The wailing and gnashing of teeth over the election continues apace.
But among the “we wuz robbed!” complaints, I’m seeing more and more acute commentary on what the left and the Democratic Party needs to do to reverse the slow slide toward irrelevance.
Let me explain why this matters to me.
On my post on the Bienert article, regular commenter and critic SAO notes:
If only you were ask concerned with the neo-cons as you seem to be with the moonbats… alas.
SAO, it’s a team sport, and for me to get to play, I need a team to play alongside. I’m deeply uncomfortable playing alongside the current left, and the current Democratic Party, and if you want to know why here’s something by Michael Lind from the Nation (via Marc Cooper) that nails the central disconnect I’m trying to articulate.It’s part of a litany of short essays – blog posts, really – by different leftist thinkers about what the Democratic Party needs to do. Some of the essays are embarrassingly stupid, some are not.
But I actually had a flash of envy when I read this one because it sums up the gap between the progressive community and the rest of us so damn well. The policy implications of some of the points he makes here make me squirm, but click through to the Nation and then to Cooper and read this as well as the comments (some less useful than others):
In an era in which most U.S. population growth is occurring in the South, West and heartland, American liberalism is defined by people in the Northeast. At a time when rising tuitions are pricing many working-class Americans out of a college education, the upscale campus is becoming the base of American progressivism.
In a country in which most working-class Americans drive cars and own homes in the suburbs, the left fetishizes urban apartments and mass transit and sneers at “sprawl.” In an economy in which most workers are in the service sector, much of the left is obsessed with manufacturing jobs.
In a society in which Latinos have surpassed blacks as the largest minority and in which racial intermixture is increasing, the left continues to treat race as a matter of zero-sum multiculturalism and white-bashing.
In a culture in which the media industry makes money by pushing sex and violence, the left treats the normalization of profanity and obscenity as though it were somehow progressive, making culture heroes of Lenny Bruce and Larry Flynt. At a time when the religious right wants to shut down whole areas of scientific research, many on the left share a Luddite opposition to biotech. In an age in which billions would starve if not for the use of artificial fertilizers in capital-intensive agriculture, the left blathers on about small-scale organic farming.
In a century in which the dire need for energy for poor people in the global South can only be realistically met by coal, oil and perhaps nuclear energy, liberals fantasize about wind farms and solar panels.
And in a world in which the greatest threat to civilization is the religious right of the Muslim countries, much of the left persists in treating the United States as an evil empire and American patriotism as a variant of fascism.
American progressivism, in its present form, is as obsolete in the twenty-first century as the agrarian populists were in the twentieth. If you can’t adapt to the times, good intentions will get you nowhere. Ask the shade of William Jennings Bryan.
The progressives are trapped trying to refight the battles of the mid 20th century in the early 21st.
You can bang them over the head with it, but most of them won’t get it. The Clintons might, though.
Er, I take issue with some of Lind’s characterizations, notably on renewable energy (solar cookers in Africa, wind in Europe, Texas, & California …) and sprawl (it’s worth sneering at). Additionally, who are these people with a Luddite opposition to Biotech? A few GMO nuts? But his point about “evil empires” and so forth is well taken.
Thank you Mr Lind: a capsule summary of why I started calling myself a “conservative.”
Praktike:
I wouldn’t say sprawl is worth “sneering” at. The casual, arrogant dismissal of the suburban lifestyle is part of the culture gap between the left and the rest of us.
Productive discussion about “sprawl”: a fine idea for liberals and conservatives alike. Sneering at working class lifestyle choices: guaranteed vote loser.
And while I’m fine with solar cookers, they aren’t going to power the factories that impoverished countries need to raise their standard of living.
” and sprawl (it’s worth sneering at). ”
To Wit: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41770
Typical collectivist CommuNazi
Gulag Purge Progrom mentality
Same crap as “Tax the Rich!”, ( taxes go up, cost passed to consumer, poor now pays the higher taxes in the increased cost of everything from bread to the clothes for his kids and health care is placed further out of reach )
The consumer of a good pays ALL taxes, all taxes from the income/ss tax taken out of the baker and janitors paycheck right down to the high property taxes the bread company pays because govt buys up land driving cost of ownership up driving up the cost of all goods and the cost of a roof over your house.
