Paul Farmer: Conservatism, Socialism, and Ambivalence

Via Rod Dreher, I see that Alan Jacobs has written in praise of Tracy Kidder's remarkable portrait of Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. I cannot agree more with what Alan has written: the story of Dr. Farmer--a Duke and Harvard- educated specialist in infectious diseases who has devoted his life to serving the poorest of the poor in Haiti's central plateau, as well as many other places around the world through numerous organizations his expertise and unflagging determination has led him to found or otherwise become involved in--is a beautiful and important one, one which challenges in a very direct sense what our priorities are. It is a book that we are reading here at Friends University as part of our First Year Experience for incoming freshman and transfer students. I wish I could say that all of them are appreciating the message--or at least are finding themselves slapped in the face occasionally by the message--of the story of Paul Farmer, but I'm not sure that's happening. But then again, as Alan points out, Dr. Farmer is himself sympathetic to the idea of the "long defeat," the idea that most battles will be lost, that most seeds which are sown are going to fall on stony ground, that most good deeds will (at best!) simply keep people alive and happy for one more day, until--perhaps--someday, maybe soon, maybe years and years hence, they will be remembered and will expand into a transformation of a person's heart and mind or perhaps even the society around them. Until then, you educate, you serve, you struggle.

A couple of things worth adding to Alan's and Rod's points. First, to get a sense of the man, and what he's all about, check out this recent 60 Minutes interview. It's on the maudlin and simplistic side--like all network television news, I'm afraid--but it gets, I think, the most important things about Farmer's background, drive, and daily life correct:



Second, let's be very clear on what Farmer has to say to all the rest of us. It is a message that focuses on 1) his belief in the absolute right of all human beings--including especially those perhaps 2.5 billion people around the world who survive on the equivalent of $2 or less day--have to basic sustainability and medical care, and 2) his deep conviction that fulfilling step 1) cannot be done through casual charity or even liberal redistribution programs (though both certainly help!): it's going to require genuine social and cultural sacrifice and change:

Just when you thought had the hang of his worldview, [Farmer would] surprise you. He had problems with groups that on the surface would have seemed like allies, that often were allies in fact, with for example what he called "WL's"--white liberals, some of whose most influential spokespeople were black and prosperous. "I love WL's, love 'em to death. They're on our side....But WL's think all the world's problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don't believe that. There's a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It's what separates us from roaches." [MBM, pg. 40].

What about those who don't feel pity? I mean, isn't that one of the classic arguments for avoiding utopian or socialist thinking: the truth that in a free society--and we all believe in at least a little bit of individual freedom here, don't we?--there's going to be diversity and differences and disagreements, and as such any attempt to impose communitarian, much less any morally felt obligations of service and sacrifice is going to fail? Hence, we have to trust in the free market, or at most, in some egalitarian taxing and re-arranging of it, and hope that charity takes care of the rest. It's a strong point...but one that, as Dr. Farmer's constant, unending scrambling for funds and his unceasing labors in the field both make clear, still leaves millions of people dying from treatable diseases every year. (You want statistics? How about this: in 1995, "UNICEF estimated that the total cost of providing basic social services in the developing countries, including health, education, family planning, and clean water, would cost $30 to $40 billion per year. At the time the rich of the world were spending more than this on golf each year" [Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving From Affluence to Generosity, pg. 17].) Dr. Farmer's story--his life--teaches, in my view at least, a central truth about serving the poor: that a commitment to social justice will, and probably should, hurt. Indeed, being sensitive to that hurt is what can make you aware of, and willing to do something for, the society around you in the first place:

"If you're making sacrifices [Farmer once said], unless you're automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you're trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to be a doctor for those who don't have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence." He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn't bristle, but his tone had an edge: "I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can't buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent." [MBM, pg. 24]

Farmer was raised a Christian believer, but only became truly committed during his years of going back and forth between Harvard and Haiti: "The fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor--not just in Haiti but elsewhere too--made me even more convinced that faith must be something good" [MBM, pg. 85]. He became a fierce advocate of that element of Catholic social justice teaching that emphasizes giving preference to the poor, or the "option for the poor." For Farmer, this has meant liberation theology, and a thoroughgoing critique of the failures of the rich capitalist nations of the world to attend to the manifest and desperate needs of the poorest of the poor. Socialism? Farmer's not an economist, nor is he a theorist: he is, in his own words, "an action kind of guy" [MBM, pg. 79], and so he likes the untheoretical pragmatism of social justice in the context of a place like Haiti: socialism simply means prioritizing social goods, such as those support mechanisms whereby the poor do not necessarily die when they might be easily saved, and that means regularly providing sufficient for the poor to receive the service and remediation they require. Figuring out what role the state should have to do with it all comes along later, and probably would need to change as the times do.

Ambivalence--and the properly conservative understanding that, over the long haul, even one's best efforts in this fallen world won't add up to very much--ought to keep those who dream of perfect liberation and justice from trying to harden their revolutionary plans into a rigorous dogma. It is a hopeful, yet chastened, appreciation of what it means to be a Christian or just a decent human being, and thus feel obligated (to feel "oppressed," as I once put it) and serve the poor; an appreciation driven by ambivalence, and a sense of limits and of the tragic, and most importantly one focused on the personal and the local alongside the social and economic, rather than scampering off in search of easy ideological solutions. Those so-called "conservatives" who write off his vision as "abominable," as well as those "white liberals" who admire him from a safe suburban distance while they write him a check, don't get it. I can't say I fully get it...at least, not yet. But I'm trying.

Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford, You Moron

Via Laura, I have learned that, in this time of economic crisis, Saturday Night Live is way ahead of all of us, as usual:



And in case you're wondering, the title of this post applies at least as much to Melissa and I as it does to any likely reader, so hey, don't get offended, man.

Incidentally, Laura has written on this topic before, more or less; you can read my runimations on her thoughts, but it's better just to read her directly.

Not so incidentally, Laura's family has had some rough times lately, and the times may just get worse for them. So send some prayers and good thoughts their way, everyone. Thanks.

Bailout Questions from Kansas (Populist Alternatives, Socialist Realities, and Progressive Compromises)

This past Friday, I appeared on Kansas Week to discuss, among other things, the bailout bill which had finally passed the House of Representatives and been signed by the president just a few hours earlier. I can't imagine the readership of this blog and the viewing population of Kansas Week overlaps at all (except maybe for you, Caleb!), but in case there is someone out there who saw me on KPTS, and is a little confused about what I said there on the one hand, and what I said here and here on the other, let me see if I can elaborate just a bit more.

(I've sent a version of this post to the Wichita Eagle; we'll see if they ever run it. [Update: here it is.])

My main point during the discussion was that the remarkable amount of uniformity in the Kansas Congressional delegation's "no" votes (Senators Brownback and Roberts both voted no, in a vote that ended last week 74-25 in favor of the bailout package, and Representatives Boyda, Moran and Tiahrt--three out of Kansas's four representatives in the House--voted no not just once, but twice) needn't be shocking; it just needed to be explained. This was a huge vote, in political terms; the president, both major presidential candidates, and the Democratic and Republican leadership in the House and Senate all pushed for it. To go against that kind of pressure suggests either seriously political calculations, or serious convictions, or both. It would be nice, especially as four of these five people come back to Kansas to campaign for re-election, to be able to get them to elaborate upon what their votes meant. I think I got that point across, however briefly. But along the way, there were a couple of things said that needed more context. One was an unfair comment about some politicians engaging in "populist pandering"; another was my final observation that I would have liked the bailout plan a lot more if there had been more "honesty" about what it involved. Let me see if I can situate both comments a little better.

We all know that the debate over this bill was a contentious one. In the end, as is usually the case in our democracy, impassioned words and party directives were not enough, and the votes for this complicated, unpopular, and very expensive proposal had to be bought, with the final bill being sweetened with over $100 billion worth of tax benefits, federal guarantees, and outright pork, all to win over enough Republican and Democrat representatives for it to pass. (By which time, incidentally, it had expanded to an 460-page monster). And even still, five out of Kansas's six federal politicians said no. Why?

Was it simple political calculation? In the Senate in particular, that explanation is pretty believable. The U.S. Senate is, by design, a fairly elite body, and there was never much doubt that the majority of U.S. senators would be moved by elite financial considerations–crumbling credit markets, stock portfolios and retirement plans losing value, access to business loans drying up, etc. Running angrily against Wall Street’s "greed" always good politics, even if there’s no substantive populism or suggestions of reform laying behind one’s criticisms, and so it’s not surprising that Pat Roberts–who, on the basis of his record, doesn’t have a single economically populist bone in his body–took a look at where the votes stood amongst his colleagues, and figured that he could afford to rail against the bill for the benefit of Kansas voters, confident that it would still pass. The same kind of calculation could explain the second votes of Boyda, Moran, and Tiahrt; they could see that enough of their colleagues had changed their minds so as to make certain that a bill which most of the Republican and Democratic establishments were firmly behind, and so they could afford to vote to show off their anger for the folks back home. (And lets not forget the presence of your usual interest group quid pro quos: in both the Senate and the House, the Congresspeople who had received the most campaign support from the financial sector were the most likely to support the bill. You stratch my back, I'll stratch yours, etc.)

But perhaps all that is too cynical. After all, how to explain our representatives’ first votes? How to explain the vote of Senator Brownback, who isn’t up for re-election this year? Brownback, in contrast to Roberts, actually does occasionally make Huckabee-style populist-type arguments, and so perhaps his no vote was more principled; might the same be said for Boyda, Moran, and Tiahrt?

I don't want to pick out or particularly criticize this reaction; far from it. I am a populist--at least, of a sort--and I respect populist arguments. The problem is that so often populism is treated cheaply as a style, without any real thought of the costly (and, yes, often comprehensive) reforms that would be necessary to make a populist economics and politics substantively worth pursuing. And so, when I hear attacks on Wall Street, I want to ask: is the populist anger at and defiance of Wall Street which, perhaps, Boyda and Moran and Tiahrt showed, directed at contemporary financial capitalism itself? Do they have something substantive to say about today’s economic world, so heavily dependent upon credit, debt, consumption, investments, and constant expansion? Will they follow up their populist attack on this admittedly astonishing and desperate power and money grab by the federal government, with an attack on those citizens–the rich, surely, but also the middle-class–who have allowed economic sovereignty to slip through their fingers, leveraging themselves for the sake of ever bigger homes, ever nicer cars, ever more profitable investment and retirement plans, ever more expensive universities for their children? In other words, would they be willing to explain their no votes as an expression for contempt not only for the financiers as the top who sent Wall Street’s banks reeling, but also for those average citizens who put the tools for doing so into those financiers’ hands?

