Author Archives: suratsweet

Glossary: January 18-31, 2013: Games of Risk

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials, Jan. 18-31, 2013

afflatus: Obama exercising power; aka, “imperial overreach”.

dithering: any Obama foreign policy initiative; see also deliberation, retrenchment, and shrinking.

extremism: encouraged on Hillary’s watch, especially in North Africa. This is really the old, old charge of “appeasing” the Soviets; or the more recent trope of “Obama’s apology tour”. It was recently expressed in a classic Journal causal chain “The Obama policy was to be “absent” from Libya after the fall of Gadhafi, which led to the inattention to Benghazi security, which led to extremism taking root, which led to the attack that killed four Americans”. Never mind how weak leaks in this inevitable sounding cascade of consequences.

huge: any Obama tax cut–can also be “massive”; leads to a “spending blowout”.

income tax: “a direct penalty on the savings, investment and labor that create new wealth”. (see also, sales tax)

modern liberal catechism: green energy, climate change, ethanol.

Obama Protection Club: the lamestream media

peace: the ultimate foreign policy illusion and delusion. Ways to make sure the preposterous idea of peace doesn’t take hold: “perpetual vigilance”, “stalwart solidarity with allies” and Pax Americana (“keeping the seas secure for trade”). Beware “the dividend of an illusory pace to fund Obamacare”.

risk: in foreign policy, see “dithering”and “extremism”, above; in economic policy, “more Fed cowbell”, higher government spending; taxes and regulation.

sales tax: a tax that the Journal suddenly loves because it “hits consumption, which is the result of..wealth creation”. Apparently, no one could consume without the wealthy making it possible.

Senate millionaires: usually Dems, mostly Rockefeller & Feinstein.

spending cuts: in another causal chain: “spending cuts will help the economy grow faster by keeping resources in private hands, which will use them more effectively”.

with impunity: always characterizes how our enemies attack us.

the world: the Reality Principle invoked whenever anything bad over which the US had little control happens; always juxtaposed to Obama’s “illusory” “dreams of easy peace”.

Freedom From or Freedom To?: Politiscripting Obama’s Second Term

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President Obama used his second inaugural address to establish some throughlines for his entire second term. The emerging keywords/contrasts in the speech were

journey/fixed set of rights

principle/absolutism

politics/spectacle/

collective action/individual freedom

reasoned debate/name-calling

As James Fallows argues on The Atlantic website:

The rhetorical and argumentative purpose of the speech as a whole was to connect what Obama considers the right next steps for America — doing more things “together,” making sure that everyone has an equal chance, tying each generation’s interests to its predecessors’ and its successors’ — with the precepts and ideals of the founders, rather than having them be seen as excesses of the modern welfare state.

As in the one-sentence summary at the start of the speech, Obama wants to claim not just Lincoln but also Jefferson, Madison, Adams, George Washington, and the rest as guiding spirits for his kind of progressivism. In this passage he works toward that end by numbering among “our forebears” — those honored ancestors who fought to perfect our concepts of liberty and of union — the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martin Luther King and other veterans of Selma including still-living Rep. John Lewis, and the protestors 44 years ago at the Stonewall.

Right on cue (and speaking of “name-calling”), the Republican commentariat has likewise wasted no time laying out their own rhetorical maps. Snides and sneers prevail, calling Obama a “dogged collectivist” (Jennifer Rubin); an elitist who wants us all to bow to his “superior moral purposes” (the Wall Street Journal editorial page); “alienating”, “sour”, “paranoid”, “self-pitying” and “strange”  (Peggy Noonan);  “untrustworthy” (Ramesh Ponnuru); and, of course, a pusher of “big government” (Fred Barnes).  These commentators take strongest exceptions to Obama’s “progressive myth” (aka, “the journey”), which runs counter to their bedrock belief that “the primary task of government is the protection of a fixed set of rights from ever-changing threats” (Ponnuru),  They seem to be in great fear of what Gerald Seib calls Obama’s “pent-up agenda,” his “misplaced” emphasis to “roll over his foes”, or, as Erick Erickson puts it, Obama’s inclination to make people “the subjects of government, not citizens in charge of it”. They see Obama as one super-demonic “threat”.

