How Long Does Experience Keep a Dear School, Anyway?
Ron Beasley’s prediction of a failed Obama presidency will tick off some partisan Dem commenters. I think we have to distinguish some confounding factors we can’t know yet.
One school of thought – mine, half the time – has it that Frank Jones was right all along: “The first black president will be a conservative.” The funniest thing about the wingnut complaint that Barack Obama harbors a deep-seated hatred of America and All We Hold Dear is not just how obviously, laughably wrong it is, but how understandably wrong it is. Recognize that all politicians have a narcissistic streak. What America is, then, to Barack Obama is a country and a system that has brought him personally to the pinnacle of power, despite all its and his cultural baggage. Of course Obama loves America. Of course he will have a fundamentally conservative (in the root sense) attitude toward it. Therefore he will ultimately feel protective of the status quo – its military-industrial complex; its financial sector; its power brokers: the way America works. Because ultimately America works very well because even Barack Obama can grow up to be President.
Another school of thought – mine, only very occasionally – holds that Barack Obama has firm progressive ambitions but is playing the long game of letting his enemies over-extend themselves. On this view, how things look in August of 2009 matters much less than how things look in August 2012. This conforms exactly to the old “rope-a-dope” theory of Bushian political genius current among right-wingers in the early years of the decade. So, let’s not kid ourselves.
A third school of thought – mine, most of the rest of the time – is that Obama has some progressive instincts but was naive about the opposition he’s facing, and has gotten rolled on almost every issue since taking office as a result; yes, even including the stimulus that he allowed the Senate to chop down. You can conflate this with another theory that Obama imagined that much milder measures would suffice than the present moment calls for. This seems to be the Ron Beasley school. Here the question is one Beasley doesn’t address: whether the Obama administration can learn. Can Obama change approaches and personnel in time to make a successful (in political and policy terms) first term?
I’ve become a pessimist. I think our future is Argentinian: a nation’s elites can have very nice lives for themselves if the commonality is financially secure and healthy, but history shows that a nation’s elites can have very nice lives for themselves even if most people live crabbed, fretful existences. You just need more security guards or, if necessary, paramilitaries. Since the financial crisis of last year, we’ve seen that the FIRE sector will work overtime to redistribute wealth to itself while working overtime to keep from redistributing wealth elsewhere. I think that with the normalization of the filibuster in the Senate, we’ve just about completed a revolution-within-the-form that is a much bigger deal than Barack Obama’s personal failings. The government works perfectly well at ensuring the lifestyles of defense contractors and investment bankers. That is its purpose. America may have one more good bubble in it. Or we may go straight to villas and bodyguards for the comely daughters.
Comment by Chris Gerrib —
August 18, 2009 @ 12:26 pm
I think we all tend to forget how long it takes to get things done in the real world. I mean, we’re not even a quarter of the way in to Obama’s first term yet. Take a deep breath and give the guy a chance.
Comment by Carlos —
August 18, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
Jim, speaking as someone who has lived in places like you describe, if you think the U.S. is even twenty percent of the way there, you’re on the bad stuff.
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August 18, 2009 @ 12:59 pm
[...] If Jim had just read this post… Obama has some progressive instincts but was naive about the [...]
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 18, 2009 @ 1:07 pm
Carlos, I do take your point as far as it goes. I said “future” rather than “present” for a reason. In any case, best to head off full-blown phalangism before it occurs.
Chris: the same complaint actually applies to you, I think. From you’re different perspectives you seem to be saying, “Has the plane actually hit the mountain yet? No? Then stop whining about the view of the looming escarpment.
Comment by Carlos —
August 18, 2009 @ 1:43 pm
I think we’re well within the historical band of American crappiness.
Setting aside the race and gender and technological differences — which were huge, and all in a negative direction — Woodrow Wilson’s America was politically worse. More corrupt, less transparent — who was running the White House after Wilson’s stroke? — and crazy abuses of executive power at all levels of government.
Eisenhower’s America was also worse, with the same provisos. The Red Scare. The Lavender Scare, Federal agents proud about hounding people into suicide. One percent of the Federal budget went to the secret manufacture of plutonium. J. Edgar Hoover running what was effectively a domestic secret police force, while ignoring the growth of actual crime.
Reagan’s America, not too great either. I trust I don’t have to go into detail.
So this myth of decline into Argentina-hood doesn’t really hold up. There hasn’t been a slow slide into Evitaland; we’ve always had a mildly unpleasant, venal and corrupt political system that preferred protecting the rich.
