A Ship Lost At Sea

One of the great pretensions of the liberal left was on display in Martin Peretz's editorial homage to the history of The New Republic, which, as of this week, is no longer his own: Namely, he indulges in the sort of painstaking soul-searching about past failures (not his own, but his predecessors') that make liberals seem like whiny, futsy, self-obsessed wonks incapable of imagining anything new because they can't get over their past mistakes.

I have before me a collection of TNR pieces, The Faces of Five Decades, with an introduction for each of those decades by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died within the past fortnight. In his notably evocative prose style, AMS sketches tnr's philosophical commitments and its (certainly in retrospect) silly dalliances. Among these were collectivism, isolationism, and, for a few very long moments, an idiot infatuation with, yes, Stalinism.

Ack! Stalinism? Seriously? Stalinism? This coming from a man who oversaw the encouragement to war in Iraq. An interesting dodge there. I may have been wrong, but at least I wasn't a Stalinist...

In fact, Peretz's editorial almost seems like a warning to the new management at TNR. Following the above, he goes on:

Why do I dwell on this tawdry part of the honorable and actually fastidious life of The New Republic? Because it highlights, perhaps even to the point of exaggeration, the precariousness of the liberal idea and of liberal institutions and liberal men and women when faced with regimes, movements, and systems of belief (however cruel or crude) that mobilize with words and arms against the United States and its lessons. Forgive me: The United States has something to learn from a few other countries. But many countries have much to learn from us.

That is, Peretz--a man guilty of no few mistakes himself--is warning those who follow not to stray too far; the history he demonstrates shows the failings of radicalism and the potential for being led astray. In the last three decades, he led TNR steadily rightwards.

"By the time the change took place," he writes of his acquisition of the magazine,

the Democratic Party and American liberals had slipped into a deep and disturbing trauma, of which George McGovern's campaign was itself less a cause than a reflection--a pathetic reflection, to be sure. That the demos should have chosen someone as demonized as Richard Nixon in the midst of a hated war and after Watergate had begun unraveling told us something stark. And it was not just the colossal margin of his victory that was doing the telling. There was a serious breach in the populace. One evident truth was that the American people were offended by haughty elitists, self-styled revolutionaries, and tribunes of the pretty soul.

So what was Peretz's own legacy at the helm of a defining journal of liberal American politics? The answer, unsurprisingly, is "neoliberalism."

"Neoliberalism was the doctrine on domestic affairs that Michael Kinsley shaped when he came to edit the magazine shortly after I took over," writes Peretz. And indeed, his warning comes at a high moment of tension over not just TNR's future, but the future of neoliberalism itself. On Sunday, David Brooks dedicated his New York Times column to "The Vanishing Neoliberal," writing: "For the past few years, The New Republic has tried to keep the neoliberal flame alive, under editors like Peter Beinart. But there is no longer a readership for that. The longtime owner, Marty Peretz, has sold his remaining interests and, starting this month, the magazine will go biweekly."

Why? According to Brooks, the answer is simple and predicatable: Bloggers. "[Kevin] Drum and his cohort [i.e., bloggers who hate neoliberalism] donít want a neoliberal movement that moderates and reforms. They want a Democratic Party that fights," writes Brooks. "Their tone is much more confrontational. They want to read articles that affirm their anger. They are also further to the left, driven there by Iraq on foreign policy matters and by wage stagnation on economic matters."

I suppose I might count myself amongst that bunch; after all, I did write a post a couple months back entitles "Neoliberals Take a Bow at The New Republic." It would certainly be edifying to imagine I--as a nameless part of a critical mass--somehow contributed to the downfall of the pitiably misguided neoliberal movement. But that's all B.S., spun by one of D.C.'s biggest bullshitters. By that logic, TNR first non-Peretz cover should have had a reflecty page with the words: "The Future of American Liberalism" atop it. Thus the egos of bloggers--yesterday's armchair cranks sending out barbed letters-to-the-editor--are appropriately stroked.

Unfortunately, as above, that's all bullshit. True, bloggers can get a good crowd going and screaming for blood. But if bloggers have had anything to do with changing TNR, it's less ideological than economic. The web is killing print media, and that's sad: I am yet to be convinced that blogs actually add anything important to discourse. In fact, let me rephrase that: blogs don't add to discourse. They replace it. They assure their readers that they're our choir leaders and we can be safely preached to; worry not, you need not be exposed to dangerous ideas. In fact, you need not be exposed to ideas at all. We're all realyl here to kvetch about the daily outrages we get from Daily Kos or whatever other piece of crap we read.

