J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 274
December 3, 2018
Margaret Thatcher Against Friedrich von Hayek's Pleas for a Lykourgan Dictatorship in Britain: Hoisted from the Archives
Hoisted: Margaret Thatcher Against Friedrich von Hayek's Pleas for a Lykourgan Dictatorship: "My dear Professor Hayek, Thank you for your letter of 5 February. I was very glad that you were able to attend the dinner so thoughtfully organised by Walter Salomon. It was not only a great pleasure for me, it was, as always, instructive and rewarding to hear your views on the great issues of our time...
...I was aware of the remarkable success of the Chilean economy in reducing the share of Government expenditure substantially over the decade of the 70s. The progression from Allende���s Socialism to the free enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons. However, I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure.
Best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Thatcher.
#shouldread
Olivier Blanchard: The French "Yellow Vest" Movement and ...
Olivier Blanchard: The French "Yellow Vest" Movement and the (Current) Failure of Representative Democracy: "Go back to the end of communism and the failure of central planning as an alternative to the market economy.... With the end of communism, it became clear that there was no alternative, only a muddle between market intervention and free markets. So long as growth was strong, and all boats were indeed lifted, the problem was manageable. Then growth slowed down, and inequality and insecurity became more salient...
...The center-right and center-left parties tried their best to manage, but their efforts were not good enough. Sarkozy tried reforms but failed. Hollande, his successor, had a more realistic agenda but did not achieve much.... People increasingly felt that the traditional parties did not improve their lot, nor did they represent them. Then came Macron, who correctly pointed out that the left/right distinction did not make much sense anymore, and he won by occupying the large middle.... In the process, he may have made the political system worse. As the economy has not improved much yet, people, unhappy with the lack of results, do not have the traditional parties to turn to. Some have joined the extreme left or the extreme right. More have become skeptical of any representation... and have taken to the streets.... But unorganized direct democracy does not work. In a country of 65 million people, ancient Athens' agora-style democracy cannot work.... There is no coherent voice or message emerging from the movement: The state cannot provide more public services and simultaneously lower taxes. In the streets, the movement cannot avoid being hijacked, to its dismay, by anarchists or vandals. It is going nowhere....
#shouldread #politics
Niskanen Center (December 11, 2018): Starting Over: The C...
Niskanen Center (December 11, 2018): Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump: "Donald Trump has had a hurricane-like effect on the Republican Party. The 2018 midterm elections have forced center-right Americans to reconsider their relationship to the Trump-driven conservative populism that has come to dominate the GOP. The Niskanen Center will present an important public analysis of this new political reality...
...featuring��conversations with some of the nation���s leading thinkers and activists on the center-right. Panels will focus on political prospects for a new center-right, and the policy ideas and ideals that can revitalize the post-Trump Republican Party. Registration will begin at 8:30 AM and lunch will be provided.To reserve your spot, RSVP to events@niskanencenter.org.... Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Anne Applebaum.... Lessons Learned (9:30-10:40 a.m.) Jerry Taylor (Moderator), Mona Charen, William Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Peter Wehner. Beyond Polarization: Republicanism for Republicans (10:45-11:55 a.m.), Brink Lindsey (Moderator), Mindy Finn, Pete Peterson, Jonathan Rauch. Political Prospects for a New Center-Right (1:30-2:40 p.m.), Geoffrey Kabaservice (Moderator), Whit Ayres, Juleanna Glover, Mike Murphy. Beyond Small Government: In Search of a Governing Center-Right (2:45-3:55 p.m.), Will Wilkinson (Moderator), Oren Cass, David Frum, Megan McArdle....
This event will be live-streamed, and will most likely be recorded. We will announce the details in the next day or so...
#shouldread #politics
Tom Nichols: "Counter-Intuitive Though It May Seem, Trump...
