We're All Democratic Socialists Now

 

"Socialism in Milwaukee": Drawing from The Milwaukee Independent, probably ca. 1910-12, when the city had its first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel.

I began coming to this idea on election night itself, and the morning after, contemplating the most cautious candidacy, that of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey—cautious for understandable reasons, I might add, with the most plausible Republican opponent, who'd come scary close to beating Governor Phil Murphy four years earlier, in a state that elects an awful lot of Republican governors for one of its general blueness, but I'd been worrying it had made her so cautious it wasn't good for her, making her really tense and uneasy. The victory speech showed her much better, much less buttoned-up and tight-lipped; energetic and relaxed at the same time. It struck me that it was the first time I'd seen her having a good time during the campaign, and I was honestly happy for her.

But something surprising escaped my notice until the morning airing of radio excerpts, from her acknowledgments of all the volunteers and all she had learned from them:

I was moved during my block walk in Trenton with Shanique because she spoke so passionately about the promise of her city and her neighbors despite the challenges. I love the group of young men from Monroe who have been hard at work on this campaign. They want a seat at the table and they're ready to fight for their future. The little girls who come up to me to say that they're going to be a governor or they're going to be a president. It reminds me of my own belief that anything was possible. Akeem's team, who worked their butts off, knocked over 60,000 doors. Akeem told me these are not the kids who will succeed in Trump's vision of this country. But they will in mine. Union jobs at a time when our economy is set up to make it harder and harder for working people. You know what? They don't just fight for their brothers and sisters in labor. They fight for all of us.

Sherrill, under the guidance of working people she's come to know, has come to a particular kind of view on how things are working: that the industrial economy is "set up" to deprive working people of a fair share of the profits, and that the organized labor movement is an essential part of righting the situation, and that the object is a social movement from which the whole society can benefit, "for all of us."

That's more than a little bit Marxist, whether she understands it that way or not. At a very fundamental level:

• that industrial capitalism, the fostering of industrial growth through capital investment, inherently exploits workers, robbing them of the value they produce;
• that the "point" of the analysis, as Marx says, "is to change" the situation for the better; and
• that whatever is done to change it starts with worker organization.

And not at all incompatible with the more orthodox outline of inevitable class conflict in  Zohran Mamdani's victory speech:

We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

Mamdani's socialism has inspired some violent reaction from some people (mostly Gen-Xers, I imagine) who directly identify, like the fictional Alex P. Keaton, with the bloodsucking bourgioisie; after Mamdani had said:

The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

(which ought by rights to be about as controversial as Ronald Reagan announcing that it was morning in America, in fact it's practically the same thing),  I saw some unhinged corporate guy from NBC News reacting to the opening of Mamdani's speech with its stirring invocation of the spirit of Eugene V. Debs with real horror etched in his face, as if he'd seen somebody proposing to perform human sacrifices to Moloch.

But I haven't seen much awareness of Debs's role in American history as one of the most popular third-party politicians we've ever had (clearing 6% of the vote in 1912, the year Bull Moose Theodore Roosevelt got better than 27%), a proponent of expanded labor unions, public ownership of utilities, women's suffrage, and an end to child labor, among other things, characterized by Senator Bernard Sanders as "probably the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had". Not the importer of some abomination from Russia or China, but as absolutely American a figure as William Jennings Bryan, or Upton Sinclair, or Henry Wallace, whose cause may well have lost out, but who ought to retain our patriotic respect.

One of the weirdest things about the campaign was the continued professed shock at Mamdani's calling himself a "democratic socialist" and acknowledging his membership in the DSA, as if Bernard Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn't been doing the same thing ever since we met them, along with dozens more American politicians young and old from Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib to my own Rep. Jerry Nadler, from 35 in state and local offices in 2017 to over 250 today. Being a "democratic socialist" is not weird! 

But the word itself remains problematic, burdened perhaps by the horrible vicissitudes of its own history, like Sade's heroine Justine (whose subtitle was, remember, "The Misfortunes of Virtue"), from Utopian experimental communities, all inevitable failures, through science fiction thought experiments, through human disasters like the end of the Franco-Prussian War in Paris to the "scientific socialism" implemented in the USSR, in which it was supposed to represent an evolutionary phase on the physically ineluctable path from reality to communism, which obviously never came close to happening, to the self-parody of "socialism with Chinese characteristics". 

