Our Broken Social Contract

The New York Times

THOMAS B. EDSALL

Our Broken Social Contract

By THOMAS B. EDSALL

 JUNE 19, 2013 10:05 PM

Many Americans think that their country has lost its way. But when they try to make sense of what’s happening, they disagree about whether the problem is essentially economic or whether it stems from cultural and moral decay.

Charles Murray, the provocative author of “Coming Apart” and “The Bell Curve,” argues that the cultural insurgencies of the 1960s yanked crucial underpinnings out from the social order and undermined traditional norms of self-restraint, responsibility, family, faith and country. Murray’s latest portrayal of America’s social deterioration focuses on the long-term impact of these insurgencies, notably on a typical, though fictional, working-class community he calls Fishtown. Fishtown is made up of whites who “have no academic degree higher than a high school diploma. If they work, their job must be in a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.”

Murray continues:

Now let us return to the relationship of Fishtown’s decline with America’s civic culture. The decline of industriousness among Fishtown males strikes at the heart of the signature of America’s civic culture — the spirit of enterprise, stick-to-it-iveness, and hard work to make a better life for oneself and one’s children. The divergence in marriage and the rise of single-parent homes has cascading effects. The webs of civic engagement in an ordinary community are spun largely by parents who are trying to foster the right environment for their children — lobbying the city council to install four-way stop signs at an intersection where children play, coaching the Little League teams, using the P.T.A. to improve the neighborhood school. For that matter, many of the broader political issues in a town or small city are fought out because of their direct and indirect effects on the environment for raising children. Married fathers are a good source of labor for these tasks. Unmarried fathers are not. Nor can the void be filled by the moms. Single mothers who want to foster the right environment for their children are usually doing double duty already, trying to be the breadwinner and an attentive parent at the same time. Few single mothers have much time or energy to spare for community activities.

An eloquent description of American social dysfunction comes from my colleague David Brooks, writing about Edward Snowden, who leaked information on domestic surveillance. Brooks argues that Snowden is the product of an upbringing lacking “gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world,” who thus became party to a

rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

A very different assessment of where and how America has lost its ethical and moral moorings comes from Alan Krueger, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Krueger has argued in two recent appearances, at Oberlin College and more recently at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (of all places) that the uncritical worship of the free market in the 1980s allowed the nation’s corporate elite to abandon longstanding constraints in its treatment of labor, especially in shifting the rewards of rising productivity from employees to the owners of capital.

With the blessing of the new right, Krueger argues, corporate America has abandoned its commitment to the commonweal over the past three decades. It no longer honors norms of fairness and equality. To Krueger, it is in the economic sphere that American integrity has been eroded and its ideals corrupted.

At Oberlin, Krueger put it this way:

In considering reasons for the growing wage gap between the top and everyone else, economists have tended to shy away from considerations of fairness and instead focus on market forces, mainly technological change and globalization. But given the compelling evidence that considerations of fairness matter for wage setting, I would argue that we need to devote more attention to the erosion of the norms, institutions and practices that maintain fairness in the job market. We also need to focus on the policies that can lead to more widely shared – and stronger – economic growth. It is natural to expect that market forces such as globalization would weaken norms and institutions that support fairness in wage setting. Yet I would argue that the erosion of the institutions and practices that support fairness has gone beyond market forces.

As the point man for the Obama administration on economic policy, Krueger has become the leading opponent of those who believe that growing inequality and middle-class stagnation are the inevitable consequences of technological innovation and the disruptive force of globalization.

The approach Krueger disputes was succinctly expressed by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the George W. Bush administration.

In 2006, writing on his blog, Mankiw tackled the factors behind the decline of unions, which once exerted countervailing pressures on corporate giants:

One is globalization. As the economy becomes more open, firms are increasingly operating in competitive markets. This means they have less economic profit that could be a target for unions.

In a 2013 paper, “Defending the One Percent,” Mankiw argues that

changes in technology have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago.

Krueger agrees that globalization and technology have been powerful factors in shaping both the job market and the distribution of income. But he makes two points that directly undermine the economic inevitability argument, which is often used to justify the declining share of income going to labor and the sharp rise in income inequality that followed this decline.

First, if corporations are coerced by competition to slash spending, including labor costs, Krueger asks why “corporate profits as a share of the economy are near their all-time high.” Such profits make it particularly “hard to argue that companies do not have the ability to support higher wages.”

Figure 1 from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, hardly a bastion of radicalism, shows that corporate profits as a share of Gross Domestic Product have reached record levels:

Photo

Fig. 1 CreditSt. Louis Federal Reserve

Krueger suggests that the recent surge in corporate profits gives businesses wide leeway – what he terms a large “zone of indeterminacy”— to raise wages and remain solidly in the black.

Krueger’s second point is that rising inequality has not achieved improved productivity:

Productivity growth has not accelerated over the past 30 years; in fact, except for the late 1990s (when inequality narrowed) productivity growth has slowed. If the rise in inequality had improved incentives, one would have expected productivity growth to rise even more quickly, not slow down. Indeed, it is hard to see what the macroeconomy has gained from the enormous shift in the income distribution.

Before the 1980s, C.E.O. pay, according to Krueger, was set with close attention to norms of fairness, so that the range of compensation between janitors and top executives was kept within limits. This “social compact began to fray in the 1980s,” Krueger argued in his Cleveland speech. He provides a chart, Figure 2, showing “how labor compensation has failed to keep pace with productivity growth.”

Photo

Fig. 2 CreditWhitehouse.gov

To further buttress his case, Krueger points out (see Figure 3) that other wealthy countries have experienced the same economic pressures as the United States, but have not seen such sharp rises in inequality.

