Pusillanimous pissants

Do you believe that Donald Trump legitimately won the election in 2020? If so, an astonishing number of people, including election officials, state attorneys general, and judges, conspired to fraudulently undermine the election. Indeed, the necessary conspiracy would be so vast that democracy (or what passes for democracy) in America is dead. The entire government lacks any semblance of constitutional legitimacy.

So if you believe this conspiracy, if you believe that the government is irredeemably broken, why are you posting on Facebook/Twitter/whatever? All you're doing is exposing your dissent to an illegitimate tyranny. If you truly are a patriotic American, you should be running to the hills right now with your AK-47 to join the Resistance. 

But you're not running to the hills right now, are you?

You're not because you know that Trump lost the election, and that result is so unacceptable that if elections mean Trump loses, so much the worse for elections.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

I like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If I had any money, I would donate to her campaign. But she is not, as Jacob Silverman claims, "an inflection point in Democratic politics."

She probably won't be elected, and if elected probably won't serve more than a term or two, but if she survives, she'll be corrupted by power. Everyone becomes corrupted, no matter how idealistic they start out.

I don't mean corruption in the legal sense; I'm not saying she'll eventually take bribes or something like that. But the Democratic party and the House of Representatives are institutions, and every institution exerts a powerful moral force on its members, and expel those who fundamentally resist its moral core. And the moral core of the HoR and Democratic party is to preserve corporate capitalism at any cost.

If elected, her choice will become plain: appease the corporations and retire to a cushy job on a few boards of directors or as a lobbyist, or oppose them, be buried, and go back to waiting tables for subsistence wages. Courage doesn't enter into it: it's not "courageous" in any sense, it's just pointless stupidity, to sacrifice oneself for no gain. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is not going to drag the Democratic party one inch towards even New Deal social democracy, much less a socialist utopia.

I kinda hope she does sell out. She's not going to change anything, so she might as well cash in. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure makes misery a lot more comfortable.

Smashing the bourgeois state

Smashing the bourgeois state is always a priority of any good communist revolutionary. Fortunately for my tired old ass, The Republicans are doing it for me, and the Democrats seem unable to resist. Oh, Clinton will win, of course, but she won't be able to govern.

This development is doubleplusgood. No Democratic government will ever be legitimate to the Republicans. No Republican government will ever be legitimate to the Democrats. The bourgeoisie is tearing itself apart. And I don't have to lift a finger. Yay!

If any socialists can pull their head out of their ass long enough to pick up the pieces, we might have a chance at progress. However, socialists' heads are pretty firmly wedged (I'm just observing: it took me 40 years to pull my head out of my petty-bourgeois ass, so I'm in no position to criticize), so it'll probably be the fascists who gain.

A rant on Democrats and Republicans

The Democratic party has the power to utterly crush the Republicans. Not just win the presidency in a landslide, but to make the Republicans a fringe party of Klansmen, MRAs, and fundamentalist Christians, with no more hope of electoral success than the Libertarians or Greens.

The Democratic party could, if it chose, take no only the presidency, but also the congress, every governorship and state legislature, and even every mayor, city council, and dog catcher.

For twenty years, I've been hearing that the Democrats cannot enact a progressive agenda because of those darn Republicans. That was perhaps true in the past, but if the primary obstacle to a progressive agenda really were the Republicans, the Democrats have the opportunity to remove that obstacle for a generation.

With no effective opposition from the Republicans, the Democratic party could, if it chose, enact every progressive measure conceivable. Reform police departments, make abortion available to every woman, let everyone vote, enact universal health care, raise the minimum wage, provide a Universal Basic Income, maintain and even expand Social Security, rebuild our infrastructure, break the big banks, end the wars in the Middle East. I'm not even talking about a socialist revolution, just enact every measure that most working people think constitute basic decency.

The Democratic party will not crush the Republicans. The Democrats need the Republicans. The Democrats do not want to enact a progressive agenda; they have been using the Republican party as an excuse for their inaction.

More precisely, the capitalist class does not want to enact a progressive agenda, and the Democratic party no less than the Republican party does what the capitalist class wants.

No ruling class can rule by brute force, every good ruling class needs to con the population into legitimizing their rule. So the capitalists have been playing a good cop/bad cop scam on the United States for 35 years. Note that both roles are necessary: after Ronald Reagan's elections, the Republicans could have utterly crushed the Democrats, but did not do so, because that would not have served capitalist interests.

The capitalists are definitely worried by both Trump and Sanders. Both are populists, and the one thing that both the capitalist class and the professional-managerial class who serve the capitalists agree on is that the people should not have any actual power.

Ideally, the capitalist class would use Trump as an excuse to further limit popular power: "We can't have another Trump, right? So we have to more carefully manage who gets nominated, right? You just can't trust those people to have an effective political voice."

Clinton will win this election because, well, Trump is not just batshit crazy but also stupid, and stupid is bad for business. But this election is not the real issue. The real issue is 2020 or 2024.

Clinton will govern as a good neoliberal. She'll throw a few crumbs to the working class, but will not change anything of substance. We'll still have the police killing black people. We'll still have a minimum wage below any decent standard of living. We'll still have a lot of poor women (and especially poor black women) without access to contraception or abortion. We'll still have tens of millions of people going without needed health care because they can't afford it. We'll still have massive voter suppression. We'll still have globalization, depressed wages, underemployment. We'll still be murdering brown people overseas in industrial quantities.

The Republicans will retain enough power to ensure that the Democrats have some cover for not enacting much actual progressive policy. Both parties will change their nomination procedures to make sure that no one like Trump or Sanders can get as close as they did.

However, because neoliberalism is itself cracking, the global economy is going to go tits up, likely in the next four years, and almost certainly in the next eight.

The capitalist class has for most of the last century crushed socialism, but only minimized fascism. Then they get to tell the story, "Yeah, capitalism and neoliberalism kinda sucks, but y'all need to suck it up and adjust. If you don't, you'll just end up with fascism." This is a good strategy. It's worked for almost a hundred years.

But when neoliberalism finally falls apart, people are going to say, "If the fascists are the only alternative, then better the fascists than the neoliberals."

There are two ways out of that depressing scenario, both of which could work separately or in tandem.

