Optimism, Pessimism, and Hypocrisy

Maintaining the image of two alien races, unable to even ponder learning from each other, a site maintained by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called “Red Feed, Blue Feed” claims to present Liberal Facebook vs Conservative Facebook rants side by side… and let YOU decide! 

At a glance, it clearly supports the Fox narrative, that we must choose between extreme narratives(!!!) And heaven-forbid actually negotiating with each other, finding middle ground like adults. 

This dichotomy-of-demonization is how politics -- one of our civilization's key problem-solving methods, along with free markets and individual endeavor -- has been deliberately killed in the United States. And it reveals the foremost (among many) reason why Rupert Murdoch is the principle enemy of any calm, rational and grownup American republic.

Let me restate that to be clear. If you believe the sole Murdochian agenda is to support an ever-more extreme confederate right-wing, then you only perceive the surface. Sure, the lobotomization of American conservatism commanded by Rupert and Clear Channel svengalis certainly did lead to today's frothing, hydrophobic GOP phenomenon. 

But no. The actual purpose is made clear by Red Feed, Blue Feed.

To destroy politics as an pragmatic, grownup American approach to negotiating and resolving new solutions to onrushing 21st Century problems. Stop focusing only on surfaces and slogans! Look at the actual, actual effects.   

The opposite of the Murdochs is not eloi liberalism, that is now rife with its own cynical dogmatists.  The opposite of crippling pessimism is...

When Did Optimism Become Uncool? In the New York Times, Gregg Easterbrook, author of “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse,” points out the corner into which we’ve painted ourselves, emphasizing and exaggerating bad news while frenetically ignoring any good. An irony since the latter arguably far outweighs the former. 

Subjectively - to heed all the carping and grousing from every end of the spectrum - we are in terrible times, with a “glass” that is nearly empty. Objectively, the glass turns out to be significantly more than half full.

Easterbrook writes, “Job growth has been strong for five years, with unemployment now below where it was for most of the 1990s, a period some extol as the “good old days.” The American economy is No. 1 by a huge margin, larger than Nos. 2 and 3 (China and Japan) combined. Americans are seven times as productive, per capita, as Chinese citizens. The dollar is the currency the world craves — which means other countries perceive America’s long-term prospects as very good.

“Pollution, discrimination, crime and most diseases are in an extended decline; living standards, longevity and education levels continue to rise. The American military is not only the world’s strongest, it is the strongest ever. The United States leads the world in science and engineering, in business innovation, in every aspect of creativity, including the arts. Terrorism is a serious concern, but in the last 15 years, even taking into account Sept. 11, an American is five times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be killed by a terrorist.

"Is the middle class in dire straits, as Mr. Sanders contends? Yes, inflation-adjusted middle-class household income peaked in 1998 and has dropped slightly since. But during the same period, federal income taxes on the middle class went down, while benefits went up. Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution has shown that when lower taxes and higher benefits are factored in, middle-class buying power has risen 36 percent in the current generation.

“Is American manufacturing in free fall, as Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump assert? Figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show industrial output a tad below an all-time record level, while nearly double the output of the Reagan presidency, another supposed golden age. It’s just that advancing technology allows more manufacturing with fewer workers — a change unrelated to foreign competition.”

To be clear, while I agree with most of Easterbrook’s points, and even with much of what the king of optimism - Peter Diamandis - says in his book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, that does not make me a Pollyanna without deep and fretful worries!

  It is not their lack of purchasing power that is demolishing the American middle class, but their perception that they’ve lost their central standing in American life.  To Trump supporters, the blame falls on rising immigrants.  To anyone sensible, it is blatantly because an uber-oligarchy has seized the reins, using lies like Supply Side “economics” to justify their hell-bent drive toward feudalism.

To re-parse Easterbrook’s point, things aren’t anywhere near as bad as we’re saying in mass media today… but they are nowhere near as good as they’d be if, say, high-velocity money were circulating through excellent middle class jobs repairing a decaying U.S. infrastructure… a flow vastly more (obviously) beneficial than trillions in outright gifts to the rich have been, since Reagan. 

And of course, that is exactly why the Republican Congress refuses to fund infrastructure repair.

Read the original article. Especially where Easterbrook lays into liberals for buying into these sick-alluring pessimism trips: “while addressing issues such as inequality, greenhouse emissions and the condition of public schools — will require optimism. Pessimists think in terms of rear-guard actions to turn back the clock. Optimists understand that where the nation has faults, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”

Easterbrook concludes, “The lack of optimism in contemporary liberal and centrist thinking opens the door to Trump-style demagogy, since if the country really is going to hell, we do indeed need walls. 

