Bobo tries to remake his image for the 21st century

Our old friend Bobo is working on an image remake for an era where supporting the Republicans' positions without simultaneously howling at the moon could pass for a "moderate" conservative stance. (David Brooks, Joe Biden Is a Transformational President New York Times 03/11/2021)

This is a fairly typical Bobo head-scratcher line. "The Republican members of Congress voted against it, but the G.O.P. shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle."

Let's see ... The Democrats just passed a historic bill, one of the most substantial relief bills in US history.

This week in Congress:

Dems: Passed $1.9T COVID package to deliver stimulus checks (w/ dependents!), cut child poverty in half, extend $300 UI, prevent cuts in state + local services, largest-ever investment in Native communities, etc

GOP: Took a week to read The Cat in the Hat

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 12, 2021

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says of the bill that the Republicans all voted in lockstep against, "The economy is coming back, people are getting vaccinated: We're on the way out of this. We're about to have a boom. And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion." (Ramsey Touchberry, GOP's new reality-warping message: Economic boom will have "nothing" to do with Biden stimulus Salon 03/11/2021)

And Bobo's take is that the Republican Party "shows no interest in turning this into a great partisan battle"? Well, that's one way of organizing the information, I guess.

I give Bobo credit for recognizing that Biden's COVID relief package is a qualitative step up from Obama's cautious approach to stimulus. Although I'm not entirely sure he means it as an improvement. In 2010, he thought that Obama's super-cautious stimulus approach was too wild and crazy. Dean Baker wrote about the 2010 version of Bobonomics in real time (The Arrogant David Brooks Tells Readers That Stimulus Will Risk National Insolvency CEPR 07/096/2010):

David Brooks has decided to jump into the debate over stimulus with both feet. In a column in which he warns against arrogance he tells readers that additional stimulus would: “risk national insolvency on the basis of a model.”

Mr. Brooks doesn’t tell readers how he has determined that further stimulus carries this risk. He doesn’t explain how raising the country’s debt to GDP ratio by 4-8 percentage points over the next few years would jeopardize the creditworthiness of the U.S. government. ...

There also is a basic question of logic that Mr. Brooks neglects. If the country really did start to face insolvency (i.e. no one would buy its debt), why would the Fed not simply step in and buy up government debt itself, as it has been doing to some extent over the last year and a half? This could cause inflation, which could be a serious problem, but then the issue would be inflation, not insolvency. [my emphasis]

The fact that he thought a country that borrows in its own currency could actually go bankrupt says an awful lot about the state of Bobo's grasp of real-world finance and economics.

In the column Dean Baker cites (A Little Economic Realism New York Times 07/05/2021), Bobo writes, "Maybe monetary policy is the only strong tool we have."

Eleven years later, the sound of laughter coming from John Kenneth Galbraith's grave can still be heard.

But apparently he did talk to unnamed "entrepreneurs in Racine and Yakima" for that column, so who are we to quibble?

But it's encouraging to see that it only took Brooks 30 years or so to notice that opportunities and income for younger people have been declining, as he notes in this week's column, "in 1970, 90 percent of 30-year-olds were making more than their parents had at that age. By 2010, only 50 percent were."

But I guess part of being a Bobo-style "conservative" means not rushing to conclusions about the terrible effects of the policies he supports.

But this is a cute line from the current column, "Even Republicans like Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney, for example, are cooking up a plan to actively boost wages for American workers."

I'll make a wild guess that it will be something involving deregulation and tax cuts for business. Just a random hunch!

Take my advice, stop existing: conservative and neoliberal advice to progressives

Part of politics is an endless stream of allegedly friendly advice to progressives by people who opposed their goals and programs. It's an international phenomenon. It's usually pretty transparent when it comes from people who clearly identify with a different side. Like our old friend David "Bobo" Brooks.

Bobo was holding forth from his regular weekly PBS slot on Friday (Shields and Brooks on impeachment hearing revelations, Democratic debate takeaways PBS Newshour 11/22/2019). First comes the alibi:

Judy Woodruff:

So, the case — is the case stronger, David, or does it even matter?

David Brooks:

Well, the case [against Trump] is legally stronger ...

So Bobo the NeverTrumper can say he was a consistent critic of Trump after Trump is out of office.

Then comes the stock Message Control Republican Party line of the moment:

... but it's not politically stronger.

We have had now a bunch of polls. Nate Silver's Web site, FiveThirtyEight, has an agglomeration of them. And it shows that the public support for impeachment has gone down very slightly over the last couple of weeks. It's now about 45-45. The nation is evenly divided.

