Come on, people, now, smile on your brother

 

Feel like I need to start following Insta to keep up with Hakeem's extraordinary color choices when he's filming in Brooklyn, also see below. Could change hearts and minds, or even my own wardrobe. 

I'm a little surprised that nobody seems to have come up with the thing that seemed obvious to me about the meeting between Trump son-in-law and crime associate Jared Kushner and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries some weeks ago, in a story Kushner appears to have leaked for a New York Times story by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni that appeared on Sunday: that Trump sent Kushner to set up a meeting where he could explore the possibility of bribing Jeffries to block House efforts to impeach the president when Jeffries becomes Speaker in January.

Not likely with cash, but more probably with Trump concessions on legislation Jeffries would like to pass on housing or immigration or the Democrats' "affordability" agenda, making the Times story somewhat truthful—they really did talk about the subjects reported, but I'm speculating they also talked about other stuff.

That certainly fits in better with the Trumpian proclivities than the alternative as reported, that it was a pure policy discussion, backed by the evidence that the two men "have a relationship" from eight years ago, when  Congress was working on the bipartisan First Step prison reform bill, of which Jeffries was the main House Democratic sponsor, and Kushner was its lobbyist in the White House, convincing Trump the bill,  wasn't too "soft on crime" (he's said to have favored it himself in recollection of his criminal father's time in the federal pen). And the prospect of impeachment following expected Republican losses in the coming election is something Trump's been preoccupied with all year:

The Soul of Moderation

Drawing by Hugh Lofting of Dr, Dolittle and his creatures, with the Pushmi-Pullyu at left.

Another day, another confusing story on the mysterious views of Senator Sinema. Yesterday, a leaker speaking to Politico asserted that she had agreed to accept some kind of tax program to fund somewhere around $2 trillion for the reconciliation bill—

"Senator Sinema has agreed to provisions in each of President Biden's four proposed revenue categories — international, domestic corporate, high net worth individuals, and tax enforcement — providing sufficient revenue to fully pay for a budget reconciliation package in the range currently being discussed."

— A source familiar with the discussions

—but then House Ways and Means chair Richard Neal came away from a 40-minute conversation with her on the subject unsure whether she had anything specific in mind at all, though he was convinced she was ready to make a deal:

The Mustache of Conciliation and Compromise

Via.

Old Tom Friedman bothsidesing the Democrats internally ("Do Democrats Have the Courage of Liz Cheney?"):

I have only one question for them: Are you ready to risk a lot less than Liz Cheney did to do what is necessary right now — from your side — to save our democracy?

Because, when one party in our two-party system completely goes rogue, it falls on the other party to act. Democrats have to do three things at the same time: advance their agenda, protect the integrity of our elections and prevent this unprincipled Trump-cult version of the G.O.P. from ever gaining national power again.

It is a tall order and a wholly unfair burden in many ways. But if Cheney is ready to risk everything to stop Trump, then Democrats — both moderates and progressives — must rise to this moment and forge the majorities needed in the Senate and House to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill (now scheduled for a Thursday vote in the House), a voting rights bill and as much of the Build Back Better legislation as moderate and progressives can agree on.

I guess Rep. Gottheimer (leading the tiny rump in the House who say they won't vote for the human-insfrastructure bill unless they get to vote for the structural-infrastructure bill first, but refuse to say whether they will vote for the former if they get their way on the latter) might think he's already doing the same kind of thing as Cheney when she voted to impeach Big Donald—fearlessly bucking his party.

Anxious

Two of these states are Arizona and West Virginia. Via Data For Progress.

I'm starting to get too anxious. I'm anxious about going back to the office, which I keep putting off week by week, not because I think we won't be adequately protected against Covid (the protocols look very good) or not wisely but too well protected (hybrid Zoom meeting today had unmasked people gathered around my desk that I haven't sat in for 19 months, and I knew everybody was vaccinated) but because I'm afraid I may have become too weird. Or incompetent (I've had two tech emergencies in two days that involved endless hours of head-desking panic before I realized they involved tasks I've figured out and done before). Or unable to skip my mid-afternoon nap.

And I'm really anxious about politics, with the sense that, as Steve says, 

Mod Squad

 

Mods with modified scooters, Peckham, South London, May 1964, Daily Mirror via All That's Interesting.

This is making me crazy, on the subject of the push in the House, back early from August recess to deal with the double infrastructure package, the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure proper, and the $3.5-trillion "human infrastructure" including the universal pre-K, universal two-year college, permanent child tax credit, expanded Medicare and Medicaid, and all the global warming initiatives that got cut out of the first one, to be passed by Democrats alone if necessary in the form of "instructions" to be carried out in the Senate.

