Before assessing Biden’s initiative to change America’s social structure through government, let’s stand back and consider these other initiatives to do this in the course of, say, the last hundred and twenty years, when government emerged out of a Wild West culture where businesses jousted with one another to industrialize America without much government intervention. Remember that wars, or the Space Program, or establishing national parks, or conventional infrastructure, such as building the Continental Railroad or the Interstate Highway System, however admirable they may be and of considerable consequence, are not part of these social initiatives, all of which, whether Republican or Democratic, failed or successful, have tried to expand entitlements and regulations, where an entitlement means awarding money or some other favor, such as ten points oxtra on a civil service exam for veterans, and a regulation is the stipulated procedures for an organization, such as regulating the way to calculate utility charges for the consumer, and these entitlements and regulations have been opposed by those who had preferred whatever had already been there, or thought government was too intrusive and so a danger to individual liberty, or were simply oppositional, in that the other party was always to be opposed against the incumbents for that reason alone, and that is the present case, where Mitch McConnell is against Biden’s programs just because Biden is proposing them, and think that Republicans can win the Congress and the White House just by being contrary.
Read MoreThe Anger of Rashida Tlaib
An event in current events prompted for me a consideration of the nature of anger. Rashide Tlaib, the only Palestinean American person in Congress, was at the tarmac in Dearborn, Michigan meeting with President Biden a week or two ago when he was touting the recovery and promise of the Ford River Rouge auto plant and she was reported to have had a heated exchange with him about what was the then continuing war between Israel and Gaza, she reported to have claimed that Netenyahu was a “aparteid prime minister”. Afterwards, at the auto plant, Biden had publicly praised Tlaib as an eloquent and passionate spokesperson for her own point of view and that he hoped her family on the West Bank was doing well. The question is how she would have taken to his response, putting aside that the meeting itself, as that had been engineered by the President, allowed the congresswoman to be known as someone expressing the concerns of her constituents in a particularly pointed manner. Quite aside from these politics where one hand washes the other and that Biden might need a favor from her later on for his having given her the opportunity to speak out, a deeper question is whether she would have felt the President was to be noticed as having been gracious rather than angry for what she said, certainly not how Biden’s predecessor would have done, which was to angrily chastise Tlaib for her point of view. Rather, Biden and Tlaib had acted in a civilized manner to one another. Biden had in effect said that being cordial whatever are the political differences, however emotional they can become, and that recognizing familial loyalty is something everyone can embrace. Biden. In his brief remarks, refused to villainize an opposition just as George Bush ‘43 had done when he did not villainize Arab Americans after the World Trade Center disaster. Biden, I might take it, was binding wounds and making all of us feel better, rejecting animosity in favor of mutual respect. That is the way I first took it. Biden’s remark was to remind us that American politics can put aside personal rancor while pursuing the political process, each of those who hold positions in the government to be treated as worthy of dignity. We all become warm, or many of us do, for having risen to this occasion.
Read MoreThis Week in History
Here is a record of what happen this week that might be worth remembering fifty years from now, just as I wish I remembered vividly some week’s events in 1962 when people like me were wondering whether Kennedy would push for some civil rights bill, that mounting sense of disappointment occurring at the same time of heightening tensions while there were rumors and reports that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba. I have also repeatedly seen the record captured in the footage of George Stevens of the ravages of Berlin and Munich in mid 1945. Women send bushels of rubble from one hand to another in a chain of workers so as to clear some of the debris (I understand they were paid a day wage by the American government so that some people could get some work). Stevens also, at the time, filmed German POWs, smiling perhaps because they had survived the war or, perhaps, only angry that they had lost, not yet rehabilitated from Naziism. Like every moment, there was a knife edge on whether Germany would change what was not at all inevitable, which is to return to a democratic society. The Stevens films conveyed the tenor of the times, more accurate than a reconstruction through history. I also remember having read the next day of the New York Times reporting on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in 1911, when 146 girls died and 78 were injured in a sweatshop factory where the doors were locked so that the girls could not take bathroom breaks. Journalism didn’t only provide “the first draft of history”, a phrase invoked to praise journalism. Rather, such journalism or newsreel footage or memory provide but facts that might otherwise ever escape notice and retain the character or flavor of the concatenation of events that make the period of a time as being such.There were reports of girls jumping off the building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was housed, to their deaths so as to avoid the fire, just as people did when they also jumped from the World Trade Center on September 11th, teachers not telling the children who saw it that these were not birds. That immediacy of experience is not as well captured as happens in, let us say, the 9/11 Commission, and so should be treasured for what is established as a record just last week too.
