The "Sister Souljah" Moment, in Reality; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-03 Fr
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
I find myself genuinely of two minds about this <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/09/opinion/democrat-shor-politics-bill-clinton.html>, from the very smart Jamelle Bouie. Yes, there is no such thing as idle presidential rhetoric. Yes, Bill Clinton took a cheap shot at Sister Souljah. Yes, I do not expect the very smart Jamelle Bouie to support the idea that other politicians should emulate Clinton here, or for Jamelle to approve, or for Jamelle to forget. But there is much more here than Jamelle’s recounting presents.
Yes, Sister Souljah did say something very stupid—although she claims this is out of context:
Q: A lot of people look at the violence that was unleashed and say... let's talk now about white America and middle-class black America-- will see the videos of the looting, the burning, people with their kids walking away with merchandise, people shooting at firemen, and think, you know, "Thank God for the police, because the police is what separates us and our property and our safety and our lives from them, because look what they're capable of."
Sister Souljah: They [middle-class blacks] do not represent the majority of black people, number one. Black people from the underclass and the so-called lower class do not respect the institutions of white America, which is why you can cart as many black people out on the television as you want to tell people in the lower and underclass that that was stupid, but they don't care what you say. You don't care about THEIR lives, haven't added anything to the quality of their lives, haven't affectuated anything for the quality of their lives, and then expect them to respond to your opinions which mean absolutely nothing? Why would they?
Q: But even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence, did they think it was wise? Was that wise, reasoned action?
Sister Souljah: Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? You understand what I'm saying? In other words, white people, this government, and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, or above and beyond dying, when they would kill their own kind?…
And Bill Clinton then did then pounce—use the fact that Jesse Jackson had included Sister Souljah on a panel to throw shade at him:
You had a rap singer here last night, named Sister Souljah. I defend her right to express herself through music, but her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with the kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. Just listen to what she said she told The Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? So you're a gang member and you'd normally kill somebody. Why not kill a white person?”… I know she is a young person. But she has a big influence on a lot of people. When people say that—if you took the words white and black and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.
Let me tell you: we all make mistakes, and sometimes we're not as sensitive as we ought to be, and we have an obligation—all of us—to call attention to prejudice wherever we see it. A few months ago I made a mistake. I joined a friend of mine and I played golf at a country club. It didn't have any African-American members. I was criticized for doing it. You know what? I was rightly criticized for doing it. I made a mistake. And I said I wouldn't ever do that again.
I think all of us have got to be sensitive to that. We can't get anywhere in this country pointing the finger across racial lines. If we do that, we're dead and they will beat us. Even in Reverend Jackson's new math of this election, it's hard to get to a 34% solution or a 40% solution if the American people can be divided by race.
Yes, Clinton was throwing shade at Jackson—implying strongly that Jackson should have deplatformed Souljah, and had done the Republicans’ work of attempting to divide the Democratic Party and America by race in putting her on the stage.
This is Jamelle’s reaction:
Jamelle Bouie: Bill Clinton, Race & the Politics of the 1990s: ‘Clinton concluded his remarks with a now-notorious denunciation of the rapper and activist Sister Souljah, an attack by proxy on Jackson, who had brought Souljah to the event…. “What Clinton got out of the Sister Souljah affair,” noted the historian Kenneth O’Reilly, “were votes, particularly the votes of the so-called Reagan Democrats like the North Philadelphia electrician who said ‘the day he told off that [expletive] Jackson is the day he got [mine].’”… If Shor’s analysis is correct, then this is what it could be like to change course. Progressives would complain, as they did in 1992, but—a proponent of this approach might say—Clinton still won 85 percent of the Black vote. And once in office, he would try to reverse course: to moderate and to show his commitment to the people who put him in the White House…. But there is no such thing as idle presidential rhetoric…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/09/opinion/democrat-shor-politics-bill-clinton.html>
But is that an adequate reaction. What was Clinton actually doing here?
Bill Clinton (1992): The “Sister Souljah” Moment <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtSifopiL1g>:
Clinton here is trying to do ten things—and he is a master politician:
If the American people can be divided by race, we—Democrats and America—lose
I palled around at a white’s-only country club—that was big mistake.
I palled around at a white’s-only country club—I promise not to make that mistake again.
I palled around at a white’s-only country club—and I was smacked down for that, and it was right that I got smacked down for that
We need to call each other out when we make mistakes.
We need to recognize the big picture, and to recognize that we all make mistakes.
