There has been a lot of talk since the election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we’re told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they’ll favor direct measures to help working families.
So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them “Democrats”?
There are three things you need to understand here.
First, on economic issues the modern Democratic party is what we would once have considered “centrist”, or even center-right. Obama’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired health care plan is to the right of Richard Nixon’s [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/19/cheer-up-papa-johns-obamacare-gave-you-a-good-deal/ ]. Nobody with political influence is suggesting a return to pre-Reagan tax rates on the wealthy. Fantasies about Obama as a socialist, redistributionist hater of capitalism bear no more resemblance to reality than fantasies about his birthplace or religion.
Second, today’s Republican party is an alliance between the plutocrats and the preachers, plus some opportunists along for the ride — full stop. The whole party is about low taxes at the top (and low benefits for the rest), plus conservative social values and putting religion in the schools; it has no other reason for being. Someday there may emerge another party with the same name standing for a quite different agenda; after all, the Republicans were once defined by opposition to slavery, and the Democrats by rural voters (hence the donkey) and Tammany Hall. But that will take a long time, and it won’t really be the same party.
Finally, it’s true that there are some Republican intellectuals and pundits who seem to be truly open-minded about both economic and social issues. But I worded that carefully: they “seem to be” open-minded; indeed, they’re professional seemers. When it matters, they can always be counted on — after making a big show of stroking their chins and agonizing — to follow the party line, and reject anything that doesn’t go along with the preacher-plutocrat agenda. If they don’t deliver when it counts, they are excommunicated; see Frum, David.
Anyone who imagines that there is any real soul-searching going on is deluding himself or herself.
Commentary Editor John Podhoretz Has Awkward Postelection Epiphany
The election situation has developed, not necessarily to the GOP's advantage.
By Jonathan Chait November 21, 2012 at 12:24 PM
The first few weeks after a losing presidential election are an awkward period for the most devoted ideological polemicist. Months of optimistic spin about your candidate must be cast aside for an entirely different sort of spin — where before the candidate was a budding juggernaut boldly carrying the party banner onward to victory, now we can see in hindsight that he was a hapless loser unable to articulate our side’s clearly winning vision. Transitioning from one line to another can often take months of careful tip-toeing. Commentary editor John Podhoretz offers up a magisterial postelection essay, “The Way Forward [ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-way-forward/ ],” that instead simply takes the full plunge all at once.
The postelection Podhoretz argues that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” He owes it all to the brilliance of his campaign strategists — “a peerless political instrument, a virtual machine.” Obama’s assault on Romney business career may have “been the smartest and most effective political campaign of our lifetime.”
Because they don’t only sell the snake oil, they drink it themselves. They buy their own propaganda; they believe the hype.
The astonishing turnabout in the evaluation of Obama’s campaign, from delusional nincompoops to the most terrifyingly efficient campaign apparatus in history, helps Podhoretz reach his desired conclusion, that Obama’s victory owed nothing at all to his policy platform. Obama’s campaign, he tells us now, was “bereft of ideas” and offered “no second-term governing agenda whatsoever.”
... the “Romney isn’t being substantive enough” crowd is wrong if its members think the strategy of staying relatively vague is a losing one. Successful politicians have to allow less ideological voters some room to project their own best hope for the future onto the person they’re thinking of voting for.
The postelection Podhoretz now sees that Romney’s singular error was his failure to offer enough specifics:
The contentlessness of the Romney campaign was a vacuity of the center-right …Thus did the flight from content create a fatal problem for Romney. He may have thought his lack of specificity would lend him more appeal, but in the end, it made him less appealing because he offered nothing but words.
The preelection Podhoretz was perfectly willing to credit any potential Obama victory, however unlikely, to his policy agenda:
if he loses on Nov. 6, he will lose for the same reason he would have won — because of his very real, very substantial, and very consequential achievements.
The postelection Podhoretz asserts that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” In no way whatsoever. Onward to victory in 2016, comrades!
