Tuesday, October 27, 2020

The Conservative Tide?

NOTE:  This is one of the many posts here that were written over a series of days, or even weeks. Given that, there are events in it and references to posts not yet posted, or which were posted, that may seem sort of out of order, as they in fact are.


The crest of the modern, and quite liberal. . . for the moment, Canadian province of Quebec.  The fleur de lis recalls the Kingdom of France, the lion the United Kingdom, and the maple leafs Canada.  Below it all. . . "I remember".

This might seem like a bad time to bring this particular thread back up, particularly on a blog that ostensibly deals with historical topics rather than others, although this blog very obviously deals with a lot of things.

And besides that, the November election hasn't happened yet.

Barack Obama, the nation's first post Boomer President by some measures, or a late Boomer President by others, with Joe Biden (dob 1942) and Donald Trump (dob 1946).

And added to that, much of what we'll relate here is completely counterintuitive. . . at first blush.  Indeed, at the time we're typing this we're about to elect the most left wing administration in seventy years, protesters backing the most radical agendas imaginable have been out in the streets and their views are now regarded as quasi main stream, and the Pope just made a statement that's clearly contrary to long held Catholic morals and which gave comfort to Catholic radicals like Fr. James Martin, S.J. and left orthodox Catholics, and orthodox Christians in general, feeling betrayed and bewildered.

Pope Francis, (dob 1936), "A_Szentév_kapujának_megnyitása_2015_-_Opening_of_the_Holy_Door_2015_4.jpeg ‎(431 × 435 pixels, file size: 138 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)"  Wikipedia Free Use.

So you  may ask, therefore, are you out of your mind?


Nope.

Having said all of that, we'll launch in.  If this topic isn't ripe, and we feel that it is, it will be soon.

But it is ripe.

Let's start by recapping the past four years and where that's taken us, although that four is really only part of seventy really, as we're about to end an era.  The Boomer Era.

The Short Term.

During the 2016 election one of the things we wrote about here is that the GOP would have to live with the results of a Trump Presidency.  Our feeling, at that time, was that Trump didn't reflect the old conservatism of the GOP but something else, with that something else being a sort of new, alt right, populism.  This isn't meant as a criticism although some might take it that way.  And frankly our predictions were only partially correct.

In reality, the Trump administration has been exceedingly difficult to define.  On some topics it has definitely been conservative in the most traditional and cultural sense. There's been, for example, no administration that was more "pro life" than Donald Trump's, a fact which has caused some people who would not otherwise do so to support him.  In other ways the administration has been purely populist.  

Personally, as has sometimes been noted, Donald Trump himself has been a strange and unlikely standard bearer for the conservative cause, a rich man with a problematic personal history and a crass personality, rather than a man representing national tradition in the conservative mold.

One thing that seems evident this election season, this pandemic season, and during the Red Summer of 2020 is that Conservatives have done a bad job of defining and advancing conservatism.

It isn't that conservatism doesn't have a set of values, goals and definitions.  It very much does.  It's more like the post Buckley conservatives have abandoned them for something else, even while still vaguely recalling that they are there.  In some ways, therefore, modern conservatism has been a blend of really old conservatism, of the pre Buckley and indeed even Pre Second World War type, combined with a remnant of Reaganism and mixed with populism.  That mix might work, but what it lacks overall is a figure who can cogently distill it into a discernible form.  Buckley, who would not have agreed with Trump on many things, was just such a man in an earlier era.  Such figures as Mark Steyn and Victor David Hanson seem unlikely to fit the bill.  Ross Douthat (dob 1979) might be the most likely person to occupy that position, but he clearly is outside of the Trump arena . . .which indeed may very well put him in first position.

What seems clear to me at this point is that following November 3, which is now very close, there's going to be a Republican reckoning.  If current trends hold, Joe Biden will be the next President and the Senate will probably be Democratic.  There will be a reckoning, we'd note, simply because of the first matter, but there will very much be one if both of those things come true.

Indeed, if they don't, the adjustment period for the GOP will be slower and more measured.  Figures like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham who have been significant Republicans in government, but outside of the Administration itself, will be major influencers in what is to come for the party, much as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been over the last four years.  That this is the case in the Democratic Party may not be evident as its lurched to the left, but Pelosi and Schumer were a brake on that trend. But for them, the party would now be much, much more left leaning than it currently is and chances are overwhelming that Joe Biden wouldn't be the current nominee.  Readers will note that Schumer is out of a position of overall leadership, but Pelosi is not and over the past two years that's been a hugely significant factor in the Democratic Party, which Schumer has participated in.

I doubt very much that Senate Republicans, should the body fall to the Democrats, will be in a similar position.  House Republicans have practically been unheard of in leadership matters for the past two years, which says something quite significant.

So where are things headed?

Well lets look back and look forward, as the direction of things may be clearer than it might at first seem.

In the immediate near term, we'd note, the entire country is going to be taking a big leftward leap. Big.  

But only in terms of the national legislature and the executive.

Now, that is pretty big, but at the same time we're about to experience a "conservative" return in the United States Supreme Court following the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett (dob 1972).  That doesn't really mean what people seem to think it does, for reasons we've noted here repeatedly.  But it does mean that the Court may be sending things back to Congress and the state legislatures in record amounts. That will mean that both of those institutions will have to act in areas, particularly Congress, where they have not for eons.

What's much less clear right now is whether the GOP misfortune at the national level will translate into a local one anywhere. The Democrats control eighteen state legislatures.  Minnesota's is divided between the parties.  Every other legislature is Republican, if you include Nebraska, where the majority of legislators are Republicans but where the legislative races are non partisan.  

That's a closer split than we might presume.  It isn't as if legislators elect Senators anymore, of course, which would make a giant difference at the national level, but the seven state lead that the Republicans now have means that a generally conservative agenda will be in evidence at the state level overall, but barely overall, assuming that lead holds.

The Democrats, however, have targeted thirteen states this election where they think they might be able to flip them, and chances are good that at least Minnesota will go into the Democratic camp.  States where the GOP doesn't have a large legislature lead may be vulnerable this election.  The GOP lead has only existed since 2010 and therefore it represented a rightward drift, but that all came before the big left surge brought about by the Trump administration.

The reason this matters is this.  In Republican states legislation will continue to be generally conservative, but probably less conservative, than it has been in the past.  For a state like Wyoming, however, the legislature is probably about to do inot reaction over the next four years.

It won't go into reaction forever, nor will other similarly situated states where there has been an alt right drift, as at a national level things are going to happen that we're not going to like and simply complaining about it isn't going to do anything, nor is pretending that it isn't happening.  At first there will be some naive hope that the Court will reverse everything that Congress will be doing, but it won't.

And that will mean that there's a real danger that states that have been having a strong alt right drift are just going to be left out of things.  In recent years Wyoming politicians that tacked to Trump's views have been frequently in the national news.  But chances are high that the branch of the Republican Party that's strongly associated with Trump's administration are going to be left out of the a re-formed GOP.  Politicians that took an independent view in the GOP, such as Liz Cheney did during her last two years, are much better situated to rise in the party.  

As part of that the days of platforms that expressed really strong alt right concept that had some appeal to that wing, but not to the base, are likely over.  A Wyoming Senator was responsible for the insertion of a plank seeking to "return" the Federal lands to the states even though locals are adamantly opposed to such ideas.  Ideas like that are now part of the past.

