Elf Sternberg

This week, three things happened that made me realize what the right-wing game plan really looks like. The first was Ted Cruz's proposal to declare anti-fascist activism a "terrorist activity". The second was Rod Dreher's ongoing series, *the Left™ made me a Trump voter, in which he posts emails from people who are planning to vote for Trump because thy equate equality with not just loss, but the actual threat of death. The third was more private: at a recent political event for a Democratic candidate, an attendee had to be ejected from the room because he was trying to take photographs of the sign-in sheet, which means that not just the people who give contributions had to be recorded, but every person, even those whose donations consist of time, or who just want a candidate's sign in front of their houses. While I was there, one of the attendees related a similar story about how the same thing happened at a trans-activism meet-up, where a guy stood out as "not like the others" and yes, was stopped while pulling out his phone to snap a photograph of the sign-up sheet with email addresses and contact information.

The "antifa" law, or a declaration from the DOJ that "anti-fascist activism needs to be investigated as terrorist activity," is part of a two-sided attack on leftist resources. From our currently very right-wing government, prosecutions and civil proceedings will hinder leftist activists from their core mission while they deal with the distraction. From the nastier, brown-shirted side, the threat of doxxing, midnight visits to activists home, and actual violence will cow many leftists from speaking up and speaking their minds, imprison them in their homes, and if they're going to continue, drain their financial and emotional reserves securing themselves against the threat rather than continuing in their core mission.

The word "SLAPP" stands for "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation," and Wikipedia defines it as "a lawsuit that is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition." (I'm not sure why we needed a new term, barratry is a word that's been around forever.) That's what the conservative game plan is for 2020: menace from the ground, and SLAPPs from the sky.

The whole point of this two-pronged attack to take leftist policy, which is more popular than conservative policy, and reduce the effectiveness of any advocacy for it, thus leaving room in the public sphere only for conservative ideas, and making conservative ideas seem "inevitable" since no-one is advocating for leftist positions.

As I've said before, I'm a firm believer in the red state / blue state dichotomy when it comes to marriage. As eminently described by Jonathan Rauch, the dichotomy is simple:

Red State values are predicated on two assumptions: (1) sex almost always causes babies, and (2) by applying himself, a man can get ahead in this world. The red state response to this environment is to create an idea: Marriage creates adults; that is, since sex causes babies and young people want sex, get them married, get them making children, and get them into the pipeline of providing and raising, i.e. get them into work and motherhood, those ennobling roles for men and women.

Blue State values are predicated on a different set of assumptions: (1) sex doesn't have to create babies at all, and (2) no amount of get-r-done is enough if you don't have the years of education necessary to operate the machinery of a technologically advanced civilization. The response to this is adults create marriages: that is, the task of maturation is a societal and educational one, and once twenty-something have earned the material and social capital necessary to have a stable life, then they can go about having children, often in a multi-disciplinary, shared-responsibilities way.

Early family formation short-circuits this maturation process. Taking on the responsibilities for young children interferes with the education necessary, and consigns those who have young children to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

My favorite take on this for a long time was Catholic writer Philip Primeau's hand-wringing article about how, yes, he had to admit, blue states not only hewed to their own values successfully, they hewed to red state's values of longer marriages, lower teenage birthrates, lower teenage STD infections, and lower rates of poverty among young adults more successfully than red states did! (Primeau goes on to claim that blue state success is predicated on the "unimaginable tragedy of abortion," but somehow fails to mention that most red states have rates similar to blue states.)

But Ross Douthat may have passed Primeau with his new article, The Imitation of Marriage. Ross admits that the pattern of shared responsibilities, egalitarian roles, longer romantic experimentation, and delayed families will become the norm. Blue state marriages "prepare [young adults] for knowledge work in ways that working class family life do not."

Douthat then whines that this wrecking of the social underpinnings of masculine identity, this creative destruction of the stern paterfamilias, has left a lot of men bereft, and they have reaped "relatively little reward" for doing so.

But what really takes the cake is this:

We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values — sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism — when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster.

Conspiracies are the refuge of the weak-minded.

I mean, seriously, what he's proposing here is, first, a kind of post-Marxian, post-modern "false consciousness," the classic accusation that secularists and liberals "steal" their moral underpinnings from conservative and Christian America, and that liberals know that if their stated values were to become the norm, America would fall apart. Secondly, he accuses upper-class liberals of, consciously or not, wrecking the lower classes by promulgating their attitudes toward sexuality without a clean and compelling explanation of why or how those attitudes work.

Douthat is edging dangerously close to saying "Democracy doesn't work." As conservative writer Irving Kristol once famously said,

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

Douthat is claiming that there are different truths about sex and the technocratic society, and the idea that "liberal" truths should also be true for the common masses is, to Ross, a dangerous experiment.