(And for the seventy percent or so of those Americans who are affected in those provisos I assumed away, things have become noticeably better. Trust me, this doesn’t often happen in Argentina-like places.)
I don’t want to accuse you of whining. But I think this is a story you’re telling yourself to reinforce your emotional state, not one based on evidence.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 18, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
If Barack Obama doesn’t withdraw from Afghanistan like he promised, his presidency is a failure! Lol.
A center-left politician runs in the primary as a center-left politician, runs in the general election as a center-left politician, and governs during the first 1/16th of his presidency as a center-left politician – so obviously, it’s time to start talking about what a failure he is, because he hasn’t implemented the leftist policies he didn’t run on.
Absurd.
Comment by Elijah —
August 18, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
Carlos’s point (about ye not so golden years) is well taken, but in and of itself its insufficient to make his point (which I take to be that the future is not as bleak as Jim envisions it).
To make it convincing, he has to tell us of the structural mechanisms that made it possible for the U.S. to (at least temporarily) avoid an Argentinian-like meltdown. The Wilson-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover plutocracy were helped out by the World War II full employment regime. As to the Wilson-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover-FDR-Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama police state, yes, its never left us, but there was a small crack in the edifice in the Ford-Carter interregnum brought about by the infighting among the American elite (perhaps precipitated by the shift from a Fordist economy to a neoliberal economy).
Which is to say, short of a war with a powerful, truly powerful enemy (China?), I don’t see the American elite needing the poor enough to stop starving, imprisoning, and killing them with processed carcinogens.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
August 18, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
Huh? He promised the exact opposite, which is why his presidency is already a failure in moral terms. America’s Afpak policy directly precipitated the biggest refugee crisis since Rwanda, in the Swat valley of Pakistan.
I dearly hope US foreign policy over the next eight years does not consist of fifteen more such crises, because that means by 2016 around 1 person in 200 out of all the people on Earth will be a refugee because of Obama.
Comment by doubled —
August 18, 2009 @ 2:41 pm
Carlos says : “I think we’re well within the historical band of American crappiness.”
As oppossed to the historical band of world utopia that the rest of humanity gets to enjoy?
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 18, 2009 @ 2:47 pm
Neel,
The “Lol” was meant to indicate sarcasm.
And “failure” is not defined in terms of whether a president meets your goals, but whether he meets his own. Reagan was a hugely successful president – that doesn’t mean I support what he did.
Huh. I here I thought it was the Pakistani government that invaded the SWAT valley.
Comment by doubled —
August 18, 2009 @ 2:54 pm
Jim says : “The government works perfectly well at ensuring the lifestyles of defense contractors and investment bankers. That is its purpose.”
Why single out just those two examples? The government also works pretty well for the politicians who act more like they are royalty to be appeased and catered to, than as servants elected to govern individuals instead of special interest groups, a list of which is a tad longer than just defense contractors and investment bankers.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 18, 2009 @ 2:59 pm
As Phil Gramm taught us, one of the ways “the government” serves the interest of investment bankers is to block others in the government from compelling them to act responsibly.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
August 18, 2009 @ 3:11 pm
It’s crazy, I know, but client states do what their hegemon tells them to. The Pakistani army was sent into the Swat valley (only one capital letter needed) because the US government demanded they be sent — remember Clinton’s panicked and intemperate comments back in April and May?
Left to their own devices, the Pakistani government wouldn’t have done jack. The Swat valley is full of Pashtuns, who the Sindhi/Punjabi majority regard as a bunch of illiterate backwood hicks. Hence, they didn’t give a crap what was going on in Swat.
But then the US government got a bug up its ass about the local Taliban in Swat. Then, they got another got a bug up its ass about the fact that the Pakistani government didn’t seem to have a bug up its own ass about the local Taliban in Swat. So they demanded that the army be sent in, and the Pakistani elite complied after only mild grumbling — after all, only Pashtuns would get the boot. Cue two million refugees fleeing their homes.
So yeah, there’s blood on the administration’s hands here.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 18, 2009 @ 3:16 pm
It does seem like, in other threads, Joe has characterized the Pak military’s campaign in the Swat valley as a diplomatic triumph for the Obama administration. Am I misremembering?
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 18, 2009 @ 3:30 pm
That’s a nice little story, but a more likely one involves the Pakistani Taliban killing Bhutto, conducting a series of bombings throughout the country (including Shiite mosques) and waging war on the Pakistani government.
