Books and Reviews

An excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich's new book This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation (Macmillan):

There was a connection, as most people suspected, between the massive buildup of wealth among the few and the anxiety and desperation of the many. The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to have come from other Americans. In fact, the greatest capitalist innovations of this past decade have been in the realm of squeezing money out of those who have little to spare: taking away workers' pensions and benefits to swell profits, offering easy credit on dubious terms, raising insurance premiums and refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, downsizing workforces to boost share prices, even falsifying time records to avoid paying overtime.

Prosperity, in America, had not always been a zero-sum game. Early twentieth-century capitalists — who were certainly no saints — envisioned a prosperous people generating profits for the upper class by

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Behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness) have some ideas on helping people to make better choices in their lives (Amazon.com):

Amazon.com: What do you mean by "nudge" and why do people sometimes need to be nudged?

Thaler and Sunstein: By a nudge we mean anything that influences our choices. A school cafeteria might try to nudge kids toward good diets by putting the healthiest foods at front. We think that it's time for institutions, including government, to become much more user-friendly by enlisting the science of choice to make life easier for people and by gentling nudging them in directions that will make their lives better. [...]

Amazon.com: Can you describe a nudge that is now being used successfully?

Thaler and Sunstein: One example is the Save More Tomorrow program. Firms offer employees who are not saving very much the option of joining a program in which their saving rates are automatically increased whenever the employee gets a raise. This plan has more than tripled saving rates in some firms, and is now offered by thousands of employers.

There's a new book out by Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? Frank is a fantastic writer and I'm sure this one — The Wrecking Crew: How Republicans Rule — will be just as entertaining (excerpt at Salon):

[...] Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction; it believes in entrepreneurship not merely in commerce but in politics; and the inevitable results of its ascendance are, first, the capture of the state by business and, second, all that follows: incompetence, graft, and all the other wretched flotsam that we've come to expect from Washington. [...]

Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns — in short, when they treat government with contempt — they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.

And, yes, there has been greed involved in the effort —

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I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, and it's just as excellent as you'd expect. The following excerpts are from an interview Krugman did with Buzzflash about the book:

Paul Krugman: The reason that Bush is so opposed to SCHIP is the same reason he was so determined to privatize Social Security, which is that they're both programs that work. You have to understand, that is the point of view of somebody who really wants to undo the New Deal — and if possible — I quote Grover Norquist in the book — get things back to the way they were before Teddy Roosevelt and the "Socialists" came in. The worst thing is a government program that actually does help people. So the SCHIP is a really bad thing, from Bush's point of view, because it works so well. It might lead people to say, well, if we can do this for lower-income children, why can't we do it for lots of other people who need guaranteed health care? So it's the determination, on his part, to do this veto, even though there's a short-term political cost, because they're deathly afraid that people will look at SCHIP and say, gee, actually the government can do some good. [...]

BuzzFlash: We want to challenge you a little on some language. […] You used the word "conservatism," though you switch and say

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From Politico

The same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry’s Vietnam service is planning a summer release of what’s scheduled to be the first critical book on Barack Obama. Conservative journalist David Freddoso’s “The Case Against Barack Obama” will offer “a comprehensive, factual look at Obama,” according to Regnery Publishing president and publisher Marjory Ross.

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... is the subtitle of U.S. Versus Them by J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic. He argues that plain old conservatism — as opposed to neo-conservatism — is what landed us in the mess in Iraq and the Middle East. The bad ideas that mark the Bushies' foreign policy are classic conservative policy ideas.

In foreign policy, "conservative" describes a distinct attitude in which the world is conceived in terms of "us vs. them" or "good vs. evil," with the United States assuming the role of a righteous protagonist facing a monolithic enemy. It is often an explicitly religious vision, with frequent allusions...to God, Satan and Armageddon. Characterizing the Soviet Union as an earthly manifestation of evil, rather than...

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Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:

In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.

See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.

So once you've finished the reading list of anti-conservative books, you can get started on these:

• Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, Eric Alterman
• The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
• Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, Robert Reich
• Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success, Paul Waldman
• Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, George Lakoff
• Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation, Jeffrey Feldman

Back in 2006, I remarked "it's about time liberals start taking aim at conservatism itself" and not just individual conservatives like George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter. It looks like others had similar thoughts, because there's a bumper crop of anti-conservative books available now.

• The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, Greg Anrig
• Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean
• Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, Glenn Greenwald
• Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, Jeffrey Feldman
• God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sarah Posner
• The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, Jonathan Chait

Another book to put on your reading list — The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, by Greg Anrig Jr. (TPMCafe):

The real wonder of the conservative enterprise has been its ability to transform the rudimentary desire of a handful of wealthy families to gut the government into a set of public policy ideas that would help accomplish that goal while sounding appetizing enough to attract large numbers of voters. Rather ingeniously, the simple, easy-to-understand ideas they developed are largely consistent with each other and elegantly link to a broader story line that the conservative movement has effectively sold with remarkable sophistication. That's how the right won the war of ideas. It's also the underlying reason why those ideas keep failing in practice.