THE McARDLING CONTINUES.

You may forget over time how awful Megan McArdle is, especially since she took her perch as Peggy-Noonan-successor-in-waiting at the Washington Post and could be safely ignored while she pupates. You scan the column titles and they seem anodyne enough -- for example, "The looming disasters we don’t prepare for." Then you read the thing and you realize it's McArdle defending Texas' decision not to winterize its electrical grid (or make arrangements to share the load with other states during heavy use periods or protect consumers from massive emergency charges) because what if the same thing happened to your liberal states, not winter storms because obviously you do have those and so you plan for them but what if it was something unexpected like "climate change or asteroids or supervolcanoes," aha, then you'd be the laughingstock because your voters don't like to spend money to prepare for these things, that is they don't like to pay taxes because, like McArdle, they haven't changed since Reagan.

Ugh. Then you perversely check more recent columns to see if they, too, stink. The title "I get the indignation. But where are the ideas, Republicans?" suggests a gentle tsk-you-Trumpers thing, but since it's McArdle she starts out beating up a liberal state -- again on behalf of Texas! 

It happened again last week: Blue America unleashed a storm of media attention and righteous fury when Texas and Mississippi announced they were lifting all their COVID-19 restrictions, including their mask mandates — only to be embarrassed when true-blue Connecticut announced that it, too, would be lifting most of its restrictions, though the mask mandates would stay. Connecticut, predictably, got a bit less attention, and a lot fewer epithets like “reckless.”

It's like the Cuomo thing: Much if not most of "Blue America" thinks Cuomo's a dick and wanted Cynthia Nixon to kick his ass and not only a bunch of Democrats and even the Democratic state senate majority leader are now demanding his resignation, yet conservatives act as if we all love him and are trying to prop him up. Similarly McArdle thinks we're all fronting for Connecticut, the Shame of the Blue States. Number one, show me anyone who is; number two, unlike Texas, which Abbott opened and unmasked universally and immediately, Connecticut is only opening select facilities (churches, gyms, libraries etc.) on March 19, and is still calling for restaurants to maintain an 8-person table capacity and bars to stay closed, and 25/100-person caps at private/commercial indoor facilities. And everyone's required to wear a mask -- a universal precaution which conservatives still think is better handled by the private sector on a voluntary what-about-my-rights basis rather than by meddlesome public health officials. 

After that cock-up McArdle passive-aggressively tries to reason with the Trumpkins. "Arguments and indignation are starting to define the limits of conservative ideas," she says, "and defiant gestures are increasingly what the party has in place of policy." You don't say! But it turns out she's mainly mad because these guys are devoting energy to culture war that she'd rather they spent on denouncing the Democrats' COVID-19 relief bill -- about the most popular legislation of the past 10 years -- because it  "bails out bankrupt union pension funds, offers blue states a federal piggy bank," and other such offenses to McArdlehood.  Shit, if I were handing out free advice I'd say the GOP might expect better returns from their cancelculture crybaby shtick than from talking down a relief effort with a 70% approval rating. 

But her latest column -- "Stimulus checks are the most indefensible part of the covid relief bill" -- is just classic:

I don’t say, of course, that no one will be helped by getting a $1,400 check. But the same can be said of almost any policy you can imagine, including leaving fully loaded Lamborghinis at randomly selected intersections with the doors unlocked and the keys inside. Giving away sports cars would still be a poor use of government funds; it would cost far more than any conceivable benefit to the car recipients, and the help most likely wouldn’t go to those who need it most.

Tee hee, Lamborghinis are for makers, not takers! (I wonder if she had "Cadillacs" in the first draft.) 

Upshot: The stimulus won't stimulate, because "the people who are out of work are home largely because we want them to be" and "giving money to someone who still has their job doesn’t make them more likely to go out to dinner if the reason they’ve stopped going out is that they’re afraid of the deadly virus." So they're just going to invest those checks in stocks or mutual funds rather than spending it on food, clothing, etc. Finally, she warns, the stimulus "may well do more to seed the next economic crisis than to fix the current one." 

Which is hilarious as McArdle is also the author of "No stimulus makes no sense" from October 2020, when Republicans were offering a gigantic program and she thought "there are good reasons for even a deficit hawk such as myself to support an aggressive stimulus." Looks like the deficit hawk has spread its long-folded wings once more!

Let's check back in a year or when Noonan clears her perch for her, whichever comes first.  

LIBERTARIANS, THEY'RE LOVIN' IT!

Ah, Megan McArdle is at Bloomberg now. Let's see what she's up to -- oh yeah, that McDonald's how-to-survive-on-our-shitty-pay thing. Guess what, McArdle sides with McDonald's! (Her husband's right, these scripts are getting awfully predictable.)

Moreover, a number of people are claiming that this budget is not merely unkind, but downright Draconian -- “the amounts specified in this budget just aren’t enough to get by, at least not safely,” Irregular Times says. 

This seems overdramatic; $24,000 in after-tax dollars is not princely. But it doesn't put you at significant risk of death or dismemberment. While $800 a month is not a lot to have for clothes, entertainment, groceries and sundries, even taking inflation into account, that was a lot more than the disposable income I had when I first started at The Economist. After student loans, rent and taxes, I had about $300 for everything else, including utilities and MetroCards.

Young career-tracker with a starter job at The Economist, McDonald's employee = pretty much the same thing.

If you are a middle-class professional, and you attempt to imagine replicating your own lifestyle on McDonald's wages, you are bound to feel panic and outrage. But that’s not actually the task facing people who work at McDonald's, or people with a household after-tax income of about $24,000 a year.

Yeah, they're never going to need just the right shoes for a gala reception, so their needs are different.

The McDonald's workforce skews young. The average age of a fast-food worker is almost 30 right now, but that’s because of the recession; in 2000, it was 22. The average McDonald's line worker is not planning to put two kids through college on their salary. Only a minority are trying to support just themselves exclusively on their minimum-wage paycheck; they are living with a spouse or partner who makes at least as much as they do, or with parents or other relatives who make more than minimum wage. Moreover, very few people stay in entry-level minimum-wage jobs for very long (though again, the Great Recession has made this happen more than it used to); those workers eventually get promoted or leave for a more promising job.

Sorry, had to go to the "emphasis added" there; I didn't want you to miss the use of McArdle's  trademarked "the facts support me except for the parts that don't, which I dismiss by naming them" process. Also, funny as I find the idea that shit wages are okay for these people because they can always get their uncle in North Dakota to send them money orders, it's nothing compared to this:

Those who don’t [advance] -- who actually try to support a family on minimum-wage paychecks -- will end up with substantial government support. They’ll get the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Earned Income Tax Credit and, in many places, they will now be eligible for Medicaid.

For one thing, these are programs McArdle's fellow conservatarians are working hard to get rid of. For another and more to the point, this sort of employer exploitation of public assistance is famously what's keeping the whole crap-job paradigm alive. It like defending a con game by saying, "but if you shut it down, how's the con man going to make any money?"

McArdle can't resist adding that you silly elitists can't understand: "There are millions of people in this country doing it," she says. "Keep in mind that most McDonald's workers don’t live close to New York City or Washington... Survival on such a lean budget is possible because people who do it are not trying to live the atomized life of an upper-middle-class college graduate." Woo, that's telling those of us who have our own bathrooms! We get something similar at the Washington Post from McArdle's fellow conservatarian Timothy B. Lee -- but first let me quote my favorite part:

The budget allocates $0 for heat. This could be realistic in some Southern states...

