“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Triumph of the Unthinking
“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” I’ve always loved that quote, and have tried to apply it to my own writing. But I have to admit that in the long slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis – a slump that we had both the tools and the knowledge to end quickly, but didn’t – the unthinking were quite successful in fending off unwelcome thoughts.
And nowhere was the triumph of inanity more complete than in Keynes’s homeland, which is going to the polls as I write this. Britain’s election should be a referendum on a failed economic doctrine, but it isn’t, because nobody with influence is challenging transparently false claims and bad ideas.
Before I bash the Brits, however, let me admit that we’ve done pretty badly ourselves.
D. D. Guttenplan: Fear Wins Big in Britain
Fear is the right’s home-field advantage. Asked why, after five years of grinding austerity, real-wage stagnation, and an economy that was outperformed in Europe not just by Stakhanovite Germans but by the joie-de-vivring French, so many English voters lined up for more of the same, one politician quoted Hillaire Belloc:
And always keep ahold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.That was a strategy Labour never seemed able to counter, whether out of failure of political imagination or fear of appearing fiscally irresponsible. As in Scotland in September, Labour let the Tories define the contest as a battle between hope and fear. Fear won, both times.
In the next few days the media here will be filled with arguments between those who insist that Labour needs to lurch left and those who urge a swerve right. It will be ugly. And there will be blood. But this argument, which Ed Miliband worked so hard to avoid, needs to happen. Not because either side is correct-although my own sympathies are mostly with the left-but because some time in the Blair era Labour stopped standing for anything, and defeat on this catastrophic scale may just prompt a renewal from the ground up, rather than (as happened after 2010) from the top down. Nicola Sturgeon’s triumph in Scotland shows what can happen with idealism and energy and a genuine openness to change. But before Labour can again serve as a vehicle for change, the party itself will have to change, to decide not just where it stands but who it claims to speak for. And to do that, it will first have to do a lot of listening.
If the Scottish National Party was a small anti-austerity party that had never before made a real dent in British politics and suddenly shot into contention-grabbing dozens of seats away from the traditional parties and elbowing its way into position as the third largest party in new Parliament-the world would take notice.
Well, the Scottish National Party is a small-make that formerly small – anti-austerity party. And it just made a real dent, a huge dent, in politics with an epic electoral breakthrough. “The tectonic plates of Scottish politics shifted yesterday,” said SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon on Friday morning. The veteran British political commentator Andrew Marr declared as the election results came in that, “Scotland has moved decisively to the left.”
That move offers an important lesson for American progressives about going big in politics-especially anti-austerity politics. It is not just possible to run against the failed conservative policies of seeking to balance budgets with cuts to public services, attacks on public employees and their unions, and crude policies of privatization that redistribute wealth upward. It is necessary.
Leslie Savan: Who’s Really Laughing About the Invasion of Texas?
All week long we’ve been having a good laugh over Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordering the Texas state guard to monitor Jade Helm 15, a military exercise planned by the Pentagon to simulate “covert military operations” in Texas and seven other western states. The conspiracy theory on the right is that the operation is designed to “take over” Texas, which is funny because the state is actually already part of the US. The speculation that abandoned Walmart stores are being prepped to hold gun-lovers and patriots makes it only more hilarious because, well, don’t Walmarts already do that? [..]
But as Jon Stewart points out, these military exercises have been going on in Texas for years, and the Lone Star state has always welcomed them. Hmmm, what’s different now, he wonders, under a photo of our black president.
This is how ginning up the base works. If there’s a near-time analog, it would be the 24/7 coverage before the 2014 midterm elections about Ebola and the crazies’ theory that the feds were encouraging an epidemic in America by not quarantining anyone who set foot in West Africa. That was a bad joke, too, since, after all, nobody who had not been in West Africa or treated someone with Ebola had ever caught the disease. And the media coverage stopped on a dime when the election was over.
But, boy, did that coverage help drive racially biased voters to the polls.
Michele Chen: Devaluation of black lives starts in classrooms
Black students are disproportionately subjected to suspension and arrest
In New York City, where youth of color live under the shadow of stop-and-frisk policing and hundreds of children are jailed each year, school authorities recently promised to limit the use of metal handcuffs on students younger than 12 years old – unless absolutely necessary. Yes, that’s considered progress.
Since the Black Lives Matter movement exploded last year, the public spotlight has focused on violence against black youth in the streets. But the devaluation of black life often begins in the classroom – not at the hands of riot police, but through more subtle forms of force.
Black students are disproportionately subjected to disciplinary measures, ranging from suspension and expulsion to physical confinement or restraint – and sometimes arrest. Like zero-tolerance law enforcement, social control is the goal, though paradoxically, those disproportionately targeted for restraint typically come from the most disempowered communities.
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