United States Politics Thread 46

[Zju]

Apparently, Biden dropped out of the race. Now, excuse me for the cynicism, but I felt like he was the only one capable of losing to Trump. Though we'll see, let me not speak too soon.

[alice]

It's no longer "apparently", it's now official.

[Travis B.]

Biden is now endorsing Kamala Harris for President.

[Torco]

Look at this graph: https://jacobin.com/2021/09/labor-day-c ... inequality
It's hard for me to look at that graph and not conclude that Democrats have merely happily managed the decline of organized labor for the past 40 years, instead of reinvigorating it. Note also the inverse relation between the lines.

It's almost like on your planet, there was no such thing as Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump.

that's the point, though. just like in spain, chile, and so many other countries under the american aegis the eighties are pretty clear clear line to draw in this: before it, you had some mixture of pro-worker and pro-business policies competing for the vision of the future politician offered their voters, as well as either a robust welfare state or a clear politican aim to build one: thus, you had, for example in Chile, a strong tradition of building decent, spatious, relatively fancy social housing, for being a poor country, being built by the public sector. since then, it's all subsidiary all the time, to the result of little shit-tier boxes of cardboard being built instead by private building firms who skim a sandalous amount off the top. or, in the us, for examples of this new line, plummeting trade balances as a result of consensus low tariffs, which can directly explain, though not in full, the drop in union membership, the new "service economy", etcetera: this is why the fash get people riled up with stuff like "globalism" or "chayna".

the nineties might have had number go up, but people's standard of living did not go up, and this was the result of the neoliberal consensus betweent the right and 'center-left' at a global level, not some particular victory of the republican party. neoliberalism started in the seventies-eighties, to the assent and collaboration mainstream "center-left" parties everywhere, including the democrats, once they checked that it "worked" in chile. it's likely a new wave of such reforms will come after they "work" in argentina, for example, and in ten years deleting ministries and canceling disability and unemployment checks will be as much a mainstream 'centerleft' view, touted as 'basic economics', as it is today that 'the market is always more efficient at doing everything and actually anything a private business could do they should do, it's basic economics'.

[zompist]

the nineties might have had number go up, but people's standard of living did not go up, and this was the result of the neoliberal consensus betweent the right and 'center-left' at a global level, not some particular victory of the republican party. neoliberalism started in the seventies-eighties, to the assent and collaboration mainstream "center-left" parties everywhere, including the democrats, once they checked that it "worked" in chile.

Sure, if you completely ignore political opposition, then every country and every person in it follows precisely the same politics. And sure, if you pretend that the Democrats were in charge in 1973, then you can blame the Democrats for Republican crimes.

Can we play this game too? Chile became an authoritarian right-wing state, obviously Allende must be responsible. Well, maybe that explains why you're rooting for the fascists today.

[jcb]

Look at this graph: https://jacobin.com/2021/09/labor-day-c ... inequality
It's hard for me to look at that graph and not conclude that Democrats have merely happily managed the decline of organized labor for the past 40 years, instead of reinvigorating it. Note also the inverse relation between the lines.

It's almost like on your planet, there was no such thing as Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump.

The line still went down even when a Democrat was president.

Who forced Bill Clinton to pass NAFTA? Who forced Obama to surround himself with Wall Street guys instead of union guys? ( https://www.axios.com/2021/02/07/richar ... den-unions ) Who forced Obama to focus on education instead of unions? ( https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29445201 ) (As an aside, liberals clearly haven't thought out college-for-all. It wouldn't lead to everybody getting paid more like they think it would, it would lead to needing a burger-flipping degree to get a job flipping burgers. (And that degree isn't free, of course.)) Who forced Hillary Clinton to say that 15$/hour was too high for the minimum wage? ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstal ... imum-wage/ ) (And don't say that she later changed her position. Any savvy worker knows that it's a lie.)

