Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, April 7, 2025
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54 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
Well, from the South Side of Chicago to the East Side of London, we now have a place. One more day in this wretched Travelodge. 60616/E20 3AR
A good news story. Maybe? The fact that it exists is because of the awful bad news story underneath.
Hero rat sets Guinness World Record for detecting landmines
@Beth:
Glad to hear it.
Stories like this need to be front and center:
NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it.
[…] Two patients’ treatments using the experimental therapy had to be delayed because NIH’s capacity to make personalized cell therapies has been slowed by the firing of highly skilled staff and by purchasing slowdowns. Those occurred even before major layoffs took place Tuesday. […]
@Jen: They had to use that NIH money to fuel AF-1 flights to Mar-a-Loco and for golf carts and lodging for the Secret Service detail.
“Drezner“””
Link contains links:
snip
snip
“JPEG”
Suits golfing, wearing suits.
Random thought:
Given the kind of Republicans that currently run the House, Trump and his administration now have all the elements of a religious movement: run on beliefs not facts or any kind of rational behavior.
Probably not an original thought but scary nonetheless.
All the talking heads on RW infotainment outlets are now delivering the same conclusion: The pursuit of profit is not the only desirable outcome of a business.
Funny how they appear to not believe that.. when the asserted goal is a left-wing [read: actual populist rather than fake right-wing] objective.
It turns out America as a moneymaking machine only ran on wokeness. Oopsie.
The cope and attempted spin of Fox is hilariously stupid. “The trade war began when China retaliated” .. Um, no. The trade war was started by Trump, period dot.
@Gavin:
What amuses me about this is I’ve been fighting with a Communist leaning friend. She’s been a good foil as I work through some thoughts about capitalism writ large. I’m still in the camp that Communism is still stupid and unworkable, but I think we need to try and pry some useful nuggets out of it. As an aside I think it also suffers from Marx being, well, Marx, and the early communists being fanatic weirdos.
Anyway, one of my recent discussions with her has been about there being nothing inherent to capitalism that REQUIRES this current status. It’s not like the speed of light or photosynthesis. We could choose long term profits over short term, we could expand who is a stakeholder, we can make a whole lot of different choices and still be capitalist.
It’s amazing to make that Fox News is now making the same arguments.
@Beth:
Fighting maybe too strong a word. Fiercely debating to bring enlightenment might be a better way of putting it.
On that, one thing I’ve been struggling with (and haven’t had the time to dig into) is how did the Communists win the battle for the word “socialism”. It seems to me there are a number of different “socialisms” but the Communists seem to claim that all socialism is communism and vis versa.
That’s seems like marketing to me. Like “communism with Chinese characteristics”.
Bad joke to start the week:
One fine day the felon decides to go ice fishing. he’s heard about it, and he’s certain he knows more about ice fishing than the ice fishingers.
Determined to be the best ice fishinger, he gathers tools, fishing gear, supplies, etc. and heads out. he picks a likely spot (he knows more about ice fishing, remember?), and begins to cut into the ice.
He then hears an unnaturally loud, deep voice say “THERE’S NO FISH UNDER THE ICE.”
Oh, well. he moves a few yards to the right and begins again. The same voice repeats “THERE’S NO FISH UNDER THE ICE.”
Flummoxed, the rapist asks loudly “Is that you, God?”
“NO,” the voice says. “I’M THE ICE RINK MANAGER.”
@Beth:If you can find it on the Interwebs, once upon a time famous science fiction author and communist Steven Brust, when challenged by friends he respected, sat down and read Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and commented on it chapter by chapter. He was stunned by how much he agreed with most of it, and how different Smith’s actual positions were from the standard laissez-faire party line he is associated with. He also presented the most accessible communist critique of it that I’ve ever seen.
@charontwo:
Random note from the photographer, vis-a-vis background…
LBD and heels? On a fracking golf course? Mon dieu!!!
@DrDaveT:
In terms of economic philosophers, I think Smith’s writings are the most misinterpreted/misrepresented/misapplied by followers (most of whom have never have read him).
Even more than Marx, which is saying a lot.