Every thing the left does is aimed, indirectly but never-fail targeted, at the pocket of the poorest, and leftism always hurts those he want to help the most.
And the leftist solution is to increase the dosage of the very thing causing the problem.
Thats the “Usefull Idiots” anyway, I think those at the top know this is destroying america and destroying the american dream, and they approve because that is their intent.
Yes, that’s right, Raymond. I’m a typical collectivist CommuNazi.
Perhaps I was a little too glib earlier, so let me expand a bit.
Planned growth is a good thing; uncontrolled sprawl is not. It’s bad when areas grow so fast that they, for instance, build on top of their aggregate supplies and drive up the cost of road maintenance and construction. This is what happened in Minneapolis, along with water shortages … same thing happened in Boston, and the Army Corps of Engineers had to step in and buy up the headwaters of the Charles so that everyone would have clean drinking water. Not everyone wants to live in places like Atlanta and Houston …
praktike: “Additionally, who are these people with a Luddite opposition to Biotech? A few GMO nuts?”
They may be few in number, but their influence is no joke. They blocked the introduction of “golden rice” (modified to produce beta carotine) that would correct vitamin deficiencies that have ravaged SE Asia for centuries.
They have fought against genetically-modified corn that would include a natural mineral resistant to corn worms, as an alternative to pesticides. Of course, they oppose the pesticides, too. In fact, I think they’re against corn, period.
They even threatened Heinz (the very feeding trough of our beloved Teresa Heinz-Kerry!) with boycotts over GMOs, and of course they got results. They have likewise successfully intimidated Gerber, Unilever, and Nestle, although there was no evidence that the GMOs they were offering were harmful.
All you have to do is scream hysterically about “destroying the environment”, and the boys in the board room will go looking for some other way to make money. Thus do the delusions of the few outweigh the needs of the many. And of course, no one is allowed to utter heretical criticism of the sacred Environmentalist cause.
_Not everyone wants to live in places like Atlanta and Houston … _
True, not everyone does. But Atlanta and Houston, and places like them, are gaining population and the urban northeast isn’t. And any coalition that hopes to run the country will need to appeal to voters who live there. It is hard to attract someones vote when sneering at the place they choose to live.
Before the Bush era, Krugman wrote about GMO/environmental issues here here and here.
But AL, one point: you have written many times IIRC, about the need to reduce dependence on foreign oil. Well, we are dependent on foreign oil precisely because of individual choices about cars, houses, etc. The only way not to be dependent on foreign oil is due to voluntary conservation (unlikely), some technological fix which eliminates or reduces the need to make hard choices, a very large oil shock due to “natural” (non-government) causes, or some form of government coercion: taxes on fossil fuels, fuel-efficiency standards, etc. And making those kinds of concrete proposals opens you up to charges that you’re a self-righteous elitist who looks down on regular Americans and wants to control how other people live. There’s no way around it, without caving on your goals.
Lastly, if you like Michael Lind, he is, or was, a big cheese at the New America Foundation, and you might like their books “The Real State of the Union” & “The Radical Center”.
Praktike has a point. We’ve seen in earlier decades that 3rd world countries who are very dependent on fossil fuels can have their economies hit a fast tailspin when price shocks hit… and when that happens, stability often goes with it. Given quickly growing demand and instabiility in key zones, I want a more diversified set of bets.
Greater use of alternative energy as appropriate to their location is good insurance that allows for local improvements, and smart geo-politics too if our own efforts can help us use it as a form of local aid with obvious payoffs. Just as long as it isn’t touted as the only solution per some kind of “eco-imperialism” binge that disregards both economics and common sense, it’ll be a net plus for everybody.
I’m all about reasonable applications of alternative energy. But I also believe that with relatively minor changes, we could have a significant impact on energy consumption in this country. We aren’t doing the easy things…
A.L.
I share the general frustration with the left’s approach to many things that I also consider problems. You don’t grab the low-hanging fruit by trying to build an orbital spaceplane (especially when the effort is technically impossible), but that seems to be what the idealists manage to do every time.
Perhaps this comes back to the problem of groups tending toward the extreme views of their most opinionated members. California could have achieved much more by pushing hybrids than mandating ZEVs, but they went for the extreme and got almost exactly nowhere. There are examples on the right as well. How do we overcome this all-too-human foible?
