Matt Zeitlin

I almost want to let this excellent Will Wilkinson post go on without comment and just let it shine on its own, but if it weren’t for an incessant need to comment on things (which, as evidenced by my sporadic blogging, has waned significantly), then I wouldn’t even be laucnhing into this meta-conversation about whether or not to comment on Wilkinson’s post.

But here’s the nut of it, where he explains that if we take American identity to be fundamentally creedal — based around shared ideas and values, as opposed to shared ethnic identity, shared religion or shared historical experience — then we have to except that, in effect, there’s no stable definition of Americanism or genuine Americanness:

Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on.

A cursory look at contemporary America and our history will quickly bear out the fallacy of saying that any ideas that are currently being professed by any sizable group of Americans is any less American than any other one. America is a huge country, with people of different faiths, ethnic groups, countries or origin and a vast array of microcultures all across a huge geographical area. Drake — a half Jewish, Canadian rapper who whines about how rich he is — is a pop star, and so is Brad Paisely, and so is Lil Wayne and so is Lady Gaga. Katy Perry, an evangelical sexpot from Santa Barbara married to a British comedian, had a number one album. Three weeks earlier, the Arcade Fire, a seven member indie rock group primarily influenced by Bruce Springsteen fronted by a husband-wife duo consisting of a  toweringly tall descendantof Alivo Rey and a pixie-like Haitan-Canadian, were perched atop the Billboard chart. Kid A was a number one album and so was Kamikaze by Twister.

In four years, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan won presidential elections. Woodrow Wilson was the driving force behind the League of Nations, oversaw massive Progressive reforms, was perhaps the most racist president and was eventually undercut by an isolationist Congress. Then in 1945, we spearheaded the founding of the United Nations and one of our two parties totally disdains the institution. We have some of the most extensive protections for the accused in the Western world and have also seen the Palmer Raids, Guantanamo, and Japanese internment. We overwhelmingly elect a man who is outwardly cool, collected and intelligent, and less than two years later, a weepy Mormon former shock jock holds a massive spiritual revival on the Mall that’s a thinly-veiled opposition rally. In 1912, Eugene Debs got over 900,000 votes for President and nearly 6% of the popular vote, Ed Clark and David Koch got just over 900,000 votes in 1980. Jamie Whitten and Adam Clayton Powell served in Congress together for 26 years in the same party.

I could go on.

The point is simply that just about anytime a political figure or commentator claims that their political vision is genuinely American and their opponents’ is not, they’re basically full of it. Ron Paul is as American as Barack Obama, John Boehner, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Glenn Beck and Michael Bloomberg. We’re all Americans and we all disagree about stuff. Let’s talk about that stuff.

Can anyone explain why Nathan Bedford Forrest has *anything* named after him? Being a Confederate general is bad enough — like, really, really, History Greatest’s Monster bad — but being a Confederate general who was one of the most important members of the early Ku Klux Klan, perhaps the most pernicious, anti-American organization in our country’s history. Oh yeah, and the Fort Pillow Massacre.

This is just basic stuff. I would even trade all the stuff named after Sherman if the South got rid of everything named after Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Forrest, Stuart and so on.  Why can’t more stuff be named after Faulkner or Thomas Jefferson or George Mason or anyone who didn’t commit treason in defense of slavery?

UPDATE:

Oh God, this really is terrible. It’s from 2008, but I hadn’t heard about it until today, so it can be blogged in good-faith:

More than half the students at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla., are black, and some members of the community object that they are forced to attend a school that was named in honor of a racist.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave trader before the Civil War, a top-notch Confederate cavalry leader during the war, and the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee when it was over, according to University of North Carolina-Greensboro emeritus professor Allen Trelease, a Civil War scholar.

Forrest High got its name in 1959, when the Daughters of the Confederacy, angry about the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision forcing school integration, pushed for the name.

All 2,300 of the school’s students were white at the time. Now, 54 percent are black, and some feel it’s time to change the school’s name.

