An ongoing review of politics and culture

Racism Everywhere!

Media Matters for America has, rather eccentrically, identified the following line by Chris Matthews on Hardball are meriting scrutiny.

They’re the working-class white voters Hillary won and Barack didn’t. Can Obama win over the regular folks against John McCain?

Shrewdly, Media Matters doesn’t explicitly call this line racist as that would be flatly absurd. But they seem to be suggesting that Matthews has crossed some line by referring to working-class whites as “regular folks.”

Note, incidentally, that Matthews was asking me — a college-educated brown man — about working-class whites, presumably because I know something about them. If I can know something about them, perhaps his suggestion that Obama can’t connect with them has less to do with Obama’s race than with his ideology or sensibility. But we’ll leave that to the side. I happen to think Obama is perfectly capable of connecting with working-class voters, and indeed that he has connected with working class whites, in Oregon and elsewhere in non-Appalachian America.

To the regular folks line, I often quote a statistic I first encountered via Ruy Teixeira: in 1940, non-college whites represented over 80 percent of American adults over age 25. Today they represent roughly 48 percent. To be sure, 48 percent isn’t a majority, but it is darn close. “Regular” implies the norm, what is most common. Note that when we talk about young people in elite media, we focus almost exclusively on the college-bound. Anya Kamenetz of Fast Company and Douglas McGray of New America have both talked about how narrow and misleading this prism can be. The same obtains for the overall population.

That is, Matthews is implying that college-educated whites — who dominate our culture, and our cultural “mindshare” — are not regular. So is this classist? Clearly not. Rather, it is a suggestion that we spend some amount of time thinking about another large and important group that happens to consist of 48 percent of American adults over 25.

Is Matthews implying that Asian Americans over 25, like myself, and African Americans and Latinos are “not regular”? In a manner of speaking, yes. He is implicitly suggesting that they are minorities, and as a result face unique challenges that are not identical to challenges faced my members of the majority. Which is incontrovertibly true. To be sure, these challenges aren’t separate and distinct in every case — many are the same, as we all share a broad economic environment.

But is this racist? Or mildly offensive? Clearly not. Is Media Matters, staffed by very bright people who do a lot of valuable work, being anything other than obtuse in this instance? I certainly think so.

I obviously have a bias here. I was on the segment, and I used to work for Matthews, who was a great boss. But I’m also biased because I am an American of South Asian Muslim origin and I have encountered some actual hostility and discrimination based on my background. This kind of charge trivializes that, and it trivializes experiences that have been far worse than mine.

Bookstores

The rest of this post is navel-gazing-y and skippable.

Q2 Re-mark

Time to take a look again at my year-end predictions. I revisited these once before, at the end of March. Another quarter has gone by since then, so let’s take another look.

Thirst-quenchingheads.tv

Commenter osmium kindly pointed me to this moment during a Bloggingheads with my friend and colleague Mark Schmitt, the always-impressive new executive editor of The American Prospect.

I ask you, who doesn’t love double-fisting cooler-fresh cups of water?

Grand New Texican Hoedown

For those of you in Washington, D.C., Ross and I will be at Borders tomorrow from 6:30 to 7:30 in the evening. Chris Hayes will be joining us as we sing a medley of popular show tunes.

The title of this post is inspired by my all-time-favorite Larison post title.

Ross and Reihan on the Radio

Hello comrades!

So, we were on a wonderful show — On Point, hosted by Tom Ashbrook — and I was pretty darn nervous. I am very good at coming up with catchphrases, but terrible at delivering them. Ross is a very smooth radio performer. All I wanted to do was talk about Sweden and the overconcentration of women in low-wage sectors. But I fought that impulse and was instead a little vague and testy. Fortunately, Tom Ashbrook is a consummate professional. There were many moments that will haunt my dreams: for example, when I had twenty seconds and delivered a ten second answer; a truly frightening moment where I was I asked the size of government. I should have had a better answer! Aaaaaaaaargh!

I’m really grateful that On Point gave us this opportunity, and I hope you check out the podcast. We had really some great callers, a couple of whom sounded like potential Sam’s Club Republicans, amazingly enough.