As part of all of this the GOP, as a conservative party, is going to have to contemplate what its about.  Perhaps fortunately for it, what it will end up being about is already a demographic trend that will reform conservatism whether it wants to or not.  It's the passing of the bulge in the snake.

Before we get to that, however, we need to deal with society at large.

Or perhaps Boomer society would be more accurate.

The leftward tilt in politics has more than its fair share of young politicians. Still, it's impossible not to notice that is mostly lead by left leaning Boomers who came up in politics following 1968.  People like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer not only feature in it, but still lead it.  Joe Biden can't be really regarded as part of it so much as somebody benefiting from the current political tide.  Kamala Harris (dob 1964) is, however, in the same demographic as Barack Obama, either an immediate post boomer or a very late term Boomer.  Anyone in that demographic, which includes your humble author, can't deny that politic and culture for this gap generation has been heavily influenced by the Boomers.

Now, not all Boomers are left leaning politically or culturally, to be sure. Witness, for example, teh current administration. But the events of the post war era were generally left leaning culturally and became very much so after 1968.  Culturally, the events that started off in the immeidate post war really bloomed into fruition and impacted every sector of society.  Insertion of libaralism impacted all of the political parties to some degree for awhile, and certainly moved the center line of the center significantly.  In the culture the single biggest impacts were the change in the work status of women, something brought about most significantly due to domestic industrialization, and the disastrous Sexual Revolution, somethign that is still being worked out most particularly among the aging boomers who are in charge of cultural definition due to their positions in the world.

We've written about this before here but one of the real ironies of this current election is that in some ways it's really the end and last gasp of Boomer liberalism, just as the election is also in some ways the end of late Boomer conservatism.  Political ideologies that were strongly formed post World War Two are still dominating the discussion on both end of the spectrum. That's about to end, and as it does, what is also coming up behind it is a large demographic change coincident, oddly enough, with the begging of the global decline in the population.

Where we're headed.

The trend was identified some time ago by demographer Eric Kaufman, a Canadian who teaches in the United Kingdom.  A well knowna nd respected demographer, he surprised people some time ago by presenting the pretty clear evidence that, coincident with population decline, there's been a giant increase in the percentage of the population globally that identified generally with what we'd regard as conservative or traditional ideals. Bits and pieces of the trend, sometimes attributed to completely disparate factors, have been picked up from other social sciences.  In some ways the the world has walked out of the long shadow of World War Two and the Cold War and into a new era.  That doesn't mean an era of universal peace and brotherly love, or anything of the kind, but rather a new, and much more conservative, era.

Kaufman noted in his work that the percentage of the population all over the world that identified with traditionalism and conservatism, and even nationalism, is dramatically rising.  And much of it is occuring in an old European cultural fashion, although not all of it.  Contrary to what American pollsters have noted on a very localized American level, religion is massively on the rise globally.  The fastest growing religion appears to be Islam, although there's some doubt on that, but right behind it is Catholicism.  Orthodoxy has massively revived in the Slavic East.  Traditional Hinduism is on the rise in India.  

In individual religious groups, moreover, the trend is even more pronounced.  In the United States, for example, a majority of Americans will be Catholics by mid Century.  Conservative Orthodox Judaism will make up nearly 1/3d if not 1/2s of American Judaism by the end of the current decade.  While "mainline" Protestantism has been suffering in the US as it has increasingly become theologically liberal, conservative Protestants of all types are on the rise.  

This is the case in the Catholic church as well, which is overall regarded as theologically conservative but which had a large swing to the religious left in some quarters in the 60s and 70s.  Church leaders in the Church today retain a fair number of individuals who came up in this era and who continue to have a mark upon the church, ironically frequently against the views of their younger parishioners who are theologically very well educated and conservative.  People form the outside tend to confuse this with the "Rad Trads", which they are not, but the mere existence of Rad Trads shows how much this is the case.  Among younger Catholics the line tends to be drawn between the orthodox young and the Rad Trads, which are two conservative camps.  Liberals exist, but they're increasingly a thing of the past and tend to be supported in existence only where there are remaining liberals form the 1970s.

Among the Orthodox in the US, at the same time, and evolution has occurred in which the Orthodox communities have moved from having a strong and declining national identity to instead focusing on their Orthodox nature, which in turn has brought in converts from Protestant faiths which have turned liberal.  It's also caused some Catholics from very liberal areas to make the move as well.*  Overall, however, Catholicism is set to become much more orthodox as older Bishops retire and younger, highly orthodox priests move into their place. As that section of the church has always been well represented, the change will be very swift in the Northern hemisphere when it comes.  It's already dominant in Africa and Asia.


A lot of this has to do with a focus in these groups on families in a traditional sense.  To put it purely in the US context, but to provide an example that's illustrative globally, the main line Protestant religions have been traditionally white and upwardly mobile, the same demographic in the US which, starting in the 1970s, basically quit replacing itself.  If demographics is destiny, as liberals like to proclaim, that's a strategy for demographic death.  And its now happening.  Overall population in the European world will continue to decline.  In the US its population increase is solely due to immigration, which is set in the US at a massively  high rate compared to other nations.  In both of these instances, however, that amplifies the trend.  In most countries where there isn't an ethos that requires a high immigration rate for misunderstood economic beliefs or myths, the overall population will continue to go down while the percentage of those being discussed here, paradoxically, goes up.  In the US this is also true, but it's amplified by the immigration of populations from religiously traditional regions.

But viewing this solely as a religious family situation would be in error.  In other ways it's clear that a return to traditionalism, albeit modified traditionalism, is now a definite trend.  You can see it in all sorts of things, including popular culture.

One of the oddest things I've seen during my adult years is the explosion of food programs. That may seem like an odd thing to note here, but their existence and their evolution is telling in this context.  

In the 1970s and early 80s there was sort of an odd theme about how young women didn't know how to cook anymore, and young men never had.  There was no such thing as a "Foodie".  Young people were presumed to live on Ramen noodles (which are disgusting) until they married, and when they did they go by somehow if they didn't have means.  If they did, and were a double income couple ("dinc's"), then sort of the social ideal they ate out.  And then came November 1993.

On November 22, 1993, the Food Network began broadcasting. That may not seem significant in this story, but it is.  Prior to 1993 cooking shows were regarded as an amusing anachronism of the 1950s, which were seen as a remnant of an image of the 1950s that never was.  Never mind that the acme of television cooking, Julia Childs, was actually a World War Two OSS agent whose fellow former OSS husband lost his job during the McCarthy era, she and the entire genre were regularly lampooned by the hip, cool, and persistently left wing Saturday Night Live for years.

Well at some point people quit making fun of the food programs, and for their part, they no longer were what they once were. They were hip, cool and aimed at the young, and full of advice on how to prepare the gourmet dishes they were offering at home. For that matter, not all were gourmet by any means, and one Food Network bastion, Rachel Ray, went from traveling on "Forty Dollars A Day" to preparing basic home meals, like your mother who used to cook for the entire family used to make (assuming your mother did that) in thirty minutes.

