In our previous post about OWS, we linked to an item that’s been making the rounds today: this Huffington Post grumble from lesbian “electronic punk” musician JD Samson, who has become dissatisfied with how things are working out for her, affluence-wise. NRO’s Daniel Foster has add some pointed commentary over at the Corner. An excerpt:
The great, and probably terminal, flaw of the Left’s various grievance-group “isms’ is that they implicitly rely on a world in which trade-offs have been abolished. It isn’t just that Samson should be free to move to New York and consecrate herself to her “art.’ It’s that she should be free to do that while enjoying all the benefits of her choice and suffering none of the consequences. What she wants is not the freedom to choose but the freedom from having to choose.
What sort of worldview makes this fantasy conceivable? Well, if I had to pick just one French term of art popularized by a 19th-century German philologist to describe the Occupy Wall Street set and its attendants, it would be Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. Why does good old English “resentment’ not suffice? Why is the extra ”˜s’ and fancy French pronunciation required? Well, resentment is about begrudging the success of your betters as a way to avoid reflection on your own failures. The Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon described resentment as an “impotence self-righteousness’ directed at your superiors, and contrasted it with anger (directed at your equals) and contempt (directed at your inferiors). But ressentiment is what happens when you take that impotent self-righteousness and define a whole morality of good and evil in terms of it, build a whole belief system out of it, build an ideology, a political movement ”” an occupation.
Spot on. Read the rest here.
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Well done, if not crispy, I should think. And, as if that weren’t enough, we have the dickheads to contend with, and the batshit crazies, too. And how about another dose of hopey-dopey?
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit …
A quick look through the comments section of Samson’s piece shows that most of the HuffPo readers have essentially the same criticism that Foster has. Being a lesbian artist has nothing to do with her complaints, and if you can’t afford to live in Wliiamsburg: well, get over it (e.g., “do you need insurance to call the waaaaaaambulance?”).
However, this does not stop Foster from conflating Samson with “the left,” and then ascribing all of her failings, writ large, to the political movement which she is purportedly emblematic of. This is the sum and substance of most of what you find on NRO: they provide a narrative which matches their readers’ pre-conceived notions, and then superimposes unrelated items to bolster the Weltanschauung of their readership.
In this case, the narrative is that the left is chock full of slothful freeloaders, and the morally superior NRO readership is the nation’s last remaining bulwark against the mob’s attack on cherished American values like self-reliance and individual liberty. In this sense, Foster is no different than your friend in Park Slope who thinks that the Tea Party is comprised of hate-filled racists. Doubtless there are many racists in the Tea Party, just as there are others raising Cain. Life is always more complex than partisans and ideologues would have you believe.
Foster’s syllogism is that the left is just like Samson, and therefore “they implicitly rely on a world in which trade-offs have been abolished” because that’s how Samson feels. However, both parts of his equation are wrong: the left is not like Samson, and the “isms” which he derogates do not demand an abolition of trade-offs.
The left’s long campaign against racism was about providing equal rights to people of color, not to steal the rights of the white power establishment in some zero sum game. The National Review and its founder, William F. Buckley, long supported segregation in the South under the guise of states’ rights, just as Rand Paul supports it today under the fig leaf of a putative right of a business to determine which customers it wants to serve. They opposed the left’s campaign against sexism because laws against workplace harassment or unequal pay were held to be government overreach. They oppose gay marriage because allowing gays to have the same custody rights or rights of survivorship of straight couples is different from traditional notions of marriage, so must therefore be wrong. Far from being the morally superior protectors of cherished American values, they have been the morally deficient proponents of an unequal status quo. Buckley alludes to this in his famous remark in the National Review manifesto, where he defines “a Conservative (as) a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” Today’s NRO might replace the anachronistic “fellow” with the more expansive “person,” but aside from that, not a whole lot has changed there over the years.
And there you have it: the Left stands for nothing more than the abolition of slavery, and a woman’s right not to be called “sweetie” by the boss. Who but a reactionary, blackhearted bigot could refuse to join the singing ’round the campfire?
How wrong we’ve been to imagine that all those folks down in Zucotti Park are anything remotely resembling Leftists! How deceived all those prominent liberals must be to rally to their cause! Why, the very “zero-sumness” of their demands should have been a dead giveaway.
One video is worth a 1000 words…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU1CDSP7FRk
FWIW, I like any bridge that has the words, “ramma lamma ding dong” in it.
