'Revolution'? Or Revolution?

I very much like and respect the work of Paul Krugman. I suspect we share similar values about what we would call a 'good society,' based on greater equality, opportunity, and shared public facilities and amenities. That is, we're both sort of 'socialists,' despite the troubled fortunes of that term. Anyhow, I take it seriously when Krugman questions both the credentials and electability of Bernie Sanders while offering support for Hillary Clinton. And when Krugman offers a link to an article by The American Prospect's Paul Starr in Politico, laying out the fuller case against Sanders, I follow the link--and you should too.

What we find there are some predictable apprehensions: Bernie would be awfully old, no one can get elected under the socialist label, he's just too improbable, too narrow in his experience (foreign policy especially). Fine. But Starr goes on to suggest that Sanders's social policies are unrealistic because they can't be funded--that is, the vast wealth consolidated in America's .1% just can't be tapped--fuhgeddaboudit. And banks that are too big to fail? No, says Krugman, it's the shadow banks, stupid, as Hillary says. (Of course it's both, as Bernie knows.) But the point Krugman and Starr and all the other liberal policy wonks are making is, Don't try to rock the boat--it'll capsize. That could be Hillary's slogan.

Where this becomes most transparent--and shocking--is in Starr's argument against Sanders's 'Medicare for all' single-payer health proposal. Starr acknowledges that universal care would have been a good idea--back in Truman's day--and yes, we pay too much for the care we get now. Quite an understatement when you see how a rich state like Massachusetts is practically in bankruptcy paying hugely inflated health costs, and how France, the UK, Canada, you name it get equal or better care for half or less the dough. Starr denies none of this.

What he does say is, "Decades of skewed incentives have created the system we have ... 'Medicare for All' implies withdrawing an enormous amount of the revenue that hospitals ... are counting on (for example, to meet bond payments)." And there you have it: we simply MUST go on overpaying for health care, impoverishing ourselves and the rest of the public sector, in order to lard those skewed incentives (read deca-millionaire surgeons, hospital CEOs and big pharma execs). Why? The bond-holders have to get their profit. A familiar refrain, one we heard when it came to bailing out banks or pauperizing Greece. If you want sensible, meaningful change, you can't have it--because the financial structures require us to go on privileging the privileged, returning profits to the bond-holders while the rest of us scramble to pay our deductibles and avoid foreclosure.

Which brings us back to Bernie Sanders, and his cherished term 'Revolution.' He says it a lot, and I'm sure he means it. But what Krugman, Starr, et al. help us to see is that revolution doesn't happen by electing a new President, even a 'socialist' one, or passing some new laws (even if Congress wasn't wholly owned by the wealthy and incapable of passing anything useful). No, Revolution, the kind that makes it possible to rationalize our health care system and pay sensible costs, to tame our financial institutions and remove their vast bribes from the political process, to get clean energy when we need it (NOW) and not when it can make some energy executive very rich--that sort of Revolution won't happen at the ballot box. (It won't happen in the streets either, at least not yet.)

But when you hear Bernie say 'Revolution,' remember those bond-holders, making us pay double for our skewed healthcare. Remember that Revolution would mean we foreclose on the bond-holders, not homeowners. That we confiscate the vast wealth of the .1%ers to build our new society. That's the only revolution that would mean anything, and not even Bernie is going to take us there. Not yet.

Bernie and Black Voters

Will Bernie win the Black and Latino primary vote? Don't know yet, but it's probably the key to whether he can win the nomination. Should he be the candidate of choice in those communities? That's something we can talk about. In fact the highly visible commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates (about whom I posted a week ago here) has been using his weekly column in The Atlantic to wage a polemic against Sanders, which could have serious consequences for Sanders's chances. Why is this happening?

Coates, who just won a National Book Award and has become the media's favorite spokesperson on Black issues, burst into prominence in 2014 with a long article in The Atlantic in support of some sort of reparations for African-Americans to compensate for wealth "plundered" from them by enslavement and Jim Crow segregation. Coates is particularly incensed that Sanders avoids taking a position on reparations, since he regards Sanders's claims to the Left or radical wing of the Democratic Party as dubious or incomplete without a specific plan to address racism in America. Coates himself has been rather vague on what such a plan would look like (his principal goal is the HR 40 bill, repeatedly tabled in Congress, to "study" the reparations question). But he is adamant that Sanders take a position, and (along with protestors from the #BlackLivesMatter movement) has tarnished Sanders's image among the more activist elements of the Black community.