In 2021, I wrote a post on the need to rectify the name of socialism, in the following terms:

I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean. At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism",

• the "capitalist" imaginary being the world in which all economic activity is performed by individuals—capitalists living off the buying and selling and rent of various things they own, property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, and workers who have nothing to sell but their labor—carrying on like an enormous anthill or machine for value creation, with no outside interference from (for example) a state,
• the "socialist" imaginary being the world in which the state, taken over by members of a vanguard workers' party, has seized all the property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, from the capitalists and administers it all really well, so that all the workers, instead of being left to penury and starvation, get paid a fair wage and have lots of time off to cultivate themselves morally, spiritually, and intellectually, and
• the "communist" imaginary being the world from which ownership has simply disappeared, leaving everybody to work just for the love of working and share the fruits of their labor with their friends and neighbors, forever and ever.

Note that this idea is no less unrealistic than the ideas of Milton Friedman (in which completely ejecting the state from economic management will turn the inequities of the anthill into its own kind of utopia where justice reigns automatically, dispensed by the marketplace magic, through the blind faith of the population), and a typical economist's idea, shaving off all the messy details of actual human life in favor of the cleanliness and beauty of a model. And the reality of socialist practice within the narrow definition has often meant a system that isn't administered well at all and makes things considerably worse (though as I always say don't forget those great industry-nationalizing nations France and Singapore), as bad as the outcome of an attempt at a pure market economy (Somalia or fictional Mahagonny).

Which is why I'm calling them "imaginaries", in a critical-sociology noun that I'm just trying to learn how to use. Because they have little to do with reality, which makes their usefulness questionable.

A broader and more useful concept is an older one, older than capitalism really, dating at least to the late 14th century and the activities of Father John Ball, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the presence of King Richard II at St. Albans, Kent, in 1381, for preaching, to the combatants in Wat Tyler's rebellion, that the division of the English into classes was contrary to the will of God:

When Adam dalf, and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and... servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord

Not, you see, that property should not exist, as in the communist model, but that it shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of one set of people and excluded from the other set, that it should be more equitably distributed across the society, socialized; not that everybody should be a serf but that everybody should be a lord, on a very modest scale—if not by the violent expedients Ball advocated,

"uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future"

then by some more comfortable method like politics (which, contrary to Clausewitz, is war continued by other means, not the other way around). That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done. That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done.

And that, in my view, is the socialism that Zohran Mamdani and Mikie Sherill may be said to share with the reasonably (not extravagantly) progressive-minded members of their party, DSA and not: that the practices of  capitalism do bad things to working people, and collective action can, and should, ameliorate them to a really meaningful degree.

Socialist Climber

 

David F. Brooks on "The Sins of the Educated Class":

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early 20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

Even the left-wing New Republic! If you couldn't tell the difference between actual Communists (The Masses, Reed, Odets), The New Republic (the magazine had belonged to the same progressive movement as former president Theodore Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann when it was founded in 1914, but it was supporting Reagan's "bombing the Soviet Union in five minutes" foreign policy under Marty Peretz when Brooks was in college), and the stalwart New Dealers Perkins and Humphrey, then you weren't reading very attentively.

By his senior year at Chicago he was calling himself a "democratic socialist" like the great Michael Harrington or "social democrat" like the Roy Jenkins/David Owen faction that broke off rightward from the British Labour Party in 1981, unable to tell those apart as well, but also successfully attracting the attention of William F. Buckley, Jr., who tossed him a job offer with the National Review after a humor piece he'd written for the Maroon in advance of a Buckley campus visit, and the fanatically neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, who brutally shut down his socialism in a couple of sentences in a televised debate (see image at top, and video from around 2:10 to 6:20) by asking how come all the Nobel prizes went to private universities (neither he nor Brooks seems to have been aware of the 13 Nobels awarded to graduates of the City University of New York at a time when it was tuition free, or the 32 earned by alumni of the University of California at Berkeley, to say nothing of the state universities of Paris, Berlin—29 for the Humboldt-Universität alone—, Bologna, Tübingen, Tokyo—18—, and so on).

