Stop Arguing, Start Growing

Economist
Lawrence H. Summers

In this morning's Washington Post, economist Lawrence Summers has a great suggestion. A professor and past president at Harvard, Summers was Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton, and economic adviser to President Obama from 2009 through 2010. In his op-ed piece "In shutdown debate, focus should be on growth instead of deficit," he asserts:

Data from [the Congressional Budget Office] imply that an increase of just 0.2 percent in annual growth would entirely eliminate the projected long-term budget gap. Increasing growth, in addition to solving debt problems, would also raise household incomes, increase U.S. economic strength relative to other nations, help state and local governments meet their obligations and prompt investments in research and development.

In other words, Congress and the president should stop arguing "about the precise timing of continuing resolutions and debt-limit extensions" and start working together to spur economic growth.

Summers says this can be done — indeed, must be done — in a bipartisan way:

Spurring growth is an area where neither side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on good ideas. We need more public infrastructure investment, but we also need to reduce regulatory barriers that hold back private infrastructure. We need more investment in education but also increases in accountability for those who provide it. We need more investment in the basic science behind renewable energy technologies, but in the medium term we need to take advantage of the remarkable natural gas resources that have recently become available to the United States. We need to ensure that government has the tools to work effectively in the information age but also to ensure that public policy promotes entrepreneurship.

Infrastructure investment
is sorely needed today

Breaking this down by political sides: Democrats want more public infrastructure investment; more investment in education; more investment in the science behind renewable energy technologies; and for the government to be given the tools to work effectively in the information age. Republicans want reduced governmental regulatory barriers; increases in accountability for schools and educators; acceptance of natural gas, as a bridge to "clean" energy as a way to fight global warming; and U.S. policies that favor, not hinder, private entrepreneurship and investment.

There is ample room here for Republicans and Democrats to "meet in the middle" and to take the conversation from wrangling over the budget to talking instead about America's economic growth. Says Summers:

If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to “budget deals” were devoted instead to “growth strategies,” we could enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example.

Post columnist
E.J. Dionne Jr.

As Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. says in "Obama can’t waste this moment" on the same October 14, 2013, op-ed page:

The United States should build [a strong economy], not just cut [the federal budget]. We should invest again in an infrastructure whose decayed condition ought to shame us. We should deal with high ongoing unemploy­ment, reverse the rise of inequality and give poor and working-class kids real opportunities for upward mobility.

My fellow liberal Dionne sadly doesn't mention the conservative priorities Summers lists as needing also to be included in any eventual deal.

A recent opinion column by moderate-to-conservative Post economics writer Robert J. Samuelson, "The shutdown heralds a new economic norm," however, takes a similar pro-growth tack:

Post columnist
Robert J. Samuelson

The story behind the story [of the budget battles] is that prolonged slow growth threatens to upend our political and social order. Economic growth is a wondrous potion. It encourages lending because borrowers can repay debts from rising incomes. It supports bigger government because a growing economy expands the tax base and makes modest deficits bearable. Despite recessions, it buoys public optimism because people are getting ahead. ...

Slow economic growth now imperils [the post-WWII order that saw much economic expansion]. Credit standards have tightened, and more Americans are leery of borrowing. Government spending — boosted by an aging population eligible for Social Security and Medicare — has outrun our willingness to be taxed. The mismatch is the basic cause of “structural” budget deficits and, by extension, today’s strife over the debt ceiling and the government “shutdown.”

Samuelson agrees with Dionne and Summers (and me): what we most need today is government policy — a compromise policy, as Summers says — that boosts economic growth.

Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

— Song lyric by Johnny Mercer

During these tense times when the government is partially shut down, we may wonder what has gone wrong. Why are we so polarized between liberal Democrats and hard-line Republicans that we can't pass a budget or even a continuing resolution through Congress, and possibly can't head off the threat of a default on paying our government's bills?

Washington Post columnist
George F. Will

George F. Will has a column in today's Washington Post that gives some insight. "When liberals became scolds" has it that liberalism went wrong in America as far back as the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. President John F. Kennedy was shot to death in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, and within two days liberals were downplaying the identity of the putative assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and playing up a kind of collective American guilt that stemmed from “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots," per then-Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Will extends the thought:

New York Times columnist
James Reston

The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” noting especially “the violence of the extremists on the right.”

(Oswald was actually a self-styled communist, not an "extremist on the right," nor a "bigot." The Warren Commission, headed by the then-Chief Justice, determined that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK, though many have since believed he had co-conspirators.)