First, the Sanders wing of the Democratic party could make a concerted, dedicated effort to take over the Democratic party and destroy the Republican party. Sure, let Clinton be president, but make it absolutely clear she's a figurehead for a real progressive party. This means that Sanders' supporters focus their energy on congressional and state and local races. Let Clinton and her corporate money take the presidency, but make sure that the actual power of the party lies with the Sanders bloc. This effort will take serious, dedicated, and continuous effort, not just until November, but through at least to the midterm elections. Without the corporate bloc, the Sanders bloc cannot crush the Republicans in November, but they could, if they work hard, seriously weaken them before the economy crashes. If this happens, then when the economy does crash, there is an alternative to fascism.

Second, the "true" socialists can get together and make a serious effort to provide at least a coherent ideological alternative to both capitalism and fascism. Abandon the jargon, abandon the abstruse theory, abandon the petty century-long grudges, and start talking to, you know, the actual workers. Maybe, just maybe, when neoliberalism falls apart, there will be enough of a power base to resist and defeat the fascists.

I dunno. I don't hold much hope for either alternative. The corporate Democrats will crush Sanders; they want the Republicans to hold a lot of congressional and local power. The Sanders bloc would have to not only fight the Republicans, but fight their own party. Possible, but difficult.

And I have even less hope that socialists can get their shit together and actually appeal to the workers.

But who knows. Weirder shit has happened.

Killed by police

Ed highlights the most egregious police killings of unarmed black people in 2015, starting with 12 year old Tamir Rice, killed by police Nov. 22, 2014, whose killers will not be prosecuted.

See ?Killed by Police for a list of 1,190 people (as of Dec. 29) killed by police in 2015.

The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism

The Long Con
Mail-order conservatism
by Rick Perlstein

Mitt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but- overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity. . . .

Pundits—that is to say, the ones who aren’t stitched into their profession’s lunatic semiology, which holds that it’s unfair to call a Republican a liar unless you call a Democrat one too—have been hard at work analyzing what this all says about Mitt Romney’s character. And more power to them. But that’s not really my bag. . . . In my view, powerful men are but a means to the more profound end of sizing up the shifting allegiances on the demand side of our politics.

All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?

American politics as Advance Fee Fraud

Come on, just the tip:

[S]mall, incremental victories mean little to me in the context of the long, steady, thirty-plus year downward slide toward a lower standard of living that has defined post-1980 America. . . .

Like any good con, it's always the next sacrifice that will be the one that does it, the magic bullet that finally solves the problem. And then when it doesn't, there will be just one more next year, and then maybe another one a few years from now, and then…ten or twenty years pass and we don't even remember what it was we were promised when we starting cutting flesh, and we're reduced to hoping that the next sacrifice will be enough to keep us from losing the house.

The enduring malaise

Buce does not think he understands the "enduring malaise" we are experiencing today. He seems like a smart guy, but I don't understand his confusion. Things seem pretty simple to me; of course, simple does not imply "easy".

My as yet unproven theory is that the period from 1929 to present represents a class struggle between the professional-managerial class and the capitalist class. The capitalist class was the unchallenged ruling class from the beginning of the 19th century (when they took over from the landowning class) until the beginning of the 1930s. For a variety of reasons, including the Great Depression and the Second Imperialist War, the capitalist class lost its unchallenged grip on political and economic power and privilege; the "levers of power" fell to the professional-managerial class, mostly senior business executives and government bureaucrats. The capitalist class was not going to take their defeat lying down; it almost immediately began the struggle to regain power and once again become the ruling class. They finally succeeded (depending on one's analysis) during the Reagan administration (with the destruction of the Air Traffic Controllers' Union), during the Clinton administration (repeal of Glass-Steagall), or during the George W. Bush administration (Iraq war). Their complete victory is evidenced by the slavish devotion to the capitalist class shown by the nominally Democratic Barack Obama; before Obama, the capitalist class vied for governmental power almost exclusively through the Republican party. A classic story of Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets Girl back.

Buce's inability to understand today's "enduring malaise" is, I think, a case of evaluating the currently ruling capitalist class by the cultural norms of the professional-managerial middle class. During its rule, the culture of the professional-managerial class identified as "problems" challenges to the economic well-being of the working classes and created pragmatic, "technocratic" solutions to those problems. The capitalist class, on the other hand, does not consider challenges to working-class economic well-being to be problematic, and there is no need to search for solutions of any kind. Instead, as Corey Robin explores in his book, The Reactionary Mind, the capitalist class considers challenges to social and economic relations of domination and subordination to be problematic, and looks for solutions to those problems. Viewed in this light, the suffering caused by the Lesser Great Depression is not at all problematic to one faction of the capitalist ruling class: it will, in Andrew Mellon's words, "purge the rottenness out of the system. . . . People will work harder, live a more moral life." To other, perhaps more far-seeing factions, the Lesser Great Depression is problematic only to the extent that, in the long term, popular suffering might undermine the legitimacy of capitalist rule. However, any amelioration of present suffering must be both consistent with the internal morality of the capitalist class as a whole, and it must never be allowed to even question, much less actually undermine, the legitimacy of capitalist rule. This "anthropological perspective" helps understand the response of the ruling capitalist class to current economic conditions.

Many commentators — not only Buce but Krugman, DeLong, Reich*, etc. — are scratching their heads, wondering why the government refuses to implement the more-or-less obvious solutions to our current economic problems. The solution really is obvious: massive government spending to increase aggregate demand and impel business to hire workers to meet that demand. Businesses cannot do so on their own: if an individual business unilaterally increases its own workers' demand, those workers will demand other business's products, and that business will be at a competitive disadvantage because of its higher wages. Because government is not demand-driven, only government can unilaterally increase demand without disadvantage. But economic demand is, well, demand; it is real power.

*i.e. the advocates of professional-managerial class rule that I read regularly.

This solution, obvious as it might be, is morally unthinkable to the capitalist class. Viewed charitably, imagine an invariably deadly, highly-contagious, long-incubation disease. The "obvious" solution is to find all those infected, kill them, and burn their bodies. The moral revulsion to this obvious response has nothing to do with the pragmatic effectiveness of this solution; killing all the infected is just not done. So too with stimulus: the "cure" is worse than the disease, because stimulus (indeed the whole notion of a consumer economy that needs high aggregate demand) would undermine relations of subordination, the sine qua non capitalist class morality.

