Silver and Red

I've been mulling over a recent contretemps between bloggers David Sirota and Nate Silver discussed a few days ago by our friends at Donkeylicious and trying to decide whether it merited further discussion or should be dismissed as just another juvenile pissing match on the left side of the cyber-sandbox.  I've come down on the side of writing about it because I think much that Silver contributed to the "debate" actually needs to be slapped down pretty hard.

Let me first say I am surprised that this was my reaction  Like many people I became an enormous fan of fivethirtyeight.com during the election and was consistently impressed by Silver's statistical and analytical skills.  He is obviously an exceptionally bright guy and seemed to handle his new found fame as the campaign wore on with great grace  I'm not a regular reader of Sirota despite sharing what strikes me as a pretty similar ideological world view.  I've always found him a bit too abrasive, a not terribly captivating writer, and more of an aggressive self-promoter than I find aesthetically pleasing.  Given all of this, I started reading about this little battle over the appropriate direction of the left (very broadly speaking) with a presumption that Silver would have it right and Sirota wrong.

Silver begins by describing two forms of "progressivism", one which he characterizes as "rational" and the other as "radical"  (not that that isn't tipping the debate from the get go) -- when the positions on the further end of the American left are placed in opposition to the "rational" I think it is pretty clear where things are going.  Essentially Nate posits a world in which people of the more moderate center-left are empirical, analytical, expert-driven, flexible and pragmatic.  Those further out on the ideological left are assigned a series of contradictory attributes (both cynical and pessimistic yet advocating a politics that is transformative), but the ultimate quality he ascribes to lefter elements is a kind of reflexively confrontational demagoguery.         

This initial post from Silver is actually pretty juvenile, overly simplistic, and deeply unfair.  It is his follow up post, however, that is really over the top -- an ugly (and dare I say demagogic) McCarthyite attack , alleging that since Sirota vigorously attacks corporate power, he must favor a Soviet style command economy.  According to Silver, Sirota is also guilty of not distinguishing between forms of corporate evil, since he -- gasp -- doesn't distinguish "between Exxon and Apple," between MBNA and Starbucks."  Nate doesn't explain the differences -- I guess because we like ipods and lattes (and evidently hate gasoline and credit cards), that we should be sanguine about the corporate power of Apple and Starbucks.  So Steve Jobs and Howard Schultz are like our bestest friends in Nate's sophisticated and rational world.  

Excessive corporate power and political influence have been enormously detrimental to the interests of working people in recent decades.  The corporate ethos of maximizing short term profits (often fake profits) at the expense of employees has resulted in our current gross disparities in wealth and the stagnation of working class wages.  Yes, the Clinton era gave some respite in this trend, but it did nothing to increase the institutional power of working people.  Unions continued to decline, government power vis a vis corporations diminished, and the conditions were set for many of the worst excesses in the world of finance.  Clintonian neo-liberalism was not a panacea or anything close to it -- to suggest that somehow "progressives" should view it as such is to have an awfully cramped, one might even say "pessimistic," world view.  

Highly rational people with policy expertise beyond crunching numbers may well support policies that are to the left of the tepid center-left that Silver seems to think is as bold as progressivism should be.  We are not Marxists as Nate would have it, but social democrats of varying stripes, people who would be comfortable in the various European labor or social democratic parties.  Contrary to Silver's suggestion, we are the ultimate children of the enlightenment, deeply rational and highly interested in outcomes.  It's why many of us are "single payer" advocates even though we are told this is not politically possible (unless you're over the magical age of 65).  We believe in unions, fair trade, progressive taxes, and a mixed economy that is developed not with mindless growth as its goal, but to benefit all of society in an equitable and sustainable fashion.  We don't think that the society should be held captive to the narrow interests of CEOs and corporate directors., even those of Apple and Starbucks.  How far we can push the debate in our direction and what strategies will work best in advancing those goals is subject to difficult debate -- but what we want is not crazy or shameful or irrational.  What is shameful is red baiting people who want these kinds of ends, while purporting to be a progressive.                  

Comments

[fumphis]

Good post. Nate did fine work during the campaign, but now that it's over he seems to be at a loss. And even though the left side of the blogosphere scooped him up and championed him in 2008, he's always been more moderate than anything else. Sirota definitely contributed to the bruisingly personal nature of the arguments, though--no conciliator he.

[Corvus]

not that that isn't tipping the debate from the get go

It isn't. Those two words are pretty accurate representations of the two approaches he describes, and serve as good summations of the list of differing attributes between the two. People who match the adjectives ascribed to the term "radical"—Radical Feminists, the New Left—have been calling themselves radical for quite a while, so I don't think that the word can necessarily be denounced as a pejorative.