No, I can't say I think the blogosphere adds anything to American discourse, save providing easy and non-critical corners for politicians to hide in, where their most ardent supporters can watch their man's (or woman's) credentials get burnished while avoiding all those unpleasant revelations, all the nasty, devilish details.

I certainly don't claim to have added anything to the greater discourse myself. In fact, blogging has been terrible for me. I waste my time writing short pieces few will read, pieces scarce on detail and research and the sort of meat which makes for a truly good argument, a breed strikingly dissimilar from the normal web-based raving you get.

No, if TNR is failing (and as a subscriber, I certainly hope it doesn't fail completely), it's failing for two reasons: the economics of the web-based world, and the vacuity of the ideas Peretz has championed.

Neoliberalism was a dismal moment, even given that it's a concept about as easy to nail down as neoconservatism. The problem, fundamentally, was that neoliberalism was not nearly so great a break from the self-absorbed left of the past as it imagined. Or perhaps it's fair to say that all politics is self-absorbed, and Peretz's scathing indictment of 1970s liberalism as a liberlism of "haughty elitists, self-styled revolutionaries, and tribunes of the pretty soul" is merely naming one variety of a universal constant. Neoliberalism, no less than what came before and what's followed, was an ideological framework, there really being no place for rational decision-making, independent of doctrinal beliefs, in American politics. And neoliberalism's great failure lay in precisely how it helped redirect the particular brand of selfishness evident in the Baby Boom generation to reshaping the economy.

Increasing meritocracy in higher education and industry did little but replace one entrenched class with another, save that the new power-class could reasonably claim an almost Darwinian justification to their success. If they were the winners in a meritocracy, the losers had lost fair and square. As education was reshaped to favor their children, the danger of solidifying the social divides grew stronger, ironically under the name of a liberal education system. The belief that a college education was a real option for everyone devalued secondary education as job- and life-skills training in favor of college prep. Needless to say, America quickly embraced an ever-changing series of premonitions of the future that supported this decision. These days, for instance, there's lots of talk about the "creative" class--well educated, creative people, capable of learning new skills easily and fluidly navigating an ever-changing economy.

Fair enough, and that does describe me pretty well it turns out, but that's not all of America. But the reality is that our so-called "meritocracy" has created a huge underclass of people not served well by college prep high school curricula; to get even basic job skills, they now have to pay for further education through professional schools and community colleges. In the past, they could have entered an apprenticeship program through a union to learn job skills. But just as neoliberals embraced the churn of a liberalized economy, they favored weakening the power of unions, which were seen across the economic libertarian political spectrum as needlessly unwieldly and painfully outdated, not to mention likely corrupt.

Moreover, under Clinton, neoliberals got into bed with neoconservatives on the economic front. Clinton's reliance on Alan Greenspan was widely praised by neoliberals even into the Bush Presidency. Greenspan was granted an uncritical acceptance by the mainstream political spectrum that leant itself to his aura as a seeming wizard of the "New Economy," which achieved high rates of growth with no attendant inflation. The reality of that, though, was that Greenspan was an ace at balancing growth and unemployment rates (with the help of H1-b visa-happy congressmen). In other words, Greenspan always put the dampers on just enough to keep unemployment high enough to prevent too much wage increase from occuring. Abetting this tendency while serving industry's own self-interest was a greater reliance on hefty stock packages which increased investment in companies by transferring wage increases into inventment. In other words, Greenspan fought desperately to keep people from getting a raise, while congress fed the job market with a goodly number of well-educated foreign workers to level off unemployment stats, and corporate America encouraged us to take stock instead of wages, which kept the bubble increasing while wages stayed stagnant.

We're only beginning to realize the error of our ways on these fronts. Good stats on the 1990s show that the economic boom didn't distribute itself well across the populace, and the economy since 2000 has more nakedly exemplified these priciples. Education, like healthcare, is becoming a nightmare as the huge costs and massive debts become patently exclusionary towards the children of the poor and working class. And neoliberalism's vacuous foreign policy boosterism of spreading democracy (which put it more in line with neoconservativism) ultimately imploded in Iraq.

