Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1113 Editor's Choice: 106
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LBS on critique
[Read the article: Schumer: Arrogance or impotence?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... And these 'left wing' thinkers are exactly the ones who we needed to listen to in the first place and need to listen to.
I hope I understand you correctly. Let me know if I don't.
Well, it seems to me that the once-shunned views of progressives who from the start viewed the Bush regime as particularly, dangerously radical are increasingly being accepted by more putatively sober-minded, moderate liberals. So that's great.
My critique has more to do with a larger trend, and what I think to be a more fundamental and permanent failing on the part of most liberal thinking.
To the extent that every Republican administration in the last quarter century has subscribed to a coherent, corporatist, and fundamentally criminal ethos — you might call it the Reagan Epoch — moderate liberals have had a very hard time grasping what's going on around them.
Yes, there were liberals in politics, policymaking, and the press who have criticized radical right-wing policies, and that includes Salon's criticism of Bush's Iraq war.
But fundamentally the criticism has been ad hoc reaction, and has been accompanied by a general unwillingness on the part of the liberal political and intellectual establishment to aggressively deconstruct the fallacies of modern right-wing mythology.
The effect of this failure has been that liberals themselves are perpetually caught up in this bizarre right-wing master narrative. Liberals have forgotten, or could never parse, the massive differences in how Democrats and Republicans handled and failed to handle, respectively, the end of the Cold War; or Clinton's years of active and effective intelligence work in countering al Qaeda; or the urgently, immediately apparent insanity of the Bush regime's earliest foreign and domestic policies. Talk to most (ostensibly) educated liberals about these things and their eyes glaze over. They have no idea what you mean.
This is taking things back much further than Bush, of course, and further than Salon. But that's part of my point — the events of the past few years are only the most egregious, and belatedly alarming, end of a larger phenomenon. Moderate liberals somehow lacked the basic grasp of globalism that would have led them to embrace their more progressive cousins' anti-"free trade" views during the 1990s, in much the same way that they couldn't see their way to supporting the aggressive, confrontational stance of the anti-war movement. It amazes me how few liberals seem to remember the assassination attempts against Clinton, for example, or Desert Fox, or the perfidious arms-for-hostages deal that got Reagan the White House in the first place. They've forgotten how long the insane craziness of the right wing has been going on, and how timidly the liberal establishment has sat by at every turn. Literally forgotten.
So where did this deracination of American liberalism begin? If liberals were writing a letter to "Since You Asked", Cary Tennis might inquire what purpose it's served liberals to be so enthralled by the right-wing discursive regime, and so ineffectual in applying basic good judgment to the issues of our time.
I don't know the answers, but I think that it is very important to find out. Until we do, liberals in this country won't really understand what happened to them and their mode of thought, and will fail again at the next test.
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Experience
[Read the article: Sizing up the Democratic race so far]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One thing that stands out in Joan Walsh's nicely-expressed summary of the Democratic primary race is the extent to which the candidates' own level of national campaign experience is still such a huge factor.
Clinton has been through 2 presidential campaigns already, and it shows. Edwards isn't quite the veteran she is but he still seems to know how to manage his campaign, stay on message, take opportunities when he can, and so on.
The others? Not so much. Obama is doing extraordinarily well for someone with his lack of experience but as Walsh implies his early sprint appears to be petering out as the campaign becomes more of an endurance contest — not just in the traditional budgetary sense, where of course Obama excels, but in the sense of the ability to stay moving day after day and not tire, stumble, and lose focus.
None of that is to say that the candidate who runs the best campaign is the best for the party, or the country. But experience provides a definite edge that all the money an exuberance can't make up for, and that principle is what's on stark display right now.
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Misunderstanding About Wages
[Read the article: Where have all the line technicians gone?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I know everyone learned in grade school that in a free-market economy you get paid according to the value of your labor — but Andrew Leonard documents an excellent example here of where that mistaken idea falls down.
The thing is, you get paid for your labor in a free market according to how easy you are to replace, not the actual value of the work you do. As barriers to entry in skilled blue-collar work increase, so must wages. Likewise, as workers come to have (or for reasons of systemic instability need to preserve) more options, it becomes harder to find people willing to train for and accept jobs without portable skillsets. It's a pretty simple relationship, and it doesn't have to do with the "popularity" of certain careers.
There is, of course, a corollary to that principle. You can keep current wages steady, but you have to remove some of the existing barriers to entry or recruit workers who don't have other options.
Or do both at the same time. If the telcos guaranteed green card sponsorship and subsidy for training, no strings attached, plus an above-board $60k a year job on completion, there are no end of guys in my town who would line up around the block to become phone company line workers (and taxpaying legal residents).
You could solve the problem in an afternoon (plus a couple of years to get people through the training regimen). The question to ask is, why aren't the telcos doing it?