Author: Patrick Appel

by Patrick Appel

Chait assesses it:

 The old Democratic coalition was ideologically diffuse, and depended on overwhelming support among white Southern conservatives who elected reactionaries to Congress and frequently defected on the presidential ballot. The current Democratic advantage represents a smaller but more stable ideological plurality. … Something could happen to dissolve the new Democratic majority just as race and the sixties dissolved the last one. Even if it doesn’t, it won’t last forever. The Republicans will adapt to the new political climate, or else they’ll simply bore more deeply into the political institutions, discovering and expanding ways to exercise power without appealing to a majority of America. But the changing contours of America really do seem to have swept aside the old conservative majority, and there’s no foreseeable event to bring it back.

Eric Schickler thinks the GOP will have to remake itself to become competitive again:

[T]he challenge for Republicans is perhaps more difficult than just changing position on a handful of issues: it is to foster an identity that young voters find consistent with their own self-image. Given the demographics of this next generation of voters – including the growing share made up of Latinos – this may well require a substantial “reboot” of the GOP’s approach.

by Patrick Appel

Judis doubts that “the current recovery is leading toward the buoyant growth and widespread prosperity that we enjoyed after the country’s last great crash and downturn.” Among his reasons:

During the golden years, wages often accounted for almost 60 percent of national income. They are now at an abysmal 43.5 percent. Productivity has continued to rise faster than median wages. In January, incomes fell by the largest amount in twenty years. Consumer spending increased because the savings rate declined. That’s exactly the pattern that occurred in the years prior to the crash and Great Recession.

After a brief hiatus at the beginning of the Great Recession—when the crash eliminated wealth at the top—the top of the income scale has resumed expanding at the expense of everyone else. Corporate earnings increased 20.1 percent a year since 2008, but as much as $1.5 trillion of these profits remain uninvested. In other words, we have a growing accumulation of wealth at the top that is at the expense of consumer demand and that could potentially create new speculative bubbles.

by Patrick Appel

On the pros and cons of telecommuting:

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by Patrick Appel

The world George R.R. Martin created has a taken on a life of its own:

Martin has been an adviser on each season of [Game Of Thrones], but the process has inevitably required giving up much creative control. In some ways, though, Westeros got away from him long ago: At this point many of his fans know the world he created better than he does. The culture of fandom has changed; there are online communities devoted to fulminating over how long Martin takes to produce each book. One Sweden-based superfan, Elio M. Garcia Jr., runs Westeros.org, the main discussion forum for A Song of Ice and Fire, and controls Martin’s official Facebook and Twitter. If HBO needs to clarify details about Westeros, Martin occasionally fact-checks with Garcia.

by Patrick Appel

Taibbi covers the fight against stupidly harsh mandatory minimum laws, such as California’s infamous Three Strikes law:

Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. As the years passed and word of great masses of nonviolent inmates serving insanely disproportionate terms began to spread in the legal community, it became clear that any attempt to repair the damage done by Three Strikes would be a painstaking, ungainly process at best. The fear of being tabbed “soft on crime” left politicians and prosecutors everywhere reluctant to lift their foot off the gas pedal for even a moment, and before long the Three Strikes punishment machine evolved into something that hurtled forward at light speed, but moved backward only with great effort, fractions of a millimeter at a time.

by Patrick Appel

It’s not just the West that has made progress:

The World Values Survey data do suggest that Asia and Africa remain more homophobic than the Americas and Europe, but change has been rapid nonetheless. In the 2006 wave of surveys, the majority of Indians and Chinese remained firmly against homosexuality. But the proportion of people who thought homosexuality was never justifiable fell from 93 percent to 64 percent in India from 1993 to 2006 and from 92 percent to 74 percent in China.

by Patrick Appel

John Sides points out the bleeding obvious – the GOP could easily win the presidency in 2016:

The GOP will … benefit from what political scientist Alan Abramowitz calls the “time for a change” factor: only once since the 22nd Amendment limited the president to two consecutive terms has a party held the White House for more than two terms in a row.

If that happens, perhaps we’ll realize that all this talk of a “liberal majority” or “Obama’s mandate” or even a “Democratic realignment” was overblown. And perhaps we’ll even remember that the exact opposite argument was made in 2004, when evil genius Karl Rove was supposed to have ushered in a Republican realignment and Democrats would never win another election unless they could appeal to “values voters.” Those predictions of a Republican majority were soon proved false. This is why it’s premature to make similar predictions about a Democratic majority or write the GOP’s epitaph.

If, through some act of God, Republicans nominate a relative moderate like Chris Christie in 2016, a Republican victory could move the party back towards the center. An ideologue with amnesia of the Bush presidency, i.e. the majority of the other Republican presidential hopefuls, is unlikely to do the same. For Democrats to get from Carter’s loss to Clinton’s win took three failed elections. For Republicans to get from Hoover to Eisenhower took significantly longer. The GOP could easily win in 2016, but, if the party is going to modernize itself, another loss or two may be required.

by Patrick Appel

John Lanchester wonders:

When you ask people why they don’t read fantasy, they usually say something along the lines of, ‘because elves don’t exist’. This makes no sense as an objection. Huge swathes of imaginative literature concern things that don’t exist, and as it happens, things that don’t exist feature particularly prominently in the English literary tradition. We’re very good at things that don’t exist. The fantastic is central not just to the English canon – Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens – but also to our amazing parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There’s no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It’s as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to ‘off’.

Douthat adds:

Of course some of this is part of the general disdain for “genre” in all its forms that permeates the respectable literary world. But I also suspect that there is a particular obstacle with fantasy that doesn’t exist with, say, horror novels or murder mysteries: The sheer immensity of the standard-issue fantasy saga, and the fact that committing to a bestselling fantasy author takes much more, well, commitment than reading Dean Koontz or Peter Straub, Michael Connelly or Tana French.