Politics are mostly about values

One thing you start to notice listening to economic commentators--or, to use the preferred parlance of the day, wonks--is that, no matter whether they are libertarian goldbugs, Paul Ryan-ite conservatives, or neoliberal consensus sorts, they all adopt the same familiar posturing. Whichever fiefdom they swear allegiance to, they are all equally convinced that their interpretation of economic law is a branch of the hard sciences; an indisputable, irresistible manifestation of the natural world. As such, giving any non-adherents the keys to the economic franchise will just as surely bring down untold disaster, dried-up rivers, a plague of blood-soaked locusts blotting out the sun, that sort of thing.

So if you're like an everyday kind of bloke that doesn't have an economics Ph.D or the luxury of memorizing the Scriptures of whatever you've been told is the arbiter of Right Thinking, this can make you feel pretty powerless. Sure, anyone can figure out that a platform of giving every citizen $1 million and a unicorn isn't a realistic plan; but what about, say, a basic platform of redistribution centered on a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, free college tuition, and so on?

This is, you may recognize, the backdrop over which the Democratic primary is currently being contested, with liberal policy wonks attempting to paint Bernie voters who support the latter as haplessly, naively advocating the former.(This has led to the amusing sideshow of supposed liberal leading lights sneering at "entitlements," mocking Bernie's "free stuff" like proper class-conscious conservatives). But, as the blog Interfluidity writes:

Paul Ryan’s various budgets haven’t been wrong because they require giant magic asterices to make the numbers add up. They have been wrong because the interests and values Paul Ryan represents are wrong. The magic asterices don’t reflect dumb mistakes, but smart politics. The problems of our polity do not arise because one faction or another is too stupid to do high quality science. If your interests are the interests of the fossil fuel industry, and you are unwilling or unable to transcend the narrowness of those interests, then confusing the public about the science of climate change is a mark of intelligence, not stupidity. Being smart is great. You may be proud of your GRE scores, your PhD, your Nobel Prize even. And deservedly! But raw intellect is not scarce, and no faction holds anywhere near a monopoly.

Liberal technocrats would deny that they have any ulterior motives at all; they are merely driven to report empirical fact, namely that it's impossible for us to meet everyone's basic needs through redistribution. (Call it the liberal argument for full socialism; perhaps we should take them up on the offer!) Alas, we probably don't need to believe them. As good middle-class climbers, liberals support meritocracy over egalitarianism, a tepid amelioration of the worst excesses of capitalism to assuage their consciences while still rewarding the proper winners and losers. Or, in the words of the late great Utah Phillips, "the difference between a liberal and a conservative is a liberal will hang you from a lower branch."

As Mike Konczal writes, there will always be a necessity to have policy experts:

I think the wonk analysis is an essential part of the ideological work currently being done and is capable of advancing the progressive project in crucial ways. Working the numbers and the specifics creates clarity, and it forces people to put their cards on the table. 

In this specific moment, the work of the wonk forces one to justify constraints, lets you know if you are looking in the correct places, gives you a sense of whether the scope and scale of your changes is sufficient, and lets you know the obstacles and enemies you’ll face. 

 Politics are mostly about values. Voters who think work should pay a living wage, or health and well-being shouldn't be decided on the ability to pay, needn't fear intimidation by prophets preaching ideology masked as science. That is, if we believe in "government by the people" after all.

Age old blues

Last week on the internet the kids with their tubetubes and their memeboxes were briefly obsessed with this image macro "Bernie or Hillary." While all memes inevitably stray from their original intellectual origin, the broad point of this macro and its variations was to lampoon Hillary Clinton's perceived inauthenticity to young people. She's portrayed as pandering and out of touch; someone attempting to speak to young people through a focus-group translator, while Bernie is portrayed as someone who is a genuine enthusiast for whatever topic the meme-maker has chosen.

A lot of pundit clatter has been expended on the Democratic Primary analyzing demographics; can Hillary win young women voters? Can Bernie improve his standing with non-white voters? Will I be able to make a baby with a sex robot? But, in its purest form, this primary is a replay of an often-seen showdown among left-of-center Americans for the past couple of decades, the centrist technocrats butting heads with the populist progressives. And, while Hillary Clinton took a pounding in New Hampshire Tuesday, there's still one demographic she can count on.

It's important to understand that, for the centrist technocrats who make up Hillary's base, her inauthenticity isn't a bug, it's a feature. They understand nothing that's said during election season has any bearing on the business of government; pandering is merely an inconvenient chore that needs to be dispensed with before government can be returned to the hands of neutral, ideology-free experts to which it properly belongs. Hillary's waffling and attempts to outflank Sanders on anything from LGBT rights to criminal justice reform, to anything technocrats actually care about like healthcare and finance; everything is purely theater. They know better than to believe any of it, because they know exactly what they are going to get.