I didn't have to much of a problem with Nate's piece. As I said at Neil's place, I think the two columns read more as a depiction of temperament, and maybe strategy,which, when you consider the differences between Sirota and Silver, is quite ably realized. Where Silver fucks up is when he starts to ascribe these differences to desired policies. Here he goes off the rails and starts exposing his own bias(which it seems that he picked up on).

Now, there is some correlation between temperament and ideology. The more you want to see society changed the more pissed off you will be, thus radical, and if you think society only needs to be changed a little from where it is, you probably won't want to smash the entire system and start over. But it's still just correlation, not causation. Someone can rationally try to figure out what steps would realistically result in a future socialist utopia, and one can be dogmatically devoted to oddball tweaks on the present system that will do crazy shit like bring about "The End of Inequality." (Yeah, I mean Kaus.) Silver's post, due to his own desire to claim legitimacy for his own, somewhat less progressive views (a common error among almost all writers) obfuscates this, and this leads him off an an oddball rant about communism, where he has plainly left his skill-set behind. The man's a statistician, not a historian.

That said, I don't take as much issue with him as Sir Charles, because Sirota is just such an insufferable asshole. I haven't read much of him, but only because I find it hard to get a few paragraphs into his writing without wanting to hunt down the person who wrought the self-indulgent crap in front of me and strangle him. And his popularity makes it even worse, because it means lots of people on "my side" are being led around by a charlatan, which means the left is once again setting itself up to fail.

[ikl]

What Corvus said.

Sir Charles, with all due respect, you should probably learn a bit more about Sirota before you comment on this. He seems to be a deeply unpleasant character - the sort of person who seems almost entirely incapable of recognize the possibility of reasonable disagreement and is nearly blind to his own epistemic limitations. Nate doesn't really seem to know what to do with him and therefore ends up going on the rails. Given who he is dealing with, I'm inclined to be somewhat forgiving.

[Crissa]

There's nothing more rational about capitalist and less rational about feminism.

That's why it's offensive.

[ikl]

I asked Al Giordano (friendly with Silver but ideologically probably much further left) what he though of the first Silver post. Reply is here:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/john-judis-and-what-army#comment-27764

Giordano says politely that he doesn't think that the distinction that Nate is trying to make is coherent. But the bottom line is this:

"That said, I think Nate is a brilliant guy and a great human being. And I think the guy he's smacking down is analytically slow and not a good person. And I believe great radical change comes from working with the first kind as allies and not with the latter!"

[Corvus]

Al Giordano is a pretty good example of what I was talking about. Here is a guy who is far, far to the left and yet sees Obama as a Godsend because of his ability to effectively alter the conversation, moving it in a leftwards direction. Giordano falls pretty clearly, in his emphasis on nuts and bolts organizing, into a rational camps.

What I think Silver was trying to do, before he went off on a tangent, was describe the differing concerns that account for those who are broadly supportive of the Obama approach, and those who are not, and are constantly harping on his tactics. Obama is, going of of silvers descriptives, the rational progressive par excellence. Booman is probably the best advocate of Obama's approach and how it functions. The reason even people like Booman and Giordano support Obama, is that they think, in the long-run, his approach is the one that will end up working, and eventually working for their own positions. What this really is, is a split in the left over tactics, not ideology, which is not usually how this goes. That's what makes it so confusing.

[Sir Charles]

I think I was clear that I wasn't really defending Sirota as a personality or even as a thinker. I don't read him nearly enough to comment very knowledgably although what I've seen doesn't really impress me.

I do think, however, that Nate went completely off the rails and showed some deep weaknesses in his game in this particular episode. Unreasonableness in the pursuit of reason or some such thing isn't really a winning formula. And maybe it's my age, but red baiting is something I find especially unforgivable.

[big bad wolf]

SC, i fear that nate may blog without a glass by his elbow and that leads, ironically, to intemperance. beverage is a reminder that life is not a statistically quantifiable, arguable, and rationalized phenomenon. beverage would have made nate laugh at his own ridiculous chart; radical, as corvus rightly explains, is defensible, but a strict division of empirical and normative is just silly; and, since when have rational persons been outcome rather than process oriented? how can those things be separated, and how can a rational person be entirely ends (outcome) over means? beverage would have allowed nate, on seeing his excesses of the night (i draw on myself only for this idea), to proceed as if it was just another work day.

as to starbucks and apple, i think, that bring us back to daniel bell (the cultural contradictions of capitalism) and michelob light (yes, you can have it all). we want to save the world and save all the cool consumerist things we like. doubtful, and, i think, not so rational.