Tom Nichols: "Counter-Intuitive Though It May Seem, Trump winning was a political disaster for the white working class, especially older whites. They were once pandered to in elections; now it's no longer possible to indulge the pretense that their concerns are economic-or fixable. That's because there's no ground for a policy fix or a compromise with people whose basic position is that they want America to be white, sorta Christian, and frozen in 1963-except with 2018's drugs, sexual liberty, government transfer payments, ESPN channels, and internet porn...
...That's why I'm tired of people declaring conservatives (like me, Boot, Rubin, Wilson and others) who still believe in limited government, fiscal responsibility, a superpower foreign policy, and individual freedom to be "not conservatives" because we won't pander to populists. Who's more liberal? Us, or the working class Trump voters who are always looking to Daddy to excuse them for out-of-wedlock births, their embrace of a defeatist foreign policy, rampant drug abuse, chronic underemployment, and endless demands for government solutions? This "it's not your fault, the system has it in for you" bullshit pioneered by Bannon and weaponized by Trump is something conservatives castigated liberals for saying to minorities years ago. And rightly so: it deprives people of agency and responsibility. If sucking up to small-town populism-the worst melding of ignorance and self-pitying, insecure nationalism-is now "conservative," then the word has no meaning. Conservatives were once prudent, incremental, patriotic, and stoic. (Like, say, the President who just passed.)
Yes, we were also hidebound, resistant to needed change, overly cautious, too wrapped up in our sense of tradition, and often indifferent to the struggles of others. (We were also the counterpart to progressives who needed the sensible ballast of prudence and judgment.) Conservatives and liberals need each other to make progress. What we're seeing with Trumpism, especially two years in, is neither conservative nor liberal. It is a stubborn demand that the world treat white working class adults like children. To coddle them with soothing lies. So enough with the woes of the Iowa farmers who fear black and female presidents, or New Hampshire townies who fear immigrants without ever seeing one anywhere near them. That's not "conservative" any more than Occupy Wall St guys taking dumps on police cars are "liberal."
I don't know what it's going to take for Generation Fox to figure it out. I now seriously doubt they will come to their senses, if they ever had any. (This is why I have very little hope that anything Mueller or anyone else says is going to move that 30-40%.) That intransigence is the disaster for the white working class: because it shows there's no point in trying to compromise with what were once legitimate concerns about taxes, foreign affairs, education, etc. They've traded that agenda for mindless Trumpian ethno-nationalism. That kind of political agenda can't be reasoned with. It can only be defeated. And realizing that this is no longer a rational political debate is not good for America (or Europe, or anywhere else), but that's how it has to be...
@carrick510: I have to disagree here. I think the underlying problems are economic. You are seeing resentment associated with their economic circumstances fueling a lot of negative emotions. Their solution is to return to a place that never was (their imaginary 1963 world).
@dburbach: Not to generalize from my dad, uncles, and their cohort, but white collar guys with paid off nice houses, corporate retiree healthcare, and 401k accounts of half a mil and up (and up) who buy the Fox-Trump line aren't there b/c of economic circumstances, and they aren't rare.
��
@asmallkeypad: I've stopped caring about what makes them so fearful, resentful, delusional, and smug. They're willing, agents of a dark chapter in our history. Smash 'em at the ballot, put laws in place to fix the damage they've done, make sure they never have control again...
@BarendHamm: Well done Tom. Trump supporters have so much personal and psychological investment in their decision to vote for him and stay behind him no matter what. To abandon him would mean they have to admit error and gullibility. People don't do that without a hammer falling...
#shouldread #orangehairedbaboons
Highly amusing. My complaint is that Brexit is hardly "Es...
Highly amusing. My complaint is that Brexit is hardly "Establishment"���it is, rather, counter-establishment, or ex-establishment. Maybe the connection is that Classics at Oxbridge is also ex-establishment. I think of PPE as establishment: Neville Morley: We Need To Talk About Classics: "The overall breakdown among MPs was 25% Leave, 75% Remain.... Those with degrees in... Classics... 6 out of 8 did (plus one who hasn���t disclosed how he voted)...