Trump is ordering a military parade to celebrate his 79th birthday on June 14. A day of mourning for the rest of us.
@Beth:
IMO, capitalism developed and evolved from longstanding custom and practices, while communism was crafted in accordance to specific beliefs and philosophical theories.
Things like private property, markets, commerce, trade, taxes, government services, etc. go back to the earliest civilizations that left written records. Communism lacks this, with odd exceptions here and there.
Marx’s greatest disservice was his dictum that all societies evolve the same way and all must inevitably undergo violent revolution in order to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat and therefore Heaven on Earth. 20th Century history would be very different had the USSR not been intent on supporting communist revolutions in every country on the planet.
@CSK:
He should be careful. History has a nasty habit of repeating itself.
A really good Bulwark read:
“Bulwark gift link”
Above just a sampling of what is at the link.
@CSK:
From Washington City Paper via Bulwark link.
@Beth:
They didn’t, the win was for conservatives, who slandered socialists as communists.
@Beth:
@Michael Reynolds:
While Duncan did a rather deep treatment over dozens of episodes of the Russian Revolution in the Revolutions podcast, the succinct version can be had in this Wikipedia article: Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.
You can see the Socialist-Revolutionary party split into Left and Right SRs. This gets really confusing not only in Duncan’s podcast, but in other histories of the period I’ve read.
@Beth: “Communism”and “socialism”, like many words used in politics, are subject to a good deal of confusion. And properly defined communism and socialism are different only around the edges. Also, a lot of the confusion comes, I think, from calling the Scandinavian countries socialist. And GOPs have a habit of calling anything even remotely collectivist, like, say, the PTA, communist/socialist. I think it’s best to call the Scandinavian systems “democratic socialism”, and call China and North Korea “communist”.
Also, Marx thought communism would naturally evolve. The Czar triggered a more violent approach.
And, of course, all economies are mixed economies, differing only by degree and detail. And China has backslid a good deal from pure communism.
Beginning of the year, I took up rock climbing as a new hobby/exercise routine. Only get to make it to the place 3-4 times a month, but I’ve been noticing some progress. Today I summited my first angled climb. Gravity stops being your friend when you’re climbing out onto, essentially, a ceiling.
@charontwo: Also Flag Day.
@gVOR10:
I tend to pivot when somebody says “That’s Marxism!” to who Marx and Engels really were. A couple intellectuals taking first stabs at the vast social changes wrought by industrialization pretty close to 200 years ago now. Marx is no longer relevant as that vision never survived contact with reality for long anywhere. Auto insurance is a form of socialism, shall we condemn it as Marxist thought?
@charontwo: @CSK:
Having spent a career in the Air Force, I can tell you that I never met any airman who wanted to be in a parade (or even just a standing formation). I won’t speak to the opinions of the other Services.
Over 50% of Medicaid goes to supporting senior citizens with necessary care including nursing homes. However, I bet if you ask the average person on the street, they’ll say that Medicaid supports low income people (and illegal immigrants) who are too lazy to work. With all the pushback on Medicaid cutbacks, these basic facts are ignored.
Trump pollster finds Medicaid cuts unpopular among Trump voters
@Scott:
So how do you reach people who insist on voting for the party that does stuff they don’t want?
@Michael Reynolds:
With the caveat that I haven’t dug too deeply into it, my quick view of things says there were/are a whole bunch of different socialist “theories”, “ideologies” (scare quotes only because I’m unsure of a better description). It really seems like Marx did a number on the other non-communist strains well before conservatives pissed in that particular pool.
@Kathy:
I wonder if it wasn’t communism’s bad luck that the Russians got ahold of it first.
@gVOR10:
I have a problem with this (not your presentation of it) concept. I really can’t put my finger on why and it’s an ignorance on my part problem. Lol, maybe a public school education problem. I think at a most basic level, it seems to me that Communism is Socialism, but Socialism isn’t Communism.
Like, when I was debating with my friend, I mentioned that one of my problems with Communism is very utopian. She was like, no, no, that’s Utopian Socialism which is completely different.