On Nov. 3, the Duval County School Board voted 5 to 2 against changing the name. The five members who voted to keep the name were white. The two who voted against it were the board’s only black members.

Last night, I linked to this Politico story about how, relative to the rest of the county, the D.C. metro area was doing fairly well economically and specifically that its labor market is much tighter than the labor market in, say, Flint or Tampa. I think basically everyone would agree with you if you said that D.C. was doing better than the rest of the country and they would then probably agree with you if you said (correctly) that D.C.’s superior economic performance was due to a high level of government spending and activity that leads to a lot of employment where the federal government is based. Similarly, a big takeaway from Dana Priest and William Arkin’s continuing series on “Top Secret America” is just how many people the intelligence and counterterrorism communities employ, whether directly or through contractors, hundreds of thousands of people (some 854,000 have top secret clearances). Once again, no one would deny that these people have real jobs, where they get paid real money which then spreads throughout their local economies as they spend money on goods and services and invest in stuff.

Yet, in discussions of stimulus spending or any money spent on government jobs that aren’t defense or are promoted by Democrats, we have Republican insistence and some media acquiescence and so a great many stimulus and/or government jobs aren’t considered to be that important or real despite the fact that, when thought about another way, people totally accept the economic validity of government employment.

On a certain level, Bob McDonnell’s declaration that April will, once again, be Confederate History Month is quite banal. After all, there’s a lot of Civil War based tourism is Virginia, and promoting the view that the War was something else than treason in defense of slavery is a good way to get more people to visit, among other things, the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond.

Obviously, McDonnell is ignoring how slavery was central to secession — which the actual people seceding understood quite well –  not to mention how black Virginians might think about the Heritage of a state dedicated to enslaving their ancestors. And it’s just dishonest to pretend that the Confederacy, and its battle flag, is about anything significant besides the enslavement, and after their defeat, the continuing oppression of black people.

But what about Southern Heritage? Surely such a thing exists. No one would deny that the Southern portion of the United States has something like a cultural heritage and legacy that’s separate from that’s different from the heritage of the country as a whole. But why are so many Southerners so quick to identify this heritage with a failed, four year war of treason whose goal was to protect an institution that is universally considered odious? What about the great literary figures — Faulkner, O’Connor, Capote, McCarthy. Or the music (last time I checked, Nashville is indeed in Tennessee). The American statesmen (Jefferson, Madison etc etc). I understand that it’s natural to romanticize the wars you lose, but seriously, can’t we just give up the ghost?

By the way we judge presidents’ place in history, Barack Obama has assured himself a place in the pantheon, especially among Democratic presidents. And he deserves it: under his watch, the social safety net will have expanded in ways that it hasn’t since the Johnson administration. This is what Democrats are supposed to do and he’s done it.

But anyone who has actually watched this process unfold in real time, starting with the Democratic primary campaign, will notice how Obama was only one player among many in getting this legislation passed. Every major Democratic candidate had essentially the same plan and, assuming it wasn’t John Edwards, a Democrat was going to be in the White House with large majorities in both Houses and with a Congressional leadership utterly devoted to passing health care legislation. Once things got started, Obama largely ceded drafting the bills to Congress and when things were looking dire after Scott Brown’s victory, it was Congressional leaders who were forceful proponents for continuing with large-scale legislation.

This is obviously a narrative specifically designed to underplay Obama’s role, which really was quite significant. And while it’s unavoidable for people to look back on complex legislative processes and simply give credit to the President who oversaw everything and eventually signed the bill, we should take this moment and use the benefit of immediacy to give credit to other figures — namely Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid — whose efforts were invaluable.

A weird tick in the Obama campaign was that, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that he was the most personally magnetic, charismatic and inspiration candidate in a generations, he also the most careful to talk about his supporters as the real source of change, hope, inspiration etc. And, it turns out, for his major legislative achievement, it was largely those voters — who also elected a liberal-enough governing majority — who enabled the passage of health care reform. Maybe we really were the change we were waiting for.