...Geoffrey Cox, born 1960, Law and Classics, Cambridge, Conservative, Leave. Michael Fallon, born 1952, Classics and Ancient History, St Andrews, Conservative, Remain/ Nick Hurd, born 1962, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Remain. Boris Johnson, born 1964, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Leave. Kwasi Kwarteng, born 1975, Classics and History, Cambridge, Conservative, Leave. Charlotte Leslie, born 1978, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Leave. Nigel Mills, born 1974, Classics, Newcastle, Conservative, Leave. Jesse Norman, born 1962, Classics, Oxford, Conservative, Not Disclosed. Michael Tomlinson, born 1977, Classics, KCL, Conservative, Leave....
We can be charitable, and assume that latent Brexity tendencies might influence someone���s decision to study Classics, rather than fearing that studying Classics actually influences political orientation. We can take some heart from the fact that the numbers are so small.... Can a whole discipline be blamed or discredited for the political and critical failures of a tiny proportion of its graduates? Of course not���though it hasn���t prevented such accusations being levelled against PPE. But when Classics is already so closely associated with the Establishment and its values, it���s hardly good news that we run the risk of being associated now with the Establishment in its most reckless, destructive, incompetent manifestation since the Russian Revolution...
#shouldread #brexit #orangehairedbaboons
Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (December 2, 2018)
Monday Smackdown/Hoisted: The "Hastert' and "Hastertland" Paragraphs from Wooldridge and Micklethwaite's "The Right Nation"
Monday Smackdown Watch: The New York Times and Bret Stephens Continue to Beclown Themselves Bigtime
Weekend Reading: The Royal Proclamation of 1763
Contra Tim Duy, The Lack of Federal Reserve Maneuvering Room Is Very Worrisome...
Von Hayek, to put it bluntly, loved Pincohet's shooting people in soccer stadiums: the "Lykourgan Moment" in which unconstitutional and illiberal actions create the space for future stable libertarian capitalism was a recurrent fantasy of his. Friedman saw his trips to Chile to be an opportunity to preach to the gentiles���to primarily preach free markets and small government, but also respect for individuals, for their liberty, and for democracy. And he had no tolerance for those who said it was evil to try to make the Chilean people more prosperous because that might reinforce the dictatorship. Buchanan... where was Buchanan on this spectrum, anyway? It's complicated: Andrew��Farrant and Vlad��Tarko: James M. Buchanan���s 1981 Visit to Chile: Knightian Democrat or Defender of the ���Devil���s Fix���?: "Buchanan has repeatedly argued that the 'political economist should not act as if he or she were providing advice to a benevolent despot' (Boettke Constitutional Political Economy, 25, 110���124, 2014: 112), but an increasingly influential body of scholarship argues that Buchanan provided a wealth of early 1980s policy advice to Augusto Pinochet���s military dictatorship in Chile (e.g., Fischer 2009; Maclean 2017). In particular, Buchanan reportedly provided an analytical defense of military rule to a predominantly Chilean audience when he visited the country in late 1981... #buchanan #publicchoice
Jo Johnson: The Inside Story of Brexit and Where It All Went Wrong: "My oldest brother Boris, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, recently observed that the proposed arrangements were 'substantially worse than staying in the EU'. Iain Dale, a leading Conservative commentator, wrote in despair this week that the deal was 'so damaging to our country both in the short and long term that if I had to make a choice between voting for this deal or remaining in the European Union, I���d do the latter'. They are both influential thinkers in the party and they are both unquestionably right... #orangehairedbaboons
Brink Lindsey: "Another election, another round of libertarians' dumping on the right to vote. I used to just find this inane and self-defeating, but now I think it's bad citizenship and affirmatively harmful...
Steve M.: Hey, There's No Reason TO Get Worked Up���It's Only the Death of Democracy: "Leonhardt... is arguing that the electoral problems Democrats have complained about are much worse than what Republicans have cited (Republicans, in fact, are citing nonexistent acts of cheating)���but... that we should be quieter than the Republicans when they complain about nothing.... Yes, Kemp stole the election. But don't say so, because you might upset people...
