Pie

I don't know what this is but it has a Facebook page.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Crustorum, has put out a Pi Day column almost a month early ("Is America Becoming a Four-Party State?") on

the most important fault line in today’s Democratic Party — the line between what I’d call “redivide-the-pie Democrats” and “grow-the-pie Democrats.”

and its bothsider Doppelgänger the Republicans are likewise

divided between a “limited-government-grow-the-pie” right — but one that wants to just let capitalism rip — and a “hoard-the-pie, pull-up-the-drawbridge” Trump-led far right [and t]he limited-government-grow-the-pie faction is itself split between the Never Trumpers — who’ve refused to prostitute themselves to Trump’s serial lying, cozying up to Russia and other madness — and those who’ve hitched a ride on Trump’s wagon to get their tax cuts, conservative judges and deregulation.

Personally, I'd say if your pie is growing you should in general discard it immediately.

No, of course he's talking about graph pies, for which pastry pies (crusta in Latin) provide a metaphor, and the things, GDPs I suppose, that the graphs represent. The idea that the "left" is opposed to growth is, of course, neoliberal hogwash; growth and equality aren't mutually exclusive alternatives, and there's even a view, which I haven't been talked out of yet, that associates lower growth with higher inequality, as observed over the last few centuries of Western European and North American history by Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez and their associates, and which makes a good deal of commonplace macroeconomic sense when you think about it, because the very wealthy don't spend much of their excess wealth, but rather sleep on it, like Smaug the dragon in the mountain of Erebor, who's as good a symbol of late capitalism as you'd want to come up with, while the relatively poor will largely spend what they get, creating economic activity. So the more money you move from the unproductive dragon to the lively hobbits the more growth you stimulate.

Once more: postwar income tax at wartime rates and the education and housing of the working class through the GI bill and the solidest growth spurt you've even seen, as American society became less and less unequal over a 30-year period. And in France where the same years are known as the Trente Glorieuses. We've been through all this before.

But the division of the Democratic party, if it exists, has been much better formulated by Anand Giridharadas, who I keep quoting recently:

Heroic rhetorical effort will go into obscuring the difference between the two.

But they represent fundamentally different diagnoses, and imply very different prescriptions.

The everyone-betterers will sustain neoliberal rule. The pull-down-plutocrat types will seek to end it.

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 30, 2018

Growth has nothing to do with it: it's about sharing, whether it leads to growth or not, as a value for Democrats in its own right. And there's only one presidential candidate who's really on board, as far as I can tell, and it's not Sanders, but that ex-Republican lover of small-town bankers Senator Warren, who's come out and for real proposed a wealth tax. In general, the Democratic party isn't divided at all on these lines.

To the extent there's a serious divide in the party at all (and as Steve has said, the Bernie and Hillary irredentists who occupy so much of the Twitter aren't serious: they're doing 2016 battle reenactments, and it would be nice if they'd stop it), it's on lines that have been familiar for decades, and it's not so much a question of what members want to accomplish as what they think the voters are ready for: some advocating levels of taxation and increased social spending that will really do a lot of good, though it won't unfortunately affect inequality very much, and others too timid to think about it at all, and I really don't think there are too many all the way over on the latter side this year (Claire McCaskill lost her election, and Friedman says "Grow-the-pie Democrats — think Mike Bloomberg", lol), though there may not be all that many politicians yet in the clump on the other side where most of the presidential candidates have smelled the voters starting to show up. Voters are definitely showing up for that wealth tax though.

Public seems to like Warren's radical redistributionism more than Ocasio-Córtez's Kennedy-style progressivism. Survey Monkey/New York Times.

And on the Republican side the Friedmanian position is even more detached from reality, in the sense that, you know, the "Never Trumpers" don't in fact exist, or they write for magazines with vanishingly tiny readerships subsidized by the Koch brothers. It struck me that Friedman could be confusing his native land with Great Britain, where the ancient parties are in fact literally splitting as we watch, Conservatives over their attempted suicide by Brexit, and Labour confusingly not over Brexit, though they can't quite agree on it, but, I'm convinced, over the Iraq War and the other crimes of Tony Blair in abstracting the party away from socialism in the 1990s. Nothing whatsoever like this is going on in the US.

Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker recently pointed out to me research that says there are only two ways to cure political tribalism: “A common threat or a common project.” We need a common project, and it’s obvious: Build a new foundation for the middle class. Ultimately that requires the local and the national levels to work together. But for now we should be glad that it’s at least happening at the local level.

Hey, Tom, how about that "Green New Deal" thingy you came up with a few years ago? No, because a version of AOC's FAQ said that the Green New Deal would guarantee "economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work" and he realized, alongside literally tens of his fellows, that there was a plot going on to give all his money to poor people

Economic security for people “unwilling to work”? Who’s going to sign up for new taxes to support people unwilling to work or be retrained?

Which AOC evidently did on purpose just to get him upset:

When some commentators called this out, Ocasio-Cortez’s team said the F.A.Q. was an unfinished draft that never should have been released. I don’t buy it. It was also too late. That phrase — economic security even for people “unwilling to work” — was not just noted by conservatives. It rattled some center-left Democrats as well...

Too late, at any rate, for the handful of opinionators watching for Ocasio to make a mistake (don't think I've seen any evidence that anybody else noticed it), but this suggestion that you could help out some poor people who are undeserving of your largesse is more than he can stand. So he's totally over that and into something so formless and vague it could have come from a dream:

We need a common project, and it’s obvious: Build a new foundation for the middle class. Ultimately that requires the local and the national levels to work together. But for now we should be glad that it’s at least happening at the local level.

A new foundation! That sounds like a—um—thought, of some kind. If Friedman was running for president this would be the kind of meaningless gobbledegook that could wreck his chances, if he was a Democrat. (Of course if he was a Republican nobody would care.)

Tom Friedman getting pied by the Greenwash Guerillas at Brown University, Earth Day 2008, via Gawker, and with Alex Pareene's byline (!).