Katha Pollitt on My Turn
Katha Pollitt reviews My Turn in the January 25 issue of The Nation. I suppose it’s undignified for an author to take issue with a reviewer, but I’m confident that I can transcend such petty concerns.
I should say right away that Katha is a friend; not only am I very fond of her personally, I’ve admired her writing (both prose and poetry) for more years than either of us would probably like to count. But she got some things wrong, which I will enumerate politely.
It’s funny how often defenses of Hillary Clinton begin with confessing a soft spot for Bernie Sanders. But this rhetorical move is always a prelude to a dismissal: while he may have sentimental appeal, he just not a serious candidate. (“Businessmen are serious. Movie/producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.”) And this review is no exception. Why isn’t he serious? He’s upended the Democratic race and forced Clinton into a temporary, primary-season populism that no doubt will be junked come the general, should she win the nomination. (We already see signs of that in her accusing Sanders of being some sort of tax-and-spend fanatic.)
But as is also typical of the genre, Pollitt makes no serious political case for Clinton’s candidacy. Nor does she really try to rebut my critique of her 40-year record. As someone—I wish I could remember who, sorry—pointed out on Twitter, Hillary’s fans always tout her experience but don’t welcome any scrutiny of her record. Here it is in a sentence: she represented corporate Arkansas in Little Rock (often in cases involving the state of which her husband was governor), screwed up health care reform as First Lady, was a mediocre Senator, ran a terrible campaign in 2008, and was an unmemorable but bellicose Secretary of State. There’s plenty of detail on all this in the book, as well as on her penchant for secrecy and duplicity. It’d be a pleasant surprise if some of her defenders would engage with this history.
On to some specific points of dispute:
- I’m not interested in “Hillary’s marriage and its compromises.” Unlike Ed Klein, I have no idea what her marriage is like. But I wrote extensively about how Hill and Bill’s 40-year partnership redounded to the benefit of both of them—how their personalities and styles of thought complemented each other powerfully.
- “He ignores as well the curious fact that the person he regards as an enthusiastic tool of corporate capitalism and seller-out of other women (cf. welfare reform) is regarded as a radical socialist feminist by much of the country.” The first part of this sentence is irrefutably true—she’s pledged public allegiance to capitalism (“I represented Wall Street as a Senator”) and praised welfare reform years after her husband left the White House. (She also called welfare recipients “deadbeats”—how very feminist.) But how is it anything resembling a refutation of those truths to invoke crazy right-wing caricatures of her politics?
- “ But when he does weigh in on Hillary the person, he’s snarky: She swears (imagine even noticing that about a man)…” What I wrote: “Hillary apparently often swears like a longshoreman, one of the more endearing things about her.” You’ve got to admire someone who can say this to Joseph Califano: “You sold out, you motherfucker, you sold out.” Of course, she did the same herself just a few years later.
- “His run-through of her imbroglios, from Whitewater to that private e-mail server, is terse and straightforward—the only time he seems really angry is when he charges the Clinton Foundation with bungling its rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti. (At the time, only Bill was at the helm of the foundation, but Henwood argues that Hillary, as secretary of state, urged investment in reconstruction projects that fell far short of what was needed.)” This bears little resemblance to what I wrote about the Clintons’ doings in Haiti, which were truly grotesque, and very much a joint project of the two of them. Their history with that country—a country whose annual per capita income is equal to about twelve seconds of her standard speaking fee—goes back to their 1975 honeymoon there. As Secretary of State, she and her underlings enabled a deeply corrupt election, worked to suppress an increase in the minimum wage (of concern to women garment workers, something you’d think feminists would care about), and seriously botched reconstruction after the 2010 earthquake. USAID, an agency under State Department supervision, build horrid housing and deployed toxic trailers to accommodate the displaced—at the same time the embassy in Port-au-Prince commissioned snazzy housing for its staff. What both Clintons did in Haiti deserves serious scrutiny, not this sort of dismissal. If I say so myself, the Haiti passages of the book are almost alone worth the price of admission.