Housekeeping

 

I should really let you all know that I'm in a much better state, getting regular physical therapy and recovering well, though I've got a long way to go. My grievance with the hospital now boils down to just one item, their catastrophic inability to communicate, which I guess is a form of the "administrative burden" Brad DeLong was writing about (the day after my accident, as it happens) :

Pamela Herd & al.: Administrative burden as a mechanism of inequality: ‘Ask anyone about their interactions with government, and chances are you will get an earful about a seemingly Kafka-esque experience that they or a family member has faced trying to access vitally important social rights such as health care, income support, unemployment, and food assistance, or a fundamental political right….

Administrative burdens have the odd combination of being both grindingly familiar to us as individuals, and largely unattended as a matter of policy analysis, design, and practice…. One explanation for this failing is the fragmented discourse around them, siloed both across and within academic disciplines and policy areas…

The hospital never in fact abandoned me, they just never let me know. I wasn't getting PT right away because I wasn't expected to be ready for it until considerably later (most patients are too broken to start exercising for at least a couple of weeks; I was ready, in fact, as they could have found out if they'd been paying attention, but they were treating a fictionally average patient). There's a whole series of follow-up visits going on into October I have to attend, but they didn't tell me in advance, just started scheduling them and calling me when that was done. All the medical personnel are very nice, encouraging, and happy to tell me what they know (which is of course limited by the "team" approach; I finally had an appointment this morning with the "Dr. John Muller" who undislocated my finger but never entered my brain, but he still didn't show up—it was an extremely pleasant young woman called "Dr. Miller" that examined me and sent me on my way).

It is, as DeLong's reading suggests, a form of the enforcement of inequality. We commonly think of administrative burden as a rightwing issue, complaints about excessive regulation, and the suffering of businessmen forced to furnish proof that they're not robbing the public or endangering their workers, but it falls more on the disadvantaged, who can't hire the assistance they need to emerge from the process successfully and experience it not as too much paperwork but as sheer neglect: 

My view is that administrative burdens do not vary much across different types of interactions with the government—but that means that you are f***ed if you cannot afford to buy expertise to figure out how to minimize the burdens, or if you find yourself in a place in your life where you have to have a lot of interactions with a lot of different arms of governments. And federalism is an absolute killer.

Thus it is not a mechanism that raises inequality so much as a burden that existing inequality makes much heavier on the poor than on the rich—that insulating themselves from government-imposed administrative burdens is another one of the things the rich can and do buy with their money.

Something I've been too prosperous to experience in recent years (not entirely: I've had some bad and mystifying tax issues connected with Social Security) but remember from my youth and bouts with unemployment insurance and food stamps (back when there were actual stamps) and student loans, in pathetically small amounts (low four figures), that somehow took me decades to pay.

Now I'm past the actual horror I wrote about a weekend ago, I'm taking it as an opportunity to think about these matters, and kind of glad of the experience.

Public Options

 

After I was taken from the subway station where I'd fallen down a flight of steps and broken my left femur to a well-known East Side hospital a couple of weeks ago (saga here, here, and here, I stayed in the intensive care unit while they were readying me for surgery and then got moved to an ordinary unit after the surgery was done, and was dismissed a couple of days after that, in what felt like a rush job. I had to coordinate my exit myself, via text, with various family members, and negotiate the wheelchair ride to outside with nurses who had mostly disappeared, get dressed (another nurse brought me a pair of sweat pants, my leg being much too swollen to fit in the jeans my son brought from home), and nobody seemed available to answer any questions about what the rest of my life was going to be like, or even the next few days. Then, as the kids and I waited for their mother to show up, the wheelchair-wallah got antsy—it was taking too long, and he was afraid of getting in trouble for keeping the wheelchair—with me sitting in it—too long. He suggested I should get out and stand there with my new walker, or maybe if I got too tired I could sit down on one of the 18-inch round stone objects with which the pavement was dotted, which I obviously couldn't.

So I ended up surrendering, and standing to wait for my ride to show up, which was maybe not so bad (not as bad as the horror of getting into and out of the car with the kids trying to swing the leg into position). I'll never know if the guy was reprimanded for bringing the chair back late, maybe even fired, for all I know, or if his anxiety was merely irrational, as it seemed.

It's a week since then, and the whole experience is taking on a different complexion in my memory, starting from that spot and working backwards (so that the apparently harmless events of the early part are seen to foreshadow the abandonment at the end), than it had at first, in a way that's maybe relevant to some ideas that have been floating around the Tubes in the last few days. 

