and naturally focused on US politics, but the same question is worth asking for Europe...

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

The flip side of the Madisonian system is that while its harder to make those gains than under a parliamentary system, its also easier to defend themso the reforms do not automatically collapse as soon as the progressive movement evolves into a coalition focused on protecting its hard won gains. This is not sufficient to offset the structural conservative bias, but if reform was as hard to enact as in the US and as easy to rollback as in Europe, it would be the worst of both worlds.

Fundamental progressive reform simply has not in the past 200+ years and arguably cannot, without massive structural reform, happen as a consequence of regular political activity in the US - it happens because every once in a long while some progressive movement is able to stitch together a strong enough temporary governing majority to gain the reform, despite all the deliberate construction of the system to be resistant to reform.

You'd probably get more interesting US based responses, though obviously not as many, posting this to Docudharma. dKos is fine for generating comment counts, but for getting surprising responses, I find Docudharma more useful.


Utsukushikereba sore de ii

Though one must also blame the Democrats who've decided to fold on issues that actually matter to their voters (wages, taxes, labour unions) while taking the wrong (as in unpopular among their voters) side on "cultural" wedge issues.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

I sometimes wonder if both the McCarthy-ite HUAC fiasco and the entire Cold War, with its red scares, weren't political moves designed to demonise socialism and communism in the US, and take away their domestic political influence - which was significant, at least until the 1950s.

Which is not to say the Soviets were admirable, but it's interesting how McCarthyism was the first wave of narrative engineering that pushed the US so far to the right.

I doubt much will move until a new post-Marxist narrative appears, which is as memorable and influential.

Then again, it may be too late for that now. The most likely outcome at the moment is increasing cycles of economic instability creating more and more social and political damage, followed by the collapse of the US.

What happens after that is anyone's guess.

Back in the late 1940s there was an organized effort to revive liberalism as a political and economic philosophy after it had been discredited by the Depression and the following war. It was called the Mont Pelerin Society, and it was organized by European liberals led by Hayek and Von Mises.  On the American end, Hayek had by basically random chance got his book the road to serfdom published by the University of Chicago Press after one of the mainstream publishers rejected it.

The editor at Chicago at the time was Aaron Director.  This is where it gets interesting.  Hayek asked Director to organize a group of Americans to come to the first in meeting in Switzerland in 1947.  And so he did, starting with his brother in law, a young professor at the University of Chicago named Milton Friedman.

I've done research into this for a paper I presented at a the "rethinking marxism" conference in Massachusetts this past fall.  When you start drawing the lines between the people in the Mont Pelerin Society at the start, and the neo-liberal evangelists, it gets real interesting.

I only wrote on the US side, but there's a whole other side involving Brits who converted the Conservatives into a neo-liberal party.

It's the ideology that matters, and interestingly enough, the ideology that made all this possible came to us from Europe through the Austrians...

Couching what's happened in terms of nations ignores that individuals and institutions other than the state are in large part the relevant actors in ideological warfare.  And by converting the dominant ideology in a society, you can make alternatives literally unthinkable...

If anyone would like, I can send out copies of the paper.  I read way to much Hayek this summer.  Tracing the ideology from its misguided birth to the zealots who adopt its assumptions without understanding that they are assumptions is truly frightening.  And, that's what the problem with America is.

It's why I really believe that a powerful, immanent critique like the Anglo disease thesis, that argues that inequality is inefficient is needed.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

Sonya Sotomayer, the newest supreme court justice, brought the issue up in her first session.  Now, with the Court we have today it is difficult to see that challenged but not impossible. Another route would be through a constitutional amendment, which is even more challenging and basically impossible given the current environment.

The other option we have to address the issue is the one I find more salient.  That is addressing the conflation of "money" with "speech."  I think the matching of these two concepts is at the root of many of our problems.  In case you haven't noticed, the right to "get rich" (at any cost) seems to have become synonomous with the right to "happiness."  This is why most people who would historically have been more attracted to the left are consolidating on the far-right of our political spectrum.  They vote for whomever best secures their ability to "make money" and see it as a fundamental, Constitutional right.  