If You're Awake at 10 AM EST

Hua has a special guest on his superb radio show:

Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, from 1030am-noon as the great DAVE TOMPKINS hectors the airwaves with a sure-to-be unforgettable mix of inscrutable vocoder jams, suicidal soul ballads, “random rap,” John Carpenter, 80s grooves, and a Russian electro single from 1982 credited to “Udytu and his Male Harem.”

Tune in here.

But don’t listen to all of it, because Ross and I will be on a really wonderful radio show called On Point from 11 AM to noon. Some of you will say, “Fool, I know all about On Point!” Or, “I don’t listen to the damn radio!” Good grief, I’m just trying to fill you animals in!

An Imagine That Will Haunt Me for Life

A vivid description:

Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

This strikes me as a pretty good characterization of the Obama gestalt, and it reminds me of the scoop of the year.

JG: You’ve talked about the role of Jews in the development of your thinking

BO: I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.

This is an answer that is simultaneously shrewdly political, wryly funny, and self-effacing. It is dog-whistle politics for nerds. I love it! Yet one wonders if Fast Eddie Obama was at work: I mean, Leon Uris? Political disagreements aside, there is a basic level at which I find Obama impossible to dislike. This will embarrass me at some point in the (near) future.

Now I'll Eat Anything

I’ve deleted this post.

P.S. Wow, I should make clear that I don’t endorse the sentiments included in the cartoon. My politics are pretty different from Kreider’s. The humor is crude, and it was unwise of me to point readers in this direction. I weighed deleting this post, but I thought that would be dishonest of me — I should take responsibility for having put it up in haste.

Briefly, my sense is that the cartoon was written from a pro-Obama perspective. The conceit is that the demands of the campaign will lead Obama to take steps many of his most ardent left-wing supporters will find worse than distasteful. Kreider’s mini-cartoons present a couple of absurdist scenarios, at least one of which really is obscene. I should have thought better of it.

Michael Goldfarb

There’s been a lot of criticism of my friend Michael Goldfarb, who has just been hired by the McCain campaign to serve as deputy communications director. Some very smart people, including Radley Balko, have suggested that that McCain personally vets all of his hires to be confident that there is no distance between their views and his own. I find this a little naive, not least because the McCain campaign, like all campaigns, is stretched pretty thin. There are many high-level McCain staffers who are, for example, adamantly pro-choice. There are a number of Democrats on his foreign policy staff. Perhaps he is willing to brook dissent on, say, social issues from a foreign policy staffer, but not on foreign policy issues from a foreign policy staffer. That makes sense, except McCain does have foreign policy staffers who have different views on specific strategic questions, e.g., the kind of presence we should have in Iraq 5-10 years hence, or whether a League of Democracies is a good idea.

My assumption is that Goldfarb was hired by the communications staff because he is adept at communications strategy, and he is someone who knows the web very well. He’s also — and this doesn’t come across in his web writing, where he wields a flamethrower — one of the most disarming, charming, and sincere people I’ve ever met. (This is the point where I, if I were a Goldfarb detractor, would write, “Charming! Do you think Goebbels was charming, you Bushitler apologist swine!!!) He’s also very knowledgeable about national security. I know this in part because I’ve been on the wrong side of an argument with him, and let’s just say I’ve been “schooled.” And he once allowed someone to Tase him, which I imagine was more unpleasant than being the object of intemperate blogging.

I haven’t always agreed with Goldfarb. He’s a lot more pugnacious than I am, he has more confidence in the national security establishment, he is less of a Schneierian than I am, and, most importantly, he doesn’t give a damn about what anyone else thinks of him. He does, however, prefer not being Tased to being Tased. But then again, don’t we all?

Before we make any sweeping claims about what Goldfarb says about McCain — claims that invariably reflect what we already think or want to think about McCain — consider the possibility that the campaign has just hired an effective communicator.

It occurs to me that I’m friendly with many people who are profoundly antagonistic towards each other. I suppose this ought to reflect poorly on me, but I like to think I’ve managed to maintain my integrity. Of course, I suppose I’ve maintained my integrity as a kook.

