No, our economic statistics were not painting us an unusually rosy picture last fall. Yes, the state of the American economy is very disappointing. But the gap between what the statistics tell us...
You are correct. As soon as the election was over all the news services, not just Fox and the other vixens, stopped talking about inflation. It was like the Immigrant Caravans conjured up before elections that vanished on the Wednesday following the first Monday in November
The problem it, that even before the Capitulation, the MSM were not conveying the truth.
I think that Stan Oklobdzija was correct to say "our conceptualization of fascism in the US would be better if our model wasn't Nazi Germany or the USSR, but instead, any number of South American nations with decade+ experiences of fascist rule and whose fascist governments remain popular with broad swaths of the population to this day."
You may believe this is defeatist. I agree in principle that we should predicate our actions on assumptions that give some chance of saving America, even if we assess the probabilities of the assumptions themselves as low. I just don't agree that realistic assumptions are hopeless in this case. For one thing, Hitler has a positive valence for many Trump voters but Hugo Chavez does not.
Great piece … except the last para … “But if we are confronting …” has a wide variance. Many Americans do hate their fellow citizens, and want to “own the libs” in the very specific sense of wanting to see them dead, and this is going to be more and more of a problem in the coming year. There is likely to be an economic crisis and T**** will then do what dictators generally do — blame immigrants, saboteurs, foreign elements, hoarders — giving the private militias license to act on what they’ve been threatening to do to members of Congress, etc, for years.
Seems to me the problem is mostly structural. The worsening bias of the Senate creates a situation in which the Democrats would have to win a massive landslide in order to pass anything like a meaningful agenda, meaning anything that downwardly redistributed income. Biden got in the weakest half of what he promised, then Harris got spanked because only rich people's lives were any better. Not least because Biden had no chance to pass what mattered c. 2021.
Well, if Red State senators were actually willing to bargain to gain resources for their constituents... But they aren't:
> **Michael Dawson**: 'Seems to me the problem is mostly structural. The worsening bias of the Senate creates a situation in which the Democrats would have to win a massive landslide in order to pass anything like a meaningful agenda, meaning anything that downwardly redistributed income. Biden got in the weakest half of what he promised, then Harris got spanked because only rich people's lives were any better. Not least because Biden had no chance to pass what mattered c. 2021.
1. Even if they knew inflation had come down lots of people were still mad about it becasue "BIDEN'S inflation took away some of MY wages."
2. A lot of bad vibe was standard MSM reporting, not just RNM.
Although it goes against decades of newspaper punditry and so might not have worked, wasn't Biden mistaken not to have railed against the _Fed's_ inflation? What was the upside of seconding the Fed's (true but misunderstood) line about inflation being "temporary."
And if you ever _are_ put in charge of BLS, woud you please have them start doing WAGE indexes, not remuneration unit value indexes? We really ought not to have to speculate about changes inf real wages of different occupation groups and income levels.
At THAT stage how much good would it have done. She was formally in favor of border enforcement and OK with fracking. Deathbed conversions are never admired.
Of course it would have been nice if Powell had been clear a Jackson Hole in 2020 that yes we will inflate to promote and yes we will make sure it's temporary. And an apology in 2023 for delay in raising the EFFR would not have been amiss.
“ … bulk of Trump supporters who have landed us in this chaos-monkey fix are good-hearted, well-meaning people who care about their fellow citizens.” You’re kidding, right? What deludes you into thinking that is a true belief statement? You need to get out more.
Gene Ludwig's piece was a dreary exercise in hypocrisy. The issues that damaged the Democrats are the issues that Democrats don't want to talk about, most of all immigration. This has always been Trump's bigget issue, the one he started with and the one he stayed with, for good reason: it works! Democrats try to avoid this issue, because they don't have an answer that the American people will accept. Americans are in a xenophobic mood, hating foreigners and imports and feeling they need a "strong man" to protect them. I think I've recommended Karl Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" more than once. In any event, you can find "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump" on my own blog, "Literature R Us". I think it holds up.