[zompist]

Look at this graph: https://jacobin.com/2021/09/labor-day-c ... inequality
It's hard for me to look at that graph and not conclude that Democrats have merely happily managed the decline of organized labor for the past 40 years, instead of reinvigorating it. Note also the inverse relation between the lines.

It's almost like on your planet, there was no such thing as Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump.

The line still went down even when a Democrat was president.

Who forced Bill Clinton to pass NAFTA? Who forced Obama to surround himself with Wall Street guys instead of union guys? ( https://www.axios.com/2021/02/07/richar ... den-unions ) Who forced Obama to focus on education instead of unions? ( https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29445201 ) (As an aside, liberals clearly haven't thought out college-for-all. It wouldn't lead to everybody getting paid more like they think it would, it would lead to needing a burger-flipping degree to get a job flipping burgers. (And that degree isn't free, of course.)) Who forced Hillary Clinton to say that 15$/hour was too high for the minimum wage? ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstal ... imum-wage/ ) (And don't say that she later changed her position. Any savvy worker knows that it's a lie.)

Dude, I've been ranting about the turn toward plutocracy for thirty fucking years.

The general answer to your question is that there aren't enough liberals. Or progressives or democratic socialists or labor activists or whatever you like. See this Gallup chart: in 1994 the percentage of liberals in the Democratic Party was 25%. That means 1/8 of the whole electorate. Not a good basis for progressive policy.

It's 50% now, which is why Biden-- though personally more of a centrist-- has been the most progressive president in decades.

[Raphael]

I mostly agree with zompist in that ongoing back-and-forth, but I think jcb gets one important thing right, and that is education.

It is true that making sure that more and more people get more and more degrees generally doesn't lead to more and more opportunities, but just to higher and higher degree requirements. OK, to be fair, an individual who gets degrees might, other things being equal, have better chances at getting ahead afterwards, but this is one of those cases where what works for individuals doesn't work for entire societies. (Ironically, in some other contexts, such as fiscal policy, center-left people are perfectly aware that what works for individuals doesn't always work for entire societies.)

At the core of this, IMO, is the problem that all too many people in the somewhat left-leaning part of the establishment care mainly about promoting social mobility. Many of the people running the show in the world these days were either upwardly socially mobile themselves, or had parents or grandparents who were upwardly socially mobile. And so they think, "upwards social mobility worked so well for me and my family - it should work equally well for everyone else!" And so they focus their policy positions on promoting upwards social mobility - helping people to try to get to the top.

But the problem with that approach is that it's simply not possible for all people or even most people to make it to the top, because it's part of the very definition of "the top" that most people can never be a part of it. To repeat what I wrote in an earlier post, take the USA and the various disadvantaged groups there, for instance. How many women are there in the United States, how many PoCs are there in the United States, how many poor people are there in the United States, how many people with disabilities are there in the United States, how many LGBTQ+ people are there in the United States? They can't all become President! And they can't all become astronauts or movie stars or billionaires or Nobel-price winning scientists, either.

So, yes, opportunities for upwards social mobility are important. But the most important priority of progressive policy should be to improve the lives of people who are not upwardly socially mobile.

[malloc]

Education has benefits beyond getting better jobs, though. It makes people more open-minded and better at critical thinking and thus less receptive to conspiracy theories and far right ideology. There is a well-known correlation between higher educational attainment and leftward political alignment. It makes strategic sense for left wing politicians to favor higher education. You don't see many high school dropouts discussing LGBT rights or how to stop global warming, let alone with much sympathy. Humans in their natural state are basically bipedal chimps with all the cruelty and tribalism that entails. Education helps lift us away from that.

[Torco]

As an aside, liberals clearly haven't thought out college-for-all. It wouldn't lead to everybody getting paid more like they think it would, it would lead to needing a burger-flipping degree to get a job flipping burgers. (And that degree isn't free, of course.)

more like to burger flippers having, and sometimes needing to have one in the job ad, a bachelors degree in something or other, which is a trend that's already happening here and i bet elsewhere. this is an obvious outcome, but "just make education more accessible" is a way to provide opportunity for individual improvement instead of setting the conditions to actual collectivel improvement. I don't think liberals, democrats or the global 'center-left' has failed to consider this: maybe voters are fooled, but the nobles are AOK with loans that provide chances for individuals to do better while ensuring the same proportion of people remain poor: they, after all, often own the unis, the land the unis operate on, and a host of other ancilliary services to the diploma mills.

