Shocker: A Convention Speech of Reasonable Ideas, or Sound Familiar?

If any of you caught Tuesday keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention by San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro certain sections of his message might have sounded familiar to regular readers of this little blog (both of you).  For those that missed the talk - and those that just like everything neatly served to them - here are the exact sections in question from the full transcript:

My family’s story isn’t special. What’s special is the America that makes our story possible. Ours is a nation like no other, a place where great journeys can be made in a single generation. No matter who you are or where you come from, the path is always forward.

Julian Castro delivering his keynote Tuesday

America didn’t become the land of opportunity by accident. My grandmother’s generation and generations before always saw beyond the horizons of their own lives and their own circumstances. They believed that opportunity created today would lead to prosperity tomorrow. That’s the country they envisioned, and that’s the country they helped build. The roads and bridges they built, the schools and universities they created, the rights they fought for and won—these opened the doors to a decent job, a secure retirement, the chance for your children to do better than you did.

And that’s the middle class—the engine of our economic growth. With hard work, everybody ought to be able to get there. And with hard work, everybody ought to be able to stay there—and go beyond. The dream of raising a family in a place where hard work is rewarded is not unique to Americans. It’s a human dream, one that calls across oceans and borders. The dream is universal, but America makes it possible. And our investment in opportunity makes it a reality.

Now, in Texas, we believe in the rugged individual. Texas may be the one place where people actually still have bootstraps, and we expect folks to pull themselves up by them. But we also recognize there are some things we can’t do alone. We have to come together and invest in opportunity today for prosperity tomorrow.

... 

And it starts with education.

... 

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don’t accept is the idea that some folks won’t even get a chance.  Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead.

To us, that sounds an awful lot like the ideas that we were trying to get across in this post about the underlying mesh that binds a society.  We came up with an esoteric - and overwrought - way to describe what Mr. Castro describe far more eloquently.  It was more than a little comforting to hear one of the political parties at least paying lip-service to the notion that we are all in this together for better and for worse.  Perhaps it's our perceptions and biases coloring the memory, but we can't recall that sentiment being explicitly or implicitly broadcast at the RNC last week.  Can you?

We will always admit to being a sucker for this type of hopeful, positive message.  And, we are sure these and any other speeches delivered in Charlotte this week should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism.  We can't, however, refrain from getting more than a little hopeful when someone of prominence in the public policy sphere says things that are eminently reasonable.  Can we change politics if we all start looking at how we can grow closer together in this country, and be always mindful of how we can help each other out?  Yes, we can.

Why Some Are So Afraid of Obama, or Methinks the Right Dost Protest Too Much

[In last week's "Weak in Review" post we promised you two quixotic posts on politics this week.  The first introduced the idea of the perfect balance between liberty and societal cohesion.  We call it SCEP.  This post takes that idea and directly applies it as a way to pick between two flawed Presidential candidates. - ed.]

For all the moaning about how spectacularly bad the mass media is that goes on around here, we here at Distasteful Inelegance wanted to belie a misconception that you, dear reader, may have about us.  We don't watch TV news letting the poor quality of coverage angry up the blood.  We don't even have cable anymore.  What we do to stay abreast on current events is read really good long form journalism like this piece from The Atlantic online (You can go ahead and go read it now.  We'll wait.  Oh, you're back.  Welcome.) that takes a very dim - but fair - view of both party's nominees.  Kind of like what was said in this post.  Would that we could have a serious conversation about things that really matter to a nation.

Let's pause for contemplation...

As a contemplative sort, we naturally got to thinking about why people like the President despite the really bad stuff  that he has done in his first term: kill/capture list, Gitmo, Patriot Acting...the list gets disturbingly long.  Larry Lessig puts it best in his critique of the President.  Even if we ignore the scary-illegal stuff they've been up to, Lessig is correct: President Barack Obama has not lived up to the potential of Candidate Obama.  (Of course, that would have been impossible for any mortal, but anyway...)

Now, we will be quick to confess that we probably give more heft to what Mr. Obama says than what he and his administration does.  Clearly, we all suffer from a certain confirmation bias that leads us to overly weight the positive aspects of Our Guy and minimize his weaknesses.  The converse is true for Their Guy.  In our either/or choice for President, we all to often focus on why the Their Guy is going to be a disaster for the country, and don't spend enough time facing the cold hard facts about Our Guy.

While we wrestle with that for a while, let's flip this on it's head for a minute.  If you were a "swaggering, conservative, faux cowboy with authoritarian fantasies that viewed yourself as an independent alpha male taking on the world"*, what Democratic Presidential Candidate would you fear the most?  Probably a highly intelligent center-left fellow of non-WASP heritage who possesses bags of public appeal, right?  You'd probably see, and fear, the fundamental change in society that his election to the highest office in the land might represent.  Ergo, the Right's concerted attempt to recast Obama with streams of false accusations of everything he isn't: radical socialist, Muslim, foreign.

Remember this is the guy that said this in the infamous "you didn't build that" speech:

"Not every government program works the way it’s supposed to.  And frankly, government can’t solve every problem."

You can see how that practically Reagan-esque statement would freak out anyone trying to like The Mitt.  They cry the most when hit that close to home.