Buce also misunderstands what's happened to the discipline of macroeconomics. During its rule, the professional-managerial class embraced Keynesian macro. The real value of Keynsian macro is not its predictive character (although it's about as predictive as meteorology, which ain't chopped liver) but in its responsive character. Even if you can't predict what will happen tomorrow (or even know reliably what is happening today), we can at least use Keynesian macro to correct the problems we can reliably know started yesterday. When we see that the economy has become "overheated", we raise taxes, lower spending, and run a government "surplus", thus draining demand from the private economy. When we see that the economy has become depressed, we lower taxes, raise spending, and run a government "deficit", thus pumping demand into the private economy. (The government must also continuously pump a little demand into the economy, i.e. run a "deficit", to match demand to real economic growth.) Even if it lacked any predictive power at all, Keynesian macro would be extraordinarily valuable just for its ability to respond effectively to changes in the business cycle.

If your opponent has an advantage, and Keynesian macro is a huge advantage, one naturally seeks to neutralize that advantage. One strategy was to undermine the academic credibility of macroeconomics. Macro in general is not particularly important to the capitalist class: so long as the government maintains the value of money (the primary signal of capitalist status), it's not that important how the economy as a whole is doing. Since macro doesn't matter, all that was necessary was to flatter and reward academic macro-economists who steered the discipline into irrelevancy. Academics are hard to coerce, but they are ridiculously easy to bribe. (The professional-managerial class, having its own moral standards of academic freedom, both failed to see (as they assumed all academics were part of their own class) and were disinclined to correct this effort by the capitalist class to undermine macroeconomics.

The capitalist class has co-opted the entire leadership of the professional-managerial class. Senior executives are no longer managers, they are rentiers. Power in the universities — the fundamental wellspring of the professional-managerial class — has been transferred from the professors to the professional administrators. The professional-managerial class, I suspect, is more relieved than outraged that it no longer has the responsibility to govern; they will not, as did the capitalist class, find in defeat a motivation to redouble their efforts to regain their rule. All that is left today of the professional-managerial class are a few die-hards, pining for the good old days.

Ohio parents plead guilty in son's cancer death

Ohio parents plead guilty in son's cancer death

The parents of an 8-year-old Ohio boy who died of cancer in 2008 have pleaded guilty to attempted involuntary manslaughter in his death.

Monica Hussing, 37, and William Robinson Sr., 40, face up to eight years in prison each; sentencing is scheduled for February 16.

"They thought the kid had swollen glands," John Luskin, Hussing's Cleveland-based attorney, told CNN on Tuesday.

From time to time, the boy's parents would notice a lump on his neck, but it would come and go and did not appear to bother him, Luskin said.

The parents never sought a diagnosis for their son, William, who was suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma, CNN affiliate WJW reported.

They did not have much money, struggled to make ends meet and "were doing the best they could," Luskin said.

This is our world.

(via SouthernFriedInfidel)

Politics and economics

The Infamous Brad has an excellent analysis of the politics of Occupy Wall Street. (You should, of course, be following Brad carefully.) Brad is entirely correct as to the politics, but we always, I think, have to look at what underlies politics economics.

The 19th century was, in economic terms, the struggle of the bourgeois capitalist middle class against monarchical mercantile imperialist ruling class. All the apparently purely political struggles were about that underlying economic conflict. The only possible outcomes were that the bourgeoisie or the monarchists would win in the end; as we know, the bourgeoisie won. Marx would, I think, argue that because capitalism as was substantially more economically productive than monarchical mercantilism, the victory of the bourgeoisie was inevitable*.

*I don't want to get into a discussion of whether or not Marx was right, and about precisely what he meant by "inevitable".

Similarly, the struggle of the twentieth century was between the professional-managerial middle class and the capitalist ruling class. Even as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century (as Michal Perelman argues in Railroading Economics) the large-scale industries of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries required not only dedicated professional management (business is too serious a matter to entrust to capitalists*) but also authoritative macroeconomic coordination, coordination that could be performed only by the state. The professional-managerial middle class revolution was ultimately successful after the Second Imperialist War, leading to the Great Moderation. Again, because the large-scale professional management and macroeconomic coordination were more productive than laissez faire capitalism (especially with the framework of Keynes General Theory), the victory of the professional-managerial middle class was, in a Marxian sense, inevitable.

*With apologies to Clemenceau

Until perhaps the beginning of the twenty-first century, there really hasn't been a substantive change in economic conditions that would underlie a political struggle. Therefore, there hasn't really been a truly transformative political struggle after the Second Imperialist War. Even the 1960s didn't create any fundamental transformation; at best it shook up the complacency of the professional-managerial now-ruling class, but its effects were social and largely superficial. (Which is not to say the effects were unimportant; the professional-managerial class really did need to lose the straight-laced, rigid conformist baggage it carried from its time as the middle class.)

A problem with the professional-managerial class is that it is not sufficiently ruthless. On its victory it did not destroy (or thoroughly marginalize) the capitalist class as the capitalists destroyed and marginalized the monarchists. After the bourgeois revolutions, the monarchs were either butchered or stripped of all their power; there is not a single king or queen in the West with even a shred of effective legal or political power. (Price Charles, for example, has been reduced to becoming an advocate for snicker homeopathy.) In contrast, the professional-managerial middle class left a crucial legal and political tool in the hands of the capitalists: the social construction of the means of production as private property which can be owned. (The communist revolutions, which were also professional-managerial class revolutions, made the opposite mistake: they failed to adopt the bourgeoisie's only truly valuable concept: transforming personal power into the power of offices.) The professional-managerial class does not by nature crave power. They are taught to be judicious, rational, to find the best solution, not the solution that preserves and enhances one's own power regardless of the consequences. They really do mean well.

(Which is not, of course, to say that the rule of the professional-managerial class is all rainbows and unicorns, as demonstrated by twentieth century neoliberal imperialism. The best that can be said of the professional-managerial class is that its slightly less murderous than its monarchist predecessors, preferring economic slavery to actual chattel slavery.)