So with all due respect, Mr. Peretz, I have to call B.S. on you and your tepid warning, with all its high-minded rhetoric about a "people's capitalism" and that, "People who live under the heel of dictatorship and are fighting to get out from under are our friends, like the Contras were." The Contras? Seriously? For several years, it's become increasingly clear that the great mistake of many of the Bush administration's thinkers and policy architects is that they remain purely a product of Cold War thought. They never divorced themselves from the belief that states, threatening military equivalency with the United States--represent our greatest threat; and that, as with any imperial state, the best way to deal with aggression was a seemingly endless series of proxy wars, fought in far off places for a variety of ideological and realist-economic purposes. And now it's clear that The New Republic's faux intellectuals are guilty of the very same crime: An inability to move beyond the guilt-tripping, Cold War mentality of who was right, who was wrong, and who was a fellow traveller; the Cold War hawk mentality that sees a moral obligation to make war for a higher cause; and finally, the anti-Communist mentality that places capitalism on such a high pedestal that it's difficult if not impossible to legitimately question its excesses, its inequalities, and its occasional patent failure.

Thank God you've still got Jonathan Chait.

Neoliberals Take A Bow At The New Republic

Back on Oct. 30th, I wrote of Peter Beinart's attempt to link Thomas Frank and other dissenters from neoliberalism to xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric a la Lou Dobbs ("The Neoliberals Seek Their Revenge For Questioning the Market God"). From his bastion as an editor of The New Republic, Beinart decried our new breed of economic populists:

For writers like [Thomas] Frank, the tragedy of that era was that the free-trading, Wall Street-friendly Bill Clinton did not use economic populism to permanently lure these angry white males into the Democratic fold. Now Democrats have another chance. But renouncing future NAFTAs won't be enough. Many liberals would like to pick and choose their anti-globalization politics--arguing for more regulation of international trade and investment, but resisting punitive measures to regulate the flow of international labor. Morally, that's perfectly defensible. But, politically, it is likely to fail. There is a reason that the late nineteenth-century populists Frank admires were nativists: While low-skilled immigration may benefit the United States as a whole, it rarely benefits low-skilled Americans. And, for many blue-collar Americans today, Mexican immigration--whether legal or not--is not just linked to broader anxieties about globalization; it has become the prime symbol of those anxieties.

As the title of my article implied, I was less than impressed with Beinart's analysis. To my mind, he was comparing apples and oranges: on the one hand, assuming Lou Dobbs's nativist rhetoric could speak for nuanced policy criticisms for people like Frank; on the other, using the conflation of the two to set up a straw man that was much easier to defend his own precious neoliberal theories against.

So it was a pleasure to see my own (I admit, I'm mugging a bit, but I'm proud) analysis verified by the same magazine this week.

"[I]mmigrant laborers are being screwed by being paid lower wages than Americans (and sometimes lower than the law allows), and the average American worker is being screwed because our jobs are being lost to lower wage workers, who are, as before, being screwed themselves," I wrote. "Does that sound like we're on opposite sides here?"

And lo and behold! This week, in the editors' column in The New Republic, TNR's editors came out with much the same conclusion.

Writing of a highly publicized immigration bust at six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants, the editors note,

This was a theatrical stunt, not the makings of an immigration policy. But, if Bush did want a new-and-improved immigration policy, meatpacking would be a good place to start. There is, after all, a reason that immigrants populate the Swift plants: An industry that once prided itself on its stable, middle-class workforce has become a hellhole that only the most desperate workers would enter.

The story they go on to tell should be well-known (and, as it happens, is to readers of Thomas Frank, who devotes a good deal of space in What's the Matter With Kansas? to the subject): Following Upton Sinclair's devastating expose of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle, a series of reforms were launched that eventually cleaned up the industry. Meatpacking was dominated by well-paid union workers by the post-war period; wages were upwards of $20 an hour in today's money, with benefits. Then, slowly came the backsliding: Plants moved to rural areas, wages fell, and safety took a back seat.

"[W]with their move, they changed how meat was processed," write the editors.

