Apologism

Except for the wars and the torture and the assassinations and the extraordinary renditions and Guantanamo and Bagram and the tax cuts and the deficits and the cover-ups and the bailouts of rich bankers and ignoring Katrina victims and gay-bashing and doing nothing about unemployment and letting millions of people lose their homes and coddling CEOs and propping up dictators, Obama is awesome

— Ted Rall

Love and sacrifice

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles brusied by a lady in black
And I held my toungue as she told me, "Son,
"fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back

— I Will Follow You Into The Dark, Death Cab for Cutie

In his comment to Dagood's post God’s a Big Human, commenter OneSmallStep asserts that God's love does not "humanize" god. I'm not at all interested in whether anyone's imaginary friend is or is not human, or can or cannot be humanized. I'm much more interested (and appalled) by OneSmallStep's assertion that God's love expressed as the sacrifice of Jesus (presumably per John 3:16) "matches the definition of love we all have."

This assertion is arrant nonsense. OneSmallStep's definition certainly does not match the stated definition of love that atheists have, it does not match the stated definitions most non-Christians have (neither Islam, Buddhism nor Hinduism place much theological importance specifically on sacrifice, especially a deity's or supernatural power's sacrifice to humanity) and, if we look at people's actual behavior, does not match even Christians' definition of love, at least as applied to other human beings.

Love is of course a very complicated set of emotions, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and ethical standards. But we can extract obvious commonality from observations of human behavior: love is characterized by trust, cooperation and mutual benefit. I've been married for almost six years now: I love my wife and she loves me. Before I met my present wife, I raised two children: I love them and they love me. Yet in any larger sense, I've sacrificed nothing to either my wife or my children. It is certainly the case that in every way, economically, materially, and emotionally, both my wife and I are much better off than we would be alone. To a certain extent, I made economic "sacrifices" to raise my children, but that sacrifice was not to them, it was a trade of a lesser value to a greater value of my own: my self-image and self-esteem. They certainly had no choice in the matter, and whatever I gave up for my own does not place any sort of obligation on them, not even for gratitude. Whatever love we feel for each other has nothing to do with what I sacrificed to raise them, and everything to do with the trust, cooperation and mutual benefit we gain from acting as a family.

Indeed most civilized, healthy people consider the connection between sacrifice and love in ordinary human life as at best creepy and neurotic (e.g. the stereotypical (and misogynist, racist and false) "Jewish mother" who manipulates her children with guilt) and at worst literally insane (e.g. people who commit suicide "for love"). Few think (and no one should think) that a battered wife sacrifices her own physical well-being for her "love" for her husband (she does so out of fear), and no one would or should admire her if she actually did so out of "love".

I suppose that under extraordinary circumstances, if my tail's in a crack, I would probably sacrifice my life to save my wife or children... I might even, out of "love" for humanity, sacrifice my life for a stranger. But such a sacrifice would be an act of desperation. It isn't love, not really, and it's certainly not the definition of love. As much as I love my wife, I don't want to sacrifice anything for her benefit. I could, in theory, make the "ultimate sacrifice" and commit suicide, but I don't think my wife would consider that an act of love: indeed she would be well-justified to consider it an act of hatred and violence towards her. Even if I made suicide look like an accident so she would gain considerable material benefit from my life insurance, she would consider it more loving for me (and better for her) to stay with her in poverty than kill myself for her wealth.

The narrative becomes even more absurd when we consider the "sacrifice" of Jesus in the context of the whole Bible. First, it's not really that much of a "sacrifice": death has no meaning for a deity. Secondly, the sacrifice was entirely gratuitous: an omnipotent deity by definition cannot act out of desperation. And the sacrifice was to "atone" for a "original" sin that's nothing more than a blatant frame-up. No, the resurrection of Jesus has to be seen even within the context of the Christian narrative (absent, of course, the "faith" a Christian must bring to that narrative) as nothing more than an opportunity for Yahweh to awe the masses with a cheap magic trick. OneSmallStep would have us belief that the definition of love that everyone has is exemplified by a deity sacrificing itself to itself to atone for a sin it itself engineered. This definition is not just perverse, it's completely ridiculous.

