Greed

Liberals contrived a story in folk psychology that they have tried, with varying success, to hoist upon the hoi polloi since the muckraker days. In this story, the explanation for the inequality of wealth in America is that the member of governing class are greedy. Supposedly, some weird disparity in the greed quotient explains why bankers gouge third world countries, or scarf up the pension funds of retired airline employees. As a cartoon, this has a certain vividness; but as a reiterated rhetorical trope, it has ended up convincing only those who mouth it.

The idiocy of the thing is two fold. First, the greed explanation is unlikely. The third world coffee picker or the black lung afflicted coal miner isn't less likely to be less greedy than the emerging markets manager -- they simply don't have the large scale opportunities to exercize their greed. We suspect that behind this unbelievable picture is another picture, that old myth of some chosen people -- the working class, the urban black, the feminist lesbian collective -- which seems to haunt lefty projects. Perhaps it is time to say hasta la vista to all of that. History has no special peoples or classes. To work against oppression is one thing; to assume that the oppressed are expecially virtuous is quite another. If the lefty journalist or movement worker doesn't know this, the oppressed themselves sure as shit do. While they -- the oppressed -- are as happy as any other biped to be flattered for virtues they don't possess, usually these are virtues of the powerful: strength, for instance, as in living in a country strong enough to bomb the crap out of a less powerful country. The virtue by identification syndrome tends that way.

The second idiocy is that the rhetoric obscures and actually skews the actual progressive progam, which should be about encouraging the working class to pursue its self interests with the same techniques that the governing class employs. David Brooks has promoted the idea that, if you look at polls, the endebted class identifies with the creditor class so that it votes for the interests of the creditor class. Brooks thinks this is all about hope; LI thinks this is all about hopeless economic illiteracy. The argument for creating a pursuing countervailing egalitarian trends in a capitalist political economy that tends towards extremes of wealth is that the endebted class is never going to leap the gap to creditorhood unless it limits the gap. When the agricultural laborer or the waitress makes her two hundred thou a year, she can decide, then, whether to vote for her further monetary aggrandizement or whether she can afford to listen to the better angels of her nature. But the better angels are just telling her the cold truth when they advise her to attack as she can the difference between the rich and herself. Among other things that the current state of equality has wrought is a certain connective poverty -- the endebted class can not only not make the money of the wealthy, their kids and their housing and their connections are no longer in the vicinity of the wealthy. Increasingly, the upper management type segregates him or herself in neighborhoods of her or his kind, sending their children to schools where the janitors kids are only seen if they come in to help the janitor. Anybody who has studied the recent "science of networks" knows that connection -- social capital, as it is euphemistically called -- is essential to the preservation of class status.

So instead of coming out full bore against greed, perhaps progressives might think of coming out for countervailing greed. In any case, they shouldn't reach for the term anytime they want to handily abuse the wealthy. Because the word has zero resonance.

Bollettino

LI is in Albany. We don't have time for elaborate posts. We do have a post coming about greed -- as in, get rid of the "rich are greedy" template from the progressive stock of phrases. But we will get to that when we get to that.
Instead, go, if you want to, to Locus Solus, which commented on LI's Snopes piece. We commented on their comment in their comments section.

Bollettino

LI will be erratic in this space for the next two weeks, as we are going to a Blue State for some much needed R & D.

We want to pick up on our freerider thesis. Some readers might think that we have gone nihilistic. We haven’t. Really, our point is simple. From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1970s, progressive thought in America was all about instituting progressive legislation at the national level. It so happens that this extended benefits for the working class to a whole region of the country, the South, which generated no autonomous progressive organizations. Between the Revolutionary War and today, I can think of only one Southern generated progressive movement: the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement, led by middle class blacks and peopled by working class and agrarian blacks, broke the back of the South’s pseudo-feudal system and opened it up to the world market. The South owes its prosperity to this act; and so, in gratitude, throughout the Snopesian South, from South Carolina to Mississippi, the Confederate colors were sewn into the state flag, where they remain today. Reminders that the Snopes leave no act of generosity unpunished.