Okay, thanks. Lee has a pot o' sneers for those decadent coastals who insult our fast food slaves by suggesting they could live any differently:

With a couple of exceptions, these are typical figures for the spending of millions of low-income Americans... Gawker’s Neil Casey calls $600 per month for rent a “laughably small” figure, but Casey should spend more time outside the Northeast Corridor... while working two jobs is tough, it’s not that uncommon. About 7 million Americans, or about 5 percent of the workforce, do it... And the reality is that these low-income Americans have to make the kind of hard choices that critics are deriding as ridiculous... Gawker calls the budget “just-shy-of-condescending,” but budgeting is an important skill that isn’t obvious to every young adult in America. Offering practical advice on how to live on a modest income is more constructive than ridiculing the choices required to do so.

In other words, low-end jobs like these are increasingly long-term propositions, and you're just being insulting by suggesting it's anything but the way things ought to be -- why, it's like asking a harelip for a kiss, or teaching a slave to read!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Ever heard a steel drum band play
Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor?

I kicked out a few Roy Edroso Breaks It Down items about the election – here’s the most recent. Maybe that will be a.) of interest to you, or maybe you’re b.) sick of that shit already. Don’t blame you if b.)! 

But there’s still some comedy to be wrung from the situation. Remember back during the primaries, when some Democratic campaign committees ran ads letting Republican voters know how thoroughly MAGA candidates like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Dan Cox in Maryland, and John Gibbs in Michigan were – the idea being, let such nuts as love that shit nominate these nutjobs in the primaries and the normal voters would reject them in the general? And remember how Conservatives with Good Taste blubbered over it, saying not only that it was dirty politics to which such as they would never sink, but also that it meant when these lunatics won it would be the Democrats’ fault?

My favorite was Megan McArdle. As I described it at the time:

Megan McArdle is first among equals in mendacity here, dudgeoning that Democrats are willfully making it more likely that the worst Republicans (that is, the ones that are 5% worse than the second-worst) might win if the Democrat loses, and that this shows -- say it with me now -- Both Sides Are The Same ("Democrats can stop asking how Republicans could have sold out their principles and their country in a pathetic grab for some evanescent political advantage. Because now they know"). This will come in handy when McArdle inevitably pimps Yang's Forward Party as the Choice of People Who Want Clean Hands When DeSantis Becomes Dictator.

Well, as it happens, all of these and most of the other Trumpy candidates lost, and now all the rightwing big-bugs from Dame Peggy Noonington on down are crying that Trump must be ousted for the good of the party. Even Salena Zito, long the biggest Trump suck-up under cover of journalism, has turned: “The chickens have come home to roost for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania,” she announces, digging up no fewer than three Republican strategists (but no Republican electeds!) to say things like “I see golf courses and a rocking chair in his future.” (This being Zito, there’s also “a Pennsylvania father of two grown men of voting age… who asked not to be named.”)

It is to laugh, but wait’ll it comes time for prominent Republicans to decide whether or not to endorse Trump; then we’ll see who’s got any guts.  I'll bet not many! 

JUDGE DREAD.

There are lots of law-smart people making great cases against putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court but to me, a simple lad, the best reason to oppose him is that the worst people on earth want him on there.

First, Donald Trump -- I could rest my case right there. Second, the Federalist Society, not only a creep cluster of committed world-ruiners run by an Opus Dei freak, but also applauded by Jonah Goldberg in his typically lazy late-Goldberg style. First, there's his now-traditional explanation of why as a Trump "skeptic" he applauds this as he does everything else Trump does:

One of the odd things about the triumphalism over the Kavanaugh pick — which is a great pick as far as I’m concerned — is that the wrong people are taking the most credit for it. People seem to forget that the list Trump committed to was a constraint on him.

Get the fuck out of here. Trump's deal with Republicans, as I have said repeatedly, is that he'll give them everything they want so long as they let him grift; they don't serve him as a snaffle and curb or screen and bank but as accomplices. Later Goldberg refers to the Fed Soc guys as "Conservative Legal Beagles" -- much as a 50s movie goon might refer to a priest as "padre" or an intellectual as "professor" -- and says there's "nothing nefarious" about them worming their way onto the court because "liberals have their own vetting process. It’s less formalized than the Right’s, but that’s probably because it can be." Goldberg certainly doesn't know how much he's admitting there, and there's nobody at National Review -- certainly not an editor! -- inclined to tell him.

Elsewhere we have Ross Douthat slo-mo ejaculating over the imminent end of Roe v. Wade; "abortion opponents will have [their] trust vindicated" with Kavanaugh, and the Court will "legislate freely on abortion once again," Douthat declares, stabbing his thigh with a penknife in hopes Jesus will call it square and his emissions will be, in the greater sense, wiped clean.

And leave it to Megan McArdle (* see update) to think of an angle I wasn't expecting -- the possibility that Kavanaugh will make colleges stop trying to bring in more black people, or, as McArdle and her colleagues still call it (in hopes of animating the Louise Day Hicks-era prejudices of their readers), "affirmative action." "The Constitution forbids discriminating by race," McArdle says, as if rehearsing for whatever test case the Becket Fund sends against Brown v. Board of Education;  besides, John McWhorter is black and he doesn't like it either, hmmph!

McArdle throws in just enough references to "trying to right past and present wrongs" and "rectifying the effects of past discrimination" to convince her dumber readers that she's sincere about that stuff, but nonetheless racial preferences have to go because we're living in a "more diverse United States where at least some groups outperform their privileged white neighbors in educational attainment" -- and if you're missing her point, she says, "racial balancing encourages anti-Asian discrimination" and "a broader racial-balancing regime... might put Asian American students at a disadvantage" and "pursuing racial balance zealously" will lead to "continued discrimination against Asian American students." Also, did she mention John McWhorter is black?

Anyway, McArdle says, all this "will leave our new justice with an uneasy choice as the court steers us into an America where race is no longer a simple matter of black and white," though from everything else we've heard about this vat-bred wingnut automaton there'll be nothing uneasy about his choice at all.

Oh, and then there's Kavanaugh's apparent conviction that Presidents (at least since Clinton) can't be indicted. The brethren are pretending he meant no such thing -- and for my money there's no clearer sign that he did than than David French insisting he didn't, and using words like "barmy" in his argument ("he was brainstorming policy proposals, not suggesting future legal rulings" -- can't you people take a joke?). These people see Trump as the promised land for their lunatic ideas, and the extraordinary feebleness of their arguments shows how little they care whether they make it look good.

*UPDATE. McArdle says she's in favor of affirmative action -- her explanation here. You tell me, guys.

I MEANT TO DO THAT.

Megan McArdle contributes to the latest conservative Syria tantrum, calling the President "stumbling" and "tin-eared" (Yeah, I know! Megan McArdle!) and piling up several other insults before coming to her teeth-gritted point that if Obama's ploy works out the way some people think it's going to, it won't count because no fair:

Keep that in mind as the revisionist history begins emerging from some quarters -- i.e., our patiently brilliant president once again demonstrates his mastery of n-dimensional policy chess. This may end up coming out “right,” in the sense that the U.S. will have been delivered a face-saving way to back down from a threat on which Obama never seriously intended to make good, and Syria may give up some of its chemical weapons, forcing the government to rely on unreliable methods such as bullets to slaughter thousands of its own citizens.

But if it does turn out “well,” this will be because the president was lucky, not brilliant...

Human beings tend to judge failure or success by outcome, rather than process. It’s an easy heuristic, but as in so many things, the easy way out is often disastrous.

Hmmm, where I have I heard this argument before? Ah yes --"Jane Galt," January 2007*, talking about Iraq not going the way she expected:

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky?

