Conscription in a Neoliberal (and Neoconservative) Age

"There is no such thing as society," snarls the neoliberal--meaning exactly what they sound like they mean, even if they deny it afterward, or others deny it on their behalf.

However, those who talk in such terms are not unknown to suddenly decide that there is such a thing as society after all--when it lets them make demands on the less powerful members of that entity whose very existence they just denied. So does it go with figures like Rishi Sunak proposing bringing back mandatory "National Service" for the young in a fashion that, however much Sunak insists that the proposed program offers "choice," is undeniably intended to press at least a portion of the relevant age cohort toward the armed forces (while, with General Patrick Sanders floating visions of British mass armies for fighting on the continent, the pressing of a few that way is plausibly interpreted as a first step toward much more).

The reaction of the most relevant part of the public--the young from whom the government is intent on exacting this service--is not merely unimpressed with Sunak's talk of "choice" (and "opportunity"!) but hostile to the idea, enough so that it is a reminder that it is one thing for politicians conducting an electoral campaign with such extreme incompetence that they seem determined to lose to shoot their mouths off about such plans, another to actually make such a scheme work. However, national-level political figures these days, in any country, rarely show any understanding of the concept of making things work, or even seem to care to pretend to do so for simple appearance's sake—and get away with it the more easily as their courtiers, and the courtiers of those to whom they really answer, are, as always, highly accommodating of their most brazen stupidity, ever assuring them that they are brilliant even as they consistently prove themselves the extreme opposite of that word in all its senses.

Looking Back: The New Republic's list of Overrated Policy Intellectuals From 2011

Recently I stumbled across The New Republic's 2011 list of "overrated" policy intellectuals.

I admit to not recognizing every name on the list (I did not remember previously hearing of Drew Westen), and to not being in a position to judge some of those I did recognize because of my knowing something of their work only secondhand--and especially the particular charges the list's makers laid against them (as with Rachel Maddow).

Where those I could judge are concerned I did not think that Ayn Rand belonged on the list at all, not because of any strengths or weaknesses of her work, but because she died almost thirty years before the list was made, in contrast with everyone on the list who was, at least at the time, among the living and actively part of the scene.

Of the others many seemed entirely appropriate. Fareed Zakaria? Definitely, and for exactly the reasons the list's makers say: "a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle," and frankly, an off-putting "mix of elitism and banality."

Parag Khanna? Likewise a fair choice. I reviewed his book The Second World. He got enough right that, a more generous reviewer then than now, I was on the whole favorable to the work--the more in as I was inclined to emphasize the positives over the negatives. Still, it was not one for the ages, and Khanna's next, How to Run the World, left me deeply unimpressed--"a self-congratulatory anthology of clichés and platitudes—the life of the mind, Davos-style" in the Republic's words. And nothing I have heard or read of him since has suggested I needed to bother with his work.

Still, I would say that this portion of the list was at best right fifty percent of the time--which also made it wrong fifty percent of the time, with Frank Rich one such case. The Republic's charge was simply that he is "an utterly conventional pundit of the old salon liberal variety." Even were that true it seems to me that his being an "old school salon liberal" would still leave him several cuts above the competition given the degeneration of the quality of political commentary across the spectrum of mainstream opinion, such that he has injected into that mainstream much that needs saying and is ever less likely to be said within its bounds these days--not least at his paper, the New York Times. Indeed, remarking the Republic's list Salon, in its worthwhile contemporary comment, characterizes the inclusion of Rich as a cheap piece of hippie-punching, which seems to me a very plausible reading of that item.

Selective Coverage, Fake Facts and the Conditioning of the Public

In his criticism of the media's coverage of current events in The Brass Check Upton Sinclair stressed its treatment of labor, discussing in particular its coverage of labor strikes. Discussing at particular length the strikes in the West Virginia and Colorado coal fields, and the Michigan copper mines, in the 1912-1914 period, he stressed how the press never missed a chance to associate strikes with violence in the public mind, with the strikers invariably the cause and perpetrators of the violence, rather than the victims they principally were (for, in the terms of the Herman-Chomsky analysis, strikers were "unworthy victims").

