None more bitter

Rightwing productions of history

My dissertation advisor David Hollinger, about to assume the Presidency of the Organization of American Historians, has a terse rebuttal to the Wall Street Journal's claim that the Tea Partiers are promoting a more accurate version of the past than that produced by professional historians. While such a brief rejoinder is probably the organizationally appropriate response of the President of the OAH to such slander, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a little more context for this skirmish between the official head of professional American historians, and what we might call the counter-professional version of American history that is widely promoted in places like the the op-ed pages of the WSJ or the Washington Post.

Over the last forty years, the production of American historical memory has been quite radically transformed. With the effective victory of a capacious, polysemous understanding of the past - which is the hallmark of professional history today - those who prefer a smaller, more politically or religiously sectarian view of the past have withdrawn into (or perhaps less pejoratively, have developed) their own historical epistemology, one that is barely in dialog with what professional historians do. The creation of this parallel, unprofessional historiographic universe is a politically self-conscious project of the American right, central to their effort to roll back the twentieth century's expansion of political inclusiveness, social tolerance, and the welfare state.

Producing an American past usable for the political right constitutes a sizable industry, one with far more influence than most professional historians realize - certainly more than I realized when I was in school. For example, I can't tell you how many people I meet - people who think of themselves as passionately engaged with the past - who really believe that, say, Mark Moyar's absurd interpretation of the Vietnam war, or Amity Schlaes's ridiculous interpretation of the New Deal, or Paul Johnson's tendentious interpretation of the Enlightenment [sorry, I refuse to link to such tripe], define these episodes wie sie eigentlich gewesen. Some such readers know that professional historians take such books about as seriously as professional athletes take the participants in "Wipe Out"; but insofar as they are even aware of the dismissiveness of the professionals, such readers tend to regard the attitudes of the professionals as merely typical of "liberal, elitist bias."

Despite certain notable exceptions, the political right in this country has largely given up even trying to fight with professional historians over the meaning of the American past. Rather than try to battle over truth using accepted professional standards of evidence and argument, the political right has taken their partisan interpretations of the past directly to the people, for example via the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal or the Weekly Standard, where one well-argued piece can gain a wider readership (and more political influence) than a hundred articles in the Journal of American History.

There's an underlying irony here, which is worth underscoring: while the political right has largely lost the interpretive battle for the American past among professional historians, they remain far more sensitive than the political left to the political importance of dominating popular understandings of key episodes from the past. They understand that inculcating the belief that the New Deal was somehow constitutionally illegitimate, or that the Civil Rights movement somehow represented federal overreach, or that the Vietnam War was somehow winnable but for perfidy at home are crucial in order to be able to promote the policies that they prefer in the present - whether it means rolling back the welfare state, ending affirmative action, or promoting aggressive neo-imperialist wars. This is precisely why partisan bloggers like Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, or Stanton Evans write books like Liberal Fascism (about contemporary liberalism's genealogical roots in interwar fascism) or In Defense of Internment (which describes FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans as his finest moment) or Blacklisted by History (which argues McCarthy was good and right about domestic Communism, and has been unfairly maligned by quisling-ish liberals and academics).

While such arguments might seem so grotesque as to be not worth dignifying with a reasoned rebuttal, we should not let scientific-professional judgments obscure the political influence that such books and arguments command among the hoi polloi. Though measuring these things is difficult, I strongly suspect that texts such as these have far more impact on the popular historical memory (and thus on contemporary politics) than virtually any Bancroft prize winner, appalling as that may be for professional historians to admit.

The reason why these books have such political impact is simple: it is because they are conceived and written first and foremost with a contemporary political intervention in mind.¹ Indeed, the whole point of these para-historical productions of the right, their whole reason for being written, is not to "get the past right" but rather to influence contemporary politics. From a methodological perspective, right-wing popular historiography starts with a contemporary political or policy objective, then chooses an historical episode through which to convey the critical contemporary political point, and finally selectively marshalls evidence to support their contemporary political purpose. For these "historians," creating an accurate and complete representation of the past is entirely beside the point. (Indeed, even raising the issue of objectivity or balance is likely to get you labelled a liberal-biased pettifogger.)