[Corvus]

I don't know, I guess the "red-baiting," while wrong-headed, didn't bother me so much, because it seemed like he was coming at it all on his own, and not pulling upon some grand tradition to silence his opponents. Silver just seemed legitimately freaked out by some of the rhetoric on the left, and pulled upon the one example that is most readily apparent of the abuses that a stance can lead to.

And you know what? That isn't completely unfair. Soviet Communism really is a huge debacle for the left, one that I think put the final nail in a whole bunch of notions that still run rampant, and the left has just not managed to face up to them, and properly disavow what went wrong. The Bolsheviks, in the final analysis, were evil, and the left, in order to gain any traction in the future, will need to disentangle themselves from that legacy, and cut out all aspects of itself that could lead to such an occurrence, because the general public will never sign up with us when they think that might be what we really are. We are not that, and we need to know how, and say it.

[Corvus]

bbw,

The took the outcome/process distinction to be that the rationals will seek a way to achieve a goal and use that, whatever it is, and radicals will insist upon a code of behavior, whether it results in the the desired goal or not, because to do otherwise would be impure. Thus the argument about bipartisanship. The rational thinks, if bipartisanship will get the stimulus bill passed, be bipartisan. The radical thinks "No! don't compromise with Republicans! Attack them! Stand up for what you believe in!" I doubt such a strategy would have resulted in a bill getting passed, but it was very popular in the netroots.

Empirical/Normative I am less sure on, though I think the point is that the rationals format strategy based on an assessment of facts, and tries to work within the constraints that become obvious through this assessment. Radicals think there is less objective truth, take a kind of post-modern stance, and try to change the constraints of debate. Hence the emphasis on language and framing. Make the field of battle more amenable, and it will be easier to win, and win big.

[big bad wolf]

corvus, i have to disagree. not with the idea that soviet communism was a terrible thing, or even that it was damaging for a segment of the u.s. left, but with the idea that soviet communism has much currency for or relevance to the u.s left of today, or even the past 35 years. hell, when i was in high school 30 years ago, gus hall was a running joke, at least in massachusetts. a lot of people at that time might not have liked tom hayden, but no one thought he aimed to bring the u.s.s.r. to the u.s. that we on the left condemn mccarthyism doesn't mean we think some of those who identifed with the u.s.s.r. in the 40s and 50s were right; we think that free speech and free association and privacy rights allowed them to be wrongheaded without being persecuted. to suggest that the u.s. left in the past 40 years has in any way been stalinist or soviet-style or has to prove itself not tainted by secret stalinist deisres is just wrong, i think. that we are so linked by the limbaughs of the world should not make us repent of imaginary, imputed sins. that is why nate's rhetoric was intemperate, unwarranted, and unhelpful to even a rational progessive agenda

[shadowfax]

You said exactly what I was thinking when I read Nate's piece(s). He picked a fight, for reasons I couldn't quite follow, and didn't comport himself well in the predictable ensuing kerfuffle. Whatever. This wasn't his finest hour. But I've written stuff I wasn't too proud of, afterwards. You get over it.

[big bad wolf]

SC, i guess i think nate misuses the term process, though your explanation of how he uses the term makes sense. i think his misuse important to note. liberals generally conceive of process as the legal and procedural avenues through which one goes about achieving (or failing to achieve) a result. thus, liberals traditionally value process and the respect for persons that process entails over outcomes, though smart ones, such as obama, see the best way to sustainable outcomes to be through proper process. radicals generally prefer outcomes over process.

my difficulty with empirical versus normative, as nate appears to use them, is (putting aside that one need not be po-mo to question the certitude of statistical measures of empirical data---look where empirical economics got us) that an empirical analysis does not always point the way to a political or social course of action. facts, just are. what one makes of the facts or how one acts on them are normative judgments. i don't see how normative judgments are to be avoided, or that they should be. to the extent that nate implies that "radicals" are never empirical, that they are not reality-based, then he simply proves your point that he was tipping the discussion from the beginning. i'm not sure he menat to go that far, but caught in the moment he did get carried beyond what an empirical, practical, flexible view of the situation would seem to warrant

[big bad wolf]

my bad, corvus, not SC on that last post

[Corvus]

bbw,
I agree with all your diagreements, because none of them conflict with what I see as the problem. McCarthyism is a still a violation of freedom of speech. And I don't think that the left is tainted by stalinist desires. But I think that certain assumptions are held on the left that were held by the original bolsheviks. Namely, there is this assumption that a transformative process could yield some kind of leftist paradise in short order. (Single-payer or bust!) I think the results of both the Russian and French Revolutions should put the end once and for all of some kind of the possibility of revolution to successfully transform society in a positive manner is impossible.