David Warsh: Situations Wanted: "The mood at Duke has been gloomy since its economics department failed to make a place last year for Steven Medema, of the University of Colorado at Denver, in a quarrel over resources.�� Both sides became the loser. Medema, an expert on the law and economics movement and a stalwart of the discipline, was expected to join professors Bruce Caldwell and Kevin Hoover in the core faculty of the Center for the History of Political Economy...#historyofeconomicthought
This may well be the most interesting working paper the WCEG released last month: Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett: Consequences of Routine Work Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Wellbeing: "Research... has overwhelmingly focused on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low and stagnant wages. But the rise in precarious work has also involved a major shift in the temporal dimension of work such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules... #equitablegrowth
Paul Krugman: The Trump Tax Cut and the Balance of Payments=: "It seems likely that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will turn out to have been the only major piece of legislation enacted under Donald Trump.... The TCJA played almost no role in the midterms: Republicans dropped it as a selling point, focusing on fear of brown people instead, while Democrats hammered health care. But now... seems like a good idea to revisit the bill and its effects. What I want to focus on in this piece is the effects on the balance of payments. Why?... Because the theory of the case... depended crucially on claims about what tax cuts would do to international movements of capital... [via] the balance of payments... #fiscalpolicy #globalization #orangehairedbaboons
Margaret Sullivan: The Media���s Eagerness to Discount the ���Blue Wave��� Feeds a Dangerous Problem: "Democratic strategist James Carville... was among the first to make the proclamation... 'When you look at what���s going on here tonight, this is not a blue wave.'... On a stage Friday night in Manhattan, forecasting that Democrats would ultimately gain 37��House seats (not��29, as some early results had it), the data-oriented journalist Nate Silver said what happened certainly looked like a wave to him. Silver has been in a dust-up with New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote a column last week titled 'The Midterm Results Are a Warning to the Democrats'. Silver said he was 'enjoying thinking about Bret Stephens knowing deep down how dumb his hot take was and cringing a little bit every time Dems win an additional House seat'... #journamalism
Is there any chance for a revival of the California Republican Party? Not as long as the national party is Trumpist���or rather, Pete Wilsonesque. This is what Pete Wilson wrought, after all: Carla Marinucci: RIP, California GOP: Republicans Lash Out After Midterm Election Debacle: "���There is no message. There is no messenger. There is no money. And there is no infrastructure,' says one top Republican.... even longtime conservative stronghold Orange County bereft of a single Republican in the House of Representatives, a growing chorus of GOP loyalists here say there���s only one hope for reviving the flatlining party: Blow it up and start again from scratch...
Listening to Gabe Zucman last week on this reminded me that Heather Boushey said wise things about distributional national accounts before the U.S. Congress's Joint Economic Committee: Heather Boushey: Testimony Before the Joint Economic Committee: "The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis releases a new estimate of quarterly or annual GDP growth every month. Distributional national accounts would add to this release an estimate that disaggregates the topline number and tells us what growth was experienced by low-, middle-, and high-income Americans. Academics have already constructed such a measure. The so-called DINA dataset constructed by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman... #equitablegrowth
Joseph Schumpeter on the Ricardian and Keynesian vices. The echo of bdsm practices���le vice anglais���that you hear is intentional on Schumpeter's part, as is his feminization of Keynesians, and the misogyny. Schumpeter was a very smart but very interesting man: Joseph Schumpeter (1953): History of Economic Analysis https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1134838700: "Ricardo���s��� interest was in the clear-cut result of direct, practical significance. In order to get this he... piled one simplifying assumption upon another until... the desire results emerged almost as tautologies... It is an excellent theory that can never be refuted and lacks nothing save sense. The habit of applying results of this character to the solution of practical problems we shall call the Ricardian Vice... #books #schumpeter #keynes #economicsgoneright #economicsgonewrong #historyofeconomicthought
Jing Dong, Harold Pollack, and Rita Tamara Konetzka: Effects of Long���Term Care Setting on Spousal Health Outcomes: "A large expansion in noninstitutional long-term care (LTC) use... shifting away from nursing homes toward home- and community- based services (HCBS).... The rationale... (a) LTC users generally prefer HCBS to institutional care, and (b) for nursing home residents with less intensive care needs, HCBS may be cheaper...
