Bobo has a question in a thing he excreted called “The Growth Imperative:” Now that we’re in the decade of the nasty crawl, what political approach is best for getting us out of it? Let me guess… OOH! I think I have it — have the Democrats act more like Republicans. That’s Bobo’s solution for everything, right? Mr. Cohen, in “Modern Odysseys,” muses on the hope and the hurt of uprooting in a restless world. Prof. Krugman, in “Curbing Your Enthusiasm,” says President Obama rode into office on a wave of progressive enthusiasm. But, for many reasons, that has given way to progressive disillusionment. Here’s Bobo:
We could be in for a long, slow decade. There’s a confluence of forces that are probably going to retard economic vitality.
Consumers are still overindebted, and it will take years of curtailed spending before households are back on a sustainable path. Federal and state governments also will have to pull back. Labor markets were ill before the recession and are worse now.
Our trading partners in Europe and Japan are stagnant or in peril. Banks in this country are not lending to small businesses and banks elsewhere have huge write-downs to endure. The psychological war between business and the Obama administration also is taking a toll. Business types think the administration is stuffed with clueless professors. Some administration officials think corporate honchos are free-market hypocrites prowling for corporate welfare.
What we have is not just a cycle but a condition. We could look back on the period between 1980 and 2006 as the long boom and the period between 2007 and 2014 or so as the nasty crawl.
Politically, this period could be akin to the late-1970s. Economic anxiety could produce good and bad ideological effusions. As the economy stutters, people will ask fundamental questions about the nature of our political-economic structures and come up with grand proposals to revive growth. The electorate could shift in ways hard to imagine.
In my previous column, I tried to imagine what a moderate Democratic growth agenda would look like. You could call it the Moon Shot Approach. In this approach, government tries to spur economic development first by creating the context for growth with a big infrastructure program and then by focusing subsidies and tax credits on key sectors, like energy research.
The Republicans have their own growth agenda. You could call it the Unleash America Approach. The underlying worldview was deftly sketched out in Arthur C. Brooks’s book, “The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future.”
Brooks (no relation) argues that Americans are a uniquely entrepreneurial people. A nation of immigrants, “America’s vast success might be explained in part by our genetic predisposition to embrace risks with potentially explosive rewards.”
Citing an array of polling data, Brooks argues that 70 percent of Americans embraces this free-market and entrepreneurial vision of their country. But 30 percent prefers a more government-centric, European-style vision. The battle, Brooks concludes, is between the 70 percent, trying to reclaim the country, and the 30 percent, which is now expanding the federal role on an array of fronts.
Paul Ryan, the most intellectually ambitious Republican in Congress, lavishly cites Brooks’s book. Over the past few years, Ryan has been promoting a roadmap to comprehensively reform the nation’s tax and welfare system. On the tax side, he would sweep away most of the special-interest-favoring tax credits and subsidies and give people a chance to join a simple tax system with only two rates.
On the welfare-state side, he’d sweep away most subsidies to the middle and upper classes, like the tax exemption on employee health plans. He’d essentially voucherize federal benefits, like health care and Social Security, and increase federal subsidies for people down the income scale.
The idea would be to end the complex and sclerotic arrangements and solve the fiscal crisis. The effect would be to radically reduce the power of federal policy makers and shift discretion (and risks) onto individuals.
Both the Democratic and Republican approaches have problems. The Moon Shot Approach relies on omniscient experts to pick out the engines of future growth and on public-spirited legislators to pass bills that maximize productivity instead of special-interest favors. The weakness of the Brooks and Ryan approach is that their sociology is off a bit. America is not a nation of risk — embracing pioneers. It is a nation of heroic bourgeois families who want to thrive within a secure social order. The economic debate is not as Manichaean as the culture war since most people are split down the middle and because it’s easier to compromise on money than on life.
