More dismal than Ayn Rand? "Meet the Hidden Architect Behind America's Racist Economics."

Photo credit: Slate.

Meet the man credited with public choice theory -- which means being given little real choice when it comes to oligarchs keeping you down for their further enrichment.

Meet the Hidden Architect Behind America's Racist Economics, by Lynn Parramore (Institute for New Economic Thinking)

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back ...

Independence Day? Two, with pleasure: "The only Founding Father worth honoring this 4th of July is Thomas Paine."

It's a long read, and this is a short excerpt. It's worth your time.

Why? Because July 4 makes me feel radical and revolutionary, and it's never too late to make good on promises deferred, especially in 2020 (see Pierce, Charles P. for more).

There's still a chance to bust this sucker wide open, folks. For more on the topic, see "Happy Birthday, America!" by Ricky L. Jones in a past issue of LEO Weekly.

Reading Paine From the Left, by Sean Monahan (Jacobin)

Though embraced by the likes of Glenn Beck, Thomas Paine was the American Revolution's most radical figure.

 ... Paine was a consistent advocate of a strong federal government and also a sharp critic of economic inequality and poverty who designed the world’s first fully fleshed-out scheme of social welfare provision. Beyond that, he introduced millions to a radical critique of private property and class society, and pointed to democratic politics as the solution.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, while ruling classes were cursing Paine’s name from pulpits and palaces, the growing radical workers’ movements were toasting to his memory and reprinting his works. The Irish Republicans, the Chartists of England, and the early American labor movement all lauded Paine and his ideas echoed across Europe in the Revolutions of 1848. For generations, the revolutionary’s birthday was celebrated every January 29 by fledgling trade union and socialist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, who regarded Paine as one of their intellectual fathers and a role model for democratic revolutionaries.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the only Americans who dared to openly claim Thomas Paine for their own were radical trade unionists, freethinkers, abolitionists, and socialists. As John Nichols points out, in 1856 the New York Times warned that the “many socialist Painites . . . and their affiliation to every species of radicalism in the land boded evil to the future of our republic.”

The Prussian Forty-Eighter, disciple of Karl Marx, and Civil War Union Army Gen. August Willich praised Paine’s radical criticisms of authority at dozens of the birthday celebrations held by radical German-American organizations. Eugene Debs too was an open Painite, and at his trial for sedition for publicly opposing World War I, he cited Paine’s declaration, “My country is the world. To do good is my religion” as a model of the “wider patriotism” that he espoused.

As Harvey Kaye observes, the Communist Party published a collection of Paine’s writings in 1937, and hailed him as the “foremost fighter for world democracy,” the “chief propagandist and agitator of the revolution,” and a visionary radical who saw “beyond the limits of the bourgeois revolution,” attacked the “accumulation of property,” and proposed a “system of social insurance.”

Paine was at the center of two of the great democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century — the American and the French. (Beyond that, though he found the violence of the Haitian Revolution “distressing,” he considered it “the natural consequence of slavery,” which should “be expected everywhere.”)

Not only was he a central personality in the “age of revolutions,” he was one of the first radicals to connect the cause of political democracy to economic demands. Because of that, he was touted as a champion not only of the rights of the commoners against aristocracy, but, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “the radical-democratic aspirations of small artisans and pauperized craftsmen” against the owners of property ...

Reich: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

"I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system – I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause."
-- Robert Reich

I'm confused. Reich's analysis appears to be broadly correct, but nonetheless, I still feel the pressing need to take a shower. I asked Jeff Gillenwater for his thoughts.

Yes. A few quibbles - marking the erroneous white working class bit again - but generally correct. An overwhelming majority of “professionals” are complicit, hoarding opportunities and not standing up while outwardly claiming to be very liberal just as long as the financial and social order favors them. As a country, we’re not in overall possession of the self-awareness, intelligence, and fortitude to own up to that. While actual discrimination remains a serious problem, much of the virtue signaling lately serves the same role as “but I have a black friend” did previously. It’s more cover than impetus for genuine self-reflection within realistic social and economic frameworks.

Reich says: "Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement."

And, as I write, these same Democrats are frantically undermining radical democratic reform in a desperate attempt to install a fully complicit nitwit like Joe Biden as the party's candidate.

The Democratic Party's engorged elites never learn; on second thought, that's a redundancy.

Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump, by Robert Reich (The Guardian)

... In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’ magnetism or Trump’s likeability
Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism”.

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement ...

Paging Chris "Ed Anger" Morris: "Reactionaries Call the Green New Deal ‘Radical,’ Like That’s a Bad Thing."