Thiemo Fetzer: Did Austerity Cause Brexit?: "The rise of popular support for... UKIP... strongly and causally associated with an individual���s or an area���s exposure to austerity since 2010...
Once again, the Trump administration does not have to be competent for its chaos-monkey nature to wind up doing enormous damage: Gabe Gutierrez and Annie Rose Ramos: Harley-Davidson workers stunned by plant closure after tax cut: "Tim Primeaux has worked at the Harley-Davidson plant in Kansas City, Missouri, for 17 years. He was sure he was going to retire from the company. That all changed when Harley-Davidson told its 800 employees in January that the plant will be closing next year. Operations will be shifted to the motorcycle manufacturer's facility in York, Pennsylvania...
December 2, 2018
Once again, the Trump administration does not have to be ...
Once again, the Trump administration does not have to be competent for its chaos-monkey nature to wind up doing enormous damage: Gabe Gutierrez and Annie Rose Ramos: Harley-Davidson workers stunned by plant closure after tax cut: "Tim Primeaux has worked at the Harley-Davidson plant in Kansas City, Missouri, for 17 years. He was sure he was going to retire from the company. That all changed when Harley-Davidson told its 800 employees in January that the plant will be closing next year. Operations will be shifted to the motorcycle manufacturer's facility in York, Pennsylvania...
...���We did everything Harley-Davidson asked us to do,��� said Primeaux, a welder. ���To have it all blow up in your face is kind of disappointing.��� Days later, Harley-Davidson announced a dividend increase and a stock buyback plan to reward shareholders, repurchasing 15 million of its shares, valued at nearly $700 million.... House Speaker Paul Ryan visited a Harley plant in Wisconsin in September and said, ���Tax reform can put American manufacturers and American companies like Harley-Davidson on a much better footing to compete in the global economy and keep jobs in America.��� Many Harley-Davidson workers wondered if the tax cut would trickle down to help employees....
The company calls the closing of the Kansas City plant a tough decision but says domestic sales are down and it needed to ���address the excess capacity in the U.S.���... Rick Pence, who started working for Harley-Davidson more than 21 years ago, recalls his elation at landing the job. ���When I got hired, I felt like I won the lottery,��� said Pence. Primeaux said that if he could deliver a message to Harley CEO Matthew Levatich, it would be to keep the factory in Kansas City not for him but for his three girls. ���If my girls want to work there it���s a good place to work,��� said Primeaux, adding that the plant closure has not affected his support for President Donald Trump. ���I blame the company more than I blame the president.��� ���We gotta accept it," said Pence, who turns 60 next year. ���It���s truly hard���...
#shouldread
Monday Smackdown/Hoistred: John Cochrane's Claim in Late 2008 That a Recession Would Be a Good Thing Deserves Some Kind of Award...
The fact is that by the end of 2007 the construction sector had rebalanced: there was no excess of people pounding nails in Nevada...
To: @johnmlippert: If I may beg a small slice of your attention...
I am tracking down John Cochrane's claims that (i) in your December 23, 2008 article you were "only... on a hunt for embarrassing quotes", (ii) he had "spent about 10 hours patiently trying to explain some basics" to you, and (iii) you took him out of proper context when you wrote: "'We should have a recession', Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room.... 'People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do'."
Do you by chance remember the larger context of Cochrane's "pounding nails" comment, and do you have any idea why he now claims that you took him out of context? Or what he thinks the proper context would have been?