Apparently, it’s offensive to Irish people to identify with Joseph McCarthy the tendency to smear your political opponents by gay baiting them and calling them communists without any real evidence. Even though that’s what Joseph McCarthy did and was lauded by conservatives for doing it.  And it was a tendency that he took so far that his own party and most of the U.S. Senate condemned it for it. But McCarthy is an Irish name and liberals are, to be consistent, supposed to just buckle at every accusation by conservatives that we’re being insensitive. Or something.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Matt Yglesias defends his cheeky caption of a tea-partier with a Confederate flag as “pro-slavery” by saying that he “desire[s] to live in a world in which the social understanding is that embracing the Confederate Battle Flag is an embrace of the cause of treason in defense of slavery.” More generally, it should be the burden of those who display the Confederate flag to explain why they aren’t in support of treason in defense of slavery and that people should not really listen to these reasons and should understand the Confederate flag to be just that: an emblem that symobilizes treason and the continuation of human bondage.

Yglesias also includes this picture:

Notice something interesting? Just as the Civil Rights Movement is beginning, Georgia decides to alter their existing state flag to include the Confederate battle flag. This does not strike me as coincidental or something that supports the claim that displaying the Confederate flag is about support for some notion of Southern heritage that has nothing to do with slavery or treason or the oppression of black people.

Read Jamelle too.

Friend of the blog Jamelle Bouie disagrees with this denunciation of Bill Clinton from the left:

- In reading this post from Bruce Reed the other day offering advice to Obama and the Democrats, while trumpeting Bill Clinton’s political adjustments after the 1994 election, this thought kept occurring to me — has there ever been a less consequential two-term president in the history of the United States than Bill Clinton?  Seriously, what did he accomplish in his eight years?  A balanced budget.  That’s something.  There was prosperity on his watch — but how much of that was ephemeral and how much of it was Clinton’s doing?  It seems to me that the neo-liberal policies that he embraced were not all that different from those of Reagan and Bush II — oh they were the free market with a human face of sorts, but by and large he helped foster the bubble economy.

One thing that hasn’t happened yet — but should — is that liberals who are noting that Republican obstructionism and the 60 vote Senate are the primary causes of a frustrating first year for Obama should become much more sympathetic to Bill Clinton. After all, Clinton was in much worse shape than Obama to pass any progressive legislation. He was elected with well under 50% of the popular vote and from 1994 to 2000 had to face Republican majorities in Congress. That he was able to do anything worthwhile — and balancing the budget was worthwhile — is remarkable. Now, there is room to complain about his priorities in office and whether NAFTA and welfare reform were really key components of any type of progressive or liberal agenda, but it seems impossible to say that the only reason that the Clinton administration didn’t produce the progressive results one might have wanted had much to do with Clinton himself.

Everyone should read Ben McGrath’s sympathetic, yet quite damning piece on the Tea Party Movement in the New Yorker. There’s all sorts of great stuff in there — from interviews of the nutty and sensible people involved in a true grassroots movement to some good historical analysis of where the Tea Party fits in with other populist movements in American history — but I wanted to focus on this bit, Republican representative Geoff Davis’ denunciation of cap-and-trade:

Geoff Davis, brought up the proposed cap-and-trade legislation favored by Democrats, and called it an “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.”

Of course, this is a pretty clear misrepresentation of how any carbon pricing scheme would work. While it is certainly true that cap-and-trade would mean higher costs for those whom carbon consumption makes a bigger portion of their income — the middle class who has to commute a lot, the rural poor — this overall picture of how liberal programs work is almost strikingly inaccurate. Putting aside that cap-and-trade wouldn’t pay for “social programs in the large coastal states,” this overall picture of how taxing and spending works in the U.S. obscures the fact that the states with the highest per capita incomes are generally  liberal and so end up transferring a lot of that money to the poorer states, which are generally more conservative.