A couple of weeks ago, Rod Dreher kindly linked to this old paper of mine, which was one of my several attempts over the years to put populist thinking to work in addressing the practical social and economic problems which farmers and those who depend upon them--which means, of course, all of us--face in America today. Rod is a fan of the populist alternative, but he also recognizes that pursuing real social and economic sovereignty is going to require supportive communitarian values to sustain it, and he, perhaps rightly, that "our culture is too fractured to form any stable populist political coalition," adding that: "Are you really going to get people who are pro-life and pro-choice, who are for affirmative action and against affirmative action, who are for gay marriage and against gay marriage, to put all that aside and unite around a populist economic agenda?" He makes a good argument, an argument which, in terms of this blog at least, goes a long way back: all the way back to when, in the wake of the 2004 elections, I was talking in this post (and this one too) about how the only way a genuinely liberal egalitarian politics (which I've since come to believe necessitates a significant populist component) was going to survive was if we could create--or recover!--a left which could contribute to, and become more supportive of, the "conservation" of a common culture, including a religious one. Perhaps Rod's right that such is a lost cause; that any common culture America once had is irretrievable, leaving us with just the "Benedictine option" as our only alternative. I hope not, if only because, as much as I have learned from McIntyre and all the various types of "Benedictines" who are following the path he gestured towards, in the end I fear too many people--too many poor people, too many unpopular or marginal people--would be left behind if we all dissolved into such routes. But anyway, in the meantime I nonetheless keep an ear out for populist rhetoric...and when I suspect it's being used, I want the people using it to treat it with some respect, not just as cheap vote-earning ploy.

Back to the bailout questions. All this aside, perhaps there was nothing populist about all these no votes whatsoever: perhaps, instead, they were expressions of libertarian conviction that, in a free market, banks that take risks with their assets must be allowed to fail. Well, you know how I feel about libertarianism, especially in the context of the farming Kansas voters depend upon and ritually praise. Still, I would love nonetheless to hear expressions of such conviction from our representatives’ lips. I think it would take remarkable political bravery for politicians running for re-election to look in the eye small business owners, farmers, students, and all others who depend upon solvent banks and flowing credit lines to pay their bills, cover their inventory, and handle their costs, and tell them that if they took a risk--and that includes putting their financial needs and decisions into others’ hands--then they need to be able to deal with the consequences. I would really respect such an answer, knowing as it does that it would mean a rebuke to all the safety nets, both corporate as well as governmental, which the great majority of Americans have come to plan their lives around. I wouldn't expect politicians who gave such answers to have a very long career in office, but it would be good to hear such honesty while we could.

Of course, populist anger and libertarian conviction do not exhaust all possible answers our senators and representatives to give to us. One could have voted no because one wished to express discomfort with granting this kind of power and financial discretion to a thoroughly unpopular and discredited president, and preferred to wait (and let Wall Street wait) until a different administration was in power. Or, one could have voted no because one genuinely did not agree with the plan to empower the Treasury Secretary to attempt to jump start the credit market by driving up demand for the business of these banks through bidding and negotiating for their assets. (The lack of confidence in international and credit markets over the past couple of days suggests that, whatever else is true, the promise of the approved plan alone is no magic bullet to putting things back the way they were, assuming that is even possible.) Perhaps one voted no because one actually preferred a more honestly socialist response, in which the federal government nationalized these banks or their transactions, and thus made voters not just indirect beneficiaries of any money that might be recouped though the recovery of Wall Street banks, but actual owners of the assets in question themselves. (This is the approach Sweden took during a similar banking crisis in that country fifteen years ago, and it seems to have worked well, though I doubt the Sweden social democratic model was on the mind of anyone who voted on this bill last week.)

Let's talk about Sweden for a moment, not just because I've brought it up already, and not just because a whole bunch of other bloggers are doing the same, but because it goes to the heart of what I meant about wishing our Congressional delegation could have been more "honest" about what they were voting on.

Some time ago, Patrick Deneen (who was on the same panel at which I presented the paper linked to above...small world!) posted a bit of a screed on his blog about "progressivism." His basic aim was to attack John Dewey and show the connection between his belief that, when properly educated, a people through democratic action can rise up and distinguish themselves from the "savages" back home in their primitive communities, and the tendency for elites today to freak out when a cultural "throwback" like Sarah Palin comes onto the scene. He makes a decent point (though Dewey is a complex figure; alongside his easy dismissal of any kind of traditionalism is a thoughtful understanding of how communitarian practices and goods need to undergird democracy)...but in any case, it is a limited point. Progressivism's cultural sins were, from my point of view (and Patrick's too) legion; that I don't deny. You can't be a reader of Christopher Lasch and not recognize that. But one of the problems with such a condemnation of the progressive movement in American history is that it fails to acknowledge the fact that so many of the "savages" that rose up within their communities--communities across the American South and Midwest, communities in Kansas too!--and called themselves "populists" (whether they actually joined the People's or Populist parties or not) found a home for themselves, a decade or two later, in progressive movements with the Democratic and Republican parties. William Jennings Bryan is the best example here, but he's not alone. Of course, such populists could be called--and historically were sometimes called--traitors to the cause (and worse), but the fact remains: when populist reforms ran aground, Progressivism pushed forward many of their same aims, and then some.