The contrast with professional historians' standards of evidence and argument couldn't be sharper. Closeted positivists all, professional historians consider it their duty to capture the nuance, contradictions, and unknowability of the past, even where that conflicts with or complicates the usability of their conclusions for contemporary left-liberal (or any other) politics. Indeed, most academic historians are vaguely - or more than vaguely - embarrassed when they see such similarly partisan texts for "our side" of the political debate. (Just consider how most of us regard, say, Howard Zinn; or how our instinct is to bicker and quibble with a book like Nixonland.)

We are thus left with a profound irony. On the one hand, because professional historians basically support their view of the past, the political left for the most part doesn't bother to produce popular histories designed as interventions into contemporary politics. On the other hand, the professional historians fail to return the love, producing histories which are full of complexity and nuance, rather than pointedly partisan talking points. On the contrary, professional historians' efforts to capture the ambiguity and contradictions of the past tends to render problematic any simple lessons for the political present. It's only a small overstatement to say that professional historians, whatever their politics, are in the business of trying to render the past politically unusable. Ultimately, appreciating the perplexing richness of the past, which is what professional historians do, makes it difficult to produce historical narratives that serve a politics of slogans and zingers.

By contrast, the one-sidedness of the right's interpretations of the past is precisely what makes it politically powerful: having dispensed with the difficult task of trying to get the past right, the right finds it far easier than the left (with its crotchety insistance on empirical truth and complexity) to produce a past that has obvious and unambiguous political implications for the present.

1. Right-wingers assume that professional historians approach the past from the same (e.g. primordially political) perspective as they do, and that therefore what they are doing is simply providing a corrective to the leftist political bias of the academy. But in fact, contemporary political questions are almost never the point of intellectual departure for professional historians. Rather, professional historians usually begin in one of two ways: either they begin with a body of evidence historical evidence - an archive of some sort - and are seeking to make sense of it in some way; or they begin with some historiographical debate - trying to extend, rebut, or revise some existing (professional) historical perspective on whatever the topic at hand is. As a result of these approaches, professional historians tend to be much more fixated on methodological and evidentiary issues, which also helps explain why they tend to be less interested than popular writers in creating narratives focused on dramatically compelling characters and "events."

Adam Smith, notorious socialist

Adam Smith, on the righteousness of progressive taxation:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

(Source: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book Five, Chapter II, Article I.)

Face of the Day

Man carrying a shark to market in Mogadishu:

Hat tip: The Guardian and MC.

Negative growth: literally inconceivable

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” – Kenneth Boulding

To a large degree, the very idea of something called "the economy" is coextensive with the idea of economic growth. When John Maynard Keynes wrote his General Theory, there was no reified entity called "the national economy." Adam Smith never used the phrase; neither did Karl Marx; nor did any of the neoclassical economists. Rather, the word "economy" refered simply to the process of individuals allocating scarce resources.

In fact, the first effort to analytically and statistically instantiate "the economy" as a holistic and unitary object probably occurred in 1928, with the first Soviet "National Accounts," which formed the basis for Stalin’s first Five Year Plan—arguably the first full-spectrum "national economic growth" plan ever put forth by a government. For capitalist economies, the idea of national income accounting was developed in the late 1930s by Simon Kuznets as a way to test the efficacy of Keynesian theories for generating aggregate economic growth.

Here's the key point of this mini-history: as a body of positive theory, modern macroeconomics is built around the normative assumption that what economies are supposed to do is grow. (And it’s not just economics: modernization theory in political science and sociology also assumed the viability of endless growth.)

This fundamental theorical assumption in the social sciences in fact merely reflects a similar set of assumptions at the core of modern politics: in a nutshell, modern politics in all countries in the world over the last century or so have been built around the normative assumption that endless growth is not just the solution to overcoming distributionist conflict, but also sustainable in perpetuity. In other words, the macro-political problem the planet now faces is underpinned by a fundamental theoretical problem: the very notion of "the economy" takes for granted the idea of an endless "more." Political will aside, political officials and policy intellectuals (to say nothing of businesspeople) literally don’t know how to think about an economy predicated on principles other than expansion and growth.