Everybody I interacted most with—the nurses and physical therapists—was kind, competent, and respectful, but these relationships weren't very stable; few lasted longer than a shift, day or night. The others were still more fleeting, especially in the upper orders, social workers and doctors, of whom I never met one twice, never got a name or an offer to call, never got an effort to connect (except one of the anethesiologists, they always have a sense of humor), and at the top of the hierarchy groups of four or five from which no individuals emerged at all, except a chairman charged with the job of speaking for them, a "team", and where they mostly gave me the neurological test (name, birthdate, and "where are you?" "what year is it?"). I finally lost my temper with one of them: "What are you, tourists?" That chairman took it courteously, explained that they were the "Trauma Team", monitoring my case, and that they thought I was ready to leave. I apologized and thanked him, but I feel funny about it now.

The Art of the Impossible

Illustration by William Pène du Bois for his 1947 juvenile novel The Twenty-One Balloons,  via Swann Galleries.

Robert Kuttner, at The American Prospect:

In 1948, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Harry Truman’s approval rating was in the 30s. He was universally expected to lose. So Truman sent Congress a Roosevelt-scale program that he knew Republicans would vote down, and he went on the road to remind voters of the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

In 1964, Democrats were in solid control of both houses, but Lyndon Johnson, campaigning for the presidency against a lot of suspicion in his own party, in mourning for our handsome young murdered president from Massachusetts and not sure how we felt about the unelected Texan, did something rather similar. In May he gave a commencement address at the University of Michigan calling for the United States to become a "Great Society"—

Right Behind You. II

Viceroy (left) vs. monarch, a famous case of adaptive evolution; the monarch, with its diet of milkweed, tastes horrible to birds; the viceroy has evolved to mimic the monarch look so the birds assume, wrongly, that it tastes bad too. In much the same way as David Brooks has learned to mimic the style of socially conscious, compassionate humanism, so that inattentive liberals will swallow his Tory authoritarianism, which they'd spit out if it was coming from Russell Kirk. Photos via Treehugger. 

(continuing from yesterday)

Indeed, the pandemic didn't even come from China, really, as New Yorkers ought to know:

What few people realize is that, yes, the virus originated in China, but the true focus of the epidemic that spread to the world was actually in northern Italy,” says [epidemiologist François] Balloux, who has observed the pandemic from London. “We think it happened in Asia first. But the countries that were seeded most massively, the countries that were hardest hit, were not the countries that had the most contact with China. Many of the countries that were hardest hit were the countries that had contact with northern Italy.”

Orientalism was one of the things that made it happen—the idea that it's the sort of thing that happens in countries where people eat bats, not in places like rich, clean Lombardy, and the idea that there was something hysterically authoritarian in the reactions in China itself, with the sudden massive total lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and also in Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore (which shut down before the virus had even been detected there), and South Korea. 

Rectification of Names: Socialism

 

I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean.

At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism", 

May the Force Bewitch You

 

I understand why they have sororities and pencil skirts, but what's with the vulgar teeshirt and need to parody a radical street-demonstration slogan? Not the actual Force, but randomly conservative young women via a website that didn't feel comfortable to my computer.

Bemused by this piece from Politico:

On the first day of Congress’ freshman orientation, four incoming GOP members realized they shared a special connection: All had first- or second-hand experience living in communist or socialist countries.

The crew quipped that their family histories with brutal dictatorships and their aversion to Big Government basically made them the opposite of the liberal “Squad” that has surged to political stardom in the House.

Taking a page from their social media savvy rivals, they took to Twitter to share the name of their own counterrevolution. And the Republican “Force” was born.

They're putting together their alternative "populist" agenda of giving away free stuff to voters and recruiting candidates from minority groups to add variety to their sea of white maleness, and they're cultivating their alternative social medium, known as "Parler" (not pronounced in French but as in "Won't you come into my Parler, said the spider to the fly") as a safe space where conservative voices are never brutally silenced the way they believe they are on Twitter (though Parler's claim to freedom from censorship is a bit exaggerated at best), and now they hope to have an alternative Squad, which will perhaps enable them to say they're a Jedi brotherhood, since the Force is with them. It's as if they were trying to construct a Democratic Party with a different flavor by reverse engineering it, like Pepsi trying to create a drink with the appeal of Coke but their own trademark.

Cure, maybe, but not proof that capitalism will solve all your problems

Image via Freedom From Religion Foundation.