Immigration is not just a US issue. The Brexit referendum in the UK in 2016 was about xenophobia/jobs/etc that was pushed by Nigel Farage's UKIP. Both the Tories and Labour in the UK are trying to manage immigration, especially illegal immigration. The Labour party won't even reconsider reentering the EU with its free movement of people. Germany's AfD party, as well as Austria's FPO, both extreme right-wing (even neo-Nazi) parties have immigration (even deportation) as primary issues. France, Italy, and Greece are also grappling with this issue. Immigration is a common theme across the EU.
Sadly, the evident failure of dealing with global climate change will result is climate refugees. What happens when populations migrate from the tropics to the northern, cooler, countries? I fear that rich countries will not allow these migrants respite, forcing mass deaths. Walls going up everywhere.
I hesitate to tar DeLong with Noah Smith’s claim, though Smith mentions him as sort of a fellow traveller as it were but “contemporary orthodox economists don’t read Marx” or so Noah asserts. I speculate without any evidence that to the extent they have read Marx, neither “The Eighteenth Brumaire” nor the Manuscripts of 1844 made their reading list. However, that’s mere conjecture on my part.
Marx's 1844 ms. are... not easy to read... and circle around themes that are then submerged and in the background for the entire rest of Marx's career, at least in writings that he published. They do, however, emerge in Engels's 1878 "Anti-Dühring". IMHO, the 1844 ms. and "Anti-Dühring" are best read at the end of one's long march through Marx. But, IMHO at least, do not start there...
A better base to the road that Marx was going to follow in his published writings can be found in Engels's 1844 "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy"...
As for the "18th Brumaire..." there is a lot that is very interesting in there on how, as Marx writing as a High Patriarchal Misogynistic Victorian Gentleman puts it, "It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along could violate them. The riddle is not solved by such turns of speech, but merely formulated differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six million can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three swindlers..."
But the underlying analysis? The Orleanists were not the representatives of the industrial-commercial bourgeoisie. The Legitimists were not the representatives of landlord-agricultural bourgeoisie that the aristocracy had become. The peasants were not a "sack of potatoes", but rather had strong views that Louis Bonaparte had their back, and would better guide France forward than the standard politician-clowns—beliefs that may well have been wrong, but that were not reflective of their inability to form and act as a political class. IMHO, the underlying analysis is simply wrong.
Well, you are clearly not among Noah Smith's fellow travelers! Briefly, 1844 ms. and really anything by Marx is not an easy read which is likely why we just get received wisdom as opposed to having it as part of our actual reading canon. Satz in _Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale_ and Anderson in _Private Government_ make that point about reading vs received wisdom with respect to Marx and Adam Smith.
My own reading of Marx and of Smith has come later in life (not part of the Kennedy School experience) and motivated only by sitting in on some political theory courses and then subsequently deciding to lead a course in Illiberalisms. Both required actually reading the canon as opposed to reading what someone else said. Both reading experiences were excruciating but informative.
You clearly have read Marx (and,I speculate, Smith) both broadly and thoughtfully. I'll forego further comment on the meat of your rejoinder at least for now -- it requires and deserves far more thoughtfulness on my part than my current situation allows (the tediousness of Real Life interferes).
"The peasants were not a "sack of potatoes", but rather had strong views that Louis Bonaparte had their back, and would better guide France forward than the standard politician-clowns."
In other words, they were Trump supporters. What is particularly cogent, to my mind, is what Marx says about Napoleon's supporters: "Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. "
Trump's people want a man who is all powerful, who can and will protect them by any means necessary. They don't want to have to think; they want someone to think for them.
without doubt in this very large country there are "tens of millions of Americans [that] really want ... a greenlight to hate their fellow citizens, the “Libs” who need to be owne [and] wants to be misinformed" and in fact there is probably a large crossover between that group and "the good-hearted, well-meaning people who care about their fellow citizens." (People are complicated!) But even the haters (or aleast a large share of them) don't want to see their prosperity, security, health, etc. destroyed. This is a paradox of anything coming close to good liberal governance. If liberal governance provide good governance (in terms of prosperity, security, health etc.) the more people feel secure and will discount the probability of losing these things and infate the importance of their specific grievences and tribal demands. I don't have a preferred solution to this particuar conundrum (and in fact there are probably many things that need to be done to confron this), but I think its an important to understand the dynamic if a solution is to be found.