But the capitalists were not willing to be contained, however gilded their cage. Owners of capital are conditioned to absolute self-interest. A capitalist grows his business not because of the social benefits of doing so, but to crush his rivals. A capitalist plays to win, and anything he can get away with, however he can get away with it, is fair game. Atlas Shrugged really sums up the thinking of the capitalist class: without the capitalists, the world will descend into anarchy and chaos. The irony is that Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged immediately after the greatest purely economic collapse in human history, which happened during the unquestioned rule of the capitalist class, and during the greatest economic expansion in human history, an expansion that occurred during the unquestioned rule of the professional-managerial class. The protagonists (I cannot call them heroes) are not laboring under the yoke of oppression; their complaint is rather that the power of the "exceptional" is not absolute. The antagonists are ridiculous caricatures not of the proletariat but of the professional-managerial class with their concepts of bureaucratic management and state macroeconomic coordination.

The Marxian puzzle is this: because they are clearly more economically productive than the capitalist class, the victory of the professional-managerial class ought to be inevitable, and yet never has there been a class so quickly defeated and demoralized by its own success. Without another economic model that can out-produce even laissez faire capitalism, the best that the Occupy Wall Street protests can do is restore power to the professional-managerial class. But the professional-managerial class has ceased to exist, leaving only isolated hold-outs such as Krugman and DeLong. The economically superior class has already been defeated by the economically inferior class. Marx may ultimately be wrong: economics does not "determine" (i.e. exert ineluctable selection pressure) politics. If so, what can we hope for?

The capitalist class has defeated and destroyed the professional-managerial class. There are obviously a lot of professionals, managers, bureaucrats, etc., and the capitalist class will continue to use them, but their very identity as a class has been just as thoroughly destroyed as has been the identity of the industrial proletariat as a class. Since the class does not exist — and the capitalist class is not so stupid as to easily allow them to restore their class consciousness — no political movement can restore them to power. Lacking any way to actually be successful, the protests will peter out. Even if the the state botches the job and pulls a Kent State, people will just get scared and go home. Political change happens not when things are the darkest, but when they have started to improve. It is only when they realistically hope for improvement that the people stand up with sufficient force and demand more. Things are going down, not up.

The alternative to protest for improvement is the absolute and total collapse of the ruling class. In Russia, the people revolted because the Tsarist state caused the utter destruction of the Russian nation in the First Imperialist War. In China, the people revolted because of the Imperial state caused the utter destruction of the Chinese nation by the Japanese invasion. So we can confidently predict that without the professional-managerial class, we will have a revolution in the United States only after the capitalist class causes the utter destruction of the American nation.

The most plausible cause of the destruction of the American nation is from the Christian Right. The capitalist class has built much of its pseudo-democratic political power on this base. The capitalist class simply cannot manage a 350 million person economy on its own; when they plunge the nation into a real depression, only the Christian Right will be able to operate without the capitalist class simply crushing them. The capitalist class can potentially fall to a Christian theocracy. But a theocracy will not only prove even more economically inept than the capitalists, they will also be more politically inept, and we will return to personal, rather than official state power, with all the banal corruption and self-serving of monarchism. What happens after that... I don't know.

Sigh... another rambling essay with no real thesis.

Unemployment cards from Hallmark

I shit you not: Hallmark has unveiled a line of unemployment-related sympathy cards.

(via Monday Through Friday)

Experienced only

Sign Spinner / Human Directional (Placentia)

---

Date: 2011-08-25, 10:56AM PDT
Reply to: [redacted]

---

Want to get a workout while getting paid? This is the position for you!

$12 Per Hour STARTING PAY!

DO NO TRESPOND TO THIS POSTING WITHOUT LISTING YOUR SIGN SPINNING EXP. YOU WILL NOT BE CONSIDERED IF THIS INFORMATION IS NOT PROVIDED!

- Monday through Saturday (5 of 6 days), Saturday m,ust be one of the 5 days
- 32.5 hours per week 11am to 6pm with 30 minute lunch break
- Must have Sign Spinning experience.
- Must show Sign Spinning demonstration for ability.
- Please include most recent Sign Spinning employment (When and Where.)

Email your resume or experience to [redacted]

Interviews start immediately!

• Location: Placentia
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 2565545012

Originally here on Orange CO Craigslist; via Work Fails and Job LOLs

William K. Black on Obama

What Aspect of Dealing with Bullies Did Obama Fail to Learn as a Child?
The Effort to Claim That Economists Support Obama's Capitulation on Tax Cuts for the Wealthy
Bill Black: No, Mr. President, you did not negotiate a winning tax deal

There are only two conclusion: either Obama is a staggeringly incompetent executive, or he is an operative for the Republican party.

It's true that Obama doesn't have any executive experience. But his incompetence goes much deeper: anyone who has run an endeavor more complicated than a coffee shop has encountered bullying and brass-knuckled opposition. As Black notes, Obama is failing at lessons he should have learned in middle school. We can't entirely rule out incompetence, but we should be looking more closely at a hidden agenda.

I'm of course employing hyperbole in describing the alternative as Obama being a Republican party operative. It is, I think, more accurate to make the uncontroversial assertion that Obama is an operative for the capitalist ruling class; the capitalist ruling class is presently dominated by the ideology of the Randian faction; and the Republican party is (and has always has been) the primary political arm of the capitalist ruling class. Obama and the Republican party serve the same masters. Part of the strategy of the capitalist ruling class has been to weaken the populism of the Democratic party.

I haven't done any research, and I don't know what the capitalist ruling class has actually done, but the most obvious strategy is to use campaign contributions and other forms of funding to strengthen "moderate" (i.e. would have been Republicans 40 years ago) Democrats and weaken populist Democrats. They would do so to ensure that the Democratic party does not represent the interests of the working people and lower-middle-class against the capitalist ruling class, but rather serves as a counterweight to the religious right that has been courted exclusively by the Republican party. The capitalist ruling class has good reason to distrust the religious nutjobs.

It's clear however, that Democrat or Republican, the capitalist ruling class has not decided to rescue the consumer economy. I say "has not decided" intentionally; I'm not saying — and I don't believe — they have actively decided to destroy or let the consumer economy fail. I suspect the truth is more subtle.

The Randian faction has been operating ideologically: they have been promoting a set of ideas within the capitalist ruling class.

