What we Lost as Women Entered the Workforce
And other highlights from my touring of the net this week
"It didn’t pay off in the end."
The tragic story of Lillie Harden
We’ve all heard denunciations of ‘top-down’ management. This story from 2016 couldn’t be more emblematic of something similar which is ‘top-down messaging’. Much of our politics is driven by messages that sound compelling, even if, on closer inspection, they’re not. Here was the heir to FDR’s new deal dismantling that deal with a feel-good story about welfare to work. Like Lillie Harden said “It didn’t work out”.
Clinton paralleled conservatives at the time who saw welfare not as a safety net but as a broken entitlement system fueling lazy dependence on the government that needed reform to incentivize the nation’s poor to work hard to escape their plight. But the president’s victory rested largely on the presence of Lillie Harden. The 42-year-old black mother from Little Rock, Arkansas, once embodied the "welfare queen" stereotype burned into America’s collective conscience by Ronald Reagan, which she both fit and shattered standing over Clinton’s right shoulder that day on the White House lawn. …
"When I got my job, my son was so proud of me," Harden said. "But I made a deal with him. I told him, ‘I'm going to work every day and take my work seriously.’"…
In a 1997 Atlantic essay titled "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done," Edelman, a longtime friend of Clinton, lambasted just what was wrong with PRWORA: "The bill closes its eyes to all the fact and complexities of the real world and essentially says to recipients, Find a job. That has a nice bumper-sticker ring to it. But as a one-size-fits-all recipe it is totally unrealistic."…
Last year, for Alternet, journalist Zaid Jilani tried to seek Harden, and found that she had died 12 years after she suffered a stroke in 2002, which left her unable to qualify for Medicaid or afford her bill for monthly prescriptions.
Conservatives on post-liberalism (Recommended)
I tweeted this excellent passage from Adrian Pabst’s latest Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal. (HT: Martin Turkis for the reference.)
Enlightenment values have replaced the good with individual rights devoid of equally robust obligations. They have replaced a covenant between generations and groups within the body politic (Burke’s partnership between ‘those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born’) with a social contract among individuals who are assumed originally to be asocial and apolitical.5 And they have replaced the practice of virtues, such as courage or practical wisdom, with an appeal to foundational values such as ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ or liberté, égalité and fraternité. The difference between virtues and values is that virtues are embedded in practices and embodied in relationships and institutions, whereas values are often abstract and removed from the common life of people. Virtue provides a way of finding commonality while accommodating differences because it expresses ends that are social, not individual.
Which, Twitter being the marvel that it is, got me engaged with Adrian and @burrititabeats who pointed me to this poisonous bit of American arrogance and right-wing culture war, and this excellent reply from European Conservatives and “critics of liberalism from both Left and Right”:
The absolute sovereignty of the nation-state presented in the Statement is a modern myth, which traditional conservatives such as Edmund Burke questioned because, as with the French Revolution, it can lead to terror and tyranny. Burke’s alternative was a ‘cultural commonwealth’ of peoples and nations covenanting with each other in the interests of mutual benefit and flourishing.
There is a profound irony here. A document that set out to condemn “the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image,” cites as its only vision of nationhood the American liberal constitutional model with its the separation of powers and “limited state.” But there are many European countries with very different and highly successful models, which have more blended forms of mixed constitution and fuse political and economic functions.
The commitment to an explicitly “Anglo-American” ideal of “free enterprise” and “individual liberty” is at odds with much of the European conservative tradition which has historically sought to limit the market and uphold a non-individualistic model of liberty, balancing rights with responsibilities.
What America Lost as Women Entered the Workforce
Civic organizations were built on the voluntary labor of women. As the demands on women's time increase, communities are suffering.
From the Atlantic Monthly, 2016.
Men often did good works individually, rather than as groups, Scott wrote, and when they gave money, “they tended to make large gifts to institutions, particularly those that might bear their names.” Most of all, their civic activity was largely a form of self-advancement, Scott argued: “Benevolence figured in the building of a man’s career, both as a means of forming associations with other men and as a means of promoting a favorable public image.” But for women, participating in these organizations was their career—“an accepted extension of their defined roles as wives and mothers.”
As women have taken greater positions of leadership in the United States, they have also left a leadership vacuum behind them. In middle-class, highly educated communities, women may be busier and more tired than their mothers and grandmothers once were, but they mostly figure out ways to advocate for their kids at school-board meetings or volunteer to chaperone a class trip to the zoo. The people who have suffered most aren’t white and well-off; they’re lower income, poorly educated, and largely disconnected from the rich network of membership-based associations that used to provide both a local sense of community and a national voice in politics. Women in these positions have lost access to one of their only means of gaining leadership skills. And while many of their educated, wealthier peers now have alternatives to the suffocating housewife’s life that so enraged Betty Friedan seven decades ago, some experience it as an opposite kind of suffocation: a never-ending, ladder-climbing work life, the height of which is making money for someone else rather than building a world in which they’re invested.
Brecht on the truth in a world of lies, reality in a hall of mirrors
Can’t say it’s a great article, but it’s on a great theme that couldn’t be more timely.
Another milestone for the nihilistic right
As Oscar Wilde has Algernon say in the opening scene of the Importance of Being Earnest “really if the lower classes are not prepared to set an example, what on earth is the use of them?” Certainly the right seem to have more or less completely lost their moorings in the English speaking countries. After the bizarre aimlessness of the Morrison Government, it’s easily the best when compared with the gangster president Trump and now Liz Truss who, with the damage of Brexit under her belt is moving on to similar catastrophes.