How the 2012 election polling really was skewed – for Mitt Romney
Democratic political strategist Stan Greenberg: Democracy Corps, the polling organization founded by him and James Carville, was one of the few to predict accurately the size of Obama's 2012 win. Photograph: Jay Westcott/Rapport
Many in the GOP were sure polls were biased against their guy. In fact, they undershot Obama's win by an embarrassing margin
Harry J Enten guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 November 2012 15.18 EST
There is a fear that runs through any good prognosticator's bones when dealing with a seemingly close election. Polls are not perfect. They are instruments to judge public opinion, and they can be wrong.
The national polls, as it turned out, were not systematically biased against Republican Mitt Romney. The final surveys pointed [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/07/how-pollsters-won-2012-election-mostly ] to President Obama's re-election, and they were right. That does not mean, however, that the polls weren't biased. It won't be until all the ballots are counted that we can access who the most accurate pollster was on the state level, but we do know that Mason-Dixon and Rasmussen were off the mark. Right now, we can only make statements about national polling.
You might think it's unfair to count polls taken so far back from election day (although most scoring techniques [ http://www.openleft.com/diary/19686/the-worlds-greatest-election-forecast-in-the-world ] utilize a similar method to the one employed here). Even if you only count the surveys done over the final week of the campaign, Obama's lead is 1.3pt; that'll be an error of around 2pt. Eliminating Gallup and Rasmussen put the final average up at 1.5pt, yet, that is also going to be perhaps up to 2pt biased against Obama.
Some math indicates that internet polls [ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/ ] were more accurate than other surveys. That's true to an extent, yet internet polls were biased, as well. Over the final month, an average of internet polls gave Obama a 1.6pt lead, to give an overall bias of at least 1.5pt, and perhaps near 2pt. For example, an average of all Google polls, post-first debate, gave Obama a 1.4pt advantage.
Unlike the overall aggregate, internet polls were not too much more accurate in the final week than in the month before the election. They had Obama ahead by only 1.8pt. Counting each pollster only once (as Google had many one-day surveys in the final week), Obama is ahead by a slightly larger 2.2pt – at least a percentage point off the final margin.
What about the pollsters who did everything right, according to polling gold standards? Those who conducted surveys over the phone with people doing the interviewing and including cellphone calling? The average of those polls after the first debate had Obama ahead by an average by just 0.1pt. Eliminating Gallup puts the average at a slightly higher 0.5pt – in other words, way off the mark.
These live-interview cellphone calling pollsters were slightly better in the final week. They pegged Obama's lead at 1.2pt – still at least 2pt too low. Without Gallup, Obama's edge climbs to 1.5pt, which is not a whole lot better.
It's fairly clear that no matter what method is utilized, the national polls were too favorable towards Romney. Only eight out of 113 polls (or 7.1%) during the final month had Obama's lead at above 3pt. Three of the eight were from the Rand Corporation, two were from Google, and the rest were scattered between Democracy Corps, IBD/TIPP, and the United Technologies/National Journal survey.
During the final week, only three out of 30 polls (or 10%) conducted had Obama's lead above 3pt. They belonged to Democracy Corps, Google, and Rand. If Obama's lead climbs to 3.5pt, then, even with rounding, the vast majority of national polls were off in the final week. (Note: usually one would consider a poll giving Obama's victory margin as 3pt to be right if the final result were between 2.50 and 3.49pt.)
Only two pollsters with at least two surveys post-first debate out of about 30 (less than 10%) had Obama's average lead at 3.5pt or above. Again, it was Democracy Corps (Obama +3.5) and Rand (Obama +4.0).
The fact that it's these two pollsters that may come closest to the final result is interesting to say the least. Democracy Corps is a fine polling organization, though some might assume bias in an outfit founded by Democratic operatives James Carville and Stan Greenberg [ http://www.democracycorps.com/about-us/ ]. Rand was a panel-back survey (that is, using the same respondents over and over again), which weighted respondents [ http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR961.html ] according to how sure they were to vote and for whom. That is, a respondent might say they were only 60% likely to vote and 60% likely to vote for a particular candidate. There were doubts whether Rand's methodology was sound, but it clearly worked this year.