In cases this had to do with selective reporting, following the "simple and elemental rule--if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires," even when it is a question of a very large strike going on for months. One may add that if there was no violence of the kind they wanted to report they were often prepared to say there was, as Sinclair showed when comparing side by side the Associated Press' coverage with the facts as reported in sworn affidavits vindicated by Congressional investigation in the case of the Michigan strike. The result was "that nine-tenths of the telegraphic news you read about strikes is news of violence," conduct which "irrevocably" engraved "the idea-association: Strikes--violence! Violence--strike!" in the public's imagination.

Looking at the news we see today that the same filthy practice is alive and well, if mainly deployed to malign groups other than strikers these days, with very few batting an eye at any of it.

Convenient Social Virtue and the Supply of Engineers

John Kenneth Galbraith introduced the term "convenient social virtue" in his 1973 book Economics and the Public Purpose. In that book he defined the term as the willingness of society's less powerful members to let themselves be exploited by the more powerful in the name of social good.

Galbraith raised the concept for, among other purposes, consideration of how differently society tends to treat people in different jobs, doctors as against nurses, for example. The conventional think it entirely acceptable that doctors should drive a very hard bargain where their monetary compensation is concerned--but should nurses receiving much, much less ask for a cost-of-living increase this is seen as unseemly, the nurse expected to be fobbed off with praise for her "service to the community" instead.

Other areas where one sees this kind of combination of exploitation with shabby moralizing include, of course, the teaching profession (resistance to which exploitation has led to the unhinged degree of demonization of the teacher seen in contemporary America).

Conventionally we do not think of society as making such demands on members of the far more respected engineering profession. Yet consider the eternal whining about the number of engineering graduates the country produces. As it happens the economy, especially in its current deindustrialized, hollowed-out state, offers plenty of careers that seem far, far more likely to be lucrative to those who have the potential to be engineers--like finance (to say nothing of those old standards, law and medicine)--and indeed is always recommending those careers to them.

In overlooking this they seem to simply think that in spite of the material rewards appearing to lie elsewhere young people will flock to engineering simply because business wants them to, never mind whether it is prepared to compete with other sectors for able young graduates--expecting, instead, that young people will choose engineering out of "convenient social virtue."

Ignoring Status Politics

As I have remarked in the past, the "consensus historians" remain important to American political discourse today. Not the least of the reasons for that is that consensus historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Louis Hartz, and Daniel Boorstin, were the theoreticians of what we today call "centrism."

One of these, Richard Hofstadter, comes in for mention from time to time because of his interest in the ever topical subject of right-wing populism. As with all the historians of that group his work had significant shortcomings that only seem the more glaring with time.* Still, for all those shortcomings, much of their output did have its interesting aspects, which predictably get overlooked. One is Hofstadter's discussion of what he called "status politics"--a politics that, having to do with perceptions of a group's standing in American society, trafficks in the bitterness, paranoia and vindictiveness of groups toward each other. Hofstadter's discussion, arguably, underestimates just how preponderant such politics can become. (Hofstadter thought it a luxury of good times. Today we see how prominent it can be even in bad.) It also seems that he was inattentive to how such politics can be cultivated and exploited for the sake of other agendas--for instance, whipping up part of the public against this group or that to get it to sign on to an economic agenda unsalable in itself. All the same, he at least understood that what the country's culture wars really amount to is politicians telling the public "I can't make your life better, but I can make their life worse. Vote for me!"

In a political milieu of very limited choices it is possible that this works for at least some of the people, some of the time--or at least, that it is sufficiently hard to prove that it does not that they go on playing the game as a matter of course, all day long, all year long, bringing us to where we are today.

* Thus is it the case that Schlesinger Jr. in that early work so important to this current, his six hundred page epic The Age of Jackson, "makes only three passing references to Indians," completely eliding the 1830 Indian Removal Act and all that followed from it in its rather appalling attempt to paint Jackson as some hero of the common man.

From Red Lobsters to Pizzaburgers: Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic in May

Having written quite a bit just now about the absolute dreck to which The New York Times subjects its readership, let us discuss journalism of which we can say something more positive--Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic.