Is this fair? Sanders (unlike former Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton) was an active foot soldier in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. He has strongly called for federal intervention in cases of racially tinged police violence. The shockingly high levels of poverty and unemployment in communities of color are at the core of his candidacy, and his proposals--for a $15 minimum wage, for free college education, for more comprehensive health insurance, stronger consumer finance protection, and more--go much further than Clinton's in addressing inequality.

So what is Coates's objection? He believes in principle that the legacy of racial inequality in America is so vast that it must not be subsumed under issues of class, as Sanders tends to do. While the Sanders agenda would address poverty independent of race, Coates had convinced himself that the impoverishment of black people (his preferred term, "plunder," is wholly justified by the outrageous legacy Coates painstakingly documents) constitutes a special case in America, and merits a distinct redress via some form of reparations aimed specifically at African-Americans.

Though I sympathize with Coates's argument, I have two main objections. First, as to reparations themselves, I'm dubious that an equitable remedy can be found. Black Americans experienced very different degrees of deprivation over 400 years, and their descendants have been impoverished differentially, in ways that would be hard to quantify. Other groups--Latinos, other immigrants, exploited factory workers, even white ethnic groups like Boston's Irish--might make analogous claims. Maybe Congress should study the matter, as HR 40 proposes, but I'm not convinced an equitable proposal would emerge--and Coates isn't either.

What is very clear to me is that the systemic solutions Sanders proposes would offer significant support for black people--and everyone else currently excluded from American prosperity. His program is far more activist than anything Clinton would propose, and deserves the label 'Left,' or even 'radical,' that Coates objects to. While it does not acknowledge the specific injuries done to African-Americans--and they are legitimate, and vast--it would do what is possible in the way of remediation.

What is not possible--and this gets to the heart of Coates's argument--is to correct the inherent injustice in wealth accumulation. Yes, Blacks under slavery were cheated out of their wages, and yes, racist practices running through the 20th century and into the present have kept them from accumulating home equity and other typical forms of family wealth. The extraordinary gap in net worth between black and white families in America is the measure of historic injustice--but frankly, most accumulation of wealth is a measure of injustice. To insist, as Coates does, that reparations are essential to any equitable policy for African-Americans is to ask history to go in reverse. We can deplore what was done to African peoples on this continent, over centuries prior to our own, and we can demand that the perpetuation of that legacy be terminated, immediately, in every identifiable way. But can we fix the injustices done to the ancestors of African-Americans? Alas, no. Coates is in that sense holding Sanders hostage to an emotionally compelling but unrealizable standard.

And that's a shame, because I believe with a strong show of support for Sanders in the next few months, African-American voters would make a strong statement against the complacency and gradualism of the centrists. And who knows, they might even help elect the most progressive President since Lincoln.

Sanders/Clinton, Clinton/Sanders

The hour draws near. Nerves are stretched. Will we follow the path of pragmatism and common sense, the path that leads to Hillary? Or do we stand up, utter an irreverent expletive, and declare ourselves for Bernie? Ego or Id, reason or desire? It's not an obvious choice.

Take The Nation. The current issue, a 'double issue,' has a double cover: turn it one way, it's Feminist-Socialists for Hillary, the other way they choose Bernie. Just for the record Liza Featherstone (Commonwealth School '87) wins that debate on Bernie's behalf--but the question remains. How much value is there, as Suzanna Walters insists, in breaking that glass ceiling and electing a female President? And not just any female--not Sarah Palin, not Carly Fiorina--but a vaguely progressive one? Yes, Hillary has made a lot of pronouncements for women's rights, even if she supported her husband's dreadful welfare 'reform' and takes a tepid stance on the minimum wage. She is, as Katha Pollitt argues in the same issue, "a Democrat," faint praise but praise nonetheless. And the truth remains that every girl and woman in America would feel a bit more ownership of the political process if Hillary wins the oval office. But is that enough?