The "non-Randian" capitalist faction has a view, I think, much like, "We're on top; we rule the world. All we have to do is keep the consumer economy working reasonably well (which is no mean task) and our privilege is guaranteed." The Randian faction, however, finds it intolerable that they do not have absolute power. Just as it's morally wrong to give a sucker an even break, it's morally wrong to make any concessions to anyone outside the capitalist ruling class. Read Atlas Shrugged again and note why every member of the elite chooses to follow John Galt (why Galt himself decides to destroy society). Is it because they lack power, privilege and material reward? Hardly. It is because they do not have absolute power. To the Randian mind, the task of keeping the consumer economy running is as deeply immoral and reprehensible as the task of keeping the system of chattel slavery would be to an ordinary person.

They believe the members of the capitalist ruling class are the creators of all value. They see themselves as, if not the John Galts, then the Hank Reardens, despite the fact that not a single Randian capitalist has the slightest bit of scientific or managerial competence; they have delegated both activities to the professional-managerial middle class. (Indeed those few members of the capitalist ruling class that do have actual scientific, technical and managerial competence are the least Randian.) They believe they really can let the consumer economy slide into catastrophe, retreat to Galt's Gulch, and emerge in a few years to enslave an exhausted and starving population. They really do want to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate ... it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people."

They are, of course, deluded. They are not the creators of all value but parasites on the labor of the working class. They fail to appreciate the power of torches and pitchforks. And they seriously underestimate the Chinese; I can't imagine the leadership of the Chinese "Communist" Party looking at our political and economic troubles with anything but unrestrained glee. I hope for their sakes the Randians are learning Mandarin. (I should probably take my own advice.)

While the Randian faction has not completely taken over the capitalist ruling class, they have succeeded in spreading their ideas and way of thinking among their opponents, as well as spreading an appropriate version of their ideas in the professional-managerial middle class and the working class. The non-Randians are starting to think about the world in Randian terms; more importantly, they must communicate with a population a large segment of which has been trained to respond to Randian ideas in a particular way. They have lost their confidence in their own pragmatic ideology, which causes weakness and indecision at critical moments. They aren't really happy with the kleptocrat financiers, but the Randian memes cause them to shy away from actually punishing them: they feel a sense of indecency in doing so. And how do they communicate this unhappiness to the people? If some of the priests know the pharaoh is corrupt, how do you communicate that corruption to a people who worship him as a god? Furthermore, the priests derive their own prestige from their service to the pharaoh. If the pharaoh is corrupt, then what are they but servants of corruption?

None of this calculation need be conscious; everyone develops habits of thought that preserve their own privilege and status. In much the same sense, Democratic party politicians have always seen itself as servants of the (relatively) pragmatic faction of the capitalist ruling class; with the pragmatic faction itself losing confidence and starting at least not reject a Randian "moral" view out of hand, the faction and party are increasingly becoming indecisive, rudderless, and helpless.

This is precisely what we're seeing. The Randian faction may use pragmatic, instrumental arguments (most of which are as transparently fallacious as the instrumental arguments against gay marriage) but theirs is a fundamentally moral position: whatever results from an immoral activity, however seemingly useful, is itself inherently immoral. The consumer economy, which — in the Randian view — can result only from an immoral transfer of income and wealth from those who produce to the "moochers" and "looters", those who do not produce (or who produce only as instruments, as the hammer produces only as an instrument of the carpenter). This fundamentally moral view has gained traction in the minds of the pragmatic faction of the capitalist ruling class; the appropriate versions have gained traction in the professional-managerial middle class and the working class. This traction weakens the will and character of the pragmatic faction: They pretty much know what to do to fix the economy (imprison the kleptocrats, regulate the financial system, and stimulate demand), but the Randian ideas render these strategies distasteful; they cannot commit wholeheartedly to them.

The Randian faction is deluded, but they are not deluded in the way the pragmatists think they are deluded. They do not believe that the measures they favor — increasing inequality of wealth and income — will "save" the consumer economy. They want to destroy the consumer economy, because the mass of people do not create value, they only consume the value the capitalist ruling class itself creates. Arguing with the Randian faction about whether or not this or that strategy will save the consumer economy is as fruitless as arguing evidence for evolution with a creationist. Just as the creationist is not interested in coming up with the best scientific theory, the Randian faction is not interested in coming up with the best way to save the consumer economy.

The Randian faction is deluded only in their belief that they can survive the collapse of the consumer economy and be in a strong position to exert dominance in the recovery. They will, if we are lucky, find themselves on the wrong side of a hundred million pitchforks; if we are unlucky, they will be frantically studying Mandarin to cling pathetically to the bottom rungs of our new Chinese overlords' (whom I for one welcome) bureaucracy.

Battered and Beaten

Brad deLong is not a happy man.

Battered but not and Beaten

(via the holy bearded one)

Failure of demand

First, we have to understand the underlying nature of the problem: demand. People have to want stuff and they have to be able to buy stuff. (The producers also have to be able to collect the money, a problem (with several interesting solutions) for free software and free information in general in a capitalist economy.) The financial crisis in the current economy is caused by a failure of the second part of demand: people want stuff, but they can't buy it.

Capitalism prior to the Great Depression was driven primarily by production to make the working classes more productive*. There was tremendous pressure not only to use machines to make workers more immediately productive, but also to improve their standard of living to make them better workers overall and to support more workers. (Note that Marx was not incorrect in noting the poor quality of life of industrial workers in the mid-19th century; there was no "altruism" whatsoever in the capitalists drive to improve workers' standard of living. Utopian fuckwits notwithstanding, it still remains arguable, however, that the quality of life of pre-industrial agrarianism was even lower than under industrial capitalism. Secondarily, capitalist production created the professional-managerial middle class, which absorbed much of the luxury production afforded by improved productive efficiency.

*Per-capita consumption as a percentage of total production by the ruling class has fallen substantially from feudalism, and continues to fall. Contrast Versailles with the Hearst Castle and Bill Gates' home.)

The problem, becoming apparent even by Marx's time and underlying the recessions of the 19th century, was that the personal demand of the upper and middle classes was beginning to fail: they no longer wanted stuff. Contributing to this failure was the social attitude that created the capitalist ruling class in the first place (and which permeated to the middle class): a distaste for consumption in favor of saving and investment. The feudal ruling class consumed not only ostentatiously but proudly: they were, in their own eyes (and to some degree justifiably) turning what little surplus labor there was — surplus labor that couldn't be invested — into works of great art and beauty, which they (again to some degree justifiably) conceived themselves to be holding in trust for future generations. One reason why the capitalist ruling class arose as a distinct class — rather than the feudal ruling class simply embracing industrial production — was precisely because the capitalist attitude favoring investment over consumption afforded a much higher rate of industrial development.