Still, these two visions are better than the nativist and antiglobalist visions that will be arising. And despite the tough battle talk, they are combinable. At his best, Ryan wants to cleanse and rejuvenate the nation — to sweep away the special-interest sclerosis that strangles flexibility and growth. At his best, Obama wants to create a context for innovation — to employ blue-collar workers and to spur growth clusters like Silicon Valley, which, let us remember, was a magical cocktail of federal research subsidies, hippie culture, entrepreneurial daring and university settings.
The two projects are in tension, but in a sane political culture they are not mutually exclusive. It should be possible to simplify the tax code, target welfare spending and also build strong infrastructure at the same time.
Not much about the land war(s) in Asia, right? Didn’t think so… Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Now about to circle back to London after 30 years, I’ve been thinking about my family’s odyssey. We lose sight of the long arc of things in the rapid ricocheting of modern life.
This is just one story among many, with its measure of joy and tragedy, and I recount these events not because I find anything exceptional in them but rather because I believe the pain of displacement amounts to a modern pathology.
I’ll begin in South Africa, where I recently went to the Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It was a perfect winter’s morning on the high plateau, still and luminous. On a wall, beneath pines, there is a plaque inscribed to the memory of my mother, who was born there in 1929 and died in London in 1999.
In Africa, it is your forefathers’ graves that identify your land. On that principle, it seems right that my mother be remembered in Johannesburg. Her parents are buried in that cemetery, as is her grandfather, Isaac Michel, who was a co-founder in 1927 of the OK Bazaars, a pioneering department store. I have a photo of Isaac, chin jutting, suit impeccably pressed, in full tycoon pose; a South African Henry Ford.
Fortunes come and go. His went, which is another story. Well before that happened, my mother enjoyed the fruits of Isaac’s entrepreneurship — his Johannesburg mansion was known as Château Michel. Then love of a young doctor, my father, lifted her from that comfortable cocoon into the cold and the rationing of post-war London.
She made the best of it. Uprooting is hard. The surface current of her English life appeared smooth at times, but in the depths the tug of African sun and light never abated. She abhorred the damp.
Hers was the land of avocado trees and dry heat. In her latter years she spent more time in South Africa. It was her soul’s home, another reason for putting the plaque there rather than in London.
Where is home? For Robert Frost, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” It’s “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
My mother knew South Africa would always take her in.
You can live somewhere for decades and still in your heart it’s no more than an encampment, a place for the night, detached from collective destiny. Across the world today millions are bivouacked, dreaming of return. The inverse is also true: Home can sink its roots in little time, as if in a revelation. But that is rarer than lingering exile.
While in South Africa, I finished reading Christopher de Bellaigue’s fine book, “Rebel Land,” which is about a troubled provincial town in Turkey and — because of those troubles — also about the pain of “various diasporas” from it. The author, a wanderer, knows something of such alienation. His mother, who moved to England from Canada, never “quite knew where she belonged.”
He writes: “After her death by her own hand, when I was thirteen, as I memorialized, even martyred her, I resented her origins. I felt obscurely that they had contributed to her death.”
That jolted me — and sent me back to my mother’s suicide note of July 25, 1978: “It’s as though I’ve turned to stone. I can’t relate, I can’t communicate and I can no longer bear the pain and gloom I cause to those I love most. … At present I am filled only with self-hate. I do love my family and dear friends but I can’t go on and on like this.”
My mother survived, just. But the bi-polar state that led her to try to take her life that day never entirely relaxed its grip. Her will to live was intermittent. Cigarette ends stained with lipstick accumulated in ashtrays around her, red-smudged little death piles.
I myself have wandered and found at last a home in New York. It’s the place that will take me in.
Standing in the cool air of that Johannesburg cemetery beside the grave of my great-grandfather Isaac, who left Lithuania as a boy for South Africa, I wondered at our restlessness and at the depressive family gene transposed across continents. I wondered at the bonds of the heart, the bones of forefathers and the beauty of the world.
And now I move on again to Europe to continue this column from there. For me, it is also a return to something deep and unresolved.