I don't think that it's difficult to decouple these concepts as ultimately most people aren't comfortable with the idea on its face.  The reason it continues and gains strength and fervent backing is that people view money as the ONLY option for political speech. If you take it away, there is no way at all to achieve representation.  

Any effort to develop non-monetary channels for political representation will chip away at the money/speech connection.  Fortunately there are many channels through which political ideas can be communciated that don't really cost anything. The trick is getting people to listen through the noise.

I see the modern noise as mostly a function of commerce.  With the decline in commerce, which is very pronounced in the US, I find that the noise levels are coming down signficantly.  People are looking for something other than advertising, marketing, the next gadget, in part because they can't afford to buy anything and are pessimistic about pursuing greater wealth, thereby dampening the appeal of aspirational purchasing and information.  When the pursuit of wealth loses its appeal the pursuit of spiritual wellbeing, work/life balance and all that tends to become more appealing, in part because it's inexpensive.

Politics is a reflection of society.  Obama was elected because people wanted to believe something different was possible.  The door is open, we need to all walk through it. I honestly believe that repackaging most of the good ideas of the left over the past 100 years will go over like a rocket in this climate.  Tailor your message to the times, leave out the identity-politics and gender wars, spiritual pacifism for its own sake, etc.  Many ideas of the 70's, for example green tech, have already caught on with the power of thirty more years of reflection.  The economic ideals of the 70's can come back as well, now the added hindsight of the disastrous alternative, which succeeded in gaining power in part because it was new and untested in the popular view and was thus harder to prove wrong through experience.  You see the way "communism" was discredited entirely over the past 20 years, Reagansim should suffer the same fate.

What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? . . . Our shortcoming--forgive the academic jargon--is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things. . . . The problem lies not in social democratic policies, but in the language in which they are couched.

His answer seems to be to recast social democrats as conservatives:

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear. Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

If any if you are familiar with Big Tent Democrat's Lincoln 1860 argument -- essentially paint the opposition as extremists -- I think this is similar. This approach may not work so well in Europe, unless some version of Thatcherism replaces traditional Christian Democracy as the major approach of the Right.

I'd personally like to see a more positive program:

Messrs. Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf don't stop at analysis. They offer an Economic Bill of Rights meant to finish off the corporate state whose death struggle is giving us all such grief. To make employment more attractive and secure, they would offer public jobs to all comers . . . shorten the work week, control prices (but not wages) and discourage plant closings. To destroy invidious corporate power, they would make union organizing much easier, give communities control over investments by local banks and insurance companies, subsidize community-owned enterprises and the production of goods deemed ''needed'' by a public planning administration, give the House of Representatives control over monetary policy, and much, much more.

However I fell that on social issues and "superpower" issues we are getting a strong movement to the left in the US.

The AmericanEmpire  has always tortured, now for the first it does not.
The American Empire has always backed right-wing wackos, now they do not grant visas to the same guys (Hnduras)
The American Empire has always invaded what they see fit, now they are getting out of oil-resource-war back to the loose-nuke Af-Pak area

The AmericanEmpire has moved to engage and support the emergence of new superpowers.. I quite can not believe how Brazil is becoming the ruler in South_America and the US is fine with it. Or the deals with Russia... adn China. and India.

And on global warming in the elite in the US is with the center (thankfully no center-right any longer)

Regarding personal rights, the US is moving to the left... except for the death penalty.

So I would say we are losing the narrative in economic issues... and I guess it is because the economic mythologies,media and academic status is against us and 40 years of mythology is very hard to overcome without lots and lots of money , media and improvement of narratives.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

The advent of English-language media coming out of Europe and delivered over the internet is massive.  Target this audience and nurture it.  Anything "European" has built-in appeal for most of the upper middle-class, educated US population under 30.  If you can get these people more radicalized those ideas will carry through the culture rather efficiently.  For now they have mostly become centrists as the opportunity to live a comfortable, glamorous life has been such an easy road.  This is all fading away and there is a void of angry, disappointed and entitled people who are a receptive and influential audience.  The farmers, etc, are organized seperately.

