CURRENT EVENTS - May 8-14

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Paine said:
The masterstroke of the modern right is its ability to force liberal parties to take responsibility not only for the perceived excesses of liberalism but also the conservative turn of neoliberalism.
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The modern right, or the modern left? I mean, it's not me who lumps Reagan and Obama presidencies into one big undifferentiated "neoliberal" regime.

I mean, aren't you doing right now what you say "the right" is doing? It sounds like it to me, given that you're blaming the center-left for the neoliberalism espoused by the ruling center-right party in Germany. Or at least forcing liberalism to answer for a policy that liberals vehemently opposed.
 
Paine said:
Oh, I agree. And Republicans are very adept at getting their natural voter base to be angry about one thing or another. When the entire identity of liberalism has been defined by its right-wing enemies, it’s not surprise that people start to hate liberalism.

Liberals haven’t done themselves any favors in trying to escape this definition, though.
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Problem is republicans have been fed lies for decades from the right wing media. They are brainwashed.
 
Paine said:
It’s a gross mischaracterization of my position to say that I lump Reagan and Obama into a “undifferentiated” regime.

My position is the one supported by the history. Neoliberalism has not been a project exclusive to the right and center right. Many center left parties across the world engaged in the same neoliberal policies advanced by Reagan and Thatcher. This was their way of regaining power in the face of conservative cultural critiques. It worked for a while (in terms of winning elections), but it doesn’t anymore.

After all, the FDP also supported austerity.
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1. I didn't say you did that. Leftist political commentators have. They do regularly. I mean, the whole concept of neoliberalism is an attempt to put right-center and left-center in the same box. I mean, that's literally what infuriates me about it. I'm not making it up.

2. I'm not going to talk about world history in a broad sweep like that. For one thing, I'm not qualified. It also seems far afield. Your contention is that liberal parties in Europe were disgraced by their support for austerity. I just don't think that particular claim is well supported by the historical record.

3. I'm not very familiar with FDP. Wikipedia describes it as:

The FDP's political position has variously been described as centrist, centre-right, and right-wing. The FDP has been described as liberal, conservative liberal, classical liberal, and liberal conservative. Others have described the party as fiscally conservative, libertarian, or right-libertarian.
 
Paine said:
Your beliefs surrounding the word neoliberalism continue to be bizarre. It is not an attempt to put center right and center left into the same box. It is a well-documented historical phenomenon. Hayek et al. called themselves neoliberals. The Atari Democrats also called themselves neo-liberals.

The shared framework is their support for market fundamentalism, deregulation, privatization, austerity, free trade, and globalization. It is just a fact that Clinton continued us down the route of neoliberalism started by Carter and advanced by Reagan.
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1. I see no evidence that either Hayek or Atari Democrats called themselves neo-liberals. The term neoliberalism wasn't in circulation until the 1990s, except in leftist academic circles. This is a tiny point, as the labels mean very little.

2. Here's how I see the folks you call neoliberal:

***Not market fundamentalism; market realism. If Clinton was a market fundamentalist, he wouldn't have been so strong on antitrust (within what the courts allowed). Same with Obama. I think everyone acknowledges that markets, when they work properly, create prosperity that other forms of economic stewardship cannot. The difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals are much more keen to detect market failures and advocate for policies to address them.

***Not deregulation but right-sized regulation: Reagan had a hostility to regulations. Clinton had a hostility to inefficient regulations. That's why Clinton retained the Reagan executive order on cost-benefit analysis. When I was younger, I thought cost-benefit analysis is bullshit. Then after law school, my view became something like: cost-benefit analysis is kind of bullshit, and over-reliance on it is bad, but there are no better substitutes.

Cap and trade, for instance, was a right wing idea. Liberals didn't embrace it because they were neoliberal. They embraced it because it fucking worked.

*** Austerity: that's just not part of the American story. Clinton's deficit reduction wasn't about austerity; it was about a peace dividend and higher taxes on the rich. I'm not going to comment on it outside this context as it quickly gets too complicated.

*** Free Trade: absolutely. Clinton and Reagan were free traders. Agreed.

*** Globalization: I reject this word because I think it is pejorative and doesn't have a well-defined meaning. If you're referring generally to the idea that nations should cooperate more and trade more, I mean sure but that's mostly overlapping with free trade.

