Madoff has been in the news for carping about how the responsibility for the guilt and anxiety he suffered during the time he spent running the nation’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme ultimately lies at the feet of incompetent regulators. Apparently, Madoff’s primary take-away from his gov’t-funded counseling sessions is that it’s their fault for not doing a better job at standing between him and his baser instincts….

Walker is pulling the same sort of “interesting move” (the sarcastic phrase my old philosophy professor used to use when he felt that someone’s reasoning was particularly full of sh*t) with his insistence on blaming collective bargaining for several decades of political leaders having kicked the can down the road on public employees compensation models rather than having done their jobs.

The damning thing about both of these creeps’ positions is that you can’t say that they’re completely wrong –Madoff was clearly able to game the system for much longer than he should have, and there’s no doubt that the process of collective bargaining has been badly managed. But not completely wrong is nowhere near the same thing as even a little bit right. Systems made up entirely of human actors (as opposed to, say, those built on computer code or steel) are designed with the presumption that there are trusted leaders at the top making things work.

In the case of Madoff, one of the primary reasons that he got a pass for so long was that he and his unindicted co-conspirators (JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, etc.) occupied critical leadership positions in our system of finance – him the chairman of NASDAQ and the banks chartered agencies which are supposed to have a much stronger financial interest in keeping the system safe and secure than they are in gaming it. The fact that they abused these positions isn’t because the system itself suffers from poor design or shouldn’t work as constituted – it’s because the people running the systems were themselves deficient (or perhaps more accurately, corrupt). So solving the problem isn’t a matter of throwing away the system, it’s a matter of getting better people to run it (which, practically speaking, means giving the people who are charged with policing it more resources so that the cream, not the scum, rises to the top).

In the case of Wisconsin and Walker, a similar principle applies. The problem isn’t that a system built on collective bargaining is itself terminally and inevitably dysfunctional. It’s that our political leaders have become so craven and feckless, so alienated from any having level of respect for the institutions of which they’ve been appointed stewards, that they have no problems writing post-dated checks and leaving the cashing to the next generation.

It’s very tempting to point the finger at Walker for this, but in fact he’s merely the inheritor of the legacy left by the prime mover of this dynamic. Ronald Reagan, eager to exploit his honest if somewhat politically-tone deaf predecessor’s insistence on telling the people not what they wanted to hear but rather the truth as he saw it, created a generation of infantile deniers of reality…loud-mouthed losers demanding that anyone who refused to join them in their religion-of-choice is a corrupt non-American. The result is a body politic in which even supposed good guys like Michael Bloomberg can embed in an otherwise creditable NYT op-ed the phrase “…we share the same goal as cities and states across the nation — less spending and better services”, as though New York exists on some bizarro world in which there is no connection between the amount & quality of a service, on the one hand, and what it costs on the other.

Good government and good regulation share in common the fact that they rely on high-functioning, high-quality people in order to fulfill their missions. Despite the bloviations of Chicago-school economists, Glenn Beck, and other charlatans, many of those people would be perfectly happy to sacrifice personal financial gain for the opportunity to do a little social good – if only they could be assured sufficient resources to do their jobs, and a modicum of respect for their efforts.

In a society in which the desire to work together to further the Jeffersonian vision of forming a more perfect union has been essentially vilified, in which the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, those people quite rightly join the ranks of the cynical and disaffected. They pursue personal wealth as the only bulwark against the rising tide of chaos and decline that they – again rightly – feel in their bones is on its way. They’re wrong, of course; money can only go so far to insulate one from a threadbare social fabric. But who can blame them for taking whatever steps seem sensible in the face of a frightening tide?

Until we decide to get real about maintaining the institutions required to secure the blessings bestowed upon us by the courageous men who founded the nation, until we accept the responsibility of paying the freight for the system we claim to love so dearly, we’re going to be at the mercy of fixers like Madoff & Walker…small men who take no responsibility for their own actions and who lack respect for the institutions and systems which have allowed them to ascend to positions of greatness and power.

Until then, we’ll be stuck the state of nature best expressed by the words of the immortal Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us”

Except for Israel. Shockingly, I didn’t hear the word uttered once.

That made me curious, so I did a Google News search on ’Israel’, then on ‘Egypt Israel’. For ‘Israel’, of the first 10 topics*, only 2 of them mentioned Egypt –one was Ha’aretz, which criticized Israel for hypocrisy of supporting democracy except in the case of Egypt, and the other was a little-known blog called ‘The Jewish Week’, which had a remarkably balanced discussion focused mostly on how certain commentators are talking about the issue.