After the past week and a half the liberal pundit class has been in a growing meltdown trying to discern the the reasons for the eye-popping numbers Bernie is putting up with the youth. They are naive and unrealistic! It's campus PC-ism run amok! The girls are trying to hook up with hot Bernie Bros! They aren't likely to find a satisfactory solution. In 2008 when Obama was winning the youth vote by 30 people said "wow, this guy is really popular with the youths!" Bernie Sanders is winning under-30 voters by 70. It would be easier at this point to find a dentist who doesn't recommend Crest(TM) than a Hillary-supporting millenial.

In reality, Bernie isn't a pied piper who's leading innocent, naive children into ruin. He's a 74-year old white man who's been preaching Cold War social democracy for 40-odd years. Kids don't think that is cool. And yes, while millenials are more left-wing than their predecessors, saying "it's all ideology" alone isn't enough to explain Bernie's immense popularity. But he is also not a blank slate for young people to project themselves onto, as Obama was. He's a politician with a long record that reflects his ideas, at least some of which have hit home with a lot of young people. And that is what presents the biggest threat to the liberal technocrats, who have long relied on encroaching middle age and the ascension to the middle class to blunt the fervor of youth (and the latter is becoming harder and harder to attain for today's twenty-somethings anyway). Bernie is merely the developing manifestation of the id of a generation that can resist.

Bernie prose

(Boy is it ever dusty in here)

Back when this blog was still going hot in around 2006 or so, and I was young and full of vigor, I found myself fascinated by a little-known Congressperson from Vermont named Bernie Sanders. "Wow," 2006-me said "that guy should've run for president, I would've loved to see how the Democratic Party establishment would deal with a genuinely eloquent populist and defender of social democracy."

Turns out, I am a genius.

So when Sanders announced he was running for President as a Democrat, I rubbed my hands together gleefully. Of course, he was a virtual no-shot against the Clinton juggernaut, but I allowed myself a smirk at the pundits who believed he'd merely be a Kucinichesque distraction squeaking short-lived endorphins into the Democratic Party's leftmost wing before quickly petering out.

And, lo and behold, while Sanders remains an extreme longshot to actually win the Democratic nomination for president, he has rudely stolen the media spotlight away from Hillary Clinton and, albeit temporarily, called a halt to the coronation. Despite facing unprecedented, near-total opprobrium from the Democratic political machine, Sanders has made it a race, virtually splitting the vote with Clinton at Monday's Iowa caucus. And, despite being a 74-year old white guy with a Brooklyn accent, he has built his campaign engine around millennials, winning the under-30 vote in Iowa by an almost-impossible 85-15 margin.

Bernie is so fascinating to watch for a number of reasons, a few I'll touch on briefly here. Firstly, despite not meeting the most particular definition of the term, Sanders nonetheless openly describes himself as a socialist. Even though he wouldn't need to, Bernie dons the mantle of a term which has heretofore been considered as good as instant suicide in American politics. Yes, ultimately Bernie is selling an un-revolutionary, social democratic agenda of redistribution. But, in an American political and economic system that's been so thoroughly corrupted, that's as good a place as any to begin selling socialism. The longer Sanders can stay on the stump preaching his message, the better it will be for the long-term prospects of socialism in America. And that is the hopeful long-term benefit to this (probable) losing effort.

Secondly, Sanders has confounded the liberal opinion-making establishment. For many elections the liberal pundit class has assured its left-sided counterpart that, no, you'll have to accept our deeply-compromised, business-friendly candidate, because no social democratic candidate could ever reach anything like a critical mass of popularity. But Bernie has shown remarkably by slowly, if unsteadily, rebuilding what used to be the Democratic coalition; broad, cross-racial support from poor and working class voters, and young people.

Which brings us to the third point. Sanders, even in defeat, could represent a victory for solidarity politics over liberal identity politics. Liberal pundits, in an attempt to erode Sanders' support among young people, have concocted a caricature of his enthusiastic backers as "Bernie Bros," supposedly crude young white males who support Sanders only out of a desire to keep a powerful woman from the White House. Polls showing Sanders to be even more popular with young women than young men have so far not dissuaded them. Young liberals are often stereotyped, sometimes with merit, as over educated "PC" brats obsessed with personal identity over everything. That they would get behind a broadly old-fashioned campaign of economic populism (though one that has certainly been modernized to the realities of racial and gender inequality) has been rewarding and pleasantly unexpected.

This, of course, is a longstanding favorite liberal smear of the left; that it is merely the province of out-of-touch, comfortable White Male (always writing off left-wing feminists and people of color as irrelevant). They point to Sanders lagging behind among Black voters as evidence of his unfitness, though even there he is slowly making inroads. Bernie picked up three important endorsements from black public figures in South Carolina in the past week. And he's long enjoyed the support,of, among others, critically-acclaimed rapper Killer Mike, who has become one of Bernie's most prolific public advocates.

What a time to be alive!