3. Again, the problem here is emphasis and rhetoric. I've never said there are no continuities between Clinton and Bush, or Obama and Bush 43. But the differences are as important and your language doesn't allow for that. GOP are market fundamentalists. The Dems are not. They just aren't. There is no cogent meaning of that term that can describe any national politician associated with the Democratic party in my adult life -- at least not that I can remember. The GOP are deregulators. The Dems are not.

The problem with "neoliberal" as a label isn't that it is wholly inaccurate; it's that it effaces important distinctions, as I've described above. I mean, it's really weird to think of Clinton as a market fundamentalist when he:

A. Championed a "managed competition" health care system that would be government financed in most ways
B. Stepped up environmental regulations, to the point of even signing the Kyoto treaty.
C. Expanded the Community Reinvestment Act.
D. Championed and signed the FMLA

That's off the top of my head. That's the record of a market realist, of someone who believes markets can create prosperity in some conditions but will not achieve acceptable outcomes on their own without regulation.
 
Paine said:
. But the core of neoliberalism is about the belief that markets are generally the best solution and that regulation should be limited to just fixing the worst market failures.

So, it’s more of a market-driven approach than a state-driven one.
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1. If you take out the word "worst" (which I don't think is accurate in any sense), that describes me and Bill.

I think it also describes pretty much everyone with even a faint understanding of post-WWII economics. In other words, I don't think a market driven approach is ideology. I used to think it was, but markets have been pretty conclusively proven to be the best way to prosperity when they work.

2. What's ideological is the frequency with which market failures are detected and the proposed remedies. Conservatives almost never see them, unless it is politically favorable. Liberals try to keep their eyes open more frequently, and apologize less.

For instance: antitrust. Antitrust enforcement should be favored by conservatives, as the goal is to preserve markets and their competitiveness. And once upon a time it was (hence in antitrust law, scholars have historically divided into "pro-enforcement" versus "anti-enforcement" rather than conservative or liberal). But since the 70s and especially 80s, conservatives have been hostile to antitrust. Reagan basically killed almost all antitrust enforcement; it was a dark time for antitrust attorneys.

So the conservative view about this is ideology, in my opinion. That is, conservatives decided to prioritize their skepticism of government over their affection for markets. And that's a consistent theme, yes? The reason that conservatives liked cap-and-trade was that the government wasn't really involved in enforcement. They happened to be right that it was more efficient that way. It more often is not.

3. Anyway, my overwhelming instinct is to solve problems. Which is to say that I try to be as non-ideological as possible. Which is only partly successful, because we live in a society in which solving problems is controversial and thus a matter for politics. It's also true that I have biases and preconceived notions and I make mistakes sometimes and knowledge evolves. So I'm not perfect. Liberals are not perfect.

But I would put my track record up against pretty much any conservative. I'm pretty sure I've been more accurate. Because while we can't ever have perfect knowledge, usually the attempt to do the right thing ends up better than the opposite. There are famous examples of "do gooderism gone wrong." Ezra Klein thinks that's a reason that we can't build stuff today. And it's also true that liberals, before the early 90s, tended to ignore economics and reason on the basis of moral instinct, which is not a good policy approach. But for the most part, taken as an entirety, "do good" regulations outperform the alternatives in the vast majority of cases.

Which is why the GOP tends to attack "regulations" as a general matter. They rarely try to list the problematic regulations, because they are few in number. They inveigh against them in general. That tells me that the do-good approach is generally effective.

4. Labels are just words. I think of myself as a policy pragmatist. That makes me a liberal in our world because, well we all know why. But if you want to call me a neoliberal -- I mean, it's just a word. Where I really push back is in the implicit suggestion that I'm simpatico with the GOP. I have been fighting against the GOP my whole life. Almost literally: I became a Dem at a very young age because I thought Mondale made a lot more sense than Reagan in their debates. I have not only never voted for a Republican; I've never given it any thought.

And I just don't think my agreement that Glass-Steagall was outdated and probably should have been repealed (which was not my position at the time, as I didn't know much then) puts me in bed with Reagan or Bush. I would not have appointed a fucking Ayn Rand disciple without an economics PhD to be the Fed chair -- Greenspan being the person most responsible for the financial collapse. I also think I would have done better with the CFTC/SEC turf war on derivatives, but that might be mere optimism; those struggles are intensely political and really hard to evaluate from outside.

Ultimately, it's the association that galls me. It's just really weird to be told that your political views are the same as the people I've regarded as my enemies for decades. And I'm too smart to be blind to it.