I thought you were at least making a respectable argument, that it was the American involvement in Afghanistan that led to a large terrorist presence in Pakistan which was hostile to the government. That’s at least plausible.
Big Bad America bullying the Pakistani government in fighting the people waging war on the citizens, on the other hand, is just cramming the facts into a poorly-fitting costume.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 18, 2009 @ 3:32 pm
Jim,
I think I remember what you’re referring to. IIRC, I was pointing to the Pakistani’s offensive against their terror threat to refute someone else’s point about our efforts alienating the Pakistanis, not to make an affirmative case about Obama.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
August 18, 2009 @ 4:02 pm
At the very least, the official stories do not link the Taliban with Bhutto’s death. The PPP (Bhutto’s party) claimed the Musharaff government was behind it. The government denied this, and claimed the organization responsible was Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
LeJ are Punjabi Islamic radicals — that is, they are not Pashtun, and not the Taliban. LeJ are also the people responsible for attacks on the Shia, not the Taliban.
You cannot view radical Islamic groups as an amorphous blob and understand anything about Pakistan.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 18, 2009 @ 4:31 pm
My bad, I used “Taliban” loosely. I meant to refer both to the actual Taliban, and the other Islamic fundamentalist militants and terrorists who are allied with them.
Initially, but very briefly. It was long-ago conclusively pinned on a group led by the guy we hit with a Predator last week.
You cannot deny that the radical Sunni Islamic groups in Pakistan are working together as part of an alliance and understand anything about Pakistan.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 18, 2009 @ 4:34 pm
But, again, this is all irrelevant to Jim’s point.
The success of Barack Obama’s presidency cannot be judged based on what Neel would like him to do, any more than the success of Ronald Reagan’s can be judged based on what I wanted him to do.
Comment by Carlos —
August 18, 2009 @ 4:57 pm
7: Actually, I don’t, because I don’t think Argentina’s institutions were ever in good shape. That might change in the future to their benefit, or it might not. In comparison, the United States’ institutions have functioned historically at a very high level by global standards (although that probably includes things you consider part of a police state). Anyhow, I think the extraordinary claim here is institutional collapse, which requires extraordinary evidence. Muddling through with incremental progress, each generation bitching anew, looks more like the American norm to me.
9: You might recognize that “band” is a term from currency trading, and that crappiness is entirely relative. But since emotionally normal human beings don’t immediately ask strangers questions with the form and intent of, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” I don’t think your comment was meant in good faith.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 18, 2009 @ 5:05 pm
joe, I am not an expert on the different factions active in Pakistan, but I find that the biggest mistake outsiders make in most such situations is to assume that “all those people are on the same side.” If Neel tells me that
The Pakistani People’s FrontTaliban are a very different bunch of religious fanatics than thePeople’s Front of PakistanLashkar-e-Jhangvi, with opposing goals, and if he seems to be pretty well informed about Pakistan, then I am inclined to believe him when he says that the Pashtuns in the Swat Valley didn’t have squat to do with the other problems.Now, I am always open to the possibility that different factions will cooperate when they find it convenient, but I also suspect that cooperation between opposing factions is most likely when a third party tries to get involved.
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August 18, 2009 @ 5:47 pm
[...] “The government works perfectly well at ensuring the lifestyles of defense contractors and investment bankers. That is its purpose.” – Jim Henley [...]
Comment by BDB —
August 18, 2009 @ 6:21 pm
“Reagan’s America, not too great either. I trust I don’t have to go into detail.”
Sorry, but the ’80s and especially ’90s were better than the ’00s. The last nine years have sucked the big one in just about every way you can think of politically, economically, and culturally.
You’d have to go back to the mid to late ’70s, the Malaise Era, to find a period as all-around crappy.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
August 18, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
I can deny this, because it is not true. The country’s full name is The Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Every point along the political spectrum, from democrats to militarists to rebels, is chock full of Sunni Islamists.
The military and intelligence services have been dominated by Islamists since the 1970s, even before Zia ul-Haq’s coup d’etat and declaration of Pakistan as an Islamic state. Both the civilian government and the opposition in Parliament are Islamist — one half of the civilian government, Nawaz Sharif’s PML(N), was responsible for the introduction of sharia law in Pakistan. The opposition is headed by the PML(Q), another Islamist party. (PML stands for “Pakistani Muslim League” — the two parties split back in 2001.)
