The Good Ship Conservatania

I love me some Larison:

This is something that I didn’t elaborate on last night, but the idea that the message of Spread The Wealth would be a political loser at the present time is bizarre, which makes McCain’s insistence on identifying Obama as the “spread the wealth” candidate even more bizarre. I mean, does McCain want to get crushed in a landslide? Let’s think about this. There is an economic downturn coming on the heels of an era of wage stagnation and growing economic inequality, the financial sector has imploded thanks to the combined blunders of government and holders of concentrated wealth and Obama’s use of a phrase that on its own could easily be mistaken for an expression of neo-Harringtonian distributism is supposed to be politically radioactive? Consolidation of power, concentration of wealth and centralism all stand condemned for having created the present fiasco, and there is supposed to be a political downside to talking about distributing wealth?

He goes on to wonder how conservatives forgot that the argument for free markets over welfare-state planning was precisely that it more equitably and unbiasedly distributed wealth in society, and especially throughout the broad middle class. Capitalism combined with limited constitutional government was defended as an antidote to aristocracy and oligarchy. I happen to believe that this argument, particularly in the American context, was profoundly ahistorical, but it had an internal logic and consistency, and although it was wrong, it could be made in basic good faith by its believers. Certainly Larison is right to point out that any conservative appeal to a middle class rests squarely on the ability to argue that a conservative economic program will prove more favorable to their economic fortunes than a program of liberal redistribution which (whether true or not) favors the poor and jobless over the hard-working, upright classes.

But like Larison says: when you live in a time of stagnating or declining real wages, and when the value of owned (or mortgaged property) is likewise in stagnation or decline; when actual inflation (as opposed to "core inflation") is on the rise due to a weak currency and high energy, food, and utility costs; when payrolls are contracting and unemployment increasing; when an implosion in the financial sector is beginning to reduce retirement savings and pinch the fortunes of the upper middle class (i.e. the educated, "professional classes" of doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, administrators, upper managers, etc.); then positioning yourself as the candidate who opposes "spreading the wealth" smells of remarkable incompetence.

It's another example of how McCain's infelicity precludes the dual-message communication that's been the modus operandi of his faction for decades. He wants to signal to his fervent base that this Obama character is a Marxist-communist along the "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" line while suggesting more mildly to the broad swath of non-ideological voters, the folks who don't actually pay much attention to politics in the off years, that he's gonna tax them out the wazoo and give their money to bad, poor people. Even in difficult economic times, there are ways to do that. McCain's just not fast enough on his feet. He's like a game of Telephone within a single mind; having heard something once, he repeats it to himself again and again, changing it slightly each time, until what emerges from his mouth in public is changed entirely.

Obama, meanwhile, is doing what it is that successful politicians do--namely, telling people what they want to hear. He is going to get us out of Iraq, get bin Laden, help the middle class, build an electric car, stop outsourcing, raise wages, help small business, blah blah blah. He says these things plainly and often, never straying far from his set-piece oratory. McCain's attempt to paint himself and his running mate as "mavericks" and "reformers" is dumb and doomed not because they're unconvincing in those roles, but because people do not actually care about "reform" or "getting rid of the old boys network." If they did, incumbency wouldn't be so reliable a predictor of victory in elections. Prompted with questions about "Washington" and "the way things are done" and "the tone of politics," people will of course respond that they find it all regrettable and that they disapprove. The idea that this constitutes motivational opinion is wrong, silly really. People care about their paychecks and their bills, and if you can successfully reassure them that the former will increase and the latter decline, then for the most part they'll go along with just about any other bullshit that comes out of your mouth.

Finally This Blog Achieves Unity with the Universe

Putting the Fun in Fungible

You know, I hate to invoke Henley's Law for the umpteenth time, but this "foreign oil" thing makes me totally nuts. I mean, here you have a highly fungible, eminently transportable commodity. All it takes is to ensure that Crude A arrives at Point B is a basic market and some big boats. The Obama line that we should stop borrowing billions of dollars from SCARY CHINA to give to EVIL SAUDI ARABIA for their MUSLIM OIL is perfectly indicative of the political bankruptcy at the heart of the Democratic project. The idea that we should cease purchasing oil that originated in this or that country as a kind of economic sanction to punish governments we don't like for being Muslim and Scary and Evil is right on par, morally and intellectually, with the idea that we should invade them, kill their leaders, and convert everyone else to Christianity. The reason we should seek to reduce consumption of all oil is that it's a non-renewable, dirty resource of declining recoverability which has deranged millennia-old patterns of human settlement and habitation for the past hundred years. Its point of origin is totally not germane.

Welterweight

The notion that Joe the Plumber who Owns a Small Business and Makes $250,000/year and Goes to Political Rallies to Question the Candiates--that this dude somehow represents the average American is patently absurd. It's wonderful. McCain, who increasingly appears to be the hate child of Danny Devito's Penguin and Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, had this crazy houdou direct address to Joe thing going on, and then Barack got in on the act, swiveling toward the camera and chopping his hand and shouting out to "Joe." The "average American" makes more like foedy, fiddy, sisty grand, works in an office, and exists only to amuse the world-spanning, multi-nodal, transpersonal superconsciousness of The Internet on company time. He doesn't fix things or conjure jobs and wealth out of the ether. The Politicians' endlessly reiterated genuflection to The Genius and Innovation and Productivity of the American Worker is the most cynical ploy in all of politics. Do any of you folks buy it? What the fuck are you doing reading blogs at 11:30 on a Thursday morning?