Read MoreRace Relations Today
There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.
Read MoreBiden's Gun Control
Biden is going big in his Liberalism in that he believes that big government is the solution rather than big government being the problem, which is what most Conservatives think. Big Liberalism thinks that government can provide money and programs that will alleviate inequities and discrimination between class and ethnic groups, as happened when Social Security and Medicare led to abolishing the fact that the elderly were poorer than the other age groups in the population. Laws to insure equal accommodation transformed the southern states. Conservatives may think that government might tweak the market system, such as by creating incentives whereby private companies could expand broadband to rural areas, but Liberals think that only a government effort can make broadband universal so that it can become the basis for educating young people through distance learning and so broadband has to be the equivalent of a public utility, part of the national infrastructure, rather than a luxury item for those able to buy the product. You can’t have elementary and middle school and high school students attend distance learning if broadband isn’t universal. The prior model was rural electrification, where the government had to step in because customers were far enough apart that it made no sense for private power companies to expand their reach to rural areas and the cost of some areas, should the private companies enter the field, were prohibitively expensive. The government, such as in the TVA, had to do it, and so does broadband today, where a third of rural areas do not have broadband.
Read MoreBiden's Long March
Biden’s press conference on last Thursday made clear that the achievement of his legislative agenda will be a long slough, inched forward, rather than a blitzkrieg whereby Biden will rush law after law following his spectacular success at the American Recovery Plan. The reasons for this are that the American Recovery Plan was a fluke in that it was subject to reconciliation, whereby only a majority was required, and also because McConnell has made clear that he will hold his caucus together to be against any legislative measure Biden may propose just so that McConnell can in 2022 claim that Biden hadn’t done anything and so the Republicans should take the House and the Senate, even though McConnell has no legislative agenda himself, the same pattern whereby Republicans had said they would replace Obamacare with a better plan and never bothered to offer one for twelve years.
Read MoreJoe Biden's Radical Liberalism
Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, said “No crisis should be wasted”. What he meant was that when there is a legislative moment where there is an urgency and general willingness to act, measures should be added to the package of other measures that are a long time part of the leadership’s agenda. That is what happened with the passage yesterday of the American Recovery Act. No Republicans joined to aid the Democrats, truthfully saying that many of the measures had nothing to do with coronavirus relief but were part of long time Democratic wish lists, but some of the Democrats did not waver too much from the bill, except for eliminating the fifteen dollar minimum wage and forgiving student loans, and did approve of provisions that could be considered radical in a liberal way in that they moved forward major programs to expand entitlements so as to provide a more substantial way of life for all citizens and particularly those who were all but the rich, the rich not needing the assistance. Biden’s law is incremental but substantial, a firm way whereby economic situations do not interfere in people achieving their life, liberty and quest for happiness. From a Liberal point of view, this is the greatest advance since the New Deal, and Democrats from Bernie Sanders to John Manchin are impressed by the audacity, even if Larry Summers says that the package of money is so large that it will lead to inflation. The U. S. has had no inflation since the late Seventies, which is two generations ago, and the Federal Reserve has the ability and the power to squeeze out any inflation should it arise. Look at the solid policy accomplishments rather than speculation.
Read MoreThe Department of Justice
Merrick Garland will need all the intelligence and judicial discernment his supporters say he has, as well as a theoretical perspective his prior roles have not required, so that Garland will be successful as Attorney General because the policies to be implemented by him will be the most important of the issues of the Biden Administration after that of the coronavirus Recovery Act and what comes right after that, which will probably be some deal on immigration. Biden is correct in picking Garland to deal with some of the most controversial issues Biden will have to deal with. Here are three of them: what to do with prosecutions of Trump and his henchmen; the legislation concerning police violence and voter disenfranchisement; and the legislation concerning social media. All three of them fall into the hands of the Justice Department because criminal justice, voting rights and anti-trust are part of their responsibilities.