A specific way to encourage the Europeanization of the US is to start treating yourselves as an equal.  The Green City Ranking is very interesting, but it should be merged with the US ranking.  Too often we see data presented as the US alone or the US + the rest of the world.  I want to see more data containing the US and Europe alone.  This kind of subtle change in the way information is presented will have enormous benefits.  As you elevate yourselves to our "equals" in these kinds of ways you'll ultimately elevate your ideas alongside them.  It's not about being better or worse, in fact rankings showing the US cities beating European ones are probably a great idea.  It's about putting us all on equal footing.

In contrast, Europe was in much worse shape, partly due to income disparity and partly because of a generally lower standard of living. Thus, I think, a stronger tendency to support the leftist viewpoint. Then, as Europe caught up with the U.S., the socialist viewpoint gradually recedes.

I have no statistics to back this up, though.

..change will require a bigger crisis. And given that change from our unsustainable system is inevitable, a bigger crisis WILL happen. The only question is whether it happens before 2010, 2012 or later.

I doubt bigger crisis will change anything (for better). History is full of examples imperiums turning into serfdom without popular uprising. Only foreign invader has been able change things of a bankrupt country. People just think that is a natural way things go (at least as long as they themselves "survive").
There is no political movement addressing the basic problem: banks creating money -> inflating property prices -> sellers getting fortunes -> leaving population in debt -> destroying "wealth creation."

That is how that conflict ended, right?

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

"Thus, the questions we need to ask are - (1) why is it that the range of political discourse and policies considered possible in the US ranges from the hard right to the center right?"

is the essential one of political economy -- "Why do governance outcomes happen as they do instead of as they should?"

Regarding the simple fact the US is a center-right country while many European countries are better described as center-left, the recent empirical work by Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote has been seminal in the political economy field, particularly among progressive scholars who study things like "race and politics."  (Even though Alesina and Glaeser can't really be categorized as "progressive.")

Their findings, after looking at a number of different variables, boil down to just two factors which are much more basic than money, corporate control of media, or who can shape narratives. If we associate altruism (the basic individual incentive underlying socialism) with being left or progressive or "not right-wing" then we can argue that higher measures of welfare systems is indicative of being more leftist or progressive politically, and we can try to find other relevent, measurable factors that are associated with greater or lesser support for large welfare systems in different countries.

What Alesina, et. al. find after searching through many variables is that only two are strong indicators -- proportional representation voting for legislative bodies, and racial diversity.  

Proportional representation allows a voice in policymaking for more extreme, but less popular, points of view, which has allowed communist and socialist political parties to remain active in Europe, providing a relentless, if minority, voice for the poor in policy-making negotiations.

But the darker indicator is that of racial diversity. More diversity means more right-wing, because it appears that people tend to be less altruistic when their generosity might go to people who look different. Greater diversity means more rightist opinions in politics, which has important implications for migration and economic development policies. (Though, providing hope for the left in a finding in other work by Alesina, people who live in close proximity to diverse populations, such as in mixed neighborhoods in large cities, tend to be just as altruistic to their racially different neighbors as people who live in same-race communities are to their same-race neighbors.)

So, mapping countries by the size of minority populations and by electoral systems provides a schema for predicting structural political bias toward the right or the left.  The US is the most racially diverse country with a non-proportional electoral system, meaning that there is really very little hope for a consistent left-wing majority to ever develop there.  Japan, by contrast, is racially homogeneous, so it falls to the left the the US in that respect, and while it's lower house is proportionally elected, its upper legislative house is not, landing it in the "mixed member majoritarian" category. Scandinavia is racially quite homogeneous (still), and its parliaments are proportionally elected from party lists, and the Nordic countries have the most generous welfare systems in the world. For fun, you can go through the countries of the world and see which ones comply with the model and which are outliers.

The implication is that there are strong, structural and institutional reasons for political bias among countries that are much more basic than money and corporate influence.  And the best, long term strategies for the left in right-biased countries is to promote policies which lead to increasingly proportional representation in even majoritarian elections (such as instant runoff voting), and to promote policies of urban and suburban development that provide for mixed-income communities. (And public transportation is a big part of providing for successful, mixed-income development.)