Everyone gets a little peeved at pundits who are spectacularly wrong and proceed blithely as if they hadn't been, but after this, I'm actually grateful that they don't take the time to explain why other people were only right because of luck, or why right is wrong, etc.

(*Sorry for the indirect link -- McArdle has wisely memory-holed [or, as we like to say around here, Sullivaned] her old posts.)

DUMB IN GILEAD.

Megan McArdle has seen the future and it's Mormons! She has returned from Salt Lake City to tell us that religious and racial homogeneity makes everything better. As does marriage, of course!

Utah is sparsely populated and its government is tightly intertwined with the LDS Church, which (as Chris Lehmann points out on his excellent McArdle reponse at The Baffler) is rich as fuck -- imagine Vatican City as a U.S. state. The Utah government spends big money on getting businesses to relocate to Utah, but, unlike in other theo-Republican states, a lot of money also gets spent on -- record scratch! -- social services, much of it directly by the Church rather than the government, via projects like "Welfare Square," through which Church elders give their pauper charges food that will "sustain human life, not lifestyle" so they don't get too comfortable.

How much is Church and how much is State? McArdle's kind of hazy on that:

Once I got there, I found that it’s hard to even get a complete picture of how Utah combats poverty, because so much of the work is done by the Mormon Church, which does not compile neat stacks of government figures for the perusal of eager reporters.

That's one of the benefits of small-government, big-religion -- no tedious supporting documents! Of course you could, if you were interested, find some government paperwork like the Utah Intergenerational Welfare Reform Commission 2016 report which would tell you that "the federal Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) is the primary funding source for Utah’s child care system." It also contains nuggets like "It is worth noting that participation in [SNAP, child care subsidies, Medicaid, CHIP, et alia] does not necessarily reveal dependence on public assistance." Big Government on the downlow!

But McArdle doesn't want to get into "sanitary, clinical terms" like economists use to describe this paradise because "these are easier to quantify than a dream, but also less satisfying." And she has found a Dream -- the best kind: The American!-- in Utah. Salt Lake City has more upward mobility than Charlotte, North Carolina -- there a person has a nearly 11% "likelihood of moving from the poorest quintile to the richest" as opposed to 4%. Why, that's almost like getting three lottery tickets for the price of one! And since the Church is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, she doesn't have to give Big Government any props.

But if you know McArdle, you know she can't quite come out and say the solution is to have everyone join this religion -- that would be blasphemous to Mammon. But she does suggest some ways we can replicate Utah's results. Naturally there's a lot of her customary marriage-makes-you-rich guff. And there's an element that's even creepier. McArdle finds the poverty discussions she has with the Utahns don't include any mention of race -- "No proposal was immediately decried as racist. Truly surreal to a Washingtonian and a recovering New Yorker," ha ha, amirite -- and intuits it's because Utah has very few black people, mainly because the Church spent years trying to keep them out.

She could have just moved on from there, but it's like she can't help herself:

This near-absence of racial diversity means that racism is largely left out of Utah’s conversations about economic inequality. That leads to some conversations around inequality that would be unbearably fraught elsewhere. When the poor people are, by and large, the same race as the richer ones, people find it easier to talk about them the way they might talk about, well, family members — as folks who may have made some mistakes and started with some disadvantages, but also as folks who could be self-sufficient after a little help from an uncle or a sister. It’s a very different conversation from “victim”/“oppressor” and “us”/“them”: a conversation that recognizes that poor people often make choices that keep them in poverty, but also that the constraints of poverty, including the social environment of poor neighborhoods, make it very difficult to make another choice.

If only we didn't have to deal with this "victim"/"oppressor" stuff! Then we could really talk, as if these people were members of our family (except, ha ha, come on).

Inevitably we get the Putnam Maneuver, the polite conservative's way of saying stick to your own kind:

It’s not clear that we can have those same sorts of conversations in the places that are still struggling more openly and frequently with the legacy of slavery, or the inevitable clashes that come from throwing a lot of different cultures together in a small space. The many benefits of diversity have been so frequently and thoroughly extolled that I need not rehearse the refrain here.

I mean, diversity blah blah blah, after a while you almost forget you're white.

But there has been a growing disquiet in recent years with diversity’s costs. About 10 years ago, public policy professor Robert Putnam began quietly pointing out that along with enhancing positive qualities like creativity, diversity also created conflict and reduced the level of social trust.

“In more diverse settings,” suggests Putnam, “Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.”

Utah’s willingness to help, and its ability to help, may arise from its homogeneity — a trait that won’t be exported to the diverse nation at large.

But that's okay -- soon gentrification will chase all the black people out of Petworth, and then D.C. can finally have better social services!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It's nice to find a newish band you kinda like
•   Last week Megan McArdle shared with the world her 12-point secret to happiness which somehow did not contain "get paid a lot to write terrible shit." Most of it was about being nice to people -- not peons, just those near and dear, and perhaps donors -- and one item was "save 25 percent of your income," which led to her being smacked around by people who understood that saving 25 percent of one's income may be easy for her, but hard for low earners who did not, as McArdle did, come from moneyed professionals. This led to a McArdle Twitter tirade about how she had to eat ramen for a while and how the left was mean to her. Later she wrote about how rent control would be very bad for rents, as if rents could get any goddamn worse. All this reminded me, not only of how terrible McArdle is, but how fucked out conservatism is in general -- that is, that sliver of conservatism not devoted to Trumpian nationalism, the kind that six-figure columnists have to push. Increasingly our citizens are taking a second look at socialism, rent control, single payer etc. because uncontrolled Reagan-style capitalism has obviously fucked us over, and all its handmaidens like McArdle can do is groan NOOOOO DOOON'T IT WILL BE VENEZUELLLAAA with a flashlight under their chins and talk bootstrap penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned gush. What market is there for that, besides New York Times managing editors? At least the full-on Trumpkins offer the pleasure of unreasoning hate. Yet still they heap money on her and I'm wearing a cardboard belt! Sigh, I am too childish-foolish for this world.

•   Further proof that conservatism is fucked out: Not one but two idiotic National Review columns on how it's great to pray to Jesus for your football team to win. "Yes, God Cares about Football" by -- who else? -- David French is excruciating; French starts by basically admitting that there's no reason to talk about this -- there's been no recent backlash against God-bothering footballers for him to defend against ("Perhaps event militant atheists were grateful to see the Patriots lose") -- but he figures he'll go ahead and homilize anyway, and oh how I'd like to know what great preachers like John Donne would make of this:

Moreover, there’s something specific about football — distinct from other sports — that can concentrate a person’s faith. Yes, football is more religious in part because of its southern strongholds (the South is more religious). Yes, football is more religious in part because it’s disproportionately black (African Americans are more religious). But I’d also posit that something else is in play: keen awareness of human fragility...

So football is God's Favorite Sport, as opposed to basketball -- which, French has previously told us, is too "clustered in progressive urban centers" (pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip and tongue) for His taste. What could be worse? Well, French actually inspired colleague Nicholas Frankovich to chime in, and Frankovich manages to work in the paranoia French was too embarrassed to affect:

The question [Is it appropriate to pray for victory in sports?] embarrasses believers who are anxious to be taken seriously in public and goes to the heart of why they feel that anxiety to begin with. In theory, they still enjoy freedom of religion in the public square, but the social reality is that what they enjoy is the freedom to worship in private. Under the law, they are free to speak as if those parts of their religion that clash with materialism were true, but they risk some loss of social stature and credibility among peers when they exercise that right. Their problem in this regard is not legal or political. It’s social, cultural, and intellectual...

