize that there are also people in the world who worked as hard as they did but were not rewarded. They would rather believe that we are a perfect Darwinian meritocracy; much less guilt that way. These are the libertarians and George Gilder-types. There was a book called "CyberSelfish" written about this phenomenon in Silicon Valley. It's a pretty bad book, though.
40- yes, and having two college educated parents helps more than anything else. But insulting people who are born a certain way does not win votes, which is after all the point of the exercise. You can eat the rich later, Robespierre.
Alternately, the hard-working bootstrap types should also recognize that there are a lot of lucky sumbitches who did *not* work all that hard to get where they are, and that while hard work *can* make a difference, it's no guarantee. You can work as hard as you like, but if you have some bad luck, you're screwed. What 39 is really trying to say is that a lot of working-class Republicans object to social welfare because they think of it as a handout. But given that the working class knows better than most of us that the difference between getting by and getting screwed is as much a matter of luck as it is hard work, this is largely a function of Republican race-baiting, poor-shaming, and flat-out lying.
Or alternately, if we're talking about hypereducated libertarian computer geeks, then they oughta be smart enough to recognize that without things like, oh, say, government investment in things like research and development, e.g. of computer science departments and the internet, they wouldn't be hypereducated libertarian computer geeks.
"You can eat the rich later, Robespierre" is pretty catchy.
45 I don't think that is the point at all. I think there is a question of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. If you believe in #1, you need to be cognizant of the fact that opportunities are not equal, given different starting points, support systems, etc. But #2 flies in the face of free enterprise and free choice, which is why it is rejected by many people, even smart ones.
I recently realized that I failed to make my intended point in 32, which was that when you have only two parties, you can't generalize about somebody based on what party they belong to without a strong likelihood that you will be wrong and piss them off. Some may feel that this is a good thing because people will be less likely to generalize, but I don't think this is actually true. To me it seems more like a sign that too many people are allied with each other for no good reason and because of historical accident.
Sure, there's no guarantee of equal outcome. But that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that, say, person A, who works hard and supports their family, isn't substantively different from person B, who works hard and then gets laid off when the factory closes, or their kid develops cancer, or whatever. And I don't think that, in fact, person A really begrudges person B some help. The problem is that person A doesn't want to help the Reagan-invented "welfare queens," black women who spend "your" tax dollars on Cadillacs. Which is what I said: race-baiting and lies.
you're not being fair. What I'm talking about in 37 is people who worked hard and moved up in life, not people who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.
So am I. There are no Horatio Alger stories, and everyone who's successful - regardless of how much work they put into it - has a lot of luck on their side, from genetics to environment to gender and race. I wasn't born George Bush, but I was born with a Y chromosome, which automatically puts me ahead of any woman in a similar situation. Beyond that there are countless random factors that amount to being in the right place at the right time, that can make my hard work more valuable or less valuable than the same amount of work from someone else. This is a fairly simple observation, not a revolutionary manifesto.
I agree that welfare queens driving Cadillacs is race baiting, and certainly a lie. But telling someone that there personal success is due to luck will not win their love. Pointing out that their success is not solely due to their brainpower and fortitude, but due to a set of conditions that not everyone is able to take advantage of will probably find a receptive audience.
I wasn't born George Bush, but I was born with a Y chromosome, which automatically puts me ahead of any woman in a similar situation.
A woman with a Y chromosome? That would be quite problematic, I suspect.
Do you have anything meaningful to contribute, BL, or are you specializing today in missing the point?
Actually, I think it generally isn't much of a problem.
55- I have nothing meaningful to contribute.
56- Wow. I stand corrected. I'm going to write a letter to my middle school biology teacher, who was wrong, wrong, wrong!
To get substantive again, why is telling someone they were lucky an insult? I don't get that from it at all.
You don't see how telling someone their success is due more to luck than to their own hard work and superior intellect is likely to be taken as insulting?
Telling someone that the *only* reason they're successful is luck is insulting, agreed. But there are few people who would say that, and I don't think any of them are in this thread. And there are, in fact, people who are successful only because of luck--the current president is one of them.
Right, saying that both luck and hard work are necessary for success isn't telling someone they didn't work hard, just that their hard work alone didn't do it.
I didn't say only. And I'm not saying that luck is wrong -- I think it accounts for far more success than most people acknowledge. But I do think a majority of people would be hostile to that message.
A majority of people are hostile to a lot of unflattering truths.
It comes across as an insult because it's telling them that their work was comparatively unimportant and that by not acknowledging that they are a bad person. This may be true, but true and insulting are more or less orthogonal.
Working in tech startups, one sees a lot of people who make a shitload of money, in large part through luck. Some of them recognize this, but there are enough that don't that "struck it rich once and now thinks he's an internet visionary" type is a well-known and generally looked down upon "type".
Of course, Silicon Valley is weird and probably doesn't generalize to the rest of the country, but hey, it's what I know.
63: what's the difference between a hostile truth and an insult?
Er, between an unflattering truth and an insult.
A majority of people are hostile to a lot of unflattering truths.
Which is why telling unflattering truths is a bad way to get elected.
Not that we're trying to get elected here, but you see what I mean.
One of the wealthiest guys I know always says "I'd rather be lucky than good".