As I have remarked in the past, I consider pretty much every post Doctorow publishes there to be worth reading. (Not skimming, but proper, word-for-word reading.)

Still, sometimes it seems to me that a particular piece of Doctorow's merits special mention, and that the past month had more than its usual share of them.

There was Doctorow's item on the real story behind the bankruptcy of the Red Lobster restaurant chain. In its combination of "shareholder activism" and real estate trafficking, the death of antitrust and the death of the middle class, Doctorow makes clear how the decline of this restaurant chain has been a history of neoliberalism in miniature.

There was Doctorow's discussion of the Democratic Party's "Pizzaburger" politics--as well as the enormous risks those politics entail for the party in these fraught times that testify to what might politely be called the party's extreme dysfunction. (For how else can one speak of a party that so often demands that the electorate ""Hold your nose and vote" even as this approach fails again and again?)

And there is, of course, Doctorow's discussion of progress in climate technology and the expansion of electricity production from renewable energy sources--which apart from being worth reporting on itself, especially given the short shrift that the mainstream media tends to give it, he contrasts usefully with the technological hucksterism of Silicon Valley as a matter of real innovation against the fake kind that the "courtiers" of the press so love to slobber over.

Four years ago I concluded that as the techno-hype of the 2010s about self-driving cars and the rest disappointed very badly we had a real technological revolution in the area of renewable energy--in spite of the press coverage. I am more convinced of that now than ever, even as the hucksters of northern California's Bay Area continue to get all the press.

Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check: The Book's Reception and Legacy

Recently reviewing The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair I limited myself to discussing the book's contents. However, others have addressed the book's reception, not least Robert McChesney and Ben Scott when they wrote the introduction to an edition of the book that the University of Illinois Press published in 2002 that McChesney and Scott also published as a separate article in their own publication.

In that introduction McChesney and Scott report that of all of Sinclair's other books The Brass Check was the only one to compare with his novel The Jungle in repute--until the book was buried, and so deeply that, as they write in their piece, those interested in the criticism of journalistic practice are often under the misapprehension that no one addressed the subject before the 1980s (when such works as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent appeared). Of course, this burial did not simply "happen," but was a reflection of the hostility to Sinclair generally and this book particularly--not least, from the very press institutions which Sinclair attacked, and which would have liked to sue him (indeed, Sinclair challenged them to try if they could catch him in an error of fact), but to his credit and not theirs proved unable to do so for lack of grounds (because, Sinclair and his supporters have been able to say, everything he wrote in that meticulously researched and documented book happened to be the truth).

If, as the book's onetime reputation shows, it did not prevent Sinclair from reaching a significant audience and having an effect on the dialogue that way at the time of its appearance, it did make it harder for the book's effect to endure. Moreover, as McChesney and Scott make clear in their piece there was also the presumption that journalism had been reformed in the Progressive era so that the ills of which Sinclair wrote in The Brass Check had been consigned to the past. Journalism was "professionalized," they said, and a wall put up between management and editorship to protect the autonomy of the professional journalists as they went about their work of reporting the news "objectively."

In hindsight that can seem a thoroughly "centrist" response--reflecting the belief of adherents in that ideology (inherited from the Progressive movement) in "education," "expertise," "professionalism"; in the idea that one could speak of objectivity in such matters in such a way as to not have to deal with touchy matters of "ideology" (a category from which centrism excluded itself, of course). This approach can seem very centrist, too, in the haste to consider a very large, structural, societal problem resolved by some tweaks, over and done with, so that there is no point in talking about it anymore. It also seems very centrist in what was really behind all of the above--a spirit of elitism and exclusion in the regard for "professionalism"; the sort of impoverished, narrow, context-avoiding, theory-averse analytical stance that C. Wright Mills criticized as "abstracted empiricism" as the reality of their "objectivity"; a greater inclination to dismiss problems than solve them (just as with their pretense that the New Deal and post-war boom took care of the problem of poverty); and as the last in particular suggests, a hostility to social criticism and social change that preemptively shuts down talk of a very large part of reality in loyalty to the status quo, not least by treating capitalism and the questions of class inextricable from it as entirely off-limits to legitimate discussion.