None of that may seem like a cultural conservative revolution, but food reflects on the culture and it is.  In the early 70s the concept was that the young were getting stoned at Studio 54, and nobody thought of much of the spouse of the Canadian Prime Minster being photographed sitting on its floor wearing a miniskirt and showing too much.  By the late 1970s and 1980s dinc's still viewed eating out as the standard and people proudly stated "I never eat at home". Well, by the 1990s they were and by now a staple of the food channels are home cooked meals for a family, often with an ethnic emphasis.

That latter item also is demonstrative of a developing type of conservatism that's being missed.  For most of American history conservatism was defined in a WASPish way, except in rural areas of strong other ethnic character.  The "Protestant Work Ethic" defined an aspect of American culture and an aspect of "Americanism" was conforming to a certain WASPish ideal.  Ethnic communities strove to conform to it.  One individual I know whose grandparents were from Armenia noted how they strove to abandon their Armenian identification and to be identified as "Americans", including speaking in a foreign tongue they'd not grown up with.  In my childhood many people resented even the commonly claimed ethnic identifiers, like "Irish Americans", and noted they were Americans, not hyphenated anything.  My own father, whose father spoke German and English due to his place of birth, and who was half Irish and half German by descent, never identified with either and never made any effort to observe the Americanized Irish national day, St. Patrick's Day (my Canadian born mother, however, certainly observed it, but in a much more traditionally Irish way).

Certainly, of course, "ethnic" food existed, but it wasn't domestic in the way its become and remained often distinctly eating out ethnic. Nearly any town of substance had an Italian restaurant and, at least in this region, one or more Mexican restaurant. Chinese restaurants seem to be universal everywhere.  But beyond that, there wasn't much, and not much in terms of restaurants that incorporated those fares into their menu outside of those categories.  Our town had a couple of restaurants that were run by Greek immigrants, for example, but you would not have known it but for maybe one or two speciality items on the menu.  When I was a kid a German immigrant had a family diner and it did have some items that German Americans would recognize, but there was no particular emphasis on it (and indeed, well into the 70s in some areas emphasizing a German menu might have been a mistake).  In big cities ethnic neighborhoods usually had ethnic restaurants, of course.

None of that is surprising and all of that would seem to cut against the point.  But here is the point.  Food Network spends hours and hours per day with programming that shows the viewers how to cook Italian (or whatever) meals at home, "like my mother did", with the idea that you are going to do that. When not doing that, its spending hours and hours per day showing you how to make fast American meals large enough to feed an army, or in at least one case how to feed your presumed big ranch family.  To at least some extent, people watching The Pioneer Woman see themselves in her role, the matron of an agricultural family where the men are out working, and she's manning the large capacity and high demand kitchen.

Indeed, riffing from that, television has become fascinated with families in general, and particularly large ones.  The Duggars, a giant family living an extremely conservative lifestyle, commanded television viewership for years before one of their sons took them down due to a fascination with procreating that strayed outside of his family fold and which was generally icky.   At the same time viewers watched "Kate" and her eight children which wasn't any more interesting other than that she had a bunch of kids at one time.  That too fell to domestic discontent, but now viewers can watch Out Daughtered about a somehat whiney husband and his cute but tough as nails wife and their large collection of kinder.  None of this really resembles watching the single protagonist in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, or her friend Rhoda, or Maude.

Indeed one such liberal television female of the 70s is emblematic of this transformation in some ways.  Valerie Bertinelli portrayed the liberal teenager in One Day At A Time in the 70s, a member of an all female household.  Now 60 years old, she's cooking traditional Italian meals on. . . the Food Channel.

Hmm. . . 

Of course, careful readers of this august cyber tome will note that we've noted the moral sewer which is television before and declaring, therefore, a cultural conservative revival being reflected in it is problematic.  And it is.

But there are several things here to consider.  First of all, television reflects back at us as to who we are, but it also reflects forwards as to what the producers are.  Hollywood has been a moral sinkhole for reasons of its own since day one, and as part of that its always pitched as low to our baser instincts as possible.  Early big film productions were frequently pornographic even by today's standards, a situation that was brought temporarily to heel only by the Film Production Code.  Television operated in restraint out of fear of FCC regulation until its boundaries were slowly expanded and broken.    Pitching to baser instincts work, as long as people are willing to tolerate them, as people are interested in them.

But non fiction shows that are aimed at something else appeal at a different level, if even to the same people.  Food shows and shows depicting families are aimed at something else.  That people are interested in sex on television may mean nothing more than than that are interested in sex, although television has certainly been part of the missive change of the Sexual Revolution and the destructiveness that it's brought in with it.  Interest in such basics as food and raising kids are aimed at something else and reflective of something going on in the culture.

Even on the small screen elsewhere something is going on, even if it remains, almost by prescription, routinely morally problematic.  Having said that the recent film Greyhound may be telling.  Taken from the CS Forester novel The Good Shepherd, its notable that Tom Hanks' (who is Russian Orthodox) adaptation is apparently the only Forester novel in which the captain of the ship is outwardly religious, with even the title referring to the New Testament.  In Hank's adaptation he definitely is.  Elisabeth Shue shows up as a love interest, but in a remarkably understated and traditionally Christian way.  The entire movie is one of virtue in the most traditional sense, emphasizing deep personal sacrifice.  Greyhound looks like a morality play compared to The Big Red One, even though, in some ways, their underlying theme is extremely similar.

This is also evident in other activities that people are participating in, some of them now amplified by the Coronavirus Pandemic.  Hunting, an activity that was decreasing in the 70s and 80s, started to rebound in the 1990s and now significantly has.  As part of that women are joining the activity in unprecedented numbers, something that reflects not only a return to the civilization status quo ante, but the way that this topic has evolved, something we'll address more below.  Women coming to hunting doesn't reflect a sort of feminist statement so much as it does an interesting conservative evolution. At any rate, this trend was ongoing before, but the pandemic has hugely amplified it, as it is many of these trends.

It's also amplifying gardening, a highly related activity.

The most extreme version of this is the agrarian "homesteading" movement, featuring a definite misuse of the word. Strongly rooted in a sort of agrarian ideal, it's been it the works now for probably a decade.  While its easy to find information regarding it in the US, it's spread to Canada as well and is also going on in Europe where young farmers have returned either to old farms owned by their families or purchased small farms that production farmers are no longer using as part of larger units.  During the recent economic downturn in Greece, a long term and systemic problem, it was particularly noted that young people whose grandparents had last been on family farms were going back to them, effectively skipping an entire generation in the process in sort of an Agrarian "Okay, Boomer" moment.  The situation in France has been similar, but with a longer generational gap involved.

Women, it should be noted, have been part of the last several items in a way that they were not in earlier eras. Certainly women gardeners are nothing new, but women agrarian farmers in their current roles are an evolution from prior eras. Women hunters and fishermen are at all time high rates in human history, which should show that what's occured, in some ways, is that feminism has cycled through the left and come back out, in this form, on the right.

This is also true of careerism.

The entire story of women in the workplace has been really badly done. As we've noted here before, it was never really the case that women worked during World War Two, suddenly were acclimated to work and then came the "Women's Liberation" movement. Rather, as we've maintained here, the advent of domestic machinery in the 20th Century reached a critical point following the Second World War which made women's domestic labor surplus to the households and freed them for other employment, which they took up pretty rapidly. That was coincident with the Second World War's employment of women in the emergency, but that had also occurred to a remarkable extent during the First World War as well.