This week's news of a remarkably successful early trial at the University of Chicago for a possible Covid-19 drug, Gilead's Remdesivir, is really good, let me say that, but I'm not so sure about Mr. Bret Stephens and his panegyric to pharmaceutical profit (The Story of Remdesivir")—

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there should be no big-pharma haters in pandemics. Last year, Elizabeth Warren wrote that “giant drug companies only care about one thing: raking in profits on the backs of patients.” I wonder if the Massachusetts senator would have the nerve to say that to [Gilead clinical research head Diana] Brainard and every other private-sector scientist laboring to find cures under the intense strain of this global emergency.

—and their beneficent employers,

profit-seeking companies operating in fiercely competitive and well-regulated marketplaces. Whatever the fate of remdesivir or any other drug, one lesson from this pandemic is how dependent we are for our survival on an innovative and robust pharmaceutical industry. Maybe we should do more as a country to cultivate it than tear it down.

As a matter of fact, Gilead has had plenty of cultivation from our federal government, in particular with respect to Remdesivir, starting with the CDC in 2014 pulling it out of a "library" of some 1000 possible antiviral compounds the company had been patenting over some decades, as a possible treatment for Ebola, refined with the full collaboration and financial support of the the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) whose scientists did the actual testing of the drug's effectiveness in cell cultures and 100 rhesus monkeys who all survived the disease.

If you want to feel some people have a worse grasp on this than you, ask a libertarian

Cheerful libertarian. Via David Brin.

Libertortionist economist Tyler Cowen wrote his own not-so-short Shorter for a piece at Bloomberg arguing for a silver lining to the Covid-19 cloud: it may destroy us all, but at least it will definitely destroy that noxious progressive left, forcing all its adherents, if any of them survive, to realize that Dr. Cowen was right all along:

— The egalitarianism of the progressive left ... will seem like a faint memory. Elites are most likely to support wealth redistribution when they feel comfortable themselves, and indeed well-off coastal elites in California and the Northeast are a backbone of the progressive movement. But when these people feel threatened in their lives or occupations, or when the futures of their children suddenly seem less secure, redistribution will not be such a compelling ideal…

I'm not interested in arguing that his ghoulish prediction is wrong, beyond noting that it's self-evidently silly, like people in some French town in 1348 wondering whether the Black Death would bring people to reject religion or cling more tightly to it (it clearly helped to bring on both, the secularization of the Renaissance and the theocracy of the Inquisition, along with a third option nobody foresaw, the creation of the new religion we call Protestantism).

But I would like to give some serious attention to the undeclared assumption that there is some crucial overlap between some or all (depending on which sentence you look at) of the members of the undefined class of "the progressive left", and some of the members of the undefined class of "elites" who are frequently well-off and frequently live in California or "the Northeast", which begs so many questions it ought to be arrested for vagrancy.

David Brooks Joins Cancel Culture

Ilya Salavskiy, right, at a protest action in Oxford, May 2016. Euromaidan Press.

David Brooks ("No, Not Sanders, Not Ever"):

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years.

Actually, no. As Brussels-based deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1990 to 1994, Brooks got his byline on exactly four articles mentioning the Soviet Union, suggesting two visits to Moscow (and none after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991):

• A puff piece ("It's too late for a party congress", 2 July 1990) extolling Ilya Saslavskiy, a Ukrainian Oxford graduate and member of the National People's Congress, calling him a "combative intellectual" and "New Soviet Man" representing the "real action" in the Communist Party. Saslavskiy became an American and was working for BP's Russian operations when he and his brother Oleksandr were arrested for spying on behalf of the US and Ukraine in 2008—not because they were actually spies, but because Putin found it useful in his campaign to turn BP into Rosneft. I'm glad to report the brothers (who were sentenced to two years probation) seem to be OK, see photo at top. The Soviet Union, of course, had no future.
• A review ("The Soviet Reality: Murder, Apathy, Dishonesty", 17 July 1990) of Stanislav Govorukhin's 1990 documentary We Can't Live Like This which, Brooks notes, was applauded by the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
• A lengthy opinion piece ("In USSR, possession is better than the law", 16 May 1991) illustrating the collapse of rule of law with the case of an astrophysicist, "Maxim Hlobov", who succeeded in stopping the KGB from stealing his new apartment. He got the name wrong (should be Khlopov—he's in France now, working in the Astroparticles and Cosmology Laboratory of the Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique de Particules). 
• A travel piece ("An American in Moscow: Hard-currency god", 21 May 1991).

