Monk

David Brooks has put on his sociologist's hat and offers some interesting comments about America's changing demographics and its significance for the Republican Party.

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Our political culture is threatening to get a little out of hand.



Let's just hope that we don't start having drive-by shootings, or that someone gets beaten with canes in the Senate.

(Source: News-LJ)

Nicholas Kristof takes another shot at painting for us the lurid picture of American inequality, and since I am feeling a little depressed after last night's debate, as we stare down the barrel of a possible Romney victory and the effective consolidation of plutocratic rule, I will keep Kristof's cute little morality play.

Before we do that, though, one substantive point that he raises is worth highlighting. He notes that when Americans are asked which country they would prefer to live in, in terms of wealth distribution, America or Sweden, 90% of Americans actually prefer Sweden, at least when the national labels are not used but are only denoted by their distribution. You have to wonder why the Democrats cannot win when they have overwhelming facts like this on their side, but as Kristof concludes: "Perhaps nothing gets done because, in polls, Americans hugely underestimate the level of inequality here. Not only do we aspire to live in Sweden, but we think we already do." But why can't we get past this lie, when it is not even a close call?

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Why is America dominated by anti-intellectualism? Here is an interesting discussion springing from a work from the early 1960s by Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life". We'll take the two paragraphs that Sully grabbed for his blog, though HOfstadter also has some sharp and sadly funny things to say about public education and how sports are celebrated more than real studies.

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[T]here arose an ethos, a romantic conviction, that a popular democracy should favor "the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do." Practical experience mattered more than imaginative thinking, and vital emotion trumped anemic rationality. "Just as the evangelicals repudiated a learned religion and formally constituted clergy in favor of the wisdom of the heart and direct access to God, so did advocates of egalitarian politics propose to dispense with trained leadership in favor of the native practical sense of the ordinary man with its direct access to truth. This preference for the wisdom of the common man flowered in the most extreme statements of the democratic creed, into a kind of militant popular anti-intellectualism."

All too often, moreover, a "fundamentalism of the cross" united with a "fundamentalism of the flag." While the true political mind accepts conflict and compromise, recognizing that there are no final victories but only temporary periods of balance and equipoise, the fundamentalist mind, says Hofstadter, "is essentially Manichean: it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and, accordingly, it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities."

-- Michael Dirda at Barnes & Noble

WASHINGTON -- It's time to retire the American Dream -- or at least give it a long vacation. We ought to drop it from our national conversation

-- Robert Samuelson at The Washington Post

Bah, at the very least the phrase is rich in ironical value. You cannot drop a pervasive, long-used meme just like that. It's in our DNA now.

Stanley Fish gives us some interesting discussion on the Mideast riots over that anti-Islam movie that was made in America, going over the tension between Western free speech and Muslim religiosity.

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So the entire package of American liberalism — the distinction between speech and action, the resolve to protect speech however distasteful it may be, the insistence that religious believers soften their piety when they enter the public sphere — is one the protesters necessarily reject. When they are told that the United States government had no part in the production of the video and deplores its content, educated Libyans and Egyptians reply (reporters tell us), “Well, if they think it’s bad and against their values, why didn’t they stop it or punish those who produced it?” The standard response is that we Americans don’t suppress or penalize ideas we regard as wrong and even dangerous; in accordance with the First Amendment, we tolerate them and allow them to present themselves for possible purchase in the marketplace of ideas.

But that means that protecting the marketplace by refusing to set limits on what can enter it is the highest value we affirm, and we affirm it no matter what truths might be vilified and what falsehoods might get themselves accepted. We have decided that the potential unhappy consequences of a strong free speech regime must be tolerated because the principle is more important than preventing any harm it might permit. We should not be surprised, however, if others in the world — most others, in fact — disagree, not because they are blind and ignorant but because they worship God and truth rather than the First Amendment, which not only keeps God and truth at arm’s length but regards them with a deep suspicion.

-- Stanley Fish at The New York Times


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I especially love that last line about regarding 'God' and 'truth' with "a deep suspicion", for is that not the very key to understanding our appreciation for free speech and the open marketplace of ideas? It might be one thing if there was indeed one God and we were capable of knowing the one Truth about this God, but of course we know there is no such thing, or at least no such thing that we would agree on. So, you are free to pursue your Truth as well as your happiness, but you should not be able to close down anybody else's attempts to pursue their own, perhaps contrary, ideas, and you certainly should not kill them or beat them or burn down their places. You first have to be able to understand that the world does not revolve around you, and be able to appreciate that people who are different from you should enjoy a certain equality of respect.