In lots of Tea Party/right-wing populist rhetoric you see this overwhelming concern with money being transferred from those who are upright Americans who deserve it to un-American leeches who use their powerful, liberal representatives to make these heists legitimate. I think this goes to show that the ideas and passions of the Tea Party are really just those that have animated the modern conservative movement for as long as its existed and that, pace Yglesias, people are much less likely to support redistribution to strangers when they themselves are suffering economically.

Paul Krugman thinks that Obama, like Reagan in the beginning of his first term, should blame the weak economy on his predecessor:

Finally, about that narrative: It’s instructive to compare Mr. Obama’s rhetorical stance on the economy with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s often forgotten now, but unemployment actually soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan, however, had a ready answer for critics: everything going wrong was the result of the failed policies of the past. In effect, Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

Maybe this is good advice, maybe it isn’t, but it’s worth noting the main differences between the two scenarios. Basically, because Reagan and Paul Volcker were directly responsible for the recession, Reagan had to blame Carter.  Although Bush was much more responsible for the current recession than Obama, Obama has pursued policies that have been purely expansionary in intent and still hasn’t gotten any political credit for doing so.  This situation, oddly enough, constrains him because it looks like he is deflecting criticism from his supposedly ineffective economic policies. Reagan, on the other hand, had no choice but to furiously distract people from the fact that he, along with Paul Volcker, was deliberately engineering a recession.

There are two Irving Kristols. One is the wide-ranging, detached and influential New York Intellectual of the 40s, 50s and most of the 60s. This was the man who was at the center of an intellectual culture whose scope and influence is only rivaled by Bloomsbury and 1930s Vienna. Although his colleagues produced more substantial work of lasting import (Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, Nathan Glazer), Kristol was hardly some intellectual dilettante.

But then in the 1970s and onward, he turned into one of the most dangerous creatures that can exist in the public sphere: the ironic, cynical ideologue. Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan both point out that Kristol openly and blatantly disregarded expertise in economics when selecting supply-side pieces to be published in the Public Interest and maintained a thoroughgoing agnosticism despite publicly insisting that religion was necessary for the maintenance of the values that hold society together. Kristol himself, the philosopher king of the Republican Party, could maintain a basically faithless, cosmopolitan life among intellectual elites of all political stripes, but the masses could not. It’s not so much that he made arguments for the superiority of white-middle class values and religion in bad faith, it’s that his entire intellectual style — whatever is good for the Republican Party is true — doesn’t admit any difference between good and bad faith.  When you see his son, William, be so cynical and cavalier about the truth or any objective standards for candidates besides the ability to provide a short-term boost to a flagging Republican presidential campaign (Palin, Sarah) you are seeing the inevitable result of his father’s style.

Of course, Kristol’s heirs could use some cynicism — the conservative movement’s obscene faith in the magical ability of supple side tax cuts is nothing if not sincere — but it should be recognized that much of the synthesis that defines the conservative movement was conceived in a way that regarded intellectual honesty and skepticism as a crutch.

PS – Even if you don’t think that “ideas” or intellectuals are the driving forces of political coalition building or success, it’s still worth pointing out that the conservative movement reveres Kristol.

Finally, after electing a president who wasn’t defined by an irresponsibly belligerent response to the murder of 3,000 Americans, I think we can gain some perspective on how the events that day revealed much of America and its political leadership to be fundamentally weak, immature and irresponsible.

Many countries have seen tragedies. Many countries have been attacked by outsiders. And they have nearly all responded by drawing in on themselves and becoming more hostile to the outside world. But America is different. Our understandable anger and paranoia turned into something horrible, not only for those Americans who have seen their constitutional values destroyed and their friends and relatives sent off to die in a pointless war, but for all the Iraqis and Afghans who have died needlessly or have found themselves locked up in a Kafka-esque island fortress for being aligned with the wrong warlord in the Hindu Kush. One would hope that America’s size, strength and influence would breed a certain sense of responsibility and humility, an awareness of how our actions affect the entire world, for good as well as evil. Instead, we had a political class intent on war and the nullification of our the principles that are the supposed bedrock of our nation.

