American Right
-
Wage Discipline
Why are wages are flat, unemployment high, and inflation stable despite the economic recovery? Because it benefits the so-called investor or rentier class: But capitalists are always fighting a two-front war in democracies, against workers and against their representatives in the government, who might begin to change the social framework to give workers more bargaining
-
GOP Is Not the Party of Entrepreneurism
Patrick Ruffini, up-and-coming GOP strategist, attends RootsCamp, watches Democratic organizers share tactics and lessons learned from the 2012 campaign, and tells Draper that “the thing I was struck by at RootsCamp was that in many ways, the Democratic technology ecosystem has embraced the free market — whereas the Republican one sort of runs on socialism, with the
-
Garry Wills on the South
After the Crimson Tide’s big win over Notre Dame on January 7th, a Web site called Real Southern Men explained the significance in terms of regional defiance: “Football matters here, because it is symbolic of the fight we all fight. Winning matters here, because it is symbolic of the victories we all seek. Trophies matter
-
Les Miserables, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, et al.
I wanted to like Les Miserables because I am so sympathetic to the underlying Christian mythos of the original Hugo story, but it took all my control to stay in the theater after about a half hour of this musical version of it. This film lacked emotional texture. It was the same song over and
-
The Bully Pulpit and Beltway Paralyis
From Ezra Klein in the New Yorker: This, Edwards says, is the reality facing modern Presidents, and one they would do well to accommodate. “In a rational world, strategies for governing should match the opportunities to be exploited,” he writes. “Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not
-
Robert Kuttner on Albert Hirschman
Two of his finest books as economic philosopher are The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in 1991 when Hirschman was 76, and Rival Views of Market Society,published in 1987. In Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman goes back several hundred years and identifies three basic strands of conservative argument against social reform that keep recurring. He calls them Perversity, Futility and Jeopardy. These
-
Lest We Forget
Clinton had campaigned on a pledge to raise taxes on high incomes, arguing that the affluent had disproportionately benefited from the prosperity of the ‘80s and that the middle class had been left behind. As president, he followed through, pushing for the creation of new 36 and 39.6 tax brackets for high-income earners. He got
-
Movement Conservatives and Reality
The notion of a pervasive constructed world of falsehood and illusion built on the fabrications of the press and the liberal establishment has long been central to the American far right.1 And since Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater before him, the knowledge that its supporters have their own truth, that they are forced to battle continually
-
Bruce Bartlett on ‘Epistemic Closure’
In The American Conservative: A couple of weeks before the 2004 election, Suskind wrote a long article for the New York Times Magazine that quoted some of my comments to him that were highly critical of Bush and the drift of Republican policy. The article is best remembered for his quote from an anonymous White House official dismissing critics