- Although I use a highly critical 2003 quote from Brad DeLong, which includes the declaration that “Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life” as my epigraph, DeLong now endorses her. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but perhaps the reason that DeLong took down his blog from that era (thank God for the Wayback Machine!) and now disowns the statement is that he’d like a job in a Hillary Clinton administration, probably better than the one he had in Bill’s. But Hillary, who compiled an enemies list after the 2008 primary, can read the Wayback Machine too.
- “After all, the sins he finds so damning in Hillary are those of a multitude of successful male Democratic politicians, who similarly cozy up to the rich, accept huge speaking fees, have books ghost-written for them, and worse.” I say as much several times in the book—she’s an utterly orthodox political figure, not the great progressive feminist her supporters make her out to be. On p. 7, I say: “Although this is a polemic directed at a prominent figure, I also want to make clear from the first that Hillary is not the Problem. (I should also say, because most truths are not self-evident, that all the misogynist attacks on her are grotesque.)” I’m not sure that many other politicians, however, command the kind of speaking fees that Hillary did—and I don’t know of any others who tried to stiff their ghostwriters out of their fee, as she did with the unacknowledged author of It Takes a Village.
- “John Kerry, for example, voted for welfare “reform” and the Iraq War, but Henwood endorsed him in 2004.” Yes, I’ve sometimes voted for the lesser evil; I voted for Obama in 2008 too. And other times I haven’t; I’ve also voted Green and Socialist. Very close to the end of the book I say: “If people want to tell me that Hillary would be a less horrid option than whatever profound ghastliness the Republicans throw up, I’ll listen to them respectfully. If they try to tell me there’s something inspiring or transformative about her, I’ll have to wonder what planet they’re on.” Some of my more militant friends have expressed disapproval of this position. But it would have been nice had Pollitt acknowledged my concession to “realism,” one that earned me a volley brickbats from my Trotskyist and Green friends.
But I would like to thank Katha Pollitt for writing about the book, which is something that no other liberal feminists have done yet.
Glum job prospects, say officials
On December 8, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its employment projections for the next decade (or 2014–2024 to be precise). They don’t make for happy reading.
The Bureau projects GDP growth of 2.2% a year over the decade, well under the 3.6% average that prevailed from 1950–2000, and lower even than the 2.4% average from 2000–2007, a period that contained a recession and the weakest expansion in U.S. history. And they also project that labor force participation (the sum of the employed and those actively looking for work, aka the officially unemployed), which has been frustratingly stagnant in this expansion, will decline by 2 percentage points over the decade. This is partly the result of an aging population—the median age of the labor force, which was 37.7 in 1994, and was 41.9 in 2014, will rise to 42.4 in 2024. In other words, job growth will go from roughly matching population growth to lagging it.
But, as the graphs below show, the aging population is far from the whole story. As the top graph shows, participation for the two youngest categories is slated to decline from current levels, and remain essentially unchanged for 25–44 year olds. The only categories projected to rise are those over the age of 45, with the over-65s in the lead. As the bottom graph shows, comparisons over the 30-year interval are even more striking, with all but the over-55 categories declining. The decline among teen workers is the most striking; one presumes they’re getting more schooling, and the early-20s cohort as well, but as we’ll see in a moment, the labor market might not welcome them generously when they graduate. But the decline in prime-aged workers, the 25–54 set, is forecast to be 2.2 percentage points from 1994 levels. The 55–64 and 65+ groups are projected to rise by over 9 points from 1994 levels. So while the aging population explains some of the overall decline, you’d never know it by just looking at the geezerly skew of tomorrow’s labor force.
And while we hear a lot about the importance of education for jobs of the future, these projections don’t offer much support for that point of view. The box below is a list of the 15 fastest-growing occupations over the next decade (accounting for over a third of employment growth); they don’t look like the stuff of college recruitment brochures. Just four of the fifteen require a bachelor’s degree or more for entry, and none require an advanced degree. Eight require “no formal educational credential,” and just one a high school diploma. Just three have an above-median annual wage.