For the ‘Egypt Israel’ search, I got similar results – most of the discussion of the nexus between the two was on non-US news organs, with only a few commentators at the fringes of the US media scene having notice that there’s an elephant in the room.

Looking back at the week’s coverage of the Egyptian revolt, I realize that I’ve heard only the barest treatment of this central issue. We’ve heard a lot about how the US has backed Mubarak for 30 years because we’ve wanted “stability” in the region, and we’ve heard a huge amount about how this has compromised our credibility on the street, but the central question as to where our interests lie given recent events has been danced around – and only barely.

It seems to me that the central debate in the US right now should be as to where we come down on the intractable conflict between Egyptian democracy and our “special relationship” as Israel’s protector/enabler in its decades long refusal to make rational compromises in order to foster stability and peace in the region. If this were any other region in the world we’d be treated to lengthy news analyses of the pros and cons of backing each side, hear strong opinions expressed by political leaders and pundits, and be given the feedstock for healthy policy debate.

But, as always, not so with Israel. The silence seems deafening to me – a glaring hole in the conversation. Hard to fathom, except for the fact that talking about Israel is the third-rail of American media…a guarantee of a fast & slippery slope to someone (usually AIPAC) throwing down the Antisemitism card.

This isn’t exactly censorship…exactly being the operative word. But it is certainly a on the part of the media failure to shine the light on an issue of huge import to our own democratic processes. It feels quite ominous to me. As though once again — as with Iraq and Afghanistan –  our national conversation will shy away from a full and balanced discussion of all of the relevant issues before some pretty important foreign policy decisions are taken.

Something to think about.

Bigger Is Not Always Bad

New York Times | December 8, 2010

Where to start! This is a horrible piece of rhetoric…it doesn’t even qualify as a serious analysis of the problem. I would hope that Professor Rajan has higher standards for his students than is reflected in this painfully transparent apology for an industry gone terribly wrong.

Let’s take the glaring flaws in order:

1.       The 4^th paragraph is built around a patently specious, self-abnegating straw-man scenario in which the author imagines a very specific, unsavory route to “too big to fail”, as though that’s the only – or even a likely – way that firms scale. Setting aside the fact that the premise (“senseless mergers”) flies in the face of any concept of good corporate governance, the structure of the argument is one that wouldn’t get past a freshman philosophy major, yet alone her professor. Saying that something is bad because it’s senseless is circular hogwash.

That, however, is not the worst of it; by focusing the reader on this narrow, highly-unlikely route to corporate obesity Prof. Ragan trivializes the problem. This is an illegitimate cul-de-sac in the discussion, and seemingly only there to confuse the subject.

2.       In the following paragraph, Prof. Rajan starts off with the word “finally”, suggesting that somehow all of the ground in the argument against ‘too big to fail’ has been covered. Nothing could be further from the truth. This may seem a trivial criticism, but it is an all-too-common ploy to try to manipulate the mind of the reader, and so deserves to be called out. It’s just wrong to tell people you’ve covered a topic when you’ve barely scratched the surface.

3.       The next paragraph is particularly insidious because it seems to attempt to address the flaws pointed out in #1 above, when in fact it does no such thing. As with the critique in #2 above, this is rhetorical legerdemain, pure and simple. But again, it gets worse: the claim that “it is the successful firms that grow faster in a competitive environment” is both circular (because success and fast growth are often taken to be the same thing) and inaccurate (because, as we’ve seen, high-fliers all-too-often end up crashing – so today’s “success” may end up being tomorrow’s disaster. In fact, there is plenty of recent evidence of a direct correlation between fast growth and ultimate failure: Madoff, Countrywide Mortgage, Enron…and, sub-prime mortgages & of course, the Country of Ireland). For a finance professor to treat such a discredited canard as a given is unforgiveable.

4.       There is little evidence that “large firms have the resources to attract better talent and to build better organizational structures.” There is however, plenty of evidence, that large firms – and banks, in particular – can use the lure of asset bubble-driven trading gains to significantly distort the market for professional talent, siphoning off otherwise-useful high-potential graduates into economically counter-productive pursuits. This is an evil unto itself – not only is society robbed of people who might actually do something socially and economically useful, it creates a feedback loop of groupthink and entitlement. What’s the point of educating a kid at a top-flight school only to have her head to Wall Street to dream up increasingly complex schemes to manipulate securities markets? China loves it, or course…asset bubble-driven consumption does lovely things for their balance of trade account….