Quote of the Day

Emile Durkheim, on the social consequences of economic disasters:

In the case of economic disasters, something like a declassification occurs which suddenly casts certain individuals into a lower state than their previous one.... Time is thus required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things. So long as the social forces thus freed have not regained equilibrium, their prospective values are unknown, and so all regulations are lacking for a time. The limits are unknown between the possible and the impossible, what is just and what is unjust, legitimate claims and those which are immoderate. Consequently, there is no restraint upon aspirations....

(From On Suicide)

Modernization theory never dies (Chinese city planning edition)

High modernism in architecture is strongly associated with the figure of Le Corbusier. This version of high modernism sought to impose rectilinear, uniform solutions on everything, from the architecture of cities to the lives of men, literally bulldozing anything in its way. Consider Le Corbusier's infamous plan for the right bank of Paris.

In the arena of development studies, High Modernism has been grandly criticized for its indifference to the richness of premodern social orders, and for its brutal simplifications that often have produced political monstrosities, from Stalinism to Tanzania. Modernization theory was the American entry into this hall of horrors, and although it continues to live a troglodytic existence in the life of the American Mind, it is today an officially repudiated doctrine.

In China, on the other hand, modernization theory is not regarded as a historical curiosity of American mid-century hubris, but rather as a blueprint for their own contemporary efforts to bring themselves into the final stage of history, what modernization theorist Walt Rostow famously described as "the age of high mass consumption." And guess what, their taste in city planning reflects this heritage, as one can see from this billboard advertising a construction plan in Shenyeng, Manchuria:

David Harvey explains the crisis

"It's the nature of capitalism, stupid":



Whether you buy the Marxist analysis, much less the Marxist prescriptions, you can't deny the centrality of a point Harvey only makes in passing, which is that there's no way we can get out of this crisis the way we did the last time (that is, in the 1970s/80s), namely by re-disciplining labor to rein in costs and supporting aggregate demand by issuing lots of cheap credit. Those byways have been exhausted, and so how (or if) we can get out of this crisis remains radically unknown.

Hat tip: JH

The collapse of communism & the rise of deviant globalization

When Communism collapsed during the 1980s, what died was not just the particular collectivist economic system and authoritarian politics of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Cremated along the corpse of Communism was the broadly civic-minded conception of development as the central responsibility of the state – a conception that had been largely shared by communists and liberals during the Cold War.

In the wake of this ideological collapse, what emerged was the so-called "Washington Consensus.” Coined by former World Bank economist John Williamson, the phrase described the paradigmatic program of economic “reform” imposed on parts of the Global South during the 1980s and 1990s by the IMF, and generally with the support of the US government. Pointing to the undeniable corruption, inefficiency and rent-seeking of most states in the Global South, the neoliberals associated with the Washington Consensus demanded that aid recipients slash public bureaucracies and services, reduce dependence on foreign aid, dismantle trade barriers, and curtail the political power of organized labor. Pioneered as domestic policy in Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain and Ronald Reagan’s United States, the programs associated with the Washington Consensus soon became a model that London and Washington sought to export to the Global South and the post-Communist world. As Dani Rodrik put it, "'Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize' became the mantra of a generation of technocrats who cut their teeth in the developing world and of the political leaders they counseled." "There is no alternative," Margaret Thatcher famously declared.

Where such programs were imposed, they often led to what might be called the "hollowing out" of the state. The physical buildings and institutions of those states remained in place, but the ambitions and capacities of those states shriveled. This late- and post-Cold War hollowing out of states, particularly in the Global South, had two important results. First, it signaled to everyone in these countries that, "you are on your own." The end of the promise of building a public goods-providing state – or rather, the revelation that this promise had always been empty – unleashed a flood of survival entrepreneurship throughout the Global South, above all in former Communist states. As the Iron Curtain fell, some people entered legal industries; many others, however, pursued faster profits in the deviantly globalized marketplaces of the post-Cold War world or were lured into the role of foot soldiers in flourishing deviant industries. The second and equally important impact of hollowed states was the dismantling of the regulatory capacity in the Global South. These weak states lacked the institutions and the practical capacity to enforce the rules of international transactions, liberating both the forces of mainstream as well as deviant globalization.