Anyone who relies on SocSec payments knows that each year the inflation-adjusted income falls behind the rising prices of food and health insurance, to name but 2. In recent years, PE control of rents has risen faster than inflation. Property owners, property insurance has been rising faster than inflation, and there will be a huge increase in 2025 premiums.
So please don't tell us that incomes have been doing well. The aging population is well aware of the decline in living standards and are unable to do much about it.
" surely Republicans who take the long view should be as dismayed as we Democrats"
But WERE the Democrats dismayed by this? Fox News, right wing radio and Republican think tanks have been spewing this crap for decades... and yet I continue to see them treated as if they're valid media outlets.
Fox sent an ex-porn start with no journalistic experience or training, and the Dem President sat them in a coveted seat where actual journalists could have been seated.
There are wonderful, hard working, truth telling journalists and outlets all over this nation - are Democrats making sure that they have access? Are they making sure the liars are excluded?
Quit patting yourself on the back, Dems have been either welcoming or feckless to the emerging Right Wing propoganda machine.
You are correct. As soon as the election was over all the news services, not just Fox and the other vixens, stopped talking about inflation. It was like the Immigrant Caravans conjured up before elections that vanished on the Wednesday following the first Monday in November
The problem it, that even before the Capitulation, the MSM were not conveying the truth.
Sanewashing, bothsiding, lede burying.
I think that Stan Oklobdzija was correct to say "our conceptualization of fascism in the US would be better if our model wasn't Nazi Germany or the USSR, but instead, any number of South American nations with decade+ experiences of fascist rule and whose fascist governments remain popular with broad swaths of the population to this day."
You may believe this is defeatist. I agree in principle that we should predicate our actions on assumptions that give some chance of saving America, even if we assess the probabilities of the assumptions themselves as low. I just don't agree that realistic assumptions are hopeless in this case. For one thing, Hitler has a positive valence for many Trump voters but Hugo Chavez does not.
Touché...
Great piece … except the last para … “But if we are confronting …” has a wide variance. Many Americans do hate their fellow citizens, and want to “own the libs” in the very specific sense of wanting to see them dead, and this is going to be more and more of a problem in the coming year. There is likely to be an economic crisis and T**** will then do what dictators generally do — blame immigrants, saboteurs, foreign elements, hoarders — giving the private militias license to act on what they’ve been threatening to do to members of Congress, etc, for years.
Seems to me the problem is mostly structural. The worsening bias of the Senate creates a situation in which the Democrats would have to win a massive landslide in order to pass anything like a meaningful agenda, meaning anything that downwardly redistributed income. Biden got in the weakest half of what he promised, then Harris got spanked because only rich people's lives were any better. Not least because Biden had no chance to pass what mattered c. 2021.
Well, if Red State senators were actually willing to bargain to gain resources for their constituents... But they aren't:
> **Michael Dawson**: 'Seems to me the problem is mostly structural. The worsening bias of the Senate creates a situation in which the Democrats would have to win a massive landslide in order to pass anything like a meaningful agenda, meaning anything that downwardly redistributed income. Biden got in the weakest half of what he promised, then Harris got spanked because only rich people's lives were any better. Not least because Biden had no chance to pass what mattered c. 2021.
Some combination of dying for whiteness and supply-side dogma. The Southern Strategy has been a helluva drug...
I agree, but ...
1. Even if they knew inflation had come down lots of people were still mad about it becasue "BIDEN'S inflation took away some of MY wages."