Which brings to me another point. I really hope that Sir Charles is wrong, and the left isn't really the inheritors of the enlightenment, because if we are we are doomed. The Enlightenment failed. Failed. It argued that humans could be guided by reason, and when we tried that it just led to everybody getting their head chopped off. Yeah, reason is a good tool, but as the Romantic pointed out, humans are messy irrational animals, and that needs to be taken into account. Going on about being the heirs to the Enlightenment ignores all the correctives that have been added to that original vision, and makes you look kind of like a sap.

We can't radically change society, even if we want society to be vastly different. We have to do it in bits and pieces, or else the whole thing spirals out of control and human irrationality and base instinct takes over, which the left's humanistic values will not be able to overcome. Ignore this fact, and the general populace will continue to treat us like crazy lunatics who want to destroy their lives in the name of glorious revolution.

[DN]

Nate went off the rails, and if it wasn't Sirota he was fighting with I think most folks defending him above wouldn't speak up. What's actually needed is even more criticism from the left so the conversation stops dragging to center right, again and again. And the idea one would use Apple as a good corporate citizen is so stupid I can't believe. I wish he had been there in the late 90's layoffs to watch. I was. It makes Nate look like.... silly.

DN

[drip]

I'm sorry,Baseball Prospectus 2009 came on Wednesday and I haven't been able to keep up with my blogs. What's going on?

[oddjob]

The Enlightenment failed. Failed. It argued that humans could be guided by reason, and when we tried that it just led to everybody getting their head chopped off.

?

Our founding fathers weren't guided by Enlightenment principles?

[Sir Charles]

Corvus,

I concur with oddjob -- I think the statement that "the Enlightenment failed" is a little much. Only if you consider Soviet Communism the logical outcome of the Enlightenment, which I think is not really justifiable.

And I don't want to come off as a really old and cranky guy, but Jesus, the non-communist left embodidied by people like Walter Reuther, Michael Harrington, Arthur Schelsinger, Irving Howe, and many others fought the good fight against communism over 60 years ago. The left in the U.S. is not tainted by Soviet communism and certainly hasn't been associated with it in my lifetime.

bbw,

Your comment re: Gus Hall made me think of one of my favorite lines by former Celtic great Kevin McHale, who hailed from Hibbing Minnesota home of Bob Dylan and Gus Hall. He was discussing his famous hometown brethren and noted that "Hall could really go to his left." Very sophisticated for an NBA player.

[Sir Charles]

Corvus,

Also, I don't think anyone is speaking in terms of a glorious revolution -- you've read enough of my stuff to know I'm pretty pragmatic, even when drunk. I'm a lawyer for God's sake -- not exactly on the barricades. My point is that social democracy of a European style is not a revolutionary ideology, but a temperate and gradualist one that I admire, even though it is far to the left of what passes for mainstream politics here.

[Corvus]

DN, total agreement on the corporate angle. Silver looked silly. However, I don't think that we should, in our desire to have a more vocal left, to give a pass to any one who seeks to speak for it. It doesn't do any good for anybody if the people making the arguments for leftist policies are making bad arguments.

Sir Charles, The Enlightenment failed with the French Revolution.

The reason the left is tainted by communism is not so much because anyone on the left supported the Soviets, it's just that it was a leftist revolution that turned into a totalitarian nightmare. The general public then has taken to associating communism or socialism with authoritarianism, and when you see resistance to the left pop up, it is almost always in the context of depicting the left as an assault on liberty. Though this is often disingenuous, I don't think the left has really done enough to show it's divergence from that mentality, make the case about how it's values and policies will increase freedom. Usually it just complains that the right is lying, and while this is true, it doesn't do much to convince anybody that that isn't the case. And, I still will sometimes see people make arguments for the left based on individualism being a problem, something that needs to be decreased.

I agree that no one around here is a glorious revolutionary. On the other hand, Sirota wrote a book called The Uprising.

There is a strain within the left that still wants the language and romanticism of radical change, probably because it serves as a better rallying cry than trying to slowly work towards social democracy.

[Lisa Simeone]

Progressivism is a slow slog. That's the bald, unromantic, sometimes sad, dispiriting truth. Bruce McFadden has written movingly and convincingly on this many times.

[Sir Charles]

Corvus,

Again, I don't think the French Revolution is the sum and substance of Enlightenment values or achievements. I think one can just as easily make the case that the American Revolution, however imperfect and incomplete, is just as representative.

I agree with you about unsophisticated attacks on individualism, particularly the sometimes neo-puritanical strain of anti-consumerism that can be very offputting to working people, especially when uttered by those who have had nothing but plenty all of their lives.