Read MoreMy First Vaccine Shot
I got my first vaccine shot yesterday, as you oldsters probably already had before me. It was done in what is called "The Salt Palace'', which is in downtown Salt Lake City. It is a convention center of gigantic proportions that was built in 1995 and seems to have taken its inspiration from an airport terminal. It had very long hallways with properly spaced chairs between so that all the people waiting for their appointments to start at ten a.m. business could sit while they were waiting, quite considerate of the fact that many elderly people can’t wait standing for a long time. Everything was well organized. I was ushered into the Grand Ballroom where one person promptly went over the paperwork and then shifted to a table where I got my shot and then went to another place to wait for fifteen minutes to see if I had a reaction. All of the people at work, from those at the start to guide you where to go, or at the end to tell you to go home, were all perky and friendly, something I much appreciated, anxious that something in the process might go wrong because of the paperwork or the injection. Nothing did.
Read MoreThe Crisis in Education
All institutions are always in a state of crisis. The economy has to adjust every generation or so to new products, a changing work force, and new ways of raising capital. The airline industry has to find today ways to work out of the problems created by high union contracts, unregulated competition, terrorism, and high oil prices just as it had to find a way out of the cluster of problems that arose after World War II: how to increase the passenger base; how to absorb Army Air Corps bases as civilian airports; how to stake out routes. Medicine switches from being office based to hospital based, from treating infections to treating organ diseases and cancers. Institutions are never just on the cusp between one era and another. The ground shifts so quickly that an era of medicine or industry is only a metaphor for the fact that some features of an institution may coexist for a while together even if one or another of those features will change for any number of reasons.
Education is an institution that is also always changing. Education, however, is described as in a state of crisis rather than merely in the process of responding to the next challenge. That is because education always falls short of the goals it and other institutions of social life set for it. Doctors may be required to treat but they are not required to cure diseases regarded as incurable; generals are expected to win wars, not to put an end to war. Teachers, on the other hand, are expected to provide, as the New York State Court of Appeals has held, “a sound basic education” for every young person, without defining what that would mean, though the phrase would seem to mean, if it has any meaning at all, that every young person will have learned enough to hold down a middle class occupation, regardless of the abilities of the child. Education is, in general, so grand a thing in conception that its goals always outstrip the ability of the institution to meet those goals. The goals of education are no less than to make every member of society economically productive, intellectually inquisitive, morally responsible, socially conscious, and psychologically mature.
Read MoreThe Insurrection as a Great Event
How do we know when great events have occurred, when something happens which is of great consequence, the road of history having taken one fork rather than another? Sometimes there are announcements and celebrations and ceremonies. Neville Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was at a state of war with Germany on Sept. 1, 1939. FDR announced there was a state of war with Japan at a joint session of Congress on Dec. 8, 1941. There were crowds of people in Times Square on V-E Day. Bells rang when the Declaration of Independence was announced and read at numerous crowds. Great events are also proclaimed at technological events. There were fireworks when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, and crowds of people crossed it in celebration at the new marvel. People cheered and were itself a celebration when Edison opened up the Pearl St. station in lower Manhattan and so began the Electric Age. There was a ceremonial golden spike hammered in by the last link between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific to commemorate the opening of the railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
Read MoreMarjorie Taylor Greene
I know those whom I respect and with whom I can discuss political matters who nonetheless disagree with my Biden Liberal-centrist perspective. It takes a little more to understand or try to discuss matters with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who most of us dismiss as a kook or a laughing stock, what with her Jewish lasers from space attacking California so as to start forest fires and so make available lands for high speed train travel. Let us compare the differences in the kinds of people who are anti-Biden and we will find that even Greene can be placed within an ideology, which can be defined as a highly articulated set of propositions about politics and society, or else placed, like Greene, as just a not very articulate view even if some intellectuals can fashion thoughts and feelings into an ideology or turn an ideology into sentiments that do not have much thought about them, Biden as well as anyone else subject to the back and forth of feelings and ideas. None of us can escape some broad view of what constitutes the political and social landscape. Even my uneducated father believed that the gentiles were, in general, out to get the Jews, but that the United States was pretty safe for the Jews, and my students, who thought themselves too uninformed to go out and vote, had a sense, living in the Northeast, that there should be racial justice and protections for gays and lesbians as just a matter of common decency.
