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This is really “hope and change”:

Once-despondent Democrats now believe that they may be able to avert a total midterm wipeout, as several important states now appear to be trending in their direction or growing more competitive.

The bad news: In a sign of how hostile the election environment remains for the party, the cautious optimism is largely due to the view that the impending political hurricane could be downgraded from category 5 to category 4.

I should remind everyone that Katrina was a Category 4 when it made landfall.

The storm surge that hit Mississippi was bad enough.  What really sunk things was when the levees broke and New Orleans filled up like a bathtub.

That event redefined for everyone the question of whether the glass is half empty or half full.  Irrespective of whether you thought New Orleans was half empty or half full, it was still flooded and still a mess.

I must weigh in on Jacob Weisberg’s rather strange piece on Republicans using elitist as a pejorative term:

Palin’s definition says elitists are those who think they’re better than other people—a category in which by Election Day, on the evidence of her autobiography, included many of the people working for her own campaign. Palin is raw with the disrespect she feels and takes offense at being condescended to by people who, she thinks, think they are better than she is. Her anti-elitism takes the part of all Americans who feel similarly snubbed, and not necessarily in the context of politics. This version is a synonym for social snobbery, with the wrinkle that it’s not based on family, ethnicity, or wealth, but rather on the status that in contemporary American society is largely conferred by academic institutions.

I think–although it’s not entirely clear–that Weisberg is trying to say that elitism is just an epithet and not a reality, or at least a reality shared by both sides.  But, as a bona fide Palm Beach raised elitist snob, I think I can address this issue cogently.

Weisberg is correct that the definition of who is elite and who isn’t has changed in the last half century or so.  In the old days, we had the WASP old money, with all of the cultural and social mores that went with that (although I’d direct Mr. Weisberg’s attention to pieces such as Best Friends: Jewish Society in Old Palm Beach.)   To some extent I am a representative of that, although things are complicated by all of the Southerners my ancestors married (including my New Orleans native grandmother and heavily Scots-Irish mother.)

Weisberg’s conclusion from noting this change is that we now have upward mobility, success and power based on merit: “In a meritocratic society, rejection can bring an even worse sting than under an aristocratic or hereditary one, because those who are less successful can’t blame outcomes on the arbitrariness of the system.”  But that’s debatable too, for the following reasons:

• The shift to dominance of the successful (in government at least) of Ivy Leaguers hasn’t addressed the crying need for more scientifically educated people to direct a nation in a world driven by rapid technological change.  This is not to say that there aren’t excellent schools of science and engineering in the Ivy League (there certainly are) but most of the Ivy Leaguers that end up at the top of our government are lawyers with the occasional B-school interloper like George W. Bush thrown in for fun.  That’s an inheritance of our Anglo-Saxon culture that needs to be changed very badly, but you can be sure that the 1960’s era Luddites on the left will do what they can to block that.
• It’s not clear that the Ivy League schools are as far ahead of the rest of the pack as everyone thinks they are (Victory at Last: You Learn More Away from Harvard, But…).
• It can be shown that Ivy League admissions are prejudicial against working and middle class white people (Poor White People and Élite Universities: Beating the Dog in the Water).
• The whole issue of character is lost in this new “meritocracy” (It’s Not What School You Went To, It’s the Kind of Person You Are).

Weisberg is correct that Sarah Palin and others feel deep resentment towards this relatively new situation.  But the attitudes that Palin and her supporters feel aren’t as widespread in this country as they used to be.  Barack Obama wasn’t shy about characterising people as bitter, holding to their Bibles and their guns.  There was a time when such attitudes were the kiss of death for a politician.  But Obama’s victory in 2008 was a demonstration that many Americans were no longer averse to being condescended to in this way.  It was in that wake that I changed the slogan of this website, figuring that being an elitist snob was where it was at in this country.

Unfortunately many Americans, underwater in their mortgages and out of a job, are not as admiring of our elites as they were just a few months ago.  And make no mistake about it, Mr. Weisberg: it’s an elite whose “merits” are being sorely tested in this election cycle.  What we really have in this country isn’t a system based on family or even merit but on credentials, which academic and governmental institutions are masters at handing out.  Such credentialism won’t cut it in the face of our foreign rivals, be they economic, political or religious, or even in the face of our internal folly.

How soon we forget:

“People are frustrated, their anxious, they’re scared about the future. And they have a right to be impatient about the pace of change. I’m impatient,” President Obama said at an event for Gen44. “It took time to free the slaves,” he added.

