Elite failures

By Dave Anderson:

Our elites have failed. That has been the basic netroots diagnosis of the American political system since 2002. The elites of all stripes are either engaged in self-enrichment, looting expeditions, or are almost criminally in-effective. This applies to Republicans, this applies to Democrats, this applies to public intellectuals and this applies to the press. The solution has been to create new incentives so that some of the elites who still hold positions of power behave in a more responsible fashion (at this point, this project needs to be re-evaluated) and to create a new generation of institutions and individuals that can displace the old system. I'm not in a good mood today, so I just want to highlight some of the evidence for elite failure and elite ass-covering.

Paul Rosenberg advances the arguement Democratic elite failure is due to a misreading of the political landscape and the scarring of the Democratic Party from the Reagan Republican era. I find this argument persuasive, perhaps not complete, but persuasive.

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Obama and Emanuel have quite fundamentally misread what has happened to American politics the last 8 years (and going back even further, of course). Obama's basic view was that Bush was an irritant - remove him and you remove the cause of the infection in US politics. Without Bush out there sowing division Obama believed he could build a stable center.

Rahm Emanuel's role was to be the force behind that work. For Emanuel, the Obama Administration was an outright restoration. He would pick up right where he left off in 2000, cutting deals of a center-right variety and browbeating a weak progressive bloc into accepting it.

The netroots don't accept the view that Bush was an irritant. Instead, there is a strong perception that I and I believe many others hold, that Bush was a logical extension of the American political trends of the past few generations. Most of what he pulled or attempted to pull had antecedents from the Landon campaign, to the Nixon and Reagan Administrations. Most of his first team of advisors were either Nixon/Ford retreads or were up to their eyeballs in Reagan era shenanigans. As the pushback on the "Left's" accurately calling the politicization of terror alert shows, the evidence was there for anyone who could afford to piss into the tent.

Marc Ambinger indicts himself and his profession as incompetent elite journalists with a beautiful line slamming the dirty f*cking but correct hippies:

Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.

So trust the guys who have a strong political incentive to lie instead of looking at patterns of evidence --- that is what elite journalists do instead of attempting to reduce the information asymmetry that insiders possess.

From Ian Welsh on Bernacke's re-appointment:

Bernanke bailed out the banks and the rich. You know this, but what is not clear to many people is that bailing out the banks and fixing the banking system were not connected at the hip. It was possible to fix what was wrong with the banks by taking the big banks into receivership and then using them to lend directly. Wipe out the shareholders, write down the bondholders to the actual value of the banks, but keep lending to the real economy, and indeed increase lending and capital flows, by, say, deciding to refit every single building in America for energy efficiency and generation, and to take every clunker off the road.

The banking class, and the rich as a group, tanked the system. They committed what amounted to systematic fraud, and earned billions of dollars of bonuses for themselves by crashing out the system and daring Bernanke and other politicians (and Ben is nothing if not a pol) to do something about it. Bernanke folded, and threw trillions of dollars at them.

There was significant public support and intellectual cover in November, December, January and February for the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress to take a whack at the finanancial institutions that made a series of bad one-sided bets that privatized all gains and socialized a good deal of losses. They failed to take this potential system transformation moment to enact any systemic change.

And here is Aimai at No More Mister Nice Blog on the failure of liberal pundits to take responsibility for getting things wrong on torture and law breaking:

I was standing at the cookout minding my own business when Klein started pontificating for the rubes on how �surprising� and �shocking� it was that Grassley, of all people, should have come out and endorsed the �death panels� lie. I walked up and said �why are you surprised?� [edited to remove typo] to which he, in best pundit debater fashion (never allow yourself to admit you were just posing!), shot back �who says I'm surprised?� I said �well, you did. You just started your lecture saying �Its surprising....��

I explained the Klein was upset because he had been caught out shilling for the Republicans on National Security Matters and on the FISA court legislation in particular and that he was still upset because he'd been held up for ridicule for his absurd statement that there was no problem with the secret Bush programs although he didn't know anything about them. And that this extended to the actual retroactive FISA legislation, which he also said was fine but didn't know anything about. This seemed to inflame things somewhat. Can't see why. He began shrieking at me that he hadn't been wrong, he'd been misled by a �democratic staffer� but really, I just began laughing at that point because �I didn't read the legislation� like �the dog ate my homework� is rather a lame explanation for a grown man, let alone a self described journalist.

Elite failure is systemic, and there is no penalty for being wrong. We�re screwed unless the incentives change.