At the heart of the fray is Obama’s contention in his speech that “individual freedom requires collective action”. This runs entirely counter to, say, the Journal’s claim of Obama’s vision of an “activist, expansive government”, with “activism” being at least as much of a pejorative as “community organizer” was in Obama’s first campaign. Denying collectivism and almost any moral dimension to government, the Republican right offers nothing new, but only their unwavering counter-agenda:

Probably more than any other party in the world, the Republicans have in recent decades stood unflinchingly for the cause of liberty abroad, and, at home, with a bit more uncertainty, for limited, constitutional government and for the principle that government exists to serve free men and free markets, not the reverse. (William Kristol)

Government vs. markets is one succinct distillation of the principles underlying the endless and debilitating gridlock and rancor to come. They essentialize government as something alien and other, as a hydra-headed entity that has a mysterious life of its own. They do not see it as shared sacrifice and purpose, as an expression of collective will. Obama’s head may explode as he tries to figure out how the vision of a collective city on a hill, whose whole exceeds the sum of its parts, has been reduced to markets, being left alone, and thinly-veiled Social Darwinism; how the “freedom to” create something new in the world has degenerated into “freedom from” any binding and ennobling social obligation.

Republicans have a thousand ways to describe encroachments on their freedom, but seem to have run out of words to describe what they want to do with that freedom. They are “absolute” in their irrational hatred of government. They are not willing, to use Obama’s own words, “take the risks that make this country great”. They reject his paradoxical, “united we stand” dictum that “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”.

Obama Unfettered or Obama In Retreat?

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The Journal has lately had a divided mind when it comes to President Obama. In foreign policy he is all about “retrenchment” and appeasement, but in economic and domestic policy he is now “unfettered” and relentlessly pursuing his aims of “destroying the House” in 2014 and being on a redistributionist rampage.

Obama, after all,  wants to “extend and entrench entitlements into the daily expectations of the middle class–from cradle to college to health care during the working years to retirement and then the grave,” in the process “reorienting the private economy to finance income redistribution”.

These two faces of Obama merge once the Journal helps you realize that he is cutting back on defense and a Pax Americana strategy in order to fund his redistributionist endgame.

Other bizarro moments in the Journal’s recent editorials: mocking any idea of protecting homeowners from default (homeowners now characterized as expecting a “free roof”); rooting for the AIG lawsuit against the federal government for the government’s audacity to save AIG from bankruptcy (aka, the “vague concept of systemic risk”); and the born-again discovery of shortcomings in the mental health system.

Gun politics indeed makes for strange bedfellows.Turning unaccountably pro-government and all considerate & caring, the Journal now wants to enhance mental health provision, after championing the decimation of it along with the entire social safety net for at least the last twenty years. (Mental health being one of the many babies drowned in Grover Norquist’s fiscal bathtub).   Anything to change the subject from guns.

Glossary, mid-January, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials, Jan. 5-Jan. 17, 2013

“assault” weapons: (note: “assault” must always be in fright quotes). Demspeak for any guns–rifles, handguns, etc. Really a recycling of the old “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” meme.

“biggest tax hike in twenty years”: not actually a new tax, but  “fiscal cliff”-related reinstatement of mostly Bush-era tax cuts.

global retrenchment: Obama’s diabolical strategy to let the bad guys take over the world.

growing world disorder: any challenge to American policy or power, anywhere in the world. “Disorder” always has to be “growing,” a meme to maintain the steady drumbeat of impending doom under a hapless, appeasing Obama (see also, “global retrenchment”). aka, “global troubles and disarray,” traced ultimately to liberals clinging to their entitlements.

growth agenda: any economic policy that promotes deregulation, tax cuts, and an unchecked private sector. Anything that unleashes the inherent and unfailing magic of the free market. “Growth” defined, of course, in purely economic terms, regardless of social or environmental consequences, as if a society cannot “grow” morally. (see also, “market failure”). (see also  the “productive engine”)

market failure: any economic policy that promotes deregulation, tax cuts, and an unchecked private sector.

productive engine: the unleashed power of private sector free markets policies. As opposed to the unproductive “entitlement” culture. Obama wants to “extend and entrench entitlements into the daily expectations of the middle class–from cradle to college to health care during the working years to retirement and then the grave,” in the process “reorienting the private economy to finance income redistribution”.