The meaning of deviant globalization

In a nutshell, here's how I would summarize my theoretical-historical argument about deviant globalization:

1. The modernist promise of complete, inclusive, efficient, equitable nation-building failed (for many reasons), and we can't go back to that. Since we can't go back, we should stop holding the high-rectitude bureaucratic-modernist state up as the tacit normative standard, which is what we do when talk about "failed states" and "transparency" and "good governance" and so on.
2. Instead, the reality we've got in the Global South is deviant globalization, warts and all.
3. What's more, deviant globalization isn't all bad, since it markedly increases the overall income of these communities, even if it has lots of unpleasant externalities. (But hey, all industrial capitalism has nasty externalities — visited the Gulf Coast lately?) It sure beats a predatory state.
4. In some cases deviant entrepreneurs even start to backfill some of the functionality that modernist states used to promise (and usually failed to deliver) — health care, education, infrastructure, social insurance, security, justice, etc. Needless to say, state incumbents find this highly threatening, even if they have no one but themselves to blame.
5. But: deviant entrepreneurs deliver these political services in a partial, exclusive, inequitable (and often inefficient) way. Indeed, they don't even pretend to try to be complete, inclusive, or equitable. They are delivering services to clients, not benefits to citizens; this is "privatization" albeit perhaps not exactly as Maggie Thatcher imagined it.
6. In sum, the social-political ambition of these deviant entrepreneurs is far smaller than their state-based predecessors, but then again, so is their hypocrisy. (Just compare Mobutu Sese Seko to "El Chapo" to appreciate the difference.)
7. The one place that the hypocrisy still flourishes is among western policy analysts, who continue to measure and discuss these countries according to a series of metrics and morals based on a long-discredited vision of what the nation-state could and should be.

Update: The practical choice for countries in the Global South is not "Should we try to be more like Singapore, or more like Denmark?" Rather, the real choice is more like, "Do we want to be more like Venezuela, or more like Mexico?" These are not pleasant choices, but we may as well face them with open eyes rather that holding on to absurdly antiquated and historically discredited conceptual and political standards.

Black market sanction busting

Riz Khan discusses how sanctions regimes creates vast profit opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs, who in turn become political forces in their own right.

My Long Now talk on Deviant Globalization

It's long, but hopefully worthwhile. Comments most welcome.

Magical climate thinking

One reason why so many greens put so much faith in cap-and-trade is the belief that once the price of carbon is set appropriately, this will create incentives that will inevitably push scientists and inventors to come up with solutions to our energy needs. Several things can be said about this touching dual faith in markets and technology.

First, this claim is based on a discredited supply side economics view of invention. Just because there is an economic incentive to invent something, doesn't mean that inventing it is technically or physically possible, or even if it is invented, that other barriers to deployment won't arise. An analogy should make the point clear: vast economic incentives exist to invent pills that would cure alcoholism or drug addiction, and indeed much snake oil gets peddled claiming to provide such benefits. You may have noticed, however, that substance abuse doesn't seem to have disappeared from our society. Given the addiction of modern civilization to cheap energy, the parallel ought to be unnerving to anyone who believes that technology will pull our the climate rabbit out of the fossil fuel hat.

Second, the hopes that many greens place in a technological deus ex machina is an expression of faith in the old high modernist verities every bit as profound - and every bit as rational - as Augustine's faith in Christ. Very telling in this respect is the totemic way in which the Manhattan Project, the ultimate high modernist technological triumph, is regularly invoked as a supposed model for developing breakthrough Green technologies, despite the radical differences between building a weapon and remaking the entire global energy system. In truth, the belief in a technological fix to the climate solution is the ultimate form of high modernist magical thinking. It's no coincidence that the phrase "technological fix" was invented in the early 1960s, the heyday of modernization theory, by Alvin Weinberg, a nuclear physicist and chief administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the Manhattan Project period through the 1980s. (See Weinberg's essay "Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?" [1966].) Weinberg claimed that nuclear power would create limitless energy, allowing age-old social problems to be overcome while minimizing political conflict over distributional issues - an argument that should feel uncannily familiar to all those who believe that technological breakthroughs will allow the climate crisis to be overcome without fundamental political conflict.