I'm thinking here about Camassia's comment on the aforementioned post, in which she asked some pointed questions about economic sovereignty and social democracy and localism: how much is too much? How can you tell good local control from bad? Sweden is a fascinating site for thinking about the balance between community and populism and local cultural authority, on the one hand, and the desire to generate and spread some wealth, on the other. The reason why it's fascinating is because it is a thoroughly modern capitalist nation-state, but it is also rather small. I noted that in my post, and Tyler Cowen picked up on it as well, turning it into a point of critique: in arguing against the Swedish approach to managing this kind of economic crisis--basically, nationalizing the banks and taking public ownership of the assets in questions directly--he observes that "Swedish governance is in many ways of higher quality than American governance. It involves lower transactions costs, more social unity, and it is more inclusive of many different interest groups....The Swedish banking system is also "small as a whole" compared to surrounding markets; you can't say that about the USA....[Moreover, the] U.S. doesn't have any tradition of successful nationalization....The diffuse and highly federalistic American political system is lacking in accountability and thus it is poorly suited for such policy actions." These are an important considerations: the kind of decisions we can make in the face of huge, costly, complicated economic crises, crises of a sort that so many unthinking and everyday modern liberal capitalist presumptions and activities--presumptions and activities that involve one's home, one's workplace, one's children--are implicated in it...well, said decisions are going to be, by definition, shaped by our size and our self-understanding and our history. Which, of course, isn't a socialist one. And so, as much as I think it's obviously that socialist solutions are the only one's available to those a modern state (and a modern state of being) that, in pursuit of greater justice and equality and comfort, has already exchanged one form of (negative) liberty for another (positive) sort--Daniel Larison, whom Ross Douthat is quoting in the above link, is a great thinker, but he doesn't often appreciate that "freedom from fear" is a real liberty too!--it nonetheless may be the case that neither the populist alternative, nor the socialist reality, is really practical. So what is left? Why, progressive compromises of course. (Senator Obama to the rescue? Perhaps, perhaps not. But as Noah Millman put it, there's only one party whose leadership appears to be fully serious about the compromises were faced with, and it's not McCain's.)

In any case, these are the sort of political thoughts and questions which we Kansas voters ought to be following up on, and which our no-voting politicians ought to be answering. Just because the bailout finally passed doesn't mean the debate should be over; the contrary, it's only beginning. In the meantime, it's Tuesday, and I'm going to watch the debate tonight. Will I see any of this, one way or another, on display in Tennessee tonight? I doubt it...but you never know.

I'm Raising a Daughter from the 80s

I'm helping the other girls--ages 8 and almost-5; the 2-year-old is already asleep--pick-up the downstairs playroom before bed. In the background, our oldest--Megan, 12 years old--is doing some math homework.

At about 7:40pm, I realize Megan is playing some music in her room. The song? Van Halen's "So This is Love."

A few minutes later, I pick up on another song coming from her room: Tone-Loc's "Wild Thing."

"Megan," I ask her, poking my head through her open door into her bedroom, "why are you listening to this station?"

"I like it," she says. "It helps me concentrate."

She has an MP3 player, which she often downloads music for, whenever she can afford it. "Is there anything you'd rather be listening to?"

"No; I like what this station plays a lot." She looks at me curiously. "Is there a problem?"

"Not really," I say, hoping she doesn't listen to lyrics any more than I did at her age. "It's just, well, the songs this station is playing are pretty old. I can remember listening to them while doing my homework in high school."

"Oh." She shrugs, and looks back down at her math homework. "I hadn't noticed."

As of this point, the music from her room has continued: Prince's "Little Red Corvette," Steve Miller Band's "The Joker," Eurythmics's "Sweet Dreams," Bee Gees's "Night Fever," Huey Lewis and the News's "I Want a New Drug."

Apparently we are not only managing to raise an FM-station listening daughter from the 1980s, but one that is every bit as MOR as I was at that age. Thank goodness things never change.

Rosh Hashanah (Happy 5769, Everybody!)

It was a beautiful afternoon and evening today here in Wichita. A strong breeze was blowing, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying the late September warmth as I rode my bike home from work, watching the sun turn slightly orange as it approached the horizon. And then, when I got home, the smell of challah bread, fresh from the oven.

Four years and a couple of weeks ago, I wrote my first Rosh Hashanah post. At the time, we were living in northeastern Arkansas. Now we're living in south-central Kansas. Neither, as you might guess, are major centers of America's Jewish population. So while I have Jewish friends, we haven't ever had Jewish neighbors (at least, not so far as we've ever known) during our sojourn through the American South and Midwest. Hence, we've never been able to get caught up in, or even just catch a small glimpse of, this holiday in its full civic aspect. So why write about it, especially seeing as how I'm not Jewish and won't be attending synagogue tomorrow? Well, because it's a new beginning, and I'm nuts for beginnings...especially those that I can tie into the calendar, and to however small a degree, make into something about where we are, and where we're going. To paraphrase some of I wrote back in 2004:

Melissa and I incorporate just about any holiday we can plausibly conceive of a connection to into our family life. Traditional Christian holidays like Easter and Christmas, of course, but also various religious festivals connected to cultures and places with which we have some affinity: St. Andrew’s Day and St. Lucia's Day during the holiday season, for example. Then there are outright national, civic holidays: Independence Day, of course, but also German Reunification Day (seeing as how our lifestyle gets in the way of celebrating Oktoberfest to its fullest) and the Korean Thanksgiving, Ch'usok. And we celebrate Rosh Hashanah. We don’t doing anything special--talk to the kids a little bit about the history and experience of the Jews, and eat some of Melissa's excellent challah bread for an evening meal after sundown--and I won’t pretend that we’re somehow plugging into something deeply authentic by putting it on our own personal (Mormon, American) calendars....But I'm glad we do it anyway, and not just because it gives me the ability to take a nice early morning walk and, justifiably or not, lend the beginning of the day a certain (admittedly somewhat arbitrary, but nonetheless meaningful) significance.