Here’s a third-world idea: on-farm digesters that turn manure into combined heat and power, dump some electrons back onto the grid, and spit the manure out cleaner than it entered. All it needs is capital!
And so forth … lots to be done.
On the GMO tip, I believe there are some valid concerns with proprietary seeds, notably with Monsanto. If I were forced to buy Monsanto’s corn because it crept into my own crop, I’d by PO’d indeed … so the intellectual property needs to be loosened, I think. Another concern is that farmers will develop a dependency on vertical rather than horizontal immunities, and thus be vulnerable to sudden mutations … this proved to be a problem in Peru when a bunch of smarty-pants Americans waltzed in with blight-proof potatoes that were actually quite vulnerable to being wiped out by strains they hadn’t planned for. The peasants are rational, you see … but yes, many of the worries seem spurious and hysterical.
praktike
Lets say i have no repect for Social Enginneer Commisars that are always corrupt crooks.
Heres an idea, let the market price water, in other words its a goverment caused problem in the first place.
“drive up the cost of road maintenance and construction.”
Yeah ? so ?
Show me a utopia without growing pains and ill show you a police state contr0oled by central planner burocrat corrupt crooks sucking the peoples blood, and you think thats better ?
News for praktike, the “untidy” “unprdictable” freedom that thwarts the projections of social planner commisars is exactly what we want.
” Markets don’t build a bridge to the future, a path from point A to point B across a scary abyss; they continually add nodes and pathways in a web of many different futures. Market processes make it impossible to make society as a whole adhere to a static ideal, whether that ideal is a traditional way of life, the status quo, or a planner’s notion of the one best future. ” — Virginia Postrel
Your idea that free people should be “controlled” I find morally offensive.
The unexpected and the need to solve new problems are as certain as your eventual death, life is messy and untidy and life in freedom is unpredictus maximus, planners might have a job dealing with conditions as they encounter them, but the idea that one of the tools they use to solve them is any kind of control on free people shares space at the root of stalinist thinking and is as offensive as Stalin himself.
Get that ?
Hybrid Cars:
Consume more net energy than equivalently sized conventionally powered cars due to the high energy content lithium batteries and electric motors in the hybrid cars.
Result: Hybrid cars are good at moving pollution from the point of use to the point of production, but are USELESS as either energy conservation devices OR greenhouse gas reducers.
This is a FRAUD foisted upon ignorant liberal pseudoenvironmentalists who “hate” cars and want an excuse to thumb their noses at the rest of us.
J. Pickens: Please back up that hybrid car claim with some actual data and sources. I’d be interested in seeing it.
j. pickens wrote:
This is exceedingly curious, because current hybrids use nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, not lithium. Perhaps he needs some enlightenment with the clue stick, and the propagandist a thorough fisking?
“On the GMO tip, I believe there are some valid concerns with . . . ”
But see, this is exactly the problem. Yes, there are valid concerns but we usually don’t get to talk about them because of all of the invalid concerns. I consider myself, generally, a moderate but you would never know it when I attempt to question some of the fantastical claims made by some of the people on the left that I know. Seriously, I’ve been called names like nazi, facist, and right-winger for saying such controversial things such as “I don’t think that data is accurate.”
As long as the left is dominated by people who refuse to consider moderate stands and openly discuss realistic solutions . . . they’re going to keep losing to the right.
The ultimate in irony is that the leftists intellectuals cried out after 9-11 that instead of attacking Afghanistan we should look for the root causes and try to understand them. When Bush won the election, the leftists intellectuals’ response was “F Middle America!” and filling out applications to become Canadian citizens.
So what’s wrong with living in Houston, exactly?
For less than you pay for a one-bedroom studio apartment with no air conditioning in NYC, you can BUY a four-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood with very low crime (you know, I don’t even know anybody who has ever been mugged – seems the prospect of getting shot repeatedly deters violent crime?) Sure, it takes half an hour to get downtown, but unless you’re commuting completely cross-city, or something equally stupid, your commute’s probably less than 40 minutes, and most of that is spent at 60-70 mph getting highway mileage instead of boiling over in gridlock. Yes, you’ll need to own a car, and that costs money (though the difference is probably still soaked up in your cheaper housing costs), but then you HAVE THE CAR, so you can go wherever you want whenever you want instead of relying on fickle public transportation. No moving on the subway for us! The city isn’t zoned, so the mix of residential areas, apartment complexes, commercial strips, and industrial areas is pretty chaotic, but that’s not a -bad- thing, and certainly not any worse than high-density urban living.