In swing states, it's gone - impeachment has become less popular. We don't have a lot of data. But, in Wisconsin, only 40 percent of voters support impeachment. Roughly 53 oppose it.

And I think we have seen there's a Politico poll where they asked independent voters, what do you think? And independent voters don't like it at all, and by 61-23, they think that's the sort of thing that's more of interest to media people than it is to me.

And so I don't think — I don't think — I think everybody knows he's guilty. They just don't think this is the issue that affects my life. And why are they talking about all this stuff? [my emphasis]

And then he recaps:

They [the Democrats] had to do this just to uphold the standards of our country, and that I can't think of any president who has done anything as bad as this and didn't get impeached.

And so, I mean, that's basically true. I think Democrats do have to acknowledge that it's not a political winner. And some of them walked into this sort of knowing that. [my emphasis]

Yes, the Democrats are doing the right thing and the Republicans know they should be doing so too but they aren't. So, the Democrats are not only losers, they should admit that they're losers. And then nominate Mitt Romney as their Presidential candidate. Or something.

The New Republic brings us this piece by Ryu Spaeth (The Strange Liberal Backlash to Woke Culture 11/25/2019), reporting on a trend of people grumping about "woke culture," i.e., people concerned about racial and gender equality and the environment and so forth:

There is a certain kind of liberally inclined writer who sees Donald Trump’s America as a nation in crisis. ... The twist is that this crisis has its source, she contends, not in the person of Trump, but in his frothing-mouthed opposition: the left.

That, roughly speaking, is the thesis of a group of writers who, since Trump’s election in 2016, have chastised the left for its supposedly histrionic excesses. Their enemies extend well beyond the hashtag resistance, and their fire is aimed, like a Catherine wheel, in all directions, hitting social justice warriors, elite universities, millennials, #MeToo, pussy hat–wearing women, and columnists at Teen Vogue. Everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates down to random Facebook commenters is taken to task, which makes for a sprawling, hard-to-define target. These writers might call their bugbear “woke culture”: a kind of vigilance against misogyny, racism, and other forms of inequality expressed in art, entertainment, and everyday life.

Spaeth gives an explanation of how that particular controversy plays out, including how that woke-ness, being a human enterprise, does have some adherents who do or say things that can be reasonably criticized. Or, as he puts it, "I should note at the outset that I am not unsympathetic to the concerns of these liberal (or liberal-ish) writers, although none of them shows a particularly firm grasp of the thing they are rejecting or its history."

I believe that calls damning with faint praise.

He deals with three different examples from woke-critical writers. Or maybe we should call them pro-sound-asleep. One is Bret Easton Ellis, whose argument Spaeth characterizes as, "Why can’t the kids stop whining?" Not exactly an original argument, since thousands of generations of homo sapiens have been making similar arguments about the young'uns. Ellis complains that the Mean Libruls are pickin' on him.

Meghan Daum is also tired of hearin' all the bellyachin' from what she calls Generation Wuss. Daum appears to be working on positioning herself as a repentant former leftie who has now discovered the immense virtues of being a reactionary. Daum seems to think not just those so-fun-to-criticize Millennials but feminists of all ages are a bunch of whiny poopy-heads who should just suck it up and stop their griping.

Spaeth quotes Wesley Yang's that Mean Libruls are employing "administrative and disciplinary power to delegitimize, stigmatize, disqualify, surveil, forbid, shame, and punish holders of contrary views."

Those examples are stock conservative arguments accusing those on the left/center-left for being Big Ole Hypocrites who supposedly are violating their own professed ideals of free expression and free inquiry. That's the sense in which those three are "liberally inclined," as Spaeth describes them in the quote above.

Then there is the neoliberal/corporate-Democratic pitch to progressives. A leader in the Austrian Social-Democratic Party (SPÖ), Gerhard Zeiler, just published a book in which he makes his own version of that appeal, Leidenschaftlich Rot (Passionately Red) whose title might give a misleading impression of his message, which is more along the lines of a TINA (There Is No Alternative9) neoliberalism. In a review (Gerhard Zeilers Abrechnung mit der SPÖ Standard 25.11.2019), Theo Anders writes (my translation from the German):

Social Democracy must seek an alliance with entrepreneurs and avoid an overly edgy attitude against them, otherwise a "false polarization" would arise, [Zeiler argues]. That is why the red [social-democratic] poster slogan "People instead of corporations" was also a bad one in the recent European election campaign, says Zeiler. Moreover, the SPÖ's opposition to making working hours more flexible [removing overtime pay requirements after eight hours] is "unworldly"; opening hours for shops should be deregulated, and in general [the SPÖ] should be less oriented towards Jeremy Corbyn than toward Emmanuel Macron, whom Zeiler counts as belonging to reckons as belonging social democracy, in a rather broader interpretation of the concept.