Holidays are a way of putting ourselves in time, marking ourselves in relation to things that came before and things yet to come, people long dead and people yet to be born. Much communitarian thinking may, perhaps, be rightfully derided for being more a matter of philosophical anthropology than political theory, for failing to give any concreteness to the socially and morally necessary imperative to belong, but reflecting on holidays is one such area of inquiry where that accusation is, I think, clearly unwarranted. The calendric sense of recognition and orientation (not to mention the opportunity for association and celebration) afforded by holidays represents an affective binding at least as important, if not more so, than that associated with more explicitly shared beliefs, boundaries, or civic habits....True, few Americans today live a sufficiently pious or agricultural life for liturgical or seasonal holidays to much normative force; believe me, we've packed up the kids and gone to see a movie on Christmas, just like the rest of you. But the eclipse of a holiday’s traditional restrictive authority doesn't mean its ability to help us "authorize" a particular moment, or turn, or feeling, or resolution in our lives has been lost. On the contrary, it's still there. All we need to do is invest the effort to get into its rhythm, rather than letting the commodification and banalization which so many holidays have fallen victim to (President's Day, anyone?) excuse us from examining their significance.

I'm not Jewish. But I know that for millions of people, carrying with them a history of thousands of years, tonight at sundown a New Year began. The mere fact that for many of those millions that history doesn't matter much may be worth pondering...but it isn't, I think, an argument that the holiday can no longer be meaningful, in however small and simple a way, to anyone at all.

Life continues on: it's one damn thing after another, it's daily. More debt. More crises. More charges on the credit card. More bad times--but also, more good ones too. We get all the tomatoes out of garden, and now it's time to transplant the blackberry bushes. I get paid. Melissa gets a book review done. We have some friends over for dinner. The girls are getting older. We carry on. It's nice, in the midst of this, to pause, to mark an ending...and then, after we eat, to know that it's beginning all over again.

Just to Make My Position Clear...

I sincerely doubt that there's anyone who checks on this blog with the intention of finding out the latest news, but still, as part of a probably vain attempt to make my take from yesterday current with the still-developing struggle over the bailout in Washington, three relatively quick points:

1. I don't like the bailout, perhaps mostly because I don't like being told by elite economic opinion-makers that if we don't "trust the Treasury [Department] to find a way out of this crisis," then "[f]inancial institutions would fail, part of your savings would be wiped out, jobs would be lost and a lot of economic activity would grind to a halt." It sounds too much like exactly the same sort of panic talk that always drives establishment pundit opinion whenever their ox is potentially being gored: "save us, for if we go down, we take the nation with us!" Daniel Larison's call for us all to slow down and consider the consequences is worth heeding.

2. And yet, I'm not sure how we--meaning you and me, dear reader--can avoid hoping for some sort of bailout (and preferably sooner rather than later) given the way our financial system has been jury-rigged by our own consumptive habits (a house! a bigger house! a bigger refinanced house!), our own toleration of speculative investments (did my retirement fund grow this year? what, only by 5%? off with the boards' heads!), and our glorification of credit and debit and outsized growth (too may examples to even pretend to list). We are not economic sovereigns in our own places, as we ought to be; we are hooked up to and made dependent upon and are expected to anticipate and exploit the mostly-just-on-paper growth which Wall Street is supposed to magically provide us with, whenever we pay for college or buy a home or make a savings plan. Since we are not sovereigns over our own economic affairs, why should we be astonished when we ultimately have no say--when our voices seem tinny and besides the point when we try to have a say, as the opportunist John McCain and the petulant House Republicans have been doing over the past 18 hours--over the economic crises which befall us? Is this game really playing out any differently than did the S&L crisis, or the fall of Enron? The only difference is the size of the final bill.

3. So what do I want? I want to live--I want us all to live--in small(er), more self-sufficient, interdependent but not thoroughly globalized, socially democratic states (preferably with parliamentary governments), where the financial resources of my community is not in hock, by definition, to markets and schemes that have next to nothing to do with actual production and everything to do with the interests of elite snake-oil salesmen who manage to make most of us look away most of the time by showing us an ever-expanding bottom line. In other words, I want small-scale socialism, I want to live where the habits of the people and the provisions of the state make populism possible. Sweden? Maybe. But then, I also want to live in America, with all its bigness, because I love my country. As long as there's a way to muddle through without completely selling off our sovereign soul, I'll take the bailouts and compromises as best I can.

More later.

This Country Deserves a Better Class of Socialist

As per Rod's command, here I am. I've been working on, and then deleting, incomplete posts for a week or two now, never quite able to catch up with events and say the things I think I'd like to say before my whole reason for saying them becomes either irrelevant or exhausted. The same will probably go for this post, but hey, at least I'm getting it up.

