All talk?

Hendrik Hertzberg, himself formerly a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, critiques Obama’s inaugural address (text here) and concludes that it was…a mixed bag.

Some sections were turgid, Hertzberg suggests (perhaps a bit cattily):

My stylistic reservation has nothing to do with “narrative arcs” and the like; it’s about staleness of language. Lines like these—

The words [of the Presidential oath] have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.

—come dangerously close to “It was a dark and stormy night.” Also, while one might conceivably take an oath “amidst” clouds and storms, one cannot speak words “during” tides and waters. Not without gurgling, anyway.

But Hertzberg likes the approach to history he heard in the speech:

All that said, there are fine passages, and the speech makes many strong and subtle points. It improves with each rereading, as its political shrewdness and the generous liberal values that underlie it come through more clearly.

E.g.:

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and travelled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

The mentions of sweatshops, the lash of the whip, and Khe Sanh serve to broaden the national mythos. The struggles of labor (implicitly including organized labor) and the long history of slavery (not just its abolition) are brought fully into the official American story. The sacrifices of the soldiers sent to Vietnam are recognized and separated from the folly of the policies that sent them there—an important psychological step toward withdrawal from Iraq as well as a welcome generational marker.

And then, of course, there’s the question of Obama’s approach to the opposition:

E.J. Dionne wrote last week that “President Obama intends to use conservative values for progressive ends.” Sure enough, the speech was replete with grace notes like these:

Our journey. . . has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work

the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things

not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good

those values upon which our success depends—honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true.

a new era of responsibility

I sometimes forget—but Obama never does—that for all the brutal skirmishing, there is considerable overlap between the views of most American liberals and most American conservatives. The phrases above may “sound” conservative, but as a liberal I find them perfectly congenial, especially when served up alongside phrases like these:

choose our better history

all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness

bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions

roll back the spectre of a warming planet

Obama is unusually adept at deploying “conservative” aesthetics in the service of “liberal” goals. This is not a new phenomenon on the center-left. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of what Herbert Croly, the founding editor of The New Republic, prescribed in his hugely influential 1909 book “The Promise of American Life”: the use of “Hamiltonian means” to achieve “Jeffersonian ends.”

Anyway, it’s an interesting piece, worth reading in its entirety, and a reminder of how few good inaugural addresses there have been. Speaking of which, would you like to hear me recite Lincoln’s second inaugural? Because I can, you know.

A Military Under Stress

Suicide rates in the military have jumped over the past few years. The Army has seen the highest rates of suicide in the last 30 years, according to an Associated Press article:

Suicides among U.S. Army troops rose again last year and are at a nearly three-decade high, senior defense officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008, said two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data has not been formally released.

But, the moon landing!

EotAW’s own Kathy Olmsted does an excellent job discussing her new book Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy from World War I to 9/11 on Capital Public Radio’s program Insight for today (start listening at about 19:55). (And everyone knows why you don’t discuss the moon landing conspiracy.¹)

So, please listen to Kathy. And buy her book. (Again. Because you bought it once already, right?)

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¹Kidding.

Big Hollywood’s Big Tent

Ancillary to a point I would’ve made had this been worthy of a reply:

For those keeping score at home: those are the faces responsible for everything plastered on Big Hollywood as of 6:17 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. We’ll see whether they can’t rustle themselves up a token before tomorrow.

The pony chokers.

Ronald Reagan liked to see himself in the parable of an optimistic boy who, facing a room full of manure, happily set to digging: “With this much manure around, I know there’s a pony in here someplace.”

But today we need a different parable. In this one a boy discovers a well-kept stable with a pony in it, contentedly munching hay. It’s a fine pony, though maybe in need of some brushing. There’s probably also a horse-pat in the bottom of the stall, because hey, it’s a pony. The boy fixates on these aesthetic drawbacks, and begins to complain loudly about them. A friend comes along, gives the pony a brush, grabs a shovel and removes the horse-pat and says, “there you go, son, your pony’s in fine shape.” Incensed that his complaints have been rendered irrelevant, the boy does not choose to enjoy the pony, but instead orders a cartload of manure from the local store and starts shoveling it into the stall, to vindicate his initial criticism. Left unchecked, the boy is not only going to foul the stall, but also to bury the pony.