2. A lot of bad vibe was standard MSM reporting, not just RNM.
Although it goes against decades of newspaper punditry and so might not have worked, wasn't Biden mistaken not to have railed against the _Fed's_ inflation? What was the upside of seconding the Fed's (true but misunderstood) line about inflation being "temporary."
And if you ever _are_ put in charge of BLS, woud you please have them start doing WAGE indexes, not remuneration unit value indexes? We really ought not to have to speculate about changes inf real wages of different occupation groups and income levels.
Well, certainly Kamala Harris would have been wise, electorally, to take the line that Powell had mishandled the situation badly... B.
At THAT stage how much good would it have done. She was formally in favor of border enforcement and OK with fracking. Deathbed conversions are never admired.
Of course it would have been nice if Powell had been clear a Jackson Hole in 2020 that yes we will inflate to promote and yes we will make sure it's temporary. And an apology in 2023 for delay in raising the EFFR would not have been amiss.
“ … bulk of Trump supporters who have landed us in this chaos-monkey fix are good-hearted, well-meaning people who care about their fellow citizens.” You’re kidding, right? What deludes you into thinking that is a true belief statement? You need to get out more.
Gene Ludwig's piece was a dreary exercise in hypocrisy. The issues that damaged the Democrats are the issues that Democrats don't want to talk about, most of all immigration. This has always been Trump's bigget issue, the one he started with and the one he stayed with, for good reason: it works! Democrats try to avoid this issue, because they don't have an answer that the American people will accept. Americans are in a xenophobic mood, hating foreigners and imports and feeling they need a "strong man" to protect them. I think I've recommended Karl Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" more than once. In any event, you can find "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump" on my own blog, "Literature R Us". I think it holds up.
Immigration is not just a US issue. The Brexit referendum in the UK in 2016 was about xenophobia/jobs/etc that was pushed by Nigel Farage's UKIP. Both the Tories and Labour in the UK are trying to manage immigration, especially illegal immigration. The Labour party won't even reconsider reentering the EU with its free movement of people. Germany's AfD party, as well as Austria's FPO, both extreme right-wing (even neo-Nazi) parties have immigration (even deportation) as primary issues. France, Italy, and Greece are also grappling with this issue. Immigration is a common theme across the EU.
Sadly, the evident failure of dealing with global climate change will result is climate refugees. What happens when populations migrate from the tropics to the northern, cooler, countries? I fear that rich countries will not allow these migrants respite, forcing mass deaths. Walls going up everywhere.
I hesitate to tar DeLong with Noah Smith’s claim, though Smith mentions him as sort of a fellow traveller as it were but “contemporary orthodox economists don’t read Marx” or so Noah asserts. I speculate without any evidence that to the extent they have read Marx, neither “The Eighteenth Brumaire” nor the Manuscripts of 1844 made their reading list. However, that’s mere conjecture on my part.
Marx's 1844 ms. are... not easy to read... and circle around themes that are then submerged and in the background for the entire rest of Marx's career, at least in writings that he published. They do, however, emerge in Engels's 1878 "Anti-Dühring". IMHO, the 1844 ms. and "Anti-Dühring" are best read at the end of one's long march through Marx. But, IMHO at least, do not start there...
A better base to the road that Marx was going to follow in his published writings can be found in Engels's 1844 "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy"...
As for the "18th Brumaire..." there is a lot that is very interesting in there on how, as Marx writing as a High Patriarchal Misogynistic Victorian Gentleman puts it, "It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along could violate them. The riddle is not solved by such turns of speech, but merely formulated differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six million can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three swindlers..."
But the underlying analysis? The Orleanists were not the representatives of the industrial-commercial bourgeoisie. The Legitimists were not the representatives of landlord-agricultural bourgeoisie that the aristocracy had become. The peasants were not a "sack of potatoes", but rather had strong views that Louis Bonaparte had their back, and would better guide France forward than the standard politician-clowns—beliefs that may well have been wrong, but that were not reflective of their inability to form and act as a political class. IMHO, the underlying analysis is simply wrong.