Graphed below is the educational distribution for the decade’s projected occupational growth. Just over half, 51%, require no more than a high school diploma for entry, and another 14% some post-high school education short of a bachelor’s. Just 35% require a bachelor’s, and 9% an advanced degree. The educational distribution of the workforce will change little from today. For example, 25.6% of today’s jobs require a bachelor’s or more for entry; in a decade, that will rise 0.6 point to a dizzying 26.2%. Today, 63.6% of jobs require no more than a high school diploma; in 2024, that will plummet by 0.8 point to 62.8%.
So while politicians and pundits love to talk up the need for getting more people into (and through) college—liberals prominent among them—you have to wonder what sort of job market awaits them.
Of course, these are projections. They could be wrong. But these are nonetheless the official projections of the U.S. government. If they think things are this glum, shouldn’t we be talking about it some more? Maybe talking about how they’re a good part of the reason behind attacks on non-elite higher education and the intensified disciplinary model of primary and secondary education for the bottom half of the distribution? And how an economy that promises only a modest supply of new jobs, many of them shitty, is in need of a major overhaul?
Making collective guilt palatable to liberals
Michael Tomasky, whom I’ve known over 20 years—sparring with him much of that time but liking him anyway—just wrote an awful piece which apparently aims to legitimate for liberals assertions of collective Muslim responsibility. Following the lead of the president, himself no stranger to rampant paranoia about Muslims, Tomasky basically tells Muslims to shape up or face Donald Trump.
To counter accusations of tendentious paraphrase, let me quote a few choice bits:
[Obama] used the usual liberal language about how most Muslims are great, but he also said that religious fundamentalism is “a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse.”… This is the first time Obama has issued this challenge…. It says to Muslim Americans that the rights you have as Americans have to be earned, fought for…. [I]f other Americans had some sense that Muslim Americans as a group were really working to ferret out the radicalism, then this stalemate might be broken.
If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities…and give a speech that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you have to make that happen…. It’s ultimately a humane gesture to make toward a struggling immigrant group, to explain to them in ways they may not have thought about before what American citizenship means…. I do believe…this president can take steps to bring Muslim Americans more fully into our culture and society. That doesn’t mean just reading them their rights. It also means reading them their responsibilities.
This is addressed to all Muslim Americans, and makes two odious assumptions. The first is that Muslims have a collective responsibility for the behavior of other Muslims. Would a liberal say that about, say, Jews? And second, that citizenship rights have to be earned and don’t automatically apply to citizens. And this is coming from the editor of a journal called Democracy, of all things. (It’s impossible to resist pointing out that its publisher, Bernard Schwartz, is a weapons magnate, and its advisory board is laced with national security types.)
Tomasky’s argument—which he has the nerve to call “humane”—looks like an attempt to set a left boundary on acceptable discourse, and to write out any principled critique of the treatment of Muslim Americans—and Muslims, really—as an undifferentiated mass. It makes it far harder to fight the incendiary hatred of people like Trump, and then presumes to offer itself as the only realistic alternative to fulminating evil. I suppose liberalism has often played this role—see Truman and loyalty oaths—but it’s depressing and enraging to see it enacted before your eyes.
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
December 3, 2015 Benjamin Page, co-author of this paper, on the politics of the top 1% • Alfredo Saad Filho on the political and economic crisis in Brazil
My anti-Hillary book is shipping!
Have I mentioned yet that my critique of the presumed frontrunner, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency, is shipping? Order it now on the OR Books website and it will be in your mailbox in about a week.
My main thought after reading @DougHenwood’s My Turn is that this is the book that all Hillary supporters need to own, because it compiles all the credible criticisms of Hillary in one place, without mixing in a load of right wing dreck. So if something isn’t in Doug’s book, it can probably be safely ignored. If it is in the book, it needs to be taken seriously & some defence prepared. That’s extremely useful. I don’t think many HC supporters will understand this though, as they seem very committed to ignoring the fact that their preferred candidate comes with more historical baggage than any other in generations. Which is odd.