Reading James Salter’s haunting novel “A Sport and a Pastime,” full of the twinned formality and sensuality of France, I encountered this passage:
“Life is composed of certain basic elements,” he says. “Of course, there are a lot of impurities, that’s what’s misleading. … What I’m saying may sound mystical, but in everybody, Ame, in all of us, there’s the desire to find those elements somehow …”
Technology is wondrous but also multiplies the “impurities.” In the end we must go back to the things — birth, death, love and beauty — that spoke to me on that South African plateau. And we must each discover and render the elemental in our own lives.
Now here’s Prof. Krugman:
Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?
These questions were inspired by the ongoing suspense over whether President Obama will do the obviously right thing and nominate Elizabeth Warren to lead the new consumer financial protection agency. But the Warren affair is only the latest chapter in an ongoing saga.
Mr. Obama rode into office on a vast wave of progressive enthusiasm. This enthusiasm was bound to be followed by disappointment, and not just because the president was always more centrist and conventional than his fervent supporters imagined. Given the facts of politics, and above all the difficulty of getting anything done in the face of lock step Republican opposition, he wasn’t going to be the transformational figure some envisioned.
And Mr. Obama has delivered in important ways. Above all, he managed (with a lot of help from Nancy Pelosi) to enact a health reform that, imperfect as it is, will greatly improve Americans’ lives — unless a Republican Congress manages to sabotage its implementation.
But progressive disillusionment isn’t just a matter of sky-high expectations meeting prosaic reality. Threatened filibusters didn’t force Mr. Obama to waffle on torture; to escalate in Afghanistan; to choose, with exquisitely bad timing, to loosen the rules on offshore drilling early this year.
Then there are the appointments. Yes, the administration needed experienced hands. But did all the senior members of the economics team have to be protégés of Robert Rubin, the apostle of financial deregulation? Was it necessary to install Ken Salazar at the Interior Department over the objections of environmentalists who feared, rightly, that his ties to extractive industries would make him slow to clean up a corrupt agency?
And where’s this administration’s Frances Perkins? As F.D.R.’s labor secretary, Perkins, a longtime crusader for workers’ rights, served as a symbol of the New Deal’s commitment to change. I have nothing against Hilda Solis, the current labor secretary — but neither she nor any other senior figure in the administration is a progressive with enough independent stature to play that kind of role.
What explains Mr. Obama’s consistent snubbing of those who made him what he is? Does he fear that his enemies would use any support for progressive people or ideas as an excuse to denounce him as a left-wing extremist? Well, as you may have noticed, they don’t need such excuses: He’s been portrayed as a socialist because he enacted Mitt Romney’s health-care plan, as a virulent foe of business because he’s been known to mention that corporations sometimes behave badly.
The point is that Mr. Obama’s attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction. And in a midterm election, where turnout is crucial, the “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats could spell catastrophe for the Obama agenda.
Which brings me back to Ms. Warren.
The debate over financial reform, in which the G.O.P. has taken the side of the bad guys, should be a political winner for Democrats. Much of the reform, however, is deeply technical: “Maintain the requirement that derivatives be traded on public exchanges!” doesn’t fit on a placard.
But protecting consumers, ensuring that they aren’t the victims of predatory financial practices, is something voters can relate to. And choosing a high-profile consumer advocate to lead the agency providing that protection — someone whose scholarship and advocacy were largely responsible for the agency’s creation — is the natural move, both substantively and politically. Meanwhile, the alternative — disappointing supporters yet again by choosing some little-known technocrat — seems like an obvious error.
So why is this issue still up in the air? Yes, Republicans might well try to filibuster a Warren appointment, but that’s a fight the administration should welcome.
O.K., I don’t really know what’s going on. But I worry that Mr. Obama is still wrapped up in his dream of transcending partisanship, while his aides dislike the idea of having to deal with strong, independent voices. And the end result of this game-playing is an administration that seems determined to alienate its friends.
Just to be clear, progressives would be foolish to sit out this election: Mr. Obama may not be the politician of their dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of their nightmares. But Mr. Obama has a responsibility, too. He can’t expect strong support from people his administration keeps ignoring and insulting.
No shit.