Agree with teo and Jake. Moreover, it doesn't accord with their experience, and it casts into doubt your own connection to the world they live in.
My engineer/libertarian* readers don't like the idea that luck contributes to my success than my effort at all. I say "there but for the grace of god" and they try to convince me it was all my abilities and skill. They can't even handle the idea that my success was largely due to luck, much less theirs.
*I do not solicit libertarian readers, but they find me and keep reading even after I insult them.
69: and I agree with him.
And for the whole insulting bit, how hard is it to say "Oh, we know you worked hard for your success, and we respect that, but surely you know a lot of idiots who just happened to get lucky or had a rich dad or something, and in order to tax them fairly we need to hit you a little. But we're taking you into account, blah blah blah." You know, being politic.
I really don't think a non-offensive argument regarding the perils of fortune (and the corresponding need for a social safety net) is nearly as impossible as Leech is making it out to be. The fact that social welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security are overwhelmingly popular, and that a growing majority of Americans supports universal health care, indicates that it's not. Most people who aren't obscenely rich (or insane) tend to intuitively grasp how fragile their financial situations are, and how easily a few health complications or a sudden accident could make their lives a whole lot more miserable. That's why broad support for these programs already exists, and why that support gets even broader when you actually go out and make the case for it.
...why is telling someone they were lucky an insult?
More than insulting, it's scary. The idea that random events can play a big part in one's life is something that many, many folk simply cannot handle, they are fearful that bad can come as easily as good.
You knoe, it is really isn't envy. I don't read the Crooked Timber thread about how if you haven't seen Caravaggio in Italy you need to wipe your hard drive and just stop pretending you understand beauty...but I don't envy the people who can afford go to Italy and flaunt it. I hate them for other reasons.
I don't care about being rich. I don't hate the rich for being rich. I hate them for thinking it makes them better than me, or that the opportunities wealth provides makes them better. Better bodies, better taste, better education, better kids, better politics.
"You can eat the rich later, Robespierre."?
Now. Now. NOW!
75:Umm, the mask kinda slipped a little, huh. Sorry. Didn't really mean it, have much more rational stuff, not really ressentiment and all that.
It is the global warming stuff. I'll be better.
More than insulting, it's scary.
I think it's even more than that. There's a strong strain of belief that success is demonstration of moral worth. If a lot of it is luck (or even part of it), you're deprecating the successful person's moral status (as well as their status to speak with authority on matters outside their expertise, etc.)..
Exactly. The problem is that the success = moral worth thing is so fucked up. But it's a huge part of the capitalist/Protestant heritage.
78: It isn't only capitalism. It's not exactly unknown among those who've placed a high premium on and done well in matters of education, B. And part of the problem is a weird sort of confusion. There is some value to what they have, even if it was achieved by luck: there is some reason to listen to people who are experts in their fields. "Listening to them" often means "following their advice," and that, in turn, feels somehow similar to moral compulsion. There's something going on there about the respect and deference you give people, I think.
I'm on Team STFU Kerry myself. Of course, remarks will be spun regardless, but our good friend Senator Kerry has a knack for rhetorical clumsiness that serves up the raw materials needed to contruct a big gaffe. He could have said, for example, "if you don't, you end up like the President: stuck in Iraq" instead of "If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq." Same joke, different outcome."
Thats his whole problem. If he could have just used simple sentences, without extraneous clauses, with words with no more than 2 syllabls, with descriptive words, he'd sound normal, instead of like some 'let me show off my giant, shinny brain".
79: But capitalism covers basically an entire structure that includes modern education and the belief in meritocracy rather than birth. In pre-capitalist systems, your worth is determined by your ancestry; in capitalist systems, it's determined by your achievements, which include things like education, earnings, profession, and so on. Not that these things are entirely unaffected by ancestry in most cases (hence the "luck" thing), but the role of modern education in meritocratic ideology is hardly a counterexample to the idea that capitalism helped invent the work=worth belief.
80: Yeah, I think that "like the President" vs "stuck in Iraq" thing is really a manifestation of social class. In Kerry's mind, "you" means "people with power and ambition and social status," so it didn't even occur to him that "you end up stuck in Iraq" would be taken as a slam on enlisted guys; he wasn't talking about them.
Of course, the flip side is that for all their bitching and moaning about how disrespectful that is, the Bush folks, who are as privileged as Kerry is, are less tone-deaf on that particular subject. They know perfectly well that the people who end up stuck in a war are the uneducated and unprivileged, because they themselves used their connections to avoid going. And they also know that that's not something one should ever, ever talk about.
are you saying they're less tone-deaf because their seeing the power structures better. and->better at manipulating, as a general thing?
I dunno if Dr.B is saying that but I would. The right certainly has a better grasp of human psychology as it is rather than as the left wishes it to be.
What they don't have (and neither does the left) is a grasp of the notion that a whole collection of fuck-ups creates a lump that's simply too big to sweep under the rug.
Actually, what I'm saying is that the folks who are currently in power know more about classist subtext because they are quite consciously classist, whereas (some) on the left are tone-deaf about that shit because their classism is more sublimated.
I wouldn't make sweeping judgments about who understands human psychology better. I think the right has become very good at playing on some of the more negative aspects of human psychology, but that doesn't mean they understand it better as a whole.