They replaced skilled and semi-skilled workers with assembly lines that turned out packaged beef and pork products. Workers now stood on slippery floors in dark, fetid buildings wielding knives and power tools with which they would slice steers or hogs as they swung past at high velocity. They were paid about half of what their unionized counterparts had earned. The Jungle had reemerged.

The new assembly-line jobs were extremely dangerous. Lacerations were common, as were maimed limbs. Repetitive muscular injuries were virtually unavoidable. (Imagine throwing a baseball with the same motion 10,000 times a day.) Nearly one-third of workers at the average plant suffer a work-related injury each year. That has contributed to an astoundingly high turnover rate.

Immigrants became the primary source of labor since the combination of inhuman conditions and low pay meant that no self-respecting American would take the job. Under Reagan, the National Labor Relations Board was de-fanged, and union organizers are frequently fired and occasionally assaulted, in union-busting moves most voters are probably unaware still exist in this country.

So what is the solution to this problem put forward by The New Republic?

if the Bush administration truly wanted to alleviate the tension that surrounds immigration, it would reform the industries that rely on immigration. It could begin by enforcing the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which makes the federal government responsible for assuring "safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women." Of course, Bush has done exactly the opposite. One of his first presidential actions was to overturn the ergonomic standards that the Clinton administration had adopted. These would have applied directly to the meatpacking plants. To add insult to injury, the Bush administration even stopped requiring employers to report these injuries, enabling it to claim the industry has become safer.

Hmm. I seem to remember writing something like:

So this really is a situation in which the little guy loses out and the companies make huge profits; politicians then play the little guys off one another to win elections, and the companies get off free. I say, put the immigrants on the same level as natural-born Americans, prevent exploitative labor practices, and the demand for illegals begins to drop and a competitive labor market exists that does workers a lot better than the system we have now, which to one degree or another the neoliberals support. Fine the hell out of companies for employing illegal immigrants (why always the double-standard when it comes to tough-on-crime tactics with regard to corporate America?) and stop American companies from taking advantage of migrants and, in the process, putting Americans out of jobs... The way of equitable economic policy does not necessarily lead to nationalist demagoguery; it's a low electoral tactic and nothing more, and we shouldn't let neoliberals like Beinart convince us to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Insane Novelist Threatens Critics With Baseless Accusations of Child Rape

We here at The New Libertine have long had our suspicions, but this week we've got confirmation: Michael Crichton is bat-shit crazy.

On the cover of this week's New Republic we were promised an article pithily plugged as: "Michael Crichton, Jurassic Prick." After searching through the magazine, we discovered it was actually the back-page "Washington Diarist" column. Here's how it starts:

There is an obscure publishing doctrine known as "the small penis rule." As described in a 1998 New York Times article, it is a sly trick employed by authors who have defamed someone to discourage their targets from filing lawsuits. As libel lawyer Leon Friedman explained to the Times, "No male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, 'That's me!'"

Got you hooked? Wondering how this related to Michael Crichton? Well, read this passage from his new "novel," Next (as reprinted from TNR:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

Wow! Jesus Christ! Bonus points for the detail on the rectal damage caused by child-rape you sick fuck. But that's not really the point. The writer in The New Republic goes on:

The next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a "dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an unlikely target of Crichton's ire.

It was at this point we stopped reading, scratched our heads, and said, "Huh?" Why was the author doing Google searches on the name? Surely whoever was the ire of Crichton's wrath wouldn't share the same name. I glanced down at the bottom of the page to see what sort of rhetorical half-wit had written this thing, and then-- Well, I'll let the author explain:

And that's when it dawned on me: I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

Yes, Michael Crowley, a senior editor at The New Republic, had indeed written a brilliantly devastating feature on Crichton back in the March 20th edition ("Jurassic President: Michael Crichton's Scariest Creation"). The subject was Crichton's State of Fear, a 2004 novel that posited (if a novel can truly posit an idea) that global warming was a ruse concocted by a conspiracy of leftists radicals to terrorize the planet. Or something. Honestly, we can't be expected to read this crap. But we have it on good sources that this is the subject of said novel.

"Although 'State of Fear' comes dressed as an airport-bookstore thriller," begins Bruce Barcott's Jan. 30, 2005 review in The New York Times, "Crichton's readers will discover halfway through their flight that the novel more closely resembles one of those Ann Coulter 'Liberals Are Stupid' jobs. Liberals, environmentalists and many other straw men endure a stern thrashing in 'State of Fear,' but Crichton's primary target is the theory of global warming, which he believes is a scientific delusion."