Jesse Jackson made a mistake by palling around with Sister Souljah.
Sister Souljah made a mistake by saying something that David Duke could have said if you had just switched the words “white” and “black”—”If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”
Yes, she is young and deserves slack, but she is also influential and needs to be held to a high standard.
If we, here, get in the habit of pointing our fingers across racial lines and focusing on our mistakes and what divides us rather than what unites us, we will lose. We—and America—cannot afford that.
What Bill Clinton did here in front of the NAACP in 1992 is much more complex, much more sophisticated, much more subtle, much more righteous, and much more politically nuanced and effective than a Ronald Reagan or a Mitt Romney going to the NAACP to bait the audience into booing him so that they can get visuals of the candidate being booed by the black crowd on TV that evening. Clinton did not want to get booed by the black crowd. And I do not believe Clinton was. A sharp contrast between that and what a Romney or a Reagan would have done, where getting booed by the black crowd is the goal.
People care as much or more about their identity and having it validated—what Max Weber called their “ideal interest”, ideal not in the sense of optimal but as opposed to material, in in the sense that it is a thing of internal thought and perception rather than of solid, external physicality—as they care about material interests. The North Philadelphia electrician whom Jamelle Bouie quotes Kenneth O’Reilly quoting, a guy who had probably spent much of his career working in a whites-only union that George Shultz had forced to integrate when he was Labor Secretary, sees Clinton doing this—or, rather, probably, sees this event transmitted through some “Democrats in disarray” media filter—and approves of Clinton as a guy eager and able to put and keep the black man in a subordinate place. And that was a way that Clinton had known that what he was doing would be perceived. And I do not expect Jamelle Bouie to forgive or forget. After all, Jamelle has a powerful ideal interest to: in not being forced to respect Democratic politicians who seek political advantage by having the media show them putting a black man (and a black woman) in their place.
But that was not all, or even most, of what Clinton was doing here. To remember the Sister Souljah moment without remembering Clinton’s big message is, I think, something America cannot afford. What was Clinton’s big message here? I have made mistakes. We all have. We need to call each other out when we do. If we get divided by race here, we—and America—lose.
One Video:
Damien Ma & Houze Song: Filtering Through the Noise: What’s Actually Happening in China: ’From property and tech crackdowns to the sixth plenum and “common prosperity,” making sense of what’s going on in China can be confusing these days <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwErKkCMmK0&t=7s>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Nikhil Venkatesh: Philosopher-in-Training: ‘Utilitarianism. I’m also interested in collective action, the long-term future of humanity, in Marxism, race and feminism, and in the nature of politics, normativity and morality… <https://nikhilvenkateshphilosophy.com/>
N.S. Lyons: The Triumph & Terror of Wang Huning <https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/>
Danny Blanchflower: ’I don’t buy [the] tight labor market argument at all. EPOP=58.7 v 61.1 in Feb20… when every other advanced country has seen EPOP rise…. Not plausible…
Matthew Yglesias: “Stop & Frisk” Was Really Bad: ‘Eric Adams shouldn’t flirt with bringing it back…
Aaron Rupar: Russia’s Descent into Authoritarianism & What We Can Learn From It: ‘“The opposition has collapsed”: a Q&A with Sarah Hurst, author of The Russia Report…
Skanda Amarnath: ’I think the Fed fears the loss of a ZLB psychological trick if they admit that QE since April 2020 has been doing nothing other than forward guidance about rate hikes. Swapping risk-free assets means nothing…
Paragraphs:
Michael Pettis: Will China’s Common Prosperity Upgrade Dual Circulation?: ‘Rather than raise wages, in other words, Beijing will pass on what it deems to be the excess profits of businesses and the wealthy to middle- and working-class Chinese households in the form of fiscal transfers and donations from businesses and the wealthy. In this way, the Chinese government can keep domestic wages competitively low, while at the same time raising overall household income levels by effectively delivering to workers and the middle classes a higher share of business profits. In principle, this approach could help strengthen domestic consumption without undermining export competitiveness, but there are at least three reasons to be cautious…
LINK: <https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85571>
