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Beautiful Losers: What’s the Matter with Democrats?

It’s that time again, isn’t it—and, really, when is it not?—when liberals of all stripes and hews gather round the table and ask themselves that perennial question: How’d it all go so wrong? Two years ago Barack Obama swept into office riding the “Yes, we can!” wave. Well, the tide has turned: “No, we can’t!” “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is still in place. Bush-era tax cuts for the rich are extended. Joblessness in America is close to ten percent. Indeed, how did it all go so wrong?

Politicians and pundits will have their say. Few seem to have the right answer. Time for a throwback to another era—one that many thought had ended when Obama took office. I put great stock in what Ellen Willis says in an essay entitled, “Escape From Freedom: What’s the Matter with Thomas Frank (And the Lefties Who Love him)?” Frank, in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, attributes Democrats’ political woes to their inability to provide economic security to average Americans and thereby stave off a “culture war” with the religious right.

Willis, smartly, doesn’t buy this line of reasoning. She died in 2006, but the main thrust of her essay is timeless: Democrats simply don’t want change bad enough. And while she didn’t live long enough to see Obama’s presidency, it’s not difficult to think how her words might apply to him, too. She writes:    

If an ambivalent public hears only one side of a question, the conservative side, passionately argued—if people’s impulses to the contrary are never reinforced, and they perceive that the putative spokespeople for feminism and liberalism are actually uncomfortable about advancing their views—the passionate arguers will carry the day. Why would anyone support a movement that won’t stand behind its own program? But the left did not learn the obvious lesson—that to back away from fighting for your beliefs on the grounds that you have no hope of persuading people to share them is to perpetrate a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the contrary, the appeasers could see in their defeats only a confirmation of their pessimism. This scenario has been repeated countless times as the country has moved steadily to the right, yet it appears to have inspired no second thoughts. The stubborn failure to rethink a losing strategy can’t help but suggest that its proponents at some level do not really care to win.

Or maybe Obama and Democrats only care to lose. It’s a hypothesis that certainly makes sense in light of recent events. The trouble is that when Democrats lose, so do Americans, if not in the short-term then certainly in the long-term. Not such beautiful losers, after all.

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Sign of the times? Terminal 5 poster outside a grocery store in Crown Heights. We have bike racks, too. And an organic pet food store, as well. More indy coffee shops on the way, I presume.

For all the tough living that poor people have to endure in so-called slums, it is a life, in the broadest sense of the term, that they are leading. Robert Neuwirth (blog; profile), featured in this TED talk, offers a necessary reminder of that fact. In the talk, based on his book, Shadow Cities, he reads a short passage about Armstrong O’Brien, Jr., who lives in a “10-by-10 cell” in Nairobi, Kenya. A few pages after he introduces Armstrong—in a part of the book that he does not read—Neuwirth adds a worthy challenge:

After all, if society won’t build for this mass of people, don’t they have a right to build for themselves? And if they do, then isn’t there merit in their mud huts? If they are creating their own homes and improving them over time, then isn’t there something good—at least potentially—about a community without water and sanitation and sewers? And if that’s true, then shouldn’t the comfortable class stop complaining about conditions in the shantytowns and instead work with the squatters to improve their communities?

Why, yes, in fact, that is a good idea. As good may be the idea that we get out of the way of people like Armstrong, who know more about their situation than any outsider, a fact often ignored by otherwise well-meaning folk.

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A caption in need of a store, and a social movement. (Clinton Hill, Brooklyn)

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Snapped this photo last night on the Brooklyn-bound platform at Bowling Green. I like it even more today. Read what you want (or who you want—Foucault, anyone?) into it.

In the wake of the latest scandal to befall India, Anand Giridharadas, in a recent article, laments the unmooring of the Indian soul. He approvingly quotes Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party, who would seem to have a good grasp of the problem. “Our economy may be increasingly dynamic,” Gandhi says, “but our moral universe seems to be shrinking.” It’s shrinking in China, too, apparently, as revealed in a few choice quotes from Chinese entrepreneurs.

In Indian and Chinese “thrivers,” Giridhadas can detect a search for meaning:

[A]mong those who have arrived, we may see a rising tendency toward self-scrutiny. It could take disparate forms: Indians and Chinese turning down lucrative jobs to join think tanks, become journalists, activists or otherwise play their part in the public sphere; young people digging into these two ancient cultures to find ideas of what to wear, read and eat, after the feverish years of Westernization; sobering media that interrogate growth instead of just giving evidence of it; philosophers guiding these nations toward new constellations of values.

If only it were true. I snapped the above photo of a billboard standing on the side of a road in Bangalore this summer. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bangalore these past few years, in fact. In my travels across the city and in other parts of the country, speaking to hundreds of people from all walks of life, I sensed a stronger drive for attaining money and other material possessions than anything else.  

I can appreciate the efforts by Giridhadas to suggest that something else is now under way, but it would appear that even he is doubtful, when he writes: 

A relentless futurism has gripped two societies that long prided themselves on reverence for the past. A migration from the countryside to the city is changing their essential characters, with restless, rootless urbanites replacing villagers as the cultural center of gravity.