Overall, it's fairly clear that the national polls missed the mark, big time. Depending on the final count, it seems possible that less than 10% of surveys came close to correctly projecting Obama's edge. Few will talk about the national miss because Obama won. But just imagine that the same magnitude of error had resulted in almost all the polls showing a narrow Romney lead going into election day, but Obama had won by just 1pt. Then we'd be having a conversation.
Although it is commonly believed that the Laffer curve [ http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laffercurve.asp ] – the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves – is the core Republican idea about tax policy, this is wrong. The true core idea is something called starve-the-beast – the idea that tax cuts will force cuts in spending precisely because they reduce revenue. But there are slight indications that some conservatives have awakened to the reality that not only does starve-the-beast not work, but it also leads to higher spending.
The notion came into being in the 1970s to allow conservative Republican economists to reconcile their support for a balanced budget with their party’s intense desire to cut taxes without worrying about the deficit. Proposition 13 in California had proven unmistakably that voters didn’t much care whether spending was cut; they just wanted lower taxes.
I have traced the origins of Republican starve-the-beast theory to testimony by Alan Greenspan before the Senate Finance Committee on July 14, 1978 – just weeks after the passage of Proposition 13 on June 6. In explaining why he supported the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which proposed an across-the-board tax rate reduction of 30 percent, while also supporting deficit reduction, Mr. Greenspan said:
Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today’s environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenues available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.
Among those who totally bought into this theory was Ronald Reagan. When criticized for proposing a tax cut in 1981 even though the deficit was high and rising, he replied in a national television address on Feb. 5, 1981 [ http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43132&st=&st1= ]:
Over the past decades we’ve talked of curtailing government spending so that we can then lower the tax burden. Sometimes we’ve even taken a run at doing that. But there were always those who told us that taxes couldn’t be cut until spending was reduced. Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance.
During the Obama administration, the principal enforcer of that doctrine among Republicans is the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. He continually argues against tax increases because they feed the beast and lead to higher spending. As he put it in an Op-Ed [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22Norquist.html ] page column last year in The New York Times, “Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government.”
The problem for Republicans, as is so often the case, is that the real-world impact of their theories doesn’t measure up to their theories. There was no reduction in spending as a share of the gross domestic product despite a sharp fall in revenue as a share of G.D.P. during the Reagan years. By the time Reagan left office the spending/G.D.P. ratio was about the same as it was in Jimmy Carter’s last year: 21.7 percent in 1980 vs. 21.3 percent in 1988.
During the George W. Bush administration, spending increased sharply even as revenue collapsed. Revenue as a share of G.D.P. fell to 17.5 percent in 2008 from 20.6 percent in 2000, yet spending rose to 20.1 percent in 2006, before the economic crisis hit, and 20.7 percent in 2008, from 18.2 percent of G.D.P.
In short, we have tested starve-the-beast theory in the laboratory, and it has failed miserably. At least a few conservatives have had the courage to acknowledge that lowering the tax cost of spending may be a culprit. After all, the main reason to oppose higher spending is that it will lead to higher taxes. But if people can have tax cuts and higher spending at the same time, why should they not have their cake and eat it too?
The theory made sense so long as the maximum politically acceptable deficit was an independent variable. But if in fact the effort to cut taxes increased the political system’s tolerance for deficits, then spending could go up. And it’s easy to see how cutting taxes could make deficits more acceptable. As for practice: The last decade has not been kind to the idea that cutting taxes would restrain spending.
Mr. Kristol is not a fool and can read the polls as easily as I can; he knows Republicans are holding a losing hand on taxes. A Nov. 14 Gallup poll [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/158828/balanced-approach-cutting-deficit.aspx ] shows the percentage of Americans favoring a spending-cuts-only approach to the deficit has fallen in half, to 10 percent from 20 percent last year; the percentage willing to accept higher taxes to reduce the deficit has risen to 86 percent from 73 percent.
Taxes are going to rise; that is no longer in doubt. The question for Republicans is what can they get in return. Starve-the-beast is dead.
