Christopher Caldwell slips into the Fallows Fallacy on China

Noting that toilet maker Kohler has a global hit with an ultraluxury $6,400 toilet that was designed in large part to cater to Chinese tastes, Christopher Caldwell sees "a harbinger of trouble for the U.S":

A stubborn myth, in fact, holds that US creative exports are a more robust foundation for prosperity in the global economy than heavy industry ever was. Anyone can build a car, but Americans’ gift for innovation is ineffable. It is a kind of creative magic that is hard for the country’s sclerotic, overly bureaucratised trading rivals to match. How can you fight what you can’t fathom? Who can compete with a je-ne-sais-quoi?

America’s rivals are much less backward than its cheerleaders assume, however, and the country’s creative dynamism is much less mysterious. Taste tends to follow wealth. It should not surprise us if it turns out that people want US design only so long as the US is perceived as the richest, the best, the hegemon. True, there will always be American products that mix glamour and craftsmanship. But certain US exports are based on glamour alone, and will collapse as US prestige does.

At first read I thought that Caldwell was onto something profound here. And maybe he is, long term.  But I think he's overselling the troublesome toilet as a signifier that we're in deep shit now on the design-and-style front. This may well be an episode of what James Fallows calls the " "I just rode the bullet train to Tianjin, and holy shit, we're doomed!" approach to China's rise:

Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II

The idea is circulating that conservatives, largely at Rush Limbaugh's instigation, voted in significant numbers for Hillary and helped put her over the top in Texas.

Ironically -- or maybe not -- Obama has been cast many times as the liberal Reagan. Conservatives thinking this way might well try to block his nomination -- who wants to be cast into the wilderness for forty years? On the other hand, if conservatives think about liberalism the way Obama thinks about Reagan's conservatism, they might conclude that he'd be good for the country and even for their party.

How exactly has Obama channeled Reagan? Christopher Caldwell's excellent analysis of What Obama Owes to Reagan sent me back to The Audacity of Hope, in which Caldwell sees "an interest in Reagan that borders on fascination." He's right. Obama not only admires Reagan's political skills, his ability to "change the trajectory" of American politics as he put it in his notorious interview with The Reno Gazette-Journal in January. He also acknowledges the legitimacy of the course-change that Reagan drove and pays tribute to substantial accomplishments.

Obama's homage to some of Reagan's core principles bespeaks his faith in the American electorate. Implicitly, he acknowledges that Americans were right to give Reagan his mandate:

Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, person responsibility, optimism, and faith.

That Reagan's message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.

Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he'd written for them--a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites (Audacity of Hope, 31-32).

Obama treads a delicate line in these tributes. Always, he acknowledges a degree of legitimacy in Reagan's critique and course correction; usually, too, he paints the rhetoric and the policies as exaggerated, deceptively oversimplified, damaging on many fronts. "Fascination" is a good way to describe these ambivalent assessments. But whatever his feelings about Reagan, his portrayal of the liberalism to which Reagan was reacting is unsparing:

In his rhetoric, Reagan tended to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare state had grown over the previous twenty five years. At its peak, the federal budget as a total share of the U.S. economy remained far below the comparable figures in Western Europe, even when you factored in the enormous U.S. defense budget. Still, the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight--that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie--contained a good deal of truth. Just as too many corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering value, too many government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their shareholders (the American taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of government services) were getting their money's worth (Audacity, 156-157).

Arguably, Obama himself is proof that Reagan's chastening of liberal orthodoxy was a net positive for American governance. Obama is running on an unabashedly liberal platform, seeking a "working majority" to accomplish universal healthcare, strong wealth redistribution through the tax code, and ambitious public investment in infrastructure and energy technology. But he filters these goals through a consciousness, reflected in his rhetoric, that liberalism must hold itself to a diet; government must hold itself accountable -- and hold the beneficiaries of its various programs accountable as well.