Can we play this game too? Chile became an authoritarian right-wing state, obviously Allende must be responsible

sure you can, but you need to play it correctly: allende was dead as a doornail by the time chile became the neolib test center of the western world, so he couldn't have either collaborated or opposed this move. the 'center-left', however, from the partido socialista to the democracia cristiana, were there to do so: did they oppose or collaborate? factually they did collaborate in administering the model: a lot of concertación nobles were in the board of one AFP (private pension fund administrator) or other for most of my life (now they probably use middlemen, as jornos learned to google for such things): we even had a word for this in the nineties and early oughts, socialistas renovados, meaning 'center-left' nobles who went on to study economics in the us, following in the footsteps of the chicago boys. it's a good game to play, we've uncovered an truth.

of course not everytime the right wins is because soi-dissant 'center-left' help them along, but the democrats have had, as jcb points out, plenty of opportunity to do things differently, and they've elected thus far to help neoliberalism along at pretty much every turn even as they've adopted genuinely progressive positions on non-economic issues: this turn to neoliberalism is not accidentally co-temporal with the fall of the soviet union, but it's also very probably that it has to do with a general shift to the right, on economic issues at least, of the american electorate and of society in general. the causes of this are complicated, but almost certainly include the control of the media by billionaires: twitter is, after all, the demesne of the wealthiest noble in the world, meta of the fifth, google of the sixth and seventh, amazon of the second, and microsoft of the ninth, but still it's very comfortable for both donors and politicians, both right and 'center-left' to focus on the appearance of plausible equality of opportunity rather than on improving the lot of the poor.

Education has benefits beyond getting better jobs, though. It makes people more open-minded and better at critical thinking and thus less receptive to conspiracy theories and far right ideology. There is a well-known correlation between higher educational attainment and leftward political alignment. It makes strategic sense for left wing politicians to favor higher education. You don't see many high school dropouts discussing LGBT rights or how to stop global warming, let alone with much sympathy.

yeah but when education is accessed through literal houses worth of debt, not to mention years of one's life, it seems rather dystopian to justify forcing people to get it because they'll become more aligned with other people's political interests innit? education should be, at least primarily, for the educated... or, rather, for the educand? you know what I mean, for the benefit of the student.

[zompist]

At the core of this, IMO, is the problem that all too many people in the somewhat left-leaning part of the establishment care mainly about promoting social mobility. Many of the people running the show in the world these days were either upwardly socially mobile themselves, or had parents or grandparents who were upwardly socially mobile. And so they think, "upwards social mobility worked so well for me and my family - it should work equally well for everyone else!" And so they focus their policy positions on promoting upwards social mobility - helping people to try to get to the top.

You have a point: education does not in itself create jobs (except educational jobs). This can be seen in a number of developing nations, where there are far more educated people than there are jobs. And humanities majors in the US are often in no better shape.

But it's a misapprehension that education is promoted to help people "get to the top". Oversimplifying, for the last century and a half the logic has been: 1. modern jobs require a full secondary education, and some need more; 2. premodern society did not provide this; 3. jobs in the future will require more rather than less education; 4. so education, especially technical fields, is always good.

The French method was to educate only as many people in the top universities as government and business thought they would need. I can't say how well that's worked out, but the US prefers to let students choose their own majors and let "The Market" work it all out.

The system worked fine as long as there was a steady stream of productivity increases and the people as a whole were getting richer— as was true from the 1800s up till Reaganism. Even now, the problem is not that there are no jobs— the unemployment rate is currently 4.1%, which would have been a good figure any time in the last half-century. It's that jobs are not, as the paradigm demands, getting better and requiring more education.