The "freedom to worship in private" bit is actually related to a fundamentalist trope about how Godless liberals are trying to trick believers into being grateful they can go to the church of their choice when real freedom means raving and snake-handling in public. Only, in this case, the allegedly proscribed conduct is praying for Jesus to cover the spread. Man, why do these Christians even stay in this country if they don't like it here?

• I don't commend our comments section enough, so I will do so now, with special attention to commenter keta's own version of McArdle's 12 Steps. Sample: "If you're going to praise someone, lay it on thick. Nobody ever died thinking, 'geez, I wish I hadn't been such an obnoxious phony suck-up without an ounce of integrity in my entire being.' Get that nose up in there." But really, they're all winners.

• Aha, this again: "San Francisco Bay Area Experiences Mass Exodus Of Residents," reports a local CBS News outlet. The proof points are a study from the kind of think tank that has David Brooks do their keynote address; some lady from San Jose who's moving to Tennessee to escape SJ's "sanctuary city status"; and "Operators of a San Jose U-Haul business" who "say one of their biggest problems is getting its rental moving vans back because so many are on a one-way ticket out of town." This of course is being repeated credulously by wingnuts ("IT’S OFFICIAL: There’s a mass exodus happening in San Francisco"). But I've seen this sort of "Har everyone's leaving the blue cities" yak before -- sometimes even with moving company stats!-- yet San Francisco is still growing, as are other big cities, because nobody wants to live out in Bumfuck if they can help it. Part of the Trump strategy is to make sure fewer Americans can help it, of course, and also to strip wealth from the cities and make them less attractive, because keeping people stuck out in the great land of meth and assault weapons helps turn them angry and crazy enough to vote Republican. But that could take years to move the needle if it happens at all. Meantime they can just go on telling themselves that cities are expensive and crowded because no one wants to live in them -- which contradicts their alleged economic beliefs but, as we just saw with the budget bill, they don't really believe that shit anyway.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: WHAT ARE YOU, MY MOTHER? EDITION.

Dig these crazy beats!

Those of us in the Northeast are feeling autumn if not autumnal. Maybe because of my somewhat recent change of address the weather shift is not exciting thoughts of death and diminution so much as curiosity – like, how will cooler weather change the pace of life in the neighborhood, and will the boiler still work? 

But whatever the season, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down goes on, five days a week, and Friday means freebies for the joy-poppers. (Get a subscription, ya cheap bastids, it lasts longer.) 

First up is one about the recent revival of the conservative “Marriage Makes You Rich” routine – you know, the idea that you don’t have to give impoverished Americans any money or job programs, you just run them through the chapel and presto, their earnings jump!   

The MacGuffin in this case is some think-tanker’s book, but I believe the wingnuts have jumped on it hard for a couple of reasons, which you’ll learn if you read the thing. Sadly I wrote it before Megan McArdle offered her contribution, which is predictably hilair:

Yet it feels nearly impossible to say “[single parenthood] is a very bad thing” as frankly — and as often — as we’ll need to if we’re going to address this critical issue, both because the first step to fix any problem is admitting we have one, and because saying “that’s bad, actually” is one of the ways that we remove risky behaviors from our cultural script.

Of course McArdle and her fellow scolds have been nagging single parents for decades, and even running marriage promotion scams based on their nagging, without moving the needle. In fact, McArdle seems to think if anything she’s been too inhibited by her fellow-feeling for single moms to nag effectively:

Yet even those of us on the center-right who privately tell pollsters that marriage is important might be reluctant to say so forthrightly in public... I cannot get through even half a sentence without an overwhelming urge to load it down with caveats, for example, that no one should ever stay with an abusive partner for the sake of the children.

So the temptation is to talk about something else, to play down the facts or, at least, sugarcoat them.

Oh, be brave, Megan! Go through the poor neighborhoods with a sound truck crying MARRIAGE MAKES YOU RICH, YOU STUPID PAUPERS!  Remember, it’s for their own good.

Even funnier in its tweetstorm version, in which McArdle answers critics who say we should help working people get jobs that can support a family first (she’s “skeptical of the power of policy change on its own,” lol) so now it’s all up to nagging and she’s tired of doing it all alone, dammit, and wants “public intellectuals” and Hollywood to help:

I’m trying to remember what the last real “marriage sux” show on TV was… “Married… With Children,” maybe? Well, now that Murdoch has left Fox, maybe at last we can get some real conservative pro-marriage programming in there! 

The other freebie, inspired by the news that Marjorie Taylor Greene is working on a book about Marjorie Taylor Greene, is an exclusive look at the book’s preface. It’s a shoo-in for a Puke-lister Prize! 

UPDATE: Rebecca Traister:

It’s not just the think-tank-economist-columnist class prescribing the marriage cure. It’s also hard-right commentators and politicians pushing policies aimed to re-center (hetero) marriage as the organizing- principle of American family life by reversing the progress — from legal abortion to affirmative action to no-fault divorce — that has enabled women to have economic and social stability independent of marriage.

Bingo. 

INSTEAD OF THROWING MONEY AT THE PROBLEM, LET'S THROW DUMB ANALOGIES!

Hey, Megan McArdle’s at the Washington Post! Let’s see what she’s up to now:

What caused the 1968 riots? A lack of respect.

If this headline had appeared over anyone else’s column, you might think, okay, maybe there's a new editor at the Post who's not so great at condensing the author’s point; but, this being McArdle, we may assume it’s perfectly apt (and we'd be right!), since part of her shtick is to declare that whatever misfortune is suffered by the non-rich in this country, the government has no role in alleviating it except maybe to call in the troops to shoot the looters.

Fifty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the scars of the riots that followed are only now fully healed in Washington. In other cities, they still aren’t. And we still don’t know exactly why they happened — or for that matter why the 1960s as a whole saw more rioting than the decades before or since.

Yeah, who knows why blacks would riot in the 1960s, particularly after Martin Luther King was murdered (not to mention, after centuries of ill-treatment at the hands of white supremacist society)? It’s a mystery!

What we can say with some confidence is that we can’t simply explain them as a function of unemployment and poverty.

That would be like saying if the ghettos that went up in flames hadn't been ghettos but were instead rich gated communities, their residents wouldn't have torched them, and that just doesn’t make sense! And if you think it does, you know what you are?

Marxism as an ideology was crushed when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but as a method of analysis it still thrives.

Like many rightwing idées fixes, this is projection; McArdle, as previously mentioned here and elsewhere in this space, is averse to all solutions that require government money that should be returned to the Koch Brothers via tax breaks. That’s why she keeps insisting Marriage Makes You Rich — sure, a college degree is more strongly correlated with greater earning power, but scholarships require a wealth transfer to poor people.

What did cause the riots, then? Well, rage and despair and a lot of hard-to-quantify socio-political factors. But taking them all in total, I’d sum them all up with one word: respect. Whatever our economic conditions, we also want — we need — to command a certain minimal amount of admiration from our fellow citizens. 

The great victories of the civil rights movement changed many things. Schools were integrated; funding disparities eased. But that didn’t obliterate the racism that still followed black people around stores, eyed them suspiciously on the street, dogged them in job interviews and caused the police to stop them for “walking while black.”

Generous of McArdle to acknowledge endemic racism, but guess who else suffers from a lack of respect?

There are vast differences, of course, between the race riots of the 1960s and the 2016 election. But when we explain these events, the tendency toward economic reductionism looks very similar, as does its implausibility.