Looking at the time series (bea.gov) for federal expenditure and receipts from 1969-2012 Q2, Reagan is the spending and deficit king when comparing the total expenditure and debt of each president's first term with the last of his predecessor's. Carter and Clinton actually had lower deficits during their presidencies than their republican predecessors, the only 2 presidents to do so. W's spending increase was in line with others but his tax receipts increase was much smaller than previous presidents'. Obama's spending increase is coming in as the least increase of any president over his predecessor since 1969, yet his deficits are topped only by Reagan's because of, the real story: the drop in receipts, the first time receipts over a whole term have actually decreased since 1969; the only jump in expenditure (2009 Q2) was from a jump in transfers to individuals and states, and a jump in interest payments.
So that's the reality that the numbers tell.
As for starving the beast, it has been used to gut programs that conservatives don't like while they spend as they wish on what they like, and then use the resulting deficits (surprise!) to call for more cuts to the things they don't like.
Nov. 22, 2012 at 2:34 p.m.]
===
Econ Crisis 12 - Deficits & the Debt
Published on Nov 18, 2012 by leearnold
VOICE NARRATOR: The United States is at a decision point that will affect everyone. To understand the issues, start with Federal spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to 2087 -- 75 years from now. Here is 2012. So this part actually happened, and this is what is projected by the Congressional Budget Office.
Now look at Federal tax revenue: income taxes and payroll taxes and everything else. The difference between taxes and spending gives us deficits (in pink) or surpluses (in yellow). Spending more than taxes makes pink deficits, and spending less than taxes makes yellow surpluses.
This adds or subtracts from another graph: the total debt, held by the public as Treasury bills and bonds, which goes to back to zero around 2070. So the bottom graph, on spending and taxes, changes the top graph on total debt.
Notice that we are not changing the percentages on the left side. We are just squashing the pictures.
Here is President Obama's first term. There were spikes in spending and in debt. What caused this?
Well, it is not Social Security. That flattens out for the next 75 years. It will be easy to manage. Please do not believe the silly propaganda that we cannot afford it.
On the other hand, Medicare and Medicaid grow continuously. But there is no bulge, at this point. So they didn't do it, either. Let's make them into the top layers.
Here is Defense. The bump starts with spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here is all the other spending, including Defense. We blend-in Defense.
There is the rest of the spike. It is stimulus spending to fight the recession, plus some of the bank bailouts.
But if we look at the bump in total debt, the wars and stimulus are little slices. So what else is there?
Well, did you notice the dip in tax revenue? There are two causes: the economic downturn means people work less, so they pay less in taxes. And there are the Bush tax cuts, which are supposed to end. Without these two, the deficits would be small.
They complete the causes of the bump in debt. Otherwise, the debt would go downhill.
So this was predetermined, no matter who was elected. It's like "pre-existing conditions". What is important is that this is a short-term problem (if we can call 20 years the short-term). And it solves itself, because the reasons are supposed to end.
But after that, we see long-term growth in spending, due to something different: the long-term rise in medical costs, from the inefficient healthcare system, plus the aging population. So there are two stories: the short-term, and the long-term.
Well the short-term solves itself. The way to deal with the long-term (for now) is a piecemeal approach, little by little. Number one: raise taxes to cover our needs. But do it slowly, while we work on number two: fix the healthcare system to get everyone's medical costs down, because the private costs affect the public costs.
In fact, there is serious doubt about the healthcare projections. An alternative CBO scenario makes them higher, due to the Medicare doctor fix, and other things. But they may also be lower, because Obamacare has efficiencies that are difficult to calculate in the official projections. Plus, every other country already spends only half as much as the U.S. So we may be able to bend down taxes, as well. No one really knows. We just have to work on it, and see what happens.
Even as it stands now, do not be fooled: officially, there is no crisis. Let's repeat that: there is no crisis. "Crisis-talk" is politics. By the laws in effect, as of December 2012, taxes will rise to cover spending. No one would enjoy that, but taxes still stay lower than most modern countries for many decades more. There are surpluses, so the debt will be paid down.
But some Washington politicians are using the short-term build-up of debt, to scare us about the long-term. What they really want is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and to level the revenues, first. Of course, this makes the debt explode. Their answer is to cut the safety-net and entitlements, including Social Security.