@dazedandconfused:
I think it also matters that Marx, while intelligent, seems to have been profoundly lazy. Also, why is it Marxism and not Englism?
@Beth:
Partly, yes. Marx prophesized communism would come first to more advanced economies, namely Germany and Great Britain.
One thing I mislike about philosophy, is that philosophers often build elaborate, common sense arguments, self contained, and attack existing systems. They offer their argument as proof that their system is superior and will lead to only good outcomes and won’t have any flaws and be perfect forever.
That’s not all philosophers do, but a great many indulge in the practice. I’d say things go clear back to Plato’s Republic, and include luminaries of laissez faire capitalism like Ayn Rand and Friedreich Hayek. In some ways they’re as bad as Marx, since their claims can be tested against developments and seen not to be valid.
@Beth: Perhaps because Engels came to be viewed as Marx’s Garfinkel? I really don’t know. Just one of those things…
Oh, this is really good: The felon’s team is looking into making the US government pay retaliatory tariffs.
So, on the downside, the American people will pay higher prices due to the felon’s import taxes (aka tariffs). But on the plus side, they’ll know their additional taxes will go to big businesses that might otherwise suffer from retaliatory import taxes in other countries.
Lose-lose. What could be fairer than that?
Oops! Double post.
Our clear-headed leader:
https://bsky.app/profile/acyn.bsky.social/post/3lmacsyk5q22y
@charontwo:
Oh, no worries. Fortune should be along shortly do explain that you just don’t know how to read English. And then when you prove you can, Fortune will further explain that you don’t follow politics.
thread:
https://bsky.app/profile/tompepinsky.com/post/3lm6pu7677s2e
https://bsky.app/profile/tompepinsky.com/post/3lm6pu7qn2t2e
@Beth: The problems I observed with communism were that humans don’t tend to be altruistic enough to sustain the system (not even the early Christians sustained their communitarian impulses for all that long) and that the system tended to attract kleptocrats and despots.
The great leap backwards for market capitalism as a model came with the heirs of Maoist Communism discovering that capitalist practice and open, democratic government were not inevitably linked (as had been the theory so far). The discovery from the cradle of Asian civilization that authoritarian assholes could run market economies just fine brought us to where we are today.
Personally, I think the world really lucked out in how long capitalism and good government stayed linked. But I’m cynical that way.
@Kathy:
Now you’ve got me wondering whether the link between writing and private property is coincidence or not. We know that many nonliterate hunter-gatherer societies do not have much notion of private property, and we suspect that this was true of nearly all early societies. Writing seems to arise where there is either a dominant religion with a priest caste or wealthy individuals in need of cost accounting, or both.
@dazedandconfused:
I tend to pick public education and sewage treatment as my preferred obviously socialist pastimes. It’s fun to watch the contortions from people trying to argue “but that’s different”…
@DrDaveT:
I think it’s really complicated, but essentially yes. A lot of the earliest known writing consists of property accounts, debts, credit, and so on.
@dazedandconfused:
That’s pretty much my take. They were a good first draft. Expecting them to have gotten everything right is a pretty high bar. And as I noted elsewhere, the Czar kinda pushed things in an unintended direction.
@gVOR10: I’ll add an anecdote. Years ago I read some recent history, forget who. He mentioned an economist or diplomat in the ’30s going to Moscow and being introduced to Marx Marx. After the “30s? Russia?” doubletake he elaborated, Harpo Marx, who was on a grand tour of Europe.
@Beth:
@Michael Reynolds:
@dazedandconfused:
Communism was, imuho, rather borked by Marx’s triple fixation on Hegel, on French revolutionary radicals, and on a version of “classical economics” that would have had Adam Smith rolling his eyes like a steam turbine.
Engels was often rather smarter, imo, but hero-worshipped Marx.
Then you get it taken over by Lenin, who was an opportunist with a mind like a corkscrew, and then Stalin, who was an authoritarian with a mind like a steamroller.
Traditionally, European “democratic socialists” have tended to loathe communists.
And vice versa
The German Social Democrats are an interesting tale: they started out as sorta-Marxist, but by c.1900 generally came to reject “revolutionism”.