Update: Here's Steve Chu artfully backpedaling from the idea of a green Manhattan Project.

The second great tragedy in life

This story drives home a point I've been making for quite some time:

The right is acting like the left did in the early 1970s. In both cases, it's the aftermath of having had a President who achieved virtually all the party's maximalist goals and, as a result, is widely perceived to have ruined the country. What do you do when it turns out that your cherished goals actually hosed the country? While some people (the moderates) beg for moderation and/or ditch the party, others (the radicals) double down and say that the Dear Leader didn't go anywhere near far enough and, further, that the moderates in their party were a big part of the problem anyway. Also, in both cases, the succeeding president (Nixon, Obama) is anathema to everything that the former ruling party, both its moderates and radicals, believe in, which only exacerbates the ire and craziness.

The result is an intra-party circular firing squad, threats and actual instances of violence, and all in all an unseemly spectacle that alienates the mainstream of the country.

Why modernization theory never dies

How many times does chapter 7 of this book need to be written: “Theories That Won’t Pass Away: The Never-Ending Story of Modernization Theory.”

After going through the usual suspects of modernization theory (Lerner, Shils, etc.), and pointing out all the internal contraditions and tensions, Wolfgang Knobl concludes out that modernization is a pretty lousy theory in terms of explanatory power, and is probably better thought of as a series of modernization "discourses" rather than as a "theory" at all.

But this leaves us with a paradox, he notes: "Why will the theory not die despite all its weaknesses and failures? [This] endurance is based on the fact that the term 'modernization' as well as the related term 'modernity' has a strange kind of (normative) attraction for all those — politicians or intellectuals — debating the contours of contemporary and future societies...." (p. 105).

This is correct, but it begs the question: what is the nature and source of that "strange kind of (normative) attraction"? In other words, what is the normative appeal of something positively misleading? For this, I think one must resort to explanations that are ultimately psychological:

• Implicit in (and central to) modernization theory is a just-so story about our own civilizational superiority, and more important, our civilization finality — nothing will ever supersede "us." We are the ultimate, final perfected incarnation of mankind’s historical development. This is a deeply self-flattering idea.
• The theory provides a neat (overly neat) closure to a lot of messiness, and so appeals to a desire for cleanliness, parsimony, clarity, and other Protestant psychic virtues.
• The underlying historical metanarrative of modernization puts a happy gloss on various ecological and cultural losses and destruction caused by industrial and commercial civilization that might otherwise be hard to stomach. All these losses are in the name of a worthwhile higher goal, namely the completion of mankind’s historical perfection. It thus appeals to our sense of moral purpose.
• It implies that “all good things go together” and that losers in the process can either be paid off or considered a worthwhile price in the process. The implication is that no ultimately painful choices need to be made. As anyone who's ever had a destructive habit they didn't want to break (quite yet) knows, this idea is also extremely psychologically appealing in an Augustinian manner.
• It suggests that antinomian movements (from Marxism to Al Qaeda) that resist this narrative and lament the losses or object to the direction of change are fated no matter what to lose their struggle against. It thus provide confidence in long and painful political-historical struggles.

There are probably additional reasons why modernization theory continues to survive despite its manifest failures as an explanatory tool, but these are certainly among the central appeals of the theory. If you have other ideas, please note them in the comments.

GOP today = Dems in the early 1970s

Watching the GOP in circular firing squad mode in the aftermath of David Frum being sacked from AEI over mild ideological heterodoxy, on the one hand, and generalized extremist rightwing craziness, on the other, is eeriely reminiscent of the way the Democratic party went off the rails in the early 1970s. This is a theme I've touched on before.

The reason for this similarity is quite straightforward. In the 1960s, under Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats basically achieved most of the maximalist policy ambitions of post-Roosevelt liberalism: immigration reform, voting rights, medicare, etc. Likewise, in the 2000s, under George Bush, the Republicans basically achieved most of the maximalist policy ambitions of post-Reagan conservatism: massive tax cuts for the wealthy, wars of choice against foreign enemies, a rollback of restrictions on executive action, the utter dis-regulation of financial services, and so on.