Instead of tempering our anger and fear and distrust, they played on it. The media and the public, instead of being wary of demagogues who use times of fear to advance nefarious ends, were enthralled with the idea of projecting power and strength, with little care for the consequences we’d bring upon ourselves or inflict on to others. We were hurt and humiliated, but not chastened.

In stark contrast to the collective failure of our leaders, the culture has largely recovered. Though the memory of 9/11 was manipulated by those who have nothing but contempt for our cosmopolitan, urban centers that are the driving force of our culture and our economy, the victims were largely New Yorkers. They were blue staters, living in a city whose greatness is a product of its diversity and dynamic cultural energy, values that a revanchist, hostile right can’t stand. And New York, the site of the attacks, recovered. There were those who talked about how humor and irony would be impossible after 9/11. How New Yorkers would give up their decadence, get settled down and have kids. But it never happened. New York retained its essential cosmopolitan identity. Comedy and irony, two great American values which seem to be infused into the lifeblood of our cultural capital, are still with us. New York is still New York, though scarred. It’s noteworthy how the culture of American — that ineffable product of 300 million people interacting and desiring and producing — survived the trauma of that day, while our politics, which is marked by unconscionable amount of cynicism, bad faith and utter uncaring for those hurt by the power wielded by America, could not. It suggests that while we can come under the thrall of bad people, we are still, in some sense, good.

When I first saw that Ted Kennedy had died, I had my own blog-obit already planned out. I was going to talk about despite having the least impressive natural endowments of the three political Kennedy brothers, how he actually achieved the most good of any of them (not the most original point, I know). But then Dylan, despite it being very early in the morning/late at night on the East Coast, explained his policy achievements much better than I could. Then Tim Noah’s obit went up, and yeah, that’s really what I was getting after. But here are some scattered thoughts.

I guess what’s so interesting about Kennedy is the sharp contrast between his staggering substantive accomplishments and the procedural travesty that was his political existence. To put it simply, he never really worked for anything, and none of his accomplishments — with the exception of all the legislation for which he’s responsible — were very much a reflection of anything besides the luck of his birth.

He got into Harvard because he was Kennedy, and then got kicked out for cheating. He enlisted in the Army because he was draft eligible, but through his father’s connections got a plumb job at NATO headquarters and left the service as a private. He went back to Harvard, graduated, and went on to law school. Only because he wasn’t yet old enough to become senator, he waited out a few years as a Boston assistant district attorney, and then won his first senate election at the age of 30 in what Joe Klein describes as “the closest thing to a regency appointment the Senate had ever seen.”

Then, inexplicably, when one considers anything else besides his breeding, he was considered as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate, but demurred. And then Chappaquiddick. It was through a combination of the press’s love for the Kennedy mystique and the now-baffling level of deference that the media and the public gave politicians for grave personal failings that Kennedy was able to survive politically an incident that, at best, refelcted a horrible combination of entitlement, cowardice and callousness.

The point of recounting all of this is to show that Kennedy’s rise and sustained influence reflect the type of privilige on account of birth and social standing that ought to sicken every liberal. If liberalism means anything, it’s diminishing the influence of birth on one’s chances in life. And, almost too ironically, Ted Kennedy is probably the political figure who has done the most to make that vision, that dream, to anything close to a reality in the United States.

It was because of his name that he never had to be worried about reelection. Once again, on a procedural level, Kennedy’s lifetime Senate seat was distressing, but substantively it allowed Kennedy to be bolder in his vision for American than nearly any other senator. As Matt Yglesias points out, Kennedy was  able to achieve so much through another illiberal, anachronistic feature of our political system — the cult of seniority in the Senate. Just like the deep social injustice of inherited wealth and power that allowed Kennedy to become so powerful, the seniority system in the Senate is systematically illiberal. There are far many Max Baucuses than Teddy Kennedys.