I haven’t been following the events in Zucotti Park, so I’m not qualified to comment there. Whether it is a principled Gandhian protest or a bunch of kids with nothing better to do, I really have no idea. Based on what little I do know, it seems like the mirror image of Tea Party protests: a bunch of really pissed off people without any idea of how to fix things beyond that which fits on a bumper sticker. The obvious difference, of course, is that while the Tea Party is organized and funded by wealthy individuals and corporations, the OWL protests seem more like a flash mob.
As for the rest of your condescending and remarkably silly response: it is a matter of historical fact that since at least the Progressive era, the left has stood for expanding the practical application of the principle that all men are created equal, while the right has stood for restricting it. The people who were, in fact, reactionary and blackhearted bigots — men like Bull Connor, Orville Faubus, and Strom Thurmond — were hardly known for their blazing liberalism, and their actions were consistently supported by, among others, William F. Buckley and the National Review. (Towards the end of his life, Buckley did have the decency to admit that his support of segregation was the thing he regretted most about his career.)
It’s equally inarguable (that is, if being inarguable is a modifiable condition) that the women’s rights movement was involved in things like the struggle to guarantee equality of opportunity in the workplace, and not trivialities like being called Sweetie. As with the civil rights movement, those who favored things like providing equal pay for equal work were predominantly from the left, and those who opposed them were predominantly from the right.
This is not to say that all conservatives are racists or misogynists. Rather, it is to state the obvious: their philosophy is far more hospitable to policies which enable, or fail to inhibit, the tangible results of racism and misogyny, while those from the left are far more hospitable to policies which employ the power of the state to eliminate those results.
It is also not to say that this dialectic is consigned to the past, as witnessed by current efforts by those on the right to stymie or reverse equal rights for gays, or their unprecedented campaign to disenfranchise poor and minority voters through phony voter ID laws and restrictions on ballot access.
However, why let pesky things like facts get in the way of a good narrative?
Wow, pretty impressive, Pete, even by your usual standards: by your own admission, you don’t know enough about the actual topic of this post even to comment on it in an informed or useful way, so instead you decide to hijack yet another thread just to remind everybody what racist, misogynist moral lowlifes conservatives are in comparison to your sainted Progressives (oh, perhaps not all conservatives, of course, just most of them, and those vile policies they all endorse).
Pause along the way to throw in, in lieu of actually addressing (rather than simply gainsaying) the critique raised in that NRO item, an utterly irrelevant and gratuitous ad hominem attack on the late William F. Buckley, add some knee-jerk comparisons to the Tea Party, sprinkle in a little Jim Crow calumny, and call it a day!
If the Left’s agenda were confined merely to anti-racism demonstrations, I’d have no complaint, having participated in a couple myself in my youth. That has nothing to do with what’s at issue here.
I’ll also remind readers that if there’s any racism/sexism on offer here, it’s coming, as I pointed out in my previous post, from the protesters themselves — who are sending white males to the back of the line, and railing against the Jooz.
Sorry, I thought the topic was the link which starts your post, as well as the excerpt which immediately follows, in which Foster conflates Samson’s pitiable whine with “the great, and perhaps terminal flaw of the Left,” which is that its “isms” are dependent on a world “in which trade-offs are abolished.” I must have been misinformed.
And when Foster derogates the Left’s “grievance groups” — suggesting that the really have no legitimate grievances, they’re just like Samson not being able to afford skinny jeans — and its “isms” — it was a big mistake to rebut his thesis with examples of “grievance groups” who suffered very real injustices, which we generally categorize under rubrics like sexism and racism. I guess that’s not “actually addressing” what he writes. He must have been referring to panzoism, or maybe zootheism. Hard to tell. So confusing.
And in suggesting that the Left, with its long history of defending its “grievance groups,” might have actually have done something to help those suffering from “isms” despite the fervent opposition of the Right, including the very publication with Foster works for: how could I do such a thing? I forgot: conservatives were totally gung —ho for desegregating schools! They just loved Brown v. Board of Education, and all the other decisions of the “liberal activist Court!” And when the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 came down the pike, they were so thrilled that any objections they might once have had vanished quicker than the Yankees and the Phillies. How could I forget this stuff?
Another boo-boo: suggesting that there might be just a teensy connection between using states’ rights as an excuse to block integrating restaurants and using states’ rights as an excuse to deny a father the right to visit his child because his partner was another man. Hey, that was then and this is now, right? And why use historical analogies? Modestly precludes me to state who analogies are used by, so I’ll refer to the bit of hot water which Silvio Berlusconi recently got himself into, when he suggested that his political party be renamed the “Go Pussy!” party. One thing you have to say for Silvio: he takes his role as an alpha male primate pretty seriously.