What did occur is that a group of social movements, some of which had roots at least as far back as the 1910s, benefitted from this and to some extent co-opted it.  Feminism as a movement didn't have its origins in the 1960s and 70s, but rather in the Suffrage movement that dated back to the 1860s.  The suffrage movement was split all along between radical and focused elements, with the focused element (the majority) really focused singly on the vote.  Radical elements, however, resembled later feminist to a large degree, but in ways that were of course central to their times.  By the 1910s the more radial elements had broken into other causes, with perhaps Margaret Sanger's birth control movement being the most notable. Generally understood later on to be a woman's cause, Sanger's movement had a strongly racist element in that she was fearful of the growth of the African American population.  Nonetheless, the movement gave an early indication on how women's causes were either being developed or other causes were co-opting existing women's movements.

In the 1960s this expanded into a radical feminist alliance with what effectively was the pronography industry following the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control  Playboy, introduced in 1953, taught that all women were big boobed, easy, dumb, and sterile.  With the introduction of pharmaceutical birth control radical feminist allied themselves partially with pornographers, and indeed Cosmopolitan was semi pornographic, in order to argue the easy part as an attack on marriage.  The concept at the time was that with rising female employment, something that had been a year by year feature of the 20th Century since its dawn, an era had now been reached in which marriage could be eliminated or redefined to exclude much of its traditional aspects, and therefore they pushed the "easy" and sterile parts of the Playboy myth, if not the big boobed and dumb parts (Coso women were think, barely dressed, and smart in their portrayals).

With this came the real push in careerism that was otherwise already occurring post World War Two.

Prior to World War Two a majority of American men didn't graduate from high school, although the situation was approaching parity with those who did. A majority of American women by 1940 did, but a large percentage still did not.  My father and his siblings, all of whom were in school during World War Two, did graduate from high school but my father's father had not and in fact had not even attended it.  My mother, like my father, was a college graduate but interestingly not a high school graduate as she'd been taken out of school at age 16 to work.  It's important to note that all of these people were highly intelligent.  It's the situation that was different.

One of the differences is that was that work was generally grasped by the majority of people as something they needed to do to support themselves and their families.  Often the economic quality fo work was judged in that fashion.  Statements at the time, and even into my teen years, about the need to "get a good job to support a family" were common.  I never heard, the entire time I was growing up, about anyone needing a good job in order to buy nice things or go on vacations.  Rich people were not despised but they also were not really quite envied the way that they later were.

All of that started changing after World War Two but it really took into the 1970s and 80s for it to really get rolling. The generation that started the 1970s off singing Taking Care Of Business was digging Wall Street by the 1980s. Entire professions have ultimately come to be entirely money focused the way they never were before.  As an example, in the 1910s and 20s it was common in mid sized cities and even in large towns for a physician to start a private hospital as sort of a community focused charitable and humanitarian endeavor.  By the 1930s communities everywhere had taken over those institutions.  Now, the government owned ones are being taken over by for profit companies.  We've reprivatized, but now with the same focus.

Starting about a decade ago, however, Boomer employers started to notice that the generation just entering work had a much different focus on work.  They were no longer that dedicated to it as an end all and be all.  Large numbers of the entering generation were willing to drop out of work for long periods of time just to "experience things".  Alternative work situations sprung up.  As noted already on the discussion on agrarian returnees, many young, and well educated, members of society dropped out of traditional work situations entirely.

This lead to the quasi myth of the "slacker".  To some extent this image has some validity as some members of the youngest work age generation came to give up hope of productive lives in an economy that's become increasingly urban and alien to human impulses.  And the reduction in the societal expectation that couples marry and undertake the responsibilities that come along with that has lengthened childhood, particularly for men.  But all throughout society the careerist goals and focus that existed into the 1990s has really declined and is almost dead among younger generations.  

With women, this means that the lie about people finding "fulfillment" in their work, something promised by feminist, has been fully exposed.  Almost nobody finds fulfillment at work. Now very few believe that and the discussion about that as an aspect of employment has vanished.  

We're just on the cusp of this development and where it leads is hard to discern.  To an extent, however, it returns people to a more traditional way of looking at work.

Also more traditional is the return of domestic situations which had seemed to vanish forever.  

In 1981 when I graduated from high school it was the case that some high school colleagues were leaving their parents homes immediately and forever.  This view is one that had come up in the 60s and 70s.  But prior to that, as we've discussed before, it was uncommon.  Men usually remained in their parents households until they married, or if they didn't, they usually had what they viewed as temporary living arrangements that were necessitated by work or school.  Women exhibited this to an even larger degree.  By the late 60s this was changing and a new world, imagined as glamours, came in.  This was reflected to a degree in entertainment in such films as The Apartment from 1960, which depicted two young, unmarried, people who had living arrangements reflective of the period.  Protagonist C. C. "Bud" Baxter has an apartment, in a building which we learn is otherwise generally urban and middle class (his neighbor is a married physician).  The female protagonist, Fran Kubelik, is living with her sister and brother in law and engaged in an illicit relationship with the senior figure at her office.


Citing a movie might seem to be bad form, but that 1960 depiction is telling in many ways. Baxter is of an age at which in an earlier era he might be like the male figures in It's A Wonderful Life, living at home if they're not married.  Kubelik isn't living at home, but the female protagonist is living with her married sister.  She's also engaged in an illicit sexual affair but is not negatively portrayed in the film for it.  Her last name, Kubelik, is one of strong ethnicity (Czech) and her brother in law is a blue collar taxi driver.  Without really mentioning it, its subtly suggested that Kubelik isn't really fallen, and the budding romance between the WASP Baxter and the almost certainly Catholic Kubelik will work out.

We can read a lot into that, and The Apartment isn't regarded as a risque film by any measure.  It stands in blistering contrast, however, to Marty, which portrayed a much different set of urban realities just five years earlier in 1955.  The male protagonist is an aging blue collar meat cutter who wants to get married. He lives with his mother.  The female protagonist is an aging school teacher who also wants to get married.  Marty, when introducing his situation to her, emphasizes that he can likely buy the butcher shop where he works.  Both of the characters are Catholic.  A more recent treatment of the same themes is presented in the recent film Brooklyn, which is set in the same locality in the same era and basically treats all of the same issues identically.

Looking at it from a personal angle, my father left home for the first time, to live, when he went to the University of Nebraska.  He then entered the Air Force. But when he got out of the service he returned home and lived at his mother's home (his father had died a decade prior) until my parents married.  My mother, on the other hand, had entered the work force during World War Two due to economic desperation in her family in Quebec.  She boldly moved out to Alberta at the invitation of an uncle who had employment for her there, and who wanted to try to separate her from the situation in Quebec which he felt was one of low prospect. At some point, and I"m not sure where, she lived with her sister, who also had left home and was working.  She came to the United States to be a bridesmaid for another sister in Denver, over the objection of her uncle, and then came to this town as it had work, taking a basement apartment where the upstairs was occupied by the owner and her husband.

Now, we find, press reports that are full of the "new" trend of adult children returning to their parents homes.

This was going on before the recent Coronavirus pandemic, we should note, although there are now lots of news stories emphasizing it in that context, as its increased it. But this isn't a "new" phenomenon in real terms, but a return to a prior living standards, as noted above.  