By now we know the Green New Deal is to be Super McConnell-sized, which should come as no surprise. Meanwhile the Tom May Bugle's Chris Morris is still trying to remember exactly what to call it.

In finding Chris Morris' Green Deal (sic) "oops-ed" to be disinformative, misinformative, objectionable and dismissive, our guest columnist is being charitable.

Amid the local chain newspaper's race to the bottom, here's a welcome round of rejoinder.

Reactionaries Call the Green New Deal ‘Radical,’ Like That’s a Bad Thing, by John Nichols (The Nation)

Supporters of action on climate change must borrow a page from FDR by laughing off critics—recognizing that there are times when we must indeed be radical.

Republicans in Congress say the Green New Deal is “radical.” Excellent!

Even before a historic congressional resolution to address climate change and create jobs was introduced last week—in the House by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with backing from Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal and in the Senate by Ed Markey with backing from Democratic presidential prospects such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Jeff Merkley—the Republicans pounced.

The reactionaries who represent the nation’s fossil-fuel industries griped that the Green New Deal would negatively impact their paymasters.

“As Democrats take a hard left turn, this radical proposal would take our growing economy off the cliff and our nation into bankruptcy,” cried Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chair John Barrasso (R-WY). “It’s the first step down a dark path to socialism.” Illinois Republican John Shimkus, the ranking member on the Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, decried “radical policies like the Green New Deal.”

“The climate crisis is a problem of epic proportions that requires a level of ambition just as big.” —League of Conservation Voters

Thank you, Senator Barasso. Thank you, Congressman Shimkus. Thanks to all the reactionary Republicans and docile Democrats who are doing their best to portray the Green New Deal as “radical.” Please, please keep it up.

Climate change represents a stark threat to the planet and the people who inhabit it. When Pocan says “we can’t afford to wait any longer and need to take action on climate change,” he’s right. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that dramatic action will be required over the next 12 years to avert environmental and economic disaster.

“The climate crisis is a problem of epic proportions that requires a level of ambition just as big,” explains League of Conservation Voters president Gene Karpinski. “This is an all hands-on-deck moment, and now is the time to challenge ourselves as never before.”

Denial won’t cut it anymore. Nor will the half-steps of those who acknowledge the crisis but refuse to respond in sufficient measure. “Even the solutions that we have considered big and bold are nowhere near the scale of the actual problem that climate change presents to us, to our country, to the world,” explains Ocasio-Cortez.

So a radical solution is called for. No one should make apologies for recognizing this necessity. Radical change goes to the root of the problem and addresses it. The details of the Green New Deal are up for debate, as were the details of the original New Deal. FDR taught us that responses to historic challenges develop as an understanding of crises evolves and a real sense of urgency takes hold.

Wisconsin State Representative Greta Neubauer, who worked as a fellow with 350.org and as director of the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network before her election, says that what matters now is an understanding of the need to advance an ambitious program “that provides living wage jobs and protects our environment ...”

Paine & Pleasure, Part 1: "The only Founding Father worth honoring this 4th of July is Thomas Paine."

It's a long read, and this is a short excerpt. It's worth your time, and will be followed by the second part, an old column of mine that includes a passage about Paine.

Why? Because July 4 makes me feel radical and revolutionary, and it's not too late to make good on promises deferred. For more on this topic, see "Happy Birthday, America!" by Ricky L. Jones in the current issue of LEO Weekly.

Reading Paine From the Left, by Sean Monahan (Jacobin)

Though embraced by the likes of Glenn Beck, Thomas Paine was the American Revolution's most radical figure.

 ... Paine was a consistent advocate of a strong federal government and also a sharp critic of economic inequality and poverty who designed the world’s first fully fleshed-out scheme of social welfare provision. Beyond that, he introduced millions to a radical critique of private property and class society, and pointed to democratic politics as the solution.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, while ruling classes were cursing Paine’s name from pulpits and palaces, the growing radical workers’ movements were toasting to his memory and reprinting his works. The Irish Republicans, the Chartists of England, and the early American labor movement all lauded Paine and his ideas echoed across Europe in the Revolutions of 1848. For generations, the revolutionary’s birthday was celebrated every January 29 by fledgling trade union and socialist movements on both sides of the Atlantic, who regarded Paine as one of their intellectual fathers and a role model for democratic revolutionaries.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the only Americans who dared to openly claim Thomas Paine for their own were radical trade unionists, freethinkers, abolitionists, and socialists. As John Nichols points out, in 1856 the New York Times warned that the “many socialist Painites . . . and their affiliation to every species of radicalism in the land boded evil to the future of our republic.”