Or to be blunter: college was intended to get people into the middle class. And it was foreseeable that the middle class was, in the future, all that would exist. (In the 1960s corporations were run by salaried managers, not omnipotent CEOs.)

[Torco]

I don't think people in the future will have to study for 45 years to have a job. there's a lot of knowledge that becomes irrelevant just as there's new one entering relevancy, so what you need is some degree of continuous updating of education, not endless growth of the percapita years spent.

easy for us to say, though, having seen outcomes, maybe made sense back in the day.

[Ares Land]

The French method was to educate only as many people in the top universities as government and business thought they would need. I can't say how well that's worked out, but the US prefers to let students choose their own majors and let "The Market" work it all out.

Yes and no. Historically we had very selective top schools (grandes écoles), technical degrees that were somehow slective and university proper, open to all, no restriction on the number of students -- you have the bac (~ high school diploma) you can pick any major. Now all higher education is selective, to varying degrees.

In fields like engineering, there is some attempt to adjust the number of students to the expected number of engineering jobs. This involves competitive exams and a certain set number of students in écoles d'ingénieur. But you can get a job as an engineer with a math degree for instance, which go through regular exams, not competitive ones. (Math degrees aren't easier to get, I think, but without the competition, it's less psychologically grueling). So it all works out eventually.

All in all I'm not sure it ends up that different from other systems. There's a limited number of, say, Polytechnique students, but not everyone can go to Cal Tech either.

Medicine is a special case. They restricted the number of medical degrees to match the expected number of doctors the population would need. This has recently proved to be an unmitigated disaster -- there just aren't enough doctors. A possible cause: there's a disproportionate number of M.Ds in politics; so the lesson is: don't let doctors (or any profession really) dictate the number of potential competitors!

Back to the US situation -- what does college-for-all entail, exactly? Does it have anything to do with the tuition fees? How realistic would be the idea of helping students with the tuition fees?
The real debate should be about the insane cost of higher education.
Whether or not people should go to college or not is an interesting question, but as long as education is as expensive as it is, it's entirely irrelevant.

So, yes, opportunities for upwards social mobility are important. But the most important priority of progressive policy should be to improve the lives of people who are not upwardly socially mobile.

I'd probably agree with you in other contexts... but a four years college degree is a rather moderate form of social mobility, and it can cost upwards of $200,000.
Then again, I don't know who (aside from Bernie Sanders) seriously advocates changing that.

[zompist]

I'd probably agree with you in other contexts... but a four years college degree is a rather moderate form of social mobility, and it can cost upwards of $200,000.
Then again, I don't know who (aside from Bernie Sanders) seriously advocates changing that.

If you're talking about Harvard, sure, it's $230,000. For fun I looked up Wheaton College. a Christian college in my high school town sometimes called the Evangelical Vatican. It's more, $240,000. My own university, Northwestern, used to boast that it had kept tuition down, but in fact it's a whopper at $250,000.

But public colleges are far cheaper. You can go to U of Illinois for a mere $63,000. Or go to community college for two years for $10,000. (Often you can transfer to a four-year college afterward.) And with these colleges you generally don't have to live on campus.

Presently 61% of US high school graduates attend college.

Oh, one more distressing fact. Tuition at NU when I attended was about $11,500 a year. If that had kept up with inflation, it'd be $31,500 a year. which is half the actual current total.

[Creyeditor]

All of these prices sound ridiculoudly expensive to me. At my German University, people nowadays pay 269.90€ per semester but most of it is for your tram/bus/train ticket. That would make 1620 € for a three-year bachelor. I don't think many people would go to university here if you had to pay 10,000 or more. I find this so hard to imagine.

[Ares Land]

The costs are hard to understand as well.

Presently 61% of US high school graduates attend college.

As usual, it's difficult to find equivalent metrics. One study I found says that presently 52% of people entering the job market in France have a post-bac (sort of equivalent to a college) degree. Taking in account college dropouts, we seem to be in the same ballpark.