This crisis of demand came to a head in the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent depression. The professional-managerial middle class (relatively large compared to early capitalism), whose individual desire to consume was saturated, tried to gain entry in the capitalist ruling class by exploiting loopholes in the stock market.

It is entirely incorrect to view the loopholes and weaknesses in the stock market in 1929 or the shadow banking system today as the problem that needs to be corrected. It's certainly a problem, but it's impossible to build a system with no loopholes or weaknesses at all, especially when there's any negative selection pressure that can be escaped by finding or creating loopholes. (Most simple systems work only because no one is actively trying to subvert them; the most well-designed complex systems fail even though no one is trying to subvert them.) At best, advocates of "regulation" are fighting the last war.

FDR's New Deal and Keynesian economics was the last, best hope to "rescue" capitalism from its own contradictions. It succeeded — at least for a while — because not only did FDR et al. improve regulations on the stock market and financial system, but also because it pushed a considerable amount of social demand — the ability to buy stuff — on the working class. Of course, the United States supplied this demand in no small part by creating the most powerful international economic empire in the history of the world, hyper-exploiting tens or hundreds of millions of foreign workers as well as tens of millions of American minority and illegal immigrant workers. Even so, without the demand of a huge chunk of the American working class, American imperialism would have faltered.

However, the New Deal and Keynesian economics did not address the primary selection pressure operating on members of the capitalist class: losing their money and being ejected from the capitalist class. Indeed the entry of hundreds of thousands of new members to the lower rungs of the capitalist class increased this selection pressure. It doesn't matter, for example, that there is a vastly expanded demand for shoes if you yourself cannot efficiently produce shoes: you'll still go out of business. The selection pressure remains, and to evolution it doesn't matter how you escape selection pressure; all that matters is that you do escape it.

"Efficiency" in capitalist economics has two* definitions: producing goods with less actual labor time ("good" efficiency), and producing goods with less actual labor cost ("bad" efficiency). One company that can produce 100,000 shoes a year with 100 workers paid $10/hour, is "more efficient" than another company that can produce 100,000 shoes with 75 workers paid $20/hour. There are always loopholes and weaknesses in regulations that mandate that workers be paid $20/hour; the companies that find and exploit those loopholes will escape selection pressures that will eliminate companies that don't find them or have some "moral" compunction against exploiting them. [see comments]

As long as there is labor cost selection pressure, the labor market will find ways to "fall downhill" to a market for labor power rather than a market for labor time, i.e. the price for labor will fall to its cost according to the law of supply and demand. All you can do with regulation is select against some particular methods of making the market for labor a market for labor power, and whatever you don't select against will end up being selected "for".

*Three, actually: the third is producing more (or better) goods for the same time/cost.

From the late 1940's to the 1970's, we had tremendous economic growth in the United States (and Western Europe). The vastly increased demand (ability to buy) afforded mostly by labor unions and government labor regulations eased selection pressure overall: with demand so high, even relatively inefficient producers were not selected against. The chief problem of the era (and we were lucky to have that problem) was convincing people to want to consume what was being produced. There also was a certain symbiosis between foreign and American workers. The hyper-exploited foreign were producing mostly raw materials and some technologically unchallenging manufactured products, such as textiles; American workers were producing more complex and technologically challenging products, such as automobiles and airplanes. Technological issues, especially shipping, worker education, and management, prevented "outsourcing" and made American workers more cost-efficient overall, despite a much higher unit cost.

But selection pressure was not absent: companies were going out of business and a lot of capitalists in the 50s and 60s failed and were expropriated. Even if only a small fraction of companies just looked for ways to reduce labor costs rather than labor time, that small fraction still escaped selection pressure more often than companies that didn't look for (or didn't find) ways to reduce labor costs. As evolution shows us, even a small reduction in selection pressure against a minority always* leads to that minority eventually dominating the population and often completely eliminating alternative variations.

*Almost always: there are some exceptions due to higher-level selection pressures.

Because of the way selection pressures work within the capitalist ruling class, no amount of regulation or "artificial" constraints on the capitalist class will ever be effective in the long (i.e. 30-40 years) term. We would literally have to regulate with the power, knowledge and benevolence of an deity* to successfully overcome the selection pressures inherent in the capitalist system.

*It should be noted that no such omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity actually exists.

In the New Deal years, while the upper middle professional-manager class was struggling — often successfully — to enter the capitalist ruling class, the working class and lower-middle class were storing some of their new ability-to-buy demand into housing and pensions. Naturally, when labor costs started to decline — i.e. actually working was creating less ability-to-buy demand — ability-to-buy demand devolved to first pension funds and then home prices, producing the bubbles of the 21st century. When these bubbles were exhausted (in the space of just a few years each), ability-to-buy demand completely collapsed.

To a certain extent, this stored demand was simply stolen through chicanery and outright fraud. It makes a certain amount of sense to look for ways this chicanery and fraud can be prevented and eliminated, and it seems that a lot of "progressive" economists have focused their entire attention on this effort. But the fundamental problem is that there was an opportunity for these areas of stored demand to be stolen in the first place. Two conditions are necessary for anything to be stolen: the stolen property must of course exist, but more importantly it must be placed at risk by its owners. No matter how much gold there is in Fort Knox, it's not going to be stolen from there. It's very difficult to take someone's house when it's paid for (or they have enough ability-to-buy demand to maintain their mortgage payments): if you want to steal someone's house, you have to convince them to put it at risk by taking out a mortgage they can't pay for. Because ability-to-pay demand on the basis of wages was declining for the working and lower-middle classes, that's exactly what they did: take out second mortgages and home-equity loans on their more-or-less paid-for (or being paid-for) houses. And they more-or-less "rationally" had to do so: because their mortgage payments were tied to their incomes (and their pensions tied to the health of the companies), had they not propped up overall ability-to-pay demand by tapping their houses, they risked losing their jobs (predicated on supplying that demand) and their houses anyway. Because of the fundamental nature of the capitalist system, the working class and lower-middle class was in a "damned (tomorrow) if you do, damned (today) if you don't" double bind.