In fact, what's really failing is the way red states don't keep up; they attempt to mire kids in the red state pattern all the while admitting that there is a different way, a more vibrant way, an urban and liberal way. It's the red states, with their abstinence-only programs and their outright bans on easily accessible birth control, that continue to fail their young adults.

Still, it's nice to see Ross admit that the blue state ideal of marriage works, if only for some people. It'll be even better whet he finally admits that there is no alternative, that the red states have been poisoning their own wells of economic power, and that the blue states are doing all right all along.

It's unlikely that the gay press wants to talk about this (with one very healthy exception), but yesterday the usual suspects (all good people, really) spun anti-gay activist Mark Regnerus's speech at the Catholic University of Steubenville as "Mark Regnerus: Same-sex marriage will grant straight men 'permission to stray', anal sex," with a big focus on the sodomy part.

But that's not what Regnerus is saying at all. Here's the central paragraph of his argument:

If gay marriage is perceived as legitimate by heterosexual women, it will eventually embolden boyfriends everywhere, and not a few husbands, to press for what men have always historically wanted but were rarely allowed: sexual novelty in the form of permission to stray without jeapordizing their primary relationship. The discussion of openness in straight marriages will become more common, just as the practice of heterosexual anal sex got a big boost from the normalization of gay men's sexual behavior both in contemporary porn and the American imagination. It may be spun as empowering for women, but it sure won't, it doesn't feel that way.

Regnerus is claiming, without evidence, that anal sex would never have become a part of the modern popular imagination, even in hardcore porn, if it hadn't been for gay men. Somehow, porn actors and actresses would have completely ignored the back door if gay men hadn't forced them to look closely at it. But his claim is that this has already happened; that it's too late to turn back the clock on this issue. So what he is he really worried about?

Consensual non-monogamy. The real, last, homosexualization of the American sexual psyche. Dan Savage, in his brilliant conversation with Andrew Sullivan last year at the New York Public Library, said much the same thing: "Where straight people are now is where gay people were twenty years ago. We call them fuckbuddies; you call them friends with benefits. We call it tricking, you call it a hookup. This whole move to the big city and spend your 20s fucking a lot of people and figuring out who you are before you settle down, gay people invented that."

Gay people have spent the last ten years figuring out how to be married, how to enjoy the promise of lifetime partnership, mutual companionship, and all the support and joy that comes from having someone who is your best friend, your biggest fan, and not feel locked into the sexual straightjacket that society imposes as the price for all the rest. Polyamorous folks have adopted the language gays invented, for the most part, because it's the language that works.

This is Regnerus's greatest fear: the normalization of consensual non-monogamy. That as the twin terrors of uncontrollable reproduction and sexually transmitted infection slowly fall back with the advance of the biological sciences, that the homosexualization of our culture will proceed to the place where I, personally, have sorta expected it to go: toward a world where relationships are based not entirely on falling back into tradition and habit, but are based on the actual wants and needs of the participants, deliberately chosen and consciously enjoyed.

Pride is a suspiciously strong emotion. And pride is what is going to destroy this country. But not in the way you think it will.

I've long been a proponent of the red state families / blue state families dichotomy. I don't propose that it's entirely binary, and that there aren't many families that blend the two sets of behaviors into one group, but the real pattern is simple to grasp:

Red families believe that the maturation of the adult is a result of family formation. In the red family pattern, sex is a powerful, natural, and dangerous force that must be tamed by the formation of the family, so sex and the family are sacrilized together through marriage. Men and women become adults through facing up to the responsibilities of rearing children. Because sexual desire is a dangerous force, the mechanism for controlling it must be imposed as early as possible.

Blue families believe in the conscious and deliberate formation of a child-oriented family after each adult has fully matured. They hold off on child-rearing until they have the resources to do it well, and they transmit to their children the need to hold off themselves, in order to have the time necessary to learn.

Blue families are winning. Birth control has separated sex from childrearing; much of the danger of sex has been tamed. Although sexual desire kicks in during teenagerhood, blue family values allow people to spend the almost three decades necessary to master the skills needed to run our technologically advanced civilization.

Right now, the reformist conservatives, like Sullivan, Frum, Barro, and even Gobry, are hated and villified by the overwhelming bulk of the GOP. But their plan is the only one that offers the GOP back to a chance at winning the heart of America. It goes like this: "Address family formation seriously, make it easier to start a family and raise kids, and we'll win elections. More kids and healthier families means a better economy and healthier society, and there will be less need for social services, and the GOP can cycle up to winning again."

But here's the problem. Gobry, who is overwhelmingly Catholic, will have to clench his hands and admit that, yes, the blue model is the only that actually works. The red model leads to pain and suffering, to feeling trapped in marriages and doomed to low-paying jobs, to back-alley abortion and miserable, gender-biased lives.