Will's point is this:

The bullets fired on Nov. 22, 1963, could shatter the social consensus that characterized the 1950s only because powerful new forces of an adversarial culture were about to erupt through society’s crust. Foremost among these forces was the college-bound population bulge — baby boomers with their sense of entitlement and moral superiority, vanities encouraged by an intelligentsia bored by peace and prosperity and hungry for heroic politics.

Liberalism’s disarray during the late 1960s, combined with Americans’ recoil from liberal hectoring, catalyzed the revival of conservatism in the 1970s ...

... and, he adds, led to the election of the conservative President Ronald Reagan, who was first sworn in in 1980.

Adversarial culture? Will says:

Under Kennedy, liberalism began to become more stylistic than programmatic. After him — especially after his successor, Lyndon Johnson, a child of the New Deal, drove to enactment the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid — liberalism became less concerned with material well-being than with lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom.

35th president John F. Kennedy

As a 16-year-old in 1963, I lived through those times. And, yes, we had a lot of material well-being ... though we also discovered the "other America":  a large minority of our citizens who were mired in poverty from one generation to the next. Too, we all had to confront the reality of racial prejudice in the land. But as of the time of JFK's assassination, most Americans of a liberal bent were still inclined to "ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive" more than rue the negative.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

By 1968, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War and in the wake of the twin assassinations that year of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, that had flipped. To many who were then speaking from and for the left, America was now considered a poisonous place. The country's history was mainly one of several negative -isms: racism, sexism, imperialism, and the like. "Tear down the walls!" went the leftist mantra.

If you were a liberal, no matter how close to or far from the center, you were infected by it. America: angry leftists wanted to end it, moderate liberals wanted to mend it ... but all on the left came to think more in terms of its historical poison than about the sheer nobility of the grand American enterprise.

That's what George Will is getting at:

Hitherto a doctrine of American celebration and optimism, liberalism would now become a scowling indictment ... 

Hence:

The new liberalism-as-paternalism would be about correcting other people’s defects.

Those "lifestyle and cultural issues such as feminism, abortion and sexual freedom" which took over the liberal mindset were typically couched, accordingly, in negative terms. Liberals' occasional perfunctory nods to America's greatness were at odds with an overarching narrative of American guilt. This is a narrative which — I think Will is correct here — has not played well with American audiences in general.

President Obama
ought to look like this
more often

Thus during the Obama presidency we have heard the president called, by his enemies, not a real American. Thus the endless foolish assertion that he was not really born an American citizen. Thus the claim that Obamacare is actually a foot-in-the-door for an alien socialism. And thus the tea party, which would rather bring down Obamacare than make sure the federal government has enough funds to stay solvent.

I think Will is right: liberals started shooting themselves in the foot as far back as the JFK assassination. I call myself oldstyleliberal because I would rather we liberals take back the night and start talking up America's fundamental greatness again. Then, after we have stopped demonizing the right, and vice versa, perhaps our politicians can get back to doing what they're supposed to do: engaging in the fruitful art of compromise.

Polarization in America

We are currently in the throes of a fiscal showdown in which the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, the Democratic-controlled Senate, and our Democratic president, Barack Obama, can't agree on how to reopen a partially shut-down government or how to avoid, come October 17, risking a default due to failure to raise the legal ceiling on the size of the federal debt. The deadlock can be traced in large part to how the various members of the House of Representatives came to office in the 2012 election.

Polarized 2012 vote
for U.S. House of Representatives
(Click on map to enlarge)

The map above shows how politically polarized was the 2012 vote for members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It comes from a recent Washington Post article, "Shutdown’s roots lie in deeply embedded divisions in America’s politics."

Each congressional district in each state is represented by a colored square. The deeper the color in each district, the more one-sided the vote was for either the Republican winner in 2012 (red) or the Democratic winner (blue). (Two districts that are now vacant are shown in gray.) The pastel colors represent districts where the vote was "close," while deeper blues and reds signify "safe" districts where the 2012 winner is either very likely to be re-elected in 2014 (the medium shades) or a virtual shoo-in (the deepest shades).

Notice how blue the states from New Jersey and New York up into New England are, and likewise the West Coast states. Also notice how red the states of the Deep South are. But even the reddest state has its pockets of blue, while some (but not all) of the blue states have their own pockets of red.