And as for my unforgivable ad hominem attack on William F. Buckley: I should never have referred to stuff he actually wrote which supported segregation and which opposed the historic civil rights legislation which ultimately ended it. It’s too much like Sarah Palin castigating the lamestream media in its victimization of her by accurately quoting what she says.
So I’ll do my best to remember for next time: a trenchant and well-reasoned analysis is no match for sarcasm and innuendo.
I should have mentioned that Berlusconi came up with the new name for his party a week or two after calling Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-ass.”. While I concede that his point is not wholly without merit, nonetheless the next Group of Seven meeting might get a little touchy.
No, Peter, you’ve completely missed the point of the Foster piece. Nobody is suggesting that the Left has never done any good with its grievance-based ideology; even Bill Buckley (who is dead, and who had nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Foster’s article) came to regret his states-rights position on segregation.
What Mr. Foster does correctly identify as the Left’s “fatal flaw” is its tendency always — whether it’s Howard Zinn, or Lenin, or Mao Tse-tung, or Barack Obama — to view all social and political issues in terms of a narrative of oppression, discrimination, and “unfairness”. This is the hammer of the Left, through which everything becomes a nail — and because of this, the Left is the natural home, just as Mr. Foster argues, of ressentiment — a sentiment that never needs much encouragement even in the best of times, and which is in full bloom just now (and not, as even I will admit, without some justification). When Barack Obama calls on his base to “punish their enemies”, and demonizes “millionaires and billionaires”, it is ressentiment, plain and simple, that he is trying to whip up.
Throughout history — especially since 1900 — the tendency of the Left has been to go to ever greater and greater lengths to make life “fair”, and it is this fixation with leveling life’s outcomes by pulling down and lopping off the top that has given us Communist Russia and China, Pol Pot, National Socialism, the Sendero Luminosa and so on — all of them motivated by exactly the ressentiment that Mr. Foster describes.
Wow. Berlusconi said that?
“Unfuckable lard-ass”. Wow.
Wonder how you say “OK, go bail yourself out, greaseball!” in German.
Well, there’s Leftists, and then there are violent revolutionaries like Mao and Lenin, or brutal tyrants like Pol Pot. Grouping them into a single grab-bag of “the Left” fails to acknowledge that there is a distinction between Paul Krugman and Eldridge Cleaver, just as there is a distinction between David Brooks and Vlad the Impaler. And as for the resentment which Foster imputes to the latter group: it may be a device they exploited to gain power, but what motivated them was lust for power. They certainly didn’t do much to address this resentment and create a utopian dream once they got in power.
Moreover, the purported universality of the Left to have a “fixation with leveling life’s outcomes” fails to make the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. There are some who argue that when you have cases of invidious discrimination — for example, if graduates from inferior inner city high schools score lower on standardized tests because they can’t reasonably be expected to perform as well as kids who had access to much better educations at wealthy suburbs — then it’s OK to put your thumb on the scales in their behalf. It’s a reasonable position, although probably not the consensus one. However, to equate it with National Socialism or Marxism is a fatuity.
As for Berlusconi: according to the Economist, he did indeed say that about Merkel, or whatever the Italian equivalent is. Whether he said it at one of his Bunga Bunga parties (needs no translation) was not revealed.
Hardly. I choose words carefully; please note the word “outcomes” in that sentence. When mere equality of opportunity doesn’t get the job done, that’s when the Left rolls up its sleeves.
Of course! Stoking and exploiting ressentiment is how the Left gains power.
Hardly a rarity in human affairs, then or now.
For the simple reason that it can’t be done. Given human nature, and the plain fact of inherent inequalities in human intelligence, ability, ambition, and temperament, you cannot maintain an artificial equality of outcome without imposing tyrannous inequalities of power.
I’ve got to give this round to Peter, since I think it’s a real stretch to maintain that a defining feature of “the left” is a commitment to equality of outcomes. Much more plausible is the idea that leftists are committed to the forced redistribution of wealth… which is bad enough…
I think one has to stretch pretty hard to deny it.
First of all, what is “forced redistribution of wealth” but a coercive leveling of outcomes?
Liberal dissatisfaction with unequal outcomes is evident all around us. If you buy the idea that the Left is content merely to police opportunity, you’ve been taken in by the liberal sleight-of-hand by which all disparity in outcome is declared by fiat to be evidence of some underlying inequality of opportunity that must be leveled by government intervention.
