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Tag: jonathan chait
The One Word Guaranteed To Make The Corporate Pundit Class Squirm

The One Word Guaranteed To Make The Corporate Pundit Class Squirm

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Technocratic elites and their apologists once justified their social standing by claiming simply to know more about the things that matter than everybody else. Maybe it was even a better time. But now it’s gone, and ignorance is power.

A ruling class, dizzying itself with the simultaneous beliefs that most people are fundamentally stupid and don’t know what’s good for them, and that one can exert influence by appealing to the vague cultural markers ordinary people like, has decided to become vigorously, monumentally stupid. You can see this process play out whenever one of its leading journalists is forced to reckon with the word “neoliberalism.”

The same people who love to dream up strange and senseless new conceptual systems, who pore over the minor details of insurance law with a philatelist’s perverse giddiness, who think that “innovation” or “aspiration” are good and worthwhile concepts, will suddenly slacken their jaws and cross their eyes, and insist that one of the most studied and documented concepts in modern sociology simply has no meaning. Do you really expect ordinary people to know what you mean if you start talking about something as dry and academic as neoliberalism? Do you really think you could use it to “to strike up a conversation with some strangers in a bowling alley in Toledo”?

That line belongs to New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who recently penned a diatribe titled “How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals.” He claims that “neoliberal” has become a term of abuse, by which socialists try to distinguish themselves from good moderate liberals. It’s a meaningless term, he claims, entirely useless “as an analytic tool.” But by using this epithet, the left can pretend that the Democratic Party was once the home of a robust New Deal social democracy, but has been hijacked by right-leaning forces. Exactly how all this happened is never actually discussed.

As a political columnist, Chait has his admirable qualities. His output is prodigious: on an average day, he’ll pump out around three articles for the magazine, which is certainly more Jonathan Chait than any reader could possibly handle. But this creates its own problems. He tends to repeat himself, as with a series of virtually identical screeds insisting that socialism is both entirely irrelevant and a mortal danger, or a similarly monotonous current on the evils of political correctness. Or sometimes, he’ll be forced to write about things he doesn’t really understand. And Jonathan Chait simply does not understand neoliberalism.

As a comrade pointed out to me, “where most pundits simply rip off Wikipedia for their pieces, Chait doesn’t even bother to check it.” The name Milton Friedman does not appear once in Chait’s discussion of neoliberalism. Neither do Friedrich von Hayek, James M Buchanan, Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. He also conveniently omits mention of Augusto Pinochet. (Chile seems to be a particular blind spot for Chait—in his most recent anti-socialist column, he writes that “every Marxist government in history has monopolized power,” which is not just nakedly false, but happily conceals what his friends in Washington tend to do to those socialist governments that don’t monopolize power.) Instead, Chait decides to spend the opening chunk of his essay talking about how a few fellow journalists decided to start using the word “neoliberalism” to refer to their own “moderately liberal” opinions.

I don’t doubt that they did, but the neoliberalism of Chait and his Washington Monthly pals is not the one that despoiled the globe or crushed working-class solidarity or restructured social consciousness; it’s not the ideology that anyone who calls Chait a neoliberal now is talking about. The fact that Chait thought the term was coined in the 1980s, when its general sense was already in use (Friedman’s “Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects” was published in 1951), only shows that his cluelessness hasn’t come on with age. Instead of “neoliberalism” denoting a specific set of economic and social practices that affect everyone, Chait uses it as a signifier for the strange, nameless feeling of hurt and frustration he experiences whenever someone lobs the descriptor at him.

Here is how Chait defines neoliberalism. He notes, at one point, that “the widely publicized influence of neoconservatives within the Bush administration changed the connotation of ‘neo'” and that “by the end of Bush’s term, it became an intensifier.” “Neo” means bad, and liberalism means liberalism. A neoliberal, then, is a liberal who is more right-wing. But it also refers to capitalism as such. Chait writes:

“‘Neoliberal’ means capitalist, as distinguished from socialist. That meaning has rarely had much application in American politics, because liberals and conservatives both believe (to starkly differing degrees) in capitalism. If ‘neoliberal’ simply describes a belief in some role for market forces, then it is literally true that liberals and conservatives are both ‘neoliberal.'”

He adds, “It is strange, though, to apply a single term to opposing combatants in America’s increasingly bitter partisan struggle.”

Except that it’s not.

Neoliberalism is not particularly hard to define. It’s not only an ideology or a set of principles; it’s a system of practices, and an era, the one we’re living in now. What it means, over and above everything, is untrammeled ruling-class power, an end to the class-collaborationism of the post-war years and a vicious assault of the rich against the poor. This is achieved through market mechanisms, fiscal austerity and the penetration of capitalist relations into every possible facet of human life. It doesn’t mean that the role of the state vanishes—an essential precondition for neoliberalism is the destruction of working-class power and collective bargaining, and this has to be achieved, often brutally, through laws and their enforcement. There isn’t just “some role for market forces” either, but their invasion into every fathomable social situation.

Warehouse workers are electronically monitored and made to compete against each other in efficiency rankings? This is neoliberalism. The young and unemployed are encouraged to build a “personal brand” and sell themselves as a product? This is neoliberalism. If you don’t like any of this, you’re encouraged to shop ethically, reduce your personal carbon footprint and consume vaguely antagonistic culture-commodities. This is neoliberalism.

The result of all this is that our society has become atomized: we see all our relations as essentially competitive, and the people around us as rivals for scarce goods; we are all, socially and existentially, alone. Everything we do is turned into a market transaction, a form of buying and selling. And this is because the free and unfettered market isn’t a neutral system for processing human interactions, but an instrument of class power.