Whatever creature is gnawing away at the part of McCain's brain overseeing fine muscle control is doing an excellent and thorough job, giving him a frightful testudine appearance, all head and shoulders, beak snapping this way and that. When his flippers rose to put air quotes around "women's health," I almost made uh-oh in my underoos. Give Gee-dub this much credit: he maintained enough active synapses to slickly signal fellowship with the natalist far right while blending code phrases and cultural tropes into a stage-managed aw-shucks demeanor. McCain's efforts to do the same turn his every utterance into a probability cloud of hazy non sequiturs and Kulturkampf strophes ripped straight out of 1992. I honestly feel for the monster, self-immolating on the burning political faction whose approval he so long sought and finally, if briefly, received.

Barack's occasional smiles seemed genuine: pwnd, b1chz, it said. His insane claims have the benefit of sounding like standard boilerplate politics. They wash over and around you, and though you know them to be false, they don't rankle. Smooth delivery helps when you're claining that "clean energy . . . will create 5 million jobs in the heartland." What the fuck? Why not 4 million, or 50? A job for every solar cell? Ending subsidies for companies that ship jobs oversees? Companies do not actually load container ships with cubicles and send them to Bangalore. The king who went to the water's edge and commanded the tide to stop ended up looking like quite the fool. If you can pay some Bangladeshi loser twelve grand a year to read blogs, then you're not going to pay an American five times that.

But, it's all blood under the bridge, and the Obaman mien again takes the day as far as Homo voticus goes. McCain smells of desperation and mothballs. He represents another era. Obama is made for teevee. He's going to be fun to watch as he grinds Progressive dreams to dust beneath the heavy boot of regal reasonableness.

Obama Yo Mama

Watching the GOP flail around and try to figure out why associating BO with a sixties pseudoterrorist that most Americans had forgotten or never heard of until half-past two yesterday afternoon--wasn't he one of the authors of the Port Huron statement, the original, not the watered-down second draft?--is pretty amusing. Reading media observers as they try to tease some plot out of the exquisite corpse of an American electoral season is, also, pretty funny. Christopher Buckley resigned/got booted from the magazine his daddy-doo founded because he endorsed the competent manager over the screaming queen. I mean, is John McCain not the faggiest candidate for President ever? Screaming about all you bitches and he is so sick of your fucking drama you queens so why don't you shut the fuck up or I'll leave your drunk ass right here at the club and you can try to walk home in those heels, girl. Shit, the National Review ought to be supporting Barack, who evinces a more convincing belief in dieu-donné American civilizational messianism than any politician I've seen in my lifetime--certainly more so than John McCain. While McCain is fagging out and promising that he's gonna reveal his secret plan to git bin Laden just as soon as he comes up with one, Obama convincingly promises that no matter what that faggot pussy widower president whatsisname in Islamabad and his pansy-ass government have to say, if he finds OBL, he's gonna kill him dead as fuck. I mean, Obama with his smooth talk and smiles and teflon political persona is the Ronnie Reagan of this fight. If putative conservatives were smart they'd just coopt him and try to keep their seats at the palace table, instead of griping that he's going to ship white people back to Africa as slaves.

Bricolage

In 1984, Orwell propounds the "novel-writing machine," in which pre-composed sentences and plot elements are fitted mechanically together to produce full works. I can only conclude that Tom Friedman has mastered some form of this technology.

Ground Control to Major Tom

As the Obama campaign solidifies its leads and John McCain's media interlocutors are reduced to calling for mulligans like lousy Sunday golfers, Netrootsia allows itself a few tentative sips from the cup of triumphalism. Dennis P. views the battlefield from below:

You see this with numerous Obama followers as the election appears to be nearly over. Most reactionaries have given up and are lighting cigarettes in their crumbling bunkers, awaiting occupation. This emboldens online libs, finally given the chance to bellow victoriously, and baby, are they making the most of it. What the hell. It's not as if they have any real political say in the process, so why not mimic their right wing cousins from the early Bush era and yell about their unique love of country, and how they're gonna retake and remake America. There's no point in directly confronting this emotional tide. It's gathering a frenzied speed, and nothing, no matter how accurate or fact-based, will slow it. So, losers like me will spend these final days watching this wave rise and crest, noting its velocity, awaiting its crash. For once Obama's sworn in, the wave will become a cesspool of shattered fantasies, feeding resentment not of Obama and his inner-circle, but of those who said all along that "change" was a sham.

Given that they twitter like minor Stuarts at the Restoration, I'm not so sure there are any fantasies to shatter. They may be motivated by sheer atavism. With the glowing predictions of a "veto-proof majority" in the Congress, I think they really expect Clinton, the Sequel--this time without a lot of nasty Republicans mucking up the works.

On the occasion that I link to someone like Digby in order to provoke some eminently provokable Donks into amusing foolishness, they rise inevitably to the bait and start barking that lazy solipsists like me are never going to change the world, whereas they . . . these unpithy rejoinders bouncing harmlessly off the teflon trampoline of my own self-regarding mental equipoise. (How many times can a person proclaim loudly that there is no meaningful constituency for his views?) What's telling about such crowing is just how patheticly it calls out for external validation, and how it reveals such a hollow, confidence-less core in those who engage in it. Mommy must not have said, "I love you," often enough. Why should it be important that a lousy reactionary goofball like IOZ be heckled into admitting that libloggers are Believing in Change at a rate of 9.32 hopes per second per second?

Prix Nobel

Was walking down the street and I saw Paul Krugman. "Oh, uh, hey," I said.

"Uh. Hi." He replied. He couldn't wipe that dumb grin off his face.

"Well, fuck you then," I told him, and we both went on our way. He thinks he's so great.