This awareness, I think, underpins conservatives' warm response to Obama. He is no triangulator. He makes no bones about wanting to move the American center to the left, rather than move the left to the center. His goals are liberal -- to redistribute wealth back toward the center and bottom, and to redistribute risk back toward the community. But he recognizes the need to move in these directions without killing the golden goose. This awareness makes Obama credible when he presents his set of tax cuts and subsidies for the working poor as a matter of restoring "balance" and "fairness" after thirty years of widening income inequality.

Obama's liberalism is neo-, not in the sense of being cramped or defensive, but in its respect for the limits of government action, for the need to maintain incentives for generating wealth, and in its willingness to place responsibility on the individual. When he talks about working with the opposition, refraining from demonizing, acknowledging that they may have a point or two, it's plain that he means it. He has internalized such respect as a habit of mind.

Related Posts:
Reagan-Clinton in '08
Obama's Metapolitics
Truth and Transformation
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him
More on Rhetoric:
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something

Caldwell captures core Clinton-Obama contrast

Christopher Caldwell, honing in on What Obama owes to Reagan, has a dead-on diagnosis of the difference in approach to politics between Clinton and Obama. He hones in on a paradox: Clinton's positions are more centrist, but Obama captures more independents and Republicans. "Their biggest difference," Caldwell writes,

is in their attitude towards the US electorate. Voters sense that that is everything. They are right. The non-ideological differences between Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton are vast, possibly greater than those between either of them and the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain...

Mrs Clinton views voters as either committed friends or foes. There are good people on one side. On the other, depending on the rhetorical mood she is in, is "the vast rightwing conspiracy" or "the special interests"...

Mr Obama views the electorate's affections and affiliations as changeable - at least at certain pivotal times. He believes independents and Republicans will rally to his cause, and many have done so.

Caldwell rightly points out that Obama's bid to coopt the center and build a "working majority" owes much to Reagan: "To read Mr Obama's political autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, is to see an interest in Reagan that borders on fascination. 'I understood his appeal,' Mr Obama writes." This usefully reminds us that Obama's notorious hat-tip to Reagan in an interview with the The Reno Gazette-Journal in January did not come out of a void. Obama clearly has internalized what Reagan accomplished politically and how he accomplished it:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Caldwell points out that Obama, like Reagan, is trying to move the center rather than move to the center:

Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 by attracting disaffected Democrats in millions. They did not jump to Reagan because Mr Carter was a particularly leftwing Democrat. Nor did Reagan appeal by watering his positions down into centrist mush. He ran as an unapologetic conservative, just as Mr Obama has run as an unapologetic man of the left. But the revolutionary coalition that Reagan formed was less ideological than he was. Reagan won because he solicited the whole nation's support at a time when lesser politicians mistook their parties' battles for the country's.

Obama is far from alone in sensing that the time is ripe now to move the center left. As David Frum memorably put it in the FT, "If they eat right, exercise and wear seatbelts, today's 20-somethings will be voting against George W. Bush deep into the 2060s." That's why Obama's invocation of "the fierce urgency of now" is no New Age mush (contra Caldwell's FT Comment cohort Gideon Rachman), but rather a very specific argument that the electorate is ready to be moved left if the case is made frankly, forcefully, and without demonizing the opposition.

One fascinating aspect of this election is the right's soft spot for Obama. Many Reagan Revolution alumni recognize the mirror image and respect what Obama is trying to accomplish. The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, writing on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page of all places, traced the parallels earlier this week, noting that "Throughout his campaign, Reagan fought off charges that his candidacy was built more on optimism than policies," and that Obama faces the same charge, though both laid out clear and far-from-centrist agendas.

Like Reagan, Obama casts his noncentrist agenda as a corrective. That's the opportunity of the moment. Just as Obama acknowledges that in 1980 Americans felt that government had grown bloated, so now even many conservatives are hung over by the results of triple-branch Republican rule. That leaves an opening for Obama to cast his tax and spending policies as a matter of restoring "balance" and "fairness," as he did while laying out his economic agenda in Janesville, Wisconsin:

when opportunity is uneven or unequal - it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States.

