Every once in a while, the monkeys pounding the keyboards produce some text that actually seems to illuminate. A little ray of light from the cosmos that, maybe by pure random inadvertence, or a little joke by whatever or whoever runs things on the Really Big Scale, lets you see not through that glass, darkly, but the substantive, fully-grokkable immanent reality. A reality that may be flat and ugly and 36-gritty but is part of what people ought to know about the milieu they are born into, and die out of, sometimes way sooner than they ought.
Want a little peek at what some of the folks who are fucking the rest of us so royally think about the dirty old Electorate that so many here are so terribly involved with trying to educate and enlighten, parsing the polls and examining the entrails in an effort to "progressivize policy?" Who have mythic notions of the sanctity of the individual franchise? Who still believe in a non-deterministic universe, free will, "freedom," and that other thing we all talk about that does not really exist, "democracy?" Who ruminate and fulminate about Bully Pulpit versus The Best We Could Get and all that?
Here's the view from Wall Street, from the people who look down on the rest of us, literally and figuratively, people who are unabashedly post-national, who have passports just as conveniences to get out of town if the enormous paper shitpile they are building, one $500 billion derivative transaction at a time, starts to cave. The people who buy and sell the rest of us, who "own" 80 percent of everything of value, and hope soon to own the rest, including the indenture papers for each one of us, who pull the strings on our legislative and executive/regulatory and judicial Punch and Judy Show, and laugh, loudly, all the way to the investment bank.
A sneak preview:
Although it’s a bit far afield from my usual stomping grounds of Wall Street and financial regulation, I think it might be helpful for some of my readers to have a better understanding of presidential politics.
The first thing to remember is we’re living out here on the fringes of America. Going to Wall Street—even just living in and around New York City—is pretty much equivalent to expatriating yourself. Officially, we’re part of America, but only in the same way the Panama Canal zone is part of America according to various treaties of mutual convenience.
So when presidential candidates seem bizarre or fringy to you, you should remember they aren’t usually running to be your president. They are running to be president of another country that happens to share a legal system with us. Your instincts about who is likely to be elected or who would do a good job as president are likely to be way off because you are too far removed from the situation.
At all interesting? There's more, but one more tease: The headline of the little piece I am abstracting from is "Political Weirdos, Ignorant Voters and a Wise Democracy." From CNBC, The Text Version, on August 12, http://www.cnbc.com/...
And the folks listening in say, "Hm," and turn back to the videos and the netspace news reports and the usual thinking... What's the last stage direction in "Waiting for Godot?" "They do not move."
Let us not forget, all us liberals or progressives or whatever we vociferously and tendentiously characterize ourselves to be, that the salient phrase from the latest bubble-pop in 2008 was that wonderful formulation, "Who cares? Ill be gone, and you'll be gone!" Or more familiarly, for the compulsive acronymists among us, "IBG-YBG!" Beyond the reach of "the law," which already has been rewritten to make most of what they have done "not illegal," and for the rest, the mechanisms of enforcement have been suborned and subverted and perverted. The mantra of the whippy, zippy young math whizzes who made their mothers proud of them by figuring out how to monetize and then securitize and then slice and dice and subsume into derivative "thingies" various bags of excrement. And do it in a way that let them exchange trillions of "dollars" in pure-counterfeit Monopoly Money for actual, real, hard-earned taxable dollars that us working stiffs had to create by, you know, actually doing some work, creating something of tangible value. And then these folks get to waltz, to fly, to motor off to luxurious "retirements," free of any consequence.
Here's another little slug in the gut from the folks whose best future function in life might, a really angry former middle classer might say, be as lamppost decorations (and no, for the fastidious, I am not, NOT, advocating violence, though everyone appalled by the notion might observe that the Kleptocratic Nobility are slaughtering the rest of us, quite literally, as even pointed out, poignantly, in diaries in this space):
On the other hand, we can make a few general observations about how the electorate votes for presidential candidates.
First, the electorate doesn’t have a good idea about which political party or persuasion stands for which policies. They are confused about basic terms like liberal or conservative, and about even the most basic political facts. Political ignorance is the defining feature of our political process.
Second, because of the lack of information, the voters employ various heuristic devices to decide which candidates to support. For the most part, they vote for a presidential candidate based on things like whether the candidate appears to like them, whom the candidate pals around with, and whether he looks and sounds like a leader.
Third, one of the main goals of political campaigns is to get hold of the heuristics of the public and exploit them. This is often called “spin” but the point is that you cannot win simply by adopting either the wisest or most popular policies because communicating this is nearly impossible. So you have to win by aiming your campaign at shaping and pandering to the mental shortcuts voters use to make decisions in the absence of knowledge.
Fourth, the first, second and third points absolutely drive the intellectuals and journalists crazy. They think it is poisonous for democracy to be mired in ignorance and superficiality. They’re always striving either for a better informed electorate or for power to be taken away from the uninformed and handed over to experts.
(Don’t get too upset that intellectuals are like this. Their disposition to overvalue the political effects of knowledge and ignorance keeps them interesting. Imagine how boring things would be if we didn’t have guys fighting over policy all the time.)
Fifth, our democracy actually operates better because of ignorance and hermeneutics than it would if it were based on knowledge of policy positions. There are a number of reasons for this but the most important is that a candidates policy positions are a very terrible guide for what it would be like to have that candidate as a president. Remember, George W. Bush ran on a more humble foreign policy and gave us nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama ran promising national unity: How has that turned out?
The point isn’t that politicians break campaign promises. I’m sure Bush would have preferred to have spent his presidency concentrating on figuring out how to send more people to colleges, have more people own homes, and have our borders be more open to immigration. And Obama would totally like to have brought us altogether.
How's your snark detector working?
See how much fun it is to get a view of ourselves from a little different perspective?
Old Robert Burns had the handle on this illumination:
O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.
(O would some power the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us.)
Robert Burns, Poem "To a Louse" - verse 8
Want the whole gift? http://www.worldburnsclub.com/...
I bet that the author of this sparkling, insightful gem, Jon Carney, has thoroughly studied and mastered the works of one Carlos M. Cipolla, chief among them his chef d'oeuvre. "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." To catch up with the rest of the class, click here. .
And to finish up, not that even the clearest sight, in the harshest illumination, will make the slightest difference in the nature of our cataleptic approach to the painful reality of the triumph of Vice over Virtue, here's the closing observations of Mr. Carney:
Events overtake policy. Policy positions are really just disguised expert forecasts and what choices will be available in the future. But expert forecasting is notoriously inaccurate. So it shouldn’t really be surprising that policy preferences are a bad predictor of governance.
To sum up, voters are ignorant, politics is largely about heuristic symbolism [and, of course, MONEY, lots of MONEY], and intellectuals overvalue the usefulness of knowledge and the dangers of ignorance.
And it’s a good thing, too.
[Italics and bold are mine.]
Yeah. It's a good thing, too. For whom, again?
So let's all get busy, pulling together our uneasy coalitions and descending into Policy Hell to wrestle the demons of our intellectual adversaries, driving our heuristic coupes around the Mall, loudspeakers blaring what we are so sure the Crowd needs to know, to just HEAR, to become those Educated Voters that we just KNOW are out there, waiting for that last squidge of policy enlightenment to figure out how the Kochs are short-changing them in every transaction of their lives, and why it is So Damn Important to Elect More And Better Democrats.
Here's blood in your eye. ve."