Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

«May 2018»
SMTWTFS
  12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
 

In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

May 28, 2018

The tragedy of the chattering class

I can be a liberal, a conservative and a socialist, because unlike most people nowadays, I know the meanings of those words. One of the reasons I enjoy the Wall Street Journal is that the denizens of that precinct almost all imprison themselves in this or that ideology, which allows me to feel effortlessly superior. Mr. Barton Swaim seems to have joined the paper as a book reviewer specializing in politics, and consistently refuses to set himself free.

Joseph Epstein, for example, another scribe in the WSJ stable who can be an amusing writer, seems to think that our Social Security and Medicare will inevitable lead to Soviet-style communism, while Mr. Swaim recognizes the reality, in Scandinavian countries for example, of democratic socialism. Yet he disapproves of it, and never really tells us why. This holiday weekend he has reviewed two books about the election of 2016, as well as Bernie Sanders' own My Revolution. He writes that Bernie "holds democratic self-rule to be sacred and inviolable, but he's prepared to transfer enormous power to a coercive and impersonal government that cares little for the people's will." Presumably this is as opposed to a Wall Street that lies awake at night worrying about the welfare of the 98%. Mr. Swaim has already pointed out that those Scandinavian countries "recognize the need for a robust market economy" to pay for their welfare states, which leaves the implication that we would necessarily be incompetent in that regard.

Mr. Swaim goes on to quote Bernie on the lessons he learned growing up in the streets of Brooklyn: "Nobody supervised us. Nobody coached us. Nobody refereed our games. We were on our own. Everything was organized and determined by the kids themseves. The group worked out our disagreements, made all the decisions, and learned to live with them." Mr. Swaim does not say what is wrong with the obvious point that those boys have now been grown up for a long time – indeed, they have grandchildren – and they still want to make their own decisions. They would like to have guaranteed health care for all, like every other country in the western capitalist/democratic world, and for their grandchildren they would like to have affordable higher education, and jobs that pay something more than an insultingly low wage plus food stamps. And they would still like to learn to live with their decisions, if all the lobbyists and time-serving politicians would get out of the way.

Mr. Swaim goes on to say some interesting things about the books he is reviewing, and for example pays tribute to some "refreshing plainspokenness", but he also revives the myth of "Mrs. Clinton's deliberate use of a private email server to send classified information", an unproven assertion. We are left with the tragedy of a pundit who is determined to keep his head in a place where the light will never shine.