Indeed, it is worth recalling that the target of Progressive reformers in journalism of the kind discussed here was sensational "yellow" journalism rather than the fact that journalism was "a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor." The result was that in their view the great evil bedeviling journalism was the capitulation of the press to the temptation to pander toward the lowest common denominator out of simple "commercialism," a view that not only ignores what those seeing the matter Sinclair's way would have regarded as the largest problem, but in fact provides cover for those not wanting that problem raised let alone addressed, while actually punching "down" at the broad public rather than "up" at the elites whose agendas the press was serving in that way that a fundamentally, deeply, conservative centrism is so prone to do.

As with so much else about centrism, its notions about journalism are far from the peak of their credibility circa 2024--just as, I would think, a great many would see in Sinclair's book something very credible and relevant indeed for those interested in the state of journalism in our time.

No, You're Not Wrong to Worry About Rising Prices

In his guest essay "I'm an Economist. Don't Worry. Be Happy," Justin Wolfers, smugly telling the reader that he is an economist over and over again in an "I'm a doctor, trust me" tone, dismisses the public's suffering as a result of the surging prices of recent years. Covering himself with an acknowledgment that he is dealing with averages that may obscure the existence of a little bit of pain here or there, he argues that the perception of suffering from inflation is mainly just a matter of the way people are processing the situation psychologically, the more in as the has American public have not dealt with such a shock in decades. Otherwise people would more rationally appreciate that as the price of the cup of coffee goes from fifty cents to five dollars it is usually the case that the ten dollar bill in their wallet turns into a hundred, and they are no worse off--for as this goes to show "the currency that really matters is how many hours you have to work to afford your groceries, a small treat or a home," and that "none of these real trade-offs have changed." Indeed, he writes, the trend of the past decades all onward and upward for America's economy and the country's working people, a thing he confidently expects to go on indefinitely--envying rather than fearing for the young people who will be twice as rich as people are today forty years from now.

I was aghast at Mr. Wolfers' revolting "I'm a professional" smugness (and misuse and abuse of Bobby McFerrin's hit song), and his use of both to dismiss other people's troubles--but still more aghast at the extreme remoteness of his assessment of the economy from statistically verifiable reality. Contrary to what Mr. Wolfers claims, the reality is that over the past half century the public's purchasing power did not rise in line with prices, but consistently declined relative to many an essential good, as one can see going by the measure he himself suggests, how much people get in return for their hours of work. Let us take as such a basis the median male income--which has the virtue of being a less "processed" number than the inflation figures we see (a fact much exploited by economists inclining toward Wolfers' touted "optimism"), and which can easily be compared with contemporaneous price data .

Consider that in the decade 1963-1972 the median male income equaled 28 percent of the median home sale price.

In 2013-2022 the median male income equaled just 13 percent of that sale price in 2013-2022, and 11 percent in 2022, so that where a house represented about three and a half years of that income, at that later date it represented nine years. (So much for Wolfers' claim that the "hours you have to work to afford . . . a home" has not changed.)

In 1999 (a time in which people already regarded such charges as exorbitant and budget-breaking) the average annual premium for health insurance for a family of four was 21 percent of the median male income.

In 2020-2021 that premium was 45 percent of that income.

In 1968-1969 the average price of tuition and fees at a private four-year college was 28 percent of the starting year's median male income in 1968-1969.

In 2019-2020 it was 87 percent of that income.

And so on and so forth.

Of course, faced with such facts some retort that where many of these goods are concerned the consumer gets more value for their money--but this claim is debatable at best. Can anyone really say, for example, that the college graduate gets three or four times' more value for the proportion of income spent on their education than was the case a half century ago? For instance, as measured by the boost to the incomes of college graduates? Most would consider such claims risible these days (so much so that it is making the young leery of bothering with the commitment). Does the health insurance premium provide twice as much protection, twice as much value for one's health spending, as it did at the turn of the century? I doubt many would say so. People's homes are, to all accounts, bigger than they used to be, but it would be another thing to prove that people are getting as much as they used to for their hour of work here. Certainly there are grounds to think that home prices have risen faster than home sizes, going by the more readily available statistics (the median home perhaps half again as big in square footage terms as it was circa 1970, but more than twice as expensive in the terms discussed here). In any event, it is worth stressing that even were people to prefer the cheaper options standard in yesteryear they are simply not available for, contrary to the "consumer is king" notion of the market propounded by the intellectually orthodox, the reality is that business offers the consumer what it wants them to buy, take it, or take it, with all that implies for people's living standards, and their economic security.