The program we would like to see tried is retrenching progressive legislation on the national level and re-forming it on the state level, and in bonds between states. We’d like to avoid all the familiar suggestions made by the liberals at Slate, and re-think things from the bottom. Katha Pollitt, to our mind, comes closest to seeing the problem in this article in the Nation. But she sees it from a cultural perspective, rather than seeing how the culture has been organized and institutionalized.

We’d like to see a wholesale re-framing of the discourse of the Democratic party left. Instead of railing about Bush rewarding the rich, one has to ask: where do those rich live? The investor class mostly lives in the Blue states. It is time to encourage the flow of money back to those states. Only with that kind of tax base can those states start to replace the national social welfare system with one that is maintained by the civil society that has been encouraged in the traditionally Blue states on a state by state, or association between state, basis.

Bush, when looked at from a Snopes perspective, is so popular because he exemplifies the Snopes idea of an economic plan (viz, spending the family money on buying lottery tickets). The Blue states have a chance, however, in the midst of the Neronian negligence into which, on the national level, Bush has cast our fortunes. The next recession can and should hit the Red planet. We know that recessions are regional in this country. The recessions under Reagan hit, not coincidentally, hardest in those areas where Reagan was most unpopular, while the Sunbelt was not only spared, but flourished as streams of Defense money flowed in, and credit eased towards zero in the great S & L swindles. The downturn from the coming deficit caused crunch will unavoidably impact the equities market and spread pain in the Northeast – but the majority of that pain can be borne by the South if the Democrats adopt the simple expedient of acceding to the takedown of national progressive structures. The point is to strip the landscape of anything that distances the Snopeses from their debts. And when they cry out, the liberal impulse – to rush to the rescue of the seemingly needest – should be resolutely checked. There is a difference between the needy and the Snopeses. Tough love is called for.

The moral of all this is as simple as the odious children's story of Henny Penny. If Henny Penny's labor unions planted the grain, and Henny Penny's gay liberation baked the bread, and Henny Penny's Hollywood liberals cut the loaf, then Henny Penny's Blue states get to eat the bread, all of it, by themselves.

We have concentrated here on the South instead of the Midwest since, to our mind, the Midwest is not that important. From Kansas to North Dakota, the counties are losing their youth, and those that remain have only speed and hate crimes to amuse them in the long, tedious hours of watching the wheat grow. This is simple a wasteland, and we don't intend to devote much time to Nebraskan Snopeses. The Sunbelt is the thing.

This is why it is essential that progressives not obstruct the pipeline through which Bush insists on shuffling money to the Blue State investing class, but encourage it; similarly, encouraging such radical ideas as destructuring social security and replacing the income tax with a sales tax take on a different valence when considered as means by which the Snopes will, unconsciously, be put into a position where their freeriding is put at risk. At that point, traditionally, the Dems have taken on the role of both Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt, reigning in the deficit through paying for it while trying to preserve national progressive programs, like social security. The Snopes hate the Hoover thing – hate the idea of paying for something when they have figured out how to get it free. And of course they hate the Roosevelt thing of tolerance and enlightenment and blacks moving in next door and marrying their kids. But what they hate most is the idea that the progressives they are conning don't understand what is happening. The progressive harping on the ignorance or bad consciousness or brainwashing of the Snopes class has to stop. Far from being ignorant or unaware of their self advantage, they have had a free ride that has given them the luxury of being able to indulge in reactionary hate while being bankrolled by progressive legislation and opened up to the world through Civil Rights. Everything they hate has supported everything they love: credit cards, big trucks, big motor boats leaking oil over various federally funded dammed lakes, etc., etc. It is no wonder they feel like God's remnant on earth. They have the satisfaction of knowing who is conning who in the great progressive deal, and what they really can't stand is that the liberals that are being suckered don't know who is suckering them. This is the Snopes version of class consciousness. It is that resentment which is at the bottom of the conservative complaint that the liberals are “snobby”. What they mean is: we are screwing you, and you think you are so smart!

