Here is what is happening in the world:
Frank Rich on the differences between Obama and Hillary, especially in relation to the Kennedys, Iraq, and John McCain.
George Will on the economy, foreign investors, and the American people.
Gallup Polls show Hillary Rising after the debate in California and Edwards leaving the race.
If the election were held today: Poll Data on the 2008 Presidential election.
Maureen Dowd on the fairy-tale, love-fest between Obama and Clinton. There will be no "dream team."
Peggy Noonan on the unconventional nature of the 2008 elections. This one is very interesting.
7 comments:
The Will column is a good representation of what Harrogate detests about Will. It used to be that Harrogate really loathed social conservatives and only mildly disliked the economic conservatives. Now things have inverted.
It's the smug remove from which men like George Will assure us of the propriety of the status quo. His blue-blood shake of the head at the few politicians, like Edwards, who dare criticize a rigged game for what it is.
Sure, he cedes, people are suffering, but hey, this is a "corrective," it is no big deal, it will work itself out through the wonders of the marketplace. Meanwhile he and his are of course doing very well under the current system, poverty thus being an abstraction.
I think that one of Will's main concern is character. I think that the notion, "State-craft is soul craft" is very relevant and representative of his viewpoint.
For him the biggest concern is that state and character of the American people. Today people complain about the economy though they suffer very little. (And for Will, the concern is for the aggregate and not the poor). In times past, the people, according to Will, lived in difficult times.
That is right, Will talks about character an awful lot. So do most economic conservatives for that matter.In the economic context, though, much of what is meant by character is actually an enduring literary myth known as the Bootstrap Narrative.
A question is, what Interests does this Narrative serve?
And of course, people lived in difficult times in the past. Big deal, pointing that one out.
Undeniably, no less than Barbara Bush, George Will is a Marie Antoinette figure. He might as well come out and actually write, "Let them eat cake."
For economic conservatives, character may mean rationality over passions. Those who possess good character can tame the passions (yes, bring in the platonic metaphor of the Charioteer). Those that are successful control their desires while those who are in dept are controlled by their passions.
I am not sure I know the Bootstrap narrative.
For Will, the fact that people today are concerned about the economy and recession means the passions (fear) control rationality. I presume that he would think that Plato is correct about the masses.
The Bootstrap Narrative loves examples. It both imagines, and points to real individual, instances where a person pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Thus the metaphor.
Because that is the American Dream. Rugged individualism. The free market creates conditions whereby, if you work really, really, really hard, you will make it. Look at Bob over there, he used to didn't have a dime to his name, now he owns a pencil making factory. That kind of thing.
If you are poor it is an indictment of your character, your work ethic, what have you. Because look at Bob over there.
The Bootstrap Narrative both implictly abd exlicitly denies that there is inequity built into the system. It also, as you indirectly note in your recent comment, ignores the "masses", for they do not matter. It is the Captains of Industry (to which any individual may rise from the masses and join) that matter.
To sum up:
George Will masquerades as a nuanced, patriotic Intellectual. Scratch the surface of the mask and you get (there is no better way of saying it when it comes to economic conservatism) all the moral and intellectual vacuousness of a Marie Antoinette. "Let them eat cake" and all that.
Harrogate is deeply saddened that his good friend Solon would uphold George Will as a model of something positive with respect to anything at all, let alone the state of the American economy.
In Harrogate's opinion, there are only the slightest shreds of human decency to be found in Will's overall body of work--and those tend to coalesce in his baseball writings.
Harrogate,
I posted Will's column because it is always important to examine how conservatives discuss the economy, especially since it is a liberal weak point. Further, Will upholds intellectualism in his columns. He is not a foolish, at-all costs supply-sider likes those employed at Fox News.
He is a realist, though I am sure you disagree with his "realism" since you see something else in your "realism."
further, the problem with the bootstrap narrative is the fallacy of composition- when it is used to explain the whole. Certain people, like Obama for example, can represent the Bootstrap Narrative though it will not apply to all people. The problem occurs when people use it to explain too much.
Likewise, the system argument suffers in the same way. Systems may prevent some people from rising above but not all people. If you believed that the inequality because of systems ensured that no one rose above his/her past condition, then human agency would not exist. The problem with the system argument occurs, again, when it tries to explain too much.
Solon,
In the interest of asserting street cred, Harrogate wishes to remind ye that he routinely trolls a variety of right wing sites and writers, and he follows Will's column pretty regularly.
This signals, of course, that Harrogate agrees with you 100% that it is important to follow what they are saying.
Harrogate is intrigued by your comment regarding human agency. He would suggest that in the United States, there is very little danger of human agency getting Underrepresented in the political discourse. Indeed, the imbalance is entirely the other way.
We do not need "balance"--the bootstrap narrative, the saccharine examples abound in cinema on the news in literature in sports, etc. Everywhere it's that "can-do-American-spirit," it's an orgy of it.
So forgive Harrogate for refusing to be "fair and balanced" in terms of how he discusses such things. The economic system is Tilted in a number of important ways. People like George Will act as though it is not so, but they are simply, banally, wrong.
That they are wrong needs to be emphasized in the popular discoure.
Thus spoke Harrogate.
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