Year: 2013

Steinglass points them out:

It may be more useful to compare the tea-party movement to a different sort of party that tends to crop up in parliamentary systems: far-right populist parties based on backward-looking ideologies of national identity. In France, the Netherlands and Austria, such parties consistently win substantial portions of the vote. Like the tea-party movement, they tend to be fiercely protective of existing social-welfare programmes that benefit the elderly and the ethnic majority, and bitterly opposed to social-welfare programmes that benefit ethnic minorities or immigrants.

And like the tea-party movement, they can win by losing: their partisans may treat legislative defeats as a badge of honour, and in any case, when government is stymied, the economy weakens, and people get angry, populist parties that avoid responsibility and stay out of government draw more support. But in parliamentary systems, fringe populist parties are rarely included in governing coalitions, in large part because their tendency to value expressive identity-based politics over concrete legislative goals makes them extremely difficult for other parties to work with. The weakness of two-party systems such as America’s is that purists who treat politics as a type of self-affirming performance art have to be included in one party or the other, and indeed are likely to regard themselves as being that party’s true soul.

I think of the xenophobic extremism of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, in Britain. There are right-wing factions among the Tories, but they tend to be contained within the elitist structure of the Commons and the power of the central party in selecting candidates for parliament. The BBC – however contentiously liberal – has also created a single national conversation that can help integrate extremists. None of this exists to the same degree here – and with a divided government, the unaccountable can indeed inflict the unimaginable. And they nearly did.

The Bloomberg editorial board this week gave a surprisingly critical appraisal of contemporary economics, arguing that researchers haven’t answered the discipline’s most pressing question: “Can policy makers know with any certainty when markets are dangerously out of line, and is there anything they can do about it?”

Central bankers still debate whether it’s possible to recognize asset bubbles when they occur, and whether they can or should be deflated. Regulators and bankers are still at odds over new financial products such as credit derivatives: Do they simply improve the market’s ability to process and reflect information, or do they also present new dangers of their own?

This is a failure that left the world unprepared for the most recent financial crisis, and the economics profession has been far too complacent about it. Economists can’t be expected to predict the future. But they should be able to identify threatening trends, and to better understand the conditions that can turn a change in prices into a financial tsunami.

A reader writes:

People should be more positive. Something good has happened.

This is a gross oversimplification, but it will get the point across. We can think of three groups of people. The first group is the crazy people – the ones who want to default in order to kill off the government. The second group is the people who are appalled by the crazy people — you and me, and lots of other people. The third group are the people who aren’t crazy, but who have made alliances with the crazy people.

It’s that third group that’s changing. All sorts of people who have always backed the GOP are saying, “Wow, that sure was crazy!” Your readers who want the people who are in the first group, the actual crazy people, to change course, will certainly be disappointed. But from my perspective, having all sorts of conservative bloggers, the chamber of commerce, lots of CEOs, etc., and mainstream Republicans in general wake up and question their support of the nutters is good enough.

It’s a big leap forward. It’s an almost uniquely positive event in the post Gingrich history of the nutty right. We’ve seen lots of important wins – times when the crazies have been defeated politically. But this is the first time mainstream people are actually saying, “Those people were nuts!”

It’s not a final victory, or even anything close to that. A huge chunk of the country is really whacked out politically. It’s going to take years to push back against that, a lot of work and struggle. But what’s happened has really brought that fight into a new place. It’s an extremely positive development.

It’s interesting. Things were sort of malaise-y around the administration for awhile; there was a bleak vibe. But then out of the middle of that, we had a big win in Syria. Another one here. Iran could be enormous.

I know you want a two-state solution. I do too. But we have to chip away at the region incrementally – reduce the tension, consolidate smaller wins. Iran is extremely important in that regard. Kerry bloviates a lot on TV, but he seems to know his shit.

There’s an angle of this that I haven’t seen discussed. It might be just a mean-spirited fantasy on my part. But when we talk about racism in politics, we tend to talk about it in terms of “other”. As in, white guys don’t like Obama because he’s not like them, he’s “the other”. But white supremacy goes further than that. White supremacy says that the other is weak and inferior. They’ve always treated the President that way, and they’ve always described him in those terms.

So I am finding definite pleasure in the fact that the President, as an individual, beat them so decisively. That it was his personal strength that carried the battle.

I’ve come to know this reader by his emails and he’s often extremely perceptive. I agree about Iran and Syria. And about Obama’s new steel. Know hope!

A salsa update. Meanwhile, a reader notes that “ketchup is originally Chinese”:

In the 1690s the Chinese mixed a concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it (in the Amoy dialect) kôe-chiap or kê-chiap (鮭汁, Mandarin Chinese guī zhī, Cantonese gwai) meaning the brine of pickled fish (鮭, salmon; 汁, juice) or shellfish. By the early 18th century, the table sauce had made it to the Malay states (present day Malaysia and Singapore), where it was discovered by English explorers. The Indonesian-Malay word for the sauce was kĕchap. That word evolved into the English word “ketchup”. English settlers took ketchup with them to the American colonies.

Lizza suggests ways to fix Washington:

My list would start with the return of more money to politics. One of the reasons Boehner is such a weak Speaker is that he doesn’t have the carrots and sticks that his predecessors previously used. The House banned the use of earmarks, which were a traditional tool to keep recalcitrant members in line. In a four-trillion-dollar annual budget, a few million dollars here and there to lubricate the gears of Congress seems like a very small price to pay if it would create a more productive legislative body. Indeed, last night Mitch McConnell, or someone working on his behalf, won a couple billion dollars for a dam project in Kentucky, which seems like a decent outcome if it helped prevent a default.

The political system could also benefit if the national parties, which can act as moderating influences in elections, were allowed to spend more money on individual campaigns. The current system, under which party contributions are capped, has empowered special-interest groups and ideological factions like Heritage Action and Club for Growth, which constantly thwart the leadership of the G.O.P. If the parties were more powerful funding vehicles for members of Congress, a leader like Boehner could exercise more control over his conference, which would allow him far more room to negotiate with Obama: he’d be able to make concessions and know he could deliver the votes.