When you hear “Lashkar-e-whatever”, you are hearing about a bunch of different terrorist groups (not necessarily friendly with, or related to, one another — “lashkar” is just Urdu for “army”). They are not allies with the Taliban, because as the name suggests, they are mostly Punjabi or Mohajir (refugees from India from the Partition), and tend to have an interest on India due to the ethnic and historical connection.
As a result, these groups often have close ties with the ISI and military. The military tends to turn a blind eye to what they do within Pakistan, as long as it weakens the hand of the civilian government.
Comment by Elijah —
August 18, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
Carlos states: “Anyhow, I think the extraordinary claim here is institutional collapse, which requires extraordinary evidence.”
Um, no, Jim’s claim is rather ordinary: not institutional collapse, but institutional capture of institutions; more precisely, the entrenchment of the most connected, most organized military-corporate interests. Which would mean, not the collapse of institutions, but an even greater orientation to preying on the interests of a broad majority, a significant section of which is poor and lower middle-class.
Carlos, again: “Muddling through with incremental progress, each generation bitching anew, looks more like the American norm to me.”
“Muddling through with with incremental progress” may be a slight improvement on a Whig theory of history, but not by much.The United States has been historically “lucky” to have certain redistributive jolts check its oligarchies — such as the Jacksonian “white male democratization” (bought with the genocide of Indians and Westward expansion), etc. But such jolts have been far from inevitable (and I don’t think “norms” count as a persuasive mechanism).
Comment by Thoreau —
August 18, 2009 @ 7:00 pm
Neel-
What you say makes sense, but what of the apparent connections between ISI and the Taliban (past and/or present)? Is it one of those things where these different Islamist groups rarely work with each other, but many of them work with the ISI to whatever extent ISI finds them useful? So, if ISI finds it useful to weaken the civilian government in the Pashtun areas and/or stir up shit in their neighbor to the north, they will support some groups like the Taliban, but that doesn’t mean the Taliban will work with Punjabi Islamists?
Or am I misreading you?
Comment by Carlos —
August 18, 2009 @ 7:55 pm
25: I think you don’t know American history at a fine-grained enough level to make those statements. Pick a decade from 1870 to 1930 and I will find you corporate hooks embedded in the highest levels of government, institutional capture of the highest order: the courts, the legislature, and the executive. Arms merchants, prison labor, bankers, an inbred elite, a jingo press, you name it. Any of the ills you think infect American society today, I will see you and raise.
Comment by Elijah —
August 18, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
Carlos, yet again you misread: my point is not that we are worse off than other eras that saw institutional capture. My point is that we are seeing, yet again, a trend toward greater inequality, greater concentration of wealth, etc much like we saw in say, 1895. I lack your faith in thinking that this will all be inevitably checked or stopped. As I pointed out, there are specific structural factors that accounted for the checking of these trends in the past and that’s what I was contesting in your post — i.e. I don’t think an amorphous faith in America’s ability to “muddle through” will do as an explanation. And, yes, I have a fine grained enough knowledge of American history. In any case, I was concerned to challenge the historiography with which you were interpreting the facts of history.
Comment by Kolohe —
August 19, 2009 @ 2:52 am
re: swat.
To say that the current round of pakistani army vs swat insurgents started less than 7 months ago is simply not correct, as is easily seen in a google news search of ’swat valley’ for 2007 and 2008.
To say the refugee problem started less than 7 months ago ago is also simply not correct:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-12-29-pakistan-swat-valley_N.htm
Last, you can argue as to whether or not the bennefit is worth the cost, and the specifics of implementation, but the Pakistani govt policy & army incursions are not prima facie wrong. If some hypothetical hybrid of mafiosos, neo-confederates, and dominionists formed in the Ozarks and declared themselves to be true goverment of the area (or acted as a shadow govenerment) there would be no question that the United States Federal Goverment, even under the most right wing president, would go in and clear them out by force and restore both the rightful Arkansas and Federal authority to the region. Sure a lot innocent bystanders would be killed and many civlians would flee to Little Rock (or St Louis), but it would be not only constutionally required, but also the right thing to do.
Comment by Kolohe —
August 19, 2009 @ 5:30 am
Now, based on his speech at the Phoenix VFW convention a day or so ago, it is entirely fair to say that Obama still very much wants America to remain in hegemon business. And he used the same exact rhetoric on the campaign trail. But since I too want America to remain in the hegemon business, I don’t have a problem with it. I agree with Mr Henley is that the right wing rhetoric that we will ’surrender’ (to whomever) is quite dumb.