So why elevate sacrifice, at best a peripheral, accidental and extraordinary component of love, to its very definition? And why, as does OneSmallStep, blithely attribute this definition to everyone?

Guilt is a powerful human emotion, and one of the most powerful for manipulating others into doing what you want. If you can elevate sacrifice to the definition of love then you can on the one hand use sacrifice to create obligations, and on the other hand you can justify demanding other people sacrifice themselves: You're not working twelve hours a day and living in poverty? You must not love your employer.

In a follow-up comment, OneSmallStep tries to use war as a justification for his definition of love:

Our definition of love -- how we define love -- includes an aspect of sacrificing objects or even people of value (and I would say that we have instances where we do "sacrifice" people of value. Wars, for instance, if people encourage their family or friends to fight for a greater good). I'm not focusing on the morality or lack thereof of the parent sacrificing the child, I'm simply focusing on how the element of sacrifice ties to the definition of love.

(Notice how sacrifice becomes not the definition of love that everyone has, but an "aspect of" or "tied to" the definition.)

But more importantly, and more shockingly, the effect of this exposition is not to justify love in terms of war, but to justify war in terms of love. Wars are never fought "for the greater good", they are and have been from time immemorial fought to settle disputes between factions of the ruling class du jour. (We didn't, for example, fight the Germans in the Second Imperialist War because they were killing Jews, or the Japanese because they were massacring the Chinese. We fought them because they were trying to expand their colonial power at our expense. That we happened to rid the world of a few of the world's many nasty characters was just a bonus.)

We can see the fundamental and unavoidable danger of "moderate" religion. I've been reading OneSmallStep's commentary on Thoughts from a Sandwich for quite some time, and overall he (?) seems like a reasonably nice person, although — quelle suprise — somewhat fuzzy of thought. To be a "moderate" of any religion, one must buy in at least somehow to that religion's core narrative. But all religions are rotten to the core; a supernatural or "faith" justification for any principle is necessary and has any long-term legs only when that principle lacks rational support. And principles without rational support achieve persistence in any society only when those principles allow the ruling class to exploit, oppress and abuse the ruled class.

Convincing the policymakers

In order to make substantive changes to economic policy, Paul Krugman notes the obvious: "you have to ... convince current policymakers that it’s the right answer." But Krugman is being a little naive: people — policymakers included — rarely if ever do the "right" thing just because it's the right thing to do. If you want to make changes, you to convince the policymakers that those changes are in their material interest. There are two sets of policymakers: the very rich and the elected government. So we have to ask: what precisely are the material interests of these policymakers?

People tend to construct their interests in widening circles, from their individual interests to the interests of their families, work organizations, localities, nations, and regions. They also widen their construction of interests laterally to their church or religion, their profession, their social class and (sometimes) their economic class. And members of the capitalist class seem to have been especially effective at acting in their own economic class interests.

It's a mistake, I think, to see group identification as a "sacrifice" of one's personal interests to the interests of the group. First, a group isn't "really real"; doesn't have interests of its own. A group interest is some abstraction of the interests of its members.

The simplest abstraction is merely some interest that is predominantly shared by the members of the group, especially where individuals self-identify with the group explicitly on the basis of some interest. The group of poker players, for example, are all interested in — surprisingly enough — playing poker; the members of the Motion Picture Association of America are all interested in enforcing, preserving and extending intellectual property rights.

Another, more complex abstraction is mutual benefit. There are interactions where it's always in each individual's immediate benefit to one thing, but it's to both individuals' greater benefit to do the opposite but only if both individuals do the same thing. If I buy a TV from Crazy Eddie, it's in my "immediate" benefit to give him counterfeit money whether or not he gives me a real TV. Likewise, it's in Crazy Eddie's immediate benefit to give me a box with bricks in it whether or not I give him real money. This analysis means that all exchanges are of counterfeit money for empty boxes. Compared to that outcome, it's to our increased mutual benefit to exchange real TVs for real money. Compared to mutual betrayal, mutual cooperation is not a sacrifice: it's an increase in benefit. Each party must "sacrifice" only the illusory benefits of asymmetric betrayal (i.e. where one person cooperates and the other betrays).

