A Funny Thing Happened…
A funny thing happened on the way to the bottom of my coffee cup today. Today was a day that started like normal. I got out of bed and walked downstairs to let Miles out to do his morning essentials, and commune with the bunnies that fill the yard between sundown and sunrise every night. While Miles goes out, I scoop out some coffee beans, grind them for a few seconds longer than it really takes optimally, and get the coffee pot started. Miles is usually back at the door by the time I have the coffee maker started, with some variance based upon how many bunnies he runs into on that particular morning.
I open the door just wide enough to let a 95 pound yellow lab in because it is 19 degrees right now, and then close it just after the tip of his tail crosses the threshold. I turn, and grab my vitamins, and then pour my coffee as the last thing before leaving the kitchen and sitting down with my iPad to read The NY Times. The only thing I add to my coffee beans is water and heat, so I like it to be as close to the temperature it was when it was poured once I have my first sip.
The funny thing that I refer to is a new understanding. That new understanding is provided by Michelle Goldberg in her excellent column in the Times. I hope you can all access it. For those of you who enjoy coffee, or maybe even just require it medicinally, the experience is that of waking your mind up every morning. For some of you, it may be tea. Most of us take the caffeine infusion every morning, and watch our mental marbles take their places for whatever we plan to use them for that day. Goldberg’s column today is that, only on a grand scale. The morning in this case is about 40 years long.
There is a concept that another columnist has referred to that he calls “zombie lies.” They are lies that don’t seem to ever die no matter how much evidence comes along to refute them. The columnist in this particular case is Paul Krugman who has referred to such false concepts for many years. One such concept is supply side economics. Reagan rode the wave of a false notion that said that tax cuts create GDP growth. This particular notion has led to decades of fiscal error generally, after maybe one case of success specifically. Reaganomics, as George H.W. Bush once referred to it, does not work as a principle. The event that I thought would kill it off for all time was the GOP response to the Great Recession in 2008-09. George W. Bush and his Treasury Secy Hank Paulson sought a massive Keynesian bailout of Wall Street, which conflicted with their anti-Keynesian principles. Surely the zombie lie of supply side was dead now.
Sure enough, the zombie rose again. Watching this process repeat with this concept and others over the past couple of decades, I began to wonder about the capacities of human intellect broadly. I often used the image of bug zappers, and said we are more like a swarm of bugs getting zapped by reality than we are not like them. As a child I pondered why bugs did not seem to learn from the obvious in front of them, and as an adult, I wondered the same about humans.
Anyway, Michelle Goldberg’s column fixed all of that. I do so love when a piece of information comes along to provide clarity. This is definitely one of those times. Goldberg referred to a book by Stephen Skowronek, and his concept of “political time.” These run in 40-60 year cycles, and essentially explain that the Trump presidency was just the dying of the Reagan cycle. According to this concept, Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover were also the final chapters of presidential cycles, which gave rise to new eras. There are similarities, and they are fascinating, if not also illuminating.
What’s more, it points to the notion that Joe Biden is a new chapter in this presidential time theory. If you are following along with what has been happening overt the last 9 days since Biden became president, he has been surprisingly more progressive than most expected. This column, and Skowronek’s book, provide a clue as to why that may actually be happening. So, in a time when we could use some optimism, this analysis provides both optimism and clarity.
Ron Powell
01/29/2021 @ 8:57 am
I enjoy a good cup of coffee, but lately, I’ve been starting my mornings with tea and the Times while watching and listening to the early morning programing on MSNBC….
The piece you site is fascinating….
A good way to put the AM consumption of caffeine to appropriate use…
Jonna Connelly
01/29/2021 @ 10:38 am
“Moderation can stand as an asset if it’s firmly grounded in a repudiation of the manifest failure and bankruptcy of the old order. In that sense, moderation is not a compromise or a middle ground. It’s the establishment of a new common sense.”
So, by being safe and unassuming, Biden enables stealth revolution?
As for me, I made the coffee too strong this morning and now I have to go take a little nap.
Jonna Connelly
01/29/2021 @ 10:40 am
Also, I think Goldberg started out at old Salon – not Open Salon, Big salon. I like her,
Alan Milner
01/29/2021 @ 11:14 am
Let me say this about linking to articles in publications behind paywalls. It is absolutely acceptable to quote large chunks of such articles as long as due credit is given and you include a link in the excerpt to the original article itself. I would suggest that if you want to do this that you create a second post with the quotations, and link to that post rather than linking directly to original article.
It was one of my ambitions to have a team of contributors doing this on a regular basis, excerpting the important segments from important articles behind many paywalls but I was never able to get that off the ground.
If you want to do this, use the ***UNCATEGORIZED category for the excerpt because that will prevent that post from appearing on the home page, or anywhere else for that matter. This is one of those tricks that I never got around to illustrating in the how-to section.
If anyone should ever decide to do this, it would make me very happy….even if I have never done it myself, but there are technical reasons why I am the only person on this website who should not do this that I would explain privately if anyone wants to know.
Bitey
01/29/2021 @ 11:25 am
That is very helpful, Alan. Thank you.
koshersalaami
01/29/2021 @ 7:04 pm
Yeah, I might do that. I’m not a subscriber to the Times, just the Washington Post (used to be my hometown newspaper).
I’d be interested to learn about that cycle. For cycles, I’ve been using Generations. As to Biden being surprisingly progressive, that’s because of COVID. He’s generally more centrist but circumstances don’t allow it. They didn’t really allow it before but they’re more dire now and more obvious. So he has to be like FDR, which he acknowledged a while ago, and for analogous reasons.