This is good place to mention that the average Trump voter is mainly middle class and makes a shit-ton more than the average black American, even today, never mind in the 1960s. But let's hear how that Trump guy, like your 60s rioter, suffers from disrespect:

Many places that voted for Trump never had many factories to lose to China or Mexico; many factory towns turned to Trump only after decades of decline. What most consistently motivates the Trump supporters I’ve met is not jobs or racism but anger at a culturally powerful elite that veers between ignoring them and disrespecting every facet of their lives.

Thus, the Trump people are sore because them fancy folks in Warshington and Hollyweird look down on them and force them to… live comfortable middle-class lives, but without the fancy folks’ respect. Kinda like a dream deferred, right?

McArdle closes:

We lean on economics because unlike “disaffection,” it’s relatively easy to quantify. And unlike “systemic racism” or “a rural/urban cultural divide,” it feels like something that government policy can address. We are the proverbial drunks looking for our keys under the lamppost, instead of where we dropped them. And somehow, we are perpetually surprised that we never find what we’re looking for.

Actually if we seem drunk, it’s because we’ve been stunned by a 2x4. And as to those allegedly ineffectual economic remedies, we have barely made an effort, as the man whose death 50 years ago spurred so much anger and despair knew and wished to correct.

THE UP SIDE OF DROWN.

The other day Megan McArdle published a column about how "global-warming alarmists" were mean to "lukewarmists" (her prefered name for people who don't want to do anything about climate change, because "denialist" is so mean).

Alarmists "can’t run experiments where they test one variable at a time," says McArdle, so their labors rely on "guesswork." Lukewarmists, however, are operating on the very solid premise that alarmists rely on guesswork! See how that goes? Also lukewarmists offer "constructive input," and their avatar of the moment is "calm, measured, very thoughtful" and his blogposts are "a model of how to talk about the subject," etc.

Also, alarmists are always talking about "the science." That can't be right, because "one does not believe in 'science' as an answer," sniffs McArdle; "science is a way of asking questions. At any given time, that method produces a lot of ideas, some of which are correct, and many of which are false, in part or in whole."

So how can one really know anything? By whether they're nice, that's how. Since this is McArdle, there is a thick larding of passive-aggressiveness, with "angry people on both sides," "these are not differences that can be resolved by name calling," etc. But it's all just a set-up.

A few days later, guess what:

A Sad Fact From Today's Bag of Hate Mail

Michael Mann called her column "the most intellectually bankrupt & misguided #climate piece yet." Which was mean! Also other people said mean things to her and to her editor about her! And after she was so even-handed.

Then McArdle gives us one last little both-sides wiggle ("long years of hurling increasingly angry imprecations has radicalized both sides"), which is probably meant to soften up anyone dumb enough to take it at face value before she rips into the alarmists again, harder than before: "the increasingly angry delegitimization of the skeptics" continues even though "skeptics have moved toward the activists" (no link, naturally) (wait, "skeptics"? what happened to "lukewarmists"? Wow, maybe they did write to her editor!). Finally:

A scientific approach would be to acknowledge that advocates' initial hypothesis -- that name calling will advance the cause -- has failed to be borne out by the experimental evidence. And to start looking for another hypothesis for how to move forward on climate change.

Hard times in the mill, indeed! At least she can console herself that neither words nor science will sort this out, but the market -- that is, the rich fucks who expect either to corner the market on alternative energy, or manage to afford a seat on a rocket to Elon Musk's space colonies when it all goes to shit.

WHY WE SNARK. Megan McArdle pleads for comity:

My point, which I stand by, is that calling someone a [censored] does not, in fact, advance the debate. I can think of no circumstances under which someone who is concerned about appearing too feminine will be moved to change his views because you called him a big, fat nancy-boy. Even if it were true, the effect of insulting someone on this level is never to cause them to reexamine their position; instead, it energizes them to seek out reasons that you're wrong, and moreover, a huge jerk whose other ideas are probably equally moronic.

And so on, "anger is something that we're currently a bit oversupplied with," come on people now, smile on your brother.

You have to remember that with these guys, civil discourse is always a one-way street. Just the other day McArdle characterized her bleeding-heart opponents as practitioners of what Julian Sanchez calls The Care Bear Stare ("They'd line up together and emit a glowing manifestation of their boundless caring, which seemed capable of solving just about any problem"). It's a perfectly fine insult, implying that people who disagree with her are moony-eyed dopes who just want to wish problems away. How it's supposed to "advance the debate" is hard to figure.

The post to which McArdle's plaint is a follow-up had to do with a reaction to an appalling 2003 essay -- brought back into the spotlight by Kevin Drum's Golden Wingnut Awards -- by one Kim Du Toit. Called "The Pussification of the Western Male," the essay is chock-full of such Nietzschean aphorisms as "You know the definition of homosexual men we used in Chicago? 'Men with small dogs who own very tidy apartments.'" Read the whole thing, and I think you'll agree that Du Toit is as likely to "reexamine his position" in response to reasoned counterargument as a dog is to stop licking his own balls.

But on McArdle's side of the DMZ, Du Toit is considered a major thinker. He's on the Ole Perfesser's blogroll. His essay has been celebrated by several top rightwing bloggers. He's right up there in the pantheon with Steven Den Beste.

Du Toit's essay richly deserves the often impolite mockery to which it has been subjected. But its essential crappiness is not the only reason why it got such a razzing -- just as a desire to raise the discourse is not the only (or even the real) reason why McArdle rushed to Du Toit's qualified defense.

One big reason why making fun of conservative bloggers is, in some quarters, a popular pastime is that they've been so inflated for so long. After 9/11, when irony was alleged to have died and Republicanism was decreed a unipolar superpower, "warbloggers" and "anti-idiotarians" began dreaming of domination. They were going to take down the MSM, reduce the Democrats to a rump, and remake America and the world in their own, suburban image.

While wimpy-assed liberal columnists deferred meekly to the War Party, mainstream conservatives praised and elevated their digital proteges, and such gibberish was published as would make Mencken blush. To argue with it was to be shouted down as a traitor, a Fifth Columnist, a pre-9/11ist. All a sane man could do was laugh.

Now the bloom is a little off the rose. Iraq's a looted shell, Arabia is not yet the 51st state, and the citizens are asking for health care. The mad mostly remain mad, but they're trying -- more modestly, of necessity -- to shift the grounds of debate. A more muscular occupation replaces dreams of Iraqi democracy, Iran offers new hope of revivifying bloodshed, and the next crop of Republicans promise not to embroil themselves in scandals and patronage.

When we laughed at them before, they were roaring so loudly they couldn't hear us. Now they can't help but notice. And they want us to stop. After all, we're only hurting ourselves! I may indeed bust a gut, but that's a chance I'm willing to take.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 1,543,929. I hate to make this Megan McArdle week, but she's been spectacularly awful lately. After her "How to Survive a Layoff" post -- an astonishingly condescending, EST-type exercise clearly meant to be enjoyed by other screw-the-poor types, not by actual jobless people, who probably feel bad enough without McArdle telling them what wasters they are -- she actually composed something called "Why Are The Rich So Rich?" that basically answered the question with Beats me, but it's definitely not because they have some unfair advantage!

Now she's onto school loans. Perhaps to compensate for his frequent logrolling, she quotes Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds to the effect that we just make people soft by letting them take subsidized loans to get into college. As anyone who actually walks this planet knows, people take on these ever-more-expensive loans and the years of debt that come with because they want to get jobs -- increasingly scarce jobs -- and live, if not better (who can expect that anymore?), then perhaps almost as good as their parents. But the Perfesser and McArdle treat this motivation like some kind of ridiculous presumption, as if a beggar had come to their door and asked for his tin cup to be filled with mocha latte.