Dan Savage is absolutely right: that period between college and marriage, where you have a lot of sex, figure out who you are, figure out who you're compatible with, then settle down and have kids and take on the responsibilities of adulthood, works. It may be the homosexualization of heterosexuality ("We call it tricking, you call it hooking up; we called them fuckbuddies, you call them friends with benefits") which so terrified the anti-gay crusaders a generation ago, works.

Politicians aren't stupid, but they are prideful. And their constituencies are prideful too. The last thing the red states want to admit is that the path back to healthy families and a healthier society and an easing of the economic burden of social services is through an embrace of blue state family values. They're too proud to admit that. Their constituencies are going to have a hard time admitting, "No, really, we've been doing this thing wrong all along."

But the statistics really are in: blue states are better at the declared red-state values than red states are. The formula of the culturally liberal: contraception, education, extensive courtship, late marriages, and small, high-quality families, are outpacing abstinence, religion, brief courtships, early marriages, and large families.

But try getting anyone to admit that. And as long as the red state pols' power and money depends upon them not admitting it, this vicious cycle is going to keep America paralyzed while the world falls apart.

This morning I heard John McCain saying, "President Obama needs to figure out how to put these controversies behind him."

He might have better luck if McCain could reign in his own f'ing party and have them stop obstructing him. What most Republicans understand (but McCain apparently hasn't) is that the presidents governs rather than leads, so obstructing him is easy. When Bush was in the White House, Democrats continued to pretend that he was governing when in fact he was trying to lead, which is why his presidency was such a disaster.

If McCain wants Obama to get things done, stop with the nonsense, disempower Mr. Grand Theft Auto, and let the government have a president.

I was reading an article the other day on a judge's ruling that Plan-B, the after-sex contraception, be made available to everyone, regardless of age. In his ruling, he stated that Katheryn Sebelius's almost un-heard of political overturning of the FDA's own recommendation that it be made available over the counter was political, uninformed, and contrary to the public good.

In the responses, one of the complaints was that "children should not have access to abortion drugs without their parents' knowledge." This dredged up memories of the recent case of Hobby Lobby, the toy retailer, which argued that it shouldn't be forced to provide contraception because it was the same thing as abortion. When the judge informed HL's lawyer that contraception and abortion were not the same, the laywer responded with a straight face, "It is my client's sincere belief that they are the same thing, your honor."

Have you ever read Ted Chiang's short story, Hell Is The Absence of God? In it, angels are real, show up at random, do random stuff that either heals or (more often) fucks up the lives of people in the area. The few times they've responded to questions, their response has been "He works in mysterious ways. You wouldn't understand why. Just love Him, and all will be well." And then they go on wrecking towns and lives.

The story presents a reified version of the fundamentalist mindset. Everything Happens for a Reason of God's, Even If You Don't Understand It.

And then it clicked: after every incident of intercourse, a woman is presumed pregnant until proven otherwise. Because she's presumed pregnant, every form of contraception is abortion. Since rape is the one thing fundamentalists can no longer call "intercourse," the accomodation made is that real rape can't lead to the consequence of intercourse, the presumption of pregnancy.

Another powerful fundamentalist mindset is that we must head for a godly world. It doesn't matter if people get hurt along the way; it doesn't matter if pro-sex, pro-contraception policies would alleviate teenage pregnancy by some amount; they lead away from the Godly world and the true aim, which is making unmarried pregnancy non-existent.

The whole anti-contraception, "legitimate rape" argument emerges from the synergistic effects of these thoughts in the fevered brains of fundamentalist men. The only way sex does not lead to pregnancy is if God doesn't want it to, or if someone does something criminal. In their perfect world, that would always be the case. Always.

Andrew Sullivan had a thread over the weekend, "Letters from Millenial voters", (see here, here, and here for examples), and the one thing that's been coming through in all of these is an annoying self-congratulatory "We've seen through all of the lies of both parties. A pox on both your parties. We are more libertarian than ever. We want to let gays marry. We want to end the war on drugs. We also don't want to be paying for stuff we can't afford."

This new libertarianism will last just long enough for those people to realize what my generation realized too late, what the generation before me realized too late, and what the generation before that realized too late: that the ongoing industrialization and automation of our civilization means more and more people will be out on the streets, unable to find work. The cyberization of even intellectual work now means the menial but discerning work of law clerks can now be outsourced to search engines, and China's burgeoning economy is about to get a very nasty shock as half a million fine-work assembly line workers are about to find themselves replaced with automated assembly machines that never complain, never strike, and never commit an embarassing suicide.

At which point they will realize that "the new libertarianism" was conveniently ignored by the people in power because it allowed what it has always allowed: the consolidation of wealth, the construction of power systems designed to permanentize that consolidation. The pretty debates between the "dark satanic mill" libertarians and the "bleeding heart" libertarians will be irrelevant. The world will revolve around power: the strong will do what they can, and the weak will endure what they must.

