Creeping Morgenthauism

There's a passage from Henry Morgenthau's diaries that has been a staple of right-wing New Deal denialism over the years. In it, FDR's Treasury secretary describes a meeting with the House Democrats on Ways and Means Committee in which he bemoans the supposed failures of the New Deal to lift unemployment and restrain the balloon of national debt.

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.... We have never made good on our promises....I say after six years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot!

As I noted, this is a popular quotation among people who believe that all taxation is theft and all spending draws the nation closer to full collectivization. But Morgenthau was, quite simply, wrong. The New Deal did work, albeit erratically and despite the fact that Roosevelt could never quite jettison the fiscally conservative instincts on which he based his 1932 campaign. But sure enough, between 1933-39, real GDP rose by nearly 50 percent, while private, non-farm unemployment dropped from just above 30 percent to a shade above 15 percent. Morgenthau can be forgiven for not realizing how dramatically unemployment had been whittled away, since he was relying on BLS statistics that have been dramatically revised over the past 70 years. The debt he alludes to was -- as a percentage of GDP -- roughly equivalent to the levels the US would later reach during the 1980s, and they were nowhere near the levels (e.g., ~120 percent of GDP) that the US raised during WWII. The US could have avoided those debts by not fighting, but regardless, the debts were paid off, in true Keynesian fashion, by the 1970s.

But we shouldn't be surprised that Morgenthau -- whose anti-Keynesian views put him at odds with most economists in the Roosevelt administration -- would have overlooked the data. His obsession with spending cuts and balanced budgets (and FDR's willingness to listen to him in '37) helped produce the disastrous recession that marred Roosevelt's second term and inspired Morgenthau's wailing about how the New Deal "does not work." As well, Morgenthau was one of the key figures who successfully persuaded FDR to modify his own advisers' proposal that Social Security be funded from general revenues rather than (regressively) from the paychecks of workers themselves. The result was a social insurance plan modeled differently from those of every other industrial democracy -- a plan that was less generous and more exclusionary, and one that (at least initially) bore no sense that economic security for the aged was at all a "right."

It's no surprise, therefore, that conservatives would celebrate a quotation from someone whose analysis of the economic situation in 1939 was -- as we now know -- wrong on the facts as well as the theory. And we shouldn't be shocked that these same folks would continue to propose ideas that will, if implemented, assure that the US economy fails to recover before my kids are teenagers.

Why the Obama administration would provide any solace to those who echo Morgenthau's 70-year-old error is, however, an enormous mystery.

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A collision of hacks

What the hell?

It wouldn't have been difficult to predict this, but the stupidity of Deborah Solomon interviewing John Yoo does indeed approach the density of a degenerate dwarf star. After describing Yoo's new book as "an eloquent, fact-laden history of audacious power grabs by American presidents," Solomon offers him the chance to set forth, without challenge, his usual fact-free assertions about how the Constitutional framers really wanted to recreate the British monarchy.

The idea is that the president’s power grows and changes based on circumstances, and that’s what the framers of the Constitution wanted. They wanted it to exist so the president could react to crises immediately.

I continue to marvel at the willingness of self-described journalists to describe views like this as "history," given that supporting historical evidence for them is in fact nowhere to be found. For Yoo's interpretation to be even remotely plausible, we'd have to find something in the Constitutional debates proving that the framers imagined circumstances in which the middle third of Article 1, Section 8 would somehow be switched off. That would require as well that we discover some proof that the framers -- operating on republican principles that far exceeded those existing in the British constitutional monarchy -- suddenly decided that the president should enjoy greater war prerogatives than the dreaded king of England had at his disposal. And we'd have to overlook the fact that the convention of 1787 was primarily animated by concerns about the weak legislative authority of the federal government and not by some brew of anxieties about the absence of vague, emergency powers vested in its executive.

But hey, I'm sure Yoo's book has a raft of eloquent, fact-laden ripostes to these small historical problems. Though I'd also imagine the book contains fewer dick jokes bout Bill Clinton, nor would it reveal the awkward fact that Yoo has no idea or interest in what his parents do for a living. Leave it to Deborah Solomon to produce something that actually makes reading John Yoo seem more appealing.

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Glenn Beck: The 1970s Were Golden Era

The latest tear-jerker from Glenn Beck will remind some readers of that drunken idiot who cornered you at the last reunion and wasted ten minutes of your life describing, with malodorous inaccuracy, how fucking awesome everything was when you were in high school together.