This was actually our first clue that Crichton was bat-shit crazy; later, we received further clues when in Feb., 2006, the Times noted that George W. Bush was a huge fan of Crichton's, and had invited him to the White House to discuss the novel. Then came Crowley's original New Republic piece, which seemed to confirm that Crichton had become a full-on political hack of the most pathetic variety.

"In a 1995 interview with Time magazine," wrote Crowley, "Crichton hinted at an agenda beyond dazzling people with roller-coaster plots and astounding Hollywood special effects. Somewhat ostentatiously citing Jean Cocteau's The Difficulty of Being, Crichton explained that the French writer 'said what I've always believed about myself. He didn't care about being noticed for his style. He only wanted to be noticed for his ideas. And even better for the influence of the ideas.'"

The gist of Crowley's article, if we recall correctly, is that Crichton--a man in love with his own sense of genius--frequently attacks academics, scholars, intellectuals and any other sort of "expert" in his novels. Such people are too girly, too self-satisfied, and too comfortable in their own little worlds to possibly be correct about anything. That's why they get eaten by dinosaurs. Or don't understand the Japanese are going to take over the country. Or can't bring themselves to believe that women all really wanna fuck their coworkers. You know, they're pretentious.

So Crichton tried to play gadfly to all our preconceived notions about global warming in State of Fear, ultimately (in his afterword) comparing it to pseudoscience of eugenics caliber. That position won him a number of friends in D.C. In February, 2006, Crichton's novel was awarded the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' truth in journalism award, despite being, well, not-journalism.

But Crichton had powerful allies. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), widely considered the dumbest member of the US Senate, and who has referred to global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," called Crichton to speak before the committee he chaired (until the last election): the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

"I'm excited about this hearing," Inhofe old the Times. "I think I've read most of his books; I think I've read them all. I enjoyed most 'State of Fear' and made it required reading for this committee."

(For more on James Inhofe's own bat-shit crazy rantings, see Michael Crowley's "Ill Natured" from the Jan. 20, 2003 New Republic.)

And finally, the smoking gun: Turning Michael Crowley into a kiddie rapist. "It's impossible not to be grossed out on some level," writes Crowley, "particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child." But what else do you expect from such an avid imagination, one which conceives of thousands of scientists and concerned citizens all getting together to form a global cabal for the exclusive purpose of terrorizing the poor energy sector (as if they weren't having a hard enough time as it is)?

Well, we're not surprised, at least. Not that we saw it coming in the form of accusations of child-rape and penis envy, but we saw it coming: it was inevitable that Crichton's bat-shit insanity would make itself known eventually.

The Neoliberals Seek Their Revenge For Questioning the Market God

This week, The New Republic's two editorials were both on the illegal immigrant debate, and how it's shaping the upcoming election. Peter Beinart, TNR's editor-at-large and pseudo-expert on Islamofascism (The Good Fight), takes the opportunity to take a jab at Thomas Frank, somewhat inexplicably, on this front.

"Who is the most left-wing commentator on mainstream television?" Beinart asks in this week's TRB column. "Keith Olbermann? Bill Maher? Not even close. I'm talking about a man who says both parties are 'bought and paid for by corporate America,' and calls lobbyists 'arms dealers in the war on the middle class.'"

Beinart goes on waxing poetic: "This latter-day William Jennings Bryan denounces the 'corporate supremacists' in Congress who write 'consumer-crippling bankruptcy laws, pass job-exporting free-trade deals, and raise the interest on college loans. He peppers his economic analyses with quotes from the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute. And he recently called the GOP's effort to link a minimum-wage hike to a repeal of the estate tax 'obscene.' I refer, of course, to Lou Dobbs."

Now, it should come as no surprise that, in the high-stakes ratings game of the 24-hour news networks' ongoing struggle for infotainment supremacy, an anchorman would stake out demagogic positions sure to appease the philistine masses eagerly eating up another day's worth of outrages. Anderson Cooper played the sensitive type at Katrina; Geraldo played badass in Baghdad; Bill O'Reilly tackles the real issues facing America (i.e., berating lawyers representing child sex offenders; does the guy even talk politics anymore? Did he ever?); so why should Lou Dobbs--formerly of Moneyline fame--be any different, and how exactly does this relate to Thomas Frank?