In a purely engineering sense, any competent, honest and caring economist could design a system that would maintain aggregate demand, keep full employment, and guarantee a dignified standard of living to everyone on the planet. Throw in the scientific, engineering and technical knowledge we already have, and we could probably support ten times as many people as we have, all with dignity and a reasonable level of comfort. Even I myself could probably make a decent attempt, with my amateur and half-assed understanding of economics and physical science.

Figuring out how to design an economic system is not the problem. If we had a reasonable level of good will and common desire, I can't see that it's really even as technically or intellectually challenging as designing a computer operating system. The problem is that we don't have good will. Even if 90% of the capitalist ruling class had even a little Keynesian good will and common cause with the working and middle-classes, they would be eliminated by the other 10% of Randians long before they could actually implement any economic system that was good for everyone. They partially succeeded in the 1940s only because a "perfect storm" of circumstances diminished the power of the proto-Randians (i.e. there was a "group selection" event) leaving them in a position of temporary advantage. But the proto-Randians weren't completely eliminated; more importantly, the fundamental selection pressures didn't change: the selection pressures that afforded a Randian attitude (improved cost-efficiency, not time-efficiency) a relative advantage didn't change.

To be honest, drilling down to the evolutionary pressures on politics and economics isn't all that comforting. One imagines, per Marx, that somehow the working class can directly exert selection pressure: they certainly appear to have the raw power to do so. But they do not appear to have the political and psychological will to do so, and a century of communist and socialist agitation and propaganda failed to make this will pervasive in the working class: FDR and the Keynesians threw the working class a bone in the 1940's, and they couldn't run away from communism fast enough. The massive anti-communist propaganda in the 50's and 60's had a lot to do with the outcome, but even the best propaganda cannot succeed where there isn't fertile ground in people's minds for its ideas.

With all due respect to many of my friends, whom I like and admire greatly (and even many people I consider to be well-intentioned jackasses), the radical anti-capitalist (communist, socialist and anarchist) movement is entirely ineffectual and meaningless. Even the capitalist liberal and "progressive" left appears almost completely unable or unwilling to exploit the catastrophic — and frankly egregiously stupid — blunders of the Randian capitalist right.

We're running out of options, and running out of time. All I can see is a literal mass extinction of most human societies, perhaps of all humanity. Even if some are left standing to rebuild the world, the "victors" will mostly be selected by pure chance, not by any intrinsic moral virtue.

Rearranging the deck chairs

Partly because I got interested in communism, which draws novel and deep connections between economics and politics, and partly to understand the current financial crisis and subsequent depression, I began reading a lot of capitalist economics blogs, including Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and others.

When I first started reading them, the authors seemed to be looking deeply at the fundamental economic, political and sociological underpinnings of the crisis. Lately, however, most of them (with the exception of some posts at naked capitalism) seem to have just given up, talking about the nitty-gritty details of the financial reform bills in Congress and the bailout of the Greek economy. Even Krugman, who's fairly pessimistic about Greece (as well as Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain, who are headed for similar trouble) seems to have just stopped looking at why our economy and financial systems are in trouble. At worst, they're arguing over the new arrangement of chairs on the Titanic, over the color of the band-aid on our gaping economic wounds; at best they're pessimistically noting that band-aids won't help without really talking about what would help.

There are a few exceptions, but lately I find myself skipping over most of the economics blogs I read. Ho-hum, another critique/apology for the not-even-half-assed Congressional finance reform bill or Greek bailout.

Political cash

Top Recipient of Political Cash from BP, Goldman Sachs, Defense Contractors AND Healthcare Giants: Barack Obama

If you're surprised, you're even stupider than you look.

The Laws of stupidity

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity:

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
   Corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

[h/t to faithlessgod]

Gilead

If reforming capitalism could work, even a little, then Franklin D. Roosevelt's comprehensive reforms of capitalism in the 1930's and 40's would have worked. They have not, and it seems entirely implausible that we can do better than his reforms while still preserving capitalism.

We can determine empirically that FDR's reforms ultimately failed, and there's a theoretical understanding as to why they failed. Empirically, we have seen since the 1970's a steady decline in the wealth, power, and standard of living of the American working class — in comparative and absolute terms — even as the overall wealth of the nation has increased by an order of magnitude. We have seen Democratic party administrations cheerfully undermine the foundations of reformist capitalism: especially Clinton on welfare and the regulation of finance capital.

The theoretical reason is that reformist capitalism is inherently unstable. The primary dialectic within the capitalist class under reformist capitalism becomes a conflict between those who would preserve existing reforms and those who would undermine them. Individual owners of capitalism have a strong incentive to override or evade reforms. It takes just as much political will to preserve existing reforms as it does to erode them. Therefore, any temporary failure of will to preserve existing reforms will result in some erosion; when the will returns, it will be directed towards preserving those reforms that remain, not regaining lost ground.

The dialectic within the working class mirrors this bourgeois dialectic. The capitalist reforms distribute benefits to the working class unequally: the dialectic within the working class thus becomes a conflict between those who have achieved more benefit and those who have achieved less or none. Again, we see a ratchet effect: it requires as much political will to preserve one's benefits as to lose them, and any transfer of benefits from one portion of the working class to another inevitably loses ground overall to the capitalists.

(There are, of course, a few positive gains made here and there to living standards for the working class. But for every gain there are ten losses, and the overall trend is clearly downward.)

This ratchet has — with the deregulation of finance capital — begun in the last decade to hit the professional-managerial middle class. Even the most highly skilled professionals are subject to relentless market pressures to reduce their economic participation to bare survival.

We're still far from the bottom, but with the debt crisis, the enormous and still growing unemployment crisis, the ratcheting-downwards is picking up speed.

At best, with adroit skill and iron will, President Obama and the Democratic party government can slow the decline, and perhaps pick up a couple of modest gains, perhaps some half-assed "universal" health care which will slow, but not stop, the inclusion of access to medical care to the "big three" ways (rent, interest and profit) the capitalist class exploits the workers' surplus value.