The Prussian Forty-Eighter, disciple of Karl Marx, and Civil War Union Army Gen. August Willich praised Paine’s radical criticisms of authority at dozens of the birthday celebrations held by radical German-American organizations. Eugene Debs too was an open Painite, and at his trial for sedition for publicly opposing World War I, he cited Paine’s declaration, “My country is the world. To do good is my religion” as a model of the “wider patriotism” that he espoused.

As Harvey Kaye observes, the Communist Party published a collection of Paine’s writings in 1937, and hailed him as the “foremost fighter for world democracy,” the “chief propagandist and agitator of the revolution,” and a visionary radical who saw “beyond the limits of the bourgeois revolution,” attacked the “accumulation of property,” and proposed a “system of social insurance.”

Paine was at the center of two of the great democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century — the American and the French. (Beyond that, though he found the violence of the Haitian Revolution “distressing,” he considered it “the natural consequence of slavery,” which should “be expected everywhere.”)

Not only was he a central personality in the “age of revolutions,” he was one of the first radicals to connect the cause of political democracy to economic demands. Because of that, he was touted as a champion not only of the rights of the commoners against aristocracy, but, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “the radical-democratic aspirations of small artisans and pauperized craftsmen” against the owners of property ...

"Meanwhile capitalism does what it does — mostly unabated — and inequality once again becomes the scourge of our times."

The book is Radicals in America: The US Left Since the Second World War, by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps. I have not read the book, although maybe there'll be time to do so soon, but the point of mentioning it, and excerpting the final section of Hartman's assessment, is to draw a line in the anchor crosswalks.

Hartman's essay is comprehensible to me. In short, I know what he's talking about, and referring to. If you're running for local office as a Democrat, and ask me for my vote, I'll be asking you to display a working knowledge of the history recounted by Hartman. It's as simple as that.

If you can't, then off my porch you'll be going.

It's not about expressing lockstep agreement; it's about being familiar with the material. If you're identifying as a Democrat, then I need to know where you stand in the context of what's being discussed in books like this.

As a Democratic candidate for office, if you can't comment sensibly about matters like this, you're wasting my time.

Got it?

Beyond the Whack-a-Mole Left, by Andrew Hartman (Jacobin)

Though often condemned to the fringes of American political life, the radical left has changed the course of US history.

 ... Brick and Phelps are not entirely without hope. They point to “green shoots,” including the millennial embrace of socialism, which since their book was published has gained political force through the Sanders campaign.

But grizzled historians that they are, Brick and Phelps remain skeptical that a movement capable of a mainstream left-wing revival is visible:

If new layers of youth had come to see capitalism as unstable, destructive, and inequitable, how to connect that observation to imaginative political practice, how to challenge the established order and offer plausible visions of a better future that popular movements can bring into being — in other words, how to move from margin to mainstream — remained opaque.

In spite of their pessimism, Radicals in America highlights some left-wing successes — with the qualification that “radicalism becomes invisible, paradoxically, in its victories.” One such invisible victory — the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which protects the rights of a previously excluded group of Americans — occurred due to radical organizing and protest.

But one of the reasons left-wing successes like the ADA feel so fleeting is because their effects seem far removed from the labor question that informed a more cohesive American left before 1945.

When it comes to the question of labor — or, more accurately, when it comes to class struggle — the Right is winning. The Left’s invisible victories need to be understood alongside this perplexing fact. As Brick and Phelps write in their shrewd conclusion:

Following the high point of the cascading radicalizations that ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, American political history shows two seemingly antithetical trends: one conservative, toward growing inequality, weakened unions, and an emphasis on private, market relations as a way of life; the other liberalizing, toward greater participation by women and people of color in most aspects of social, economic, and political leadership and a dramatic easing of sexual proscription to make gay and lesbian identities more legitimate.

There is an enormous difference between “liberalizing social relations,” which radicals can chalk up as a victory, and “democratizing and equalizing social relations,” which the Left has failed miserably at achieving. As Brick and Phelps rhetorically ask:

What does it mean that anyone of color can sit in the front of the bus, for example, or that it contains a wheelchair lift, if buses, heavily used by the working poor and elderly, now come with much less frequency and at greater cost to riders because of privatizations and cuts to public transit budgets?

Radicals in America offers a powerful history of how the Left has both succeeded and failed to bring its views into the center of American political life. The fight for gay marriage is a prime example of how once-radical ideas can become widely accepted.

But to make victories like these more substantive and widely shared, we need a broad socialist movement in the United States. Our task is to bring that marginalized idea into the mainstream.

Liberalism, radicalism, our ineffectual Democrats, Gahan's public housing Kool-Aid and Hoosier Action -- not necessarily in that order.