I'm more persuaded by the argument that Sanders's core issues--fighting inequality, reducing the power of large financial institutions, investing in infrastructure, education, and clean energy--are 'women's issues' inasmuch as they would produce a broader prosperity, particularly for working people. Context: the biggest problem facing women in America is poverty, unequal pay, limited access to resources of all kinds. That's not to deny the importance of more specific 'identity' issues: women's health, rape and sexual abuse, and gender discrimination of all sorts. Clinton may well have these issues closer to her heart, simply because she is female, though I expect Sanders shares nearly every policy-related position.

But the 'revolution' Bernie is promoting is much bigger and more inclusive. Politics not dominated by Super-PACs will be more accessible to every woman who isn't a mega-millionaire. A higher minimum wage, free secondary education, fair share taxation--these reforms will address the fact that woman are more economically precarious than men. And Bernie's universal health proposal will guarantee that huge deductibles don't undermine the intentions of Obamacare--for women, men, young adults, children, everybody. The case for a 'first woman President' is real, but pales in the face of these more universal issues.

My biggest reservation concerns electability. Would I rather see Clinton win, if the alternative is Trump, Cruz, or any of the rest of that sorry lot? You bet. Would I feel stupid if Sanders won the nomination, but lost to one of those deplorable Republicans in November? Maybe--but I question the logic that sees Clinton as inevitably more electable.  I think Bernie's rock-solid integrity and outsider status might insulate him from the most vitriolic negatives that will dog Hillary through this campaign. Does he bring other negatives--the fearsome S-word most of all--into play? For sure. Which candidate is most vulnerable to a billion-dollar (thank you, Citizens United) hate campaign? Not clear, but the primaries will give us a lot more information about elecatbility.

In sum, my plan is to vote for Bernie because I totally admire his high-minded way of doing business, and he has the best ideas. Isn't that a rational basis for choice?

(Of course the 'electability' question shades heavily into the 'Black and Latino voters' question--which I'll turn to in my next post.)

Thoughts on MLK Day

It has been an odd experience reading Ta Nehisi Coates's manifesto, "Between the World and Me," over this Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. Coates is a Malcolm X guy, son of a Black Panther organizer, survivor of countless acts of routine violence growing up in the mean streets of West Baltimore. He was the dear friend of an exemplary born-again Christian classmate senselessly murdered by police, and is the father of a teen-aged son about whom he shares his wholly understandable anxieties. The legacy of King's nonviolent, turn-the-other-cheek movement holds little appeal for this street-toughened polemicist. And as I read his unblinking historical appraisal of enslavement's legacy, relive his anecdotes of a community bereft of resources, still struggling under the lash of incarceration, violence both criminal and official, and of more subtle forms of racism alongside the grotesqueries of Obama-hatred and the revival of blackface stereotypes--I see his point.

And yet, unlike Coates, I am unwilling to surrender the patrimony of King's achievements, limited as they may now seem. Because our world did change as a result of the marches, beatings, murders, indignities of all sorts heaped on King and his followers. King's extraordinary dignity in the face of such brutalities changed forever the way white Americans thought about African-Americans, while the formal recognitions encoded in the Civil Rights laws built the platform on which Coates and many others, including King himself, have stood to issue their demands for a more complete justice. But I would go a step further.

Coates is a self-identified atheist whose god is history. Under the tutelage of his father, a research librarian, archivist, and publisher of African diaspora literature, Coates has mastered a vast canon of sources. He knows both the sordid and triumphant dimensions of the struggle African-descended peoples have engaged in for over 400 years. And that history is both his signpost and the domain in which he locates his goal, his Promised Land.

King's vision, though hardly uninformed by history, was in its essence a religious one. The gospel anthems that accompanied his movement were not decorative--they expressed the theory that informed the praxis of sit-ins and protest marches. King was more inspired by the Hebrew prophets than by Garvey or DuBois, Toussaint Louverture or Denmark Vesey. His vision of liberation is colored from start to finish by the transcendence of salvation, an overcoming that is part Hegelian Aufhebung but more immediately drawn from the Christian gospel of death and resurrection. This vision, both worldly and otherworldly, is most poignant in King's last speech in Memphis, where he speaks of having "been to the mountain and seen the Promised Land," speaks as Moses, knowing he may not cross over the Jordan but believing his people will. Without that prophetic, luminous, and God-inspired vision, King would still have been a political leader, a great one, but not the visionary  we honor today.