Brooks Explains Education

Victor Sjöström, The Phantom Carriage (1920).

David Brooks all excited about his new proof that socialism doesn't work, because it doesn't account for the greatness of Scandinavia, contrary to popular opinion, and the unpopular reasons are wrong too ("This Is How Scandinavia Got Great"):

Progressives say it’s because they have generous welfare states. Some libertarians point out that these countries score high on nearly every measure of free market openness. Immigration restrictionists note that until recently they were ethnically homogeneous societies.

But Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy.

See, the Nordic countries adopted the German concept of Bildung, a much larger and more holistic idea than the idea of "education", the "formation" of the whole person, not just training in the 1870s Scandinavian equivalent of STEM, but "the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person", which I think is not quite right—it's more the creation of the person: you don't want to take the preschooler and make her into somebody different, but to fully realize the flower latent within the bud. Also, of course, the Germans adopted it too, it's their concept, but they took some pretty alarming detours along the way which would complicate Brooks's argument in a way he'd prefer not to do.

David Brooks Columns I Never Finished Reading

David Brooks reminiscing about his radical youth ("I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked."):

I was a socialist in college. I read magazines like The Nation and old issues of The New Masses. I dreamed of being the next Clifford Odets, a lefty playwright who was always trying to raise proletarian class consciousness. If you go on YouTube and search “David Brooks Milton Friedman,” you can see a 22-year-old socialist me debating the great economist. I’m the one with the bushy hair and the giant 1980s glasses that were apparently on loan from the Palomar lunar observatory.

Actually there are persons with bushier hair, he's labeled not a socialist but one of the two "social democrats" in the politically diverse group which looks more like Professor Friedman's senior seminar than a debate, except for all the boys wearing suits, and he timidly suggests that government subsidies for education are a good thing because they will make students grateful and more interested than otherwise in doing good for society when they get rich, which is so exactly the future Brooks that it'll make you laugh out loud. Friedman quickly shuts him down by forcing him to agree that private institutions are better than public ones because they win more Nobel Prizes, which is not only a stupid argument but in fact false (the top 50 list is around half public institutions, including all the European ones of course, from #50 University of Washington, #47 City University of New York, #46 Copenhagen, #45 École Normale Supérieure, #44 Würzburg, #43 Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, #42 UCLA, and #41 Uppsala to #10 Sorbonne, #7 Oxford, #6 University of California at Berkeley, and #3 Cambridge), though Brooks still believes it today.

Piketty Redux

Shirelock strip by TricksyWizard/DeviantArt.

Thomas Piketty has written a new book, The Guardian reports, under the title Capitale et Idéologie, as long as War and Peace, appearing tomorrow in French, with an English version scheduled to arrive in March. I doubt I'll be making any attempt to read it before then, but I want to put a heads up at the beginning of the presidential campaign for something in the Guardian's coverage that has really captured my imagination.

One of the things that was lacking from Capital in the Twenty-First Century, you may remember, was any very clear idea of what could be done about the increasing concentration of wealth around the world in the hands of an increasingly small group of aristocrats other than the thought that it would have to involve taxing rich people. Apparently he's got something much more specific this time, and it really warmed my heart:

Among the proposals in the book are that employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards; that the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be capped at 10%; much higher taxes on property, rising to 90% for the largest estates; a lump sum capital allocation of €120,000 (just over £107,000) to everyone when they reach 25; and an individualised carbon tax calculated by a personalised card that would track each person’s contribution to global heating.

In an interview with the French weekly news magazine L’Obs, Piketty made no apologies for the impact his ideas would have on the stock market. He said: “[Yes], it will also affect the price of real estate that is crazy in Paris, and it will allow new social groups to become owners and shareholders.”

Left Behind

Kevin Kühnert. Photo by Tibor Boz/Redux/laif vie Die Zeit.

In a nice piece on Kevin Kühnert, leader of the youth organization of Germany's Social Democratic party, who is trying to bring back socialism into the party's conversation, Jochen Bittner in The Times reminds them that our DSA politicians really aren't:

Forget the wannabe socialism of American Democrats like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 29-year-old Mr. Kühnert is aiming for the real thing. Socialism, he says, means democratic control over the economy. He wants to replace capitalism as such, not just to recalibrate it.