As a man of the "Third Way" with a neoliberal tilt, Zeiler nevertheless does not want to be understood as such. He criticizes the dominance of unleashed financial markets and considers a minimum wage of 1,700 euros to be necessary. However, this should be laid down by law and, contrary to Austrian usage, should not be negotiated by the social partners [unions and management] via collective agreements, "even if unions and the Wirtschaftskammer [Austrian management group] raise a fuss about it."

This is similar to how American supporters of Status Quo Joe Biden or other corporate Democrats also argues. We have to show we’re reasonable by caving into to business lobbyists demands that result in lower wages and worse working conditions! We should avoid looking like actual Social Democrats (“Jeremy Corbyn”) and instead posture as pro-business conservatives (“Emmanuel Macron”). And in general we should make vague promises that sound pro-worker (but which we won’t take all that seriously) while we distance ourselves from our most important base voters, unionized workers.

A common theme for all these arguments, from Bobo to the conservative American whiners to the conservative Austrian social democrat, is that progressives should never actually fight for things that would actually benefit a left/center-left constituency and that those constituents actually want.

The world of PBS Newshour Friday

A legitimately elected Democratic President explains why we need to do something substantial about climate change, which presents "an existential threat to human civilization on this planet as we know it" and, more mildly, "a deadly threat to the future of our civilization." Al Gore calls Trump’s deregulation proposals ‘literally insane’ PBS Newshour 10/12/2018:

He even challenges Judy Woodruf on repeating a tired and painfully false Republican talking point in both-sides-do-it style. Apparently thinking that "reaching your hand across the aisle" knowing that you'll only draw back a bloody stump isn't an optimal approach, he even calls that nice Mr. Trump's environmental policies "literally insane," like it says in the title.

Dang hippie! Next he'll be telling people they should go out and picket against destructive oil pipelines and boycott polluters.

Then there is the weekly Shields and Brooks Clown Show, whose value typically hangs on whether Mark Shields has had a sufficient caffeine fix beforehand to be able to actively engaged. Shields and Brooks on President Trump’s ‘angry mob’ rhetoric PBS Newshour 10/12/2018:

He apparently was a bit coffee-deprived on Friday:

Judy Woodruff:

How are Democrats countering this, I mean, this approach by the president, Mark? ...

What — how to [sic] Democrats come back?

Mark Shields:

Well, the first thing they ought to do is stop picketing and stop boycotting and organize.

Speaking as an actual professionally trained "Alinskyist" organizer (from once upon a time with the United Farm Workers union), I gazed at the screen for 10 minutes wondering just how Mark Shields thinks picket lines and boycotts happen. Or voter canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts, for that matter.

I tried to think of some snarky comment in direct response. But I came up blank. And I still got nothin'.

I guess that, in his half-woke state on Friday, Mark was trying to deliver a version of a get-out-the-vote message. But it got mushed together with the stock condescending conservative response to liberal-left protesters, i.e.: I don't have a problem with what you said, but I don't like the way you said it!

Mark also fretted about incivility and blah, blah. Bobo weighed in with - of course! - both sides do it:

I think, in this age, having the moral high ground is a bit of an advantage, a major advantage. And because of Donald Trump's behavior, he has put the Republicans at a moral disadvantage.

How 2018 is different in this regard from 2016, when the Republicans swept the ticket from top to bottom, Bobo doesn't explain.

And keeping go — staying high, staying reasonably civil, not totally going into the gutter with Donald Trump strikes me as the right Democratic strategy and the right strategy for any movement, because once you go down there, you self-corrupt.

And so I — one begins to see — Eric Holder said, if they go after us, we kick them. You're beginning to see a lot of people getting so angry about Kavanaugh and other things, any means necessary. To me, that is a mistake just for the soul of your party.

Yeah, Bobo was pretty much phoning it in, too.

Half-woke Mark responds this way:

Let me say, I agree with David.

I think it's not only the right thing to do, but the wise thing to do. I think it's in the best interests of the country. And I would say, at a practical level, you can't compete with Donald Trump. He's just better at it than anybody else. [my emphasis]

Not to nitpick. But even a less-then-stellar candidate like Hillary Clinton beat him by three million votes in 2016. So there's that.

Remember, Mark and Bobo are Very Serious People.