Apparently, because this is exactly the sort of person Thomas Frank has been demanding.

"For years, writers like Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas[?], have argued that what liberalism needs is a strong dose of populism. From Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace to Bill O'Reilly, the modern American right has defined itself against cultural elites. Liberals, Frank and others argue, must fight fire with fire: attacking economic elites with as much gusto as the populists of old."

Now, ever since the 1990s, The New Republic has repudiated its leftier past and embraced a Clinton-centric brand of neoliberalism: free markets, free speech, free elections. It's a perfectly valid philosophical position (and a much older one than Clintonism: Britain's The Economist was founded on the principle that free markets would help end slavery, and across the pond, "liberal" remains synonymous with free-market ideology), but sometimes--as Frank's own journal, The Baffler, has pointed out--the good-sense philosophy of liberalism gets wrapped up in an ideology every bit as compelling--and self-deluded--as Communism or Fascism. (Don't take the comparison too far, though: we're talking ideology, not its outcome; I don't want to overstate my case here.) And this is where Beinart is coming from: a paranoid, marginalized neoliberal front that is looking to lose--and lose hard--in upcoming elections, as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party starts flexing its muscles (Beinart used this same space back in August to defend Joe Lieberman against exactly this sort of payback). So Beinart here is really just fearmongering and smearing political opponents to his left as The New Republic's coterie struggles to survive in a rapidly changing political environment.

"So why aren't liberals cheering? Because, for Dobbs, taking on corporate America means taking on corporate America's thirst for illegal-immigrant labor. Dobbs is downright obsessive about the issue, and he isn't above nativist scare-mongering--calling Mexican illegal immigrants an 'army of invaders' who are bringing leprosy and malaria across the Rio Grande."

Sadly, as Beinart goes on to note, some are (Mother Jones, In These Times, but then who ever accused them of being good?). But the riposte to Frank is disingenuous.

As I've mentioned a number of times before, I find it strange how the political establishment responds to Frank; it's as if they can't accept that a liberal isn't a true-blue Democrat politico through-and-through. I don't mean to claim that Frank's some sort of visionary (What's the Matter With Kansas? is good, but not that good), but it's as if the commentariat refuses to accept that his book wasn't about what Democrats should be doing in order to win, so much as about trying to change the political discussion away from singing the praises of the free market and generating a healthy dose of skepticism regarding its shortcomings. Frank has plenty of scorn for Clinton, too; after all, it was Clinton and his neoliberal cohort that oversaw the rise of a faith-based market liberalism that Frank once dubbed "the God that sucked." Franks' thesis in What's the Matter With Kansas? had precious little to do with Democrats at all; instead, it was the story of how moderate (not populist) Kansas Republicans were overthrown by extremists. The extremists rose to power on the backs of the religious, blue collar right, but were beholden more to the rabidly anti-government, anti-tax, economic libertarian right. Frank argued persuasively that by using wedge issues to excite an evangelical base, right-wingers were overthrowing moderates while conversely working against the economic interests of their base and never actually coming through on their socially conservative promises to end abortion.

But when the D.C. commentariat read it, what with their inability to see politics as anything but an electoral struggle between Dems and Republicans, they saw it as a story of how Republicans were baiting-and-switching, and a call for Dems to appeal to economic populism to win elections. And given neoliberals' (like those at TNR) fear of retreat from economic libertarianism, that scenario was to be avoided like the plague. Hence Beinart's smug criticism of Frank's supposed populist position. Talking heads like Beinart fail to note that some of the heroes of Frank's book are moderate Republicans, honest politicians taken down by populist demagoguery and brutal electoral tactics (including anti-Semitic smear campaigns). And this is the same guy Beinart claims wants Democrats to engage in populist rabble-rousing? I think he confuses Populism with populism; Frank does have a lot of fondness for his state's Populist past (and it's true that the former more than occasionally engaged in the latter), but it stems largely from nostalgia for a time when the people stood up for economic equality against entrenched business interests.