Social upheavals that took decades, even centuries, in the West — from feminism to gay rights to the rise of respect for the young — are happening in a historical flash. Parents are finding themselves unforeseeably abandoned in their final earthbound years. Founding heroes whose faces adorn currency — in China, Mao; in India, Gandhi — no longer inspire the same fervor, but new heroes are nowhere to be found.

Sadly, I think this is closer to the mark: billions of people with the recurring dream to land a million dollars and thereby shape their respective country after their own image, the way they “see it.” Not so bright a future, I don’t think.

The Disasters Non-Decision Decisions Can Make: George Packer Reviews Bush’s Memoir

George Packer, master critic and writer, dissects Bush’s Decision Points. The last paragraph from the review:

Bush ends “Decision Points” with the sanguine thought that history’s verdict on his Presidency will come only after his death. During his years in office, two wars turned into needless disasters, and the freedom agenda created such deep cynicism around the world that the word itself was spoiled. In America, the gap between the rich few and the vast majority widened dramatically, contributing to a historic financial crisis and an ongoing recession; the poisoning of the atmosphere continued unabated; and the Constitution had less and less say over the exercise of executive power. Whatever the judgments of historians, these will remain foregone conclusions.

The American people better soon get their heads around the fact that Sarah Palin is cut from the same cloth, regardless of her non-Ivy education and down home ways. Or else come 2012 we’re all looking at a repeat of the same failed plans and policies of the years preceding Obama’s presidency—and likely much worse.

Reading Taibbi

Wandered into the Strand just before closing tonight and picked up Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia. First chapter on Palin and the Tea Party, and he ain’t holding any punches:   

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in nacro-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

In the ghetto, nobody gets real dreams. What they get are short-term rip-off versions of real dreams. You don’t get real wealth, with a home, credit, a year, money for your kids’ college—you get a fake symbol of wealth, a gold chain, a Fendi bag, a tricked-out car you bought with cash. Nobody gets to be really rich for long, but you do get to be pretend rich, for a few days, weeks, maybe even a few months. It makes you feel better to wear that gold, but when real criminals drive by on the overpass, they laugh.

It’s the same in our new ghetto. We don’t get real political movements and real change; what we get, instead, are crass show-business manipulations whose followers’ aspirations are every bit as laughable and desperate as the wealth dreams of the street hustler with his gold rope. What we get, in other words, are moderates who don’t question the corporate consensus dressed up as revolutionary leaders, like Barack Obama, and wonderfully captive opposition diversions like the Tea Party—the latter a fake movement for real peasants that was born that night in St. Paul, when Sarah Palin addressed her We.

Some reviewers such as Derek Teslik over at The Millions will think Taibbi overstates his case. I don’t. I’m not convinced, as is Teslik, that the financial crisis was a mere problem of “laziness and arrogance.” Nor do I buy, as does Michael Lewis, who Teslik sets up as the better read, that the crisis was caused by a select group of greedy bankers and hedge fund managers. A curiosity I share with Taibbi is why the American people continue to fall for the same line over and over again, as if in some collective amnesia. As if, I say, with emphasis, because I’m sure it’s much more complicated than a false consciousness reading would imply. But then what is the proper explanation?

Jay-Z: Rap Scholar

In his new book, Decoded, Jay-Z offers one of the more compelling analyses of class and inequality I’ve read in a while (full excerpt available here; NPR interview and transcript here):

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don’t like to think of themselves as poor. It’s embarrassing. When you’re a kid, even in the projects, one kid will mercilessly snap on another kid over minor material differences, even though by the American standard, they’re both broke as shit.

The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. As kids we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.

I remember coming back home from doing work out of state with my boys in a caravan of Lexuses that we parked right in the middle of Marcy. I ran up to my mom’s apartment to get something and looked out the window and saw those three new Lexuses gleaming in the sun, and thought, “Man, we doin’ it.” In retrospect, yeah, that was kind of ignorant, but at the time I could just feel that stink and shame of being broke lifting off of me, and it felt beautiful. The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.

I like the passage for two reasons. First, for the way it shows the promise and hope that is alive in poor communities, which contrasts sharply with static representations delivered in the academy and media. And, second, for the explanation—more implied than stated—it offers for why poverty continues apace: everyone, even the poor among us, is striving and hustling for a better future, so that hardly anyone bothers to ask about the social and economic conditions that give rise to poverty in the first place.

Pity the Turkey

All but a negligible number of the 45 million turkeys that find their way out to our Thanksgiving tables were unhealthy, unhappy, and—this is a radical understatement—unloved. If people come to different conclusions about a turkey’s place on the Thanksgiving table, at least we can all agree on those three things.

Compelling words from Jonathan Safran Foer, in Eating Animals. New York Times excerpt available here. Good reading.

Just off now for the first of two (yes, two!) Thanksgiving Day dinners. I’ll be skipping the turkey. Enjoy yours—or not. Happy Thanksgiving!