And so it goes.

In a recent article, Reuters asked the question, "Are the Big Banks Winning?" The article isn't about success; it's about whether or not the banks are avoiding regulation and becoming more powerful, despite the best efforts of the Obama administration, hampered as it has been by the plutocrats' fingers in Congress. It's about short-term "winning" which will ultimately crash the economy for most of us. The plutocrats don't care; they can go live in their gated paradises surrounded by guard labor, and the rest of us can get by in our slums and swamps as best we can, enjoying whatever trickle our masters toss at us.

But what caught my eye was this line: "No country can achieve a high rate of growth without a well-functioning financial system. ... An outsized financial sector expansion can actually reduce economic growth, according to their data. This relationship holds for country after country, and the tipping points are fairly consistent. When private credit grows to between 90 percent and 100 percent of gross domestic product, it is tilting toward too big."

Now that the financial sector is so big, it's only goal is to spiral upwards in pursuit of more and more money, taking with it like a wind funnel all the cash that would otherwise go to servicing the manufacturing and service industries of the United States. These places are being starved for capitol and credit, and there's no promise that anything we small investors do will help them off the ground.

A friend of mine recently went to work for Wall Street. He was a brilliant developer who had worked on a mapping project (not for Google or Apple, so don't blame him!) and I had asked him for help with my own mapping project. (Developers do this all the time, turn to our masters for "where can I learn more about..." tips and tricks). He'd forgetten everything he knew about it because he was now working for a hedge fund, doing what he does. If what he does is mirrored across my industry, then the people who could be solving cancer, or improving internet access, or unravelling the mysteries of fusion, or whatever-- are caught in the financial windfunnel.

So, if the financial industry is "winning," it's winning the way the citizens of Easter Island "won" in placating their gods... by destroying the ecosystem that kept them alive.

Mitt Romney is an amazing businessman and CEO, able to crunch the numbers and analyze the data and understand how we got here and where we're going. He has to know that the unemployment rate is 8%, not 47%; he has to know that the 47% number comes because Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all cut taxes on and extended tax "credits" back to middle class families with children, in the hopes of encouraging more middle class children.

(The very poor didn't get credits because they didn't have any money in the first place to credit; the idea was that the middle class [read: mostly white, mostly Christian people] had Protestant values and just needed a little encouragement to have more kids, so most credits are targeted at 'having work, having kids' families.)

So what explains the attitude Romney showed in that video? Paul Krugman today in the New York Times claims it's all about Rand:

The fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn't have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party's affection is reserved for "job creators," AKA employers and investors.

The G.O.P.'s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party' policy priorities. Mr. Romney's remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as "lucky duckies."

[This] reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.

Okay, I've never read Atlas Shrugged, but I have read The Fountainhead, and while it's certainly about heroic individuals persuing their creative vision so thoroughly and so without compromise that their genius is eventually recognized by the masses, there is no disdain whatsoever for the working classes in The Fountainhead. Roarke admires the working classes: the riveters, steelworkers, stonemasons, even managers who are doing good work; he learns from them, studies them, and takes from them the values of creation. They are part of the system of creation, and Rand acknowledges that.

As of the writing of The Fountainhead, Rand had (and apparently never had) a thought for the organizations of communities outside of work; for fraternal organizations, for mutual aid societies, for families. Children never appear in her work. But she was not at all disdainful of work, or workers.

So is this loathing of the working class an Atlas Shrugged thing, or is this just another case of our oligarchical masters taking what they can from any text from which they can propagandize while still pursuing the policy of Sodom?

For those who don't love The Game known as Politics, Jennifer Rubin is a "conservative columnist for the Washington Post." She's famous (or infamous, I suppose) for being the most obviously partisan pundit on the American scene right now, blindly praising every Republican speaker as "honest," "exciting," and "direct," while describing every Democratic speaker as "deceptive," "boring," and "ineffective," almost to the point of parody. "Clint Eastwood's speech was more talked about than Obama's," "the Republican bench is deep, the Democrats don't even have one," "Obama put forward no numbers and no plan, unlike Romney," and so forth.

But on the last day of the Democratic convention, there was one tweet that got my attention. It had nothing to do with politics. She has teenagers, and it's back to school week: "I don't think I could pass a third of these classes. When did high school get so hard?"

High school is preparation for life. Everyone should be able to get through it, and every class should be manageable by any adult. I don't expect everyone to be able to able to do French I immediately, but I do expect every adult to be able to follow along, help their child through every topic, and if necessary familiarize him or herself with the child's effort.

Jennifer Rubin's not merely a bad pundit; she's also a bad parent. By proclaiming herself unable and unwilling to navigate the skillset our community agrees is the minimum necessary to survive our technologically advanced civilization, she's telling her children it's acceptable to do the same.