So Beinart tries playing the immigrant card; good-hearted liberals, after all, are all on the side of immigrants, whilst economic populists, riled up by job-insecurity, are out for blood. It's an unfortunate fact that this is often the case, but not insurmountable for liberals of Frank's persuasion. The mistake Beinart makes it playing off electoral politics against questions of intelligent policy.

"[M]any Democratic challengers are staking out immigration positions to President Bush's right. And Democratic incumbents are doing the same thing. As The New York Times has noted, 62 Democrats backed the House's enforcement-only immigration bill this September, up from 36 who supported a similarly tough bill last year. And, in the Senate, a large majority of Democrats just voted to build a fence along the Mexican border. As Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg recently told The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson, the themes working best for Democrats this year among rural voters have 'a strong nationalist component,' particularly on 'trade and immigration.'"

For a neoliberal, it's bedlam, and for a decent liberal, it's disappointing to see the Democrats playing the race-card (no white Polish plumbers for us; the economic line here is also a skin-color one). But we need to be careful to distinguish intelligent economic policy that runs contrary to the neoliberals' agenda from simple demagoguery and race-baiting. In this case, the neoliberals are full supporters of immigrant workers to feed the economy's need for cheap labor. The magic of the New Economy, after all, was the juggling act between keeping growth high and inflation low, by making sure that the labor market never got too constricted so that it would push up wages. Neoliberals like Beinart love this stuff; folks like Thomas Frank and myself know full well that this magical agreement meant that the benefits of economic growth never made it to the majority of workers. In the last few years, we've heard a lot about the economic recovery (since the 1999 tech bubble bust) that denied gains to workers while stock prices and corporate profits exceed the halcyon days of the late 1990s. But that rests on the myth that the economic boom of the 1990s benefitted workers more than our current recovery. Increasingly, the reality that the boom of the 90s didn't pass on any real economic gains to most American workers is being established by academics like Jacob S. Hacker (The Great Risk Shift; a nice review appeared in the Times Book Review this Sunday). In fact, the real wages of American workers have remained stagnant since the mid-1970s, so our current lackluster recovery doesn't mark a shift from so much as an extension of the way the economy has distributed wealth across demographics for the last 30 years.

So what does that mean? Well, it means that immigrant laborers are being screwed by being paid lower wages than Americans (and sometimes lower than the law allows), and the average American worker is being screwed because our jobs are being lost to lower wage workers, who are, as before, being screwed themselves. Does that sound like we're on opposite sides here? The neoliberals implicitly accept the good deal we get from immigrant labor; certainly they want ro curb abuses of migrant workers and expect a living wage, but fundamentally their position is, "Demand for these workers exists for a reason; let's not be hypocritical and respect that economic demand." They may criticize the president's plan for worker visas as not going far enough, but they don't support labor's attempts to change up the system by forcing companies to pay a living-wage to immigrant workers--that, after all, would mitigate the benefit of having them in the first place.

So this really is a situation in which the little guy loses out and the companies make huge profits; politicians then play the little guys off one another to win elections, and the companies get off free. I say, put the immigrants on the same level as natural-born Americans, prevent exploitative labor practices, and the demand for illegals begins to drop and a competitive labor market exists that does workers a lot better than the system we have now, which to one degree or another the neoliberals support. Fine the hell out of companies for employing illegal immigrants (why always the double-standard when it comes to tough-on-crime tactics with regard to corporate America?) and stop American companies from taking advantage of migrants and, in the process, putting Americans out of jobs. Beinart can't--or doesn't want--to see this; he's in love with the fairy tale that magically, this horrid situation will wind up benefitting everyone. The way of equitable economic policy does not necessarily lead to nationalist demagoguery; it's a low electoral tactic and nothing more, and we shouldn't let neoliberals like Beinart convince us to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Kettle, Meet Your Good Friend, the Pot

From "The Epilogue", by Ruth Franklin, in the Oct. 2 New Republic:

But victimization does not erase historical agency. Not only are victims still capable of criminal acts, but their victimization can sometimes function as the psychological foundation for their criminal acts. No matter what depredations have been perpetrated against a group, that group must still be responsible for its own actions.

This is from Franklin's obligatory monthly review of books on the Holocaust, but I was surprised that The New Republic had the balls to publish a passage like this; I wonder if they have the balls to apply the same sort of reasoning to the government and military of their precious Israel?