Some of this is due, we'd note, to the bulge in the snake phenomenon we've noted before.  World War Two brought about a change in living conditions, although it took some time to fully manifest, as it forcibly separated a lot of young men from their households and it demanded the employment of a lot of young women.  When the generation that fought the Second World War was sending its kids to school in the 1960s, in a lot of ways it was sending them away.  This didn't seem that odd to them, as they'd been displaced young, and a generation that had been forced to enter the adult world before its time naturally, if highly imperfectly, saw that as the  norm.  The Baby Boom generation that had experienced that did as well, although they recall it imperfectly.  

In reality we now know that people in their 20s fit into nearly another age related class than other people, or actually do. They're definitely not teenagers but they don't really have the reasoning faculties that pertain to adulthood in the same fashion that adults do.  If they don't resemble teenagers in their thinking they often don't resemble adults of just a few years later either.  Part of the massive disruption brought about by the 1960s reflected that as not only was it a time of great social change and cultural change, but the very young were being forced into it.

Since some point in the 1990s the same age demographic has taken themselves back out of that arena in large measure.  Part of this is that they're simply smarker, and older if you will, than the same age group was in the 1960s and 1970s.  It's created some interesting conflicts as the Boomer generation has continued to assume that life for it is as it was for them, in the 2020s, even though a lot of their generational decision making was horrifically bad.

At any rate, as this has played out, individuals in their 20s and 30s have found themselves moving back in with their parents. A lot of those parents are either very late stage Boomers or post Boomers themselves.  The Boomer generation has reacted with some horror and surprise to this, and indeed, I've personally been told by one 1969 high school graduate that sending children far, far away to from their homes is part of the necessary experience of university.  Maybe it is, or isn't, but if it is, it' ssomething that seems to reflect the view of those who went to university in the 60s, 70s and to some extent in the 80s.  And a lot of that has to due with how people view work, which we've addressed above.  Suffice it to say, however, that if the purpose of going to university is to get a "good job" and then pursue that job at all costs, well that's one thing.  If its for something else, and may even be ancillary to your life, it's something else. That will impact a lot of a person's approach to these topics.


Not everything is changing, of course, and we're also not saying that Chesterton's observations about "going back" are coming into fruition, at least not in full.  But some of going forward involves going back, and cultures are plastic and sticky.  We've been living through an unprecedented era of history that goes back to the 1930s and present to our very day.  The generation that came up in the 30s and 40s is still in power, but it very rapidly will cease to be. The ones taking their seats at the table are generations that have lived in the wake of the history of the Boomers and who have, in varying but large degrees, but unhappy with it.  As the country is about to take a big jump to the political left, the evidence is that they're already looking for the exit to the right.

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*While guessing is premature, my guess is that Pope Francis recent statement on same gender "civil unions", made after we started this thread, will cause a small move from Catholicism to Orthodoxy among some Rad Tad Catholics, although it would be a bit ironic as what Pope Francis is suggesting appears to be an accomodation to the current civil reality, albeit one that's clearly extraordinary problematic from a Catholic perspective and one which requires correction.  It's ironic in that the Orthodox did the same thing many years ago in regard to divorce and remarriage, which Orthodoxy tolerates up to three times in some instances.

Notes On Nominations. Replacing Justice Ginsburg

As we noted two days ago in an entry here, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away this week.


Ginsburg was a giant on the Court and few are going to criticize her right now, but if you were to levy a criticism, it would be that her prognostical abilities were no greater than that of most pundits in 2016.  Almost everyone presumed that Hillary Clinton was to be elected President, not Donald Trump.

It's well known now that Ginsburg was ill then, and in the category of a person who was repeatedly cheating death.  Death, the way we humans seem to perceive it, can be cheated for awhile, but in the end, Death tires of the game and comes to collect everyone, Supreme Court justices included. Ginsburg was gambling with her desires as its clear that she wanted to have a Democratic President name her replacement.  It's not impossible, we should note, that she still will.

What is clear is that if she had stepped down in 2015, or so, as Democrats were begging her to do, President Obama would have named her replacement. With a narrowly divided Senate, President Obama had a track record of naming center left, but not extreme left, replacements. That may be why Ginsburg hoped to wait.  Had Hillary Clinton been nominated the nominees would have been more left leaning, probably.  Ginsburg probably hoped for a female replacement in her old mold or at least a replacement of the same intellectual tenure and intellect as herself.  It can't be said that the last female appointment to the Supreme Court met that criteria.  Her desire to wait, therefore, can be appreciated.  Like most watching the race, however, she guessed wrong.

That put her in the position of trying to outlive the Trump Presidency and she failed.  And so now we're off to a nomination of a replacement. This thread will take a look at that process.

September 20, 2020

Will there be hearings?

Mitch McConnell. As head of the Senate, McConnell has been despised by Democrats but has otherwise been extraordinarily effective.  At least from the outside, he's somewhat hard to like, but then the Democratic opposite, Chuck Schumer, is as well.

The first thing we'll note here is that its not certain that there will be hearings on a nominee. It's certain that there will be a nominee (we'll look at that in a moment).

The Senate is very narrowly divided.  In order for there to be hearings, and a vote, Mitch McConnell has to have the entire GOP in line in that body.  But right now, he doesn't seem to.

There's a lot of concern in the Senate that the Democrats will take it in the Fall. McConnell himself is in real trouble. That gives McConnell a real reason to push this quickly.  McConnell takes the view that the Courts are the most important branch of government, and given the failure of the legislative branch over the past few decades to get its act together, his view has merit.  McConnell is likely accepting that Trump is going to lose in the Fall and that the next Senate will be Democratic.

That also, however, paradoxically gives some GOP Senators a reason to do nothing, at least until November, and maybe beyond.  Indeed, one such Senator who is in trouble this election cycle, Lisa Murkowski, has said she won't agree to hold hearings until after the election, which is likely because she doesn't want to wreck her own election changes.

Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, a Republican Senator who has already pledged to hold off on a Supreme Court nominee.

So, in spite of the Press treating a nomination and confirmation as inevitable, the second part of this isn't.  Indeed, frankly right now I'd give it only a 50/50 chance.

Added to that, however, is what about the departing Senate?  Even if the results of the November election flip the Senate to the Democrats, that only takes place in January. There's a really good incentive then for all the Republicans to come together and confirm a conservative Justice.  Would Senators like Murkowski do that if the lose in November?

That's hard to say and it'd be a matter of conforming themselves to their declared positions.   But if I were in their shoes, I would. And that's because McConnell, if not fully right, is close to right on the importance of the Supreme Court.  With the Court divided often on a 5 to 4 basis, the next President may well also appoint at least one more justice.  If that's a Democrat, and Ginsburg isn't replaced by January, then that would mean the next Democratic President would flip the Court to the center left.  If its Donald Trump, he'll cement the body into the center right for the next couple of decades.

Court Packing

All of which assumes that the Democrats, if that happens, don't come and simply make the Court an eleven justice body, which they could do.

They shouldn't for a variety of reason, the primary one being that that'd make them complicit in the very thing they claim the election is about, avoiding destroying democracy.  It'd reduce respect to the  Supreme Court to nill.

They also shouldn't do it for another reason, which is just below.

What is all the hoopla about?