Nonetheless McArdle does acknowledge that the poor students have been exploited -- by the schools, who have upped their tuitions to capture the increased loan money ("It's hardly surprising that colleges began to claim more and more of the surplus created by their college degree"). And of course by the dad-gum Gummint, which subsidizes the loans, thereby enabling the scam.

Guess who never gets mentioned in her post? The banks. Banks whose profits on college loans have exploded thanks to the recent boom market in private loans. From MSNBC:

Private loans reached a high of 23 percent of the student-loan market in 2008. The number has fallen since the credit markets seized up but will probably go up again. These, not federally guaranteed loans, are the ones implicated in the worst stories of student debt. It's not just undergraduate programs but graduate and especially professional schools where this has become a huge issue. That's why the American Bar Association, worried that excessive private loan debt is keeping students out of public-interest fields, has pushed for an increase in the (professional school) subsidized-loan limits.

Wonder how McArdle missed this piece of the puzzle.

My favorite sentence in the whole thing:

Who but a lunatic would loan money to an eighteen year old with no job and no credit record, in the hopes that they will graduate college and begin speedy repayment?

Too bad she wasn't around to say this when FDR was signing the GI Bill. It would have made history more interesting, and then we'd be slightly less likely to miss its lessons.

LIFE'S BEEN GOOD. John Scalzi objects in strong terms to an Indiana State professor's Privilege quiz, and is seconded by Megan McArdle. Both have sound complaints about the methodology, and both (McArdle especially) dislike the idea of the quiz. "This list reeks of academics confusing their petit-bourgeois disdain of ostentation with actual privilege," says McArdle.

I'm not a fan of touchy-feely exercises, especially in college (at least not this kind of touchy-feely), and I share many of their objections. But I do recall that when I was these students' age, I was a jacked-up little shit. I had minuses as well as pluses on the professor's privilege scale, but the fact that I was even able to attend college in the United States put me at an enormous advantage to many of my fellow countrymen, and I was too often oblivious to it. I didn't set bums on fire or require school employees to call me Sir or anything, but when I look back on my experience then, I am struck by how easily I took my privileges for granted. If I hadn't been required by the terms of my financial aid to work in the cafeteria, I might have been totally insufferable.

I imagine that many students would take offense at the hectoring nature of the quiz and the proposed discussion to follow. As many of the Scalzi and McArdle commenters demonstrate, this kind of exercise is bound provoke the objection that the school is trying to run some PC trip on the students, and an inevitable, counterproductive round of dueling resentments.

Fair enough; there'll be plenty of time after college for life to smack some sense into the kids. But I don't think it's a bad thing in and of itself to be reminded that one has a leg up. This is not to plead for morbid self-flagellation, but for ordinary awareness of a simple fact of life. Like many of the folks who post things on a blog, I've got a job, a place to live, and more than the clothes on my back, which means I'm filthy stinking rich in global terms, and I'm not doing too shabby in national terms either. That I have this time and these resources to do what I do instead of foraging in trash cans for food is pretty miraculous.

The thought does not obsess me; in fact, most of the time I'm as oblivious to it as I was in college. So an occasional, gentle reminder won't kill me. On the contrary, as I'm still a bit jacked-up and a bit of a shit, I think a reality check now and again does me some good. For one thing, it works against some unpleasant tendencies I've noticed in myself. You know, sometimes I can even get as self-righteous about my now-aged working-class credentials as the Scalzi and McArdle commenters. (Did I mention that I worked in the cafeteria?) It can be good for a laugh sometimes, but there is something to be said for a little healthy perspective.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Who knew it had words?

•   From an alternative universe, Megan McArdle:

If you had asked me six months ago to predict which party would display extreme levels of concern about a deadly pandemic and which party would downplay the risk, I’d have thought you were tossing me a softball question. 

A disease that makes China look bad for a hapless initial response that let a new virus get established, followed by a coverup that let it infect the world? 

A disease that exposed the dangers of sourcing essential goods such as medical protective gear from a strategic rival? 

A disease that has restored and hardened borders, halted migration, and demonstrated how toothless and ineffective transnational institutions are at dealing with mortal threats?
A disease that has killed 100,000 Americans — which is approximately 100,000 more than the 2014 Ebola outbreak that Republicans thought President Barack Obama didn’t take seriously enough? 

Republicans, I’d have said, will be the party of total war against the virus. How could it be otherwise? 

Yes, well, I’m still trying to figure that out, too.

You think that's what we're trying to figure out? From my perspective:

A party that's constantly shitting on the findings of scientists to stir up culture war for their anti-intellectual rubes?

A party that demonizes Muslims and Mexicans as a contagion and pushes them out, while welcoming the European whites who brought the virus here in the first place?

A party that habitually turns every government function, not excluding public health efforts such as the distribution of emergency equipment, into a grift to enrich donors?

That's a party that will fuck up anything including a pandemic. I mean if these fuckers got us into a nuclear war with Russia I'd expect Republicans to spend half their time blaming it on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other half selling weapons to the enemy.

And part of what makes it like this is that their propagandists will grease the skids for them -- as is demonstrated further down McArdle's column:

For years, conservatives have explained that public health efforts are a legitimate exercise of government power. 

Sure, this was usually a prelude to complaining that public health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were neglecting this vital mission in favor of paternalistic nannying. But given the CDC’s many boneheaded errors over the past six months, conservatives were in a position to score some political points by shouting: “CDC, you had one job!”

McArdle is talking about the CDC that had a robust epidemiology team in China -- the country Trump keeps reminding us COVID-19 comes from -- before Trump pulled them out. He has also been generally trying to destroy the CDC, presumably because he couldn't figure out how to make a buck out of them. And even now when CDC does crawl up out of trash-heap to lend a hand, Trump kicks them in the teeth.

McArdle seems to be trying to say that conservatism is a noble tradition and will be again if Republicans can get rid of this embarrassing goon and put in a slick operator like Josh Hawley. But who at this point is she trying to convince? Conservatives today just want to own the libs by acting like COVID-19 doesn't exist -- and they're certainly not going to take no mark-of-the-beast vaccine for it from Ol' Pedi-Bill Gates! As for the rest of us, I can't imagine anyone will buy this shtick now that our country has been reduced to a shambles by application of McArdle's conservatarian principles in their purest form. Maybe her editor is fooled, though, and I guess that's all that matters.

•  Dan McLaughlin aka Baseball Crank has a nightmarishly bad Minneapolis column at National Review that I don't have time to get into, but this is typical:

It is always hazardous to draw sweeping conclusions about society from individual criminal cases. Every individual case involves individual facts, and those facts often turn out to be quite different from the initial media narrative, as happened in the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases. 

Yeah, you remember how we all decided Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown actually had it coming, don't you? Man, fuck this guy.

LIBERTARIANS: IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN'T MAKE WORSE?

As should shock no one, on the Hobby Lobby decision libertarians come down unanimously for the rights of corporations over those of women who need medicine. Megan McArdle:

Otherwise, according to the reasoning of that [anti-decision] tweet, I am being denied something every time my employer refuses to buy it for me: cars, homes, Hummel collectible figurines. And don’t I have a First Amendment right to express my love of round-faced Bavarian children doing adorable things?

Two things: first, McArdle trying to be funny is a natural emetic; and second, as awful as she is I'm still surprised to see her promoting the ridiculous idea that health insurance benefits amount to "free stuff" (as the conservatives who don't bother to call themselves libertarians have unfailing come to call it) whenever it specifically benefits women's health. (Sample witticism: "My company won't pay for my toothpaste. I'm going to be forced to have cavities now.").  Then, McArdle goes on about how unreasonable other people are being. I guess I'll have to downgrade my opinion of her, if such a thing is possible.