redistributionism: “the prevailing socialist mindset in the academy”.  aka, “Obama Unfettered”. aka, “the progressive agenda: reordering the relationships of Americans to their government”.

tax “reform”: the Democrat Trojan Horse for raising tax rates and broadening the base of taxed. Part of the Democratic masterplan to “spend, borrow, elect, tax, and then tax some more”. note: “reform” must always in fright quotes

troubling: any Obama nomination the Journal opposes (Hegel, Kerry, Lew)

Republicans’ War on Green Energy and Their Curious Born-Again Populism

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While the last couple of weeks have been absorbed with gun control and the “fiscal cliff,” the Wall Street Journal editors have also been uncommonly obsessed with energy issues, mostly contrasting “green energy” with fracking.  The five editorials between Dec. 17-Jan 4 on these two subjects paint the usual Manichean world of growth vs. regulation, and “market-driven” natural gas investments vs. “trendy eco projects”. The key editorial in this sequence, “The Jackson Damage” (12/27), lays all the blame for high unemployment at the feet of retiring EPA Director and she-devil Lisa Jackson, whose “aggressive and punitive” regulators have “contributed to business uncertainty and stole dollars otherwise available for private investment.”

At the beating heart of this robbery are Obama’s “repressed green id” and the risible Democratic bias toward “racial justice and economic redistribution”. This bizarre psychoanalysis of the environmental movement seems confused insofar as it pits the desire for social justice, labeled as elitist and “anti-growth”, against American workers’ best interests.

A further twist of this inverted logic occurs in the Jan. 2 editorial, “Crony Capitalism Blowout,” which summons Republicans to a “new populist message” based on–wait for it- less corporate regulation, fewer constraints on corporate profit, lower taxes and less government. In this brave new populist America, “the social service planners who can’t run health care, education, or public housing” will be eclipsed by small businesses, investors, and the affluent. The ants (“those who save their money”) will triumph over the grasshoppers (“those who spend their money”).

But the ants are also due a huge tax break because the $5 million exemption on the estate tax is a “pittance for 50 years of work and thrift”, and should be raised. Only in GOP la-la-land is $5 million a “pittance”. Populism spreads to the 1%!

Glossary, Early January, 2013

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an anatomy of key memes, phrases and obsessions in Wall Street Journal editorials, Dec. 19-Jan. 4

assault weapons: gun-control talk. “Assault” is always to be in quotation marks, perhaps because guns don’t assault people, people do. See also “gun control”.

fracking: “the best way to fight carbon emissions”.

green energy: no less than a “re-engineering of the US energy system”; aka, “Obama’s repressed green id,” and a “shapeless concept” that is “stealing dollars from private investment”.

gun control. The wet dream of “the social service planners who can’t run health care, education, or public housing” (Dec. 25). A term to be used very sparingly (use “second-amendment rights” instead).  Gun control will not lessen violent massacres because they are primarily caused by too many “civil liberties” for the mentally disturbed. (Apparently, the individual rights mandate of the second amendment for gun owners does not apply to other groups).

industrial policy: federal subsidies for any industry the Journal doesn’t like, especially anything having to do with “green power”, aka, “taxpayer handout”. Subsidies for the oil, nuclear, coal and natural gas industries are of course not “industrial policy”, but, rather, the encouragement of “market forces”. Most other federal subsidies are “market-distorting follies,” “coddling” or “profiting from political agendas”.

Islamists: any foreign leader or country critical of American policy. Always characterized as “anti-democratic”. Synonymous with “Benghazi,” “ramming through” laws the Journal doesn’t like and “turmoil”.

judicial restraint: any position taken by the sons of Robert Bork. (see “originalism,” below)

originalism: The Republican myth of an “enduring Constitution”, complete and whole in itself, and not open to interpretation. A text without a context. As opposed to the “judicial left,” for whom the law is “whatever they say it is..the legal inventions of the moment”. They dusted this old chestnut off for their Dec. 19 homage to “The Great Robert Bork”.

productivity: limited to the “private, productive part of the economy,” the “small businesses, investors and the affluent” that Obama is inexplicably intent on destroying through his “redistributionist tax agenda”. (“Obama’s Tax Bill Comes Due,” 1-1-13).

profiting from political agendas: any Democratic policy, especially in regards to “green energy”. Republican political agendas that also enhance corporate profits–deregulation, lower taxes, weakening trade unions–is somehow immune to this charge.

regulatory binge: any new federal policy, law or mandate. Always “abusive”, “reckless”, “aggressive” and “punitive”.  Republican laws and regulations, on the other hand, are always “good governance”.

smear: a Democratic attack on a Republican.  In relation to Bork, “Democrats cast the first smear.”