In the United States, policies frequently branded as “socialist” — health care for all, a national minimum wage, and tuition-free universities — have very little to do with actual socialism. Big government, yes — but all of them fit comfortably in a traditional free-market economy.

In contrast, German neo-socialism is profoundly different from capitalism. In an interview with my newspaper, Mr. Kühnert took specific aim at the American dream as a model for individual achievement. He said he questioned a system “in which millions start a race, very few make it over the finishing line and then shout back to the others, ‘You could have made it, too!’”

Kühnert wants collective ownership of industry—by the workers, not the state—and an end to the home real estate investment market:

The Idiocy of Rural Life

Mary Pickford in Sparrows (1926), by William Beaudine. Via Fritzi.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "What Rural America Has to Teach Us", New York Times, 22 March 2019:

What rural America has to teach us is that we should all live in a county with under 1,000 residents, or so few people that everybody has to double up on official functions in government and civil society and amateur sports as well as being bank presidents or owners of a Michelin-star bakery, which fortunately takes up no more than half your time, which will go along with an insane work ethic and "intentionality", which means having a pervasive civic mind-set. Then everybody will be just about perfect, leaving their doors permanently unlocked and going to meetings all evening, except the kids who get good grades and have to leave town to find something to do, and the local immigrants who dismember our hogs, who won't go on Facebook for fear of what they might find out about our political views.

Honest. I made up the Michelin star (in the column it's a James Beard Award), and the town he's visiting has 7,700 people, it's a bunch of other Nebraska counties that have fewer than a thousand, and the hogs are an educated guess, but other than that it's pretty much all in there: even unto

Socialist Surrealism

Drawing most likely from the time of Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel,  1910-12, though the city had two more of them, from  1916 to 1940 and 1948 to 1960. Via Milwaukee Independent.

Six weeks ago there was presidential candidate-flirt Michael Bloomberg:

Speaking with reporters after a second New Hampshire event, Bloomberg was asked about the wealth tax proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. He said the presidential contender's plan was potentially unconstitutional, and compared it to socialism. "It's called Venezuela," he added.

Only there are no wealth taxes in Venezuela.

Then around the same time there was Mr. Bret Stephens, economic theologian, laying down the catechism of orthodox socialism ("Yes, Venezuela is a Socialist Catastrophe"):

The psychopath's ability

Peter Hall's adaptation of Animal Farm in a production by the English touring company Paper Zoo, 2008.

If you want to know how this LEFTIST move toward socialism ends JUST read ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell. The PIGS (socialist left) overthrow the farmer. Before long, the PIGS are at the top of the SOCIAL ladder and the rest of the livestock who helped them get sh*t on by the LEFT. pic.twitter.com/H64b50mzc5

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) August 7, 2018

If you want to know how George Orwell's leftism stood against totalitarianism left and right and for democratic socialism you need to look at a real book instead of a PowerPoint knockoff. https://t.co/D01HDsQPb4 pic.twitter.com/sKKEyWsPQJ

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2018

Concerned

Drawing by Roz Chast, via Fine Art America.

Concern troll David Brooks is concerned today about the narratology ("What Is the Democratic Story?"):

There’s a lot of discussion about how far left the Democratic Party should go these days. Is it destroying its electoral chances when its members call for a single-payer health plan or abolishing ICE?

That’s an important question, but the most important question is what story is the Democratic Party telling? As Alasdair MacIntyre argued many years ago, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of. Story is more important than policies.

Ah, a name—a clue, perhaps, to whatever it is Brooks has been doing wrong with this concept. Alasdair MacIntyre (b.1929), Dr. Google tells me, is a Scottish moral philosopher, a Thomist in his ultimate phase starting in the late 1970s, interested in

For the Record: D'Souza's wrong about something.

Egyptian-born singer Dalida congratulating socialist François Mitterand on his plans to seize the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat, Château Chinon, May 1981. Pinterest.

Ah yes, I remember Prime Minister Atlee's reign of terror https://t.co/GwywAXU42x

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

And how Lee Kuan Yew seized the means of production and exiled SIngapore's bourgeoisie https://t.co/94PAcXstI5

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

More nationalization of industry was accomplished in France under the conservative de Gaulle than in socialist Sweden or Denmark https://t.co/obTM17p2Sh

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018

You know fuck all about history beyond the dumb bibliography you've been recycling since the 90's, Dinesh. You should really give up.

— Post-Impressionist Liberal (@Yastreblyansky) May 13, 2018