As you've probably heard, the second part is threatened by a rump group of nine representatives who used to call themselves "Problem Solvers", led by New Jersey's Josh Gottheimer—now they're billed as "the Mod Squad"—insisting that they'd like to just vote on the first part for starters, in opposition to the 95 Rockers of the House Progressive Caucus, who have demanded starting with the second part, to forestall any cheating on the part of the Mods. Speaker Pelosi (who is solidly on the "progressive" side of the issue, contrary to some reports portraying her as in the middle) is said to have been working out a plan to do both of them more or less simultaneously.

So last night the nine issued a curious statement in the Washington Post—

Longer™ David Brooks: Moderate Utopia

If you haven't read Steve's take on this singularly awful Brooks column, or that of Eric Levitz at New York Magazine, you might want to look at them first.

Edmond van Daele as Robespierre in Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927)

Opinion

Reflections on the Late Revolution in America

Or, 'Tis 30 years since: A look back at the Warren presidency from the imaginary future.

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

• Sept. 19, 2049

Few could imagine in the second decade of the 21st century that our divided country would ever find peace and unity under the beneficent rule of the Moderate Liberal Party that has now held power for 25 years, though one of them was certainly me, I mean one of the imagineers, for I had always retained my faith in the essential goodness of Americans. 

For others, however, there was a crisis of legitimacy. Many people had the general impression that legitimacy was not what it had once been and was now something different. Others felt that there was too little, or too much. It can't have had anything to do with the United States for the first time electing a president with African ancestry at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, although undoubtedly some people said that other people thought that was illegitimate, because that's how divisive and hurtful they used to be, and then the ones it was said about felt bad.

The Audacity of Moderation

Why does David Brooks think Norway doesn't have a generous social welfare safety net? Because they obviously can't affjord it! Image stolen from some stupid conservative Australian website that didn't credit it anyway.

Shorter David Brooks, "Moderates Have the Better Story", New York Times, 2 July 2019: 

Have I got a story for you! Not the tired old progressive story, the gloom and carnage mind-set of Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, in which global capitalism is a war zone and government must be on a war footing, controlling and protecting the population and giving it free stuff, but a new, boldly moderate story of a world where everything is just great now, with our new global middle class providing more creativity than ever before. The job of government could be to create a citizenry with the vigorous virtues—daring, empowered, always learning, always brave—as they do in the Nordic countries, which are not socialist wonderlands, whatever you may have been told. Why, they don't have minimum wages or estate taxes! Unlike Elizabeth Warren, who won't allow private day care and uses her so-called Green New Deal to stifle free trade. 

Honest to God, he's that crazed today, I don't even know where to start.

First, learn from the Nordic countries. American progressives sometimes imagine that the Nordic countries are socialist wonderlands. They are not. The Nordic countries have strong social supports and also open free-market economies. In fact, they can afford to have strong welfare policies only because they have dynamic free-market economies.

I guess I should start by acknowledging that the Nordic countries are not socialist wonderlands. It's true and it's true that a lot of people don't know that! (Including, I'm sorry to say, Senator Sanders.) Rather than adopting the socialist program of replacing private capital with public capital and putting the means of production under the ownership of the state, they have chosen to regulate private capital so as to minimize its ferocious injustices and abuses. They are social democracies:

Extremism in the defense of moderation is no...

...oxymoron,  I guess.

I just remembered Brooks wrote most of yesterday's column five years ago, during the Obama-Romney contest, down to the reference to the Romanian-named political scientist who is at the current forefront of Moderation Studies. It seemed funnier then, and I thought I'd rerun the parody I did, just for fun.

Dim sum from China Max, San Diego.

David Brooks writes (27 October 2012):

Ever since the debate season began, Mitt Romney has been running hard after those moderate voters, lining out a new area of agreement with Obama at every turn. Obama, in contrast, has been disagreeing with Romney—but I took a look at the interview he inadvertently gave the Des Moines Register, which I thought was supposed to be scandalous, and found to my amazement that for the white and elderly-trending population of the Quad Cities he was peddling a fairly moderate agenda for the second term there. Evidently he's trying to keep his moderation quiet on the coasts, where it might cost him votes. And I figured that meant I would be able to hack together a column explaining what moderates are with only two tabs open on the browser, so here goes.