One reason I suspect that group identification is strong in humans is precisely that group identification affords mutual cooperation for mutual benefit. It does so by changing the game, by imposing an immediate penalty — loss of group membership — on asymmetric betrayal. The dominant local strategy for each person becomes to cooperate, since asymmetric betrayal loses the more valuable group identification for the smaller immediate benefit. Group identification can evolve — it doesn't need to be planned — and group selection is much more important in social evolution than it is in biological evolution. (Although I'm hardly an expert in evolutionary biology, I suspect that we'll find that group selection plays an important part in inter-species competition.)

What are the interests of the rich?

I recently read Burn Rate, by Michael Wolff, a fascinating inside look at the Internet tech bubble of the late 1990s. In one passage Wolff, the CEO of an Internet startup, has a conversation with his primary financial backer. To paraphrase, the backer exhorts Wolff to go for a personal payout of about $30,000,000, because the people who settle for a payout of only $15,000,000 are "dead". They have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives, but they don't have enough money to make large-scale investments: they cannot become members of the true ruling class. Membership of the ruling class isn't about consuming more; I doubt that even Bill Gates actually consumes more than about $500,000/year (and people who do consume more are parvenus intent on rejoining the working class). Had living well been his only goal, he would have retired and cashed out at $15 million, instead of accumulating three orders of magnitude more money, three orders of magnitude more status and power in the ruling class. No one gets into the ruling class without the burning desire to accumulate and exercise power, and those who do manage (usually by birth and inheritance) to get in without that burning desire soon fall out of it.

(It's also worth noting that the easiest and most common way of accumulating enough money to join the ruling capitalist class is to get that money from someone already in that class. It's very difficult (but not impossible, as several televangelists have demonstrated) to get that much money directly from the working class: the working class is the source of the ruling capitalist class's wealth, and pretty well sewn up.)

It seems fairly obvious that the dominant personal and immediate family interest of the members of the ruling capitalist class is the accumulation and exercise of economic power. The accumulation and exercise of any sort of power is generally a zero-sum game. It's neither in the immediate self interest of any member of the capitalist class to improve the overall state of the economy, nor is there any sense of mutual benefit by mutual cooperation. In much the same sense, it's not in football coaches' immediate or mutual self interest to increase the overall score of a game: a 2-0 win is better than a 41-72 loss.

So clearly, Krugman cannot have the members of the capitalist ruling class in mind: the only sense that the capitalist ruling class acts in its mutual self interest is to prevent, discourage and suppress threats from other classes to their own class rule, and there's no immediate danger of any kind of socialist or working class revolution. (The only immediate danger to the capitalist ruling class is that posedd by Christian theocrats, but the capitalists are handling that danger by co-option and "corruption".) Krugman can have only elected officials in mind.

Elected officials are, like capitalists, motivated by the zero-sum accumulation and exercise of power, but their method of obtaining power is different from the capitalists'. In a capitalist "democracy", the working class occasionally gets some voice in the exercise of power: to gain power (at least for now) a politician must convince millions of people to drive to a polling place and pull the lever next to her name.

We can assume that professional politicians at the national level are generally those most skilled at winning elections (or employ those who are most skilled): if there were anyone more skilled, they would have won the election. So to convince the elected policymakers to make some change, you have to convince them that supporting the change will help them win elections (or, having won elections, allow them to more strongly exercise their acquired political power).

The working class does benefit to some extent from overall improvements in the economy: jobs, employment, work, standards of living are not zero-sum games, they are usually positive-sum games, where the natural dominant strategy is cooperation for mutual benefit. However, to influence elections, the members of the working class must think of themselves as a class, with class interests. Lacking much individual power, having power only in numbers, they must also act in concert, with a certain level of organization and discipline*.

*While "authoritarians" frequently invoke the value of discipline as justification for authoritarianism, the fallacy does not lie in the value of discipline itself, but in their connection of discipline to authority.

But if the working class did conceive of itself as a class, with class interests, and if they were capable of enough organized and disciplined action to influence elections (even under the rigged capitalist "democratic" system) to their class benefit, then they would have sufficient power not just to extract concessions from the capitalist class, but to take over completely. But of course the capitalist class does conceive of itself as a class, it is itself disciplined and organized, and they fully understand that their mutual interest in preserving their own class as the ruling class.