I would be grateful for any light you can shed on this.
Yours,
Brad DeLong brad.delong@gmail.com
John M. Lippert: "Hi Professor DeLong.
Thanks for your note. Professor Cochrane���s complaint is something of which I became aware several months after we published our story in 2008.... The bottom line is that Bloomberg did not respond to Cochrane���s comments. He never sent them to us, despite my request that he do so.
When we became aware of his complaint, we saw no reason to make a correction. Cochrane made the ���pounding nails��� comment at a Chicago Booth forum at the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago in November 2008. It was part of an ongoing lecture series, as I recall. It was kind of a big event, with a couple hundred people. So they may have a recording that you can access.
Good luck with your inquiries.
Tks,
John Lippert
Just FYI, if I were John Cochrane I would not characterize my 2008 CRSP Forum Keynote as something "I did not write...". And I would not characterize accurate quotations from it as:
an attribution, taken out of context, from a http://bloomberg.com article, written by a reporter [John Lippert] with whom I spent about 10 hours patiently trying to explain some basics, and who also turned out only to be on a hunt for embarrassing quotes...
John Cochrane: How Did Paul Krugman Get It So Wrong?: "As one little example, take my quotation about carpenters in Nevada...
...Krugman writes:
And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: ���We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.��� Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada?
I did not write this. It is an attribution, taken out of context, from a http://bloomberg.com article, written by a reporter [John Lippert] with whom I spent about 10 hours patiently trying to explain some basics, and who also turned out only to be on a hunt for embarrassing quotes.
Nevertheless, I was trying to explain how sectoral shifts contribute to unemployment. I never asserted that ���it takes mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada���. You cannot even dredge up an out-of-context quote for that monstrously made-up opinion. What is the point in conducting debate this way? I do not think that Krugman disagrees that sectoral shifts result in some unemployment, so the quote actually makes sense as economics. The only point is to make me, personally, seem heartless���a pure, personal, calumnious attack, which has nothing to do with economics...
Paul Krugman (2009): How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?: "Milton Friedman certainly never bought into the idea that mass unemployment represents a voluntary reduction in work effort or the idea that recessions are actually good for the economy. Yet the current generation of freshwater economists has been making both arguments...
...Thus Chicago���s Casey Mulligan suggests that unemployment is so high because many workers are choosing not to take jobs: ���Employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work... decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire).��� Mulligan has suggested, in particular, that workers are choosing to remain unemployed because that improves their odds of receiving mortgage relief.
And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: ���We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.��� Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada?
Can anyone seriously claim that we���ve lost 6.7 million jobs because fewer Americans want to work?
But it was inevitable that freshwater economists would find themselves trapped in this cul-de-sac: if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.
Yet if the crisis has pushed freshwater economists into absurdity, it has also created a lot of soul-searching among saltwater economists. Their framework, unlike that of the Chicago School, both allows for the possibility of involuntary unemployment and considers it a bad thing. But the New Keynesian models that have come to dominate teaching and research assume that people are perfectly rational and financial markets are perfectly efficient. To get anything like the current slump into their models, New Keynesians are forced to introduce some kind of fudge factor that for reasons unspecified temporarily depresses private spending. (I���ve done exactly that in some of my own work.) And if the analysis of where we are now rests on this fudge factor, how much confidence can we have in the models��� predictions about where we are going?
The state of macro, in short, is not good. So where does the profession go from here?...
Monday Smackdown/Hoisted: The "Hastert' and "Hastertland" Paragraphs from Wooldridge and Micklethwaite's "The Right Nation"
These may be the paragraphs written in this millennium that have aged least well: John Micklethwaite and Adrian Woodridge: The "Hastert' and "Hastertland" Paragraphs from Wooldridge and Micklethwaite's "The Right Nation": "Looking at 'Pelosiville' and 'Hastertland', it is not difficult to see why American politics has shifted to the Right. If American politics is a seesaw, it is an unevenly balanced one. Imagine Dennis Hastert at one end of the seesaw and Nancy Pelosi on the other end, and you have some idea about which party is sitting with its legs dangling in the air. In the war between the two Americas, Hastertland has been winning...
