Who Cooks Your Brooks?
Plus--no more bold Bush ideas, please!
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Wednesday, June 16, 2004, at 11:22 AM PT
Honk if you think Teresa Heinz Kerry really became a Democrat because she was outraged at the GOP treatment of Max Cleland. ... I'm not hearing anything! ... As if Mrs. Heinz Kerry (until recently Mrs. Heinz) wasn't going to switch her registration at some point before her Democratic husband ran for President? Did she change her name because of Cleland too? ... 7:10 P.M.
David Brooks writes that "the current political polarization is inflamed or even driven by the civil war within the educated class" between professionals (mostly "knowledge workers") and managers.
a) Brooks acts as if this conflict is something new--"political scientists now find it useful to distinguish"--but it's at least as old as the Eisenhower-Stevenson campaign half a century ago. Barbara Ehrenreich, among many others, limns the conflict in her excellent book Fear of Falling;
b) What's new is that "knowledge" professionals have gotten richer and more powerful, as the role of knowledge in the economy has become more important (as indicated by the increasing economic return on education). In other words, the recent development isn't that the "aristocracy of mind" is in conflict with the "aristocracy of money." It's that the aristocracy of mind increasingly is the aristocracy of money. Ehrenreich's knowledge workers were middle class and insecure, hence the title of her book. Today's knowledge workers are rich or near-rich, sitting on million-dollar homes, and all-too sure of themselves.
c) In part for this reason, it seems to me the cultural divide between Brooks' two elites has been shrinking, not growing. Even corporate managers want to be hip and edgy--wasn't that the point of Brooks' most famous coinage ("bobos" or "Bourgeois bohemians")? Do you think corporate vice-presidents at, say, Exxon, are more or less tolerant of homosexuality than 30 years ago? I'd say unquestionably more.
d) As computerization eliminates more layers of management, the old-style pro-GOP managerial class can be expected to shrink further in numbers, no?
e) Brooks writes:
Which talents should we admire most? Which path to wisdom is right? Which sort of person deserves the highest status?
That's the kind of stuff that really gets people riled up.
Does that passage ring true to you? Not to me. In a relatively socially-egalitarian society with multiple status ladders, deciding "who deserves the highest status" doesn't seem all that up-riling. (According to Plotz, Brooks' book makes this very point.) I'd say that roughly zero of my elite friends seem to spend a lot of time worrying whether movie stars have too much money relative to businessmen relative to university professors. Do yours?... Now, "Will I go to Hell?" and "Will you take away my gun?" "Is my child in danger?"and "Who you calling stupid?"--people do tend to get riled up about those concerns, but they aren't abnormally (or even normally) prevalent among the elite.
f) The real cultural conflict of the future, then, is more likely to be between the unified rich-and-educated bobo elite and the less-educated less rich non-elite. This has not happened with full-force yet. ...
[Why do you think politics has become more polarized and nasty then?--ed Well, the increasing confidence and aggressive values-pushing of the unified, socially-liberal educated elite is certainly part of it. The rest of the list includes:
1) Narcisissm of small differences. Everyone's a democratic capitalist now. We're fighting over whether the top tax rate should be 20% or 35%. The only way to make that relatively mild difference compelling is to make it personal;
2) Gerrymandering!
3) Technologies like direct mail, cable TV and the Web that enable identification, organization and mobilization of smaller, more intense, ideologically "pure" groups;
4) Pursuit of social change through constitutional rulings by unelected courts--which, as Prof. Robert Nagel argues, is always enraging to the losing side, which is unable to bargain politically for half-satisfaction and which gets told not only that it has lost but that it is wrong, un-American and dumb;
5) Democratic liberal interests groups (e.g. unions, affirmative action recipients) trying to cling to their special little deals despite the collapse of New Deal liberalism as an underlying consensus ideology;
6) Breakdown of the personal-private barrier, concurrent with an increase in the value placed on candor and openness--so Clinton's philandering required a degree of deeply aggravating public lying (and lying about the lying) that FDR, Ike, JFK, and LBJ's activities did not.
7) Chris Lehane.
It's overdetermined! ... P.S.: I like Brooks' column! I don't mean to be piling on. And I don't think Kinsley's review of his book was especially nasty. ... 6:25 P.M.
U.S.News' egregiously press-agented "Washington Whispers" column reports that the White House is making big plans for Bush's second term, including "a total rewrite of the increasingly complicated tax code, possibly junking it in favor of a European-style value-added tax or a flat tax."
"These are big ideas, Reagan-sized ideas," says a key adviser.
I don't know about you, but the prospect of big ideas from Bush in his second term is not especially appealing, in and of itself. It seems like we're having enough trouble digesting the big ideas of his first term, which have left us with an unfinished war and a large budget deficit. ... P.S.: Talking about a "total rewrite of the tax code," though, is a good way to provoke congressional campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists worried that their corporate clients' interests might not be protected in the "junking" process. After all, "energy bill" only scares energy companies. "Total tax rewrite" scares everybody. ... 4:21 P.M.
For kf readers understandably dissatisfied with the previous item, here's another state ballot initiative with the potential to affect the presidential race, and a lot more. An ambitious and apparently wealthy educator, Jorge Klor de Alva, is sponsoring an initiative to change the method for awarding electors in Colorado from winner-take-all to a proportional system. If Bush won 55 percent of the vote, for example, he'd get 55 percent of the electors, not 100 percent. Proponents of the measure claim it would take effect in time for the 2004 election, which might allow Kerry to break off a few electors even if he loses the state. ... If this proportional system spread, it would radically alter the peculiar mechanism of the Electoral College. But it might--depending on how it was written--make it too easy for third parties to gain a balance of power by grabbing a few electors, producing three- or four-way bargaining in the Electoral College. (If you could start a minor party that might get, say, 15 percent of the national vote, or 30 percent of the vote in a few states, you'd be almost crazy not to start that party under this scheme.) This would not be the same system, then, as simple direct national election of a president by majority vote. It would create a unique, bigger third-party problem. ...
You go first: As The Denver Post report suggests, there is arguably little incentive for a small battleground state like Colorado to be the first to switch away from winner-take all--candidates would stop paying attention to Colorado and focus on the remaining winner-take-all prizes. ...
P.S.: Isn't The Note supposed to pick up on all these presidentially significant state ballot drives? Or has the ABC crew become locked in its cocoon of glamorous Michael Moore movie premieres and symposia, reliant on self-promoting emails from reporters to cover the rest of the country? This would never happen at kausfiles. ...
ME/NE Mo? The other alternative elector-appointing system is the Maine/Nebraska plan, which gives electors to the winner of each Congressional and Senate district. (See this old George Will column.) Republicans would presumably benefit in the short run from the ME/NE rule--they control the majority of House districts, after all. ... ME/NE advantages: Candidates would be encouraged to campaign in both urban and rural areas--something that probably wouldn't happen with direct popular election. And the third party problem would be kept under control, since a minor party would have to actually win a congressional district to get an elector. The problem with ME/NE: Congressional districts are now so gerrymandered that there won't be many toss-up battlegrounds. ... The Maine/Nebraska system would at least create huge pressure to do something about the nation's scandalous gerrymandering problem. ... |