No, trying to blow these facts off with talk of consumers getting more for their money in that way simply will not do, leaving us with that pronounced long-term trend of the purchasing power of a year's or an hour's earnings falling in relation to many of the essentials of daily living. Moreover, contrary to Wolfers' analysis, it is the case that the pandemic-related inflationary shock that is the occasion for his writing has exacerbated the unfortunate trend, in a way likely to remain the case over the long term.

Amid that hard daily reality for hundreds of millions of Americans who were financially battered long before the pandemic-sparked inflationary surge--and the worse being experienced by billions across the globe--Wolfers' sanguine view of the relation of price to income may strike some as not only false and condescending, but an artless attempt at gaslighting the public. Alas, however one labels or explains it such "journalism" is par for the course with a paper that puts notorious science-bashing trolls on its staff while snarling at subscribers that they are intolerant of views other than their own when they question the decision, and snarling at everyone else when they open their mouths to express an opinion that they are just a pack of Know-Nothings spreading "fake news."

The Mainstream Media's Centrism and the Reality of Climate Change

In our time the mainstream media's failures of reportage, as judged by any reasonably objective standard, have been legion, with one of the most notorious of those failures its coverage of climate change--because it has been a matter of the media treating a matter of material reality verifiable and verified through an overwhelming amount of physical science research activity as "debatable."

One can, of course, see this as a matter of the profound ignorance of the media's personnel about scientific matters, and the very real efforts of certain business interests to muddle understanding of the issue, undermining the awareness of what they themselves recognized as fact behind poses of what is euphemistically called "skepticism."

However, one can also see it as a matter of the extent to which the media is deferential to powerful business interests in manifold ways. Where this is concerned editors and journalists operating within the mainstream are little better than "courtiers" of such interests, and indeed act much as if they were even when they are not simply because of the prevalence of centrist ideology in this media.

Consider certain aspects of the centrist ideology relevant here. There is the reality that the "pragmatic" centrist is not interested in figuring out objective reality, let alone solving pressing real-world problems. (Thus does the centrist believe, for example, that in society no one is more powerful than anyone else, that power is something "everyone" has so "no one" has it--a position any sane person should find risible.) What does concern them is the problem of maintaining "consensus" among those interests in society they see as legitimate and therefore as counting. Where people who do "count" are concerned they have a lot more respect for business than they do for scientists, and are as respectful of the concerns of the right as they are disrespectful of the left, regarding as they do the latter as illegitimate "ideologues" (centrists adhering to the pretense that "ideology" is a purely leftist sin).

Naturally the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change impresses a centrist media less than it might someone whose primary concern was what is actually going on in the world, as centrists attend instead to what people say they think about that evidence. Moreover, in considering what they say their according so much more weight to the opinions of business relative to the opinions of scientists, and the opinions of the right as against the left--opinions that deny the problem entirely, or treat the problem as comparatively trivial, or anything else they come up with as they throw everything against the wall and see what will stick--has meant a treatment of the very existence of climate change as "debatable" decades after this position lost any intellectual credibility it may ever have had, and resulted in their giving an immense platform to "inactivism" in all its forms.

Taking all this into account one sees centrists' highly touted respect for expertise prove, at best, highly qualified, and at worst a piece of colossal hypocrisy--experts for whom they demand respect to be respected insofar as interests they respect much more do not oppose them; while the "both sidesism" that is supposedly a default mode for journalism is, as seen here, just a cover for letting powerful interests attack those promulgating facts that simply happen to be "inconvenient" from the standpoint of their bottom line. After all, we all know that on most issues, so far as the media is concerned, only one side is to be given a chance to speak--and any other is to be shut right out of "the conversation" without apology.