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August 19, 2009 @ 8:27 am
[...] Henley is in the grips of despair and I don’t think he even favors universal health care: I’ve become a pessimist. I think [...]
Comment by Carlos —
August 19, 2009 @ 8:28 am
28: I don’t think you do, because I recognize your model of historical process. It’s basically modified Toynbee challenge-and-response, several decades out of date, and it was kind of ridiculous when he first promoted it. (You might not have got it from Toynbee, but that would only mean you’re not familiar enough with historiography to recognize its roots.)
Appealing to this obsolescent model as an authority, while (more important) not providing any concrete examples how it’s supposed to work, combined with your characterization of the contemporary United States as a police state, well.
I know how the U.S. muddled through: a lot of hard work by a lot of citizens and politicians, most of whom had less than idealistic motives, bit by bit, situation by situation. More to the point, I can demonstrate this. It’s right there in the record.
On the other hand, you’re appealing to historical development, a nebulous concept. But it sounds learned, and it seems to confirm your political biases. Ask yourself this: what would disconfirm your narrative? Anything? If not, then what you have is a faith.
Personally, I think our host is probably a little burned out. The tree of liberty is watered by emotional exhaustion more often than blood. But if the society is functioning at all — which really honestly and truly, the U.S. is — it’s not Sisyphean. It only feels like it.
Comment by Carlos —
August 19, 2009 @ 9:38 am
And to be fair, I should put up some indicators that I think would disconfirm my idea. There might be too many “veto points” in the Federal system to resolve new problems of government in a timely manner. The military might not accept civilian authority. The monetary and regulatory agencies might be too slow or too unwieldy to deal with unexpected changes in the global economic system. The U.S. population might become apathetic and gullible to the point of civic dysfunction.
Out of those four indicators, I see maybe one-half (and it’s not the last one). I won’t count the experiences of the states, since the Federal system allows them a level of moral hazard that the U.S. as a whole doesn’t have.
Though that would be an additional failure mode: enough states go dingo that the Federal system can’t deal. That hasn’t happened since the 1850s.
Comment by Joe Strummer —
August 19, 2009 @ 9:54 am
I think the roughly 60 year period of middle class growth led a lot of people to believe they could argue for political or economic reforms from their comfortable suburban perches. It had seemed as if the U.S. had broken the mold, and what we – me in my former incarnation as a libertarian – were arguing for was “more and better”.
And yes, some of us may have paid attention to the “less fortunate” – African Americans, recent immigrants, victims of the Drug War – etc. but they were not us and so the arguments being made for or on their behalf were always at some distance.
This meant that we had generally a more favorable view of our “system” than we had any right to have.
Well now we are in danger of becoming part of the “less fortunate”. But I’m here to tell you that this is not a new development. The system has always been corrupt, criminal, and deadly. We’ve always been a few decades from Argentina.
Comment by Phil —
August 19, 2009 @ 10:00 am
As far as the 80s being better than the 00’s i have one word for you: CRACK.
But maybe that’s my NYC perspective.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
August 19, 2009 @ 11:19 am
They’re not apparent connections — they were quite real. The Pakistani military sees India as an existential threat, and so wants to keep the bulk of its forces near the border with India. As a result, it’s strategically important for them to keep other powers out of Afghanistan, because otherwise they would have had to redeploy troops to their western border.
So when the Soviets invaded, they funded and trained the mudhjahideen, who were mostly Sufis and Hanafi inspired by the Ikhwan. After they left, they switched to funding the Taliban, who were Deobandi, in order to keep Iran out of Afghanistan — the Deobandi were very hostile to Shia, and Iran is Shiite government.
The current state of Afghanistan scares the crap out of Pakistani elites, because they’re worried that India will make friends with Afghanistan — India is the largest regional aid donor to Afghanistan, and has historically had good relations with Afghanistan.
More or less. Start by thinking of militant groups as mafias.
Mafias generally do not recruit outside their ethnic group; that’s why you have the Italian mob, the Russian mob, the Jamaican mob, and so on. These organizations are clannish, and do not take orders from outsiders. However, they will make deals with one another (e.g., the Russians might buy coke from the Jamaicans, who bought it from the Columbians). On top of that, stir in the craziest goddamn Trots you ever met, and their tendency to split because for arcane political reasons that no outsider could possibly comprehend. All of these groups work the same way; they split and reform for arcane reasons that are nevertheless life-and-death for them. So there is no unified, coherent radical movement, even though their political aims often overlap, both with other militant groups, and major political parties.
