Marshall Steinbaum went to the Niskanen Center conference on Beyond Left and Right: Reviving Moderation in an Era of Crisis and Extremism. He got hives. Then his phone battery died: Marshall Steinbaum: https://twitter.com/Econ_Marshall/status/1100078529482575872 "Good open from Wilkinson: didn’t moderates get us into this mess in the first place?... Kamarck’s interpretation of the history of the Democratic Party is that New Dems successfully prevented worse outcomes. Certainly not true in antitrust. She’s lamenting that Clinton did not enact “entitlement reform” in his second term. “And that was the end of the center.” The problem with Bush and Obama was that both men did not have the “capacity” to be president. Obama was to weak to resist Wall Street, she says. That’s supposed to exculpate centrism?...
...Kamarck: 'what are we going to end up with in all the talk about Medicare for All? A 55-year-old Medicare buy-in. Because of all the power of the health insurance industry. That’s incrementalism. That’s not bad. That’s great!'....
Mounk points out that Medicare for all is totally internationally standard. Lauding incrementalism as an end to itself erodes democracy. Kamarck’s response is that the promise is what’s corroding democracy. Then she blames social media.... Yascha Mounk attacks “people on Twitter.” Apparently we got to him....
Linker is lamenting how the end of the Cold War enabled the rise of identity politics. Then social media “handed a megaphone to each interest group.” Wow this is bad.... Now Linker is giving a very “this happened, then that happened” theory of recent political history of the right, after Kamarck did the same for Democrats. Missing from both accounts: the right-wing billionaires who control the Republican Party and the larger concentration of corporate power in the economy & in politics. You don’t have those things, you’re recounting a fake history. I hate to say it, but these people aren’t doing justice to Wilkinson’s opening question.... Linker points out that the real center in this country is socially conservative, economically left—the opposite of this whole conference.....
So given that the consensus of the event was that carbon taxes and cap & trade have failed and that the GND is intolerable socialist planning, what is the sensible centrist neoliberal shill plan for climate change? "Adaptation," as Elaine Kamarck said?
#noted