There is no reason to cut entitlements. It puts people in danger. And it puts the cart before the horse. A better solution is to work on it little by little. First, take care of the short term: as we exit the economic slump, raise revenue slowly, and begin now by returning to the Clinton tax rates, on the wealthiest incomes. This is unlikely to hurt economic growth. Second, work on efficiency in the healthcare system, to reduce our long-term revenue needs.
The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/whats-in-the-ryan-plan/ ]; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.
His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see.
Ryan can’t be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should be with no illusions. Fool me once …
The New York Times Reporters Do Not Understand How Marginal Tax Rates Work 11/20/2012 For whatever reason, an article titled "Investors Rush to Beat Threat of Higher Taxes [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/business/investors-rush-to-beat-threat-of-higher-taxes.html?pagewanted=all ]" was published by The New York Times despite the fact that it contains a galling bit of stupidity, which could spread like a supervirus to the general public. It is these three paragraphs in particular: "Kristina Collins, a chiropractor in McLean, Va., said she and her husband planned to closely monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing the income threshold for higher taxes outlined by President Obama on earnings above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. Ms. Collins said she felt torn by being near the cutoff line and disappointed that federal tax policy was providing a disincentive to keep expanding a business she founded in 1998. “If we’re really close and it’s near the end-year, maybe we’ll just close down for a while and go on vacation,” she said." This is a stupidity as persistent as it is avoidable. Ms. Collins, chiropractor from Virginia, is among the many people of affluence who have somehow survived without understanding how marginal tax rates work. ... [...] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/new-york-times-tax-rates_n_2166967.html [with comments]
Irish Catholics peddling nonsense about "dependency on government" need to read a new history of the Great Famine
By Joan Walsh Monday, Nov 26, 2012 06:45 AM CST
Taking a break from 24/7 politics after the election, I finally read John Kelly’s troubling “The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/080509184X ].” Our problems feel small. Ireland lost one in three people in the late 1840s. At least a million died in the famine and its related illnesses; another two million fled for England, Canada, the United States or other ports of refuge.
But I kept coming back to U.S. politics anyway. Hauntingly, Kelly repeats the phrase that drove British famine relief (or lack of it): they were so determined to end Irish “dependence on government” that they stalled or blocked provision of food, public works projects and other proposals that might have kept more Irish alive and fed. The phrase appears at least seven times, by my count, in the book. “Dependence on government:” Haven’t we heard that somewhere?
In fact, the day after finishing Kelly’s book, I found Salon’s Michael Lind writing about the Heritage Foundation brief [ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/20/return_of_the_47_percent_the_rights_latest_tax_lie/ (first item in the post to which this is a reply)], “The Index of Dependence on Government.” It could have been the title of a report by famine villain Charles Trevelyan, the British Treasury assistant secretary whose anti-Irish moralism thwarted relief, but of course it was written by well-paid conservative Beltway think tankers. The very same day PBS aired a Frontline documentary revealing that our fabulously wealthy country has the fourth highest child-poverty rate in the developed world, just behind Mexico, Chile and Turkey. And I couldn’t help thinking: we haven’t come far at all.
I don’t believe in appropriating epochal tragedies and singular cruelties for modern political use. Genocide, slavery, famine, the Holocaust; rape, incest, lynching – those terms mean something specific. A recession, or even a depression, can’t be equated with famine, let alone genocide. Nor can rampant child poverty: we fend off starvation pretty successfully with food stamps, government help and charity today. We still have poverty programs, even though we slashed them in an anti-dependency backlash Trevelyan might have approved. A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, acting at least partly on Ronald Reagan’s insight that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 and replaced it with a time-limited, work-incentive program that cut its rolls by 58 percent in the last 15 years. One in five children was poor in 1996; the exact same percent are poor today. (Among black children, the rate is almost 2 in 5.) Whether we’re fighting a war on poverty or a war on the poor, what we are doing isn’t working.
