Recommended: What Moderates Believe

David Brooks has a brilliant Op Ed piece today: What Moderates Believe. We desperately need more moderates among the rabid left-wingers and right-wingers who seem to dominate political discourse these days.

Did Russia hack the DNC email servers?

The US intelligence agencies, or at least the heads of most of the intelligence agencies (who knows what the analysts themselves think), are still convinced that Russia hacked the DNC (Democratic National Committee) servers and provided WikiLeaks with the embarrassing emails (widely reported in the liberal media), though independent experts think it was far more likely that it was an inside job (not widely reported in the liberal media), perhaps by then-DNC-chair Wasserman-Schultz’s favorite Pakistani IT expert, Imran Awan, now arrested and under indictment on multiple charges.

Should we believe the US intelligence agencies? The torrents of (largely illegal) leaks from the intelligence agencies to embarrass and harass President Trump certainly shows their political bias. And of course these are the same intelligence agencies that didn’t foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, didn’t foresee the Eastern European “color revolutions”, didn’t foresee the “Arab Spring” revolutions in the Middle East, didn’t foresee the rise of ISIS, didn’t foresee the Tet offensive in Vietnam, didn’t foresee the 1973 Yom Kippur attack on Israel, didn’t foresee the Iranian revolution, didn’t foresee the rise of Al Qaida or the 9/11 attacks, didn’t foresee the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, was sure Sadaam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction, were sure during the Kennedy campaign that the Soviet Union was ahead of the US in intercontinental missiles and that the Bay of Pigs invasion would bring a general uprising in Cuba, and didn’t foresee the Russian takeover of the Crimea, among many other failures.  Intelligence gathering and analysis is a difficult business, and some failures are to be expected, but it is notable how often these failures listed above resulted from the intelligence community telling the powers that be what they wanted to hear, or what the intelligence community wanted to believe.

And then of course there is the revelation that among the NSA’s (National Security Agency) own hacking tools that outside hackers stole from the NSA itself recently (another reason to wonder about the competence of our intelligence community) were a sophisticated set of tools for making NSA hacks look like they came from other places, like Russia. Presumably the Russians and the North Koreans and the French and probably even some US teenage hackers have similar tools, so any estimate of where a hack “came from” is now suspect.

We will probably never know the truth, but my own estimate at the moment is that this whole Russian hacking thing is a red herring. Liberals still can’t come to terms with having lost the election (and to a jerk like Trump at that!), and are still casting about for some explanation - any explanation - other than their own incompetence. And of course focusing on the Russians keeps people from focusing on the content of the leaked emails, which showed a pretty seamy picture of the inside machinations of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Recommmended: The Once and Future Liberal

This is the book mentioned in the previous post. It was released yesterday, and Amazon had it on my doorstep by noon.  It is indeed worth reading.  It will, of course, draw lots of criticism from those whose self-identities and careers are built on identity politics, but Lille makes a good case for why liberals need to abandon the destructive (and ineffectual) identity politics, pitting groups against each other, and return to a vision of a common good and common responsibilities across all American citizens and all groups.

I certainly hope a new young Millennial crop of liberals will read it and learn from it. That is the current best hope for liberals in America.

Recommended: The Liberal Crackup

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, and a liberal, has an outstanding article in today's Wall Street Journal, The Liberal Crackup. It is adapted from his forthcoming book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identify Politics. (to be published next week).

The article is complex and nuanced, and very good, but at its core Lilla argues that Democrats had a solid following when they emphasized the "We", the common concerns we all have as citizens that brings us all together. They began losing when they went to identity politics and began emphasizing our differences. The essay traces the history of that shift from the 60s and the effect it has had, for example, on academia, the new (and unsatisfactory) training ground for liberals.  Lilla is an optimist - he thinks liberals will eventually abandon identity politics and get back to their real strengths, emphasizing the commonality of all Americans. I hope he is right, but I am not so optimistic, because the new crop of young liberals has been raised, especially in their college experiences, with an entirely different and much more self-centered world view.