More broadly, in Lorain, Ohio on Feb. 24, he cast excessive income inequality as unamerican, and unity behind an agenda of strengthening unions, taxing outsourcing and greenhouse gas emissions, and spending on infrastructure and alternative energy as fidelity to democracy:

But in the end, enacting this agenda won't just require an investment. It will require a new spirit of cooperation, innovation, and shared sacrifice. We'll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America's children. That's the kind of vision I have for this country, and that's the kind of vision I hope to make real as President of the United States.

Every candidate casts his or her policies as a fulfillment of American ideals. But to make the case that a sharp course correction left or right is a restoration of core values takes unusual political skill. So far, Obama seems to be making the case effectively, and building the "working majority" he frankly asks for.

Related posts:
Obama gets down to tax brass
Obama brings it back to earth in Virginia
Feb. 5: Hillary's Speech was Better than Obama's
Obama's Metapolitics
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him

Dissing the Electorate II

A postscript to the prior post about Christopher Caldwell's complaint that HIllary Clinton successfully yanked the chain of New Hampshire voters: it always irks me when people disparage the electorate, which I believe is smarter than all of us. That's not to say that we're collectively always right, but that Lincoln's can't-fool-all-the-people-all-of-the-time formulation is still the deepest wisdom. It's patronizing for Caldwell to spank voters for allegedly "identifying" with Hillary. He just does not know why people voted for her or why the polls were wrong. No one really does. Caldwell also implies that because women in NH favored Clinton by margins roughly comparable to those by which men favored Obama, women's votes are more based on emotion, or 'servile' identification, than men's. If the gender gap were reversed, would he accuse women of hormonal voting?

In my 80% Democratic home town, I heard many friends and neighbors complain bitterly after the 2004 election agony about the alleged stupidity of American voters. I see Bush's '04 win as the end of a long unfortunate causal chain stretching from Monica through Gore's awful campaign through our Constitutional electoral college flaw through 9/11 and Bush's wartime bonding and finally through Kerry's dithering. It wasn't till after Katrina that the worm turned on Bush. Later than many of us would have liked - but when it turned, it turned decisively.

To be fair, Caldwell may be on to something in suggesting that politicians' histrionics -- and, I would add, sophisticated media manipulation -- may corrode voters' decision-making powers -- and even, for a long season, "fool all of the people some of the time." Saturation negative advertising, for example, apparently has worked in many cases. So does fear, as exploited by Bush after 9/11. But I suspect that the electorate adapts over time to manipulative techniques. One of the more refreshing things about this election so far is that neither negative advertising nor a huge campaign chest have gotten Romney any traction so far.

Dissing the Electorate

In today's Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell bemoans Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire turnaround as an ominous descent into the Politics of the Personal.

Leave it to a Weekly Standard stalwart to speak with certainty when everyone else -- all the titanic media egos across the political spectrum -- is tentative.

Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory in the wake of polls showing her an average of eight points down is one of the great mysteries in recent political history -- a delightful reminder that the future remains opaque to polls, pundits and betting markets. Clinton's internal life is equally a riddle wrapped in an enigma. But Caldwell is blithely certain that Hillary planned her tear-up and won because of it, and that this electoral melting, triggered by mass identification with the soul-baring would-be monarch, is a sign of mass "servility."

Never mind that exit polls show that Clinton's margin among people who made up their minds in the final days was nearly identical to her overall margin. Never mind that speaking in "elegant parallelisms" after a year of nonstop campaigning is more likely a reflex as a sign of premeditation. Never mind that Clinton remains almost terminally unhistrionic as she opens herself up to voter q-and-a (after Iowa) and buries her interlocutors in a mass of wonkish policy detail.

I'll take a 'servile' electorate over a certain pundit any day.