Washington Post columnist
Colbert King

Why does this geographic variation exist in "one nation under God" America? Post opinion writer Colbert King blames part of it on "The rise of the New Confederacy": "... an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government."

The insurgents of the New Confederacy equal, of course, the tea party. It is in the reddest districts that we are most apt to find a tea party-affiliated member of the House. King writes: "[The] conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia."

Many of these states are ones that made up the Old Confederacy during the Civil War (shown here in yellow):

(Click on map to enlarge)

Yet it seems that tea partiers in Congress also come from Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and West Virginia. Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia were "border states" where slavery was legal, but which did not secede from the Union. Some of the remainder of the tea-party states were territories during the 1861-1865 Civil War, and were settled in large part by whites who originated in the Confederate States. Yet others, though they were "free states" where slavery was illegal, arguably were settled by people of the same cultural backgrounds as the southerners, which might explain why certain districts in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, went to tea partiers in 2012, and why Ohio is such a crazy quilt of red and blue that it so often acts as the decisive "swing state" in presidential elections.

Colin Woodard writes in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America of how North America was — except for "First Nation," which has maintained its original Native American culture — settled by ten now-hidden "nations." Those "nations'" cultural antecedents in Europe, so different from one another, have been carried forward to the present day, says Woodard.

Here's a map of the eleven "American nations," including "First Nation":

The eleven American "nations"
(Click on map to enlarge)

Compare this map with the first one above showing the blue and red congressional districts. Notice in the first map how blue most of "Yankeedom" is, both in its original East Coast wing and in its later-settled Upper Midwest wing. Ever wonder why Minnesota is so traditionally blue? Well, it was settled in large part by people moving westward from New England and New York, in the East Coast part of "Yankeedom." And those people of eastern "Yankeedom" had their Old World roots in Puritan society in England during the 1600s. The Puritans brought certain cultural assumptions with them to the New World — ones that have led their descendants to be abolitionists who opposed slavery in the nineteenth century, and to be progressives who have voted solidly Democratic in the twentieth. Moreover, it was their "Yankeedom" posterity who were the main non-Hispanic whites to settle the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington — and on up into Canada — to make up the solid-blue nation Woodard calls "Left Coast."

Journalist-author
Colin Woodard

In terms of its power base, meanwhile, the Confederacy was largely made up of the nation Woodard calls, unsurprisingly, the "Deep South." Yet certain northern and western parts of the Confederacy, including much of Oklahoma and Texas, were sections of "Greater Appalachia," and "Tidewater" — coastal North Carolina, Virginia, and much of the Delmarva Peninsula — also played a big role in the rebellion against the Union. All of these "nations" are conspicuously red today. Though the three had distinct cultural roots in the Old World, in the New World they banded together (sometimes uneasily and, in the case of "Greater Appalachia," in split fashion) to defend the South's "peculiar institution" of slavery. So why is, say, much of Indiana so red today, even though there were no slaves there in 1861? Woodard would say it's because the southern two-thirds of the state remain part of "Greater Appalachia," and the denizens of the entire nation-within-a-nation of "Greater Appalachia" largely tend to vote red nowadays.

Look at the "Midlands," a "nation" that sprang from the westward movement of settlers coming from much of Pennsylvania. Those Pennsylvanians in "Midlands" were originally Quakers who, though they had different cultural norms than the Puritans, were notably tolerant of all peoples and engendered a polity that today favors the liberal desideratum of multiculturalism. That polity in the present day tends to the blue end of the spectrum. Notice that "Midlands" crosses through Illinois, just below Chicago, explaining why the blue parts of Illinois in the first map are not just centered in the Windy City, which is actually in "Yankeedom" anyway. Bluish "Midlands" widens out in Missouri, Iowa, and points south and west, possibly explaining many of the blue squares in those areas on the first map.

The "Far West" provides few squares of any color to the first map because it remains so thinly populated. Look at Colorado in the first map; it's both blue and red. Since much of the "Far West" was settled, late in the game of spreading westward, by people who came from the Confederacy or its cultural soulmates on its periphery, it's no wonder there are so (relatively) many red squares in Colorado and in the other states of the "Far West" nation.

Admittedly, there have to be yet other factors helping to explain why some regions and states are solid red, some are solid blue, and some are mixed. But Woodard's concept of eleven separate "nations" that we are no longer very aware of but explain a lot of our entrenched cultural and political attitudes goes a long way toward answering that question.