It’s true that, as Chait points out, the term “neoliberal” can describe much of the broad spectrum of American politics. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s important to be able to give a name to the awful totality that surrounds us. Once it can be fixed as an object, something of which we have a shared perception, we can start to think outside of it. It was not always like this; once, capitalism took other forms. Without a concept that points out the grim sameness that seeps through a corroding politics, you end up like Jonathan Chait: obsessing over the differences between two parties, as one gives the rich their foot-bath and the other gently nuzzles at their scalps; being confronted with a well-developed theory of political and social conditions, and deciding that it must somehow exist only as an insult against you.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

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Fashionable Bashing: ‘New York’ Columnist Knows Little But Talks Big

Fashionable Bashing: ‘New York’ Columnist Knows Little But Talks Big

Jonathan Chait of New York magazine has done no small damage to his own reputation as a liberal intellectual over the past year or so, but apparently feels he can rehabilitate himself by attacking the reputation of the Clintons — always a fashionable media pastime, especially during an election cycle.

So today, Chait describes the Clinton post-presidency as “disastrous.”

Certainly the work of the former president hasn’t been “disastrous” for the millions of people across the world aided by the work of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, including vast numbers whose lives have been saved over the past dozen years or so thanks to the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative (which Chait doesn’t deem worth mentioning). Nor has the Clinton post-presidency proved disastrous for President Barack Obama, a former adversary whom the Clintons have served very well indeed.

Nevertheless, parroting a series of recent accusations against the Clintons, Chait condemns the couple as “disorganized and greedy.” Much of what he repeats in his column is so easily debunked, however, that what he reveals is not their lack of character but his own weak journalism.

“The New York Times has a report about the State Department’s decision to approve the sale of uranium mines to a Russian company that donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Global Initiative,” intones Chait. But that is such an inaccurate, misleading way to characterize what happened as to indicate that the columnist may need remedial reading instruction.

Tendentious and biased as it was, even the Times report noted that the decision to approve the Russian uranium sale was made not by the State Department alone, but by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) — a powerful interagency committee chaired by the Treasury Department that includes the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the Energy Department, and a host of other cabinet-level government agencies.

Nowhere did the Times prove or even suggest that the State Department drove the Russian uranium decision, because that isn’t how CFIUS works. And nowhere did the Times report show that Hillary Clinton personally influenced the decision. Indeed, the record indicates that she played no role whatsoever. Knowledgeable observers of CFIUS believe that its operations are dominated by Treasury and Defense, not State.

To learn what really happened, though, Chait would have needed to read carefully, then maybe ask an intelligent question or two — but he couldn’t be bothered.

Chait complains that President Clinton received speaking fees from some of the same organizations that have donated to his foundation, linking to an article in the Washington Post. He fails to explain why he thinks that is a conflict of interest. To the contrary, it should be obvious that anyone who admires the foundation’s work might wish to hear the former president speak about that and other topics. (The overlap is actually smaller than might be expected, anyway: only 67 of the 420 groups that paid him a speaking fee over the past decade are also foundation donors).

He points out that the Clinton Foundation is re-filing and auditing some of its tax returns because of errors that have been discovered. Many other corporations, non-profits, and individuals have made errors on their taxes, as he surely knows. Nobody has accused the Clintons or their foundation of attempting to cheat the government; the foundation is tax-exempt, of course, and the Clintons personally have disclosed more of their tax returns over the past three decades than any political family in American history.

Continuing to build his case, Chait quotes another New York Times article, reported by Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick in August 2013, which claimed among other things that [the Clinton Foundation] “ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.”

But the New York columnist apparently never bothered to consult President Clinton’s response, which schooled the Times reporters on the basics of non-profit financing and tax reporting:  “The reporting requirements on our tax forms, called 990s, can be misleading as to what is actually going on,” the former president explained. “In 2005 and 2006 as a result of multi-year commitments, the Foundation reported a surplus of $102,8000,000, though we collected nowhere near that. In later years, as the money came in to cover our budgets, we were required to report the spending but not the cash inflow.”

The Times reporters – and Chait – could have tested their assumptions by asking a few simple questions. They might have learned that President Clinton maintained a cash reserve fund in the foundation that sustained its life-saving programs during the worst of the recession, when donations shrank. Not so “disorganized,” as it turns out.

Finally, Chait lifts a lengthy passage from a New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, arguing that Bill Clinton favored Hillary’s appointment as Secretary of State to somehow benefit himself and his foundation. It suggests that foreign leaders attended the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual New York meeting — and foreign donors gave to the foundation — because of her position in government.

To bolster this notion, Lizza quoted an anonymous source: “‘Bill Clinton’s been able to continue to be the Bill Clinton we know, in large part because of his relationship with the White House and because his wife is the Secretary of State,’” the Clinton associate said. “‘It worked out very well for him. That may be a very cynical way to look at it, but that’s a fact. A lot of the stuff he’s doing internationally is aided by his level of access.’“

That is simply nonsense, as anyone having even the barest familiarity with the facts could attest. The Clinton Global Initiative began in 2005, four years before anyone imagined Hillary Clinton would ever be named Secretary of State, with a stellar roster of present and former foreign heads of state and other leaders that included British prime minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Washington Postdescribed that first meeting as Clinton’s own “mini-General Assembly of presidents, prime ministers, kings and other pooh-bahs.” And the foundation has benefited from the support of foreign governments, principally U.S. allies like Norway, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Canada, as well as individual foreign donors, since no later than 2002. He could have looked that up quite easily, too.

For someone who knows very little, Chait is very opinionated (and loud). His ignorance was amplified by excited links in Politico and the Drudge Report – which may be what he really wanted in the first place.