We can talk all we want about "principles" and "common sense", but what's happening is (as always) a dialectic of interests: class interests, intra-class factional interests and individual interests. Analyzing the present circumstances as a dialectic of interests and the power to realize those interests leads directly and inexorably towards the conclusion that the wealth, power and standard of living of the working class, professional-managerial middle class and petty capitalists (small-business owners) will decline until they find the will to resist in common cause.

Once conditions have declined to the point where the "lower" classes find the will to resist, conditions will reach rough parity, and very small differences, especially in leadership, will have enormous effects. The outcome of that class struggle will depend in no small part on who is stronger: our Hitler or our Lenin. (We will have no Roosevelt; material and political considerations entirely preclude reformist capitalism.)

In the long run, socialism leading to communism will eventually triumph — at least if we don't kill ourselves off first. Communism is just better; sooner or later everything will come together and we'll take the next step in civilization. But, as Keynes famously noted, in the long run, we're all dead. The question is what's going to happen to us and our children, living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings.

I'm not particularly optimistic about how things will turn out in the United States. I see us more in the light of post WW-I Germany 1918-1919. (See Sebastian Haffner's excellent book, Failure of a Revolution.) First, conditions will deteriorate within the next 4 or 5 years until much of the working class (and the unemployed class, a novel feature of modern post-industrial capitalism) are in conditions of semi-starvation. Unrest will develop, but the working and unemployed classes will unwittingly support leaders and politicians who will betray them. In the interests of preventing a revolution (and not coincidentally preserving their own privilege), "leftist" politicians and leaders (i.e. supposedly "progressive" Democrats) will covertly make common cause with the right-wing bourgeoisie, who will unleash the well-armed, well-trained Christian fundamentalists to "restore order", just as the Social Democrats of post WW-I Germany unleashed on a rebellious population the rightists who would later become the Nazis.

Can we pull back from the brink of Gilead? Perhaps. But the people by themselves cannot do the job on their own. It's an unfortunate but ineluctable truth that while historical crises are caused by broad, material factors, the outcome of every crisis is sensitively dependent not on the general state of the people but on the qualities of the classes' and factions' leadership. (Else Germany would have succeeded in a socialist revolution and Russia and China failed.)

If the communists find leadership combining the theoretical brilliance, practical and organization skill and energy of Lenin, we stand a fighting chance. If the fascists find leadership combining the theoretical brilliance, practical and organizational skill and energy of Hitler (and there's no doubt that Hitler, despite being a truly horrible person, was brilliant, skillful and energetic), we're well and truly fucked.

Why the conservatives are winning

Art, commenting on Mike the Mad Biologist explains why the conservatives are winning the strategic war.

The right spent its time in the wilderness cultivating an entire self-supporting alternative media ecosystem from the ground up.

Read the whole comment.

I've been much put off by the "elect Obama/Clinton no matter how dumb they are, because McCain is batshit crazy!" idea that's floating around lately. It's true, as far as it goes, but aside from my conscientious objections, this idea reveals a lack of strategic thinking.

No good general predicates the success of his or her strategy on winning every battle. But that's precisely what the Democratic party has been doing: they have to win every election no matter what or the country is screwed. If they have to shift to the right to win this or that election, they do so, because if they lose on principle, they still lose.

The one time I showed up at a Drinking Liberally event, I was appalled. The dominant theme of the discussion was about how to win elections. When I tried to talk about substantive policies and progressive ideology, I was mocked as an unrealistic idealist.

The Republican strategy is very simple, and very powerful: When they win an election, move the government to the right. When they lose an election, prevent the government from moving to the left. Sure, they'd like to win every election, but they know they won't, and they have a plan in place for when they lose, and thus they can afford to lose on principle.

The Democratic "strategy" is precisely the opposite. When they win an election, they try (with diminishing success) to prevent the government from moving to the right. When they lose an election, they themselves move to the right to win the next one.

Closely allied with strategy is logistics. In a battle of values, ideology and people to propagandize that ideology are the resources a general must marshal to the front. Art describes the conservatives' logistical system. The left's ideological logistics used to be the academic humanities, but too many idiots have become so mired in bullshit postmodernist nihilism that they've become an ideological laughingstock.

The fundamental problem is that the left doesn't like ideology per se, and the left doesn't like private money. For good reasons: The last time we had a leftist ideology, we ended up with Communist totalitarianism. Private money, especially when concentrated, is a poor driver for social and economic equality. People with a lot of money tend to want to keep it, and they invent endless rationalizations why they should keep it.

But ideology and money are too effective to simply abandon. Ideology unites the True Believers, who are the driving force in any social change. Furthermore, most people have jobs to do, children to raise, lawns to mow — they're busy keeping Western Civilization afloat, thank you very much — and they simply do not have the time and energy to carefully and intellectually evaluate each position on its subtle and nuanced merits. "Just fucking tell me what you stand for!" they yell. The conservatives actually stand for something, and even though it's most people really think it's kind of odious, at least it's something. The progressives? Not so much. What little progressive ideology exists is all over the map, and 90% of it is useful only as a drug-free method of general anesthesia.

The failure of the Democratic party is so deep, so profound, that we must see its function as effectively part of the conservative movement. The Democratic party maintains the illusion that we have an adversarial political system, and they serve as whipping boys and scapegoats to take the blame for conservative practical failures.

Of course, that the conservatives are better at politics than progressives is not the worst problem. If it were, then we might end up with a harsher, more unforgiving country than I would like, but nu, life is tough. The worst problem is, of course, that the conservatives have lost all connection with objective reality, especially economic reality. Our actual economy is in tatters: We don't actually make anything any more. Even our intellectual and technological economy is in tatters: We are no longer actually teaching science, math and engineering to actual Americans. Our entire economy is based on suing each other and selling our homes to the Chinese for electric can openers. And that's it. When that runs out, we'll have nothing left. Our supposedly mighty army will be impotent: What good is an army when your opponents make the bullets? (Or grow the food and own the homes of those who make the bullets.)

It's far too late to change anything. All the institutions necessary to preserve an actual democracy — academia, the media, the opposition political parties, the economy, campaign finance, the judiciary, the rule of law — have already been corrupted and owned by the conservative movement. Electing Clinton or Obama to sit in the Oval Office and take the blame for the conservatives is not going to change anything. It's just as plausible that it'll make things worse as it is to stave off collapse. The Christianist military and militia, for example, might be more likely to actively rebel against a Democratic party government than a Republican party government.