Photo

Fig. 3 CreditWhitehouse.gov

“The level of inequality varies considerably across these countries,” Krueger said. “The widely differing responses to globalization and technological change suggest that other factors mediate these forces.”

While Krueger’s analysis is very different from Charles Murray’s or from David Brooks’s, all three share an interest in what they see as disintegrating moral norms. And there is something else that binds them: the trends that Murray, Brooks and Krueger deplore continue with unrelenting force. From Murray’s perspective, social decay and irresponsible behavior have spread into the broad working and lower middle class.

Social indicators of conventionally defined moral standards are discouraging: The percentage of children born to unwed mothers has grown from 20 percent in 1984, when Murray published his seminal work, “Losing Ground”, to 41 percent in 2011; the rate among black women has gone from 59 percent to 72 percent, among white women from 12 percent to 29 percent and among Hispanic women 25 percent to 53 percent.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the work force participation rate among men without high school diplomas has fallen from 77.9 percent in 1983 to 57.9 percent in 2012, and for men with high school diplomas from 90.5 percent in 1983 to 69.6 percent in 2012.

Regarding David Brooks’s lament concerning the “rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good,” the American Psychological Association has published a paper containing this pithy observation:

“You can look at individual scores of narcissism, you can look at data on lifetime prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you can look at related cultural trends, and they all point to one thing,” says W. Keith Campbell, Ph.D., head of the University of Georgia psychology department. “Narcissism is on the rise.”

Or look at the problem from Krueger’s perspective as an economist: since Jan. 20, 2009, the day Obama took office, the Gini index, a standard measure of income inequality, has risen steadily (Figure 4).

Photo

Fig. 4 CreditSt. Louis Federal Reserve

Krueger’s goal of bringing norms of fairness back into the business culture appears not to be taking hold. Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist whose work on inequality is often cited by the Obama administration,released a study in January showing that during the first two years of the current recovery, 2009 to 2011, average family income grew by a modest 1.7 percent, “but the gains were very uneven. Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent.” Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent.”

Earlier this month, Obama acknowledged America’s uphill struggle on this score.”Too many middle-class families still feel like they’re working harder and harder and can’t get ahead,” he said. “Inequality is still growing in our society.”

If these trends continue, and most evidence suggests they will, one of the central ironies of the Obama years will be that a Democratic administration committed to pushing back against the unjust distribution of resources and to the promotion of morally cohesive communities will in fact have overseen an eight-year period of social disintegration, inequality and rising self-preoccupation.

This is not the legacy the Obama administration wants to leave.

Liberalism has won, which is why conservatives do what they do

Daily Kos

kosFollowRSS

Daily Kos staff

Mon Apr 14, 2014 at 11:24 AM PDT

Liberalism has won, which is why conservatives do what they do

by kosFollow

 

Kevin Drum riffs on a theme that has truly interested me of late:

Over the last half century, various branches of government have also taken plenty of proactive steps to marginalize religion. Prayer in public school has been banned. Creches can no longer be set up in front of city hall. Parochial schools are forbidden from receiving public funds. The Ten Commandments can't be displayed in courtrooms. Catholic hospitals are required to cover contraceptives for their employees. Gay marriage is legal in more than a dozen states and the number is growing rapidly.

His point is that liberals have won the culture war, and we have. Conservatives are left trying to justify their cultural relevance by pathetically disassembling box office receipts like this. (Did you know that Tina Fey and Ricky Gervais are "two of the most divisive actors working today"?) 

And it goes deeper than what Drum writes. Liberal social values are deeply embedded in our culture, from pretty much everything on TV outside the Christian channels at the fringe of the channel lineup, to any movie of note. In that Breitbart link above, Nick Nolte waxes about God's Not Dead, an indie Christian film that has grossed $41 million on a production budget of $2 million. Good job! Then again, it's a blip. Captain America has grossed nearly half a billion in 10 days, with its overtly civil-libertarian and anti-neocon message. I mean, Captain America is saying that a fear-based (read: Republican) foreign policy is not the "American Way."

For a crowd that flinches at any notion of sex, it's gotta be impossible to escape sexual imagery, from advertising to media to Miley Cyrus' latest whatever-the-hell she is doing. And seriously, don't listen to song lyrics. I flinched hearing my six-year-old daughter sing along with Flo Rida's "Whistle." She was too little to understand what that song was really about, but at some point, she will. I'm not the kind of parent overly concerned with "protecting" her from that sort of thing, but if you are, it's a tough world out there.

On economic matters, the pendulum is swinging hard against the financial elite. There's a reason we get regular installments of "billionaire calls economic populists Nazis." They were used to being paragons of society. Now they are the enemy. And with populism on the rise, and with talk of income inequality routine, Reaganesque "trickle down" theories are decidedly out of favor. Why do you think Republicans are afraid to roll out their "solutions" to our problems? It's because they know their views, whether on health care or immigration or pretty much anything else, are out of touch with public opinion. Sure, there is infighting in their caucus, but it's a fight between those who think conservatism is popular and being loud-and-proud will be politically advantageous (e.g. Ted Cruz), and those who know how to read the polls.

That's not to say that we've WON won. We certainly have won the battle of ideas. But power isn't just about ideas. It's about wrestling the institutional levers of government from the retrogrades. Those entrenched economic and conservative interests wield power via the Supreme Court, through gross gerrymandering, through voter suppression efforts. So we've got a lot of work ahead of us.

But if you wonder why conservatives seem to carry perpetual grievances, it's because they know they have lost. The entire world around them has left them behind. Heck, they've created an entire alternate media world in which to cocoon themselves. But they know they've lost. They may still alternate between the "denial" (Ted Cruz) and "anger" (Bill Donohue) phases of acceptance, but the only question left is how long will it be before our government truly represents the public will. And when that happens, we'll be truly able to ignore the perpetual tempter tantrum from the Right.