5.       There’s very little evidence to support the claim that “small and medium-sized banks have not shown better judgment than the riskiest large ones.” Not only is the obvious rebuttal – once again! – contained in the sentence (bad judgment at a riskier bank is more damaging than bad judgment at a less-risky one. Duh!), smaller banks are inherently more constrained by the rational risk mitigation strategies of their counterparties than are large ones. Why? (drum roll please…) Because THEY’RE NOT TOO BIG TO FAIL! They have to operate in a much more efficient marketplace than do large ones because – as Professor Rajan says himself at the outset of his “case” – they’re not implicitly backed by the US government. It’s charlatanism to even suggest that a small bank can do as much damage as a large one, or that there’s any sort of demonstrated marketplace dynamic in which a group of small banks can combine to pose as much risk as a single entity that has the same footprint. I’m sorry, but this kind of thing is just enraging to serious thinkers!

6.       The next detour on the hard-to-swallow romp through Professor Rajan’s fantastical landscape of distorted financial theory is the notion that the current systemic risk has anything to do with regulating future bank mergers. The problem is the current crop of behemoths, not some future imaginary spate of industry-consolidation (which, as an aside, is virtually impossible – the level of concentration today makes it virtually impossible to create another such Frankenstein).

Given how horribly Professor Rajan describes our banking systems’ current problems and how we got here, it hardly makes sense to pay much attention to his proposed solutions. But it does make sense to say that even if his analysis were correct (which it decidedly isn’t!), his prescriptions for dealing with systemic risk are so weak as to seem little more than sandbagging. Complex capital structures, highly-subjective contingent regulatory responses to crisis situations, and (what is he thinking?!??) doing away with deposit insurance for “large well-diversified banks”* are all the province of THC-addled academics. His claim that this strange brew would somehow “reduce complexity” is laughable – fuzzy lines are what started the misery in the first place!

Even with all of the above, the biggest flaw in Professor Rajan’s analysis is what it ignores: the fact that the large banks taken form a de-facto oligarchic industry structure, and that they use the classic tactics of highly-concentrated industries (signaling, competition-avoidance, unified lobbying efforts, regulatory capture) to generate illegitimate economic rents.  All of which is saying that by being ‘too big to fail’ they also (conveniently) cook the market.

Lastly, the systemic risk posed by the highly-concentrated structure of the banking industry is only the most prominent problem. The less visible, but far more damaging, one to our economy is that such concentration distorts the market to the gross disadvantage of everybody who does business with a bank (which is to say, everybody). You don’t have to look much further than Goldman Sachs’ execrable abuses of its own clients to get a flavor of this, but it’s important to bear in mind that the difference between GS and it’s “competitors” is degree, not kind. To espouse anything else is to be willfully ignorant.

I find it shocking and horrifying that anybody with claims to academic credibility would attempt to put forward such a demonstrably misleading position. I know that the ‘Chicago School’ functions as the Vatican of free-market fetishism, but even Pope Benedict has acknowledged that where fatal diseases are involved, prophylaxis trumps dogma. Would that Professor Rajan would follow his lead.

UNCLE BARACK’S CABIN

(somebody had to say it)

.

Before anybody gets their panties in a bunch and flames me, take a moment to understand the literary reference:

“…Tom [is]a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred [and] beaten to death by a cruel master….”

This guy is going to take the entire country down in flames in service of his messianic ambitions and crap-u-lent political instincts.

I can’t even get angry about it anymore…how to describe my feelings….? Hmm…what’s the opposite of hope? Oh yeah…despair.

Despair.

President Obama Lands in Afghanistan for Unannounced Visit

New York Times | December 3, 2010

If the focus of the trip is as described in this piece, it is yet another tragically wrong-headed blunder on the part of our feckless president. Karzai needs to be read the riot act at a minimum. If not simply dumped.

Many Americans can support, out of our native generosity, helping a committed partner to build a stable Afghanistan. But we have no such partner in Karzai. He’s a weak kleptocrat, so mentally unbalanced that he can’t even resist biting the hand that feeds him, running a narco-state. He and his cronies have stolen hundreds of millions — if not billions — of US tax-payer dollars, while making fools of us on the international stage. The stomach-churning rage & frustration that this creates domestically, and the weakening of the Administration, is only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who doesn’t connect North Korea’s (largely accurate) believe that they can sell nuclear weapons to rogue states and lob the occasional artillery shell at South Korea with the public abuse of our largess in Afghanistan is blind to the calculus of geopolitics.

