How little is too little?

A co-worker was reflecting on human nature with me yesterday.  We were discussing the use of correlation in trying to understand the world, and as could be expected of tired old me, the issue of correlation between social inequality and social problems came up.  Neither one of us made any claim about the causality of such a correlation, indeed we were both bewailing how difficult it is to prove.  In other words, neither one of us claimed that social problems such as high crime rates are caused by inequality.  Conversely we did not claim that high crime rates cause inequality.  We understood that even someone in the world did know the causality, we didn't know which it was.  We merely agreed that there is correlation.

When considering the possibility that inequality is a cause of increased social woe, my colleague expressed disappointment that people who are clearly much better off than they were 100 years ago cannot just be happy with what they have despite what other people have.

I'm certainly not trying to impune my colleague here, so far in conversation I've found him to be really a rather thoughtful fellow.  The idea that people should be satisfied with "a rising tide lifts all boats" is not a novel one.  Assuming that a rising tide does indeed lift all boats, but an uneven rising tide causes tsunamis (heh... as indeed a literal uneven rising tide would) I find myself disappointed in the other part of the human nature equation.

I'm disappointed that those at the top of the tide are not so willing to share their gains.

I feel a similar inversion come on when people respond to the idea of an income limits with things like "how much is too much?"  Almost never does one ask "how much is too little?"  Fortunately, there is such a thing as minimum wage, so technically that question does get answered.

A Declaration for Democrats

Ignore the news coverage like it's the plague, and it is the plague.  The national press seems to want to have some kind of fancy narrative of what this election means.  Mainly, they want it to be some kind of drama where a decisive battle for the national future has been fought and won by someone.  In truth, the world is much more mundane than that.

There were no surprises.

This is not a time for Democrats to despair as much as everyone would like.  The Republicans are going to try to convince their base that they are awesome and that now the whole country finally sees things their way.  In reality, I suspect election demographics are much more static than that.  Their drones will keep voting the same every year and lose their gat dang minds anytime things look like they're not sailing smoothly in to the 18th century.  So be it.

This election was inevitable.  The economy is bad, and the handful of people in the mythic center change their votes or more likely their voting behavior based on that, and that alone.  Mr. Obama is entirely right that the economy was the fault of his predecessors.  Mainly, his Republican predecessors, but there has been plenty of contributions from our party too.  However, even if Republican mal-governance didn't lead to the proximate cause of the current financial crisis, and it has, as producers of the ultimate underlying set of ideas, the Republicans own it.  Obama gets to pay for it.  So be it.

The difficulty we as a nation face is a strongly entrenched right wing that has a sufficiently packed court, the lions share of money to spend on increasingly unregulated electioneering and possibly an edge in the upcoming redistricting fiasco.  They are always formidable.  They are well organized, powerful and have been refining their ideas for decades.  So be it.

However, in the long run demographics are on our side.  The outrageous behavior exhibited by the right wing, the disgraceful bigotry and intolerance is probably more panic than the sudden groundswell of a newborn movement.  Their ideas are old ideas and I predict will begin to seem stale among the current constellation of generations.  Tea-baggers are an disproportionately older, on a smaller end of the population pyramid, and represent a series of disjoint social groups that probably don't realize they have less in common with each other than the people they think they hate.  It is so.

Importantly, the Democrats demonstrated to the Republicans that their dream of having a generation of unbroken reign over the government like the Liberals of old is not to be.  We have broken them, and it is known that despite the lack of discipline within the Democratic party, they we will fight them for every piece of our society that they try to dismantle or transform with their radical vision.  It is so.

The Dean organizational legacy is still intact.  The Democratic party is not as winded and disheveled as it was in 2000.  Obama is not Abraham Lincoln, nor is he Franklin Roosevelt, though he needed to be, and surely he has disappointed on all sides.  But he is strong.  Even if he could do better leading the party, he knows how to govern, and how to lead our country.  The Democratic party in comparison with the party of No remains the party of Sense.  It is so.

Reject the narrative!

• That the Democrats should shift to the center - the Democrats should project their vision at least as strongly as the Republicans project theirs and Americans will listen just as well.
• That Tea-Baggers have won the day - They have had a bare handful of successful candidacies.
• That there has been a political re-alignment - We still hold the Senate and the Executive.
• That the Democratic agenda has been rejected - Not at least by the half of the country that supported them.

There is no need for despair.  If your heart is heavy, rally to me.  If you think you cannot go on, rally to me.  If your vision is obscured by your fear, rally to me.

Rally to me!