Originally posted to kos on Mon Apr 14, 2014 at 11:24 AM PDT.

Also republished by Daily Kos.

“Coalfield Stockholm syndrome”: West Virginians say they’re still loyal to the coal industry

SALON

Tuesday, Jan 28, 2014 02:51 PM EST

“Coalfield Stockholm syndrome”: West Virginians say they’re still loyal to the coal industry

 

Some people affected by the water crisis don't blame "King Coal" for causing it

 
Lindsay Abrams Follow

Topics: west virginia chemical spill, coal industry, coal mining, environmental disaster, Sustainability News

 

 

Mining operations, Charleston, WV (Credit: Amanda Haddox/Shutterstock)

 

 

There are plenty of people West Virginians can choose to be angry at following the chemical leak that left 300,000 of them without tap water. The folks at Freedom Industries who delayed reporting the leak until they were pretty much forced to, and who waited even longer to mention that a second chemical may have leaked as well. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection, which hadn’t inspected the facility in 20 years. The legislators behind the loophole-filled legislation that allowed them to get away with this (something that’s beginning to be remedied with today’s introduction of the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act). The CDC for having no clue how dangerous the contaminated water actually was.

Oh yeah, and the coal industry, for whose benefit this chemical was being stored. But those guys are being let off the hook, reports Al Jazeera America – even in places where people were already not drinking tap water because of the industry’s paste misdeeds:

“This is just a freak accident with the water thing, in my opinion,” said Timothy McKinney, 30, a laid-off coal miner in Prenter, W.Va. “I’ve been in coal mining since I was out of high school, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the coal industry in general.”

…Until a lawsuit against nearby coal mine companies two years ago, many Prenter residents had either drawn sulfurous-smelling water from wells or driven miles down the road to buy bottled water. The plaintiffs in the case said coal processing waste pumped underground by coal companies had seeped into their water supply, turning it a red or orange color and making it smell like rotten eggs.

After the suit, residents say, they received connections to the West Virginia American Water system. Yet on Jan. 9 they found out they couldn’t temporarily drink that either, due to the chemical spill.

Despite the accident, the decline of the coal industry — which McKinney blames on political factors — is what he believes is the region’s biggest long-term problem, not the poisoning of the water supply. His main wish for his state is a bigger, not smaller, coal industry, providing good jobs which are not curtailed by environmental regulations.

“I’m speaking for a thousand, fifteen hundred people that’s been laid off throughout West Virginia. There’s a lot of families that’s lost homes, families that’s been broken up over it,” McKinney said, speaking near a creek that emitted a strong odor of sulfur as a steady stream of large dump trucks from a nearby mine rumbled past.

To be sure, it’s a complex issue, in which a declining number of mining jobs has led some to take up cooking meth instead. But the picture Al Jazeera paints is of communities unaware that there are any other options:

“I call it Coalfield Stockholm syndrome, and it is on a mass scale,” said Dustin White, an activist with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, who is from Boone County himself.

“We are programmed early on,” said White, 30, who is also the son of a coal miner. “They (the industry) have ingrained themselves in every aspect of our lives.”

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com.

American Amnesia

July 1, 2011

defining ideas

American Amnesia

by William Damon (Senior Fellow and member of the Virtues of a Free Society Task Force)

Young people in this country are failing civics, which is a crisis for the nation.

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The New York Times headline from May could not have been more compelling: "Failing grades on civics exam called a 'crisis.'" The accompanying story reported bleak news from the latest National Assessment of Student Progress (widely known as the "nation's report card"). Among our present crop of high school seniors, only one in four scored at least "proficient" in knowledge of U. S. citizenship. Of all the academic subjects tested, civics and the closely linked subject of history came in last: "a smaller proportion of fourth and eighth graders demonstrated proficiency in civics than in any other subject the federal government has tested since 2005, except history, American students' worst subject."

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

Not surprisingly, the story drew appalled reactions from public figures such as Sandra Day O'Conner ("we have a crisis on our hands"). Charles Quigley, a civics educator, noted that "the results confirm an alarming and continuing trend that civics in America is on the decline." He declared that in the U.S. today, "civic education is facing a real 'civic recession.'" Yet within a week, despite the perception of crisis among those who were paying attention, the story vanished from sight. This may be the most alarming part of the crisis—our society's seeming lack of awareness of the grave threat that civic ignorance among our youth poses to the future of our democracy.

Perhaps this important story was largely ignored because it was not really news. For the past ten years or more, virtually every glimpse into American students' views on citizenship has revealed both a lack of understanding and a lack of interest. An American Enterprise Institute study earlier this year found that most social studies teachers doubted that their students grasped core U.S. citizenship concepts such as the Bill of Rights or the separation of powers. A recent Department of Education study found that only nine percent of U.S. high school students are able to cite reasons why it is important for citizens to participate in a democracy, and only six percent are able to identify reasons why having a constitution benefits a country. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has reported a decades-long, step-wise decline in interest in political affairs among college freshmen—from over 60 percent of the population in 1966 to less than half that percentage in our current period.

A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry.

For the past ten years, our research team at Stanford has interviewed broad cross-sections of American youth about what U. S. citizenship means to them. Here is one high school student's reply, not atypical: "We just had (American citizenship) the other day in history. I forget what it was." Another student told us that "being American is not really special….I don’t find being an American citizen very important." Another replied, "I don’t want to belong to any country. It just feels like you are obligated to this country. I don’t like the whole thing of citizen...I don’t like that whole thing. It’s like, citizen, no citizen; it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like to be a good citizen—I don’t know, I don’t want to be a citizen...it’s stupid to me."