With respect to the issue of rhetoric, I think that we do need to sometimes inspire our troops and ourselves with lyrical invocations of the world turned upside down. But I agree it can be a pretty dangerous game.

Lisa,

Welcome back. You are of course right about the slow slog that we face on the left. Hell, people in our demographic have been in retreat for so long, I think it's a shock to actually be able to move the agenda forward at all.

[drip]

Sir Charles, The Enlightenment failed with the French Revolution I could make a pretty strong argument that the French Revolution succeeded (short version: what happened to the monarchy) and a better one that it's failures were deviations from the enlightenment. Except maybe for that winter in Russia. That was just a bad idea, wherever it came from.

And the French Revolution also gave us the coolest national anthem of all time.

The position that reforming liberal capitalism is a slow arduous process may even be a litle optimistic, but what's the alternative? I have a couple of thoughts, but they aren't really alternatives, more like objections without alternatives.

[big bad wolf]

in reality, i will soon be revealed to be the GLORIOUS REVOLUTIONARY. Sirota is going to be so jealous.

corvus, count me in the group that doesn't think the french revolution marked the failure of the enlightenment. if anything, it validated it---the reason and skepticism that characterized much of the enlightenment would not have expected the world to be rethought, reshaped, and perfected before the end of thermidor.

SC, i don't think i ever heard that mchale line about gus hall. mchale was a funny guy. as is dylan---have you ever heard his theme time radio hour show? remarkably amusing and so sly.

affluent folks who call for asecticism in others we have had with us always. from a recent adam gopnik piece in the new yorker, here is samuel johnson's take on it: “Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.”

[Toast]

the ultimate quality he ascribes to lefter elements is a kind of reflexively confrontational demagoguery

I'm sorry to say this, but I think Silver's exactly right. If you'd posited that set of characteristics as descriptive of substantial numbers of liberals last year this time, I would have scoffed, but throughout a good part of the general election and then Obama's transition and first month in office I have been blown away by the determination of some on the left to keep the Outrage Knob cranked to eleven at all times. I didn't notice this much during the Bush years because there really was something to be outraged about every goddamned day. Now that Obama is in office I figured my fellow liberals would take a Valium, ratchet down from DefCon 1, and fairly judge each of the man's actions on a case-by-case basis, praising him when he does something right and taking him to task when he does something wrong. Instead, I've seen a shocking number of blanket denunciations and hilariously premature declarations that Obama has betrayed progressives and is a failure. Hell, there are some voices on the left where, even if you listened to them attentively, you wouldn't know the White House had changed hands. It's sad, and it's frustrating, and I can completely understand if Silver is losing patience with it.

[Toast]

Just got done reading Silver's original post. I found it illuminating and, for the most part, even handed. The one attribute pair I'd take issue with is "battle of ideas" vs. "battle of wills". I doubt even those on the furthest reaches of the left could be fairly represented as embracing politics as purely a battle of wills devoid of ideas, and it was silly of him to include that distinction. On the whole, though, I think that post is an excellent starting point for a "Progressivism: Quo Vadimus?" kind of discussion.

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

There's a lawyer I know who records every Dylan and show and ships them to a friend of mine. They are extraordinary. His sly wit and breathtaking knowledge of music make them a fun listen.

Toast,

I agree that there are elements of the left who have been over the top in awaiting Obama betrayal etc. That said, I didn't think Silver's treatment of broader tendencies of the left was all that persuasive or insightful. He seemed out of his depth to me and showing the limitations of a smart numbers guy without a whole lot of life experience.

[drip]

mchale was a funny guy and one of the greatest power forwards of all time. And the worst fucking GM in the NBA since, well, that's a tough one, but he is terrible. Garnett for a club sandwich and a pair of mismatched socks to his old buddy Danny Ainge was just inexcusable.

[ari]

Is there any evidence that Silver is strategic thinker of any importance at all? I don't ask that disrespectfully or snarkily, by the way. I'm totally serious. He obviously has a wonderfully nimble mind and an extraordinary facility with numbers. But I'm not sure he's the guy I'd go to were I pondering the future of progressive politics. Which is to say, he's never shown me anything to suggest that he has a panoramic understanding of strategy rather than tactics.

As for Sirota, he's a dullard, a shouter who likes attention. I wouldn't trust him to plot his way out of a paper bag. Seriously, he's a very distasteful and small-minded guy.

In short, I'm not sure that this squabble was really that interesting. But I'm willing to be convinced that I should keep my eye on Silver now that the election is over.