...As Hastertland amply illustrates, private property has become ever more widespread: ever more Americans own their homes and, thanks to suburbanization, the size of those homes has doubled since the 1950s. Compared with their peers overseas, Americans have much more control over their educations, medical spending, retirement plans and investments than their contemporaries abroad. Government spending may be increasing; but so too is the capacity of American conservatives to opt out of the state: witness the growth of homeschooling or of secessionist planned communities....
The national picture, where polls show suburbanites preferring Republican policies by margins of around fifteen points, is replicated in Hastertland. Some soccer moms may dislike Hastert���s ���Southern��� views on abortion, and some businesspeople may rail about the Bush deficit. But most voters rally to the Republican message of low taxes, tough sentences for criminals, strong families and a hard-hitting approach to national security.
And once again, it is important not to be mesmerized by party labels. While Hastertland will embrace the odd Democrat who adjusts his or her message to the priorities of people who own their own homes and go to church every Sunday, it is hard to see it ever being lured back to the old-style ���European liberalism��� that the San Francisco branch of the Democratic Party stands for. The flat land of McMansions, malls and megachurches is not going to start yearning for bigger government, sending its sympathies to the French consulate, tolerating an invasion of sturdy beggars or doing any of the other things that San Francisco regards as normal....
The more time you spend in the Right Nation, the more you are struck by its sense of certainty. Billy Graham, the man who rescued the young George W. Bush from his dissolute life, once said simply: ���I know where I���ve come from. I know why I���m here, and I know where I���m going.��� The same confidence resounds from so many of the people we have met in this book���from Dustin and Maura in Colorado Springs to the inhabitants of Hastertland. It sits at the heart of the Right Nation: conservative America is ���Right��� not just in the sense of being conservative, but also in the sense that it is sure that it is right. That righteousness helps to explain the paradox of the United States that we mentioned in our introduction: why America is often both the most admired country and the most reviled, why it is hailed as a symbol both of success, opportunity and progress and also of intolerance, injustice and inequality. That paradox will endure as long as the Right Nation itself...
[...]
Dennis Hastert, the Republican Speaker... a hulking former wrestling coach, is a fairly straightforward conservative: antiabortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-Kyoto, pro-invading Iraq, pro-death penalty.... Hastert got a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union in the days when he voted regularly....
Compared with other ���red��� districts, Hastert���s (Illinois���s fourteenth) is deep scarlet. It begins in the suburbs thirty miles west of the Chicago Loop and then stretches out through miles of cornfields to a point just forty miles short of the Iowa border. To drive across it takes a good three hours. Hastert���s district can claim to be the most Republican in the country, at least if you factor in length of loyalty to the party Unlike nouveaux droites such as Texas, Illinois has been full of Republicans since the party���s founding in 1854.... Hastert���s district is resolutely ���normal.��� The local citizens think of themselves as typical Americans, and their geographical vision is often bounded by the Great Plains that surround them.
The most important difference lies in attitudes to growth....
Hastert���s flat, boring district is in love with growth. New houses march like a vast army resolutely westward across the Great Plains from Chicagoland to rural towns such as Yorkville (where Hastert was a teacher) and even to Dixon (where Reagan spent much of his boyhood). And behind the houses are all the accoutrements of suburban boom time, particularly huge schools and ���mega��� shopping malls. The high school where Hastert once taught has doubled in size since he entered politics in 1980. The main roads are lined by row upon row of shopping malls, each one of them filled with superstores that seem to be bent on testing the principle of economies of scale to the limit.
The second big difference between the two districts lies in the relative importance of family life. Most of the people flocking to Hastert���s district are doing so for one reason: to raise their children. They want space to build big houses���many cover more than four thousand square feet���and freedom from the downside of urban life, particularly crime. In upmarket St. Charles, 85 percent of the residents own their own homes; even in meat-and-potatoes Elgin, home ownership stands at 70 percent to 75 percent....