In each case, the country ended this run of policy accomplishment by plunging into chaos that was clearly linked to (if not caused by) the policies that had been enacted under the President. The late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed urban rioting, a rising fiscal deficit and contracting dollar, rising inflation, an intractable war, a secular loss of American power and authority... and a consequent collapse of political civility. The symbolic center of the liberal meltdown was the Tet Offensive of 1968, which seemed to give the lie to everything that the sitting Democrat stood for, ideologically and practically, discrediting him both in the eyes of the opposing party and in the eyes of his own political base. Since 2008 we've seen a financial meltdown due to dis-regulation, a rising fiscal deficit and contracting dollar, an intractable war, a secular loss of American power and authority... and a consequent collapse of political civility. The symbolic center of the conservative meltdown was the Great Financial Panic of 2008, which gave the lie to everything that the sitting Republican stood for, discrediting him in the eyes of both the opposing party and his own political base.

Indeed, 1968 and 2008 were the key years. In 1968 the liberal-centrist-establishment wing got to nominate its candidate (Hubert Humphrey), who then got beaten by Nixon. A figure who was anathema to everything that post-Roosevelt liberalism represented, Nixon was elected mainly because voters were disgusted by the colossal mess that his liberal predecessor had made. The resulting fingerpointing led to a vicious fight between the liberal-centrist-establishment wing of the Democratic Party and its leftwing base. Over the next four years, the Democrats entered circular firing squad mode, fighting over ideological litmus tests as well as practical electoral tactics. More notoriously, they also took to the streets, rioting against Nixon's policies in a way that was highly alienating to mainstream voters. Eventually, this degenerated into various forms of low-level domestic terrorism (e.g. the Weathermen, Black Panthers, etc.). As a result, the "brand" of liberalism was tainted in a permanent way with the protesting extremists -- the latter being profoundly ironic, given the fact that the left extremists were at least in as much revolt against the moderate liberal establishment of their own party as they were against the conservatism of Nixon. The ultimate irony, of course, is that from a policy perspective, Nixon was in many ways a liberal... Clean Air and Water Act, wage/price controls, a continuation of the war in Vietnam with a view to eventual disengagement, etc.

Now flash forward to 2008 and consider how similar the situation is: In 2008 the conservative-centrist-establishment wing got to nominate its candidate (John McCain), who then got soundly beaten by Obama. Anathema to everything that post-Reagan conservatism represents, Obama was elected in 2008 mainly because voters were disgusted by the colossal mess that his conservative predecessor had made. The resulting fingerpointing on the right has produced the vicious fight we are currently witnessing between the conservative-centrist-establishment wing of the GOP and its scary rightwing base -- of which the Crist/Rubio battle in Florida is emblematic. Just as the Democrats were in Nixon's first term, the Republicans are now, as I mentioned up top, in full-scale circular firing squad mode, fighting over ideological litmus tests as well as practical electoral tactics, and also revolting against Obama's policies. Low-level domestic terrorism seems a possible eventual result, and indeed may already have begun to emerge. Finally, one strongly suspects that the current Tea Party behavior and thuggishness will taint the conservative "brand" in a permanent way -- again ironic, given the fact that the rightwing extremists are as much in revolt against the moderates of their own party as they are against the liberalism of Obama. And again, the ultimate irony is that from a policy perspective, Obama is in many ways a conservative... his health care bill, for example, is basically a clone of Mitt Romney's Massachusetts bill (let's not mention his conduct of the ongoing wars...).

So, what does this historical parallel tell us about what might happen next? First, it tells you that the conservatives are likely in 2012 to follow the path that the Democrats did during the 1972 -- nominating a base-pleasing but unelectable candidate. She will lose catastrophically, which will only exacerbate the intra-party hatreds. Second, it tells you that the fight for the soul of the Republican Party is likely to go on for a long time, and that it will be very ugly and that it will leave lasting scars and resentments. Third, it tells you that conservatives have a very long way to go before they can come up with any remotely appealing original ideas about governance, much less reasonable ideas about how to solve the messes that their policies made.