It's going to be very difficult to convince policymakers to do the "right" thing, to choose the "correct" answer; the difference between the "right" and "wrong" answers (according to Krugman's conscience and preferences) is at the very least irrelevant (and may be contrary to) to the immediate and medium-term self interest of the entire ruling class, moneyed and elected. The only long-term threat to the ruling class is a socialist revolution, but the ruling class does not seem to consider this threat sufficiently serious to implement general economic reform — even Obama has primarily limited himself to preserving the status of owners of financial capital and making only token efforts for the working class in the ludicrously small "stimulus" (primarily targeting the professional-managerial middle class) and his woefully insufficient (and actively misogynist) "universal" health care plan.

Dialectical Materialism, part 1

Marx's economic analyses were anticipated by earlier capitalist economists such as Smith and Ricardo, and his identification of the class struggle was hardly novel. Dialectical materialism is the absolutely fundamental element of communism, and (although he didn't label it as such, using the term "historical materialism") Marx's greatest contribution to general and political philosophy.

Dialectical materialism is most sharply contrasted with idealism, both explicit and implied, in the sense of the objective existence of ideas fundamentally independent of and distinct from the material reality of (intuitively) rocks and trees or (scientifically) the intrinsic, irreducible properties of quanta and quantum fields.

Examples of explicit idealism can be found in Plato's philosophy as well as Hegel's dialectical idealism, the direct precursor to Marx's dialectical materialism. A more subtle, implied form of idealism can be found in many people's — including many scientists — ideas about natural physical laws, the idea that physical laws have an independent existence from material reality. There exists a law of gravity, and the law of gravity itself actually exists independently of actual material things attracting each other. (To be fair, most practicing scientists do not worry deeply about or get too attached to the fine details of philosophical ontology, nor do they really need to do so. For their practical purposes ontological fuzziness is just as useful as informed skepticism.)

When we start talking about specifically political philosophy, the distinction between idealism and materialism becomes very important. According to the precepts of dialectical materialism, we have to re-think 99% of our discourse on political and ethical philosophy as at the very least using unwarranted and confusing idealistic metaphors and at worst being arrant bullshit.

Much of Western political and ethical philosophy consists of the search for the "correct" ethical and political principles. What are the correct set of property rights? How much freedom of speech should we have? Who should own the means of production? When do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

From a materialist viewpoint, these questions are at best metaphorical and at worst nonsensical. Ethical and political principles are not in any sense material entities (except as they exist as arrangements of neural properties in people's heads) and have no properties, such as correctness or goodness, independent of some physical, material representation. These questions can be interpreted as different kinds of metaphors: What kinds of property rights will lead to some desired outcome? What are the historical material causes of the collection of ideas in people's heads and in law books that we refer to in the abstract as "freedom of speech"?

Metaphor is fine for literature. An explicitly, consistently and more-or-less precisely defined metaphor becomes an unobjectionable label. But political philosophy is not literature, and its use of ill-defined, imprecise and poorly-understood metaphors does little to advance our understanding.

Paul Krugman gives us an excellent recent example of using an idealistic metaphor in political philosophy:

I’m also fairly conventional on how economies should be run. Self-interest is still the best motivator we know – or more accurately, the only consistent motivator. So I’m for market economies. But I’m for market economies with strong safety nets, with adult supervision in capital markets, with public provision of goods the private sector does badly (like basic research and much of education.) An idealized New Deal is about as far as I go.

If you construct "self-interest" in a reasonable, materialistic way, Krugman is correct that it is indeed the "best" motivator. I'm pleased that he's "for" strong safety nets, adult supervision and public provision of some goods. But how does self-interest motivate these activities? If he thought self-interest (or material factors) could motivate safety nets, etc., he wouldn't introduce these ideas with a "but". They are idealistic principles, presumably, that we "should" aspire to independently of and in some sense contrary to* our self-interest.