McArdle also suggests that Obama wanted to lose the Hobby Lobby case so his free-stuff-fueled slut-minions will vote Democrat in November. So does McArdle's husband Peter Suderman at libertarian flagship Reason, only presumably he's got a sense of shame because he's more evasive about it:

To be clear: I am not at all suggesting that the administration was hoping or intending to lose in court. But...

[sigh.]

...this does help explain, at least somewhat, why the administration was so eager to pursue the case... It’s the political/legal equivalent of online clickbait; it grabs the attention of large numbers of people, sparks their interests and passions, and gets them engaged (or at least enraged). That doesn’t mean the administration set out to lose, or doesn’t care about having lost. But it does potentially change the calculus about whether and how hard to press an issue like this by offering some real benefits just for fighting the fight, even in the event of a defeat.

If the smell didn't tip you off, the incoherence of the last sentence is a glaring tell that you've just been handed a load of bullshit. What real benefits are offered, and by whom to whom? Also, what were they supposed to do, press less hard? As for the ruling itself, Suderman's all smiles:

The big question isn't whether the contraception mandate violates the religious freedoms of some faceless corporate entity entirely separate from the individuals who own that company -- it's whether the requirement would violate the free exercise of religious for the particular people who founded and now run the company... 

As Alito writes in his opinion, "A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends....When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people." 

In seeking to defend the requirement, the federal government had argued that Hobby Lobby, as a for-profit corporation, was not eligible to challenge the rule under the RFRA because corporations are "separate and apart from" their individual owners and operators. They were distinct, and not "people," and therefore ineligible for the protections of a law designed to shelter "a person's exercise of religion." Alito says, more or less, that this is nonsense: "Corporations, 'separate and apart from' the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all."

The next time someone talks to you about corporate personhood, remember that entire fiction gets dropped as soon as it's convenient to portray the corporate citizen as a mere painting on a scrim, which when rear-lit reveals Ma and Pa Jesus, smiling, waving their snakes, and crooning "we's jes' simple folk, tryin' to get right with the Lord"; when it's time for mega-million-dollar political donations, the scrim gets front-lit again and Ma and Pa sneak offstage to count their loot.

Also at Reason, Shikha Dalmia addresses Jonathan Cohn's suggestion that a single payer system would stop all this my-employee's-medicine-is-against-my-religion crap. Dalmia begins:

One: By calling Obamacare a “new entitlement” and a “public program” he has basically accepted that the program constitutes a de facto government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, a conclusion that liberals have generally resisted. Leftists, notes Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, have been trying to convince Americans that Obamacare is not a step in the direction of socialized medicine as opponents claim because it uses private insurance and relies on market forces to deliver coverage. Cohn’s candor is both refreshing and clarifying, so thanks, Jonathan, for that.

The dream of Obamasocialism, and that any normal people give a shit about it, will never die in Galt's Gulch.

Eventually Dalmia gets to the point: single payer is just how "libs" go around "playing their brother’s keeper... and demanding generous subsidies," probably while wearing their I'M A STUPID LIB shirts and going "durr hurr," whereas libertarians want to "unleash market forces to lower soaring costs without resorting to price controls or rationing" -- which judging from Dalmia's sourcing means a tax credits and vouchers scheme similar to Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, which nobody wants because, like libs, they don't understand freedom.

Meanwhile big libertarian Rand Paul (he only wants to kill foreigners with drones, remember?) praised the decison; Cathy Young said "there are many women who believe the birth control mandate infringes on religious liberty -- among them Hobby Lobby co-founder Barbara Green," that Planned Parenthood should stop lobbying because it's "divisive," and bunch of other stupid shit; and -- well, why go on? You knew the minute I said "libertarian" how this was going to go.

UPDATE. Among conservatives who don't mind admitting it, today has also been a festival of pedantic shirt-retucking. Ramesh Ponnuru on Ruth Bader Ginsberg:

[Ginsberg says] “It bears note in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month’s full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage.” Who truly believes that this cost plays any role at all in Ginsburg’s analysis? It’s expensive, so she cites it to show that employers have to pay for it; if it were cheap, she’d cite it to show that employers aren’t burdened by it.

I suppose she'll tell us next that gold is expensive because gold just happens to be expensive! Jesus, it's like Ponnuru is taking lessons from Jonah Goldberg.

Also I'm grateful to commenter Glock H. Palin, Esq. for pointing out that Rand Paul actually doesn't mind killing a citizen with drones, after all. Maybe he's still a libertarian because he likes Drew Carey or something.

CULTURE S'MORES. Let's personalize this a little, shall we? Megan McArdle:

Let's be honest, coastal folks: when you meet someone with a thick southern accent who likes NASCAR and attends a bible church, do you think, "hey, maybe this is a cool person"? And when you encounter someone who went to Eastern Iowa State, do you accord them the same respect you give your friends from Williams? It's okay--there's no one here but us chickens. You don't.

Brushing aside this taunt from a child of privilege, let me first give a little personal background: my family never had any money. My father died when I was two. My mother lived on government subsidies, as were available before people like McArdle took such things away, and whatever extra income she could get from factory and restaurant jobs. I had the good fortune to receive scholarships -- again, in an era before McArdles slapped them out of the common people's hands -- that, along with my own labors and my mother's, put me through college.

Not everyone who works at a desk started that way. As a young adult I worked as a busboy, a waiter, a factory hand, and a messenger dispatcher. I'm not talking about a season after college -- I mean for years. I got my first writing job more than a decade after I graduated. Not everyone gets fast-tracked out of college to the Atlantic.

Throughout my adult life I've consorted with day laborers, tool and die workers, welfare cases, bums, junkies, musicians, cooks, crooks, and schnooks. And some of them -- mark it well, extra dry skim McArdle -- have been Sons of the South. I don't think this makes me special, and it certainly doesn't make me special among people who vote Democratic. Though McArdle may not have noticed it, the coastal as well as the middle states are full of people who work like dogs to maintain a decent life, and many have noticed -- despite the political sideshows and their occasional attendance upon popular sporting events -- that the order McArdle and her allies support has made things worse for them. As a Gator out of Indiana once told me, the Democrats at least will give you a little bigger piece of the pie. They may not be up on the high-level internet chatter, but they know what's what. And if I agree with them, I ain't pandering. I'm telling it like we all know it is.

To put it in terms that maybe one of her artistic friends might be able to explain to her, let me quote Clifford Odets: You call me a Red and I'll break your goddamn neck.

THE CRAP AND THE ANTHEM.

Don't push too hard, my friend.
Happy Fourth, comrades! It appears Alex Jones had it wrong and we aren't taking over the country today, leaving everyone free to celebrate in their own way.  Since for me every day is already a celebration of America -- that big, gorgeous, clapped-out zombie! -- this Independence Day I sing the Megan McArdle. The Washington Post columnist is really gunning for that Peggy Noonan Chair of Applied Patriotic Bullshit, and yesterday not only published an anti-Roe-v.-Wade column -- further proof that libertarianism is strictly for dudes, and ably dismantled in this Scott Lemieux thread -- but emitted the worst 4th of July hot dog since Ted Cruz took the occasion to tell his constituents that Harvard Law is full of communists.

McArdle's column is about the flag and the National Anthem. Unlike the Harvard Law communists, she's in favor of them. But she laments the struggle over the Anthem, which is the fault of Bothsides, cousin of Notme and Ida Know. Some think kneeling during the Anthem is "a near cousin to treason." Others hold "lengthy debates" over "whether the third verse of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' was racist," the big sillies! Room for Debate, but surely We Can All Agree that that third set of shadowy figures who "suggested that perhaps we should just stop playing the national anthem at sporting events" -- which is the new Abolish ICE -- are definitely N.G. and "rather shockingly naive about what it takes to hold a country together." The non-naive view, apparently, is that we need flags and anthems or Thus Falls The Republic.