So it's not clear that Americans have more trouble accessing college education than we do, but they do end up with a crippling amount of debt. As a point of comparison, higher education is 1.3% GDP here; student debt alone is 7.8% GDP in the US (not counting public spending and other sources of funding).

Now, I really don't know about Germany, but the French system isn't particularly egalitarian (sordid details available on request). Still, with a lot of work and a fair bit of ingenuity, it's possible for working class kids to get a very good degree and no college debts attached.
Moving back towards US politics, I don't how politically feasible moving back to the European system of almost-free education -- though I believe Bernie Sanders supported such a thing.
But it's not some kind of decadent communist system (most of Europe does fine with reasonable fees), and it's a lot cheaper than the tuition/debt death spiral (again, compare 1.3% GDP to 7.8%).

And getting back to the original debate... I don't know, going back on college education because it's too expensive or not necessary to flip burgers sounds like giving up.

[Ares Land]

Education has benefits beyond getting better jobs, though. It makes people more open-minded and better at critical thinking and thus less receptive to conspiracy theories and far right ideology. There is a well-known correlation between higher educational attainment and leftward political alignment. It makes strategic sense for left wing politicians to favor higher education. You don't see many high school dropouts discussing LGBT rights or how to stop global warming, let alone with much sympathy. Humans in their natural state are basically bipedal chimps with all the cruelty and tribalism that entails. Education helps lift us away from that.

Oh, I missed this the first time around. I'm not sure I agree; it all depends on majors and degrees. I've got what you Americans would call a STEM degree; I'm an engineer mostly interacting with other engineers. Now, engineers don't naturally incline towards the far right -- but the education I and they god is almost entirely apolitical, and I think as a group we're rather naive, self-satisfied and largely easily led.

The old-style political parties and trade unions were better at this, I think. Working class folks that grew up in the 70s or earlier could be extremely politically astute.

[MacAnDàil]

From Scotland also, those figures are humungous. I find £20,000 in debt too much.

Medicine is a special case. They restricted the number of medical degrees to match the expected number of doctors the population would need. This has recently proved to be an unmitigated disaster -- there just aren't enough doctors. A possible cause: there's a disproportionate number of M.Ds in politics; so the lesson is: don't let doctors (or any profession really) dictate the number of potential competitors!

Other lessons are that 1° don't restrict important jobs and 2° people might leave the important jobs for another one, thus reducing the pool of professionals available.

[Linguoboy]

Oh, one more distressing fact. Tuition at NU when I attended was about $11,500 a year. If that had kept up with inflation, it'd be $31,500 a year. which is half the actual current total.

I'm sure you know this, Mark, but for the benefit of the non-USAmericans, this is a direct result of our odd choice of a financing model[*]. Essentially, as federal funding for education increased, so did tuition. I don't know that I paid much more out-of-pocket for my college education than previous generations, but a huge amount of the nominal cost was covered by "grants" and "scholarships".

[*] I've seen it argued that it was actually a very deliberate choice on the part of the GOP to keep the college-educated docile by saddling them with debt, but I haven't done due diligence to investigate this. Seems like that approach would eventually backfire, since it would build a resentful underclass, but so far US politicians haven't really lost betting against ordinary citizens' willingness to upset the status quo.

[zompist]

Moving back towards US politics, I don't how politically feasible moving back to the European system of almost-free education -- though I believe Bernie Sanders supported such a thing.
But it's not some kind of decadent communist system (most of Europe does fine with reasonable fees), and it's a lot cheaper than the tuition/debt death spiral (again, compare 1.3% GDP to 7.8%).

To be clear, I wasn't defending US education costs. It's absolutely ridiculous. Americans have an incredible ability to ignore successful foreign models, though the right wing has a new hero in Orban.

As ever, there are a million things we could do if Democrats merely had the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and a new Supreme Court.

Sanders advocated free public universities and cancelling student debt. Note that this wouldn't touch the enormous tuition charges I listed— those are private universities. But you can get just as educated at a public school.