The older I get, the more I see the wisdom of his example. Liberation is the goal, but neither Coates nor I will live to reach that Promised Land. We can work toward it in whatever ways we can, and that working-toward is our salvation. It's the Prize Dr. King tells us to keep our eyes on. It's where we discover God.

The Perpetual Downturn

Using his last State of the Union address to lay claims for his legacy, President Obama quite rightly noted that the economy, in disastrous recession when he took office seven years ago, has now experienced a robust rebound. So why is the electorate unimpressed? It's not that the official numbers are wrong. Conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby tried the other day to 'prove' that Obama's claims were false by citing PolitiFact's doubts, but the core reality is what the President says it is; the objections are quibbles. No, the economy by conventional measures is doing what it's supposed to. So why are voters so disgruntled?

The answer isn't so complicated: its the maldistribution of benefits. As economists Piketty and Saez have been documenting for almost a decade now, and as the Occupy movement made clear, wages are stuck, and most folks below the 90th %ile are actually poorer--or at least they feel that way. In point of fact median income has grown slightly, though anemically, over the last generation since roughly 1980, but aspirations for wealth, gadgets, freedom of movement, the luxuries so visibly enjoyed by the privileged 10% (or 1% or .1%) are increasingly unattainable for the large majority. The consequence is a populist malaise ripe for exploitation by terrorists, demagogues, satirists, or activists weirdly dressed in Revolutionary War costumes.

To Obama's credit, he made a valiant effort to explain this dynamic in terms of the 'new economy,' technological advance, the globalization of markets. But he has no real solution. Yes, individuals can make use of the job training he promoted--and the social supports that make it possible for adults to retrain in mid-career. But for most of the would-be or former middle class there really isn't room in the upper echelons of unequally distributed income. That's really something of an iron law, if not a tautology. And it's not just an American problem: the frightening levels of unemployment for young adults in much of Western Europe are a product of the same dynamic. And the start of a downturn in China is even more alarming. In fact none of this should surprise us since it has been the case--with only a brief reprise in the 90s--that sluggish growth and unequal distribution are completely endemic to this 'new economy.'

Where will this lead? The abrasive right-wing populism in this year's Presidential campaign seems like one natural outcome. "Make America Great Again" is just what one might expect to hear at a time when that promise is most illusory. Keep out the foreigners, circle the wagons--these are the lures throughout Europe as well as America.

But is there another way? Can we preserve the technology-driven gains while socializing the benefits? This has been the Left's hope, now gaining steam in the Sanders campaign. Its European variants have been demoralized by Syriza's failure, and by the turning of electorates all over the Old Continent to the Right, but socialist traditions have a deep hold there. More locally, is the emergence of a 'shared economy,' a cheaper, lower tech way of life that includes shared housing, cooperative retail, and the ubiquitous bicycle (and Zipcar and Uber, etc. in place of the privately owned auto) a durable adaptation to new conditions? I hope the young on both continents will work to build an optimistic future in the rejection of free market capitalism, but I fear the turn to more authoritarian governance will look like an easier shortcut.

Greens, Climate, and the Left

Last Friday in Paris a very small event occurred, with large implications. At a press conference, Emmanuelle Cosse, Secretary General of France's Green Party (EELV=Europe Ecologie Les Verts) acknowledged the failure of her party's strategy, formed over the last several electoral cycles, to affiliate with France's radical Left parties. From now on, Ms. Cosse suggested, her party will work with the "whole galaxy of environmentalists" while avoiding the polarizing coalitions with the Left Party, the Communist Party, and others gathered on the radical Left.

Will this affect French politics in the run-up to the 2017 presidential election? Not really. The radical Left's share has been in steady decline anyhow, while the real action is on the far right, where the National Front is trying to keep Sarkozy's Republicans from poaching on their xenophobic, fear-mongering turf. Nor will Cosse's decision help rescue the Socialists, also in steep decline, though EELV's previous decision to affiliate with the radical Left did cause some Green deputies to withdraw from Hollande's increasingly conservative though nominally Socialist majority.But finally little EELV is not in a position to change the national calculus all that much.