As I write this, the $700 billion (we think!) bail-out of Wall Street appears to be heading towards Bush's desk for his signature; meanwhile, Senators Obama and McCain are on their way to Washington where, no doubt, they will say exactly as little or exactly as much as necessary to placate their bases and get back to the campaigns they want to run: ones in which, like most presidential campaigns in my lifetime, the prospect of substantive, challenging, serious, transformative, and/or participatory debates are exchanged for elite, media-centered (and media-manipulating) arguments about this comment or that insult or this mistake, because that kind of culture-and-appearance obsessed mud fight over which candidate can make themselves into a better synecdoche for some arbitrary slice of the American populace seems to be, unfortunately, a moderately effective way to woo and/or alienate enough random voters so as to pull off a 51-49 win in the end. Can you tell I'm a little frustrated with the process right now? And the thing is, I'm not your usual burn-both-their-houses-down!-style contrarian; while I'm more than happy to treat my vote expressively, and support whichever minor party candidates I think best represent (or at least approximate) whatever mix of issues which I believe deserve greater attention, I'm not opposed to trying to make the existing system work as best as it may, and that includes hoping for the best when the presidential show comes to town. So what's the problem? The problem is that the present crisis is so obviosuly one with roots that dig down into some of this country's most basic assumptions and behaviors, that to hear a discussion of saving investor confidence and stopping the bleeding and all the rest without so much as a gesture at the unreality and irresponsibility of a national economy built upon, and whole corporate cultures practically premised upon, consumption and speculation and debt is simply maddening.

In particular, what's most maddening about it--to me, anyway--is the fact that this enormously expensive bail-out will involve the embrace of a host of economic particulars that one can speak sensibly about, if we were willing to call them for what they are, and open ourselves up to what they entail. What am I talking about? I'm talking about what Irwin Seltzer called, with great reluctance and through gritted teeth, the "New Capitalism."

Henceforth, government will undertake previously unheard-of intrusions into the paneled boardrooms of corporate America, controlling the methods by which executive salaries are set. Board members, especially those serving on compensation committees, should no longer be friends of, or dependent on the good will of, the executives whose salaries they determine: They must be independent. And independent as judged by regulators. Auditors cannot build lifelong, cozy relationships with the executives and directors whose bookkeeping they are charged with reviewing; they must make way for other independent auditors after a number of years. Executive compensation must be transparent and somehow related to performance....[W]e are about to see equity given greater weight relative to efficiency as New Capitalists recast the tax structure erected in the last days of the Old Capitalism. Old Capitalists worry that if the marginal tax rate on the highest earners is raised from 35 to 40 percent, the wealthy will be less inclined to invest and take risks. New Capitalists, who would distribute those funds to the middle class, think it is worth sacrificing a small bit of efficiency to gain a great deal of fairness. This is the one area in which the Old Capitalists have not capitulated, and are mounting a last-ditch effort to preserve the Bush tax cuts. They will lose, whether to a President Obama or to a Democratic Congress that will drive an only apparently reluctant President McCain back to the position that he took when first confronted with the Bush cuts: They just don't seem fair.

As someone with egalitarian preferences like myself, that's all well and good...except, in fact, I hope that Irwin is, at best, just half-right. Because, of course, he isn't actually talking about a new capitalist regime at all; he's talking about social democracy, about the recognition that social accountability and ownership and equality--in other words, the basic elements of democratic fairness--are a necessary component of maintaining justice and legitimacy along with human flourishing in the complicated, interdependent world we have--for good and for ill--built for ourselves. And if one is going to recognize that some form of socialism is what is being called for here, then one at least ought to use the terminology appropriate to it, rather than grumpily insisting upon the capitalist jargon of growth and efficiency. (That's part of what got us into this mess, remember?) At the very least, continuing along with an unreconstructed globalist free-market mindset--from which I really do not expect either the Democratic or Republican parties to deviate anytime soon--will set us up for failing to appreciate how the socialism we are traipsing into could be much improved. (Which it certainly could be...E.J. Dionne is absolutely correct in calling the original bail-out proposals "socialism for the rich only.")

Those who assume, as an article of faith, that the U.S. is and must remain a fundamentally liberal and individualistic society will, of course, mount their usual libertarian complaint about this kind of transformation. But there are other cautionary voices which are not so grounded in a warped (though unfortunately common) misreading and metastasizing of Locke's defense of property rights; Daniel Larison reminds us that a hostility to a "collusion between financial interests and the government" was a central part of the old Country tradition, parts of which shaped Jefferson's own democratic-republican/communitarian-agrarianism. More relevantly, James Ledbetter in the piece I linked to above makes the obvious point that "state socialism is intrinsically unstable" and that "the Soviet Union collapsed for a reason"; he also pointedly observes, however, that "you don't see the Spanish [a nice Western European social democratic country, if you haven't heard] having to take over their own banking sector." So obviously, the question that ought to be asked--if we could be politically honest with ourselves--is not merely how to keep the "moneyed interest" from either taking over or becoming tools of the state, but more importantly, how to have a state for which the socialism that our present-day global economy seems to make unavoidable (at least for much of the world) will not pose either a threat or a temptation to democratic politics.