Take away the baubles from the Snopes. Rebuild a federal system that encourages progressive legislation. Let the South try, at some point, to generate its own progressive movements. But, basically – forget about em.

The Snopes and the freeriders

If LI were a Democratic Party strategist (brrr!), this weekend we would settle down with our Faulkner. The utter rubbish being tossed around by the talking heads about the Democrats adopting Republican moral values to win presidential elections has been untempered by reality. Moral values, we think, had little to do with this election. Rather, what brought out the hicks was the promise of entertainment. Instead of cockfighting or bearbaiting, gaybashing of a high and rare type was on the ticket. This was as irresistible to your average Snopes as a guest appearance on the Jerry Springer show used to be to your average overweight stripper.

The Snopes sullenly populated the backreaches of Yoknapatawpha County in the days before the New Deal. Faulkner’s preferred novelistic time period was the twenties, which brought a lot of changes to Mississippi – but not like the Great Depression and the New Deal did. In the post WWII period, going through the Great Society, the Snopes, with their rabid angers and short term views and long term grudges, grew used to benefiting from multitudinous government entitlements that they never properly contributed to. They have continued to revel in the whole system. But there is a problem here that the system’s designers never considered. It is the problem of the freerider.

The freerider – the user of a public good who does not contribute to the maintenance of that good – has deep resonance in the Snopes culture. It is one of the reasons Jesus is so popular among them – he elevates the status of the freerider to a divine principle, in which, for no real act, a man can be forgiven for his sins simply by prostrating himself before Jesus and declaring to all and sundry the uninteresting mental tidbit that he believes Jesus is the son of God. This, from a man whose beliefs on any cosmological question have been unleavened by reading material since the age of ten. Given the amount of sinning that Snopes like to engage in (q.v. any c & w station in your vicinity), this is the kind of deal Snopeses can’t refuse.

The government, however, is different from Jesus. The government does come in and try to change your behavior, instead of knocking ineffectually at your heart. For instance, lynching, poll taxes, and other useful means of keeping down blacks were all knocked down by the government. This made the government very unpopular. They were against having fun. A moral libertarian, confronted with the government interfering with his behavior, would perhaps try to free himself from dependence on the government. This is why Snopeses can never be real libertarians. They have no sense of integrity. They don’t even understand the problem. For the Snopeses, Bush’s career looked unblemished – he got away with everything he ever did. That counts as a blessed sign of consanguinity among that crowd.

Your average Snopes, then, has no motive to get away from depending on the government, but every reason to denounce it. And this is how your Snopes votes. He sends his Republican congressman to Washington to do two things. One is to interfere with the lives of people that Snopes have no use for – gays, blacks, feminists, New Yorkers, Hollywood types. The other is to reward the Snopes with ever deeper experiences of freeriding. This is done by cutting his taxes – the Snopes, although they don’t make a lot, rely on those refunds to get them out of the most pressing of the enormous mass of debts they have piled up in lives unrelieved by any intellectual activity that goes beyond shopping at the mall and the aforesaid Jesus idolatry – and by borrowing money. Thus, the whole system, with its trillion dollar stockpiles of arms and its special pill provisions for the elderly Snopeses, runs of itself. When it starts to choke, some Democrat will step in and sacrifice his sense of the social welfare to the necessity of taming the deficit. The Snopeses call this God's country for a reason.