In the behavior of this boy we see the modern New Deal denialist. The New Deal wasn’t perfect, it’s true, but noting that it takes occasional maintenance and correction isn’t enough for the denialists, they have to bury it in horse manure. And no sooner do their kindly friends clear one load of these misconceptions away than they order up another load and start shoveling it into that poor pony’s stall. Clear away the misconceptions and you find that under the New Deal, GDP was up, unemployment was down, productivity was up. Which, to reiterate, doesn’t mean the New Deal was anything like perfect; it wasn’t. But still, a pony is better than no pony, right?

If someone then comes along and says to you, yes, GDP was up and unemployment was down and productivity was up and the New Deal did lots of good and important things like Social Security and yanking the South out of poverty and bringing transparency to the securities market and saving the banks, “But the facts do not support the perception that FDR’s policies shortened the Depression…. Total hours worked per adult, including government employees, were 18% below their 1929 level between 1930-32, but were 23% lower on average during the New Deal (1933-39)”—well, you should be suspicious. Do you ordinarily judge a recovery by increase of hours worked? When was the last time you heard an economist on the news explaining to a business reporter, “Well, Tallulah Mae, perhaps we’re back to work and our productivity is up and our national wealth is up but we haven’t recovered because we’re not working the same number of hours we used to”?

Let us not even get into this argument—even though, if you do get into this argument, if you do concede the ridiculous starting point that we should pretend NRA=New Deal, you evidently can still show the description of the recovery is wrong; even though, when you strip away the bluster and misdirection, the argument is really, “The New Deal jolly well did save us from the Depression, it just might have saved us faster if it hadn’t been for the NRA”; even though, if you do want to talk about what happened to hours worked, per figure 1A there’s a long-term reduction 1900-2000 and though there was a spike up during World War II, it might have been because there was a total war going—no. Let us not get into these arguments because trying to turn the argument to a discussion of what happened to hours worked is simply letting a new load of manure get shoveled into your pony’s stall, and you don’t want that.

And if it should happen that you walk happily away from your pony’s stall one day, leaving it reasonably clean and cheerful, and when you come back the pony is asphyxiating under a pile of manure, please do not stand sorrowfully, reasoning to yourself, “poor pony, if only it had done a better job of not fouling itself it wouldn’t be stuck under a pile of manure.” Ponies don’t make that much of a mess on their own. The pony chokers have been at work. Get a shovel.

People send these things to me, honest.

Do I delude myself in thinking Amity Shlaes is giving a bit of ground? In her latest effort to persuade us the New Deal was bad she admits, “Many of FDR’s initial plans did bring stability: His first Treasury secretary worked to sort out banks with the outgoing Hoover administration in a fashion so fair that an observer noted that those present ‘had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats.’ By creating deposit insurance, FDR reduced bank runs. His Securities Act of 1933 laid the ground for a transparent national stock market. Equities shot up.” Which in fairness is not a concession I remember her making before.

But she’s still devotedly wrong. Today it’s the dollar devaluation that was a horror: “Using emergency powers, FDR yanked the country off the gold standard…. Some of the worst destruction came with FDR’s gold experiment. If he could drive up the price of gold by buying it, he reasoned, other prices would rise as well. Roosevelt was right to want to introduce more money into the economy (the United States was deflating). But his method was like trying to raise an ocean level by adding water by the thimbleful.”

Except, as even some George Mason economists will tell you, devaluing the dollar was possibly one of the best things FDR did, contributing mightily to the “spectacular” rate of recovery under the New Deal.

If the Post had wanted to publish a column on the general subject of whether current uncertainty is harmful, and reflecting on the New Deal, they might have wondered if today we have done as much as Roosevelt did with the bank holiday to make banks stable and worth the investment of public money.

I hear Obama likes them, too.

Even the Muppets root for the Steelers!