Such statements reflect more than an ignorance of citizenship—though they may provide us with clues about the source of students' present-day lack of knowledge. Beyond not knowing what U.S. citizenship entails, many young Americans today are not motivated to learn about how to become a fully engaged citizen of their country. They simply do not care about their status as American citizens. Notions such as civic virtue, civic duty, or devotion to their country mean little to them. This is not true of all young people today—there are exceptions in virtually every community—but it accurately describes a growing trend that encompasses a large portion of our younger generation.

This trend has not arisen in isolation. Indeed, the attitudes of many young Americans are closely aligned with intellectual positions that they likely have never encountered first-hand. In our leading intellectual and educational circles, the entire notion of national devotion is now in dispute. For example, in a book about the future of citizenship, a law professor recently wrote: "Longstanding notions of democratic citizenship are becoming obsolete …American identity is unsustainable in the face of globalization." As a replacement for commitment to a nation-state, the author wrote, "loyalties…are moving to transnational communities defined by many different ways: by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, and sexual orientation." In similar fashion, many influential educators are turning to "cosmopolitanism" and "global citizenship" as the proper aim of civics instruction, de-emphasizing the attachment to any particular country such as the United States. As global citizens, it is argued, our primary identification should be with the humanity of the world, and our primary obligation should be to the universal ideals of human rights and justice. Devotion to one's own nation state, commonly referred to as patriotism, is suspect because it may turn into a militant chauvinism or a dangerous "my country right or wrong" perspective.

As one high school student put it, "...It’s like to be a good citizen—I don’t know, I don’t want to be a citizen...it’s stupid to me."

While the lofty ideals of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship are understandable, they do not in themselves provide a realistic route to civic education. For one thing, the serious tasks of citizenship that students need to learn are all played out on a local or national level rather than a global one. We do not pay taxes to the world; we do not vote for a world president or senator; we do not serve in a world army or peace corps; and we are not called to jury duty in any world courtroom. When we write e-mails to our congressional representatives or vote and campaign for candidates running for elected office, these activities are part of our national civic life, not part of any global event. As philosopher Michael Walzer wrote, "I am not a citizen of the world…I am not even aware that there is a world such that one could be a citizen of."

To conduct our U.S. citizenship activities intelligently and responsibly, we must know how the American system operates; and we must care enough to make the effort to get involved. More than this, in times of national peril, we must care enough to sacrifice for the common good if needed. This requires more than civic knowledge: it demands devotion to a cause greater than ourselves. Over the course of American history, love of country has been the foremost motivator of such sacrifices for the greater good, in battles both against tyrannical forces abroad and social injustices domestically.

Discouraging young Americans from identifying with their country—and, indeed, from celebrating the traditional American quest for liberty and equal rights—is a sure way to remove their most powerful source of motivation to learn about U. S. citizenship. Why would a student exert any effort to master the rules of a system that the student has no respect for and no interest in being part of? To acquire civic knowledge as well as civic virtue, students need to care about their country.

It is especially odd to see schools with large immigrant populations neglect teaching students about American identity and the American tradition. Educational critic Diane Ravitch observed this phenomenon when visiting a New York City school whose principal proudly spoke of the school's efforts to celebrate the cultures of all the immigrant students. Ravitch writes, "I asked him whether the school did anything to encourage students to appreciate American culture, and he admitted with embarrassment that it did not."

These and other American students are being urged to identify with, on the one hand, customs from the native lands they have departed and, on the other hand, with the abstract ideals of an amorphous global culture. Lost in between these romantic affiliations is an identification with the nation where these students actually will practice citizenship. Adding to the dysfunction of this educational choice, as Ravitch writes, is the absurdity of teaching "a student whose family fled to this country from a tyrannical regime or from dire poverty to identify with that nation rather than with the one that gave the family refuge."

We are not "citizens of the world." We do not pay taxes to the world; we do not vote for a world president or senator.

How can we do better? Of course we need to teach students the Constitution, along with its essential underlying principles such as separation of powers, representative government, and Federalism. Excellent programs for such teaching now exist. But these programs are not widely used amidst today's single-minded focus on basic skills. Compounding this neglect, the school assessments that drive the priorities of teachers infrequently test for civic knowledge. To preserve the American heritage of liberty and democracy for future generations, citizenship instruction must be placed front and center in U. S. classrooms rather than relegated to the margins.

As for the essential matter of motivation, the only way to capture students' interest is to inspire in them some justifiable pride in their country's best traditions. Fortunately, U. S. success stories are not hard to find. In our recent history, three 20th Century cases could be taught to promote pride in the American tradition: 1) the civil rights movement that extended rights to millions of citizens in the United States; 2) victories over totalitarianism (especially fascism, communism, and other militaristic tyrannies) that extended new freedoms to millions of subjugated people in Europe and Asia; and 3) the building of a middle class that offered economic freedom to millions of ordinary citizens, and to immigrants coming to American in search of a better life as well.

We live in a time marked by anxieties over many perceived threats to our way of life—terrorism, economic collapse, and climate change, to mention just a few of the widespread fears making our headlines these days. But there is a looming crisis closer at hand that poses every bit as grave a threat to the future of our way of life: the very real possibility that our democracy will be left in the hands of a citizenry unprepared to govern it and unwilling the make the sacrifices needed to preserve it. A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry. Failing this, as Ben Franklin long ago warned, despotism lies just around the corner.

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William Damon is a professor of education at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. For the past twenty-five years, Damon has written on character development at all stages of life. Damon's recent books include Failing Liberty 101 (Hoover Press, 2011); The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find their Calling in Life (2008); and The Moral Advantage: How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing (2004). Damon was founding editor of New Direction for Child and Adolescent Development and is editor in chief of The Handbook of Child Psychology (1998 and 2006 editions). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.

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This essay is based on a new book by the author titled, Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society.