I have pre-ordered his book, which, based on this essay, promises to be very good indeed.

Despair

I have a liberal friend who is in despair about the presidency of Donald Trump. I also have a theory about worry: there are always real things to worry about, but more often than not we end up worrying about the wrong thing rather than what turns out to have been the right thing, so worry is just a waste of time and energy. Of course the congenital worriers in my family don’t find this argument persuasive.

But let me suggest that the same line of thinking applies to despair.  If one is really committed to being in despair I would argue that the real thing liberals ought to be in despair about is not President Trump, but the sorry state of their own political party, that was so incompetent as to put up a candidate as flawed and tainted as Hillary, and then ignore the very voter block she most needed to win. Liberal values need a strong representational voice. American politics needs two healthy political parties to keep each other in check. The current Democratic Party is neither of those things.

Liberals have spent the first six months of this administration whining like spoiled children, with little or no realistic self-examination, no realistic postmortems to try to understand why they lost, and no strategic thinking about the future. Now, after months of intense consultation, polling and focus-group testing, they have finally come out with a new slogan “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future.”   As one observer wrote, the new slogan channels the Papa John's Pizza slogan (“Better pizza; better ingredients”), or as another put it: "The Democrats' new slogan is like a bad pizza slice slathered with 40-year-old ingredients and almost no meat."

Notice they went first for a new slogan, not a rethink of their policies, not new plans to address the problems of the nation, not a strategy for winning local offices, not the outline of a way to address the distress of working Americans. That is what the party is reduced to, thinking up slogans, and they are not even very good at that. And this isn’t likely to change so long as the old guard is running the party. Things aren’t likely to look up until/unless the old guard (Pelosi, Sanders, Warren, etc) gets displaced by young new Millennium blood.

So if you must be in despair, be in despair that liberals currently don't have a political party which can effectively represent liberal values, and can win local and national offices to put them into practice.

Recommended: Dream Hoarders

There is lots of fuss being made about how the top 1% in this country  - that is, someone else - are unfairly outpacing the rest of the country in wealth and power. But Richard Reeves has a new book out, The Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust that argues, with good evidence, that it isn't "them" - the 1% - that is a problem, but "us" - the upper middle class top 20%, mostly the very people who read and write blogs like this one - that is really the problem.


Upper middle class for Reeves are roughly families with incomes above $112,000 per year, professional-managerial, college educated (often with advanced degrees as well), often two-income.  He shows that there is very little movement, over time or over generations, into or out of this class, because this class protects its position. As he points out, the liberal politicians and media and activists all talk a lot about promoting more social mobility, but when push comes to shove they - who are almost all members of this class - aren't about to let any of their own children be displaced by social mobility.

Reeves suggests solutions to this problem, but as he points out, for anyone to move into the top 20% class, someone has to move out.  For anyone from a "lower class"to get a coveted admission spot in an elite college, someone else has to lose that spot.  For anyone from a "lower class" to get that coveted internship, someone else has to lose it. And the upper middle class - with the wealth and political power and connections -  isn't about to let their own kids be the ones to lose out.

An interesting book, probably not terrible comfortable for most of its readers.

Recommended: Strangers In Their Own Land

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a leading sociologist, author of a number of books about class and social structure, and her latest book is Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.  A liberal academic who teaches at Berkeley, she set out to cross what she calls the "empathy wall" and try to understand how the world looks to the political right, to the conservative people who support groups like the Tea Party. And she did it by going to Louisiana and meeting and befriending and listening to (as opposed to lecturing) working people there, and really trying to understand how they got their their views, and how the world looks to them. And in fact she succeeds, and the view she uncovers - she calls it the "deep story", the emotionally powerful world view that shapes everyone's thinking - makes it clear why the right doesn't trust government and is in revolt.  And frankly, seen from their point of view, I don't blame them.

This is a terribly important book that a lot more liberals ought to be reading if they would like to better understand why Democrats have been losing elections at the local, state and federal level for the past decade - and may continue to lose - and why Trump could win the presidency.