But instead of digging in to find solutions to growing poverty in the midst of plenty, and increased suffering even among people who aren’t technically poor, Republicans spent the last year recycling theories from the Irish famine era. They’re best expressed in Mitt Romney’s remarks about the “47 percent [ http://www.salon.com/2012/09/18/mitt_romney_hates_half_the_country/ ],” the people who see themselves as “victims” and are “dependent upon government.” Romney’s job, he told us, “is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Of course, now conservatives are very worried about “those people:” Supposedly, they re-elected President Obama. An increasingly crazed Bill O’Reilly [ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/14/bill_oreilly_channels_glenn_beck/ ] says Obama and Democrats have created “a social free-fire zone that drives dependency and poverty.” Obama voters “want stuff,” he continued,” big spending on government programs,” and they’ve rejected “robust capitalism and self reliance.” Sean Hannity says Obama’s strategy was “to encourage Americans to be dependent on the government.” Of course, it’s not just the Irish: Charles Krauthammer agrees. “The more you make more people dependent, the more you have your constituencies, the more they re-elect you,” the eternally sneering righty said on election night.
God bless them every one.
At least once a generation, we have to fight the idea that the poor and struggling are to blame for their own hardship. But it’s harder to fight it if we can’t see it. I’m grateful to the modern GOP for making its prejudice plain. While that prejudice hits black people and Latinos hardest, it stunts opportunities for all Americans, particularly the poor, whatever their color. A lot of people who aren’t “dependent” on government voted for Obama; sadly, a lot of people who are dependent voted for Romney. Mitt’s “47 percent” is by far majority-white and at least a quarter are senior citizens, but Romney won the white vote, and the senior vote, overwhelmingly.
I find myself particularly puzzled by my people, the Irish Catholics in that group. I hope they all get John Kelly’s book for Christmas.
…
I’m not reviewing “The Graves Are Walking;” Laura Miller did that here [ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/19/the_graves_are_walking_was_the_great_potato_famine_a_genocide/ ]. A brief overview is necessary: Kelly fights the notion that the British famine response was “genocide,” or even, as I put it in my book [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118141067 ], “ethnic cleansing.” It was more benign and commonplace, he argues, though still cruel and deadly: An effort to use a tragedy to advance a political agenda, and to imagine God’s hand at work advancing that agenda, in matters that are well within the realm of human action to prevent or correct.
Famine Ireland combined the worst of feudalism and capitalism. Anglo-Irish landlords, given their land in “plantations” after decades of war in the 16th and 17th centuries to displace conquered Irish Catholics, were a big part of the problem. At least a quarter were absentee and only wanted the highest rents they could gouge; resident landlords preferred “conspicuous consumption” – Ireland enjoyed a million acres of deer parks and gardens – to building the infrastructure of modern agriculture.
So British leaders wanted to use the famine “to modernize the Irish agricultural economy, which was widely viewed as the principal source of Ireland’s poverty and chronic violence, and to improve the Irish character, which exhibited an alarming ‘dependence on government’ and was utterly lacking in the virtues of the new industrial age, such as self-discipline and initiative,” Kelly writes. Trevelyan told a colleague: God “sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson…[and it] must not be too mitigated.”
It was particularly easy to see the hand of God in the potato blight, because the potato was at the root of the lazy culture of the “aboriginal Irish,” according to Victorian moralists. “Why did the Irish have ‘domestic habits of the lowest and most degrading kind…more akin to the South Seas…than to the great civilized communities of the ancient world?” Potato dependency!” writes Kelly. “The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, leave the people to indolence and vice,” wrote one man in charge of Irish relief. “Food for the contented slave, not the hardy and the brave,” the Economist rhymed about the Irish staple.
Thus the failure of the potato crop was God’s way of getting lazy landlords, and more importantly, the “aboriginal Irish,” into the modern age, where they’d either work harder for better crops, or preferably, leave the farm, enter the emerging industrial society and earn wages to buy food, rather grow their own. It didn’t work that way: relief efforts and public works projects were opened, and then closed, because of worries about “dependency,” that those starving, rag-wearing slackers might prefer the dole to working. Anglo-Irish landlords evicted tenants rather than pay a higher poor rate for them; there was no one to plant the next season. Finally they opened the poor houses more widely, and they became teeming vectors for spreading disease, most notably “famine fever” and typhus, killing people more quickly (and even killing those who weren’t starving, a reminder of why public health is, or should be, a national responsibility.)