Just one thing really, states voting on stuff.

At its core, what all the leftward concern about is individual state legislatures voting on social issues, with one single exception.  

Generally, the liberal fear is that the Court will go further in the direction it is already going, and find that a lot of things aren't protected by the Constitution, and therefore state legislators can vote on a state by state basis on them.  Things like abortion, LGBQT rights, etc, they fear, would be taken up on a state by state basis, rather than simply be dictated by a Supreme Court that has been left of center on those issues over the year. 

And they're right.

So what it comes down to, basically, is democracy.

The American judiciary really doesn't have any philosophical conservatives on the Supreme Court. Rather, it has a body of philosophical liberals and judicial conservatives. This is rarely appreciated, but the fact of the matter is that the conservative justices pose no real danger of voting their philosophical beliefs, while the opposite is true in regard to the liberal justices.  For example, there's no risk that conservative justices are going to hold that life is protected for existential reasons found in natural law, and therefore abortion is illegal due to a law higher than and outside of whatever the United States Constitution may afford. Rather, there's a real chance that the conservative justices, using this example, might find that there's nothing in the Constitution about "penumbras" and the like, and therefore it isn't protected in any sense in the Constitution and the states have to handle it.

As The New Republic, back in the days when it was still worth reading and not full gonzo nutso, once noted, liberals could argue the same position as that position is an expansion of democracy and liberals otherwise claim to be for that.  They don't take that position, however, as the evidence suggests that a majority of states would act to limit the rights, if they are that, that the Supreme Court has created on its own.  In other words, their position is inherently anti-democratic.

Indeed, the real irony of this is that the liberal position in recent years actually makes a great deal more sense of conservatives.  Conservatives have always held somewhat of a disdain for the democratic process as they feel that if it's taken too far, it amounts to rule by mob. So the traditional conservative view of the Constitution is that it says what it says and protects what it protects to protect the minority against the whim of the day.  An important aspect of that is, however in order to conserve things, you have not to create them, which is where conservatives have real heartburn in this area.  No matter what view you may take, it's quite clear that the Supreme Court has invented rights that aren't really in the text.

This also points out why gun control tends to be an exception in this argument, or maybe not  The Constitution says what it says, which causes liberals heartburn as they want the Court say it doesn't, so it can be legislated.  The problem with that is that it's the intellectual opposite of their other views.  A person can't say that the Supreme Court is holding up the will of the people by reading the document literally while also saying that the Supreme Court should hold up the will of the people by not reading the document so literally.  The conservative reply tend to be the same both ways. . . it says what it says.

So what is basically at state is whether the Constitution is to be read literally or not, and if not, are we comfortable with justices who will, to at least some degree, frame and interpret what are and are not rights based upon their philosophical views.  As noted, in modern times, that has meant liberal philosophical views. There are indeed conservative philosophical views that apply to the law, but almost no judges in the US system have attempted to apply them for decades.

Not enough time and just before an election.

As the Democrats are pointing out, the last time that this came up was just before President Obama was to leave office, during which the McConnell simply didn't take up Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland.


A good case can be made that the Senate shirked its Constitutionally imposed duties by not taking up the nomination. Typically, however, those arguing that proved gutless.  A remedy existed in the form of filing a suit seeking a Petition for a Writ of Mandamus on that issue.  Maybe it would have worked, maybe not, but they just sat on their butts and didn't do anything.  

Pretty typical.

I'm not really convinced by any of the other arguments on this topic one way or another.  Not taking up the Garland nomination was a matter of politics, nothing more, nothing less, and the Senate is a political body.  Prior examples, in that context, are pretty meaningless.  And there's plenty of time to take the matter up.  Justice Ginsburg, for example, went from nomination to confirmation in nineteen days.

So all the arguments not to take this up that are based on "not enough time" and "too close to the election" are merely political. . . they way they are framed.

However, an argument can be made, and some will likely make it, that in our current era, the most devisie one politically since the Civil War, maybe its just a good idea, on the grounds of national unity, to wait.

The first name mentioned, Amy Coney Barrett

It looks like, at least this morning, the nominee might be Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Barrett is an appeals judge for the Federal Seventh Judicial District.  Her name has been mentioned before and by all counts she is well qualified.  She is a 1997 graduate of Notre Dame's law school which would refreshingly put her outside of the cabal of Ivy League law school graduates, something that's much needed in the Supreme Court.  Her career, like most current Supreme Court justices, has been mostly academic. She's been on the bench since 2017.

She's feared by the political left as she's Catholic, and there's an almost open rule now that Catholic nominees are a pariah.  The fear is that they take their theological views seriously.  Barrett was openly questioned during her nomination about her being a Catholic, including by Senator Dick Durbin who didn't like the fact that she's described herself as an "orthodox Catholic".  Durbin himself is a Catholic, but one was barred from receiving Communion in the Diocese of Springfield for his support of abortion.  His statements in Barrett's hearings lead to his alma mater, Georgetown, condemning him.  More notably, Dianne Feinstein, during Barrett's hearings, made the completely bigoted comment that "the dogma lives loudly with in you, and that’s a concern" about Barrett, which if made about a nominee of Feinstein's professed faith, Judaism, would have been regarded as a permanent disqualification for holding office.  Feinstein was criticized, but she still holds on to her seat, so she wasn't damaged by her religious bigotry.

She is a conservative jurist.

All of which means that the upcoming hearings, if there are any, and even if there aren't, are going to amount to a wild ride.  Barrett, if nominated, is clearly qualified.  Opposition to her will be massive on the political left, if for no other reason (and there will be reasons), of when she was nominated.

Stay tuned for an interesting series of updates on this one.

September 21, 2020

Not really a new addition here, but new to me as I didn't know at the time I posted this yesterday, Senator Susan Collins also will not vote to go forward with the confirmation process.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine.

Collins is very much in the political center and holds views that depart from even the establishment Republican mainstream.  She's also in election trouble right now so her position isn't surprising. 

It'd take two more GOP Senators to break ranks and decide not to press forward with a nomination in order for that to occur.

September 21, 2020, part two

A nomination for Ginsburg's replacement is now expected no later than Wednesday.

This topic is, of course, the focus of all the news shows.  I've only heard Meet The Press so far.  A lot of the analysis is predictable, but Meet The Press did have an interesting fact from Doris Kern Goodwin, historian, in that there's never been a replacement installed as quickly as is anticipated here, if absence of the seat to swearing in time is fully considered.

I suspect that if Barrett is chosen, it will be noted that she was recently confirmed to a Federal appeals court so there's no need for much more.  That argument has been made in the past for nominees who are similarly situated.

Much focus is being given to a letter that Ginsburg wrote to a niece wishing for this process to take place after the next Presidential oath of office is administered in January.  She dictated the letter only in the last few days, as she knew that death was near.  News commentators noted that her hope was to avoid the divineness that's about to emerge.

I can see why that was her wish, and I'm sure she knew that was as forlorn hope.  I'll post on it separately, but there's a lesson to be learned with gambling on the outcome of things and longevity both as a personal and national matter.  Anyway a person looks at it, something historic is about to happen here, even if the votes to hold a hearing and confirmation (which I suspect is much closer than a person might think) aren't there.

On another, and biographical note, a question was posed on whether Justice Ginsburg was a practicing member of the Jewish faith.  It's actually somewhat difficult to tell.

