The Fever Swamp

As both an avid and captive consumer of internet news, I like to diversify my sources of information and opinion on modern politics and socioeconomics.  While I would describe myself as generally liberal in most common aspects, I still appreciate an earnest conservative of point of view.  As an example, I read Andrew Sullivan daily, someone whose positions are more conservative than Republican, informed by the small-government wing of the philosophy instead of the culture war brigade.  The Economist is a largely small-c conservative publication when it comes to global economics, capital/labor disputes, free trade, and regulatory policies, but it's still a good read.

But I also like to keep tabs on the "fever swamp", a term adopted by the liberal blogosphere to describe the insular atmosphere of Republican media echo chamber and the batshit crazy things it convinces itself are true.  For this, aside from my digest of The Daily Show for Fox News and elected-official nonsense, I like the National Review's Corner blog, a collection of aspiring think-tankers or pundits with a paper trail far too long and wacky for professional employment in the real world.  I read it for the lulz, but also to try to weakly understand what the right thinks is outrageous this week.

Currently there are two front-page posts about President Obama's upcoming trip to Rio, which is being advertised on the Corner as something being done "with his family" without really noting that this is the first leg of a South American diplomacy tour focused on promoting economic relations between our regions.  The Miami Herald mentions that "Obama will begin the day Saturday with conversations with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff at her Planalto office and is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the U.S.-Brazil Business Summit at a Brasilia hotel in the afternoon."  Jonah Goldberg, however, can only be bothered to summarize it with "The president is getting away from his hectic golf schedule to go to Rio this weekend with the family. I wonder if he’ll bump into anyone there who’ll ask him “. . . And what do you do for a living?”

This kind of playground level snark is roughly 50% of the Corner's daily output.  They do occasionally branch out to slightly more analytical or academic arguments, which is, I think, far more indicative of the temperature in the fever swamp.  Today, Peter Kirsanow provides a summary of a Thomas Sowell editorial (also on National Review) on how it doesn't make sense that Black voters vote overwhelmingly Democratic when it's in their best financial interest to vote Republican, in a parallel to Thomas Frank's analysis in What's The Matter With Kansas.  Now, yes, my first reaction to that thesis was also laughter, but it's worth picking apart the actual presented evidence to understand how a Republican polemic thinks.

• Sharp increases in the minimum wage price unskilled workers out of the labor market, a dislocation that falls most heavily on young black males. Such increases impair the ability of unskilled workers to get the entry-level jobs that are the first rungs on the ladder of upward job mobility. As someone once said, a wage, minimum or otherwise, presumes a job.

First, let me emphasize that this talking point has been thoroughly debunked many times over the past twenty years.  Secondly, the jobs most heavily affected by minimum wage laws are currently the ones most widely available, namely the retail, service, and food service industries.  Unemployment in America today is driven largely by the construction and manufacturing sectors, jobs that weren't minimum wage and tended to offer generous benefits.  Striking down minimum wage laws would just make poor people poorer.  It wouldn't create a McDonalds renaissance.

• Millions of black kids are trapped in medieval public schools that are insulated from competition and suffocated by union rules. Yet Democrats resist meaningful choice, insisting instead on that infallible remedy, “full funding.” They’re encouraged, apparently, by how well that solution has worked in places like Newark, which spends $18,000 per student — among the most of any major public school system — but where only 30 percent of 8th graders can pass the annual proficiency test in math. Or perhaps they’re brightened by the example of the D.C. public-school system, which also has among the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation yet perennially returns among the lowest test scores.

I've spoken a little bit in the past about what I think the Republican goals are for public education (namely, to kill it and rape its corpse) but it's important to understand that the alternative to public schooling, and the meaning behind the terminology of "school choice".  It translates to massive government handouts to private instutitions, a decidedly unconservative position.  It means making every school a for-profit private business, busting unions, and then using tax revenues to pay the free-market tuition rate.  It hinges on the assumption that competition between schools will drive teacher improvement, which then will translate to student improvement.  Consider me unconvinced that the almighty profit motive will magically generate consumer surplus.  We've already seen what happens when you give private businesses regional monopolies.  Are you happy with your health insurance company?

• [On Affirmative Action] Studies by, for example, the Center for Equal Opportunity show that the racial preferences employed by some college admissions offices boost a black applicant’s odds of admission over a similarly-situated white comparative by a factor of 200, often much more. This results in what UCLA law professor Richard Sander calls the “mismatch effect” — i.e., black students being admitted at schools in which they’re poorly qualified to compete. Consequently, black students are more likely to perform poorly and flunk out.

Yes, you heard it here first, affirmative action actually keeps black kids out of college, because they're too stupid to compete.  Nevermind all the other societal and economic factors that might depress your average black student's high school academic performance that could be resolved in a college environment or with student loans and grants.

Anyway, it goes on like this, the same up-is-down arguments that welfare means crippling dependency on the state instead of providing, you know, food or rent or other staples needed to live and maintain a job.  By the time you get to "I pointed out that it wasn’t the GOP that had opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation." you pretty much have the full sentiment of the self-delusion:  Republicans have a sterling record on civil rights because of Dixiecrats (who became Republicans, but whatever).  Ignore political and regional shifts.  Hey, Republicans were liberals back in the day!

So, that.  Today the fever swamp thinks black people should vote Republican because repealing the minimum wage, ending welfare entitlements, and opening the equivalent of educational fast food will help inner-city african americans, not hurt.  And the Democrats want you back in chains.  Good to know where everyone stands on the controversy.