Rising inequity in income? The system is broken, and must be fixed. Educational “achievement gaps”? Racism, of course, and “broken” schools that must be fixed — leading to the school-boards cheating scandals in Atlanta and elsewhere, the predictable result of insisting that educators do the impossible.
Not enough women in the sciences? A disgraceful “systematic bias”, which schools must jump through hoops to fix.
Too few minorities passing the entrance exam for the NYFD? It’s a “racist” test. Dumb it down till we get the outcome we want.
Is the unfortunate fact that we have immigration laws keeping anyone from anywhere on earth from enjoying the benefits that US citizens do? Well, until we can abolish them (see Demand #8), just sue any state that tries to enforce them.
And so on.
According to today’s New York Times, the share of income held by the top one percent of homes went from 10% in the 1970’s to the above 20% now, which is the highest rate since 1928. This is not because a rising tide lifted the other boats: for the first time in our lifetimes, the real income of working-age households declined during the first decade of this century. Nor was it because the pie got bigger: the top few percent got bigger slices of the same pie, at the expense of everyone else.
Worker pay as a share of the economy is at its lowest point since the 1950’s, and the ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay is at its highest.
This is not because the wealthy are smarter or more industrious, or because everyone else is dumber and lazier. It is not because the “job creators” created more jobs with their lower taxes and greater wealth: there was no net job creation in the last decade. It is because changes in income tax over the last decade provided the wealthy with tax preferences and lower marginal rates, while the regressive taxes which have a much greater effect on the non-wealthy have increased.
In other words, changes in government policy have shifted wealth from the vast majority of the population to a small segment, pushing the imbalance to extreme levels in comparison both to our own historical standards as well as the rest of the developed world. This is the textbook definition of the “forced redistribution of wealth.”
However, should President Obama make a modest tinkering of the tax code — not even coming close to the half-way point of the status quo ante of the Clinton years, when a more equitable tax distribution raised the tide for everyone — well, we can’t have that! That would be class warfare!
As the saying goes: they only call it class warfare when we fight back.
The forced redistribution of wealth can, and often is, presented as necessary for the realization of equality of opportunity. I don’t buy that the redistribution need be forced, unless you include persuasive force in the equation. But I have no doubt whatever that poverty alongside wealth (understood in relative terms) results in unequal opportunities to develop our native capacities. (For me, at least, it’s the opportunity to develop one’s native capacities that is the crux of equal opportunity.)
Peter,
We could now turn this thread into a long argument about tax policy (I’ll just point out that revenue from individual returns sits at about 8% of GDP regardless of where the top rate is).
But I agree with you, as do a great many conservatives, that the tax code could use reforming. (The Simpson-Bowles commission recommended major reforms, and President Obama walked away.)
The principal beef that the Right has had with a ressentiment-based campaign to get more out of the wealthiest Americans has been that in the absence of serious spending cuts, the money would just go down the hole.
But what you’ve said here is consistent with the view that the Left’s concern is ultimately about leveling outcomes, in this case the unwelcome fact of increasing disparity of wealth — the rich getting richer faster than the poor (who in real terms are also better off than they used to be).
And no, the regulatory climate that has enabled wealth to grow in the upper echelons is in no way “forced redistribution”, which is by definition coercive and confiscatory. Whose wealth do you imagine to have been confiscated here?
Well, Bob, nobody is suggesting that the government should close all the public schools, etc.
But you see yourself how difficult it is to draw the bright line between opportunity and outcome. The inherent tendency of the Left, then, is incrementally to redefine every disparity in outcome as evidence of an underlying, pernicious disparity in opportunity, and another occasion for government intervention.
An intelligent person has more opportunities before him than a congenital idiot, and therefore his outcome will likely be better. What to do about that?
As Daniel Dennett wrote, in a discussion of free will: “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything.”
I suppose also that there is also a good deal of overlap between moderate conservatives, like me, and moderate liberals, like Peter, as to where to strike the right balance, given that there is a necessary trade-off between leveling and liberty.
The point, though, and I think it is the underlying point of Mr. Foster’s brief essay, is that Left and Right are two poles that pull in opposite directions. And I’ll add that, as with Earth’s geographical poles, these ideological poles are both inhospitable places.
Can we all agree on that?
An intelligent person has more opportunities before him than a congenital idiot, and therefore his outcome will likely be better. What to do about that?
Nothing, if intelligence and congenital idiocy express native capacities (as I assume we can agree, they do). Those with a wealth of native capacities should have a wealth of opportunities, but not at the expense of opportunities for those less well endowed by the natural lottery. That is the gap that we should mind, and strive to eliminate.
