So I discussed earlier this morning about the fact that Mitt Romney not being concerned about poor people should not be shocking to liberals-- tactically speaking. But, I also think the most important aspect of this recent flub is that it highlights a key misunderstanding liberals have about conservative philosophy.
I think the response over the past day to Romney's statement from Democrats and liberals; not to mention the nonplussed response from conservatives to their liberal friend’s reaction speaks very clearly to one aspect of conservatism that liberals do not understand--conservatism speaks to and for people who have lost something.
Oh course Romney doesn't care about the truly poor, they haven't lost anything; they never had anything to begin with!
I'm stealing this point straight out of Cory Robin's excellent new book The Reactionary Mind so I’ll let Cory jump right in to explain:
The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth, whose chief complaint is that they never had anything to lose. His constituency is the contingently disposed--William Graham Sumner's "forgotten man"--rather than the preternaturally oppressed. Far from diminishing his appeal, this brand of victim-hood endows the conservative complaint with a more universal significance. It connects his disinheritance to an experience we all share--namely, loss--and threads the strings of that experience into an ideology promising that that loss, or at least some portion of it, can be made whole.
People on the left often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess. It used to be one of the great virtues of the left that it alone understood the often zero-sum nature of politics, where the gains of one class necessarily entail the losses of another. But as that sense of conflict diminishes on the left, it has fallen to the right to remind voters that there really are losers in politics and that it is they--and only they--who speak for them.
Uber-rich Mitt--"I didn't lift a finger to make 99.999% of this wealth"--Romney is not going to win a lot of acting awards as he tries, as hard as he can, to identify with the hoi polloi. But poor acting or not, conservatives aren't concerned about Romney's nonchalance about poverty--its not going to pick at their heart strings and we shouldn't be surprised as to why not.
Hopefully Democrats can use Romney’s reel of “campaign flubs from the 1%” to elect us a pro-choice, center-right, business friendly Eisenhower Republican (if only because it will provide Occupy and the (actual) left another 4 years to point out to progressives and liberals how short sighted the progressives compromise with the Goldman Sachs wing of the Democratic Party truly has been over the past 30 years).
But personally, I also hope we can learn to better appreciate conservative philosophy, what makes it tick, why it appeals to voters, and why no one should be shocked that a Republican candidate for President doesn't care about poor people.
I think it would do the political discourse of this nation a world of good if that happened.
Election night in Florida, Mitt Romney gave the Democrats another gem--in what will certainly be a jewelry collection fit for the 1% by Election Day this November.
If you missed it.... Mitt isn't concerned about poor people.
No one should be shocked that a politician--who is scratching for the votes of conservatives--casually writes off poor people.
I've got a couple of things to say on this front but for my pre-work post let me stick to a simple one on the tactical front.
When I ran for State Senate here in Georgia 2010 I never once came across a truly poor voter when I attended events.
I met a lot of struggling working class voters, I met some middle class—and terrified because they were one illness away from working class—voters; I even met some successful small business owners terrified about the fact that the fall in aggregate demand and ungodly slow economic recovery was going to shut them down for good because the stimulus was too small to make up for the decline in consumer spending hitting the economy (okay they didn’t phrase it that way but I digress…).
But I never once met a poor person on the campaign trail. Politics is not an environment they travel in that much.
So the idea that Mitt Romney isn't concerned about poor people isn't shocking tactically speaking. I also think we need to realize that it is not shocking philosophically speaking either and it may speak to an important confusion liberals have conservatism-- I'll fill in those details latter today.
For now i'm headed to work. The trucks won't load themselves...
Fans of Friedrich von Hayek may be surprised to learn that the Austrian economist is the talk of Occupy London. Hayek’s observation that distributed intelligence in a voluntary co-operative is a hallmark of real economy rings true beneath the bells of St Paul’s. Occupy is often criticised for not having a single message but that misses the point: we are committed to incorporating different preferences before coming up with policies. In this sense, it could be said we work more like a market than the corporate boardroom or lobbyist-loaded politics – our ideas are radical but also just and democratically decided.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Contact:
Tim Franzen 404-414-5521
La’Die Z. Mansfield 678-675-3888
On Monday (01/23) at 11am Occupy Atlanta will hold a press conference in the front of Chase Bank located in the Edgewood Shopping Center, 1215 Caroline St. NE.
Like many families across the nation, the late Ms. Eloise Pittman was a victim of one of the worse cases of predatory lending. The Pittman family has been fighting to save the family home since November 2011. This house for this family is more than a building that gives shelter. It is a home that has been passed down generations since the 1950’s.
This past week we have finally been able to get Chase bank to negotiate with they family. The options they have laid out are terrible. They either want the family to leave or pay over $400,000 for a property that's worth a little over $100,000. Their options are unacceptable. When Chase bank needed a bail out they got one to the tune of billions at practically zero percent interest. We will not continue to allow big banks like Chase to continue to make profit off the backs of those that they refuse to assist.
Occupy Atlanta will be announcing our plans to escalate the campaign against Chase bank at the press conference, part of which will include actions that are provocative, and national in scope. The time where Banks like Chase are able to quietly scam folks out of their homes is over.
####
Since ownership of the debt will utlimately be passed on to future generations (ignoring the portion that is held by foreigners -- which a function of the trade deficit), the debt itself is not a generational burden.
It can raise important issues of distribution within generations and the taxes needed to pay for the debt can create economic distortions, but many other things also lead to economic distortions (like patents and copyrights).