Noah Millman wants to make a distinction between this massive bail-out and the slightly less (or slightly more--it depends on who does your accounting) expensive, and more upfront in its implication, government intervention into Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae two weeks back: "I mind it less if Uncle Sam is my landlord than I do if he’s my banker." Either way, however, is going to mean the government buying up assets and absorbing losses that otherwise would have brought private financial institutions--and the retirement funds and investments and mortgages that they'd tossed back and forth in the meantime--down with a crash. So let's talk about the buyer. As it happens, Sweden found itself, about 15 years ago, in the position of having to become such a one.

Sweden's financial crisis in the early 1990s stemmed from a 1985 deregulation of credit markets, which set the stage for overexpansion and bubbles in the real estate and finance markets. When those bubbles burst in the early 1990s, Sweden's currency crumbled and interest rates spiked to 500% overnight. Of the country's seven biggest banks, five needed either government bailouts or big injections of money from shareholders. The value of the country's real estate market plunged 50-60% in 18 months....The government tried several stop-gap measures to no effect and in late 1992 opted for a complete re-booting of Sweden's financial system....The government issued blanket insurance for a period of four years to creditors in all the country's 114 banks. It established an agency to oversee all banks that needed recapitalization and told them to immediately write down their losses. Most importantly, the government stipulated that in order to become eligible for government funding, banks would have to give up something--namely equity--in return. In the case of one leading bank, the mere prospect of the government taking a stake was enough to persuade shareholders to dig deeper and raise money on their own. For the rest, the government was able, once the markets rebounded, to sell off the stakes it had acquired, making a profit that was effectively returned to taxpayers' coffers. At one point the government controlled more than 20% of the entire banking system.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? The key point, though, was the one which, thanks to Congressional insistence, the administration appears to have come around on: an "equity position" for taxpayers in the bailout. (Interestingly, it may be exactly that vague and unspecified promise of equity that will make the bailout plan even more unappealing to House Republicans.) I'll be curious to see exactly how much government negotiators come through with in their discussions over the taxpayers becoming, through the federal government, the owners and controllers of many of these assets; as much as the Bush administration has spoken about the "ownership society," it has reliably resisted the kind of redistribution of resources and opportunities that would make it possible for citizens to truly participate in--to exercise some authority over--that which is their own (as opposed to, say, being "enabled" to buy at or buy into this or that Major Corporate Institution, as if the range of crap for sale on the shelves and stocks in the portfolio to invest in were really the sum total of liberty and ownership). Maybe the enormous cost of this bailout will be enough to wake them up to the imperative of real, significant ownership...but I'm doubtful.

The other key point is, of course, a matter of culture and connection; as the same article above put it, "Swedish experts caution that the Swedish financial system is relatively small compared to the U.S....in 1992 most leading government officials knew the bank chiefs on a first name basis." That's the sort of intimacy and involvement which breeds both trust and an awareness of the limited resources (and all resources are limited) one must share if one is going to be committed to the sort of social priorities which the economics of today expose as in desperate need of recognition and protection. Such small-scale connections and cultural assumptions are, I think, for the most part a deeply admirable thing...though for those trying to get America's financial system into a defensible, coherent, more secure shape, that realization may be a rather tragic thing. Because the truth is that the United States is probably too large, too powerful, too globalized, too involved in the structures of our consumption-and-liberation-driven world, for this kind of trust and sense of limits to be operative, or at least operative enough to make the socialism that our own financial practices have made incumbent upon us work as well as it ought. But let's not ignore what it means to see real, small-scale, sensibly conceived, social democratic practices to work.

I've talked about Sweden's social democracy a couple of times before. I don't want to use that country as an example of exactly the sort of social democratic model which we all ought to or could follow; rather I just want us to keep the "possibility" of Sweden in mind:

Sweden is not a place for mad, brilliant, disruptive entrepreneurs--but it is a place for working citizens and families, most of whom would (as, I think, most every human being would, if the options were put plainly before them) prefer to exercise a little control over the vicissitudes of existence, and preserve a place for a reliable and secure everyday world. Few people would describe Sweden as a conservative country, and it's possible (perhaps even likely) that their particular approach to choosing what to put into a socio-economic enclosure has had political and cultural consequences that make different types of conservation impossible. Yet there is a sense that, compared with the U.S., they "conserve" far better than we. In their analysis of their own situation (and in the analysis of many other social democratic countries) you can see, if you look for it, the evidence that socialists and egalitarians of many (if not all) different stripes share an intellectual pre-occupation with agrarians and others: the conservative concern with tending to what one has, and a willingness to structure life so that one's tending isn't made moot by realities that ought to be subject to the will of the people.

Patrick Deneen recently highlighted the prediction which Matt Simmons (banker, oilman, and Republican) has recently made about our nation's needs for the long-term economic future: "We should basically be going back to creating a village economy, so that we really reduce the energy intensity of how we live....We need bigtime conservation, not feel-good conservation. Make things where they're used. You'll end long-distance commuting, and we have the tools to do that now with webcams. Grow food locally. Grow food in your backyard. If they're not commuting, people will have time to do that." I couldn't agree more. And moreover, as Patrick himself has acknowledged, I would note the example of social democratic countries in Western Europe (like Sweden!) suggests that this kind of localism is achievable...so long as one acknowledges--rather than rebelling against--the sort of environmental and civic and economic regulations which allow ordinary people to sitaute themselves against the runaway forces of corporate speculation and capital accumulation and consumer consumption, and truly take ownership of their social and economic worlds (which, nowadays, unfortunately includes an awful lot of credit and debt). This isn't to say that all our fears and worries and complaints about this massive socialist--but don't say it out loud!--bailout of Wall Street would disappear if, say, it was all being run by a homegrown Christian Democratic Union party rather than by the Bush administration's Treasury Department. The problems--and the habits which support them--run deeper than mere questions of administration, running all the way down to the uncomfortable reality of America's size and strength and position in the world. But, for the moment anyway, if either McCain or Obama would suggest that they could at least acknowledge some of that, I'd certainly feel much better about it all.