Quote of the day: Brzezinski

Here's how Zbigniew Brzezinski, in 1968, explained the likely fate of the Soviet Union: the Soviet Union is at the "beginning of a sterile bureaucratic phase" which was likely to lead eventually to disintegration followed by a new political order characterized by "assertive ideological-nationalist reaction, resting on a coalition of secret police, the military, and the heavy industrial-ideological complex." (Quoted in Engerman, Know Your Enemy, p. 224.)

An uncannily apt description of Putin's Russia today, no?

Jeff Rubin on the impact of oil price spikes

Worth watching in its entirety:

Notes on decline: Orville Schell

Orville Schell provides the barest sketch of what's broken in the United States today:

The federal government, essentially busted; Congress, increasingly paralyzed and largely incapable of delivering solutions to the country’s most pressing problems; state government, largely broke; the Interstate highway system and our infrastructure of bridges and tunnels, melting away like a block of ice in the sun because maintenance and upgrading is so poor; dikes, water systems, and many other aspects of the national infrastructure which keeps the country going, similarly old and deteriorating; airlines, some of the sorriest in the world with the oldest, dirtiest, and least up-to-date planes and the requisite run-down airports to go with them; ports that are falling behind world standards; a railroad passenger system which, unlike countries from Spain to China, has not one mile of truly high-speed rail; the country’s financial system whose over-paid executives not only ran us off an economic cliff in 2008, but also managed to compromise the whole system itself in the eyes of the world; a broadcast media which -- public broadcasting and aspects of a vital and growing Internet excepted -- is a grossly overly-commercialized, broken-down mess that has gravely let down the country in terms of keeping us informed; newspapers, in a state of free-fall; book publishing, heading in the same direction; elementary education (that is, our future), especially public K-12 schools in big cities, desperately under-funded and near broke in many communities; a food industry which subsidizes sugar and starch, stuffs people with fast-food, and leaves 60% of the population overweight; basic manufacturing, like the automobile industry, evidently headed for oblivion, or China, whichever comes first; the American city, hollowing out and breaking down; the prison system, one of America’s few growth industries but a pit of hopelessness.

A fair summary, though as Schell himself points out, this really only scratches the surface.

I used to say that there was nothing like travelling -- and even more, living -- abroad to make you positively reevaluate the United States's capabilities and performance. I no longer feel that way. My last trips to mainland Europe, and even to Latin America (!!), have really underscored to me the U.S.'s relative decline.

Best movies of the 1990s

Since my post on my favorite movies from the Aughties was pretty popular, I though I might also list my favorite movies from the 1990s, again judged by the standard of how much of an immediate, visceral impact they had on me:

1. Pulp Fiction
2. Goodfellas
3. Naked
4. The Matrix
5. There's Something About Mary
6. Short Cuts
7. American Beauty
8. Raise the Red Lantern
9. The Sweet Hereafter
10. Breaking the Waves
11. Husbands and Wives
12. Reservoir Dogs
13. Leaving Las Vegas
14. Fargo
15. Hoop Dreams
16. Delicatessen
17. Four Weddings and a Funeral
18. Ulysses’s Gaze
19. Strange Days
20. Thelma and Louise
21. The Thin Red Line
22. Before Sunrise
23. Groundhog Day
24. Terminator 2
25. Bad Lieutenant
26. Silence of the Lambs
27. The Crying Game
28. Wayne's World
29. Being John Malkovich
30. Menace II Society
31. The Grifters

Update: I added the four in italics, which I had forgotten about earlier. I should also point out the many movies that I saw and didn't much like, that many others would probably put in their own top list, e.g.: Sleepless in Seattle, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, Ghost, Edward Scissorhands. LA Confidential, Good Will Hunting, The English Patient, Enemy of the State, Men in Black, The Wedding Singer, Titanic, Philadelphia, JFK, Schindler's List, Wag the Dog, Blade, Ghost, A Few Good Men, Shakespeare in Love, The Phantom Menace, The Truman Show, Rush Hour, La Vita e Bella, Unforgiven, Boyz in the Hood, Pretty Woman, American Pie, Saving Private Ryan, Basic Instinct, 12 Monkeys, and Sense & Sensibility... to name a few. A lot of those were watchable, but most of them were either sententious, syrupy, simple-minded, or somehow flawed in a way that brought me up short in mid-viewing.