5. Your post above seems to make room for the idea that there can be a policy pragmatism that is distinct from "neoliberalism." If you stay with that, then I'm good. I mean, then we would have to debate who is in which camp, but we can at least be in some agreement as to the framework for evaluation.
 
Paine said:
See, now you’re onto it.

In my view, Clinton and Obama tended too far towards market oriented approaches. This was the dominant consensus of all the smart economists, after all. But this approach has failed. And Democrats’ acceptance of these market “solutions” cannot only be chalked up to GOP opposition.

I can accept that markets are the best way to prosperity in certain areas but not all areas. Certainly not healthcare. I’m for well-regulated and well functioning markets in areas where it makes sense to have markets. Belief in markets does not make one a neoliberal.

It seems like much of your frustration with the term is wrapped up in your identity and work as a Democrat. I certainly understand those feelings. I think we can still use the word neoliberal to broadly characterize a political ideology that emerged out of the post-war liberal order. It’s a big umbrella but it is a helpful one, especially as the crumbling of this order is happening all around us.

Something new will come next, and I’m working for it to not be a fascist nightmare.
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Market oriented approaches have failed? Really?

Health care has never been a good that the free market can efficiently provide for several reasons. Obamacare was never a complete solution and remains incomplete to this day, but obviously it's much improved over what came before (despite GOP attempts to fuck it up).

Another frustration is that folks like me are in favor of industrial policy. And that describes Biden and Obama, too, right? And definitely not conservatives. CHIPs and IRA were supposed to be industrial policy and Trump is trashing them. That sort of active stewardship of the economy is anathema to conservatives, but we might think of it as a correction to the a known weakness of markets -- the inability of a market driven economy to produce strategic results. I think the term neoliberal REALLY misses that aspect of the liberal agenda.

For instance, a lot is made of the entry of China into the WTO. That's when the slaughter of American manufacturing reached its peak. Well, that was 2001, right? If Gore had been elected, there would have been infrastructure development. There probably would have been industrial projects that would help retrained workers get work experience. The "let's retrain steelworkers and make them coders" didn't exactly work because who the fuck wants to hire a coder who learned his trade in his 40s after losing a blue collar job? I've worked with coders like that. They are not good -- but that's because they don't necessarily get a chance to be. They are trained in stupid places like DeVry and tossed out into a job market like an undifferentiated mass. Why is the army so much better at training engineers than DeVry? Because they commit to the engineers' success.

So why didn't we build infrastructure and commit to industrial production after China? Oh, the Iraq War. The point is that because of the nature of American politics, and the incessant desire for "change" or "outside perspectives" (the latter almost always being terrible), liberals never get to complete the agenda. So we got half-assed job retraining after factories left. Because what we actually needed were soldiers.

This is an important difference between liberals and conservatives that the term neoliberal effaces, because it doesn't account for the differences in industrial policy.
 
Ramrouser said:
Thanks for the information. What do you see as the current issue with Boeing? They're on a bad streak.
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I've heard a few pretty good theories, including some articles posted here. By "good", I mean they make sense; I can see the mechanism by which the cause causes the effect. "Woke" isn't one of them. My God, everything bad is caused by woke. Remember the wokeism that caused the ship to hit the bridge in Baltimore? Remember the wokeism that caused the plane crash in DC? That is mind-numbingly stupid. By the way, Boeing is headquartered in VA, not "woke" Seattle.

One good theory that I have heard is that management decoupled from engineering and operations when they moved HQ to Chicago and then VA. Now that doesn't mean the move caused the decoupling, rather it was part of the decoupling. They lost focus on building good planes. Hopefully they can "couple" again. America needs it.

Full disclosure: My opinion certainly has some unconscious bias. In my case, it is the bias of an engineer who has been in development and manufacturing for over 30 years.
 
We've always had government-led industrial policy in defense technologies (read: tech) and medicine. It just took us three decades to realize that our public research investments were a big reason why we dominated those industries, and that maybe we should expand our horizons/

The other reason for the change is the abdication of US private industry in long-term research investment and capital planning. We had a historic tax cut for corporations in 2017 - something that was long overdue from a competitive standpoint. What did our companies do with that money? Share buybacks. You can argue that returning that money is more efficient for shareholders, but that's not how you build new innovation for new industries and processes that drive competitive advantage.
 
Boeing's fall is a familiar one. They hired management who were more interested in propping up the stock price thru buybacks and expense cuts than they were in building great airplanes. You can't keep making great products or technology without the acceptance of short-term risk for a long-term vision that may or may not work out.
 
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