The New York Times Does its Part--for Climate Inactivism

The climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann has written of climate "inactivism"--a shift on the part of opponents of action on the problem of climate change from relying principally on denying the existence of climate change to ward off such action to a more variegated and in many respects subtler strategy. Yes, the inactivists admit, climate change exists after all, and yes, it is caused by humans--but it is a small problem, too small to worry about so much about it for now; or we've blown our chances to do anything about it and so can only "grieve" over what we have lost; or any number of other things that all have in common the effect of undermining the will to do something about the problem in one way or another (the trivializers by encouraging us to brush it off, the doomists by breaking our wills), which is after all what the opponents of action are really after. And just as when the preferred strategy was denialism, and the mainstream media indulged this with its very selective "both sidesism," that media has been complicit in the promotion of inactivism every step of the way. (It is no accident that expert-on-nothing Jonathan Franzen was able to publish a high-profile piece of doomist propaganda in The New Yorker, that the media so loves giving time to Bill McGuire and his counterblasts at those calling out doomism as "appeasers" as, contemptuous of those pointing out how doomism has counterproductively demoralized the public, he tells us that the only thing we have to fear is an insufficiency of fear itself.)

The New York Times has been no exception to this pattern via figures like "hippie puncher" Bret Stephens. Perhaps mindful, perhaps not, of the banality that "You never get a second chance to make a first impression," he made that first impression on the paper's readership in 2017 with a piece of denialism that outraged it by, in the tradition of "concern trolling," smarmily employing that "singularly obnoxious rhetorical trick" of pretending to share climate activists' goals while working to undermine those activists' efforts. Then as if publishing such a piece were not bad enough in itself the Times' public editor Liz Spayd answered the outrage that column provoked with an astonishingly sanctimonious piece that implicitly equated their readers' questioning the appropriateness of their publishing in their pages the scientifically baseless climate denialism-behind-a-front-of-concern of a very well-known right-wing ideologue playing the all too familiar game--and indeed their simply not taking "at face value" Stephens' long-beyond-bankrupt attack on climate science as an expression of honest "skepticism"--with intolerance of views other than their own that made them stereotypical "contemptuous liberals" all but justifying the sneering of conservatives like Stephens at their kind. ("You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" she all but said.)

All of this was quite controversial at the time, with many across the media remarking the Times' open disrespect for its readers (dare I say, the contempt of which Ms. Spayd accused them?) in a vile cause. One reader particularly prominent in the dialogue, the aforementioned Dr. Mann, canceled his subscription in reply to Spayd's reply. Of course, all this has not altered the Times' conduct a whit, the paper continuing to not just publish Stephens, but often shove his columns in the faces of its readers, which one can, not incidentally, interpret as being in line with the shift in strategy that Dr. Mann described. When Stephens shifted from what he referred to as his "agnosticism" on the subject of climate change to accepting its reality he went from denying the problem existed at all to instead denying that anything should be done about it in an item in 2022 that, very heavy on page-filling graphics that the reader has to keep clicking through, grabs the reader's attention with the remark that "Yes, Greenland's Ice is Melting," after making them click the down button several times to get much more, only then shows the byline as that of Stephens, making yet another case against action on the problem; a piece in which Stephens, while saying "Okay, you've got us, global warming exists," also says, "but we had best leave resolving the problem to the market," certainly not doing anything such as would inconvenience Big Oil et. al., so that nothing really changes, in what Molly Taft called a "bad faith climate conversion" all too much of a piece with the "concern trolling" that sparked the controversy of five years earlier.

Had the editorship of the Times' presented the piece so that its nature was evident at the very top--so that from the first the reader saw that this was just another column by Stephens, and his essential argument clear at a glance, so that those who actually care about the issue would not have looked any further--his writing about his "bad faith conversion" would have been one thing. However, instead they put on a lavish production that gave every impression of being for the sake of forcing on the unsuspecting another round of the inactivism of a Stephens whose outlook and conduct had not discernibly changed one iota in the five years since his hiring, and I do not doubt that this factored into the particular annoyance many felt with the article, with Stephens, and with the paper that hired him and kept him on its payroll in a display of open contempt for its ostensible audience that just goes on and on in a manner all too telling of how the media really works--and accordingly, just who counts with it, and who does not.