SALON

Sunday, Mar 2, 2014 07:00 AM EST

Baby boomer humor’s big lie: “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack” really liberated Reagan and Wall Street

Harold Ramis was a master of subversive comedy. But the politics of "Caddyshack" and rude gestures have backfired

Thomas Frank

Topics: ghostbusters, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, P.J. O'Rourke, Editor's Picks, Ayn Rand, caddyshack, Breitbart, Movies, Conservatives, National Lampoon, Business News, Entertainment News, Politics News

 

 
Ronald Reagan, ghostbusters (Credit: AP)

I am going to start with three beloved movies of my childhood, and end with a suggestion of why liberals will probably never be able to come to grips with what they winningly call “inequality.” The three movies I have in mind—”National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “Caddyshack,” and “Ghostbusters”–were all written or directed, in whole or in part, by the great Harold Ramis, who died last week, and whose work was eulogized by President Obama as follows:

When we watched his movies . . . we didn’t just laugh until it hurt. We questioned authority. We identified with the outsider. We rooted for the underdog. And, through it all, we never lost our faith in happy endings.

That seems about right, doesn’t it? Each of the films I mentioned features some prudish or strait-laced patriarch who is spectacularly humiliated by a band of slobs or misfits or smart alecks. With their dick jokes and cruel insults, these movies represented, collectively, the righteous rising-up of a generation determined to get justice for the little guy. That’s why a group of prominent Democrats showed up at Ramis’ funeral. It’s why articles about Ramis’ movies routinely speak of their liberating power.

So, the political equation is obvious, right? We of the left own the imagery of subversion and outsiderness. It’s ours. Every time a stupid old white guy gets humiliated in a TV commercial for choosing Brand X, we know it’s because the people at Brand Y secretly support universal health insurance and a nice little pop in the minimum wage. Right?

Well, no. And with that acknowledgement, let me advance to my bold hypothesis: The dick joke is not always what it seems to be. The dick joke is not always your friend.

Start with the first really great movie Ramis had a hand in writing, “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Watching it again today, I didn’t think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs. slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is to say, where they drink beer and throw parties and actually enjoy getting laid. If this basic formula doesn’t strike you as particularly rebellious or even remarkable, that’s because it isn’t: in its simple anarchic assertion of appetite, it’s the philosophy of the people who rule us. Everyone is a fraud in this world; learning is a joke; sex objects are easily conned; Kennedy-style idealism is strictly for suckers; and in one telling moment, fratboy 1 remarks to fratboy 2, who is crying over the trashing of his borrowed automobile by fratboy 1 and company, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” What popped into my mind when I heard that line was that other great triumph of the boomer generation: the time-bomb investments of 2008; Goldman Sachs peddling its “shitty deals” to the naive and the credulous.

Drink, take and lie: translate it into Latin and it could be the motto of the One Percent. It is no coincidence that P. J. O’Rourke, who was editor of National Lampoon when “Animal House” was made and is currently a wisecracking critic of liberalism at the Cato Institute, recently declared that the release of the movie in 1978 marked the moment when his generation “took over” and started to make the world “better.” (That O’Rourke chose to write this for the American Association of Retired Persons is a particularly poignant detail.) It is also no coincidence that the fraternity at Dartmouth which served as one of the models for “Animal House” has of late become a kind of pipeline into the investment-banking industry, nor should it surprise anyone that Wall Street is home to a secret Animal House-style fraternity of its own, a place where the anarchic captains of finance come together to slurp likker and howl their admiration for their beau ideal: the self-maximizing asshole . . . who got bad grades in college.

The second of the Ramis comedies eulogized by Obama was the 1980 cult classic “Caddyshack,” which took on the great movie theme of the Seventies—class antagonism—over a game of golf. The martinet this time is a country-club grandee, depicted by veteran blowhard Ted Knight; the slob confronting him is a real-estate developer of hilariously garish taste played by Rodney Dangerfield; between them stands the American worker in all his nobility—meaning, specifically, a teenaged caddy at the country club who must decide whether to be true to his blue-collar self or to kiss the grandee’s ass in order to go to college. The movie unfolds as a series of set pieces in which WASP prigs blow gasket after gasket upon beholding some infringement of their Prussian sensibilities—absorbing one of Dangerfield’s jokes, or seeing caddies frolicking in the pool, or hearing someone using the word “sucks,” or finding a car parked on the lawn, or picking up the saucy strains of a Journey song as it wafts across the greensward. Boom: Apoplexy! Watch the patriarchs go berserk!

And that makes for a pretty liberal film, right? I mean, who else makes fun of country club grandees except for us lefty authority-questioners?

Well, free-market conservatives do. Google the phrase “Country club Republican” and what you will find, by and large, are right-wing types using it as a synonym for “RINO”: fake Republicans who are in it for the snobbery—not out of faith in the relentless, disruptive forces of capitalism.

These same conservatives are also the most likely to understand class conflict in the way “Caddyshack” does: as a rivalry between WASP old money and differently pedigreed new money. In fact, this is one of the themes of George Gilder’s 1981 book “Wealth and Poverty,” the manifesto of the “supply-side” revolution, and of countless wealth-celebrating books that followed. That’s why “Caddyshack” seems in retrospect like a piece of crypto-Reaganite social commentary. Rodney Dangerfield’s character, for example, is a clear symbol of the crude power of markets—proudly showing off one of his tasteless billboards and announcing that he only cares about the “snobatorium” country club because he wants to build condos there. The choice before the white, working-class caddy boils down to the Harvard-proud WASP snob and the earthy, joke-cracking businessman; the side he eventually chooses is the same one that millions of real-life blue-collar workers were also choosing in those confused days.