Finally, drip, McHale was doing his buddy a solid. And he got Al Jefferson in the deal, which ain't nothing. Truth be told, I'm not sure that it wasn't a good trade all the way around. Consider this: before Jefferson got hurt, laid low by the curse of the northlands, he was tearing it up. And he just turned 24! Garnett, by contrast, is on the downside of his HOF career. He's a great addition for a team trying to win now. Not so great for a team pointing to the future.

[Sir Charles]

ari,

You might be right all the way around -- as I said, I started to write this a few days ago and then scrapped it out of the sense that it was just another schoolyeard squabble in the blogosphere But the overall attitude evinced by Silver made me look again, largely because he is well respected by so many as a result of his fabulous work during the election.

I think your question about his abilities remains to be seen. Right now he looks to me like a number cruncher who may only be worth tuning into for election season. He certainly doesn't strike me as the go-to guy for progressive ideas at this juncture.

I literally never read Sirota -- I think this was the first time I looked at his blog in more than a year. I can produce better stuff on my lunch hour. So I don't really look to him as a big source of ideas for the future either.

Re: McHale -- once again, great players often prove to be lacking in coaching or front office positions. It surprises me, because I thought he would have the gifts, but there is not a lot of evidence in his favor to date.

[ari]

I had the sense that you and I agreed, Charles. I was posing the question to others who seem to be have a better sense of Silver: Strategic Thinker. And again, I think it's possible that Silver's got the chops to lead us all into a future of ponies; it's just that he's never shown me the goods. As for Sirota, not reading him is the prescribed course. I occasionally look in over at openleft, and I'm sometimes really taken with something they have up -- though they do an awful lot of clutching their pearls -- but usually I find their stuff a bit long on sanctimony for my tastes.

[Corvus]

Besides being good with statistics, I think he has good general analytical skills. But he doesn't have the breadth of knowledge concerning progressive thought that Matt, Ezra, or even the guys at Open Left have. So probably not a the strategic thinker to lead us to a future of ponies, but probably a useful tool in the liberal toolkit, since it's good to ave someone who can analyze the data of what going on at the moment.

[Corvus]

I think it's actually pretty widely considered that the French Revolution marks the end of the Enlightenment. That's what I learned in English and History class, and that's what it says on wikipedia: "At the other end, many scholars use the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment.[7] Still others describe the Enlightenment beginning in Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ending in the French Revolution of 1789. However, others also claim the Enlightenment ended with the death of Voltaire in 1778." See also the Counter-Enlightenment. Basically, what the French Revolution did was show the limits of human reason, which put a dampener on attempts to move towards the application of liberal and republican rule. The American Revolution is an incomplete vindication, since it violated it's own principles with the acceptance of slavery.

I really did not think this was controversial.

[Sir Charles]

Corvus,

I agree with your assessment on Nate.

I guess my view of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment values is a slightly different take -- it seems to me that the Enlightenment fostered a mode of thought based on reason, premised in human equality, where one did not simply accept religious or monarchal values as true and correct. To me this is not limited to a historical period but rather represents a mode of being in the world and a manner in which to approach life, science, politics and governance -- humanist, rational, empirical, and grounded in fundamental notions of the inherent dignity of mankind.

I think it these values that have allowed the continual movement towards the ideals, if not the initial reality, of the American Revolution. We've got a long way to go, but if we ever get there I think that it will be through the triumph of this approach.

(On a more prosaic note, I think you had asked me at one point about the merits of the bourbon old-fashioned versus the rye old fashioned. I think I can say, without fear of contradiction or cavil, on the basis of empirical evidence, keenly observed in a rational and humanist fashion, that the rye old fashioned kicks the bourbon's ass - but in the interest of true Enlightenment values I am going to make another to make sure that I am correct. In the morning I may awaken to thoughts of "off with my head.")

[drip]

I think it these values that have allowed the continual movement towards the ideals, if not the initial reality, of the American Revolution. We've got a long way to go, but if we ever get there I think that it will be through the triumph of this approach.

Agreed. Let Freedom Ring. cf. Lincoln's Second Inaugural.

I think I can say, without fear of contradiction or cavil, on the basis of empirical evidence, keenly observed in a rational and humanist fashion, that the rye old fashioned kicks the bourbon's ass

Fuck the Bourbons! Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

[MR Bill]

I'm really late here..and what I find interesting is the attempt for a 'centrist' liberal to delegitimize a 'radical' liberal's positions.
I know there is internecine fighting on the right, but they don't seem to get into quite the ideological pantytwists that the Left does. Sirota is bombastic and sometimes a verbal bomb thrower; and give the solid work Silver did on polling, I think his attempts at commentary odd.
It's clear enough to me that addressing corporate power and responsibility (

[Sir Charles]

MR Bill,

You're leaving me hanging here.