The Snopeses have been fortunate in that their opponents, the Liberals, have generally misunderstood the relationship. For instance, the Liberals were the ones denouncing the Bush tax cuts for privileging the wealthy. The odd thing about that is that the wealthy generally don’t live in Snopes places. There truly are a great many limosine liberals. One actually just ran for president. And the even odder thing about that is that the Liberals think that they have developed a credo that represents the income strata that encompasses the Snopes. So that your average Liberal is making an economic sacrifice of a certain sort on behalf of a people who dislike nothing more than a Liberal. This is a true comedy of errors. It is also American history, circa 1980-2004.

So the question for the next four years is: have the Snopes misjudged the situation. Having decimated the Liberals so that they cannot possibly defend the income strata of the Snopes, the rhetoric of conservatism can now become a reality. The Snopes always relied, partly, on the fact that their enemy/defenders were powerful enough to defend them. That’s done with. So will the reckoning finally come? Will reality bite? are the Snopes finally about to learn about the world outside free riderdom? It wouldn’t really hurt the Liberal, except morally.

LI has been enraged by the election, but we are fascinated by the aftermath. We’ve lived around the Snopes most of our life. And we were, until maybe three days ago, in the Liberal position. We were blind. Now we see. And what we see is the enemy. We want to see them suffer. Badly. And we want to see the self-destroying machinery they have set up work – oh so gloriously. So slowly, painfully, we are regaining our joie de vivre. This might not be so bad after all.

Bollettino

I notice in the English language press there has not been any mention of Chirac’s latest. We are, to say the least, not admirers of Chirac’s domestic policies, or of his corruption, but he has been smarter than anybody else about Iraq. He found a reason not to meet Allawi in Brussels (Saddam’s former hit man, unperturbed, got his photo op, fittingly enough, with Tony Blair) – sudden business in the U.A.R. But he has invited Ghazi al Yawer to Paris.

LI had guessed in the earlier, happy time before Nov. 2 that if Kerry were elected, Yawer would probably receive a much more prominent role. Allawi had been much too much a Bush re-election campaign puppet. Well, we know what happened. But Yawer is still out there, and he is poised to receive the popularity that comes from opposing the crime everyone is foretelling in Fallujah – a strategy which the Americans modestly claim to have had no hand in. Yes, they are only carrying out the rule of Allawi. The dummy, here, supposedly controls the ventriloquist – but outside of that old horror movie, Magic, this type of thing really doesn’t happen. It certainly doesn't fool the Iraqis.

So is Chirac trying to find his own angle in the mess? Sooner or later France is going to have to make some decision about what to do in Iraq. Unlike Vietnam, which had no material bearing on French welfare, what happens in Iraq has a central bearing on it.

Meanwhile, the Club of Paris is as unenthusiastic as ever about relieving Iraq of its debt. The report from Naomi Klein which we cited in a previous post shows why: Kuwait is still collecting war reparations from the country. One would truly have to be blind to think that this is a situation going on against the will of the Confederate occupiers – as Klein pointed out, James Baker, while officially making the rounds to relieve the debt, was, under his other hat at the Carlyle group, relying on a hefty paycheck for guaranteeing the continuing flow of money out of Iraq into the pockets of the wealthy despots in Kuwait.

Bollettino

And in the expected news… Hungary and Holland are pulling out of the CSA coalition in Iraq. Hungary is speeding up its withdrawal. LI doesn’t think this bodes well for Iraqis. The presence of these powers, even in their small numbers, creates At least some fragile limit to American ferocity. However, the shop is being cleared for butchering. Over the protests of such of Iraq’s supposedly “sovereign” government as the interim president, the Americans and Saddam’s former hitman, Allawi, have conjoined in a murderous bond that is casting the same eye on Fallujah that that big eye in Lord of the Rings cast on Gondar.

The fight is entering a new stage, as the restraints have been removed from one side. LI read on one conservative weblog a wonderful euphemistic phrase for killing Iraqis: surgery is bloody. Surgery, much like, oh, the surgeries Stalin had to effect in the Ukraine.

Put that in the same class as: to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. Yes, bony omelets are coming up. Delectably seasoned with the marrow of three year olds. Eat it.