In any event, the entire clip is standard gauge Beck -- chalkboard, photos of administration officials hastily slapped up next to portraits of dictators, silences by turns reverential and mournful, the fake tears and the rest of it -- but by far the weirdest part comes about three and a half minutes in, as he uses Coke's old Mean Joe Greene spot along with one of Kodak's "Times of Your Life" ads to remind his (apparently middle-aged) viewers of a "simpler time" in the nation's history. Which is obviously a multiple tiers of bat-shit, given (a) the implied assumption that television advertising's generic nostalgia was somehow more sociologically accurate way back when, and (b) the fact that, in this case, "way back when" happened to be 1979 and 1975, respectively. I realize that Beck spends most of his time dreaming about kissing George Washington on the mouth, so more recent historical reference points might have veered away from true North, but seriously -- 1979? The annus horribilis of the Carter era? And 1975? The year that witnessed the collapse of South Vietnam and the beginnings of the Cambodian genocide? The year the Weather Underground bombed the State Department?

Has Beck forgotten Wingnut 101? The truly Simpler Times happened in the 1950s, when everyone enjoyed racist Jell-O ads:

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How delusional is Glenn Beck?

I realize this is only scraping midway down the barrel of Glenn Beck's yawning madness, but for reasons I can't adequately defend I was actually listening yesterday when he explained why he found the idea of an Islamic Anti-Christ to be gentler on the stomach than Walter Lippmann:

I've read some pretty excruciating stuff. I have read some stuff -- I've read about the twelfth Imam. This is the guy who I think could be construed as the Antichrist. The twelfth Imam, the one that today Ahmadinejad is going to say again you mark my words. He will say it again in front of the United Nations, "Oh, Allah, give me the strength to hasten the return of the promised one." The promised one is the twelfth Imam. I believe that is the Antichrist. It is it has all of the earmarks. I've read some pretty dark stuff. I have never closed a book, ever, and said I can't read this anymore; it's just wicked stuff. Walter Lippmann. Walter Lippmann, who was one of the guys who was instrumental at CBS. I think he was the head of CBS for a while, he's one of the guys who started the Council on Foreign Relations. He was one of the guys who did the Versailles treaty, he's one of the architects of Woodrow Wilson. He is just evil stuff. I couldn't read it anymore. It's so dark, it is such a depressing look at humanity where they are saying you'll never be able to get stupid people to vote; that's why we have to breed eugenics -- breed smarter people to weed out the riffraff. I couldn't read it anymore.

Which is to say, Beck never read Lippmann in the first place. If he had, he'd know that Lippmann was the precise opposite of a eugenicist -- so much so that he wrote a series of articles for The New Republic in 1922 that condemned (a) the belief that "hereditary IQ" could be measured; and (b) the cruel mischief that had already been, and would continue to be, inspired by the World War I-era Army Intelligence Tests. (Given Beck's views on immigration and his unimpechabley non-racist interpretation of what the Constitution has to say about citizenship, it's safe to say that Beck shares more in common with Lippmann-era eugenicists than Lippmann himself did.) In those essays -- the fourth one being the most scathing -- Lippmann warned that testing advocates

have committed themselves to a dogma which must lead to such abuse. They claim not only that they are really measuring intelligence, but that intelligence is innate, hereditary, and predetermined. They believe that they are measuring the capacity of a human being for all time and that his capacity is fatally fixed by the child’s heredity. Intelligence testing in the hands of men who hold this dogma could not but lead to an intellectual caste system in which the task of education had given way to the doctrine of predestination and infant damnation. If the intelligence test really measured the unchangeable hereditary capacity of human beings, as so many assert, it would inevitably evolve from an administrative convenience into a basis for hereditary caste.

Beck's real aim, of course, is to insist (inaccurately) that Lippmann was a "founding father" of progressivism and to claim that progressives anticipated Hitler, would have wanted to kill Baby Trig, and so forth, so things like "facts" are probably unhelpful to the cause.

I suppose if Beck had actually read any of Lippmann's work -- and someone has obviously summarized/caricatured Public Opinion and The Phantom Public for him -- he'd likely be outraged by Lippmann's (amply rewarded) skepticism that "the people" constitute the repository of all virtue in a democracy. By the early 1920s, Lippmann was of course dismissive of the belief that "the people" exist as an "organism with an organic unity" in the first place -- which meant that Lippmann was, among many other things, skeptical of the nostalgic "phantom" community that animated Mussolini's fascism or the Anglo-Saxon tribalism of the KKK. You'd think that Beck would at least appreciate the fact that Lippmann's skepticism eventually led him to oppose significant parts of New Deal (including Social Security and the Revenue Act of 1935, which raised top marginal tax rates to 75 percent) and to vote for Alf Landon in 1936. But who am I kidding? Even Jonah Goldberg -- our era's most careful and detailed chronicler of the liberal fascist menace -- doesn't mention that in his book, so how is Beck supposed to know? Besides, he's busy thinking about other stuff at the moment.

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