There is nothing “crypto” about Ramis’s 1984 hit, “Ghostbusters”: Its Reaganism is fully developed, as numerous critics have pointed out. Here the martinet is none other than a troublemaking EPA bureaucrat; the righteous, rule-breaking slobs are small businessmen—ghost-hunting businessmen, that is, who have launched themselves deliriously into the world of entrepreneurship. Eventually, after the buffoon from the EPA gets needlessly into the businessmen’s mix and blunders the world into catastrophe, the forces of order find they must outsource public safety itself to the hired ghost-guns because government can’t do the job on its own.

Both Reagan and his closest advisers were transfixed by the film, Sidney Blumenthal tells us; “Ghostbusters” fit nicely into their idea of an America guided by “fantasy and myth.” And while the film itself piled up its stupendous box-office returns in that summer of ‘84, Jack Abramoff and his College Republican pals got together a troupe of “Fritzbusters” to warm up the crowds at Republican events, mocking Democratic presidential candidate “Fritz” Mondale with an offensive take-off on the catchy “Ghostbusters” theme song. And why not? What Mondale was promising—yes, promising—was to raise taxes, balance the budget, get responsible, and close down the party. What a Niedermeyer.

Harold Ramis was a sort of poet of the rude gesture, of the symbolic humiliation. Our reaction to his work, both now and when it was fresh, is almost mechanical: We see the square on the screen get shamed, and our mind shouts liberation. It is almost Pavlovian. Our culture-masters have been gleefully triggering this kind of reaction for nearly fifty years now—since the rude gesture first became a national pastime during the 1960s—and in that time the affluent, middle-class society that produced the Boomer generation has pretty much gone the way of the family farmer.

These two developments are not unconnected. One small reason for the big economic change, I think, is the confusion engendered by the cultural change. The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone believes that they’re standing up against unjust authority of some imaginary kind or another—even those whose ultimate aim is obviously to establish an unjust authority of their own. Their terms for it are slightly different than the ones in “Animal House”—they talk about the liberal elite, the statists, the social engineers, the “ruling class.” But they’re all acting out the same old script. The Tea Party movement believes it’s resisting the arrogant liberal know-it-alls. So did Andrew Breitbart, in his brief career as a dealer in pranks and contumely. So do the people who proposed that abominable gay marriage discrimination law in Arizona. Hell, so do the pitiful billionaires of Wall Street—even they think they’re standing bravely for Ayn Rand’s downtrodden job creators.

Maybe the day will come when we finally wake up and understand that insults don’t always set us free. But until that happens, my liberal friends, don’t ask for whom the bird flips: the bird flips for thee.

Thomas Frank's most recent book is "Pity the Billionaire." He is also the author of "One Market Under God" and the founding editor of "The Baffler" magazine.

Bill Moyers on the Dark Money Assault on Democracy and How Racism Stills Drives Our Politics

  Media  

Democracy Now / By Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers on the Dark Money Assault on Democracy and How Racism Stills Drives Our Politics

 

 

Moyers, "We should know who’s buying our government."

 

 

January 27, 2014  |  

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Bill Moyers, the legendary broadcaster and host of Moyers & Company. Earlier this month, his program, Moyers & Company, aired the documentary report,State of Conflict: North Carolina. He is the former host of Bill Moyers Journal. He has won more than 30 Emmy Awards. He’s also a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News. His most recent book is Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, as I hope it continues right here. Quite a report, and it isn’t even the whole thing. You go on in this report on the state of conflict in North Carolina to talk about the whole issue of voting rights. [Watch the documentary here, with full transcript published on AlterNet earlier this month].

BILL MOYERS: Yes, North Carolina now, because of this new far-right government—and these are not your father’s Republicans, they are really right-wing Republicans adhering to the fundamentalism of the right—they went after voting rights. It was one of the first objectives they fulfilled when they took power. And they now have the most restrictive voting rights in the country—a very complicated process of getting IDs that you have to have. They’ve redistricted in a way that packs African Americans into three districts, so that it’s hard to argue "one man, one vote" is happening down there. And the Justice Department has challenged the North Carolina state voting laws. But they are very restrictive, and they’re designed to perpetuate the Republican rule and to make it harder for the elderly, for the young, for minorities to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the things they realized very quickly was that a lot of the voters who were voting early were voting Democrat, so they’re cracking down on the number of days that you can take—the number of days you can vote.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, there—for a while, it looked as if Mitt Romney had won in 2012, but when the early votes were finally counted, the margin went to—victory went to Obama. So, they don’t like that, and they’re doing away with early voting.

AMY GOODMAN: So, why did you focus on North Carolina, of all the states? Is it really so singular, so unique?

BILL MOYERS: Well, it’s very compact, what’s happening down there, and it’s very recent. This has happened to a considerable extent in Wisconsin. These are battleground states, where the right wing and the conservatives and the business and wealthy communities are collaborating to make sure they don’t lose again. North Carolina is an interesting state in and of itself. It’s a blue state, it’s a red state, it’s a purple state. Obama carried it by a whisker in 2008, Romney by a whisker in 2012. It goes back and forth. Jesse Helms, the, to use your term, legendary right-wing senator from North Carolina, was simultaneously in office with a progressive United States senator. It’s a purple state, really, that goes this way. So the Republicans, the right wing, are focusing on it. The Democrats ought to be focusing on it, but they’ve had their problems down there with corruption and scandals that played into Art Pope’s hands.