But unlike so many others who achieve so much purely on the basis of their birth and accrue so much power simply by staying around for so long, Kennedy recognized that his great power and privilege could be used for good, to help those who didn’t have the advantages Kennedy was born with. No matter how sickening the cult of Kennedys is, no matter how offensive it is to basic American values to have “political royalty,” at least Kennedy had the oblige befitting his noblesse.

Hopefully, one day, there won’t be anymore Ted Kennedys. And, if that day comes, it will be because Kennedy’s vision was finally realized.

Sally Quinn’s Post article where she elicits quotes from a bipartisan clique of Washington’s elites expressing their utter shame and dismay in response to Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Monica investigation has been criticized over and over. I won’t go line-by-line or explain why it’s so horrible — just read it – but this one quote is just so absurd in light of the events that occurred between Jan 20, 2001 and Jan 20, 2009:

Washington’s insider press corps has shown little pity for any of them. The feeling toward the president is similar.

“The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

The crazy thing about the collective freakout to Monica-gate and Bill Clinton more generally is how little sense it made on its own terms. It’s obvious that the press and the greater Washington elite doesn’t mind being lied to — there was no equivalent freakout about Iran Contra or the pre-war intelligence fiasco — but the fact that they were willing to cut Bush so much slack despite the fact that he, in a deep way, despised Washington as a city and as a social group is really just mind boggling.

Michael Gerson has figured out why Democrats support government subsidies for poor women who want to get the same basic medical treatments as wealthy and middle class women:

But there is another view of the disadvantaged found on the left (and not only on the left). Instead of especially valuing the experience of the disadvantaged, some hope that public policy can thin their ranks. This is no longer pursued through the eugenic decrees that Holmes admired but through the advocacy of Medicaid abortions.

It is estimated that the Hyde Amendment limiting Medicaid abortions has saved 1 million lives since its passage in 1976 — some, no doubt, became criminals and some, perhaps, lawyers and judges. It is a defining question for modern liberalism: Are these men and women “populations that we don’t want to have too many of” or are they citizens worthy of justice and capable of contribution?

Now, I think I’m more “conservative” than many liberals and feminists, in a way, in thinking that not only was the entire population control and eugenics movement horrible, but also something liberals — and especially self styled progressives — should acknowledge wasn’t just some aberration and that we should deal with this dark chapter in our history openly and honestly. That all being said, Gerson is just amazingly wrong.

The reason the overwhelming majority of liberals and progressives support family planning in all its guises is because we believe that women are truly free when they have autonomy over their bodies and reproductive lives. And so we think that when poor women can’t pay for the medical services that allow them to exercise this autonomy — i.e. abortion services — the government should help out. What the Hyde amendment did was specifically target poor women and denied them the means to get abortions by denying them any coverage through Medicaid. When Jonah Goldberg wrote this column a few days ago, he was able to scare up some old quotes from Ben Waddington and Nicholas von Hoffman saying nasty stuff, but Gerson can’t even do that.

If Gerson were right and pro-choicers were really closet eugenicists who wanted to thin the ranks of poor people, we would be trying to discourage the wealthy and middle class from getting abortions and encouraging the poor to do so. But, of course, that’s not how it works. We simply want access to medical services — especially those medical services which we think help enable autonomy and reproductive control — to be available to everyone regardless of their income.

And as a final note, this has nothing to do with Gerson, but I find it highly odd that conservatives accuse liberals and progressives of being closet eugenicists while they’re the ones who think that Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray is some amazing intellectual.