*Independence is vacuous if it cannot be contrary. If two things are always correlated, they are not actually independent, even if we can somehow speak of them separately; if two things are always correlated, then speaking of one is always speaking of the other. I cannot, for example, talk (informally) about satiating hunger "independently" of eating food... at least not until we invent neural implants that can directly affect our subjective mental states. And even then, I cannot talk even formally about my feelings of hunger independently of the neural states that represent those feelings.

We can see another example of Krugman's idealism in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal. Just the title betrays his idealism: the principles he expounds are matters of conscience, to be adopted because they are themselves "good" principles. He extols the virtues of New Deal regulated imperialist finance capitalism. As capitalism goes, New Deal capitalism was pretty good, and pretty good even for the capitalist class. He talks in a very abstract, indirect way about its instrumental goodness, but mostly in terms of other ideals, such as stability and distribution of income. He can't really talk in detail about the material effects of New Deal capitalism, since New Deal capitalism offered only the most marginal benefit in terms of the measurable, material well-being of billions of people: tens of millions of Americans and Europeans and a billion people in the exploited third word living in desperate poverty. (You're now just malnourished instead of actually starving to death! Yay capitalism!)

Furthermore, he does not talk about the causal history of the New Deal, and he doesn't explore deeply the causal history of the thirty-year erosion of the New Deal from the 1970's to the present. I'm not pretending I can read his mind, but I get the impression reading the book that he believes the New Deal sprang Athena-like from the mind of FDR and (to some extent) John Maynard Keynes, and its erosion was due to nothing more than inexplicable, irrational perversity.

Dialectical and historical materialism (if we take historical materialism to be dialectical materialism applied to political philosophy) purports to explain these phenomena in a rigorous, detailed, systematic and, above all, scientific way.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter, Harper’s Magazine, November 1964

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

[via Brad DeLong]

Commenting, free speech and open debate

I don't much like to blog about blogging, but db0's recent Jr. High tantrum prompts me to speak. It's notable that db0 didn't complain about my "censorship" when I banned idiot creationists, uptight philosophy sophomores or torture apologists. He's hardly acting out of high-minded principle; he's just pissed that a) he personally was banned and b) that we used to be friends, kind of, and we aren't anymore. And his assertion that I'm not interested in the "facts" is ludicrous; I rejected his comments precisely because they didn't contain any actual facts. And even though db0 has known for a while that I advocate a role for the state in communism, it's only when he personally has been offended that he slanderously labels my position "Maoism".

(He might be drawing an inference from my reporting on and opinions about the controversy between Sunsara Taylor and the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, but that no more makes me a Maoist than it does PZ Myers. I'm reporting on the controversy because I think Sunsara is right and the EHSC is wrong, and because Sunsara is my friend. I refuse to self-identify even as a Marxist, much less a Maoist, and I have never advocated substantial compliance with "Mao Zedong thought". That I might have some positions in common with Mao doesn't make me a Maoist any more than vegetarian, teatotalling nonsmokers are Hitlerists.)

But there's a larger point here.

I and no other blogger has any obligation whatsoever under the principles of free speech and open debate to publish any comment. I have no obligation to even respond to any comment other than one that corrects a provable error of fact.

The principles of freedom of speech and open debate are served by everyone being able to have the same sort of platform that I myself have, and blogs are indeed free from Google, Wordpress and others. Some people want to publish and respond to a wide variety of comments, good for them. Some, such as Andrew Sullivan, don't publish comments at all. Some, such as Paul Krugman, publish comments but the author rarely responds. Some, like PZ Myers, restrict only spam, but the social milieu tends to suppress certain points of view. All of these models are perfectly legitimate from the perspective of free speech and open debate.

Some venues say or imply they want open debate, but don't actually afford open debate. But their sin is hypocrisy and dishonesty, especially when they conclude that their hypocritical "support" of open debate proves by omission the substantive failure of opposing positions; they do not sin against free speech.

I'm very open and explicit that I don't want comments and that I moderate them arbitrarily. If you think I'm wrong about some point, you're perfectly free to criticize me on your own blog in whatever terms and in whatever manner you please. I won't send you a DMCA takedown, I won't lobby to have your blog banned, suppressed, put behind an adult content filter or removed from an aggregator. I won't even suggest to my readers not to read your blog. (I don't know about your readers, but if mine aren't adult enough to make their own decisions about what to read or not to read, I'm not much interested in keeping them.)