If you want to talk about efficient use of resources, well, we’ve got a BLOODY LOT of land down here. It’s a big state. Makes sense to spread out rather than build up (not that you can build up very far, it’s EXPENSIVE to put in a high-rise foundation when your water table is low enough to float swimming pools.)
Water usage is going to be the same for a sprawling city of 4 million as it is for a condensed city of 4 million, with a small factor for lawn watering (which is the same as saying that a sprawling city allows much more of its populace to HAVE a lawn, something I seemed to enjoy a lot more as a kid who played in it than as a teenager who had to mow it.)
And we have as good an ethnic food culture as any place you can name. We’re as likely to hit Iranian or Korean as we are to hit Wendy’s (and much, much more likely than going to McDonald’s, which hasn’t happened in years), and we’re just po’ folks working for a cartoon company, not exactly a bunch of young urban professionals. (Admittedly, we do also patronize Starbucks…)
The only real disadvantages are the air – we’ve got a lot of petrochemical refineries, and so it ain’t country fresh, although it used to be a lot worse and ain’t all that bad nowadays – and the heat. Yeah, Houston’s hot. It’s too hot. It’s hot and it’s humid. When hell freezes over, the devils will all move -here-. Even Dan Rather cannot express the full hotness in a down-homey anecdote. And of course this has all sorts of connotations as to what you can get away with in urban culture… i.e. you can’t do anything which makes people walk outside because they will arrive horribly sweaty and dehydrated, so the sidewalk cafe culture is out. How convenient that we’ve all got to have cars anyway…
So don’t go slaggin’ off Houston. You might like your urban apartment. I like being able to afford a house on $30k a year. Takes all kinds…
“Water usage is going to be the same for a sprawling city of 4 million as it is for a condensed city of 4 million”
Simply put: not true, especially not if you build over your groundwater recharge areas … moving along to Raymond’s, er, “comment” — sure, you can price water appropriately. I’m all in favor of that, in theory, but I doubt anyone has the political acumen to convince certain interests to pay full price. I suspect most rural folks wouldn’t like it however. There’d be a giant sucking sound as rice farming in Arkansas disappeared, for instance … in any case, I think you’ll change your mind about all of this “communism” when a CAFO moves in next door …
Its alwsys paper versus plastic. The environmental movement cannot get beyond the tradeoffs that are inherent in any new technology.
Praktike’s manure to energy proposal is a good example — reduces waste, creates a useful product, contributes to our energy needs. BUT environmentalist label it a waste incinerator and regulate it out of contention. Don’t start on the mercury emissions. Alternative solution: people should eat less meat. Translation: do nothing. Wow, that’s the same solution offered by industry!
Someone needs to stand astride the competing interests and push for the best option, recognizing that perfection is unatainable. That someone should be the Democratic party.
Patrick
Patrick: Please show me where anyone has labelled a biogas plant as a mercury-emissions source. Links preferred, but citations to dead trees will do if properly quoted.
Never mind, I seem to have mis-read #20.
Patrick, would you please show me where environmentalists have opposed biogas plants on the grounds that they are waste incinerators (as opposed to the fact that they are half-measures for cleanup of emissions from CAFO’s)?
Here’s the latest on wind, which is increasingly becoming the real deal in Europe, pace Mr. Lind.
I imagine this will be one of the few areas of overlap between myself and Mr. M. Simon.
Engineer-Poet:
The North Shore Sanitary District in Waukegan, Illinois purchased equipment commonly used in Europe to convert sludge into energy. The Sierra Club, other environmental groups and Waukegan opposed the project, complaining that it was a waste incinerator that should be treated as if it were a major source for mercury (which it was not). There was a lawsuit. The Illinois legislature passed new mercury laws targeting the project. An environmental racism complaint was filed with the USEPA. Here is an example of a complaint from the environmental community:
http://www.lakemichigan.org/elimination/sludge_comments.asp
Patrick