Kevin Drum, who initially had some harsh words for Matt Taibbi’s Goldman Sachs piece in Rolling Stone, recants:

It’s a very good takedown of the modern financial industry and well worth reading. There are some bits here and there that I’m not sure Taibbi gets quite right, and I do think that he made a mistake in casting Goldman Sachs as the “engineer” of every bubble in the past century rather than merely an unusually big and enthusiastic member of a predatory gang that’s been ripping us off for a long time. This gives the piece a conspiratorial air that allows Goldman to laugh it off instead of being forced to engage with it, and that’s too bad. They — and everyone else on Wall Street — should be forced to engage with it.

This doesn’t strike me as such great praise. It’s hardly a novel point that financial institutions get greedy and short sighted and then cause panics and economic downturns. It’s also not a novel point that financial instituions, because of their great wealth, often get the government to do their bidding, and that this coziness allows them to take even greater risks, make more money, become less regulated and then leave the economy in shambles when it all falls down.

What made Taibbi’s piece different — and wrong for exactly the reason Kevin Drum says — was his contention that at every turn, one financial institution, Goldman Sachs, was being especially, even deliberately, nefarious. This is what gives it that “conspiratorial air.”

Furthermore, Taibbi takes pains to argue that Goldman was always leading the way, “engineering every major market manipulation since the Great Depression,” when in nearly all the cases he outlines, they were doing doing roughly what other companies were doing for the same reasons. This doesn’t, of course, excuse their shady behavior in the 1990s during the tech boom or in any other instance, but it certainly complicates Taibbi’s central thesis. One could argue that by showering so much attention on one company, Goldman, Taibbi weakens the more general, true and important argument that it’s the financial sector as a whole that we need to be worried about.

I understand why Taibbi wanted to focus on one well known, sucessful and politically influential institution to tell his story, but just because a certain way of presenting facts allows for a good story doesn’t make it more true.

Chris Hayes has a good essay in TAP on the oddly resurgent view that recessions, and even depressions, are not just normal parts of the business cycle, but are even morally beneficial.

As his modern example of this school, he focuses on Robert Samuelson, who constantly gripes about too-high social spending, and wrote The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, which is a history of how economic planners in the 60s and 70s believed that there was an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment, and thus promoted inlfationary monetary policy for essentially political reasons. There was then the horrible wage-price spiral, bracket-creep and stagflation, which helped pave the way for the election of Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker heroically plunging the economy into recession in the early 1980s to purge inflation out of the system.

That’s at least the mainstream center-left to center-right narrative. Here’s Hayes’ version of the story, which, since it’s Chris Hayes, is the smartest possible leftist/social democratic version of those events:

It’s unclear however, whether the persistent inflation of the time was the result of the nature of the social contract, or a confluence of factors: a very long debt-financed war in Vietnam, combined with a loose monetary policy. And it is almost certainly true (and hardly controversial) that stable prices, while necessary for strong economic growth, are certainly not sufficient: George W Bush presided over one of the lowest average inflation rates of any post-war American president, yet his term left average wage earners worse off while precipitating the worst financial crisis in 80 years.

But for Samuelson, inflation is enemy number one, so much so that wringing it out of a system makes recessions look not so bad. “Recessions also have often-overlooked benefits,” he wrote in his Newsweek column last year, echoing, in an albeit softer tone, Mellon and Schumpeter. “They dampen inflation. In weak markets, companies can’t easily raise prices or workers’ wages. Similarly, recessions punish reckless financial speculation and poor corporate investments. Bad bets don’t pay off.”

With the unemployment sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, workers will think twice about asking for a raise, and all of this will lead to a robust kind of capitalism for the capitalists: one with low inflation, low interest rates and very high return to capital. If that sounds familiar, it’s an apt description of the economy of at least the last two decades, a kind of capitalism recently proven far less stable than it may have appeared, but one for which Samuelson is an unapologetic partisan: “The new economic order,” Samuelson writes, “is indeed inferior to the imagined and romanticized version of the old order. But it’s superior to the old order as it actually operated.”