"And because optimism has lost its standing in American public opinion, past reforms — among them environmental protection, anti-discrimination initiatives, income security for seniors, auto and aviation safety, interconnected global economics, improved policing and yes, Obamacare — don’t get credit for the good they have accomplished.”

Recently Warren Buffett said that because of the “negative drumbeat” of politics, “many Americans now believe their children will not live as well as they themselves do. That view is dead wrong: The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.”

Of course, one of the key books to arm you simmering optimists, so that you can finally rise up in rage and take back civilization from cynics of both right and left, is Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  You will come away filled with righteous wrath against those who are weakening our can-do spirit, just when humanity seems on the verge of solving so many problems.

Oh, and a final note for this section: Nicolas Gruen on Adam Smith: “Smith was the original theorist of my subject—emergent public goods—explaining how language, culture and markets are all public goods; how they are an emergent property of life itself.  (Later, by design, we got) new largely government provided public goods enhancing public order, financial stability, scientific knowledge, public health, transport , communications and standards like weights and measures.” - Nicholas Gruen is Head of Lateral Economics, based in Melbourne. 

== Those who thrive on ultimate pessimism ==

I’ve long maintained that we should encourage the “henchman effect”… where villainous cabals are ruined from within, when some lackey gets fed-up and decides to tell-all. The Panama Papers leak is a major recent example.  Many would cite Edward Snowden. Better legislation could entice whistleblowers down pathways that both protect and offer the benefits of orderly due process.

Is the Alt-Right for real? The latest example worth pondering came when Colin Lokey confessed to Bloomberg that he had been running a supposedly populist online site called Zero Hedge that was actually a front for two wealthy financial analysts.  “Lokey was required to push certain basics: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” 

For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies. (e.g. “Putin Is Winning the Final Chess Match with Obama.”)  In other words, ballsy-blatant propaganda to discourage citizens believing in themselves or our democratic Great Experiment.

(In fact, this cult of Putin-worship is hilarious.) 

This article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells (from the New Yorker) talks about the layers under Zero-Hedge. Uber-rich dudes who got their lucre parasitically, attempting to rile the rabble while skulking behind a populist mask, with Lokey as their ghost-writer… all of it in a core element of the movement that’s been called “alt-right” — which cranks the Limbaugh-Fox ethos to Trumpist levels and then beyond, to open and overt racism. Alt-right exists mostly online, and so it is shrouded in pseudonyms, but I know some of them personally and have found that their agenda goes all the way to weird — not just contempt for democracy and all its tainted works, but nostalgia for royalty! Yes, for kings n’ such.

The article hits things on the head, when it blames some of the raging assholery on a giggling eagerness to discover what they can get away with, like extolling Holocaust themes. But the drives go deeper. Both bored and resentful of the generous, gentle civilization that gave them everything, these fellows go beyond insipid ingratitude and hatred of fact-based innovations like science. Their deepest motivation is masturbatory fantasy. Knowing that a few males in the past got such things, they envision themselves owning harems, and draw consolation by declaring hatred of the kindliness and generosity they grew up in, but that now prevents them from enslaving nubile females and getting their due.

Of course, anyone who has met some of these fellows knows the truth.  That none of them would be post-apocalyptic kings… or top dogs in a dog-eat-dog world. Nor would they even likely become bitches. In truth, only one word describes what their role would be, these pimply-dreamy-whining ingrates.  Kibble.

And more....

Abortion rates have dropped dramatically in the past 25 years to historic lows in wealthy countries, but dipped only slightly in poorer developing nations, according to a global study published recently.  In other words… if you generously help to uplift poor women, the problem begins to solve itself. Educated and confident and empowered, they need or demand abortion with ever-greater rarity.

This incremental reduction is anathema to those who need the abortion issue as their one claim at moral high ground. It only reinforces their demand for total prohibition because “even one is too many.”  

Only… in that case why is every single abortion-limiting piece of legislation recently passed in Red America … incremental?  Nibbling at the credentials of abortion providing clinics and forcing women to drive farther, but having very little effect on rates? Sometimes hypocrisy lies in such details.

In Business Insider, Nick Hanauer reports on a new study of “78 years of minimum-wage hikes have produced zero evidence of the "job-killing" consequences headline writers want us to fear.”  See: Raise Wages, Kill Jobs? Seven Decades of Historical Data Find No Correlation Between Minimum Wage Increases and Employment Levels.