To the extent that I favor redistribution of more straightforwardly economic wealth, it is constrained by, and in the service of the pursuit of equality of opportunity. This is not a difficult idea. It’s simply Rawls where what is being distributed is opportunity to develop native capacities.
Personally, I won’t be satisfied until both Koch brothers have their heads on pikes, with their wealth redistributed so everyone can download Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s thrilling rendition of Young Girl.
Young girl, get out of my mind … My love for you is way out of line …
Now is that a great song, or what?
IMHO, Malcolm wins this debate. His comments are based on the superiority of capitalism as the basis for an equitable allocation of created wealth, as opposed to all the other systems that rely on centralized planning and control, all of which latter have been thoroughly discredited. Malcolm’s position also benefits from the ideals of a meritocracy, as opposed to some collection of ad hoc feelings of guilt, which are neither universally warranted nor universally felt. And his points have the additional great benefit of being common sensical, as opposed to emotionally driven drivel.
So, then, the question of just which differences in outcomes are due to “native capacities” (intelligence, industriousness, future time orientation, self-discipline, low impulsiveness, etc.) becomes a very important one when deciding whether government intervention is warranted, no?
A view that tends to deny, wherever possible, the importance, or even existence, of such innate differences in favor of external causes will lobby always for more governmental remediation. Again, this is a hallmark of the Left, or at least the modern Left.
Yes, we need to have some sense of what capacities are native, but we also need to recognize that some of the opportunities presented to exercise those capacities are thoroughly artificial — and those latter should be apportioned, I think, in a roughly Rawlsian manner. I don’t think there are good reasons why the outcomes in question should increase the further opportunities of the naturally gifted in a manner that widens the opportunity gap.
Agreed. It’s that first part, though, that’s the snag.
A farther-left response would be: why should Smith’s inherited high intelligence confer on him opportunities that Jones doesn’t have? He didn’t do anything to deserve it.
Well, if we were actually in a Rawlsian-ordered world, and if Smith acted on the opportunities afforded him due to his disproportionately high intelligence, then we could reasonably expect a disproportionate increase in the opportunities available to those of us less well endowed by nature. If your imagined “further leftist” can’t understand how that amounts to decreasing the opportunity gap, s/he is in need of remedial education, assuming s/he has the natural capacities to benefit from it. On the other hand, however, if your imagined “further leftist” says, “But we actually are not in a Rawlsian-ordered world,” s/he makes a point that ought to make those of us with moral sensibilities feel a bit squeamish.
I think I need some remedial education too. Why does Smith’s taking advantage of the extra opportunities his intelligence affords him increase the opportunities available to the less-intelligent Jones? Simply because Smith will take that think-tank job rather than competing with Jones for the janitorial position?
I’m appealing to a form of Rawls’ “difference principle”, which treats inequalities as acceptable only if they benefit (in a relative sense) the least advantaged members of society. This is related to a notion of “fairness” that takes account of the fact that none of us can claim to “deserve” whatever natural capacities we have, and so can’t “fairly” lay claim to any advantages they afford us relative to our fellows. A Rawlsian-ordered society is so structured that inequalities in the distribution of goods can be expected to produce benefits in a manner that reduces the relative gap between the haves and have-nots. This is not a utopian scheme, since it does not presume that the gap can be completely eliminated. But it is meant to ensure that the gap does not grow. And remember, I’m proposing that we apply the Rawlsian scheme directly to opportunities to develop native capacities. The accumulation of various other goods would be relevant only indirectly, i.e., to the extent that it influences the distribution of the opportunities in question.
I’ve never found the “difference principle” argument morally persuasive (if one is permitted to say one finds anything by Rawls unpersuasive!), for various reasons — for example, on libertarian grounds I think it entails unacceptable curtailments of freedom, and in purely practical terms I think it rewards freeloaders, by discounting free choices (to work hard, defer pleasure for future gain, etc.). It tends toward what Churchill called “the equal sharing of misery”.
(Not to split hairs, but if I remember correctly Rawls himself stressed that inequalities were to be tolerated if they benefit the least-advantaged in an absolute, rather than a relative sense. Art Laffer would agree…)
I clearly am not an orthodox Rawlsian, as evidenced by my many departures from the writ of his theory. Most obviously, I’ve focussed on the distribution of a particular sort of opportunity rather than the distribution of other kinds of social goods. But I do think the kernel of his approach is true to our basic notion of a fair distribution.