Read MoreThe Insurrection Moment
The insurrection can readily be appreciated as a historical moment because it was an unprecedented one. The U. S. Capitol had never been invaded by Americans, even if Washington and New York were assaulted by Bin Laden and, much previously, by the British. Not even our current pandemic is unprecedented, though not in anyone’s memory. Other such events are historical because they are momentous. These include Pearl Harbor and D Day and Antietam, all wartime occasions which altered American history, just as had economic events such as the industrialism of the Andrew Carnegie generation and the Great Depression and suburbanization in the Fifties and Sixties. Certain other events which seem momentous when they happened did not alter the American landscape. That includes the destruction of the World Trade Center, which, however, did not seem to have significantly altered the New York landscape, it instead becoming just office buildings, now filled with family based coops and the rest of the paraphernalia that go along with urban life rather than a permanent mark of devastation, something even Germany could overcome even if what abides in it is its scar of history.
Values
The Classic comic books version of the short story “The Man Without a Country” presented Philip Nolan’s staterooms in one or another United States warship, him forever exiled from having said he hated the United States when he had been part of the insurrection by which Aaron Burr tried to wrest the trans-Appalachian mountains from the United States, these later of his staterooms festooned with banners and flags and portraits of Presidents that showed him as forever pining for his country, this a sentiment appropriate when Edward Everett Hale wrote the story in the midst of the Civil War. It struck me then and remains so that flags and banners were not the proper ways in which to display tribute to the idea of the United States. That was because these visual effects were present in all nations and no more than an icon of the team of the National Football League. Every nation has banners and so those are just lapel buttons rather than explanations of why someone would feel worthy of the nation for which it stands. What makes its images, ideas and expressions distinctive?
Read MoreThe Political Bubble
Political thinkers are deeply divided about whether people are inside the bubble in that their political thoughts and actions are anchored in their actual social life or else that politics take place as a result of what is outside the bubble, politics a circling cyclorama of people and ideas churned out by policies, doctrines, and people who live in the reality of the media. This division does not line up with Conservatives and Liberals. DeTocqueville was a Conservative who thought that politics was grounded in the town hall democracy whereby local citizens learned to compromise with one another so as to get a local road created so that they could bring their produce to market. Marxists, for their part, thought that people were grounded by the actual conditions of their labor. Lazarsfeld political polling was based on the idea that voters were grounded in the demographics of their situation. Republicans were grounded in small town bourgeois life and Democrats were grounded in their working class situations rather than the working class allegiances that were derived from their situations. Thinkers of those who opposed these views took the idea that politics took place on the outside of their lives. Machaevelli’s view was that people in power had to instill both fear and love so as to get people to accept power and so that meant that these feelings were engendered by the people in power, on their balconies and through their marches, rather than by intruding with very many people so as to create and sustain order. Most politics is the theatre of politics. Ortega Y Gasset thought that the mass of people were dissociated from their structural ties so that they could roam around and riot as they will, their political activities independent of their allegiances or interests. Lord Bryce, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, thought that public opinion had come to dominate Democratic societies in that whatever were the popular views of the moment, the fads and catchphrases of the people, would motivate people to use their vote to get their way and effectuate policies. Closer to home, people are understood as responding to Donald Trump because they find him somehow attractive and compelling, and so are responding to the outside of the bubble, even if their own conditions are not so bad, or else must be responding from grievances, whether economic or cultural, as the reasons for why they get up off the coach to become engaged with Trumpian politics.
Read MoreInsurrection
Today is Friday and it was just two days ago that Donald Trump encouraged people to invade the halls of Congress. Joe Biden said while the onslaught of Congress was taking place that a President’s words mattered for good or for ill and so he asked President Trump to tell the rioters in Congress to cease their activities. Some hours later, Trump said that they should go home even though he loved those people who were engaged in the violence, which was clearly a half-hearted condemnation of violence. The intruders did not achieve their objective to delay very long the certification of the Electoral College vote because the Congress reconvened and met through the night to finish the task. Joe Biden, who is not an eloquent man, did offer a word that had resonance during his remarks. He said that what happened in Congress was an “insurrection”. (Sen. Mitt Romney used the same term, as did Sen. Chuck Schumer, in very short order, and the term has now been used by many others.) The events at the Capital were not just a riot or a disturbance, but an insurrection, and we should think what that term means.