Glossary, mid-December, 2012

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A selection of key memes, phrases and obsession in Wall Street Journal editorials, Dec. 9-Dec. 18, 2012

coercion: any Obama administration strategy or tactic for policy or fiscal reform. (see also “serious and specific”)

good-faith negotiations: no tax increases.

government benefits:  federal incentives not to work: disability, unemployment, food stamps.

harm to the economy:  any Obama fiscal or tax policy proposal. See also “pro growth”

funneling: putting  union dues  into the hands of liberal politicians.

health care insurance exchanges: “centralized,” interventionist, hyper-regulatory”  (see also, “nimble and useful”). Always “coercive”.

lawmaker: “someone whose job it is to spend other people’s money.” “Making businesses pay more is good sport in the halls of Washington”.

monopoly wages: aka, a living wage. Even though right-to-work states average 10% lower wages, the republicans argue that the higher wages in union states are due solely to the unions’ “monopoly power”. Living wages are “extracted from industry”—economic equality being neatly paralleled to strip mining. Generally, any initiatives or policies put forth by the unions are characterized as abusive “monopoly” power.

nimble & useful: private insurance companies (see also “health care insurance exchanges”)

Obamacare: a farce.

offshoring profits:  a “corporate duty”—rational and patriotic behavior.

onerous : any and all cuts to the defense budget

pro-growth: any Republican fiscal or tax proposal. All of Washington is characterized as “anti-growth”

serious and specific: any Republican fiscal or tax proposal

soaking the rich:  The Democrats’ ultimate wet dream.

tax reform:  lowering taxes; never defined as eliminating deductions

thuggishness: any tactics or strategies of labor union to maintain workers’ right

trench warfare: what the Republicans need to engage in for the next two years. Never negotiate.

States’ Rights, Pro-Choice Leanings, and California Freakin’

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The Journal has been in a tizzy about states’ rights for about the past ten days. On December 9 they launched their states=growth mantra, with “growth “ naturalized as  only economic growth, however unequal. Only the states are the instruments of “hope and change” (Dec. 10). Right-to-work states show higher per-capita income growth than states with “thuggish” “monopoly union power”. (Thus glossing over lower wages and more income inequality in these states). Singapore, with no capital gains tax, thrives, while tax-plagued California dies. Singapore, that bastion of democracy. States having Obamacare shoved down their throats are mere “serfs”. (Dec. 13).

However, California, the nation’s most populous state, is the reverse of this pro-growth mantra, thanks mainly to CALPERS, the state’s pension fund. CALPERS “and California” are “arms of the public unions”. (Dec. 14).  CALPERS, with its “police power”,  “strong-arms” citizens and municipalities to get it’s way. On Dec. 16, the ever-demonized “monopoly labor unions” of California were blamed for the federal deficit, and for undermining “tax equity and economic growth”. Class warfare merges with geographical warfare: the good folk of Knoxville, Lubbock and Orlando suffer  because privileged fools in San Francisco rob the federal kitty via tax deductions.

Interestingly, the Journal  is sounding distinctly pro-choice when it comes to right-to-work laws:

The best case for the right to work is moral: the right of an individual to choose.

Now where have we heard that phrase before?

The GOP Prosperity Gospel: Social Darwinism Is Alive and Well

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The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.

-William James, September 11, 1906 letter to H.G. Wells

 

In the long month after the November 6 election, Republicans have of course reflected on their loss and formed the usual circular firing squads. But the Wall Street Journal has rhetorically shored up the edifice and rallied the troops by falling back on the eternal GOP verities: economic growth over collective well being, equity  and cultural ideals;  and removing all obstacles to “free market” growth.