And in news from the Red planet: more from the state of Ohio.

Wired has an article about the deliberate dumbing down of Ohio schools by the introduction of “intelligent design” to the biology curicullum. ID is a form of mysticism that might be discussed in the Sunday schools of truly subdeb evangelical churches, but certainly not around the odor of dissected frogs. This is probably going to be a big part of the faith based change that the new, ‘value-sensitive’ liberals are going to have to get used to under the Confederate leadership. Surely some Republican senator should, really should, introduce legislation requiring parity of teaching time between ID and evolution. If you want to disable a rouge super-power, let the dumbest do the work for you, is what we say here at LI. Delay or DeMint, over to you!

Speaking of the dumbest – Gilder proves there might be something to faith after all by returning from the dead and releasing his hilarious view of Darwinism in a side bar: Biocosm. For some reason, Gilder’s ties to Discover institute, which has financed ID (alas, New Age institutes should get in on the fad – surely the students of Ohio should also discuss medical astrology, alchemy, and divination with crooked sticks), never weighed down his intellectual cred when he was a telecom guru. Now, of course, he is a bankrupt telecom guru. Unbowed, he has these wise things to say about biology:

“The Darwinist materialist paradigm, however, is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago. Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists coming to understand that the cell is not a simple lump of protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It's a complex information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands of proteins arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of communication and synthesis.”

Wow. The man seems, a, never to have heard of Weissman, who basically gave us the protoplasm model that Gilder incorrectly attributes to Darwin, and b., seems to be unaware that talking about the complexity of the number of connections as some kind of disproof of natural selection processes is like saying, well, if you have 10,000 companies in a marketplace, capitalism just can’t work. It is utter nonsense. Undeterred, the man plunges ahead to a truly funny bit of nonsense:

“The human body contains some 60 trillion cells. Each one stores information in DNA codes, processes and replicates it in three forms of RNA and thousands of supporting enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with energy, and seals it in semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a process subject to the mathematical theory of information, which shows that even mutations occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected at the rate of a Google search couldn't beget the intricate interwoven fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a short amount of time.”

You read it and try to figure out what the hell it means, or its meaning in terms of variation, and why a mathematical description has turned into a binding physical law. Out of this wreck of gobbledygook one can extract some smidgen of sense: Gilder thinks Darwin’s theory is that some organism has a mutation, and then you got you a brand spanking new species. Could he really be saying that species are just too complicated to come from one another -- and thus, they all must have been created individually?

And they let this man write on biology for a major magazine?

We were going to point out the fallacies here, but is there any point? The more interesting thing is the way in which bogus profundity can be effortlessly exported into sidebar pieces like Gilder’s. It is a shame that the ancient Greeks didn’t know about cutting and pasting, otherwise they would surely have had a word for cut and paste wisdom. The phrase, “phospholipid membranes,” is the delicious giveaway – an unnecessary technical phrase that only convinces those people who think paper crowns from Burger King are instruments of royalty. So we decided to engage in cut and paste wisdom ourselves, to see how easy it would be.

“What Gilder forgets is the hydrophobicity of amino acids', which has to be used to calculate the genetic code's error value. If you do that, you can control for average changes in the resulting level of amino acid hydrophobicity caused by all possible single-letter changes to all 64 codons of the code, reducing mutation levels over which to select to 2.5 X 1018 possible configurations (approximately equal to the number of seconds that have elapsed since the earth formed).”

Now the above paragraph is complete nonsense, made by cutting and pasting two randomly found papers on genetics via Google. But of course, who is going to fact check it?

Certainly not the kids from Jesusland, after ID has been inflicted on them in the classroom. It is an odd thing about Darwin – his theory seems to evoke a virulent allergic reaction in illiberal ideologies. So we have Islamic science, Aryan science, Lysenkoism, and … coming up … Born Again Science.