The reason is in part that she was a fairly private person, as many of the Supreme Court justices are. While the religious affiliations of Supreme Court justices are generally know, they're often known only superficially and not always known accurately. For example, for years it was reported that Justice Thomas was an observant conservative Episcopalian, which was true at one time, but he reverted to Catholicism at some point with nobody really noting in in the larger public at the time.  Conversely, it's sometimes reported that Justice Sotomayor is Catholic, which is true in the context that she was born into a Catholic family, but it seems very clear that she's nonobservant.

Another part of the reason that's hard to answer is that Judaism is fairly divided in its nature and therefore its difficult to track the degree to which any one person is observant in context.  If a person took the view that observant meant observant in the Orthodox context, hardly any actually observant Jewish person in the United States would be counted, for example.

What we know about Justice Ginsburg in this context is that she was raised in an observant household but seems to have become less observant as an adult.  She was not allowed to attend the minyan for her late mother when she died, but that frankly may have been because it was conducted in the Orthodox style which would have required ten males to attend.  At least as of five years ago she co-authored a text with a Rabbi on heroic women of Passover.

So, as far as the answer to that question, I really don't have one.

FWIW, as its likely to come up, on the current members of the Supreme Court, their religions affiliation is as follows:

John Roberts:  Catholic
Clarence Thomas:  Catholic, was Episcopalian at the time of his appointment.
Stephne Breyer:  Judaism.
Samuel Alito:  Catholic
Sonia Sotomayor:  Listed as Catholic, but nonobservant in that context.
Elena Kagan:  Judaism.
Neil Gorsuch:  Episcopalian, but raised Catholic.
Brett Kavanaugh:  Catholic.

Overall, this is interesting demographic situation in that both Catholic and Jewish Americans represent minority religious demographics.  A majority of Americans are Protestants, with the largest single Protestant denomination in the United States being the Baptists.  Therefore, fwiw, in terms of its religious makeup, the Supreme Court is not representative of the American population.  Also fwiw, the legal profession is one that has traditionally appealed to minority populations for various reasons.

September 22, 2020

NPR's Politics podcasts discusses an issue in its episode of last night that I've already touched on here, but brings it into sharp focus.  That is, Mitch McConnell's long running effort to rebuild a conservative Supreme Court.  The same topic is addressed by one of the columnist in the Tribune today.

The basic topic is pretty clear.  Conservatives have felt that dating back to the 1950s liberal justices, some of whom were middle of the road appointees who turned to the left after being appointed by Republican Presidents, have undermined the Constitution by making up law to fit their image of what the law should be, rather than follow the letter of the law.  That view isn't without merit at all.

The problem has been noted, however, that Republican appointees have not been reliably conservative.  We've already dealt with the definitional problem here, but it goes beyond that.  Missed on all of that, however, is that the GOP now seems to have a handle on it.  McConnell, who has taken on this project as his life's political work, has cooperated with the Federalist Society to find really reliable conservatives to appoint to the bench. This side steps, a bit, I'd note the topic we've already noted about there not being any philosophical conservatives on the bench, in a jurisprudential sense, but that's a topic for some other time.  Anyhow, it now appears that conservative appointees are as reliably conservative as liberal appointees are liberal.

Indeed, that's created some of the angst in the political liberal class as it now seems possible that in the near future the answer of the Supreme Court to a lot of questions will be "it's not in the Constitution, take it up with your state legislature", which is something that they fear.

Anyhow, Politics asked the question if conservatives in general, and McConnell in particular, would be willing to sacrifice the Presidency and the Senate in order to achieve this goal.  The general feeling is yes.

I agree with that and I think that'll be the goal and the risk. I.e., McConnell will push forward and do whatever it takes to get a vote on a nominee before January, no matter what the risks and implications are. And I don't blame him.  Indeed, were the situation the opposite for the Democrats, I think they'd do the same.

I'm less convinced that this means a vote before the election.  I think it means a vote before January.  Even if its the lame duck Senate that does it, I think they'll do it.

Indeed, there's some logic to waiting until after the election.  If the GOP holds on to the Senate its a no harm no foul situation.  It'll look the same no matter what, or close to the same no matter what.  If Trump holds on to office, it really doesn't matter.

I'm less confident that NPR, however, that they'll have the votes to get this done.

A risk for the Democrats now is that Kamala Harris, who attacked Barrett when she was up for the 7th USCA for being a sincere Catholic, will look bad in the hearings that will be held, if they are.  The hearings will put a focus on her in a way she hasn't had yet, and if she comes across in the same fashion, it'll offend Catholic voters pretty deeply, including nominal Catholics and cultural Catholics.  Harris has a track record for really acid commentary and she'll have to self restrain, which isn't easy to do.

Justice Ginsburg will lie in repose at the Supreme Court starting tomorrow, and until Friday, when she'll lie in state at the capitol on Friday. She'll be placed at rest at Arlington National Cemetery next week.

September 23, 2020

Senators Romney and Grassley, who had been regarded as possible third and fourth votes to abstain from taking up the question of Justice Ginsburg's replacement this year, have indicated that they will not do that and that they will support taking up the question this year.

Romney went further and noted that liberal angst was due to his "liberal friends" having gotten used to a liberal court over the years, and that he wanted a Supreme Court that decided questions based on the law alone.  He further noted that the United States is a center right country and it should have a center right court.

Assuming no surprise defections, this will mean that the GOP will move ahead with Ginsburg's replacement. The remaining questions are who it will be, and whether the confirmation will occur before or after the election.

September 26, 2020

Amy Coney Barrett has been nominated by President Trump to the Supreme Court.

October 3, 2020


October 16, 2020

Hearings are well underway and by all accounts Amy Comey Barrett has accounted herself well in them.

The first day of the hearings were marked by individual opening statements from Senators on the judiciary committee, at least some of which served next to no purpose whatsoever. The opening by aged Senator Patrick Leahy was frankly pathetic.  By all accounts Barrett did well in direct examination by the Senators and her stock rose with the general public as a result.  She was fairly uniformly measured in her presentation to them, but on at least one occasion eviscerated a Senator who was repeating an already repeatedly asked question, making him look like a fool.

Following this portion of the hearings Sen. Diane Feinstein praised Senator Lindsey Graham for his conduct of the hearings, leading some in California to call for Feinstein's resignation.

It appears a vote on her confirmation, all but assured, will take place next week.

Barrett was rated "well qualified" by the ABA Standing Committee.

October 23, 2020

Judge Barrett's nomination  has gone to the Senate floor where it will be voted on next week.

October 27, 2020

Amy Coney Barrett was approved by the U.S. Senate yesterday and administered her oath of office on the same day.

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Related threads:




Monday, October 26, 2020

Blog Mirror & Commentary: For Wyo’s untaxed generations, the ‘free ride’ may be over

For Wyo’s untaxed generations, the ‘free ride’ may be over

So declares a headline on WyoFile.

This articles has an interesting item about Wyoming's tax system prior to the severance tax, that being:

I'd never heard that.  I do recall that at the time people were upset about the severance tax, or at least a lot of legislators were, as there was fear that it would end coal production in Wyoming.  The article notes that:

Wyoming legislators at the time, like future Gov. Ed Herschler and future U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, initially opposed the governor’s severance tax proposal. But when Hathaway challenged them to figure out an alternative, they admitted they couldn’t, and they passed the tax.