Read MoreObama's Victory Lap
Early reviewer’s of Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land”, his memoir of the first two years of his Presidency, found the book to be candid because Obama mused on his uncertainties about his personal and political decisions. Actually, Obama is not at all forthright in this book. He plays it very close to the vest, a kind of victory lap where he thanks all the people that helped him on his ascent to the Presidency and never clearly says what was his motivation to drive towards the Presidency. He acts as if it happened to him, arriving at the point that his speech at Kerry’s nomination in 2004 that gave him an opportunity to be in the spotlight and for people to see him as having a voice, and then coming to understand that the United States Senate was too narrow a place in which to enact public policy, and then finally deciding to run so that some little Black boy would see that he could emulate Obama. That rings false in that Obama seems to have had political ambitions from the start, he an up-and-comer in the Illinois Senate, just waiting to make his move. His greatest candor is his life long apology for how politics had made Michelle's life more difficult, as if becoming President were not a worthwhile achievement and as if she could not have known early on that he was ambitious. Harry Truman was not ambitious, but Obama certainly was. Why else had he insisted on being only a part time professor of the University of Chicago Law School? Obama, in his memoir, does not explain himself.
Read MoreEntitlements
Liberals, who believe in the intervention of government to right wrongs and to regulate the economy and the social structure, are identified with FDR’s New Deal, but FDR used a variety of mechanisms other than entitlements to achieve its ends of providing work and greater equality between peoples, the regime of entitlements meaning that legislation would consist of financial and other services and preferences to be awarded to categories of eligibility. The first acts in FDR’s First Hundred Days were not entitlements. The Glass Steagall Banking Act of 1933 provided for the separation of commercial from investment banking. It required commercial banks to have sufficient equity and provided the FDIC to guarantee that bank customers did not have to worry about runs on the banks. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, also early on in 1933, allowed for the government to buy up beef and pork so as to destroy them so as to keep up farm prices. It also allowed farmers to get money so that they would refrain from raising crops, and so also raise farm prices, even though this was sort of an entitlement because people who owned farms were paid for a purpose, the purpose more important than the mechanism. The Wagner Act of 1935 set up a mechanism whereby workers could engage in collective bargaining rather than pay or guarantee wages to union workers. The TVA put in a lot of money to build dams and create electrical grids rather than give grants to people in Tennessee. The CCC made work available to poor whites rather than give them food stamps or a dole. Yes, entitlements did come later. Social Security, passed in 1935, was a clear entitlement in that a category of people--the aged-- were entitled to get benefits when they had reached a certain age and had contributed to payroll taxes for by then just a very short time of payment. And the great last act of the New Deal, the Wages and Hours Act of 1938, did require people of occupational categories to meet pay and work standards, though not by direct payments. Nor were entitlements the only mechanisms for reform during the War on Poverty. Money was used by Lyndon Johnson to create incremental change in a variety of outcomes, such as better nutrition or availability to education, by paying programs rather than people, though some entitlements were included, as was the case with Medicare and Medicaid, so as to entitle people to the cost of health care because they qualified as old or poor.
Decades and Trends
Radio and TV d.j.’s like to talk about musical decades so as to evoke the nostalgia of there being a particular sound or style that dominated music for about a decade. I think that we can broaden it out so that each decade includes its politics and social structure so as to characterize decades as being cultural entities, distinct from the previous and the succeeding one, just as if we do when historians and literary critics speak of the periods of Classical and Romantic and Victorian, the Romantics, for example, not just meaning Jane Austen and John Keats and Charles Lamb, but also John Bright and the Luddites and Peterloo and the other early struggles of industrialism. Periodization is a different prospect from doing what a friend of mine does, which is separate before and after a critical event, which for him is 1968, That year separates two different experiences, people profoundly altered by that event so that I, for one, still expect to turn on the television and find out that there has been an assassination. Pearl Harbor was one of those events that made America different and not in just leading to the waging of the worst war in human history. It made the United States the economic, cultural and military center of the world, while the Vietnam War was just an interlude even if young people at the time, including me, found it all consuming, it instead just coming and going, which would also be the case in the War on Terror that commenced with the World Trade Center, but lasted only a decade or so, and us still not knowing whether Trumpism can outlast his separation from office.
Read MoreThe Nature of Evil
Trump is “unquestionably” evil, Marty has said for years now, because Trump separated immigrant children from their parents. Harold, Marty’s son, responded, “You still holding on to that?” Harold’s meaning, according to Roland, is that Trump’s action of separating parents from children has been forgotten by everyone, held onto only by extremists like Marty. Extremist reasoning is inherently dismissable.
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