I am endlessly amused by Gore Vidal’s claim that the United States exists because Abraham Lincoln had “an early puberty.”
Do I care if Lincoln indulged in man-love? Of course I do! It’s delicious. However, unlike the Jaffaites, it matter not a bit to me whether or not the rumors are true.
I really liked this Jonathan Rauch piece in National Journal. His conclusion:
The 2004 exit polls suggested, to many conservatives, that “moral values” won the election for Bush. It may seem odd, then, that his boldest post-election priority is not abortion or gay marriage or schools, but Social Security. The key to the paradox is that Social Security reform is not, at bottom, an economic issue with moral overtones. It is a moral issue with economic overtones.
That’s right. I’m planning to write a couple longish essays on the moral dimensions of Social Security reform, which I think are far more significant than the immediate economic dimensions.
The strategy of the left is to try to spike reform on the model of the right’s demolition of Hillarycare. The big difference, as far as I can see, is that Hillarycare was popular at the outset, but not because it struck the ordinary Joe as some kind of moral advance, but because it seemed like free stuff. The anti-nationalization coalition I think effectively destroyed that idea that anyone would really get a good deal from it, and, perhaps more importantly, plucked several resonant American moral notes about independence, autonomy, and choice.
It seems that the pro-reform coalition in the present case faces broad skepticism about changing social security. However, other than scare tactics about market Russian roulette, the only moral arrow in the quiver of the left is a dull social democratic conservatism about preserving a moribund social insurance scheme. The case depends implicitly on the rather bizarre and unmotivated notion that taking care of each other means offloading responsibility onto the political class. I don’t think this tune really sings in the heart of Americans, no matter how “populist” the arrangement. The “save the New Deal” trope lost its luster long ago. So I don’t know how well it will fly. The best thing anti-reformists really have going for them is that people are risk averse and are wary of change.
On the other hand, the reformers have a moral message about ownership, independence, choice, and equality that I think may prove popular. A problem for the left in the Hillarycare debacle was that they had no adequately resonant response to the moral argument of the anti-nationalizers (not to mention the practical arguments). I don’t think they have an adequately resonant moral response in this case, either. So their success really depends on their ability to effectively plumb the depths of mammalian fear. Risky schemes! Grandma on cat food! Rapacious moneybag bankers!
I’ve got a new piece up at Reason Online linking the effectiveness of remittances as development aid, Bush’s temporary worker program, and help for the victims of the South Asian tsunami.
Will and Amber and playing a fun game, this is what I got:
Stormy Weather, Jimmy Luxury & the Tommy Rome Orchestra
Options, Pedro the Lion
Highly Evolved, The Vines
Tears Are in Your Eyes, Yo La Tengo
If We Can Land a Man On The Moon Then Surely I Can Win Your Heart, Beulah
Gotta Get Away, The Offspring
Joe #1, Fugazi
Another One Bites the Dust, Queen
We Got the Beat, The Go-Go’s
In Da Club, 50 Cent
How about you?
I’m pleased to see that Brad DeLong has endorsed the general principles of the President’s (still indeterminate) plan for social security reform. DeLong is worried that the President’s proposal will turn into some kind of monstrosity, given Bush’s record, which is fair enough. It seems that DeLong is basically saying that he would endorse something like personal accounts if only it was proposed by a Democratic president. If he is saying that, it’s pretty interesting, given the heated vehemence of his prior attacks on personal accounts and their advocates.
I’ve just returned from the President’s well-staged event kicking off the administration’s push for social security personal accounts. I’ve got a lot to do, so no analysis now. I’ll just say that I think Bush is hitting the right notes.
As I predicted to myself, I’m catching heat for my banal generalization that “men need women to be women and women need men to be men…” Julian and Amber each have a go. Perhaps the claim is less mysterious if more specific. I’m saying that, in general, men prefer women who are more typically feminine and women prefer men who are more typically masculine. Yes. Wow. Femininity and masculinity have both natural and cultural components. Its tricky sorting out which is which. In any case, there’s nothing normative about statistical trends of either “natural” or “cultural” preferences.
My obscure point, in reference to the Kipnis article, is that the blank slate view, which was hegemonic in the humanities and social sciences until the rise of sociobiology, at best entirely fails to help us understand ourselves by assuming that sexual preference and sexual identity is entirely cultural, and at worst causes a lot of grief by causing people to bang their heads pointlessly against an unbending reality.
I find that I have been, quite perversely, made to feel guilty by blank slate ideology for having preferences for women who are, in many ways, traditionally feminine, and for preferring certain traditional gender roles. Indeed, I feel like I have been, in some ways, ideologically estranged from components of my masculinity by my tentative attitude toward my own preferences. I had been made to assume that they were cultural, elective, and possibly wrong. It’s quite strange that one can feel positively transgressive by acquiescing to nearly universal preferences. Now, I am eager for others to pioneer new modes of living, and to surprise us by revealing with their lives well-lived that norms we thought were deep were in fact shallow. But I am personally risk averse and want to maximize my chances for deep satisfaction as a human and a mammal, and I think the best bet is living largely within the old mode. In any case, that’s what my gut tells me. I think this is what most people’s guts tell them. And, yes, this is also how oppression perpetuates itself. So I vow to do my utmost to root out the genuinely harmful. But I will not ruin my life speculating about injustice.