Chris’ larger point, at the end of the essay, is that economies require some sort of political management, and that the Chicago School/Mellonist account of depressions and recessions as natural parts of the business cycle is one that A. is simply incorrect and B. not coincidentally tends towards favoring those policies which benefit the wealthy, lending and poweful. I largely agree with him — and Paul Krugman, whose work on recessions he cites — but I think the episode Samuelson recounts is a truely exceptional case.

That’s because the recession of 1981 was, unlike the recessions and depressions that business cycle theorists and Mellonists occasionally laud, was deliberately engineered by Volcker to break the inflation that was crippling the economy. He intentionally drove interest rates up so that prices would finally fall, even if it meant a decrease in growth.  Unlike other recessions, which aren’t good for the economy and simply lead to a lot of wasted capacity and unnecessary human suffereing, the 81-82 recession was specfically designed to achieve some long-term positive results for the national economy. Most recessions, needless to say, aren’t deliberately managed by financial wizards like Paul Volcker.

While Hayes is right to say that the inflation had more causes besides the obsession with keeping unemployment down, there is no denying that acertain ignorance of the micro-foundations of macro movements in the economy played a large part in the horrible mismanagement of the economy during that time. Of course, those seeking to explain everything in the macro economy by reference to micro-foundations haven’t been very sucessful, but the case of stagflation and the Phillips Curve wasn’t only a general vindication of this approach, but a very specific example of what happens when policymakers just look at historical relationships and totally ignore how individual participants in a market will respond to their policies.

Back to Hayes more general point — that “economies need management and policy to maintain some kind of equilibrium” and moreover “it will be politics, not technical expertise, which provides the principles and rules that regulate” — I think that the early 80s are probably the best example of this. Reagan’s inflation crushing had a whole lot to do with this overall political agenda, and Volcker was only able to pursue his monetary agenda because the political circumstances favored it.

I’ve had a very progressive week. On Tuesday, I was working at Campus Progress’ Journalism in Action Day, where young aspiring journalists reported a story on health care, and then progressive writers critiqued them. Wednesday was the Campus Progress National Conference, where “Liberal Heroes Bill Clinton and Matt Yglesias Woo Interns At Conference,” and yesterday was the Campus Progress/The Nation Journalism conference. Yglesias, who flitted through the conference proceedings on the way to and from his office in the Think Progress blogcave, was basically well to the right of most of the attendees, who ranged from John “massive, explicit subsidies to newspapers” Nichols to Ana Marie “I used to write for a basically small-m Marxist publication” Cox to William “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country” Greider. And while, and I’m being serious here, I really enjoyed all three days of conference events and was edified by every panel or discussion that I attended or somehow assisted, I need a little hardcore reaction to give some balance to this immense week of progressivism.

And for that, let me say that I agree nearly in toto with Megan McArdle’s takedown of Matt Taibbi’s infamous Goldman Sachs piece.

You should read her entire critique, but I’ll just add that the common thread between Taibbi’s examples of Goldman’s supposedly dastardly behavior is that he can’t really establish that Goldman was doing something so much worse than the rest of the big investment banking world. His desire to find one powerful, satisfying villain is the original sin of the piece. I understand why, as someone who likes writing satisfying, well constructed narratives — which Taibbi often does — he went with this approach, but it doesn’t make his piece particularly enlightening or informative.

I’m not saying that the big financial institutions aren’t responsible for our current predicament and are using their political clout to block sensible, important reforms. I’m just saying that the focus ought to be on the industry as a whole, not on just on one company that has been particularly sucessful.

I can’t think of anyone better than the former editor of Ramparts to eulogize McNamara. Here’s the best part:

But whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him. To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense.

Robert McNamara, who died today at the age of 93 was a very smart man who was directly culpable for one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history. He realized that the war in Vietnam was an immoral and unwinnable, and yet refused to speak out against it. His apologies, thirty later, only illuminated how banally monstrous he was. If you believe in a just God, you know the eternal fate of McNamara’s soul. If you don’t, then you take it upon yourself to bear witness to the horrible deeds that defined him.