Save Brijit

Jeremy Brosowsky, a tremendously creative entrepreneur, launched Brijit a few months back to great fanfare. Now Brijit is struggling to survive. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb eloquently explained why this Brijit was so appealing. I remember being very impressed by Jeremy when I met him, and nervous about how he would find enough people to write abstracts for the site. But as it turns out finding abstracts wasn’t the problem — a flourishing community developed around Brijit, and $5 was more than enough to incentivize some very incisive micro-form writing. The trouble was raising a second round of financing. Brijit is now trying to get back on its feet without the cash incentive. My sense is that the cash incentive was never essential to Brijit’s core concept, and we’ll see if Brijit can somehow get back on its feet without some deus ex machina.

I’d personally love to see some tool that integrated Instapaper with Brijit and with Twine. Some mammothly intelligent computer would index and summarize long-form content. For some slice of the content, humans would enter the picture — to maintain integrity, to control quality. When you save a particular article to read later, a la Instapaper, you would also generate an “executive summary.”

But this is obviously not possible right now. At the moment, Twine sucks.

My guess, by the way, is that Jeremy Brosowsky’s next venture will be a hit. Unlike most in the media business, he has tremendous optimism about the future of intellectual life. I’d love to see what he could do if he joined forces with, for example, Upendra Shardanand of Daylife or some other technology-driven enterprise.

How to Be Counterintuitive

TNR’s web headline team serves up another awesome lesson:

The Pro-Obama Case Against MSNBC’s Pro-Obama Coverage

(This is actually the subhed, but it’s what’s featured on TNR’s main page.)

Instapaper

I didn’t fully appreciate Instapaper when I first read about it, but now I realize its true genius. For one thing, it will help you minimize your browser clutter. I’m plagued by too many open tabs these days, but no longer!

The What Is A Genius

I’m about to excerpt from Adam Sternbergh’s wonderful “The Brooklyn Wars,” and there is profanity. Also, I add emphasis.

Actually, the piece is unexcerptable. It is too entertaining.

Sentences I Wish I'd Written

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes.

—David Brooks, Alpha Geeks

Shocking the Monkey

A dialogue between a young man and his superintelligent computer about shocking the monkey, and the tangled web of lies and contradictions that drives them apart — a two-minute one act play.

This isn’t exactly a song, but it is an audio recording.

In this next clip, a young man talks to his left-wing computer about Joe Lieberman.

Just so you know, this computer talks a lot of sass.

Krasikov and Oster

In today’s Wall Street Journal, you will find a wonderful excerpt from Sana Krasikov’s forthcoming One More Year and also a fascinating report on economist Emily Oster, who has abandoned an earlier finding concerning the effect of hepatitis B on sex ratios in China in light of new research.

“I’d be lying if I told you it wouldn’t be great if I was right all the time,” Ms. Oster says. “If you work like this, especially if it’s something that people care about, and you get to collect some more data that is maybe going to be even more informative than what you had before, it’s your responsibility to do that. This is the way science works.”

Osters considers her decision to revisit her earlier work an obviously sensible thing to do, and she’s right. I wish those who tackle more straightforwardly political questions would approach things the same way. But of course there are different incentives and obligations at work. I strive to be Oster-like. You should too!

Frankly Speaking

So, Thomas Frank, of What’s the Matter With Kansas fame, took a shot at “Beltway libertarians” in general and America’s Future Foundation in specific in today’s Wall Street Journal. I’ve worked for AFF for a while, and many of my friends are involved with the group, so I’m probably biased, but Frank’s column seems like a convoluted cheap shot that entirely misses the point. Here’s Frank, sketching out his thesis:

Here, in the very home of the taxing, regulating leviathan, the libertarian is such a commonplace and unremarkable bird that no one gives him a second glance. Here he is a factotum of the establishment, a tiny voice in a vast choir assembled by business and its tax-exempt front groups to sing the virtues of the entrepreneur.

And therein lies his dilemma. Almost by definition, our young libertarian’s job is to celebrate the profit motive from the offices of a not-for-profit organization.