[nimh]

I'm firmly with Sir Charles on all of this. OK, this is going to be long ...

[nimh]

OK, I'm going to ramble - beware.

In particular, I'd take issue with Corvus's argument, as I understand it, that the non-communist left is somehow tainted by the failure of communism. And I admit I react with some allergy to what I feel is a tired trope of socialists and social-democrats as accomplices of communism.

There is just too long and storied a history of social-democrats and socialists having opposed and condemned the totalitarian nature of communism from the very start. And they were not the exceptions either! An additional cause for my visceral dislike of the argument is that many of those social-democrats, of course, have paid for it with their lives. For example here in Hungary, where the larger social-democratic party was forcibly merged into the smaller communist party after WW2, and whole cadres of social-democrats who opposed the move disappeared into camps and prisons.

Of course the allergic reaction is also a response to how the right, here in Europe probably even more so, has tried to reinforce a strategy of guilt-by-association by claiming that, to borrow Corvus's words, "the left has just not managed to face up" or "properly disavow what went wrong" in communism. This directed at a mainstream left that (though the balance will, admittedly, vary from country to country) disavowed the communists both at home and abroad through decades of Lenin's, Stalin's and Krushchev's rule.

Mind you, I'd argue this the other way round just the same. I would also object to someone defining Nazism as the proof that conservatism is ideologically tainted, or arguing that a "whole bunch of notions" of Fascism "still run rampant" in conservatism now.

Of course there are many ways in which certain strands of conservatives collaborated and empowered the Nazis - just like there were many who bravely resisted it - and there was obviously much soul-searching to do in that respect. Were they aware enough of the danger; were they tempted to shut an eye because they saw the other enemy, at the left end, as the greater one; did they simply show a lack of personal courage. But I don't think conservativism per se, as ideology or cultural heritage, is somehow tainted or proven flawed by the brutalities of the Nazis.

I see this along the same lines. The kind of soul-searching I mentioned above I think was still fair enough to expect from at least the New Left and peace-movement generation of social-democrats/socialists in the 70s and 80s too. Unlike their predecessors of the 20s through 50s, many of them did seem to be marked by a relative disinterest in the Eastern Bloc; Vietnam and then Reagan were so much sexier to oppose than Brezhnev's bland stagnation, after all. Critical notes were duly cracked over that after 1989.

But that is a different story from positing that there were substantively shared assumptions that tied social-democrats to the ideological bankrupcy of Soviet communism. Leninism was always a beast quite of its own. There's a whole lot more to the way it almost immediately resorted to totalitarian power than the mere notion of radical change or collectivism. It was arguably the lethal combination of the a priori totalitarian notions of, first, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and second, the Party as avant-garde of said proletariat [and thus qualified to speak for it even if it wasn't itself yet supportive], which doomed the Leninist brand of Marxism to devolve into brutal dictatorship from the start.

I do not believe that alternatives that existed at the time, such as Menshevism, would have led to the terror of Lenin's and Stalin's times. It's easy to forget that even as late as the February revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks were nothing more than a marginal, cultlike force, based mostly abroad. The same held for many East-European countries where soviet communism was imposed after WW2, where the communist parties had been tiny before the war. Their power grab was not some organic consequence of contemporary leftist ideology in general, it was very much a question of a radical outlier group using momentary conditions to stage coup d'etats.

In that sense, too, it seems unfair to lay the Soviet outcome at the feet of the historical development of Enlightenment or socialism/social-democracy in general. It's like blaming Christianity for the Moonies - or conservatism for the Nazis. So I'd take issue with the notion that it is imperative for mainstream leftwingers to "disentangle themselves from [the communist] legacy" because I don't think they were much entangled in the first place.

But that is, of course, because I don't see the communist horrors as a product of the belief in "radical change" in the first place. Martin Luther King and Gandhi, for example, both believed in radical change - and they were exceedingly uncompromising about it at many times too, much more so than today's proponents of the single payor system. That's not where the roots of the Soviet horrors lie, and so it would be throwing away the baby with the bathwater to take the lesson of the Soviet experience to be to reject the cause of radical change per se.

[big bad wolf]

that's all well and good and very smart, nimh, but where do you stand on the world-historical bourbon-or-rye, question?

[nimh]

I am completely agnostic. (Which, I realise, is probably even more sacrilegious than either preference would have been ... :-)

[big bad wolf]

but genially so.

i have grown so old and toleratant (relative to my younger self) that even alcohol and music preferences rarely send me to the barricades

[Sir Charles]

When life give you lemons, make lemon drop martinis.

Music may still send me to the barricades.