This blog exists, though to publish my arguments, my thoughts, my opinions, my speculation. It is, openly and by design, all about me. You have no more right to publish your thoughts here, even in the comments, than you do to sleep on my couch. And the fact that I reject comments that I find repetitious, stupid, trivial, without substance, rude or that just happen to irritate me on a bad day doesn't make me an enemy of free speech or open debate.

Still not interested...

...in Jr. High School drama. I tried to handle it privately, but to no avail.

The problem is not that db0 disagrees with me. I published his disagreement. The problem is that he's just plain stupid not nearly as intelligent or perspicacious as he thinks he is, and I lack the patience and mental calmness to deal with other people's arrogant mediocrity.

Oh, and he's a liar too: I've never called myself a Maoist.

Imperialism and finance capitalism

Krugman on Finance mythbusting, third world edition:

Since the early 1980s there have been three big waves of capital flows to developing countries.

The first wave was to Latin American countries that liberalized trade and opened their markets in the wake of the 80s debt crisis. This wave ended in grief, with the Mexican crisis of 1995 and the delayed Argentine crisis of 2002.

The second wave was to southeast Asian economies in the mid 90s, when the Asian economic miracle was all the rage. This wave ended in grief, with the crisis of 1997-8.

The third wave was to eastern European economies in the middle years of this decade. This wave is ending in grief as we speak. ...

...there’s no striking evidence that capital flows have been a major source of economic success. [emphasis added]

2010 midterm elections

Sayeth the prophet:

Because [Republicans] aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

Did I call it or did I call it?

The Democrats will probably take the White House and Congress in 2008 no matter what they do, but they've handed the Republican party enough ammunition and control over the political narrative that the 2008 administration and Congress will be completely ineffectual. The Republicans will take Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012.

I made a number of other predictions in that post. Let's see how I'm doing so far (remember, the original was written before the current depression).

Specifically we will see from the 2008 Democratic government:

Continued occupation of Iraq: Check
Military hostilities against Iran: Not yet
Corporatist control of the mass media: Check
Loss of more primary manufacturing capacity: Check
Erosion of the middle class: Check
Collapsing housing prices: Big Check
Devaluation of the currency: Not yet, but inevitable
No substantial change to the employer-insurance health care system: See below
More working Americans without health insurance or adequate health care: Missed this one; see below
More concentration of wealth in the top 1% and even more in the top 0.1%: Check
More erosion of basic constitutional civil liberties: Check
Update: more erosion of abortion rights: Check

We will not see:

Repeal of FISA or its amendments: Check
Repeal of the Military Commissions Act: See below
Restoration of habeus corpus: Check
Universal or even near-universal health care: See below
Cessation of torture as military and police policy: Maybe; See below
Any substantial action on global warming: Check (so far)
Ratification of the Kyoto treaty or any comparable international action: Check
Any high-level member of the Bush administration being held to criminal account: Check (with the possible exception of Scooter Libby, which was pure tokenism)

Health Care: It looks like some form of "universal" health care may pass; I really didn't think the Democrats would get even this far. On the other hand, it's about the weakest, half-assed "universal" health care imaginable, and women's reproductive rights have not only been ignored but actively rolled back. Krugman is cautiously optimistic but only because he believes something is better than nothing; and the most one can say about this plan is that it's better than nothing.

Military Commissions Act: The MCA was found unconstitutional. Technically it was not "repealed", but I did expect the Supreme Court to uphold it.

Torture: While there's no evidence that the military under the Obama administration is actually torturing people, Obama has gone out of his way not to abjure torture as at least a policy option.

Still and all, not too shabby a predictive effort for a guy without access to Lexis/Nexis.

Barack Hoover Obama

Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again by Kevin Baker:

Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. ... Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.

According to Baker, Obama more closely resembles Herbert Hoover than Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover was a Republican, though; If Obama fails as spectacularly as Hoover (for the same reasons that Hoover failed: not being quite radical enough in a situation that demands radical action) his failure will only strengthen the Republican party.

[via Brad DeLong]