But there are three reasons for this story. One, it’s very clear what’s happening in North Carolina. Second, it’s a paradigm, a harbinger of what’s happening in other states. And then, most important, it really reveals what dark money is doing to American politics. So much of this money that has flowed into North Carolina comes from untraceable and unaccountable sources. They don’t know in North Carolina who’s funding the redistricting. They don’t know who’s funding these campaigns against their opponents. It’s coming from national sources, from Republican sources in Washington, from very wealthy people around the country. And that is, of course, flying in the face of the fundamental tenet of democracy, which is, we should know who’s buying our government.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, there is a North Carolinian in this, and it is Art Pope himself, also close to the Koch brothers.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, he is a—he’s been called a kingmaker as well as a king, because he has used his money—he’s a smart man, very shrewd, very intelligent, and very ruthless in how he uses his money. And as Jane Mayer, The New Yorker reporter, terrific reporter, as you and I both know, says at the end of the broadcast, this is more than North Carolina; this shows what a wealthy individual can do in any state where he or she is willing to put their money into politics in this way. So it’s a harbinger, as I say, of how our democracy—you know, organized money is the greatest threat to democracy because it unbalances the equilibrium. Democracy is supposed to check the excesses of private power and private greed. And if money disestablishes that equilibrium, we’re in trouble.

And the only answer—as we’ve seen in this film, the only answer to organized money is organized people. And that’s what really at first drew me to North Carolina. I’ve had a history there. I was on the board of Wake Forest University for years. I was in—I have good, close friends there who teach and who write and who work there. And I know something about North Carolina. And when I saw what was happening on these Moral Mondays, I knew nothing about them until the press stories began to come out. These people were gathering, not spontaneously, because Reverend Barber, who is himself a shrewd cat, a cool cat, as they say—I knew what he was doing in organizing these. The first arrest came in the summer, and then the news started—the news media started paying attention. It was obvious that people were becoming alarmed, agitated and organized in response to the buyout of North Carolina. And that remains the most hopeful—whether you’re a progressive conservative—a progressive Republican or a progressive liberal Democrat, you have to know that the only way we’re going to preserve our democracy is to fight this organized money. And that’s what the Moral Monday protesters are doing.

AMY GOODMAN: And they’re trying to plan the largest protest ever yet, and that will be February 8th. But there is a distinction sometimes between the progressives who are out there on the streets, who are getting arrested—more than a thousand got arrested in 2013—and the Democratic Party of North Carolina.

BILL MOYERS: That’s true. And this, of course, has played into the hands of the right wing. Progressives, of course, are more progressive than partisan. Democrats want Democrats to be re-elected, even if they’re centrists or center-right Democrats. So, there’s resentment in North Carolina among some traditional Democrats to Art—to Reverend Barber. He has now emerged as the progressive leader—not the Democratic leader, because he’s not a partisan in this respect. And so, there’s conflict between progressives and Democrats who are not progressives in North Carolina. This is an old—an old story, as you know.

The right wing solved it by this enormous confomity that they brought to their movement 25 and 30 years ago. The tea party was together enough to take over the Republican Party. Progressives are not together enough to take over, step by step, precinct by precinct, the Democratic Party. And that’s a source of conflict. And, of course, as I say in the documentary and said a moment ago, Democrats had some corruption and some scandals a few years ago when several went to jail. And that’s been a problem. That played right into the right’s hands, and it’s created a further rift between progressives and Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: Reproductive rights also very much under attack. Fascinating to see Governor McCrory saying—you know, very simple answer when asked if he would be supporting more restrictions against abortion, in one of the debates, and his answer was "None," very clearly stated, but that hasn’t been the case.

BILL MOYERS: He read the tea leaves and saw that when he got into office—he was elected with the help of these conservatives, and of course he has to appease them in order to be re-elected, if he runs again. And one of the first changes in his agenda was to go against what he had said earlier and sign the most restrictive abortion bill, reproductive rights bill—anti-reproductive-rights bill in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Last year, as you also clip, make an excerpt of in this documentary, The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi spoke to a North Carolina county precinct Republican chair named Don Yelton about North Carolina passing one of the most restrictive voter suppression bills in the nation.

DON YELTON: The bottom line is the law is not racist.

AASIF MANDVI: Of course the law is not racist, and you are not racist.

DON YELTON: Well, I have been called a bigot before. Let me tell you something. You don’t look like me, but I think I’ve treated you the same as I would anybody else.

AASIF MANDVI: Right.

DON YELTON: Matter of fact, one of my best friends is black.

AASIF MANDVI: So, one of your best friends—

DON YELTON: One of my best friends.

AASIF MANDVI: —is black.

DON YELTON: Yes.

AASIF MANDVI: And there’s more.

DON YELTON: When I was a young man, you didn’t call a black a black; you called him a Negro. I had a picture one time of Obama sitting on a stump as a witch doctor, and I posted that on Facebook. For your information, I was making fun of my white half of Obama, not the black half. And now, you have a black person using the term nigger this, nigger that, and it’s OK for them to do it.

AASIF MANDVI: You know that we can hear you, right?

DON YELTON: Yeah.

AASIF MANDVI: OK, you know that, that you—you know that we can hear you.

DON YELTON: Yeah.

AASIF MANDVI: OK, all right.

Then I found out the real reason for the law.

DON YELTON: The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.

AASIF MANDVI: Wow! An executive GOP committee member just admitted that this law isn’t designed to hurt black people; it’s designed to hurt Democrats.

DON YELTON: If it hurts a bunch of college kids that’s too lazy to get up off their bohunkus and go get a photo ID, so be it.

AASIF MANDVI: Right, right.

DON YELTON: If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that wants the government to give them everything, so be it.

AASIF MANDVI: And it just so happens that a lot of those people vote Democrat.

DON YELTON: Gee.

AMY GOODMAN: That was from Comedy Central, The Daily Show. Almost immediately after the interview aired on The Daily Show, Don Yelton was forced to resign his position in the Republican Party. Bill Moyers?