To carry this point a step further, since deficits that stimulate the economy today are likely to increase investment (especially if they are used to finance public investment and education), they are likely to make out children richer. Furthermore, the Fed could simply hold this debt and use higher reserve requirements in future years to stem an inflationary impact from a greater volume of reserves in the banking system. In that case, interest on the debt would be paid directly back to the Treasury. Where is the burden on our kids?
Occupy the Courts – Pre-Events, March & Rally
Contacts: Don Dressel, Atlanta Move to Amend, 404-307-2405
Darlene Jones-Owens, Everyday People Occupy Atlanta, 770-328-9036
The January 21, 2010 Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United v FEC, outrageously equated corporate money with "free speech." Political cash from corporate sponsors is used abundantly and anonymously in campaigns, drowning out the voices of “We the People.” For three days this week, Atlanta organizations including Atlanta Move to Amend, OCCUPY Atlanta, Everyday People OCCUPY Atlanta, MoveOn Atlanta Council, GA Peace & Justice Coalition, Teamsters, AFL/CIO, Green Friends/Atlanta Friends Meeting, 350.0rg/Atl., GA Sierra Club, Georgia WAND, Atlanta Grandmothers for Peace, Citizens Climate Lobby, and Environment Georgia will join together to protest the second anniversary of the Citizens United ruling. Speakers and artists will deliver short but powerful messages on the impact the decision is having on our politics, jobs, schools, environment, public services, military, and basic freedoms.The press is invited to all events.
Event #1: Sign-Making Party
Wednesday, January 18: 5 – 9 PM
American Friends Service Center, 60 Walton Street.
Thursday, January 19: 2 – 6 PM at
Woodruff/Troy Davis Park, 91 Peachtree Street.
Bring an old shoe to toss at an image of the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court.
Event #3: Occupy the Courts March and Rally
Friday, January 20, 2012 1 – 4 PM
March from Woodruff/Troy Davis Park, 91 Peachtree Street to
Rally at the Courtyard of the Richard B. Russell Federal Building, 75 Spring Street,
“Mourning Democracy” Funeral March back to Woodruff/Troy Davis Park
Speaking directly to the heart of the matter, Rep. Holcomb points out that those harmed by this law would be Georgia’s poorest children, not the adults who have made bad decisions.“[The family assistance program] is designed to help the neediest of our needy families,” Holcomb said. “Those that oppose it, it’s almost as if many of them are saying food is a luxury item. Which clearly it’s not.”
Georgia’s public assistance program is available only to the state’s poorest residents. A typical family supported with the assistance would be a working mother with two children who earns about $784 per month, or just $26 per day. Rep. Holcomb points out that the $26 per day pays for housing, electricity and food.
What some healthy and spry Occupy Movements across the nation couldn't quite accomplish, San Francisco geriatrics have! KCBS reports that a small group of senior citizens between the ages of 69 and 82 successfully shut down a Bank of America in Bernal Heights on Thursday with nothing more than walkers and oxygen tanks. That's right: No shouting, chanting, tear gas, or window-smashing.
Greg Sargent is rightly outraged by Romney’s claim that Obama is a job destroyer:
Romney’s claim that two million jobs were lost under the Obama presidency is based on the idea that there’s been a net loss of jobs since he took office. In other words, Romney is taking into account the fact that the economy continued hemorraghing jobs at a furious rate after Obama took office — before Obama’s stimulus passed. But the figures show that once it became law, monthly job loss declined over time, and turned around in the spring of 2010, after which the private sector added jobs for over 20 straight months, totaling around 2.2 million of them.
I think this benefits from a figure:
Does this look to you like a president who “lost jobs”, or like a president who inherited an economy in free fall? You can accuse Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery — and I have (although the biggest villain here was Romney’s own party). But to claim that Obama caused the job loss is indefensible.
HELP WANTED: Has anyone seen anything about this "left-wing, radical socialist Barack Obama" that Michele Bachmann keeps talking about? I'd like to vote for him. Unfortunately, only one I know of is a center-right moderate who looks and sounds more like Ronald Reagan than Che Guevara. #media #fail
Hopefully here in Georgia the General Assembly will start to reform our broken prison system during the upcoming session. There is talk of it [Georgia rethinks its prison stance AJC.com] but lets see if those who brought the dysfunction can clean it up....Prisons everywhere are a barometer of a society’s level of development and the huge prison population in the US is a sad reflection on that country’s lack of well-being. Most recent swift increases in US prisoner numbers coincided with the enormous transfer of wealth from middle to top that came from the Reagan led neo-liberal agenda. The privileged elite found it necessary to contain the inevitable unrest and discontent by criminalising and imprisoning it and thus the increase in numbers.
President Barack Obama has signed into law a $662 billion military spending bill that authorizes the government to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. In a signing statement attached to the bill, Obama said he was signing the bill even though he had "serious reservations" with parts of the bill dealing with detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists. Sections of the bill were opposed by key members of the Obama administration including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Human rights groups assailed Obama for backing down on his initial threat to veto the legislation. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch said, "President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law." Chris Anders of the American Civil Liberties Union has also been a vocal critic of the legislation. He recently appeared on Democracy Now!
Chris Anders, American Civil Liberties Union: "This is so broadly written, it would become a permanent feature of United States law, so that 10 years, 20 years down the road, any president could still use this power to have the military pick up people and indefinitely detain them without charge or trial, potentially for years, potentially for life.”
I doubt that libertarianism will be advanced by any campaign for national office. I suspect that the best way to advance libertarianism is not to compete for government office but to compete against government. Earn a living to support your family. Contribute to institutions, such as private schools, that compete with important government institutions. Vote against incumbents, but otherwise stay aloof from political campaigns.