—Daniel Davies on Twitter (translated from five tweets into prose)
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
November 26, 2015 Jason Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, criticizes the idea that humans and nature are separate entities • Jennifer Doyle, author of Campus Sex/Campus Security, talks about security, paranoia, sex, and the large public university
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
November 19, 2015 Yezid Sayigh on ISIS • Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson on efforts to bring sustainability and worker power to the Mississippi economy
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
November 12, 2015 Raquel Varela updates her report of two weeks ago, as the right-wing Portuguese government is replaced by a center-left one • Mark Oppenheimer, author of this article, on the culture of Yale and its impact on campus racial politics • Max Geller on why Renoir Sucks at Painting
November 5, 2015 Sungur Savran, editor of Red Med, on the Turkish election • Christian Parenti, author of this article, on what the climate movement can learn from the developmental state
October 29, 2015 William “Sandy” Darity on the racial wealth gap (links to papers here) • Raquel Varela on the Portuguese elections
Fresh audio product
I’ve been very delinquent about posting radio shows to the archive—sorry. Here’s a batch. There’s a break in the middle for KPFA fundraising (three weeks) and my racing to finish my book on Hillary Clinton (one week).
Speaking of KPFA fundraising, this Behind the News would not exist were it not for that excellent radio station. Please contribute (and mention BtN if you do).
October 15, 2015 Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow, on the ghoulish diplomat’s five-decade rampage
October 8, 2015 David Bloomfield talks edu-policy as Arne Duncan leaves • Elizabeth Bruenig, both journalist and Catholic (and author of this), on papal politics
September 10, 2015 Megan Marcelin, author of this and this, puts the post-Katrina gentrification of New Orleans into historical and theoretical perspective • Josh Bivens, co-author of this, on the gap between productivity and pay
August 27, 2015 DH on the China gyrations • Roger Lancaster on mass incarceration in the U.S.
August 20, 2015 Steve Horn on how Hillary Clinton’s State Department worked to open up the Mexican oil industry to U.S. interests • Isabel Hilton gives the rundown on law, politics, and economics in China
POR in the news
I feel guilty about using the tragedy of the Party of the Right threesome gone very wrong to promote my own work, but here are two memoirs of my time in and around the POR.
“I was a teen-age reactionary” (Bad Subjects)
“Partying on the right” (The Nation)
Me in the late 1990s, photographed by Joel Schalit in San Francisco
Unicorns
I’ve got a piece on The Nation’s website about the tech bubble.
Funnily, Vanity Fair features many of the disruptive stars of that bubble, and of the sharing economy I wrote about for The Nation earlier this year, in their latest New Establishment list. How 2015 it all seems.
Does Chicago need a Katrina? Adolph Reed responds.
[Guest post by Adolph Reed, in response to Kristen McQueary’s column in the Chicago Tribune on how Chicago could use a Hurricane Katrina.]
Kristen McQueary’s attempt to walk back from her scurrilous column of last Thursday extolling the wonderful changes that the devastation of Katrina brought to New Orleans is basically an unpology—and an even more empty, uninformed word salad than the original. The issue isn’t what she was feeling when she wrote what she wrote; it’s what she wrote.
The initial column was wrong on basic, yet important particulars. New Orleanians did not “overthrow a corrupt government.” They actually re-elected Mayor Nagin, who then served his complete second term. He did not and could not by charter seek a third term. Mitch Landrieu did not replace him. Public housing did not get rebuilt; projects were demolished at the moment of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing to make way for upscale redevelopment and thereby further intensify that shortage.
I don’t know what governments she believes were consolidated, but the “slashed budget, forced unpaid furloughs, cut positions, detonated labor contracts” all actually began under Nagin. More to the point, however, what world does McQueary live in such that she imagines that those moves, which necessarily meant slashed public services and redoubled economic hardship for those workers and their families already reeling from the dislocation and loss associated with the flood of the city, sound like such cool ideas, even accomplishments? Sprinkling in empty references to “leaner and more efficient” tells us nothing; they’re only croutons in the standard free-market word salad.