Rhetorically, these intertwining memes–the economic gospel of what William James called “the bitch- goddess success”–comprise what Bellah, et. al described in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985) as “the first language of American individualism”:

For most of us, it is easier to think about how to get what we want than to know exactly what we should want…our subjects…are confused about how to define for themselves such things as the nature of success, the meaning of freedom, and the requirements of justice.

This gospel is well-expressed in two telling, stand-your-ground salvos from recent Journal editorials:

In this era when envy trumps growth, the government is raising taxes on thrift, investment and risk-taking in the name of fairness and to finance more government spending. (Nov. 30)

American prosperity is best served by letting business exploit as many opportunities as possible, for the U.S. market or for export.(December 6)

In the first, “growth” (presumably economic growth) and “risk-taking”  are the be-all and end-all, and inimical to “fairness” or “government”.  Government can never be seen as taking risks or as fostering moral or social growth, the general welfare.

In the second, exploitation is indeed at heart of the proposition: “prosperity”, narrowly-defined, can only truly thrive in the absence of workers’ rights and safety, environmental and financial regulation, and affirmative action.

The GOP Gospel has no vision of a collective future based on political equality and participatory democracy. As Bellah, et. al put it, “the freedom to be left alone is a freedom that implies being alone”.

Glossary: November/December, 2012

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Based on Wall Street Journal editorials, Nov. 7–December 7, 2012. The Journal persists as one of the primary generators and and enforcers of Republican rhetorical orthodoxy:

accountability: kryptonite to all teachers

agenda: any policies or proposals put forth by the Democrats (see also “plan”). Democrats always have a furtiveness about them, ulterior motives, a secret agenda

American prosperity: “letting business exploit as many opportunities as possible”. See also: “self-sufficiency” and “human dignity”

blackmailing: what the EPA does to ensure compliance with federal pollution laws

campaigning:  whenever President Obama makes a speech or argues for a position or law. Anything he promotes is part of his “social and political agenda”. (See also “governing”)

clean water: a liberal pretext for regulating fracking

coercion: all government regulation the Republicans don’t approve of

distortion: what happens when the government interferes with the “free market,” which is envisoned as a perfect, charmed circle, destructively “distorted” by government

economic growth: what happens “when government gets out of the way”. Government is “the greatest threat” to economic growth

fairness: the Democrats’ word for envy. Kryptonite to “growth”

governing:  what Congressional Republicans do when they make a speech or argue for a position or law.   (see also: “campaigning”)

higher taxes: the Democrats’ “secular religion”

human dignity: maintained by doing what you want, whenever you want. Best flourishes in the free market; is fundamentally eroded by government

liberals: “class warriors”

natural gas: the rise of this has “done more to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than has the Kyoto Protocol”

Obamacare: stalking horse for the “liberal entitlement dream”, with its ultimate goal of single-payer health care

plan: any policy or proposal put forth by the Republicans. Always presumed to be “reasonable”.

ram, bludgeon, pound on, demonize: what Democrats do to try to pass laws. Republicans, on the other hand, always “compromise” and “negotiate”. Harry Reid is called “the capo”

re-engineering: Any ideas for social or political reform that come from the Democrats. Always pejorative in a  kind of Burkean way that distrusts social change

regulators: must always be described as “hyperactive” and as “job killers”

risk taking: the driver of innovation and the beating heart of the free market. What “entrepreneurs” do. Democratic innovations (such as encouraging alternative energy industries)  are called “boondoggles,” “crony capitalism” or “the dreamland of so many government subsidies and mandates”

school choice: “the great civil rights issue of our era”

self sufficiency: the natural state of man: homo economicus. From Wikepedia:  “In economics, homo economicus, or economic human, is the concept in many economic theories of humans as rational and narrowly self-interested actors who have the ability to make judgments toward their subjectively defined ends. Using these rational assessments, homo economicus attempts to maximize utility as a consumer and economic profit as a producer.This theory stands in contrast to the concept of homo reciprocans, which states that human beings are primarily motivated by the desire to be cooperative and to improve their environment”.

teachers’ unions: “the Evil Empire”; intent on “stealing our kids’ futures”

unions: always refer to as “Big Labor”