While y’all were watching the Academy Awards, I was publishing the March/April/May issue of the Washington Monthly. It takes me the better part of a week to convert the print issue into a digital format so you freeloaders can enjoy all our hard work without paying us anything, but that’s okay.
The big cover story is pretty interesting. It’s an effort by gay rights activists and social conservatives to bridge their differences and come together to strengthen the institution of marriage. Last month we had a man-eating polar bear on the cover, so this is a bit of a change of pace.
The most important part of the new issue is, of course, my book review. It’s nice to get into the print issue for the first time. And it’s a decent reward for having to suffer through reading a biography of George W. Bush. It’s not that the book was bad (it wasn’t), but I want to relive those eight years like I want to have bamboo hammered into my finger nails. I did my best.
Ed’s got a funny piece about how Huckabee stole Palin’s act.
My brother also has a book review in the new mag, so our parents may want to have this one bronzed.
I enjoyed working on all the articles and I think they’re all worth reading.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be writing about a variety of the pieces. Ed and I usually divvy them up like a box of chocolates, so I’m not sure which ones I’ll get.
In any case, enjoy the new issue, and if you find any typos don’t tell anyone.
I miss the Bush years because I still had hope then.
Ew, we should not want to be strengthening the institution of marriage. Count me out of that one. I’ll have to read it to see which activists are involved in that, but they’re completely wrong.
Why? Of course what is meant by “strengthening”? Harder divorce?
I’m interested in your views. Indeed I’m interested in all the Frog Pond views on marriage, it’s place in modern society, and how much state involvement should their be in the modern age.
I’m not sure what they mean by strengthening it. Gotta read the article I suppose. But in general I oppose marriage on the grounds that it sets up preferential treatment for certain couples over others, and the way our benefit system is structured around employment this necessitates inequities between men and women. It’s how conservatives go after the welfare state, leaving “man” the head of the household and being the bread winner. And those women won’t need “welfare” when they’re dependent from their husbands, or they can always go to church.
Nice review of the Mann book. Despiriting indeed.
Common Cause and Public Citizen were both supposed to be the public’s lobbyist in Washington. What happened? There is seemingly a fundamental contradiction in the the public lobbyist model.
Increasing the capacity of Congress to see through the corporate bullshit enriches the DC economy without dealing with the fact that Members of Congress love being misled as long as more money goes into their campaign coffers to pay for media saturation bombing come election time.
Shared the ALEC welfare queen story about the bail bond industry with my personal network. Tracking ALEC and other state legislative plays could be a real niche for WaMo. Increasingly with gridlock in Congress, it is the states where progressives will be blindsided.
On Congress, it is not a failure of analysis but the domination of strategy and tactics over actual governance that caused gridlock. Gridlock is a feature, not a bug.
The decline of heterosexual marriage is directly related to two trends over the past four decades – declining wages and salaries and the instransigence of male privilege. The latter has both economic and cultural consequences. In the 1970s, women announced that they would not be trapped with children, kitchen, church. Criticized for wanting to have it all, women have left controlling and abusive men in order to pursue their own agendas. In response, the hostility of men and attempts to dominate have intensified, re-emphasizing its legitimacy through the remasculinization of the evangelical (and some other) churches with chestbeating males. Thinking that Democrats and Republicans can agree that this is a problem is the sort of cultural delusion that sidetracks progressive politics. And austerity just makes it worse by upping the financial tensions between couples who are acting out of traditional definitions of families.
There is no way that Republicans will see the obvious. Half of the problem with disappearing heterosexual couples is the failure of the economy to recognize family life as legitimate. The other half is the Republican economic and cultural war on women. That is not a recipe for undoing gridlock.
In fact, no tinkering in DC will undo gridlock. It will take a fundamental change in political communications that makes money irrelevant in politics (and highly paid consultants and media companies irrelevant as well). And that change cannot be pushed out from the center out. And given how quickly the center moves to quash innovation I’m not sure we can get beyond gridlock in the next generation. And that goes to the fact that there is a fundamental underlying dysfunctional agreement in Congress. And that is what folks are pointing to with terms like “kabuki”, “duopoly”, “uniparty” and so on. And that dysfunctional de facto agreement seems to be tightening in Congress to the point that TPP fast track will be approved, the Iran negotiations will be scuttled, and the US will put boots on the ground somewhere (the are now even more possibilities of quagmire) because of this this Congressional agreement.
Despite my best efforts, I saw no typos or nitpicks this time.
On Kilgore’s Palin riff on Huckabee’s packaging of the politics of resentment against elitists.
Some very hoity-toity corporate money paid for a focus group that said that resentment of cultural elites can divert attention from outrage over economic elites. And that money is willing to back Huckabee if they see he can win, and even if he cannot he’s a useful idiot.