Things to Read at Nighttime on April 25, 2014
Must-Reads:
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Jonathan Chait: Piketty, Oligarchy, and Conservative Evasion: “Every so often, a right-winger billionaire will go on an epic public rant against class warfare, populism, and the depredations of the Democratic soak-the-rich tax agenda. But such rants are noteworthy not only for their hilarious lack of self-awareness and uncomfortable tendency to invoke Adolph Hitler, but for their sheer discordance with the rest of the Republican message. The GOP obviously does not want its public face to be filthy rich men wallowing in self-pity…. The sudden popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has again thrust conservatives into the pseudo-populist defensive stance…. David Brooks’s column today… a wilder essay/rant by Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti. Brooks (not for the first time) suggests that the liberal concern over inequality is driven by liberal elites, who are prestigious and wealthy, but less wealthy than the hedge-fund titans with whom they regularly interact, and against whose riches they bristle with resentment…. Continetti, meanwhile, brings up Piketty only to argue that the true oligarchs in America are the liberals…. What both have in common is a myopic focus on the sociological identity of Democratic elites…. In fact, American politics revolves around a policy dispute that carries massive repercussions for inequality…. Neither Brooks nor Continetti mentions any of these things. For all the demented paranoia of Tom Perkins, Ken Langone, Charles Koch, and the like, at least they are willing to acknowledge the basic class contours of the struggle in which they’re engaged…”
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Adam Bonica and Jenny Shen: The rich are dominating campaigns. Here’s why that’s about to get worse
Should-Reads:
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Jonathan Chait: Is the Rising Democratic Majority Doomed?: “The Emerging Democratic Majority [thesis] has been met with a series of objections, most of which have either been confounded or made no sense to begin with…. My belief… is that conservatism as we know it is doomed… the virulent opposition to the welfare state we see here is almost completely unique among major conservative parties…. America’s unique brand of ideological anti-statism is historically inseparable (as I recently argued) from the legacy of slavery. Whatever form America’s polyglot majority ultimately takes, it is hard to see the basis for its attraction to an ideology sociologically rooted in white supremacy…. Speculation… should give way to a recognition of the seismic changes already underway…”
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Gillian Tett: “Last week, I watched something rather peculiar… earnest American economists met to ponder a 577-page tract on inequality and tax policy by Thomas Piketty…. But instead of simply meeting in sombre, academic isolation, the event was so wildly popular that tickets for it sold out…. I suspect that the real reason for Piketty’s rock-star reception is not the quality of his numbers but the fact that he has forced Americans to confront a growing sense of cognitive dissonance…. The country’s founding fathers created the nation, they proudly believed they had rejected Europe’s tradition of inherited aristocracy and rentier wealth…. Piketty’s book shows that this dream is increasingly a myth…. That does not mean the elite will accept his analysis; on the contrary, rightwing commentators have attacked him…. But, if nothing else, Piketty’s work touches a very raw nerve about the reality of the modern American dream…”
Should Be Aware of:
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Art-and-Politics: “My practical experience is that the artist’s work can’t be divided from the artist’s politics…. Readers will judge the politics. There’s no way to keep that from happening. They may perceive it as (for instance) the difference between a strikingly original, a satisfactory, and a cop-out ending, but they will judge. I can’t see that as wholly bad. Here’s an example: I hate it when a promising skiffy book ends with that stupid mainstream thing about how there can never be new answers to old problems, so for those trying to transcend the old answer set, it comes down to a choice between madness and death. Bleah! I want the ending where the character invents a completely unanticipated third answer in a cave, from a box of scraps. I won’t take it well if someone tells me I have to believe a madness-or-death dichotomy ending is just as good as, or superior to, a wildly-different-third-answer ending, because the madness-or-death ending is characteristic of the author’s worldview. I can at most learn to see and understand that that ending grows out of a particular set of beliefs (which it does)…. Enough bad causality makes a dent in my reading pleasure. The only general solution I know is to become a better reader…”
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David Brooks: The Piketty Phenomenon – NYTimes.com: “Progressives have found their worldview and their agenda. This move opens up a huge opportunity for… the right. First, acknowledge that the concentration of wealth is a concern with a beefed up inheritance tax. Second, emphasize a contrasting agenda that will reward growth, saving and investment…. Support progressive consumption taxes not a tax on capital. Third, emphasize that the historically proven way to reduce inequality is lifting people from the bottom with human capital reform, not pushing down the top. In short, counter angry progressivism with unifying uplift. The reaction to Piketty is an amazing cultural phenomenon. But it says more about class rivalry within the educated classes than it does about how to really expand opportunity. Of course, this perspective could just be my own prejudice. When it comes to cultural analysis, I, like Piketty, am quasi-Marxist…”
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