So what is at stake? Here's what. The big environmental question in the aftermath of the Paris Climate conference is how to implement all those lofty goals and good intentions. Prevailing logic says that market structures need to be adjusted so that private corporations will find it profitable to convert to sustainable energy and not destroy the planet. Only market forces can effect change on this scale--that's the orthodoxy we largely hear about.

Of course some disagree. Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything famously argued that capitalism itself will need to be subdued before we can properly address the climate issue. The experience of the last generation, with massive disinformation campaigns sponsored by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests, with continued expansion of oil exploration, development of new fossil fuel technologies, and political intransigence by coal interests here and abroad--all this might suggest that Klein has a point. Capitalism is a dubious ally, and we humans have a lot riding on this question.

And here's where the repositioning of France's Greens takes on significance. France's Left Party officially adopted an eco-socialist platform several years ago, on the premise that public sector ownership and initiative would be necessary to effect rapid, large-scale renewable energy conversion. With its long tradition of state ownership and public economic direction France is a logical place for this alternative approach. The prior decision by former Green Secretary General Cécile Duflot to withdraw her party from the market-based consensus and affiliate to the Left was an eco-socialist maneuver, a vote of no confidence in market solutions. Cosse's wing of the Greens would like to reconsider. Meanwhile Duflot is preparing to run for President, starting more or less now, on a platform that will definitely describe an eco-socialist approach.

Might this reframing of the climate issue apply in any way to us Americans? Well, we do have a socialist in the presidential race for the first time in a long time. We also have some state state-sponsored climate measures--Obama's executive orders on coal-fired plants and auto emissions--though one would hesitate to call this socialism. But Americans bring a deep-seated belief that while public measures--tax credits and other public subsidies--can help advance the conversion process, only private-sector innovation, cost reduction, profit enhancements of various sorts can get the job done. In any case a full program of eco-socialist, state-driven realignment of our energy sector is probably not in the cards here (and not in France either). But if veteran campaigner Cécile Duflot indeed runs on this issue, in a country where 'Socialist' is a mainstream party, not a pejorative epithet, it may add an interesting dimension to the discussion of this existential issue, rather than leaving it to those disembodied market forces--or their corporate agents-- that have brought us to the brink.

Lost Worlds

I have lately been absorbed in the work of the great Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, whose work chronicles the world of the eastern European shtetl with humor and warmth just at the moment when that world was dissolving. Like the daughters of his most famous character, Tevye the milkman, Aleichem's Jews--who had lived uninterruptedly for centuries in the Pale of Settlement between Russia and the West--were leaving for America, for the cities, for radical causes, for a life outside Jewry. Aleichem himself tried but failed to relocate his career to America after the 1905 revolution and its consequent pogroms; the Old World author was repudiated by New York audiences. Despite his loving attachment to the Yiddish language, which he brought to new heights of expressivity in its written form, Aleichem encouraged his children to use Russian as their primary language. Born in a shtetl, he lived much of his adult life an a bourgeois in Kiev, and in the end, under the pressures of illness, Russian persecutions, and the Great War, he left Europe to die in America. And of course, despite a brief resurgence in the early years of the Soviet Union, the Yiddish culture he gave voice to was utterly eradicated, first by Stalin's purges and then by the murderous onslaught of the Nazis and indigenous militias. In short, Aleichem's glorious celebration of a folk culture and its accumulated verbal brilliance owes much of its poignancy to its aura of transience and imminent loss.

Analogies are slippery things, and I don't want to lean too heavily on this one. But I sometimes feel that the culture I was born into--now marginalized by the term 'analog'--is also slipping away, not to America or a mass grave but more nebulously into that digital, virtual space where most of us spend so many of our hours. I feel this getting on the bus or even walking down the street, as most of those around me--and everyone under 30, without exception--are looking at the devices in their hands. What are they doing, I ask myself--a harder question than it might be if, like them, I owned a smart phone. Of course now, having made little forays into Twitter and Facebook, I have a better idea. And since 2008 I have seized the opportunity to write a series of blogs, and I truly love the internet and all its treasures. But still I'm not fooling anybody, least of all myself: I'm most at home in person or on the printed page. I still think of the telephone as a device for speaking to someone not physically present. And after 140 characters I'm not only not finished with my message--I'm barely warmed up.