Oh, and one other note: the revolution Newtonian physics faced didn’t abolish Newtonian physics. Gilder’s science illiteracy is such that he evidently thinks it did. Of course, sloppy writing is par for the course for the pied piper of a trillion dollar sector loss. But expect the Red planet to pullulate with Christian con men of Gilder’s stripe in the next four to eight years. However long it takes for this gang to self destruct.

Bollettino

For a particularly nauseating mixture of cravenness and pomposity, LI recommends going to this article by Robert Wright. Wright’s idea is that the American hoi polloi, fearing the world their children are growing up in, where it is possible they will even have sex at some point in their lives, would have been wooed by liberals coming out and forthrightly condemning Janet Jackson’s nipples.


We expect the “let’s all try to get along with the Taliban” line to be very popular in those quarters of the Democratic party where they are ‘fightin’ for liberal causes – and willing to betray them all if they are elected.”

Wright is the author of a totally nonsensical book, Non-Zero, that I eviscerated in a review a few years ago. For a while he stalked Stephen Jay Gould, having appointed himself, bizarrely, the defender the true Darwinian orthodoxy, as reflected in the pages of Richard Dawkins and (bizarrely) run through Wright’s own affection for Teilhard de Chardin, a charlatan priest who impressed people in the fifties with pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. Teilhard, unfortunately for him, died to soon to great the New Age movement, where he would have certainly made a hit.

Wright, as a man who did feel he could serve two masters, wanted to water down science with gestures of reverence towards the Father of us All – his milquetoast religiosity forming an odd contrast to his Dawkinsian eccentricities.

Anyway, he purveys the kind of tripe you would expect. As we have been saying, however, the answer is simple. Progressives have to stop feeding the beast. They have to stop trying to help a constituency that would prefer to see its children wounded in war and their veteran’s benefits cut than to have them have gender inappropriate erections. It is time to reverse the flow of money out of the creative set. As LI pointed out when pondering Ayn Rand, the one good thing about her was the notion of the general strike, which she put into the minds of millions of high school students. Time to start pondering the consistency of some such strike. LI has been arguing about this with a friend, who believes, as we believed ourselves, recently, that it is the fault of the media, and the fault of history that the Godfearing masses are sunk in the acids of their cretinous hatreds. We actually believe the Godfearing masses have cleverly managed things so they could take a free ride on the massive entitlement programs devised and protected by liberals and get their emotional jollies by voting for psychos like the soon to be Senator from Oklahoma.

The intellectual defense of the liberal welfare state goes back to the enlightenment: that a level of prosperity would soften manners and bring about a spirit of generosity. Although conservatives confuse the welfare state with socialism, in reality the two are as different as a bear and a moose. The distinct feature of the welfare state is that the private sector is not simply preserved, but organic to the larger functioning of the social whole. Distributive justice, then, will have many channels to choose from. In debased intellectual form, this is the spirit behind both George Maximus' thousand points of light and Kennedy's ask not what your country can do for you.

Well, if the beneficiaries of that kind of state refuse to support its operations politically, and use it (by massive borrowing) to the malign end of warring across the globe, looting now a Middle Eastern country, now a South American country; if they use it to secure their homelives while they go out lynching gays and lesbians; if they use it to break up unions, and encourage the world wide impoverishment of the working class; then they abuse it. The abuse has to end.

The historic task now, it seems to us, is to make America, the ‘indispensable nation”, into a dispensable one. This means the slow creation of countervailing power outside of the old logic of class where that is appropriate. It is rather simple. But one despairs of the Democrats catching on to the simple logic of the situation – instead of, say, opposing the hairbrained new Senator from South Carolina, De Mint, and his scheme to burden the poorest with the majority of taxes – the sale tax – it should definitely be embraced. The people have chosen the morality of raising straight kids in abstinence happy schools (the same type that produce the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country) over economic self interest. Let them eat this decision until they puke. As Scrooge once said, are there no poorhouses in England?