Mara P. Squicciarini & Nico Voigtländer: Human Capital & Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment: ’While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution has typically been assessed as minor. To resolve this puzzling contrast, we differentiate average human capital (literacy) from upper-tail knowledge. As a proxy for the historical presence of knowledge elites, we use city-level subscriptions to the famous Encyclopédie in mid–18th century France. We show that subscriber density is a strong predictor of city growth after the onset of French industrialization. Alternative measures of development such as soldier height, disposable income, and industrial activity confirm this pattern. Initial literacy levels, on the other hand, are associated with development in the cross-section, but they do not predict growth. Finally, by joining data on British patents with a large French firm survey from the 1840s, we shed light on the mechanism: upper-tail knowledge raised productivity in innovative industrial technology…
LINK: <https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/4/1825/1914932?redirectedFrom=fulltext>
Simon Jäger, Christopher Roth, Nina Roussille, & Benjamin Schoefer: Worker Beliefs About Rents & Outside Options: ‘We measure workers’ beliefs about rents and outside options in a representative sample of German workers, and compare these beliefs with proxies for actual outside options. While subjective worker rents are large—14% of salary on average—they do not stem from workers’ subjective wage premia at their current firm, but are entirely derived from non-wage amenities. When comparing workers’ subjective outside options against objective measures of pay premia from matched employer-employee data, we find that many workers mistakenly believe their current wage is representative of the external labor market—objectively low-paid (high-paid) workers are overpessimistic (overoptimistic) about their outside options. If workers had correct beliefs about outside options, 13% of jobs would not be viable at current wages, concentrated in the low-wage segment of the labor market. Finally, we show that in an equilibrium model, misinformation about outside options gives employers monopsony power…
LINK: <https://eml.berkeley.edu/~schoefer/schoefer_files/JRRS_Beliefs_Rents_Outside_Options_July2021.pdf>
Paul Krugman: What Europe Can Teach Us About Jobs: ‘An under-discussed aspect of the current economic scene: Europe’s comparative success in getting workers idled by the pandemic back into the labor force…. [While] the United States is experiencing what many call the Great Resignation… European nations have been much more successful than we have at getting people back to work. In France, in particular, employment and labor force participation are now well above prepandemic levels. What explains this difference?… While the United States… mainly… helped displaced workers through enhanced unemployment benefits. Europe… mainly relied on job retention schemes…. Anecdotally, one factor behind Americans’ unwillingness to return to their old jobs is that enforced idleness during the pandemic gave many people a chance to reconsider their life choices…. Europe is by no means a worker’s paradise. But some jobs that are grueling and poorly paid here are less awful on the other side of the Atlantic…. U.S. elite opinion, especially but not only on the right, has long assumed that making jobs better would backfire, because higher labor costs would reduce employment. But European experience says otherwise…. And now… pro-worker policies also seem to be helping European economies achieve faster employment recovery than we’re managing here…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/opinion/united-states-europe-jobs.html>
Claire Berlinski: The New Caesarism: a Lexicon, Part III: ‘How to cook a New Ceasar…. 14 rules for destroying a liberal democracy…. Rule number one: Rewrite history. The early warning sign of Caesar ascendent is the deliberate fostering of nostalgia for an authoritarian past. If the lessons of history suggest this path leads to disaster, then history, not the path, must be changed. The revisionist storyline is in essence always the same. The people have been robbed of their greatness by a series of catastrophes and betrayals. An authoritarian or tyrannical past is bathed in nostalgia. The acknowledgement of responsibility for historic crimes is detested as self-hatred, or a lack of patriotism that is dangerous to the health of the polity…. Rule number two: Exploit ethnic, racial, religious, and class divisions. Rule number three: Magnify fear of foreigners and outsiders…. Rule number four: Enter Caesar—the voice of the “real people” in their struggle against a nebulous class of “elites.”… Rule number five: Conflate entertainment and politics. Rule number six: Create chaos, confusion, and a sense of permanent emergency. Rule number seven: Destroy confidence in the idea of objective truth…. Rule number eight: Humiliate or destroy people who are better fit to be leaders…. Rule number nine: Gain complete control of the media and turn it into a non-stop propaganda machine…. Rule number ten: Spread it around! Reward loyalists with juicy government contracts, tax loopholes, and tenders. Investors will always prefer profits to political fights. Rule number eleven: Punish the unsubmissive with punitive taxes and spurious lawsuits. Rule number twelve: Stack the courts. Rule number thirteen: Take control of the central bank and make foreign banks absorb the losses for your bad policy decisions…. Rule number fourteen: Jigger the constitution so that opponents have no hope of coming to power through democratic means…. And voilà: You’re done. Elections still happen, but they are denuded of everything that makes elections meaningful. Hail Caesar!…
LINK:
