Yes, I know

I said I wasn’t going to be blogging. Apparently, however, all it takes to start me writing again is deciding not to blog. Maybe I should just announce every week or so that I’m not blogging any longer.

Whores, running dogs, and Anglachel

Anglachel is writing again, about the Jerry Brown campaign’s consideration of the word “whore” to refer to Meg Whitman. Her initial post is here; follow-up here.

As always, I find her writing extremely interesting, on point, and well thought out within her coherent world view. Since I do not entirely share that world view (although I also do not entirely dismiss it), I don’t necessarily find her conclusions compelling; I do, however, find her to be indispensable reading.

Her initial post is about the incident itself and what it says about how slurs of this sort are used to keep women in line. I’m almost reluctant to quote any of it since I think it should be read in its entirety but her conclusion echoes so perfectly what I said to my husband that I can’t resist (emphasis mine):

Back to the gubernatorial campaign. An apology for calling a woman a whore for having engaged in ordinary campaign bargaining misses the mark. An apology is simply "Ooops, our bad. We'll hang up the phone next time. Sorry you feel offended. (snicker)". It is words. The only reassuring action would have been to hear, as the next element in the phone conversation, a roar of disgust that someone attached to the campaign would dare utter that suggestion.

Anglachel’s second post is about the reaction she’s seeing to both the incident and the outrage over it and is even more worth reading than her first post. She lays out more strongly her claim that Whitman was behaving exactly as every other (male) candidate does; that is, there as nothing particularly “whorish” about her behavior even if you do not consider it in the sexual sense. She also has high praise for Bill Clinton’s on-key campaigning in California. Like Anglachel’s first post, this one should be read in its entirety but an especially notable quote from it is:

... the larger failure of the Democrats to take seriously the disaffection of large blocks of Democratic constituencies after the horrific slash-and-burn primaries of 2008. In particular, the deliberate deployment of misogyny opened wounds that have not healed for many of us who previously and strongly identified as Democrats and who now are not willing to give candidates, especially male candidates, much leeway in how they and their campaigns deploy gender-based appeals and attacks.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure she’s right about this. Brown may have stepped into a political problem he doesn’t understand but I am not convinced that it is going to keep those who are - or who claim to be or who should be - concerned about misogyny from voting for him. After all, Barack Obama’s viciously misogynistic campaign against Hillary Clinton and even more viciously misogynistic campaign against Sarah Palin did not keep him from being elected President with 56% of women voting for him versus 43% voting Republican.

I find Anglachel’s discussion of how this incident appears to Hispanic voters and to working-class Catholic voters in general far more believable. It lends support to the idea that when it comes to social values (what Anglachel calls “cultural signifiers”), Republicans are more in line not just with working-class non-Hispanic white voters but with Hispanic voters as well. (If the Democrats succeed in awarding American citizenship to the large number of Hispanic illegal aliens in this country, they may find that they have created a massive pool of votes not for themselves but for their opponents.)

Finally, I feel compelled to repeat what I’ve said before about Anglachel:

If you want to know how an intelligent liberal (I do not believe she would say “progressive”) with an integrated view of the world and a deep respect for those who bitterly cling to their guns and religion thinks, this is a must-read. If someone like her was running the Democratic Party the Republicans might actually be dead in the water.

*****

Afterword:

Although I’m not sure Anglachel is right about how big a problem Democratic Party misogyny will be for voters - even women voters - in California, she is absolutely correct in tying the Brown campaign slur to the 2008 campaigns. I wrote about this in my first post about Fourth Wave Feminism. Even if you don’t read my post, you should read the referenced Little Miss Attila post on American Sharia.

NOW endorsed Jerry Brown in the California governor’s race the day after the Whitman-whore episode blew up. Anglachel doesn’t discuss that; perhaps, like me, she realizes NOW destroyed any claim it had to represent women or to be called a feminist organization during the 2008 campaigns and therefore what NOW does in these situations is irrelevant.

When I think about Institutional Feminists and how willing - even eager - they are to do the bidding of their male Democratic masters, I am reminded of that wonderfully descriptive but sadly now little-used term: running dogs.

Extol Uniformity

I saw a car yesterday with two bumper stickers:

Celebrate Diversity

Go Vegan

So not all forms of diversity, then.

Going dark

I’m going dark - well, darker - for a while. I’ve started a number of posts lately and can’t “close” any of them so I’m going to stop trying. Comments are disabled although you can always reach me via my email address in my profile - look to the right-hand column and down.

I’ll check back on November 3 and let you know if it rained in Poughkeepsie on the 2nd.

In which Thomas Friedman saves me

Quite some time ago I was involved in a comments discussion at Reclusive Leftist which shook one of my long-held beliefs about “the Left”. It occurred in the context of a discussion on health care policy but veered into the issue of the United States’ superpower status. RL is replying to an earlier comment on health policy when she says:

... international comparisons don’t matter to most Americans. Exceptionalism is strong in this country. Most people cannot quite believe that anything learned in any other country really applies to America.