And what notion of democratic government does she operate with such that Paul Vallas’s having been freed from “restrictive mandates from the city or the state” seems like something to be applauded? He may have “created the nation’s first free-market education system” (can someone pass the salad dressing?), but, if McQueary could imagine doing the most superficial research instead of merely exuberantly rehearsing press releases, she’d have learned that that system has not, even by the the education “reformers’” very dubious metric of standardized testing, improved educational performance overall and certainly has undermined educational quality for many students in the city. And what notion of education does she operate with such that teachers are not only least competent to organize conducting it but are somehow its enemies, though a random “entrepreneur” with no expertise is the one — actually The One — to whom that vital public service should be entrusted? God help us if McQueary starts thinking about how to organize the fire department.
There is much more that is wrong-headed and shallow about McQueary’s perspective. Considering Chicago, for instance, for all her recitation of the babble associated with the pose of tough-minded fiscal probity, it’s interesting that she never bothers to consider where the budget crisis came from, whose actions—and which actions—produced it, including the role of the City’s years of dereliction in not making its mandated pension payments or, on the other side of the ledger, the billions of dollars of revenue foregone for corporate tax giveaways and other forms of corporate welfare. It’s clear that McQueary can’t imagine herself as falling among the ranks of those who could wind up on the wrong side of the retrenchment that she airily touts with such blithe detachment, as though it were all a version of “Game of Thrones.”
I could go on, but I’ll conclude by saying that I certainly understand how anyone with connections to New Orleans and the devastating impact of that travesty wrought by decades of bad government would be appalled and outraged by her flippant statements like “Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth.” I understand so well because I’m one of those people. But one doesn’t have to have that personal connection to recognize the truly breathtaking, perhaps clinical, lack of capacity for empathy with strangers that such statements undeniably reveal. The problem is not that one might think that she “would be gunning for actual death and destruction” but that what she is “gunning for” in wanting in effect to destroy the public interest by marketizing it is a society in which such “death and destruction” would become normal life.
The greatest irony of her original stupid article and the backtracking unapology is that she can’t recognize that it’s precisely the sort of arrangements she enthusiastically touts as the utopian possibilities opened by the horrors of Katrina that created that disaster in the first place. She’s right; it was man-made, but, if she were a little less smugly shallow and ideological, she might have asked how it was man-made. It was the product of decades of the sorts of policies, pursued at every level from Orleans Parish to the White House and by corporate Democrats as well as Republicans, she rhapsodizes about—privatization, retrenchment, corporate welfare paid for by cutting vital public services and pasting the moves over with fairy tales about “efficiency” and “lean management” and “doing more with less” and hoping to avoid the day of reckoning.
So, I’ll give this much to McQueary; she’s right that Katrina has a lesson for us. It’s a lesson about what happens when you follow the sorts of destructive approaches to public policy that McQueary shills for.
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
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Posted on December 7, 2015 by Doug Henwood
Comment on foundations
There were a couple of calls on Twitter for a transcript of what I said on last week’s radio show, following my interview with Benjamin Page. Page had said in the interview that he couldn’t find any foundations interested in funding research by him and his collaborators into the opinions of the top 1%. I’ve added a link to the Leah Gordon interview, which has a link to her book. I’ve expanded a bit on the original in this version.
It’s interesting that the foundations don’t want to support research into the opinions of the upper classes. Page, of course, is too careful a scholar to put it bluntly, but I’m not inhibited by those sorts of constraints. Foundations, almost without exception, exist to put a friendly face on plutocracy, and the last thing that plutocrats want is scrutiny of themselves. They’re interested in melioration but quite opposed to anything too structurally radical. Their role in shaping social science research is profound: recall my interview with Leah Gordon last June about how elite foundations shifted the emphasis in research on race relations away from structural issues towards individual psychology, “from power to prejudice,” as the title of her book put it. Questions interest them far more than answers.
Philanthropy doesn’t get anywhere near the critical attention it deserves, in large part because the kinds of intellectuals who could do that work are dependent on those philanthropies for funding. (I don’t blame the grantees—it’s hard to get by in this world.) I’m not dependent on their generosity, so I’m doing my best to fill in that gap.
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