“Nationalism” has become a dirty word in the modern era, having become inextricably associated with repression of minorities and imperialist ambition. We’ve forgotten that the nationalists actually did start out in the 19th century with a worthy and difficult project: persuading a large group of people to think of themselves as a single unit.

You may wonder what the hell she's talking about. The country has from the beginning been united by wars and, and when none can be provided, whispers of foreign intrigue. Every general from the War of 1812 onward who distinguished himself in battle has become an automatic Presidential contender -- until the modern era, when our military adventures became so obviously insane that the most hawkish members of the electorate now spit on a war hero and vote in a draft-dodger. If you don't know history, at least think of President Flightsuit and Mission Accomplished.

But wondering what McArdle's talking about is a waste of time -- she doesn't really have arguments, just routines and sub-routines. For the Owning the Libs routine, for example, in this case she says sure, nationalism got a bad rap because of nationalists -- not like that could happen again! -- but liberals who don't like white nationalism are nonetheless constantly and hypocritically  "engaging in nationalist projects" like the welfare state, checkmate! Libs like bread and roses, McArdle's masses like blood and soil -- same diff, really. Plus the "groupish instinct" that transubstantiated into the nation-state "evolved in the African plains" -- see, Africa! And you guys claim to like black people. In conclusion:

If we are to fight our way back from this soft civil war, we will need a muscular patriotism that focuses us on our commonalities instead of our differences.

I wonder if her echo of "muscular Christianity" is conscious?

Of course, such a patriotism must not be either imperialist nor racialized. Which means we desperately need the flag, and the anthem, and all the other common symbols that are light on politics or military fetishism and heavy on symbolism.

Set aside the idea that "the flag, and the anthem" are "light on politics or military fetishism" -- such an absurdity after decades of flag pin patriotism and long, painful hours of Toby Keith that I doubt even McArdle believes what she's saying  -- what would the "other common symbols" be? The game pieces in Monopoly? Fonzie's leather jacket? Manny, Moe and Jack?

We need much more of them, rather than much less — constant reminders that we are groupish, and that our group consists of 328 million fellow Americans with whom we share a country and a creed, a song and a flag, and the deep sense of mutual obligation that all these things imply.

Call me commie, but I don't think the flag and anthem are gonna do it. A good start, though, would be a general acknowledgement that we got this day off because some guys -- some of whose values have, to put it bluntly, not aged well, and which most of us have abandoned --  nonetheless took seriously some Enlightenment ideas of freedom that have indeed worn and do serve us well, and may yet be our bulwark against tyranny, foreign and domestic. Grill and chill to that, my friends, and choose your own anthem; my own's up top here: If you hate us, you just don't know what you're sayin'.

ANTI-ASSIMILATIONISTS. Megan McArdle talks about gentrification, which she is currently performing as a new homeowner in "what is euphemistically known as a 'mixed' neighborhood" in DC. Perhaps to get her cracker fans interested, early in the piece she presents an exciting new variation on that rightwing voice-of-the-people schtick Ideologically Sympathetic Cab driver -- the Id Symp Bus Rider:

Yesterday, I rode the bus for the first time from the stop near my house, and ended up chatting with a lifelong neighborhood resident who has just moved to Arizona, and was back visiting family. We talked about the vagaries of the city bus system, and then after a pause, he said, "You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don't want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don't own a city." He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. "Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!"

In my many years of transitional living, I've never had a conversation like that. But then I probably don't have McArdle's winning ways with the locals.

McArdle says she and her husband "want to live in a place that's affordable, and economically and racially mixed." But, sigh, science says she can't, at least not for long. She quotes Benjamin Schwarz at great length on how gentrifying areas don't hold to that magical transitional stage for long, and that the new people inevitably squeeze out the old. McArdle is resigned and, it would seem, content: "I want the services, but I don't want this to price out all the people who already live there. Unfortunately, it's a package deal." It's natural selection!

The Schwarz quote is pretty snotty, but one passage especially leaps screaming from the page -- Schwartz mocks some other researchers who would prefer to see the new people and the old people coexist in harmony (which makes them "sentimental progressives" in his view); he describes their favored enclaves:

Such neighborhoods still contain a sprinkling of light industry and raffish characters, for urban grit, and a dash of what Zukin calls "people of color," for exotic diversity. Added to the mélange are lots and lots of experimental artists (for that boho frisson)...

As a longtime (and recently returned) city-dweller, I often reappraise my own view of city life to make sure I'm not just trying to wrap a Sesame Street bedsheet around reality. But though I have my own sentimental progressive side, I know I've never wished for "people of color" to supply "exotic diversity" to my experience. And if I appreciate "urban grit," it is not because I view people as mere ingredients in a cultural stew -- I guess I should say "ragout," to better conform to Schwarz's stereotype of prissy bohemianism -- but because I find places with some connection to their past healthier than those that have had their past wiped away. If someone wanted to live in proximity to their grandparents, would Schwarz accuse them of seeking "geriatic diversity" as some sort of effete seasoning?

And the changes are neither uniform nor inevitable. McArdle and Schwarz must know that while the East Village has been gentrified beyond recognition, and some waves of gentrification came quickly, there are still sections where old-time Puerto Rican and other settlers are still hanging in, thanks in part to city housing projects, and living in relative harmony with the newer people decades after they started arriving. Up in Harlem, gentrification is widely advertised -- sometimes with ludicrous aggressiveness -- but only really exists in slivers; up where I am, in Sugar Hill, gentrification basically means "some white people observed between subway and apartments." (The people I've talked to are nice, though, even if none of them have said that they foolishly destroyed their own neighborhood and are glad I am here to revitalize it.)

Despite their characterization, this is not Plymouth Rock and the originals aren't Indians. It is not absolutely necessary that, once honkies and money come to a previously disadvantaged neighborhood, all the poor people have to disappear. It has come to seem so, however, because policy and prejudice have conspired to make it so.

Schwarz himself notes the decline of manufacturing in the city; he sneers that the progressives are "wistful for the higgledy-piggledy way manufacturing was scattered throughout New York (diversity! mixed use!)" but are "compelled to make clear that they don’t miss the sweatshops and the exploitative, horrible life that went with them." But after social agitation and progressive legislation chased away much of the sweatshop trade, 20th Century New York developed enough thriving port and factory work to grant a middle-class life to hundreds of thousands of people who had no more than a high school education. In our current enlightened offshore economy, however, that type of person is now more than likely to be working poor -- heads of families laboring long hours at crap jobs with little opportunity for advancement. (Oh, and we still have sweatshops.)

This is not the result of white people liking old buildings, but of social policy. And it's going to get worse. Rent control's a thing of the past, rent stabilization is dying off, and I assume that, as everything gets even more rightwing than it already is, affordable housing schemes will pass into history. Life will get tougher, and the poor will be driven to an even greater extent into what used to be called ghettos. And writers at the Atlantic will tell you it was meant to be.

UPDATE. If McArdle's post doesn't disgust you enough, you might try her commenters; when you weed out the outright racists (a full day's work right there - "I think taller and blonder is generally nicer looking -- and if you watch Univision, you'll see that many 'Hispanics' seem to as well"), you're mostly left with glibertarian sophists ("Wanting to live in a racially mixed neighborhood is as racist as wanting to live in a neighborhood with no racial mix") and other species of asshole.