Oh, yeah, we remember why we tend to overlook the really bad stuff the current President has done, and why he is the safer choice: most of us appear to have largely ignored  the fact that we have drifted away from the proper balance in public policy that made us a great nation historically.  By just about any measure you can think of - income disparity, wealth concentration, social mobility, access to education, global competitiveness - we are moving away from a system that enables the best our citizens have to offer.  Only one candidate seems to be aware of that fact (We occasionally bump into people that can't honestly recognize that, and all we can do is ask them, "Who was the guest on Hannity last night?").  He is the same guy that said this very reasonable thing:

"The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.  There are some things...we don’t do on our own...So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together.  That’s how we funded the GI Bill.  That’s how we created the middle class.  That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam.  That’s how we invented the Internet.  That’s how we sent a man to the moon.  We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President -- because I still believe in that idea.  You’re not on your own, we’re in this together." 

Now, despite the fun had at his expense on this blog, you don't particularly need to fear, nor mistrust, nor dislike Gov. Romney.  If we afford him the same benefit of the doubt that we do Mr. Obama and ignore the execrable things he has said trying to get elected, he's a pretty moderate, reasonable guy.  The biggest problem with The Mitt, however, is if elected President he will be leading a party (and has chosen a running mate) that has staked a position diametrically opposed to the above sentiment.  A party whose current policy direction is a radical departure from what we have agreed is a good balance of support for the society at large, and the individual liberty of each of us (it's that hypothetical SCEP thing we are always talking about).  Unfortunately for our democracy, it really is the choice for the greater of two seriously flawed, candidates.  And in many ways it really will be a bigger disaster if we pick Mitt.

[We'll come back to more on that guy Ryan, and why his is a dangerous ideology next week. -ed.]


*This quote comes from a really smart person that I have the pleasure of knowing.  Unfortunately, it comes from a Facebook post that cannot be linked to on the public internet.  (Zuckerberg! <shakes fist in anger>) This will have to do for attribution.

The Myth of the Self-Made Man, or the False Tyranny of Circumstance

[In continuation of our discussion of VP choices, finance, the economy and job creation, the social safety net, and the larger mission of government.] 

If you listen to the noise coming out of the presidential campaigns - or more precisely the "unaffiliated" shills peopling super-PACs and cable news editorial staffs -  long enough, you might be fooled into believing one of two things (or both?) that aren't true about our country.

One side wants you to believe that we live in a perfect meritocracy where, through hard work and pluck alone, simply anyone can bootstrap himself (or herself) out of the middle class and take a seat at the Great Table of Unlimited Wealth.  Right next to Donald Trump and his merry band of alpha-males.  These folks seem to quake in constant fear that mean old socialists will storm jackbooted into their penthouses and force them back down into the grey, feckless mass of the middle class, forever forced to take public handouts that rob them of their self-esteem and pride.  Or, you know, actually make them pay taxes or something.

The other side wants you to believe that plutocrats have successfully perpetrated a silent coup d'eta of our government to cement a neo-feudal class structure where no man (or woman) is capable freeing himself (or herself) from the shackles of the circumstance of his (or her) birth.  These folks seem to see Dickensian villains - ever poised to send each of us to debtor's prison, or the poor house, or the orphanage - pulling the puppet strings of industry and government to guarantee that individual effort is funneled solely into corporate profits.  Or, whatever it was that Noam Chomsky and George Orwell were really afraid of.

Neither of those narratives is remotely true.  As with just about anything you can think of, the truth is more nuanced and complicated than an overly-reductive campfire tale.  As citizens of the United States of America, we fortunately live somewhere near the exact midpoint between these two dystopian hellscapes.  The issue that necessarily gets lost in the FUD, is how close we are to that midpoint.  (For more on this subject go read this excellent article in The Economist, which is similar to this old DI post.)  That is something I will call the Societal Cohesion Equilibrium Point (SCEP).

Without getting too esoteric on you, dear reader, we can think of the SCEP as the point where regulation, liberty, and socioeconomic mobility are tuned just right to create the perfectly level playing field for everyone.  Success would then be a function of ingenuity and hard work, while circumstance could unfairly hinder no one.  People are not advantaged nor disadvantaged based on demography.  Yes, this is what you might call a total f&#king fairy tale.  There aren't enough social scientists in the universe nor precise econometrics to even design a thought experiment to find SCEP.  But, I think we all could agree that it is out there, and it's pursuit is the real job of government.

Back to reality.  The dynamic systems that make up a society of 300-odd million people (let alone the interaction of micro and macrocultures on a global scale) are so chaotic and complex that luck and randomness and circumstance will always play a role in success and failure.  Conversely, despite that infallible truth, hard work and personal responsibility are essential virtues to stack the deck in one's favor.  Those, therefore, that sit on a mountain of wealth and conclude they are uniquely touched by the gods are just as misguided as those that blame their station in life on the hands of an unfair society.

So, when it comes to objectively deciding whom to vote for this Fall, try to ask yourself which guy's aim is to get us closer to the SCEP.  Try to listen to the arguments and read between the lines, because a certain vice-presidential nominee's budget proposal is more about tearing down current institutions and replacing them with some Ayn Rand inspired libertarian pipe dream.  The other guys are more interested in making those institutions bettter.  Just remember this is not a fight between neo-feudalism and.arch-socialism.

We will never achieve a truly level playing field, but if we all close our eyes and believe hard enough...