Well, you are clearly not among Noah Smith's fellow travelers! Briefly, 1844 ms. and really anything by Marx is not an easy read which is likely why we just get received wisdom as opposed to having it as part of our actual reading canon. Satz in _Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale_ and Anderson in _Private Government_ make that point about reading vs received wisdom with respect to Marx and Adam Smith.
My own reading of Marx and of Smith has come later in life (not part of the Kennedy School experience) and motivated only by sitting in on some political theory courses and then subsequently deciding to lead a course in Illiberalisms. Both required actually reading the canon as opposed to reading what someone else said. Both reading experiences were excruciating but informative.
You clearly have read Marx (and,I speculate, Smith) both broadly and thoughtfully. I'll forego further comment on the meat of your rejoinder at least for now -- it requires and deserves far more thoughtfulness on my part than my current situation allows (the tediousness of Real Life interferes).
"The peasants were not a "sack of potatoes", but rather had strong views that Louis Bonaparte had their back, and would better guide France forward than the standard politician-clowns."
In other words, they were Trump supporters. What is particularly cogent, to my mind, is what Marx says about Napoleon's supporters: "Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. "
Trump's people want a man who is all powerful, who can and will protect them by any means necessary. They don't want to have to think; they want someone to think for them.
without doubt in this very large country there are "tens of millions of Americans [that] really want ... a greenlight to hate their fellow citizens, the “Libs” who need to be owne [and] wants to be misinformed" and in fact there is probably a large crossover between that group and "the good-hearted, well-meaning people who care about their fellow citizens." (People are complicated!) But even the haters (or aleast a large share of them) don't want to see their prosperity, security, health, etc. destroyed. This is a paradox of anything coming close to good liberal governance. If liberal governance provide good governance (in terms of prosperity, security, health etc.) the more people feel secure and will discount the probability of losing these things and infate the importance of their specific grievences and tribal demands. I don't have a preferred solution to this particuar conundrum (and in fact there are probably many things that need to be done to confron this), but I think its an important to understand the dynamic if a solution is to be found.
From CNN "Among those 60 and older — i.e., closest to retiring — 69% said they will be reliant on Social Security benefits, with 47% saying they expect to be “very reliant.” [https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/21/business/social-security-benefits/index.htm]
Anyone who relies on SocSec payments knows that each year the inflation-adjusted income falls behind the rising prices of food and health insurance, to name but 2. In recent years, PE control of rents has risen faster than inflation. Property owners, property insurance has been rising faster than inflation, and there will be a huge increase in 2025 premiums.
So please don't tell us that incomes have been doing well. The aging population is well aware of the decline in living standards and are unable to do much about it.
But didn't prices, especially grocery prices, actually increase?
Another point. Consider the two approaches.
1) Things suck
2) RW lies, "I'll make life great again, as it was in mythical past."
1) Things suck
2) Dem tells the truth. "It's not as bad as it was. And we'll make it marginally better."
For a low information voter, which one is more appealing.
" surely Republicans who take the long view should be as dismayed as we Democrats"
But WERE the Democrats dismayed by this? Fox News, right wing radio and Republican think tanks have been spewing this crap for decades... and yet I continue to see them treated as if they're valid media outlets.
Fox sent an ex-porn start with no journalistic experience or training, and the Dem President sat them in a coveted seat where actual journalists could have been seated.
There are wonderful, hard working, truth telling journalists and outlets all over this nation - are Democrats making sure that they have access? Are they making sure the liars are excluded?
Quit patting yourself on the back, Dems have been either welcoming or feckless to the emerging Right Wing propoganda machine.
Re: Ludwig and it is all about the numbers.
NO!!!
It is all about racism and misogyny .
When he says this:
Trump: If it saves the country, it's not illegal
The proper response is:
If we save the country from you it is not illegal.
Thank you for writing this! I have been waiting for someone to respond to that article.