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Explained

Despite being "back," I'm obviously still not on top of things enough to do any proper blogging. Hopefully, next week. In the meantime, how can I fail to pass along this? From what I can tell, this includes pretty much everything you need to know to understand what's going on with Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, and all the rest. Enjoy! (Warning: bad--but unfortunately, probably not at all inaccurate--language.)

CDO Powerpoint SubPrime Primer - Upload a Document to Scribd

Missing the Shitstorm

Apologies for the language, but I can't think of any other descriptive term that would work as well.

So anyway, I had a few things in mind to blog about. Since I last checked in, back in mid-August, some interesting discussions came about dealing with changes in the Democratic party's platform language regarding abortion, and whether those changes were meaningful, and if so in which way. As someone intrigued by Obama and very uncomfortable with abortion rights, I had a few things I thought I might say about that.

And then, there was the matter of the American Political Science Association convention which I just returned from, and some arguments which some bloggers and scholars I admire had gotten caught up in involving APSA's decision to hold next year's convention in Toronto. There were some interesting ideas being brought up, and I thought I might pile on to that as well.

And then, of course, there was Senator McCain's selection of Governor Sarah Palin as a running mate on the Republican ticket. Definitely some things worth saying there.

But I returned from APSA late on Saturday, and Sunday was Sunday, and Monday was a holiday which we spent hanging around the house, playing with the kids. And then it was Tuesday, and I had a lot of work to catch up on. Sure, all along, I was catching snippets of news on the radio and from the daily paper's headlines and from a cursory scan of my usual blogs, and I knew that there were some rather provocative things being thrown around regarding Palin and her family and her candidacy. But, well, par for the course, is all I thought.

Then finally, I get really plugged back into things yesterday, and let float a few general thoughts amongst some friends. And I get schooled. A couple of them let me know, in no uncertain terms, all about just what Andrew Sullivan (and, excuse me, but, well, damn--do people really still read that obsessive goofball? I suspect I haven't clicked on his blog in two years or more) and the New York Times and Maureen Dowd and US magazine and Diane Rehm and Jim Lehrer, etc., etc., have all been saying about her. The rumors. The photographs. The questions. The jokes. The contempt. All of which, I assure you, doesn't surprise me. I think--and have said more than a few times before--that the Republican party hacks and Thomas Franks of the world have (with very different aims in mind, but mostly similar strategies) twisted the alienation and resentment many white, rural and exurban, working and middle-class, Protestant voters feel from today's economic and cultural elites in all sorts of crazy ways, but that doesn't mean such alienation is groundless. There really is contempt out there. So, again, it doesn't surprise me that a fair amount of it would be directed at a female Alaskan governor with five kids. I just had kind of...well, missed it.

So I guess I'll just have to quote Ross Douthat here, and make my confession:

[A] number of readers seem to be under the impression that what we've been witnessing in the media and online over the past couple days is a very serious, nuanced and thoughtful exploration of Sarah Palin's record....If that's what you seriously, seriously think has been going on lately, then you should probably look elsewhere for analysis of the media's Palin coverage, because you and I are living on very different planets.

I'm pretty certain Ross and I are on the same planet. So I suppose the only explanation is...well, I don't read Daily Kos, or Huffington Post, or hang out around Free Republic or NRO or any other place which keeps track of their every post. I usually only take the time to read beyond the headlines at major newspapers and news websites when someone I trust and like refers to an article therein. I don't often read through the lengthy comment threads on even my favorite blogs. We don't get either network or cable television reception in our home (and don't miss it), so I'm not watching CNN, or FOX, or anything else. And I definitely, definitely, don't read Sullivan. So basically, when shitstorms like this happen, I'm pretty much useless. Lengthy ruminations on political-theoretical-cultural-moral issues I can handle, but if any of you are coming here for immediate commentary and outrage, please consider my pundit license to have long since been turned in.

More later. Good to be back.

15th on the 13th

Friday, August 13, 1993, Salt Lake City, UT, around 4pm, MST:


I know, I know: we look like a couple of New-Wavish elves, circa 1982, yet with a touch of goth make-up. All that's missing is for Melissa to have put on some big hoop earrings, and for my mullet to have been just a bit longer. And the real tragedy is that I don't even remember what we were laughing at.

Ah well. Fifteen years, about eighty pounds (fairly equally distributed between the two of us), four children, three university degrees, eleven moves, two countries, six states, one beard, four cars, fourteen jobs (mostly mine), and innumerable arguments later, we can still make each other laugh. Here's to the laughter continuing for another fifteen years, or thirty (wishing for another forty-five would be pushing it, I think). Happy anniversary, Melissa.

P.S. Yeah, we're back. Put over 3500 miles on the car, and it and the family is still intact. And now, back to work. What with new classes beginning next week and the APSA annual meeting the week after that, I suspect I won't have the time or energy to blog until after Labor Day. But we'll see...the conventions may be hard to resist...

P.P.S. To see my wife in her native costume and habitat, click here.