The point regarding Kipnis, then, is that I have every intention of maintaining my preferences for women who are beautiful, feminine, and who desire to be mothers, and I am not about to be sorry for it. And I do not believe I am alone. And so, yes, if feminism as an ideology requires that men do not have these preferences and that women do not tend to wish to satisfy them, then feminism is in trouble.
Now, I also intend to maintain my preference for extremely intelligent and ambitious women. Julian writes, ” . . . neither Will nor I would find interesting or attractive someone who fit some kind of 1950s archetype of femininity . . .,” but I think I would, insofar as intelligence and ambition are allowed. June Cleaver as Secretary of State? Yes, please.
The universal aspect of femininity that Kipnis I think was lamenting was women’s propensity to go through pains to make themselves attractive to men. I am, of course, against stuffing girls like foie gras geese. So whether or not we can approve of a particular cultural instance of the tendency to ornament and improve one’s appearance according to the prevailing cultural norm depends on the nature of the prevailing cultural norm. But objecting to the tendency as such is futile. I, for one, am an advocate of lipstick, pearls, and tight sweaters, whether they appear in 1955 or 2005. Sue me.
I was also NOT saying that if you are a women and you find you prefer to be a bit more mannish than typical, or you’re a man and find that you cry at Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, or whatever, then there’s something wrong with you. Nor was I saying that guys who like butch girls or girls who like femme guys are in any sense wrong. If the prevailing gender norms get you down, then by all means, buck the norms. Find your own way. And if the elective norms are harmful, then fight them. But don’t get surprised when you find most people defending norms that are norms precisely because of the pattern of revealed preferences across the culture. Think of us as witless sheep, if it makes you feel better.
Mike Munger, chair of the political science department at Duke, has a nice article over at the Library of Economics and Liberty about what democracy is and is not.
Sure. If we had fantastic rates of growth, we could zero out the deficit and have huge surpluses in a fairly short amount of time. And we might also make medical discoveries that extend life expectancy 150 years, in which case Social Security would be in REALLY big trouble. (Raise the retirement age to 200?) It’s a wash!
Ain’t ideology grand? Laura Kipnis:
Heterosexuality always was the Achilles heel of feminism because the asymmetries involved usually took the form of adequacy for one sex, inadequacy for the other. And so things seem to remain: You may hear a lot of tough talk about empowerment and independence in women’s culture today, except you hear it from women shopping for baby-doll outfits or getting Brazilian bikini waxes and double-D cup breast implants. (“I’m doing it for myself.”)
Wouldn’t you think that if heterosexuality is your Achilles heel, you’re in big, big trouble. This isn’t far from saying, “My ism would work out great, if only people didn’t like eating and laughing.” Anyway, the asymmetries between the sexes have nothing to do with adequacy and inadequacy, unless you understand inadequacy as kind of dependence, in which case, we’re all inadequate, just asymmetrically so. Men need women and women need men. More controversially, men need women to be women and women need men to be men. And if you don’t know what that means, or know and object to it, then life among the humans may turn out to be tough for you.
No! If the government exists, and government securities exist, and different accounts have different legal status, and so forth, then the social security trust fund exists.
Every month, my employer dumps a bunch of money into a pipe (I like to imagine it as coins from a big change jar) that has my name on it. Most of that money goes through the main pipe to my checking account. A bit goes down a little pipe to my health savings account. A good bit of it is diverted down a pipe that goes to the federal government. A yet smaller amount goes down a pipe that goes to the DC government. Some goes down pipes to special bins for Social Security and Medicare. Some of that flows back up pipes to SS and Medicare claimants. Some continues into the big pipe to the general fund. The Treasury sends little pieces of paper up one of those vacuum tubes that say that they’ll pay back the money that passed through the Social Security bin and ended up in the general fund.
Now, my health savings account and my checking account are both my accounts. However, there are legal restrictions on what I may do with my HSA. If I buy a big bag of Skittles with my HSA, I will, in some fairly clear sense, owe my HSA $1.99, or whatever it is, even though I would be transferring money from myself to myself.
Similarly, the Social Security Trust Fund and the general fund are different accounts that have different legal statuses. The administrators of the SSTF can, as far as I understand it(and please correct me if you understand it better), do three things: (1) cut SS checks; (2) pay SS administrative costs; and (3) buy securities from the Treasury. The SSTF, as I characterized it, is basically a little stopping off point from the pipes that run from our paychecks to the general fund. The point of this, I take it, is to have a box of change from which to pay SS benefits without having to get legislation appropriating money for SS each year. Because there is no point in having a huge pile of coins sitting in the SSTF being unspent, the rest of the coins are sent down the chute to the general fund, and are replaced with slips of paper (vacuum tubes!) promising repayment from the Treasury.
Now, I don’t see how the SSTF is any more a fiction than my HSA. As John Searle would say, the SSTF and the general fund have different “deontic powers” associated with them, and those powers are real powers underwritten by real institutional facts.
But who cares? Suppose there was no SSTF, and SS benefits were paid out of the general fund, and thus there was no issue of the general fund owing money to the SSTF. The demographic unsustainability of Social Security as it presently exists would be exactly the same. And the regressive and unjust nature of Social Security as it presently exists would be exactly the same. So I can’t understand what’s at stake in the discussion of reality of the SSTF, or whether we have a crisis of the general fund to which the design of Social Security contributes, or a crisis of Social Security, period. What we’ve got is a program that’s just plain bad in normative terms, and even worse in normative terms because it’s unsustainable.