However, don’t think of the civilian government and the military as being separate. Their conflict is a conflict within the state for control over the same mechanisms of state power. So the ISI will never support anything that could lead to the fall of the Pakistani state, because they are one of the pillars of that state.
However, the Pakistani state has never exercised that much real control over the NWFP, nor has it had much interest in doing so. This, together with their worries about foreign influences in Afghanistan, is why the Pakistanis were blase about the Taliban; they were mostly active in regions they had never much cared much about, and they figured that they could destroy them whenever they felt like it. As the Pakistani army has demonstrated, they were entirely correct on this point, as long as you don’t care about the costs to civilians.
Comment by Seward —
August 19, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
Jim Henley,
Not to be insulting, because I generally enjoy (and I think of blogging as largely an entertainment, so enjoy is the right term) your posts even when I think you are just wrong, but this strikes me as a pessimism bias.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2004/09/economic_illite.html
joe from Lowell,
As Phil Gramm taught us, one of the ways “the government” serves the interest of investment bankers is to block others in the government from compelling them to act responsibly.
joe from Lowell,
Most countries have never had anything like the rules that preceded the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Obama administration is not to my knowledge demanding that the old system return (such as it was – Gramm-Leach-Bliley in many ways just codified what was already happening).
CATO article on regulation and the financial crisis: http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v31n4/cpr31n4.pdf
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 19, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
Seward, I trust that you will likewise not be insulted if I respond that bubble-era EMH triumphalism from 2004 just doesn’t persuade me these days.
Comment by Elijah —
August 19, 2009 @ 2:25 pm
That’s a neat sleight of hand, Carlos dear. But your argument is with Toynbee, and its rather telling that you spent most of your post attacking him and not arguing with me.
Again, you need to spend a little more time reading my post. If you want to know what my historiography is, read the post:
i) I look at the balance of forces within the most dominant institutions. In the U.S., let’s take that to be the executive; the legislature; the judiciary; the military; corporations (including the media). To the extent that ascension to the executive and the legislature in the U.S. is largely determined by who has the most money and who is the most organized, yes, the balance of forces largely favors the military-corporate elite.
ii) This does not mean that change is not possible. It is given the articulation of a number of factors:
a) Social mobilization: in other words, the non-elite must develop their own countervailing power (their own counter-institutions) to organize against and challenge the balance of forces within the dominant institutions.
b) Infighting among the elite; usually triggered by certain structural factors (war; economic meltdown; or sufficiently powerful counter-institutions/social mobilization).
c) Luck: the intervention of some completely unforeseen development (say a meteriote hitting the earth) that throws the structural forces off balance and realigns them.
When I asked you for mechanisms, this is what I was looking for. I wanted some indication of any of these factors in the horizon (or, that you were aware of them — luck after all cannot be forecast). Again, I don’t find your faith in inevitable progress remotely convincing. Again, those things that happened in the past happened because of the concatenation of certain structural factors. We don’t learn from history by thinking that if it happened in the past, its going to inevitably happen in the future (that’s religion, not history).
For this change to happen, therefore, we need more than your religious faith in the American norm of “muddling through.” In other words, there is nothing particularly inevitable about history. Your notion that I am a believer in “historical development” is another of your misreadings. I am interested in structural mechanisms that can be triggered or created by the articulation of structure and agency, not some a priori “spirit” or “norm” that inheres in history.
Where does this leave those of us interested in taking the U.S. toward greater democratization? We can’t despair, but we also shouldn’t think our self-satisfied chortling at how we’ve muddled through in the past is all that we need.
Comment by Seward —
August 19, 2009 @ 2:52 pm
Jim Henley,
Well, how about a post-bubble discussion of the matter then?
http://cafehayek.com/2008/04/the-pessimistic.html
Comment by mr.fun —
August 19, 2009 @ 3:20 pm
I wanna be Presnit.
Comment by BDB —
August 19, 2009 @ 8:08 pm
Phil, I see your ’80s crack and raise you some ’00s meth.
Still, wouldn’t you take the crack epidemic over two wars, economic collapse, shitty music, and being stripped searched everytime you fly?
Comment by dhex —
August 19, 2009 @ 11:25 pm
“Still, wouldn’t you take the crack epidemic over two wars, economic collapse, shitty music, and being stripped searched everytime you fly?”
no fucking way.