Hastert���s [district] is as resolutely middle class as it is cheerfully middle American. A few senior executives live in multimillion-dollar houses and send their children to private schools, but most people belong to the vast American middle class. They shop in the same giant shopping malls, eat in the same chain restaurants (such as Chili���s and IHOP) and send their children to the same giant public schools. Sue Klinkhamer, the mayor of St. Charles, points out that her local school district is so big that fairly modest people can send their children to the same schools as millionaires....
The contrast between middle-class Illinois and aristocratic San Francisco extends to their representatives. Hastert taught history and politics and coached wrestling at Yorkville High School for sixteen years (and his wife, Jean, taught physical education there for thirty-six years). He is passionate about old cars, sports and farming....
Hastert���s district is a place where even Democrats profess affection for George Bush.... Hastert���s constituents will turn up for the occasional rally to, say, commemorate September 11, and plenty of them are angry about the high level of property taxes, but they don���t obsess about politics. The people who look after Hastert���s two-hundred-acre farm while he is away have so far refused all his invitations to make their first visit to Washington, D.C. Yet local politics seem to work pretty well: the streets are clean; the schools are successful. The mayors of blue-collar Aurora and Elgin have done a great deal to regenerate their cities....
Hastert���s slice of the Right Nation does not have the same fire-and-brimstone feel as, say, Sugarland, Texas (where his sidekick, Tom DeLay, rules the roost), but religion matters. New churches are being built, old ones expanded. In the Chicago suburbs some churches have thousands of members. Out in the sticks some small towns have one bar and seven churches....
Hastert���s district is meticulously well kept and relatively free of urban ills such as vagrancy. Klinkhamer, the mayor of St. Charles, says she recently received a telephone call complaining about cobwebs on a local bridge. She had them removed that day...
#shouldread #journamalism #smackdown #hoisted
Monday Smackdown Watch: The New York Times and Bret Stephens Continue to Beclown Themselves Bigtime
The New York Times beclouds itself with: Bret Stephens: The Midterm Results Are a Warning to the Democrats: "Stop manning imaginary barricades, and start building real bridges to the other America. This week���s elections were, at most, a very modest rebuke of a president reviled by many of his opponents, this columnist included, as an unprecedented danger to the health of liberal democracy at home and abroad. The American people don���t entirely agree. We might consider listening to them a bit more���and to ourselves somewhat less. A 27-seat swing gave Democrats control of the House.... The Republican gain in the Senate... underscores what a non-wave election this was...
...It also underscores that while ���the Resistance��� is good at generating lots of votes, it hasn���t figured out how to turn the votes into seats. Liberals are free to bellyache all they want that they have repeatedly won the overall popular vote for the presidency and Congress while still losing elections, and that the system is therefore ���rigged.��� But that���s the system in which everyone���s playing���and one they had no trouble winning in until just a few years ago. To complain about it makes them sound like whiners in a manner reminiscent of Trump in 2016, when he thought he was going to lose. It���s also a reminder that, in politics, intensity is not strategy. You have to be able to convert. The Resistance didn���t convert...
Nate Silver has fun: Nate Silver: On Twitter: "This is funny: @SimonMaloy 'the NYT has been quietly updating Bret Stephens' bad post-midterm column and making it even worse https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/11/30/bret-stephens-2018-midterm-analysis-quietly-getting-worse/222190. Like, would it kill @BretStephensNYT just to admit that he made a hasty judgment based on having a deadline and not understanding that a lot of the uncalled races were likely to go to Democrats?I'm partly just trolling here but news is hard because it happens in real time and so you get things wrong. There should be more peer pressure (even trolling!) applied when people refuse to fix mistakes in the case of mounting evidence to the contrary. Would improve incentives..."
#journamalism #orangehairedbaboons
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