Nevertheless, it could be said that the 'movie' in question, itself, does not treat others with that certain equality of respect, and for that, one can rest assured that it will not be shown in any respectable theaters or on television. Though, this is not to justify the violence. Personally, I am inclined to regard the movie as a kind of pornography, or a hate-pornography, which is perhaps something that anti-Israel Muslims can appreciate when they consider that they tend to enjoy their own brand of hate-pornography that abuses the Jews. I believe pornography should be protected speech, too. Hey, whatever gets you off! Pornography should just be a very private thing, something carried in a brown paper sack and enjoyed in your bedroom behind closed doors and closed curtains.

The First Lady's speech Tuesday was written at a 12th grade level - the highest in history among the wives of presidential nominees and far above Ann Romney's lowest mark of a 5th grade level.

-- Eric Ostermeier at University of Minnesota and Smart Politics

An interesting analysis evaluating political speeches in terms of American grade levels. Of course, liberals have to enjoy a chuckle over how simple and childish the Republican speeches are, but one has to remember that these speeches are heavily manufactured, and our elites obviously assume that Americans are generally dumb. Hey, that's the way they make us! At least we can still amuse ourselves with the fact that the Red Staters are objectively dumber.

It's a shame that we don't have a comparative analysis on the speeches of the men. Though, it is noted that Obama's State of the Union speeches only clock in at the eighth grade level, which shows how the speech is crafted more to the assumed level of the audience than as a reflection of his own intellect. One wonders at what grade level Bill Clinton's speech from last night would rank.

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The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level. Longer sentences and sentences utilizing words with more syllables produce higher scores. Shorter sentences and sentences incorporating more monosyllabic words yield lower scores.

-- Eric Ostermeier at University of Minnesota and Smart Politics

The Repubicans have wrapped up their convention and Romney has given his big speech, but I'm going to let Paul Krugman take his swing at Paul Ryan and his speech.

We really are seeing an historic move: the Republicans have fully taken politics into the post-truth, post-modern realm - a real Alice in Wonderland, Newspeak kind of world. I kind of wish that I was in my seventies lying in my death bed, because I have this heavy feeling that life in this country is going to get really ugly in the years ahead.


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Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.

Some of his fibs were trivial but telling, like his suggestion that President Obama is responsible for a closed auto plant in his hometown, even though the plant closed before Mr. Obama took office. Others were infuriating, like his sanctimonious declaration that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” This from a man proposing savage cuts in Medicaid, which would cause tens of millions of vulnerable Americans to lose health coverage.

And Mr. Ryan — who has proposed $4.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, versus only about $1.7 trillion in specific spending cuts — is still posing as a deficit hawk.

But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.

[...]

The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on (which depends to a large extent on whether the news media do their jobs). Mr. Ryan and his party are betting that they can bluster their way through this, pretending that they are the real defenders of Medicare even as they work to kill it. Will they get away with it?

-- Paul Krugman at The New York Times

As if you haven’t already read enough about how money is influencing this year’s election in ways never seen before thanks to Citizens’ United, recently legendary Republican strategist Roger Stone made an allegation that takes things to a whole new level.

Stone claims that unnamed “sources” tell him the Koch brothers lobbied the Romney campaign hard to pick Paul Ryan as his running mate, and that they sealed the deal at a July 22 fundraiser with Romney, where David Koch pledged an additional $100 million in support to SuperPACs and C-4s (another type of political non-profit for influencing elections) in exchange for picking Ryan.

-- News-LJ

This story may well be entirely groundless, but I think it aptly captures the spirit of our time.

I suppose it is worthwhile to be mindful that the other side also has its perspective about how we liberals and progressives are all unbelievably thick headed and dangerous and everything that is wrong with this country. Of course, that does not mean that both sides are equally right and wrong. Unfortunately, there are more Jesus idolators and white supremacists in America, who also enjoy the active support of almost all of the billionaires, which, I'm afraid, means that they kind of rule. This also accounts for much of America's decline, as they cling to an archaic vision of the holy fatherland.