[big bad wolf]

SC, me too i think, but only in a pro sense. i am no longer willing to argue along the lines of how can you like X or how can you not like Y, except with people with pretty substantial knowledge who can defend their choices. and those folks i don't argue with, i talk with and learn from, though we may disagree about the particular band.

don't get me wrong: i can still be completely unfair in judging on musical choices. any chance that i might catch up on the sopranos, which i missed because i have young kids and thus either have more important things to do with them or was exhausted, went out the window when i found out the show ended on a journey song. indefensible. :)

[Gene O'Grady]

Nimh,

I think your take on what was and what wasn't sexy among VietNam protestors (myself included) is completely accurate. Sure, nobody bothered to protest Brezhnev (although I seem to recall a general nervousness when Krushchev was canned), but the sense of anger and loss when the Soviets crushed the Czech revolt in 1968 was, at least in my circles, as strong as anything relating to VietNam. The connection perhaps being that the move into war in VietNam destroyed the hopes of a better world that looked like it might be emerging, Czechoslovakia did the same, perhaps something similar happened in France, but otherwise Russia, Hungary, etc. were just the same old thing.

[nimh]

Gene - fair enough, for sure. Plus, you can make an argument that it is more incumbent on a citizen to protest one's own government's (or allies') crimes, than to protest those of a country one has no way of influencing in any case.

And even so, among the relatively rare human rights activists who cultivated ties with East-European dissidents in the 70s and 80s, many were leftists too ... while a conservative like Franz Josef Strauss pragmatically engaged in all kinds of dubious ties with East-Germany. It's definitely not simply a question of the left being tainted by communism and the right having been, well, right - no matter how eager conservatives are to see it that way.

[MR Bill]

Sorry, man. My friend, tired of me faffing with the computer waited till I went to get coffee, hit post and shut down my computer before I could ramble on and attempt to make sense. Let's just say I got distracted afterward .And yesterday sorta went off plan.
Not in a bad way: my foster son's '97 Geo Metro was stolen from the grocery parking lot where he works last week. With his and my son's schoolbooks, gym clothes, ipod, the mailbox key and a spare key to my wagon and his and his dad's tax return, for FAFSA. The county cops didn't want to take the report at first: "A Geo Metro? Are you sure this isn't one of your friends pulling a prank?" The Kennesaw GA (that's suburban ATL, and hour and 15 mins. from here)caught the thief this weekend, a guy with outstanding warrants, with family here, driving drunk with an open bottle of vodka. It was in good shape, and such as been the disruption of our lives without it, I thought it expedient to recover the car. The stuff in it was long gone (as was the somewhat expensive stereo), there was a +$100 tow bill, and getting through the paperwork took way too long, but it was overall a good day.

And I was just going to say that I hadn't followed Sirota that much, but that he's an odd target for Silver. I keep thinking a lot of the conservative project is to misdirect people from seeing just how much of our economy is quasi-socialist, and just who is actually benefiting from the government's spending. I'm thinking of the military-industrial complex: yesterday's article in the Washington Post ("the Post, why can't I quit you?")about how the US Military couldn't drop KBR or it's outsourced functions even if they wanted to. The agribusiness sector has massive subsidy for corn, cotton, soy, peanuts..and we saw a big giveaway of public resources, in mineral leasing, or timber or other public land uses, and bandwidth of the EM spectrum, during the previous administration..
If there has been a time when we need to examine just how far creeping Corporate Socialism without the restraint of regulation has come now is it. I for one am ready for more regulation of capitalism if it can save the planet and force a redirection of capital to meeting the needs of people.
We've reached a point were Greenspan is ready to nationalize banks. Not even Mr. Sirota really seems to think we should hold on to them in public ownership. We have a mixed economy, if only we admit it. We need to have one where all the money and power do not concentrate against the public good, and we need our corporate citizens to have responsibilities as well as rights. That could be seen as radical...

Nate used to be a corporate guy, right?

And I must say I personally prefer bourbon to rye whiskey, especially in a manhattan. But I'd be gettin' bar brands...

[Sir Charles]

MR bILL,

Sorry to hear about the car theft. Stuff like that is a huge hastle, even if it is a '97 Geo Metro (somewhere in the back of my mind I'm hearing Mike Myers on a "Sprockets segment).

Corporate welfare reached new heights under Bush all the while these clowns are singing paeans to the free market. I don't know anything about Nate's background, but he really seemed to take offense at the idea of attacking "good" corporations.

I would say that I generally prefer bourbon to rye, but in the old-fashioned I find the rye distinctly superior. In this case I was using pretty high dollar brands of both and I found that the rye just goes with the sugar and bitters in a more complementary way.