That’s not entirely untrue. My day job is with a free-market advocacy group (not the first one I’ve worked for, either), and we do think the profit motive is often a useful motivator. But it’s not the only virtuous thing in the world, and you’d be hard pressed to find a libertarian — professional and otherwise — who says so. Most of us tend to think that non-profit work and private charity is, in fact, a really great thing — an antidote and alternative to government programs, not a cause of inner tumult. (I mean, look at me: Do I look conflicted?)

Frank goes on, describing what he heard at an AFF panel a few weeks ago:

The audience of young professionals learned about the need to find a job that you loved. It heard the inevitable complaint that “there are plenty of people who are choosing for-profit over nonprofit” when their heart tells them to do the opposite. A panelist asked the audience to imagine a foundation worker saying to his boss, “I love what I do, but in the end I’ve got a wife and three kids, and we live in McLean, and the mortgage is through the roof, and my commute sucks, or whatever, I need a little bit more cash,” only to have his employer turn him down.

What’s this got to do with anything? The episode he describes has rather little to do with anyone’s free-market purity and, instead, a lot to do with the recognition of a pretty obvious fact: Mon-profit work is often very personally satisfying, but it often pays less than the private sector, especially for the fairly well-educated cohort that tends to work at think tanks.

And then we get this:

Selling out is not a threat to the market order; selling out is how the market gets its way. Just look at the city in which all these remarks were made. Private-sector Washington is one of the wealthiest places in America. Public-service Washington lags considerably behind. The chance of ditching the one for the other is what accounts for everything from the power of K Street to the infamous “revolving door,” by which a public servant takes a cushy corporate job after engineering some extravagant government favor for the corporation in question – or its clients.

The libertarian nonprofits that line the city’s streets often serve merely to rationalize this operation after the fact, giving a pious shine to the policies that are made in this unholy manner.

To their credit, the nonprofit libertarians I watched the other night did not ask for sympathy. Their own doctrine won’t permit it. Having spent years urging lawmakers to wreck the social order that once made occupations like theirs tenable, they will cling stubbornly to their free-market idol all the way down.

Where to begin? You won’t find many hardcore libertarians amongst the ranks of those who hand out favors to the private sector from their government posts and then move into cushy jobs. You’ll find a lot of partisan Republicans, yes, but that’s hardly the same thing. Just as most progressives recognize the difference between a true-believing liberal and a Democratic staffer who takes a job at a corporate lobbying shop, there’s a similar difference at play here. In fact, most of the libertarian professionals I know abhor the way the Washington favor-trading industry works. We’re happy to see real free-market policies go into effect, but the rent-seeking that usually gets labeled “free market” by liberal pundits may actually be more frustrating to most of us because of the way it gets used to discredit our ideas.

As far as his contention that free-marketers have successfully worked to make non-profit jobs untenable, well, that seems pretty suspect. Scratch that, it’s flat out wrong. Without the explosion of wealth we’ve seen over the last three decades, there would be no ideological non-profit industry. Most of the major free-market institutions were started in the late seventies, and the movement has grown rapidly since then. There are far more jobs in free-market advocacy and policy analysis than there ever were before a few now-prominent think tanks — Cato, Heritage, etc — set up shop in Washington. (That’s true on the left as well; the last few decades have seen an explosion of jobs at environmental advocacy groups in particular.)

I can see that he’s trying to work his What’s the Matter With… shtick on young libertarian non-profit employees. Woe is them, for they only hurt themselves! But it just doesn’t work.

So what is it that Frank’s getting at here? For libertarians to be true to their ideology, they should quit their non-profit jobs and work in the private sector? No, that can’t be it. Libertarian policies have mean it’s not feasible to hold down a non-profit free-market advocacy job? No, that’s not it either. Maybe he’s just saying that many young professional libertarians in Washington are facing tough choices about their lives and careers. Well, sure, but that particular dilemma doesn’t make anyone a libertarian; it makes him or her a thoroughly average young urban professional, regardless of political leanings. And if that’s all he’s got, that makes Frank — perhaps unsurprisingly, given his track record — a pretty poor judge of the people on whom he’s reporting.