In the first place, moderation is not attained by establishing two extreme points on an opinion scale and then situating yourself at the midpoint between them. Anybody who thinks that is a helpless fool who should probably be enjoined from using a fork, really, if only for their own protection.

Nor is moderation some kind of abstract philosophical position, such as a person might learn about from reading Aristotle and committing herself to an abstract ideal of not being excessive in either direction. Only an idiot would say that. To understand moderation, in fact, you have to read history, and understand that America is a nation of immigrants whose parents worked hard and played by the rules so their children could go to college and graduate into a decent job; and a reverence for this country and the Founders who planned it that way.

Extremism in defense of moderation is no...

...oxymoron,  I guess.

Dim sum from China Max, San Diego.

David Brooks writes:

Ever since the debate season began, Mitt Romney has been running hard after those moderate voters, lining out a new area of agreement with Obama at every turn. Obama, in contrast, has been disagreeing with Romney—but I took a look at the interview he inadvertently gave the Des Moines Register, which I thought was supposed to be scandalous, and found to my amazement that for the white and elderly-trending population of the Quad Cities he was peddling a fairly moderate agenda for the second term there. Evidently he's trying to keep his moderation quiet on the coasts, where it might cost him votes. And I figured that meant I would be able to hack together a column explaining what moderates are with only two tabs open on the browser, so here goes.

In the first place, moderation is not attained by establishing two extreme points on an opinion scale and then situating yourself at the midpoint between them. Anybody who thinks that is a helpless fool who should probably be enjoined from using a fork, really, if only for their own protection.

Nor is moderation some kind of abstract philosophical position, such as a person might learn about from reading Aristotle and committing herself to an abstract ideal of not being excessive in either direction. Only an idiot would say that. To understand moderation, in fact, you have to read history, and understand that America is a nation of immigrants whose parents worked hard and played by the rules so their children could go to college and graduate into a decent job; and a reverence for this country and the Founders who planned it that way.

What makes a good yoga mat? From ehow.com.

If you understand that history, which most people don't, you will understand that America is not an idea, but rather a collection of disagreements, like the choices on a Chinese menu, where you can get wonton soup, egg drop, or hot and sour; white rice or fried rice; and so on. In our menu of American political principle are the conflicts between collectivism and individualism, faith versus science, and the two-parent family against the one-parent family, just to name a few, and the moderate's task is to compose these into a simple and nutritious meal, minimizing the amount of MSG, and with attention to balance: for instance, if you've been having too much fried food lately, it's good to try some of the steamed fish; or the government should do something to get bowling alleys to open up very early in the morning so that married white men with children can join bowling leagues instead of being forced to study yoga and carry those silly mats to work.

Thus a moderate would never say that one should always cut taxes, as Republicans usually do, or that one should always raise them, which is what Democrats think. A moderate would say it depends on the situation: you shouldn't mess with taxes unless they are out of whack.

Nowadays, there is a good deal that is out of whack. Family structure is falling apart, globalization is running amok, and the information age has dawned, leaving people more unequal to each other than they ought to be, for reasons that I have covered in previous columns and will no doubt return to again. The cost of health care is rising through the roof. And the arteries of commerce have grown plaqued and sluggish, suggesting that American business is on its way to a massive myocardial infarction, a metaphor whose interpretation is too frightening to contemplate.

In order to solve these problems, a moderate would insist that you adopt a different principle for each, so that there would be enough principles to go around. Indeed one of the ways in which we are too unequal to one another nowadays is that some parties have been hogging the principles for themselves, leaving the others with no principles at all.

Being a moderate is no passive Goldilocks approach of rejecting one policy that is too hot and another that is too cold in favor of one that is just lukewarm. It takes plenty of athleticism, not to mention flexibility, to draw up a different set of principles for every problem. And it distrusts emotionalism: as Yeats said, the worst are full of passionate intensity, and the best are restrained and elegant like Edmund Burke, who was also Irish, as a matter of fact, or Alexis de Tocqueville.

If you've never heard of this kind of moderation it is probably because it is not a very well organized political persuasion, and doesn't lend itself to the writing of manifestoes. But it might well also be that you are outstandingly ignorant, and have never heard of Tocqueville scholar Aurelian Craiutu, whose new book, A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830 is in my Kindle, and probably says much the same kind of thing as I am saying here, or at least its first chapter uses many of the same words.

If our presidential candidates want to appeal to the moderate vote they would be well advised to do the same.

Voters of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, contemplating Newt Gingrich, 2011. Photo by Patrick T. Fallon.