It’s enormously frustrating, of course. But I don’t know any way around it. I think we may have to get further along in our descent from World Superpower. Kind of the way Britain had to stop being an empire before it could really deal emotionally and psychologically with being one of a number of small European countries.

A friend of mine likes to cheer on the Chinese. Take our crown! she says. We’re ready for you to take over as the Evil Empire!

To which I replied:

Which is why I found Dr. Socks’ comment #51 quite surprising and rather discouraging. I always believed that conservatives who insisted the Left actually *wanted* the US diminished and would be overjoyed to let others - India, China, possibly Russia - become the globe’s super-powers, were paranoid wingnuts. Sure, I would say, the Left wants the United States to use its power and wealth differently but it doesn’t actually want the US to be at the mercy of other countries, a couple of which have remarkably lousy records on human rights. I now realize I’ll have to go abase myself for being so naive.

I thought about this exchange from time to time but never quite found a hook on which to hang it in a blog post. (Besides I don’t like to abase myself any more than anyone else does.) Recently Thomas Friedman wrote a column that gave me that hook. He argues that:

When the world’s only superpower gets weighed down with this much debt — to itself and other nations — everyone will feel it. How? Hard to predict. But all I know is that the most unique and important feature of U.S. foreign policy over the last century has been the degree to which America’s diplomats and naval, air and ground forces provided global public goods — from open seas to open trade and from containment to counterterrorism — that benefited many others besides us. U.S. power has been the key force maintaining global stability, and providing global governance, for the last 70 years. That role will not disappear, but it will almost certainly shrink.

Friedman quotes Michael Mandelbaum’s claim that:

No country now stands ready to replace the United States, so the loss to international peace and prosperity has the potential to be greater as America pulls back than when Britain did.

He then does a brief rundown of possible replacements:

After all, Europe is rich but wimpy. China is rich nationally but still dirt poor on a per capita basis and, therefore, will be compelled to remain focused inwardly and regionally. Russia, drunk on oil, can cause trouble but not project power. “Therefore, the world will be a more disorderly and dangerous place,” Mandelbaum predicts.

Friedman (and Mandelbaum) appear to be arguing that the existence of any global superpower would be better than none. That may be true in terms of containing armed conflict. I don’t think it’s true in all global concerns, though. It seems to me that the United States has usually tempered its raw national self-interest with at least some concern for the welfare of the global community as a whole. I’m not sure China would so temper its own self-interest - although I suppose it might grow into that - and I am fairly sure Russia would not. As for Europe, I believe it probably would be concerned with global welfare but think that’s irrelevant since Europe seem to be permanently stuck in wimpy - although enough chaos in the wake of an American retrenchment might change that.

Still, it’s reassuring to see that someone who I think can accurately be described as Left (with a capital “L”) acknowledges the fact that the United States’ reign as superpower has provided benefits - “global public goods” - for other countries. He may not agree with me that this country has been unusually beneficent but it eases my mind to read the remainder of his column and find that he would, in fact, like for the United States to do whatever is necessary to stop its “descent from World Superpower”. Not only is it substantively reassuring, it also means I can dismiss Reclusive Leftist’s position as on the fringe and not have to abase myself after all.

Lovely spam, wonderful spam

Blogger is sorting some comments into the Spam bucket which is fine. It’s sorting some non-spam comments into the Spam bucket which is understandable. However, when it emails me about comments it is not warning me when a comment is sorted into the Spam bucket and that's neither fine nor understandable. This means I’ve been assuming the comments I’m emailed about have been showing up and so I haven’t been keeping up with un-spamming good comments as well as I should. I finally figured out this was going on and will be checking the Spam bucket more often - I’m hoping to remember to do it every day.

My apologies to anyone whose comments languished unread for too long.

Majestic equality

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. - Anatole France

And to drive gas guzzlers.

Jeff Jacoby has written a critique of last year’s Cash For Clunkers program. There were a number of problems with this program but the one that stands out for me is the one caused by the environmental aspect of Cash For Clunkers. In order to help the environment, the program required the destruction of the (perfectly usable) cars traded in when new cars were bought. This has reduced the supply of used cars and driven up the price for people who want to buy one. According to Jacoby, there should have been no question who would benefit and who would suffer as a result:

No great insight was needed to realize that Cash for Clunkers would work a hardship on people unable to afford a new car. “All this program did for them,’’ I wrote last August, “was guarantee that used cars will become more expensive. Poorer drivers will be penalized to subsidize new cars for wealthier drivers.’’

I have written before about a government program - outlawing incandescent lightbulbs - that is saving the environment on the backs of those who can least afford it. As I said then, I do not think either Michael Crichton or Aaron Wildavsky would be surprised at yet another example of the truth of Wildavsky’s conclusion that:

resilience is a better strategy than anticipation, and that anticipatory strategies (such as the precautionary principle) favor the social elite over the mass of poorer people.

(Via Greg Mankiw)