Sometimes I felt like quibbling with Kelly over his effort to refute charges that the famine response was a deliberate form of ethnic cleansing, given the way it was driven by centuries of crippling prejudice against Irish Catholics. But he’s right: It isn’t genocide when we don’t act to stop the deaths of people we don’t care about in the first place. Certainly some Irish leaders veered into crazy anti-British conspiracy theories. The famine even had its version of Jeremiah Wright: Irish revolutionary John Mitchel, who claimed the British government created typhus in laboratories and deliberately infected the Irish, much as Wright accused the U.S. government of spreading AIDS in poor black communities. I guess centuries of oppression can lead to some crazy, intemperate ideas.
Ironically, in one of his half-cocked soliloquies, Wright brought this whole story full-circle, talking about the way the Irish had once been denigrated and despised, just like black people: “People thought that the Irish had a disease, when the Irish came here.” Then he referenced Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, and added, “Well, they might have been right.”
…
It troubles me beyond reason that the face of the white GOP backlash is so frequently Irish Catholic: O’Reilly, Hannity, Pat Buchanan. Reading Kelly’s book again reminded me that everything racists say about African Americans was once said about my own people, and in the famine at least, with a deadly outcome.
To justify shutting down aid mid-famine, the London Times editorialized that it was to help the poor Irish themselves. “Alas, the Irish peasant has tasted of famine and found it good…the deity of his faith was the government…it was a religion that holds ‘Man shall not labor by the sweat of his brow.” Sounds like Bill O’Reilly, only more clever. “There are times when harshness is the greatest humanity.” The Times’ “chief proprietor,” John Walter, put it more crudely. The Irish were no more ready for self-government than “the blacks,” he said in Parliament (he was also a Tory MP). ”The blacks have a proverb,” he explained. “‘If a nigger were not a nigger, the Irishman would be a nigger.’”
I suppose expecting Irish Catholics to therefore be appalled by efforts to blame the poor for their poverty is unfair. It’s like expecting African Americans, given their history, to unanimously be liberal do-gooders, and reading Herman Cain, Allen West or even Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell out of the race. We’re all entitled to draw our own conclusions about how we got here. Pain can harden hearts as well as open them. And it’s possible to raise questions about the role of government, or even to resist “big government,” without being racist or anti-poor people.
Still, it’s striking the extent to which so many American Irish Catholics have historical amnesia, not just about the famine, but about the way we rose in this country: By fiercely building our own parallel society, with our own churches, non-profits and schools, while grabbing the reins of government and making sure no Trevelyan would ever hold our fate in his indifferent hands again. “Two institutions reached out and offered refuge to [Irish] immigrants,” Kelly writes: “The Catholic church…and the Democratic party, in the form of Tammany Hall, which provided jobs in return for political favors.” Government built the Irish Catholic middle class, whether by protecting unionization or by outright public sector employment, and helped other white immigrant groups in similar ways.
But now the O’Reillys and the Hannitys and the Buchanans demonize those who rely on government, in terms remarkably like those used to malign their own people. Our 40-year GOP-led grudge against government isn’t abetting a famine, but it is absolutely preventing action that would ease the slow-motion tragedy of persistent poverty and chronic unemployment, which ensnares Americans of every race but disproportionately hits African-Americans. People who relied on government to climb out of poverty and into the working and middle class suddenly decided that “harshness is the greatest humanity” when it came time to help a new generation rise.
Even today, a key obstacle to a public works jobs program in this long recession is the Republican delusion that such measures coddle slackers; that only job creators, not government, can help the poor. Unfortunately, some Democrats, including at times the president, have been unwilling to identify such arguments as the ancient defense of privilege that when unchallenged has led to tragedies like famine Ireland. Maybe Romney’s defeat, and the subsequent right-wing freak out over “dependence,” can awaken more people to the contempt and cruelty behind their politics.
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter with White People: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118141067 ]."
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