And in the 1920’s and 30’s were violently – literally violently – at odds with the Bolshevik-oriented Communists.
While the British Labour Party came to define itself as socialist, but was never really Marxist at all.
It’s roots were more in Chartist democratic liberalism, the trade union movement, and “self help” co-operativism, with a sizable amount of Methodism in the mix.
@Kathy:
Ever read Karl Popper The Open Society and Its Enemies?
His basic argument is that grand philosophical structures tend to end up as the Bed of Procrustes
Empiricism, tolerance, and rational humanism tends to be more effective in practice.
@just nutha:
Authoritarian capitalism is not that new.
Europe has seen several variations on that theme.
The Chinese difference has been the Party as a rather highly organized bureaucratic and semi-aristocratic system.
What’s interesting is that the Party under Xi is enormously reluctant to take the obvious steps of increasing domestic consumption at the expense of the obviously dead-ending export/capital investment centric economic model.
Or to improve effective governance by letting local resolution of issues, and a “rules based” legality stop the Party base leeching on business and at the expense of the public interest.
If the CCP can’t address that, I doubt all the ambitions of the “central Party” to be the ruler-by arbitrary appeal” (a rather traditional approach in China) or for a “surveilled society” can actually effectively run a market without collapse, as the Marxists might say, due to “contradictions”.
@Kathy:
@DrDaveT:
Arguably the earliest basis of government was relating to weights and measures, land demarcation, and courts with jurisdiction over property and commercial disputes.
And, of course, the means to enforce such rules.
See also the re-emergence of “state”authority in Europe in medieval history, or in China after dynastic collapse.
@DrDaveT: Mr Google AI agrees with a nagging memory regarding your clever thuoght linking property and writing. Early proto-cuneiform tablets are mostly accounting for movements of grain. About 3200 BCE.
@DrDaveT: My favorite is to note that a society where the market has to provide everything won’t even have drainage ditches for the paths, let alone rain gutters, catch basins, paved streets, and the like.
@JohnSF: I’ll agree that authoritarian capitalism isn’t new at all. It probably predates democratic capitalism. But the link between capitalism and democracy is one of those Western/American exceptionalism things that dominated the time in which my political awarenesses were developing. “Godless communism” was another shibboleth of the era. And communitarian Christianity was the province of the Catholics, Lutherans, and other conformist sects that “had lost the faith*.” (I came of age in a much more sheltered, but also more interesting, world than you did.)
ETA: *And had leaders who had become “Godless Communists” no less.
Re communism, there is a somewhat interesting book from 1888, Looking Backward. It’s kinda like Rumpelstiltskin but in this case the 1888 man wakes up in 2000 to a communist utopia in the USA. Apparently it was a very popular book at the time. I can understand how communism would appeal to many people in the age of robber barons.
@just nutha: “The problems I observed with communism were that humans don’t tend to be altruistic enough to sustain the system”
In the book there is very little crime in the year 2000. Why would anyone need to steal when all their needs are provided for? Just crazy optimism on the part of the author imo.
@JohnSF:
IMO the defining characteristic of socialism is state ownership of all business enterprises. Some state ownership of business is or was common all over Europe and Latin America. Since a private sector always existed, however, it was referred to as a mixed economy.
I regard that as a defining characteristic, but not the only one. it would be more accurate to say there’s a spectrum running from laissez faire on one side to absolute control of all economic activity on the other.
Someone didn’t get what they paid for. Namely several billionaires are unhappy with the insane tariffs.
Whocoodanode!
@Kathy:
And Musk has also become vocal in his opposition to the tariff so-called plan. Looks like we have an unexpected trump opposition group… billionaires unite!
But seriously, shouldn’t this mean that congressional republicans who are needed to pass bipartisan tariff legislation need not be as concerned about being ousted by a better-funded primary opponent? (*Not saying this is how democratic elections should work.)
@Scott O:
I dunno. Why does Trump feel the need to cheat people? Why does Jeff Bezos feel a need to start from the assumption that his employees don’t work as hard as the pay warrants? Why does the money always look better on the wallet of the owner of capital than it does in the wallets of the workers or shareholders?