I always took the left’s complaining about globalisation robbing countries of their policy autonomy with a grain of salt. At least in principle, like trading in a currency or indeed speaking a language, if you want to avail yourself of the resources a system has to offer you, you do so on its rules. Of course the left had a point. Money markets are less kind — less fair — to left leaning than to right leaning governments. Yet at bottom traders on money markets are trying to make money — and that imposes disciplines on them that are hard to avoid. Keating used to boast of ‘wearing the hair shirt’ of responsibility that he’d allowed financial markets to impose on his government — as it powered on with reform which delivered a spurt of growth, sadly enough, for his successor. In any event, the bond vigilantes are waiting there if you do something moronic enoug — even if you call yourself a conservative.
Here’s Martin Wolf on the new British Budget:
The UK, says Kwasi Kwarteng, chancellor of the exchequer, is now “at the beginning of a new era”. He is correct. It is new in his willingness to pour scorn on the past 12 years of Tory rule. It is new in the size of his gamble with economic stability. It is new in his promises for a transformation in the rate of economic growth. But the question is not whether this era is new. It is whether it will be an economic success, a failure or an outright calamity. …
If the supply side promises are a fantasy, the fiscal and economic risks are not. The permanent tax cuts amount to close to 2 per cent of gross domestic product. … This huge increase in the fiscal deficit occurs in a country that ran a current account deficit of 8.3 per cent of GDP in the second quarter of 2022 and has a tumbling exchange rate, low unemployment and already high inflation. Who could seriously regard this huge fiscal loosening as responsible? The Bank of England will be forced to tighten sharply. The government might then pour blame upon it for the results of its own decisions.
In sum, this mini-Budget will do nigh on nothing to raise medium-term growth, but risks serious macroeconomic instability. The failure to ask the Office for Budget Responsibility to assess its impact is simply scandalous. This government may be indifferent to painful reality. But reality usually wins in the end.
Make that the moronic right
And some further thoughts from Krugman: a 10 tweet thread
A fundamental particle anyone?
Stunning article
HT: Clive
Paul McCarney
I posted this tweet, and, it being heavily retweeted was tweeted towards the video below. I’d seen a clip of it before, but it’s lovely.
HT: Adonis Sarhanis
If you want to diet, you need one weird rule
Very enjoyable column from eight years ago by the very generous, very interesting Rory Sutherland.
Absolute rules (if X, then Y) work with the grain of human nature. We feel far more guilt running a red light than breaking a speed limit. Notice that almost all religious laws are absolute: no food is half kosher; it is or it isn’t. No Old Testament prophet proposed something as daft as the French 35-hour ‘working-time directive’: they invented the Sabbath instead. …
During the second world war, experts needed to decide whom to train as RAF fighter pilots. Today this would mean a battery of complex tests. Back then they used two simple questions: 1) Have you ever owned a motorcycle? 2) Do you own one now? The ideal recruits were those who answered 1) Yes and 2) No. They wanted people who had been brave enough to ride a motorbike but were sane enough to abandon the habit.…
How many of the world’s problems could be solved if we abandoned this pretence of perfect rationality and fell back on simple, heuristic rules of thumb? … So here’s my heuristic suggestion to improve social mobility. All Russell Group universities should be compelled to reserve 50 per cent of their places for people who have never been on a skiing holiday.
With hundreds of years of tradition, why not rebrand?
Putting new meaning into Edmund Burke’s old expression
Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and a large PR agency.
Why you’d wait in line for hours
Sometimes a few words, a handshake, a smile, goes a long way to promoting change. Such was the case in 2012 when the late Queen shared several words in Irish, smiled, gave a speech focused on peace and shook the hand of the late Martin McGuiness one time of the Irish Republican Army.
Technically adversaries, they warmed to each other; anyone could see a mutual respect evolved between individuals with an inner sense of duty, albeit how that duty manifested itself was at odds.
Centuries of violence in a conflict many had begun to take for granted now seemed to have a chance for a new dialogue. Do not underestimate what an impact this had on those of us in Ireland. Respect from the British monarchy embodied in a smiling Queen seeking dialogue. A welcome hand from a onetime leader of a movement committed to change using all means available, including violence.
I had no hesitation in setting out on Wednesday evening to say thank you to a woman who had courage and generosity of spirit to promote peace in a clear and obvious way.
Joining the queue at London Bridge at 8pm I met a woman from Bexhill who had jumped on a train after organising tea for teenagers and husband, aiming to be back on the last train. She caught the 5.35am the following morning and over the intervening hours we formed a group with two other people, work colleagues who bumped into each other in the lobby at the end of the working day, realised they were both going to join the queue to say farewell to Queen Elizabeth II, and decided to join up, and another woman, who travelled in from West Ham aiming to be home in the early hours to prepare for her graduation the following afternoon.
Across nine hours we had conversations we would likely never experience if we hadn’t joined this queue, aka ‘The Elizabeth Line’. You heard about people’s lives from many walks of society. Many were there on behalf of grandparents and family members to pay respects. Others, because this was a woman who at 25 had entered the world stage with great courage and stamina; a blast of colour in the grey slate of world leaders.
Perhaps it was just the people in this and nearby groups but many were there to celebrate the women, the person and less so the institution. What struck me was how swiftly we moved to support each other over the night, sharing stories, jokes, sadness, jumpers and scarves, food, and warm drinks. And of course, the chats about portaloos! Less said the better.