Loudest damn crickets I can recall.

It's probably not impossible for liberals to morph into radicals, though it surely can't happen until liberals are ready to sacrifice an element of material comfort for the sake of whatever revolution we're talking about. Being a radical means you might win, and you might lose; either way, something changes.

Is Donald Trump Turning Liberals Into Radicals?, by Sarah Leonard (New York Times)

On Nov. 9, 2016, millions of Americans woke up with a crushing sense that something was terribly wrong with their country.

Donald Trump’s election inspired such moral revulsion and political outrage that by that afternoon, parts of the American electorate had taken to calling themselves “the resistance,” evoking the guerrillas who took to the hills and fought the Nazis during World War II. Just a day before, many of these same people were enthusiastically casting their ballots for a centrist Democrat; suddenly they were self-styled revolutionaries.

The day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration saw enormous protests across the country that incorporated a panoply of groups and interests. For those of us on the left, the millions of protesters in pink hats and the dads toting funny signs was a promising sight: Could this be the moment that liberals were converted into radicals?

This point cannot be stressed and repeated often enough: "Inequality’s staggering growth shows no signs of stopping."

Mr. Trump — like right-wing populists across Europe — rode into power on waves of discontent with unaccountable globalization and growing inequality that have increased even under liberal and social-democratic parties. As the French economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated in “Capital in the 21st Century,” inequality’s staggering growth shows no signs of stopping. And it’s pulling democracy apart at the seams; no one but the rich feels represented.

The failure of the Democratic Party to reverse this over the past 40 years can’t be overstated, which is precisely why the resistance cannot just be about getting Democrats elected.

Especially here in New Gahania, where the words "Democrat" and "resistance" are diametrically opposed concepts. Want to know why I chose not to block Kool-Aid?

Because if I did, there'd be no more Floyd County Democratic Party infomercials.

Local Democrats apparently are unaware of staggering inequality, because if they were, more than a handful of the better informed among them would be holding Dear Leader's personality cult to the fire, because for an allegedly Democratic mayor to be waging war against affordable housing and the community's less fortunate isn't tremendously democratic, is it?

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Agoraphobia with a peniaphobic chaser, or the drunkenness of a sociopath's power.

Returning to Leonard's essay, we are referred to a phenomenon of interest in this context.

THE ELECTION HAS GALVANIZED activists of all kinds. After Hillary Clinton’s poor performance with working-class white voters, many on the left have realized that this constituency deserves more of its attention. I spoke recently to Kate Hess Pace, who founded Hoosier Action in her home state of Indiana, a membership organization for working-class Indianans who, with the decline of unions, have few ways of influencing politics. The group has brought members to Washington to lobby their senators on health care, among other actions. Ms. Pace says that most of the people she talks to in Indiana don’t hate Democrats or Republicans, but “outsiders,” people in Washington who have caused their state’s decline.

Some new members of the resistance may have people they can turn to easily for guidance: their kids. The radical movements calling attention to inequality and racism well before Mr. Trump’s election — from Occupy to the movement for black lives to a growing interest in socialism to the Dreamers protests — have been driven by millennials. And these movements are eager to grow.

Indeed, we've already been introduced.

Meet WE ARE NEW ALBANY, and tell Jeff Gahan: No demolition of public housing without a plan to replace!

I’ll keep asking local Democrats about their cognitive dissonance. They’ll keep not answering. The Jeffrey's got the Kool-Aid, all right -- but I think the raging hypocrisy will begin nagging at those Democrats with a conscience. They're there.

They just need to regain control of Gahan's sinking ship.

Sunday thinking: "Islamic Extremism Is Not the Root Cause of Europe’s Terror Problem."

The problem is “not the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism.”
-- Olivier Roy

In America, we have BOTH kinds of glib explanation: Black or White. Perhaps the only reason I continue to link to articles like this one is the entertainment value of being called out by local "Christians," who advise me that it doesn't matter -- just kill 'em all, and let the Christian "god" sort it out.

Islamic Extremism Is Not the Root Cause of Europe’s Terror Problem; European elites have a “youth revolt” on their hands, by Joshua Holland (The Nation)

 ... There’s a lot of focus on radical theology, and not enough on the conditions that allow it to take hold. European law enforcement, says Ahmed, “are analyzing this through the prism of theology. They’re studying the Koran for explanations, but what we’re seeing is nothing more than disaffected, disenchanted, illiterate young people who are not adjusting to society. Look at these young idiots who are blowing things up—they’re looking at ISIS videos with a beer in one hand and a joint in the other.”