Barack Obama has forgotten a simple fact: in this country, it took the War Between the States to free the slaves.  If he is comparing his agenda to ending slavery, he better be prepared to use the might of the United States military to make it happen,  just like his fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, did a century and a half ago.  I may be wrong, but I don’t see Obama having the nerve (to say nothing of the backing of the military) to make that happen.

He should be forgiven for this: Christian activists have compared the campaign to end abortion in the U.S. with the same ignorance re the need for the military to make it happen and the same lack of invocation for that power.  As I noted in 2007:

In an earlier piece entitled The Army of Joshua, we contended that, in order to make the Ten Commandments the law of the land, it would take an act of military force, as it had done in ancient Israel.  This is a shocking result, but what’s even more shocking is that, for revivalists of yore, the Army of Joshua was in fact the same army that suffers IED’s in Iraq, and that did Clinton’s will in places such as Bosnia and Kossovo.  Half-cocked militia groups won’t get the job done; not even the Confederate army could resist.

But there was a downside to all of this.  Finney expressed the following in advance of the great conflagration:

I believe the time has come–although I am no prophet, I believe it will be found to have come, that the revival in the United States will prevail no further and no faster than the Church takes the right ground on this subject (slavery)…

What is the condition of the nation?  No doubt God is holding the rod of WAR over the heads of this nation.  He is waiting, before he lets loose his judgments, to see whether the Church will do right.  The nation IS under His displeasure, because the Church has acted in such a manner with respect to revivals.  And now suppose war should come, where would be our revivals?  How quickly would war swallow up the revival spirit.  The spirit of war is anything but the spirit of revival.  (Revivals of Religion, pp. 315-6, 321)

What Wilberforce did for the slaves was right and needed to be done.  But the American experience is a cautionary note for all those who make “bringing the nation back to God” their top priority, along with the social causes of abortion, etc.  In Finney’s day the Civil War–which accomplished a major objective of the revival–stopped same revival in its tracks, as Finney predicted it would.  The use of the power of the state to accomplish the will of God had a backwash that we still feel today.

From this fascinating analysis by Walter Russell Mead on China and the U.S.:

Over the long term, what American policy makers need to remember (and what I fear too many have forgotten in both parties over the last couple of decades) is that America’s international standing and security ultimately depend on health of our domestic economy — and that the economy in turn ultimately depends on the dynamic, self-reliant, entrepreneurial and, yes, virtuous character of the American people.  Unless our educational, cultural and political institutions reflect and support these characteristics, American power could rot away at the core.

Americans still don’t think in terms of losing to a foreign power.  They shouldn’t.  They should think in terms of losing to their own folly domestically.

The thing that is the most wrong about the Obama Administration isn’t that it couldn’t wave its hand and get us out of this economic ditch.  It’s its desire to centralise everything in Washington, thus draining the nation’s strength.  With the debt load we have, that process of decline may not be a long one either.

Let’s start with this statement about the “lost decade” of the 2000’s:

From 2000 through 2009, the Census Bureau found, the median income (measured in inflation-adjusted dollars) declined by 5 percent for white families, 8 percent for Hispanic families, and more than 11 percent for African-American families. That’s almost unimaginable over an entire decade. From 1991 through 2000 (again in inflation-adjusted dollars) it had risen by 13 percent for whites, 19 percent for Hispanics, and 28 percent for African-Americans.

Similarly, the total number of Americans in poverty increased by nearly 12 million in the last decade, more than obliterating the 4.1 million reduction during the 1990s. Especially troubling is that the number of poor children jumped by 3.9 million — again, more than erasing the 2.8 million decline during the 1990s.

Now let’s look at this chart of personal debt from 1948 to more or less now, from here:

Note the major run-up in the debt from around 1994 to 2002, just after 9/11.  Most of that was in “non-revolving debt,” and that’s mostly real estate related debt.  It’s not a hard conclusion that we basically achieved prosperity by borrowing.

“Mr. Consumer” has been the driving engine of this economy for a long time.  When he or she is maxed out in their borrowing capacity, the fun stops.  The consumer debt was flat this past decade, which was reflected in the economy’s performance.  The government has tried to take up the slack with its own borrowing, and that process has accelerated from Bush to Obama.  But the government is a less efficient driver of the economy than our debt-obsessed consumers.

Even with the relatively lax bankruptcy laws we have in the US, people can know when they’ve reached their limit.  Through dollar hegemony and other forms of alchemy, our government can more easily conceal its own long-term profligacy.  I do not think this process can proceed indefinitely.

I also think that the easily ability to borrow funds–both public and consumer–has injected a hopeless sense of unreality into our population and its expectations.  That even reaches in to the church; the perennial popularity of prosperity teaching may be driven by the availability of easy credit.  The current crash is correcting that, but it’s going to be a long time before sanity is restored.