I was recently told by a young friend--politely, because all my young friends are scrupulously if sometimes patronizingly polite--that my prose, elegant as it is with its subordinate clauses, its deferred subjects and apostrophic flourishes, simply takes too long to read. And those long paragraphs! Use bullet points, she counseled me. Bold--she meant 'embolden'--the words you want people to really notice. And of course she's right.

In that vast river of information, that flows unceasingly across our screens, most of it visual for easy absorption, who has time to stop, reflect, correlate, or even--dear God--reread? I'm no Sholom Aleichem, booed off the stage on Second Avenue after one of his old-fashioned melodramas flopped, but I do--alas, children--sometimes feel that my caravan has moved on. Taking with it, I might add, much of the literary legacy our forebears took such pains to store up. I love the 'new television' as much as anyone, and I even find myself claiming that works like "Mad Men" or "The Wire" are our new, great novels. But I know, deep down, that they will not replace the interiority, the solitary and reflective experience of reading what are often referred to these days as 'doorstop' novels.

But no need to worry--we have Sholom Aleichem with us still. That's the beauty of great literature. So I brighten up when he ends the tragic story of Tevye's daughter Chava by saying "Let us talk of something more cheerful," and then asks "Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" That's a writer I could stand behind.

E Pluribus ...

Of the 20th century's many tragedies, the 'ethnic cleansing' of thriving multicultural communities throughout the former Ottoman Empire is not the least. I'm no expert, and I suspect these regions in North Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Balkans saw their share of tensions, hatred, and ethnic violence over the centuries. Nonetheless the top-down administrative structure of the Ottomans seemed to allow for communities to co-exist side by side despite fundamental differences in religion, culture, language, and history. Much of this pattern of settlement survived the break-up of the empire after WWI, but in our own time, for various reasons, the multi-cultural model has given way to intolerance, removal, and even genocide.

In North Africa, Jews who had lived alongside their Muslim neighbors symbiotically since the expulsion from Spain left en masse for Israel in the 1950s and 60s, partly because of local independence struggles and partly tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In Iran the 1979 theocratic revolution hastened the expatriation of a thriving Jewish community, while the collapse of the secular regime in Iraq following the US invasion in 2003 has left a trail of dislocations among Christians and Jews, Shia and Sunnis, Yazidis, Zoroastrians ... an amazing patchwork of cultures, groups, clans, uprooted with little chance of restoration. A decade of civil wars and ethnic aggressions in the Balkans following the collapse of Yugoslavia has wreaked similar destruction on the multiculturalism of that region. And now something similar is happening in Syria, where the multiplicity of cultures held in a kind of suspension by a secular despotism has collapsed under the weight of Arab liberalism, environmental depredation, and Islamist terror.

In the ecology of human settlement, these impositions of monoculture on what was once a vibrant and fertile system of cultural interchange is as great a disaster as the vast tracts of agriculturally depleted soil, or the sterile river deltas devastated by effluents--another way we humans are impoverishing our eco-systems and mortgaging our future.

I reflect on this tragic sequence of events as I hear about nationalist parties in Europe campaigning to exclude immigrants, take away citizenship from foreigners, build barriers at the borders, preserve the 'Christian culture' of certain localities in a world that is irrepressibly plural. And now as the American presidential campaign accelerates, I hear the same sorts of demands here, in what has been one of the world's most successful experiments in multiculturalism. And yet the siren call to exclude the Muslims, wall off the Mexicans, deport the foreigners, return America to the homogeneous, small-town culture it never was--that call is resonating widely and dangerously. The America of E Pluribus Unum wasn't just 13 colonies; it was a patchwork of cultures speaking Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and a host of native languages as well as English. It was as black as it was white, with Jews, atheists, Quakers, and even Muslims among its early inhabitants.

It has been heartening to see clergy of many faiths rise in defense of America's Muslims. The Chief Justice of Massachusetts's Supreme Judicial Court distinguished himself by assuring Boston's Muslim community of its protections under the rule of law. For all its excesses the #BlackLivesMatter movement and its many campus affiliates make clear the accommodations the white majority needs to make in order to achieve the full value of our multicultural legacy. In an increasingly intolerant and dangerous world, this simple message mustn't be taken for granted.