BILL MOYERS: It’s sad that there are so many people in this country who cannot escape the prison of the past, and race is very much at the heart of this—particularly in the old Confederate states, this right-wing resurgence that we’re facing now. There are very few who speak as openly and as blatantly and as honestly as Don Yelton. He’s telling the interviewer, "Yeah, this is why I did what I did." Many do without revealing their motives. And if you track the voting patterns, if you track what’s happening in the country, you see that unspoken racism is still driving a large segment of our politics.

And fortunately, he outed himself and reminded us that the Republican Party in the South is the party that took over after the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when President Johnson said to me, "I think we’ve just handed the South to the Republicans for my lifetime and yours," because the racists who had been Democrats all those years until this transformation in American politics through the civil rights legislation and the civil rights movement—until this transformation brought them over, the Democrats had been the racist party in the South. I grew up in the South, and I remember all my Democratic friends were essentially racist. So, it’s changed, and Yelton was speaking a truth that dare not be heard. But he did say it, and we know it.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Bill, we just came from Sundance Film Festival in Park City. Freedom Summer was one of the documentaries, from the remarkable filmmaker Stanley Nelson, and it’s about—this summer coming up is the 50th anniversary of the summer of 1964, when the three civil rights activists, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, were killed. Of course, they were named; there were others who we don’t know who died. It was the summer of organizing in Mississippi, and it was the summer of the Freedom Democratic—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And you were the press secretary of Lyndon Johnson. What was it like to be there when Fannie Lou Hamer was taking Lyndon Johnson on at the 1964 Atlantic City Democratic convention? He did not want that voice, who wanted to integrate the Mississippi Democratic Party delegation to the convention, to be heard, and so he gave a speech at the same time, so the cameras would switch from her—as they did, reliably, giving voice to power—to President Johnson.

BILL MOYERS: What a dramatic and traumatic moment it was, a riveting moment. By the way, I didn’t become press secretary for two years. I was 30 that summer, and I was actually President Johnson’s domestic policy adviser, working on civil rights, voting rights and politics. And it was a—it was a dramatic moment. It was an unfortunate moment, too, because I wish, in retrospect, that we had embraced Fannie Lou Hamer and realized that’s where the future of the Democratic Party lay.

AMY GOODMAN: Could it kind of be like North Carolina Democrats today?

BILL MOYERS: Yes, exactly, exactly. But here was Johnson’s predicament. He wanted to carry as many Southern states as he could. He was from Texas. He wanted to bring progressive, moderate Democrats along with him in his campaign for ’64. And had he embraced Fannie Lou Hamer, the morally right thing to do, it would have been, he thought, politically costly. So he hammered out this compromise, which was not satisfactory to either side, in order to preserve his political prowess and his political opportunity to carry the South. And we did carry several states in the South in 1964 that I think probably he would have lost if he had not made this compromise. But in retrospect, of course—and not even in retrospect, at the time, the moral embrace would have been the right one to do, and that would have been to bring the Mississippi leadership, the Democratic—the black and civil rights leaders of Mississippi into the Democratic Party.

AMY GOODMAN: He almost resigned then, didn’t he? The pressure so enormous, at least that’s what comes out in Freedom Summer. He was saying—he was wondering if he would throw in the towel then.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, he was torn between winning and doing the right thing. Lyndon Johnson had never been an outstanding proponent of voting—of civil rights when he was a senator from Texas or the majority leader, but his heart was always in the right place, because as a young man he was a New Deal congressman from Texas, and that was trying to embrace a larger constituency.

AMY GOODMAN: He had just signed the Civil Rights Act earlier that summer.

BILL MOYERS: 1964, that’s right. And then suddenly he was faced with this moral-versus-political choice, and it really created a great tension in him. He was torn by what he had done at the same time. And he wasn’t sure that winning re-election was worth the moral price he had paid for it. But he got over that and ran a hearty campaign, and of course received the largest plurality in the country up until then in a presidential race.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bill, before we end the show, I wanted to ask about what your plans are. This year you turn 80.

BILL MOYERS: Yep.

AMY GOODMAN: You announced in October that Bill Moyers & Company, you’re going to be ending it. You got an avalanche of response. People—the force more powerful than any one person, the people spoke, and they said, "You can’t end this show." Bill Moyers—

BILL MOYERS: Well, enough people spoke to make me think that I was leaving—I was going AWOLin the middle of the battle. And, you know, when you’ve been at it 40-some-odd years—I’ve been a broadcaster for 41 years—you do have somewhat loyal constituents. Many of them are aging out, dying off. I mean, young journalists have no idea of what’s happened in broadcasting over the last 40 years. They’re into the web and so forth. But there were enough loyal fans, constituents around the country. They wrote—4,000 or 5,000 letters came to us, emails. And I had to face myself shaving in the morning and saying, "Are you abandoning these people?" So we came back for one more year.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s great to see you coming back with documentaries like these. What’s your next?

BILL MOYERS: We’re working on a—we’re looking at Ayn Rand’s influence today. Ayn Rand was—is the libertarian, the famous writer, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, a libertarian who celebrates the virtue of money and says the—has had an enormous influence over American politics and is even popular today. I think Atlas Shrugged sells something like 150-200,000 copies. It’s being taught. Her philosophy is being taught in universities funded by Koch brother organizations and others. And so we’re looking at Rand Paul, for example, who’s a likely candidate for president in—I don’t know. They say not, but there’s some kind of a convergence there, because when he was 17, his father, Ron Paul, gave him a set of Ayn Rand’s novels. So we’re working on that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we look forward to the commentary. Bill, thanks so much for joining us, legendary broadcaster, host of Moyers & Company. Earlier this month, his program Moyers & Company aired a documentary called State of Conflict: North Carolina, and we’ll link to the full documentary at democracynow.org.

  

Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism.  He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism.  He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy. This is his first TomDispatch piece.