I'll be frank.  I don't know what to do regarding Wyoming's state budgetary woes.  I'll note, however, that so far the state has been unwilling to look at anything much which was based on the hope that things would return to "normal".  Wyomingites are acclimated to looking at taxation this way.  Indeed, we used to proudly hear that Wyoming had "500 years" worth of coal resources, whatever that meant.

What now seems plain is that coal is on a long term systemic slide.  Indeed, it was even at the time we started to first tax it.  It's becoming additionally clear that petroleum may be entering an analogous condition, something we would have regarded as simply impossible only a few years ago.  Petroleum production was increasing on a massive scale a decade or less ago, of course, and that could come back.  But something is changing.  Within the last few years, indeed within the present Administration, the country was proud of having reclaimed its status as an energy exporter for the first time in decades.  Now, however, a Saudi Arabia/Russian price decline, combined with oversupply (which has decreased this year) has made the market highly valuable.  More significantly, however, there's very open talk at the national level of a technological phase out of petroleum as a motor vehicle fuel.  

That, as a technological matter, seemed like an absurd suggestion itself until only recently.  But now electric cars are coming on strong.  Ford is introducing an electric Mustang and has an electric F150 slated for 2022 or 2023.  General Motors is introducing a light electric truck under the Hummer name.  Chrysler has been pretending to hold back, having a sector of the truck market that is slated towards heavy trucks, which electric vehicles have not yet penetrated, but at the same time its introducing an electric Jeep.  If Ford makes headway in the light industrial market with its F150 Chrysler will jump in, it'll have to.

Critics still scoff at the vehicle developments, and there are some real problems there.  The one we hear here is that they don't have the range to be useful for the state's vast distances, but they're starting too.  Indeed, while its never noted, their present range frankly exceeds that of early gasoline engined vehicles, the real difference being, of course, that you could take your fuel with you in the latter case.  But they're developing rapidly. I have a range of 600 miles or so in my diesel 1 ton pickup, which compares with an advertised low 300s with the new Hummer, so the electrics aren't there yet, but they'll soon be.  If nothing else, they're exploring what the market is and will start capturing sections of it soon.

The real irony of electric vehicles, which isn't missed by their critics, is that they're not really all that green in that they're not really necessarily "zero emissions". Indeed, electric vehicle are, if you will, energy vampires in that they suck their energy from something else generating it, as opposed to petroleum fueled vehicles which carry their own power plants.  In the case of electric vehicles, they're only as green as the remote power plant that produced the energy they store in their batteries.

In fairness, that's become greener over the years, which takes us back to the story of coal.  Coal's been heavily supplanted by natural gas, which requires drilling, we'd note.  There should be, therefore, continued drilling for gas in the U.S. and indeed their has to be, as its largely non transported save by pipelines.

The dream, of course, of Green New Dealers is green electrical generation, and that has been coming on in the form of now viable wind and solar.  Indeed, in this area I continue to hear from those who don't want any changes that wind isn't economically viable.  Oh yes it is, and it has been for some time.

What would really push electricity for transportation over the top is nuclear energy.  The fact that greens don't support it shows how unrealistic people could be.  The US could generate 100% of its electrical needs through nuclear and its much safer than coal in real terms.  Indeed, the US could have surplus capacity through nuclear energy even it it required the electrification of the railroads.  Joe Biden spoke, in the recent debate, of having the US switched over to electric vehicles by 2035.  I'm not suggesting it, but a real "New Deal" type program involving nuclear energy could do it in less than less than half that time.

Uranium is mined in Wyoming, or it was, so there would be some hope of regaining a revenue source there, if reason prevailed.  Absent that, we're going to have to start taxing wind and solar, but we can't at a rate that would harm them as new entities. There have been proposals to do that, but once again they're sometimes advanced by people who really simply hope to kill them, which really would achieve what the opponents of Stan Hathaway feared in the late 1960s, driving an industry elsewhere.  Right now we don't know how much money there will come to be in those sources.  It might be quite a bit, and perhaps that will solve our budget woes.

Or maybe it won't.  Indeed, it probably won't.

So what then?

It's interesting that agriculture carried the freight before the extractive industries. And that likely was as it was making more money per capita than it does now.  Some serious examination should be given to reviving that situation while we still have the money to do so.  Long term economic planning doesn't seem to be our forte, however, or we would have picked up the Occidental lands while we could have, which we didn't.  We've noted that here before.

Where we're headed in the country right now with agricultural commodities is really hard to say.  The United States has had a "cheap food" policy since after World War Two and it appears intent on keeping it.  Cheap food is great for everyone, but it's greater for those consuming than those producing and its driven agricultural consolidation and monoculture.  One thing Wyoming could do is to try to boost the mid and downstream aspects of agriculture, which we haven't done much of. That is, we don't have large commercial meat packing here, we don't have wool mills and so on. That may seem like not much, but it could be a lot, if done right.

If we're talking about agriculture and taxes, of course, we're into a new area that I didn't explore before.  And if we're talking ag, what that means is that we're really looking at a mixed tax base, based on taxing production.  Indeed, taxing wind and solar (and severance taxes) is really the same thing, but this would be on a broader basis.

Prior suggestions to tax production of every kind has been really hostilely received, however.  Certainly a proposal to tax services, such as legal services, was hugely opposed some years ago.

About the only things left to tax, however, is land and income.  There's little support for taxing property rates at an increased level, but I do have to wonder what would be the case if it was graduated. An effort like that would be specifically designed to tax the extremely wealthy and I suspect most Wyomingites would welcome that at some level. As far as I know, that's never been suggested so there's no way to know.  People might resent the suggestion as unfair.

That leaves income taxes, which there is no present support to impose.  I suppose it also leaves sales taxes, which there's no support to increase.

None of which addresses the cost of government itself.  With no money, it'll have to shrink, there's no other choice.  And given where we're presently at in this discussion, that seems inevitable.  But how that will be done is yet to be seen.  We will, I think, be seeing it in the very near future.

Which takes us back to the 1960s.  

I was around in the 1960s, to be sure, but I don't recall much about state government and its funding woes.  Shoot, I was seven years old when 1970 arrived, so I wouldn't.

I'd guess that the budget problems persisted into the early 1970s, but again, I don't recall much about that sort of thing.  How much smaller was our government back then?

It's something we should begin to ask.  At the state level, rather than the Federal one, everything has to be paid for. The state passed up on acquiring economic land, which will likely be to our huge regret really rapidly.  We could likely have brought in large sums through it, but now we won't.  And we don't have any immediately clear path out of where we are.  That may mean a return to budgets of the past.

But what does that mean?


The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.


Amy Coney Barrett's Notepad

Has no notes on it.

And why, exactly, would we expect it to?  I wouldn't.  If mine did, they'd be there principally for distraction.

It's not like she gets to ask questions later of a witness, now is it?

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Airmail puts Laramie on the map in t...

The Aerodrome: Blog Mirror: Airmail puts Laramie on the map in t...: Airmail puts Laramie on the map in the 1920s

Monday Morning Repeat for the week of July 19, 2009

This has been a frequent topic here:

More tiny, but viable, towns