This guy needs to be cut off, or taken out. Such has always been the price of treachery towards one’s patrons. For Obama to persist in the fiction that we can somehow work with the guy is the at center of the cancer that has us unable to deal effectively with our international adversaries on both the political and economic fronts.

Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires for a reason. Only a fool sets up permanent camp there — particularly when the place is full of grave robbers.

• Much of what has been revealed was only “news” because the state-of-the art of journalistic practice has degenerated into note-taking at staged press events and repackaging press releases. If the fifth estate was doing its job properly no one would be surprised that the Saudis don’t like Iran, that diplomats don’t trust Putin, that Afghanistan is a kleptocracy, that the Chinese policy towards North Korea is cynical and exploitative, or anything else we’ve “learned” from the leaked cables. In point of fact, today’s crop of “journalists” have abandoned their role of seekers-of-truth to such a great extent that it wouldn’t surprise me at all were we to discover that much of what was in the dump was already in the hands of media institutions who self-censored as part of the grand bargain that includes embedding reporters with combat units and gaining access to government officials for pull-quotes and Sunday morning talking heads commitments.

• Julian Asange may be no angel, but it should be pretty clear that he’s being slammed by US government officials (both elected and career) more as a formal reaction to having their jealously-guarded institutional control of information challenged than because of any toxicity of substance. While their sense of personal affront is completely understandable on a human level, we should evaluate claims that some great damage has been done to US standing in the world in the light of how much our reputation has already been degraded by how quickly we abandoned any pretext to principle in our self-indulgent response to 911.  I had a good head of steam to write something suitably blistering when I ran across this response to David Brook’s quisling column yesterday. Ms. Garcia couldn’t have put it any better.

• In the eternal battle between the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the propensity of the powerful to operate in the shadows, it’s better to err on the side of the Bill of Rights, even if there are some unpleasant consequences. As Ben Franklin said, those who would give up an essential liberty to purchase a little temporary security deserve neither. I cringe when I see those bumper stickers that say “Freedom isn’t Free” (usually pasted to the back window of a pick-up truck, just under the gun rack), but at its essence, the sentiment is dead on. Every once in a while, ugly truths need to be aired, if only to keep those particular muscles from atrophying.

• This is not to say that anarchic impulses should be applauded, or that we should ignore maxims about too much of a good thing not being such a good thing at all. But I think that Assange is a lot less anarchic than he’s been portrayed as being in recent days. Apparently he gave White House officials more than ample opportunity to review the documents and extended to them an invitation to make their case as to why any of them would put specific people or programs at risk. The Obama administration turned up their noses at the offer, under the tired old canard that playing ball would unreasonably legitimize WikiLeaks. I don’t know if they were too busy figuring out how to best cave on the $250k break-point for the Bush tax cuts to put time into it, but it’s clear that they could have done a lot more to separate the wheat from the chaff. But they didn’t.

• Lastly, it’s pretty clear that much of the hoopla coming from various world leaders is just the prelude to another round of the interminable shake-down of the US government. Look for bridges to be mended with various financial, military and geopolitical concessions. You can’t blame ‘em for trying, particularly when our current President has signaled his willingness to pay any price to avoid unpleasantness. And we should really be all that surprised when he does it — after all, it’s not his pocket that’s being picked….

I may be missing something…maybe there is a very large bill presented every year to the Korean government for the 50k American troops who have been there since the 1940′s. But I kind of think we would have heard something about it were that the case.

In my mind, this is directly related to the weakness of our government…to its inability to accomplish the basics of governance. If they’re going to be the stewards of American resources (particularly military ones), they sure as hell should make sure that we come out at least somewhere near even. But the fact that Obama was humiliated at the G20 suggests pretty strongly that there’s nobody minding the store in that regard. It’s hard for me to imagine that someone, at some point during the talks, couldn’t easily have mentioned that the US, being in a major recession and tearing itself apart politically over budget deficits, might have to consider halving the troops stationed in South Korea if we couldn’t at least earn some of that money back through an appropriate balance of trade. Or that they should just pay us at cost +10% for providing human shields against the million+ soldiers of the DPRK…that would have the same effect (because they’d have to earn US dollars with which to pay the bill).

Don’t get me wrong — I’m all for the US playing an appropriate buffering role in critical geopolitical hotspots. We’re the only ones who can do it, and it’s certainly in our self-interest to promote stability. But there’s nothing at all inconsistent in expecting to be paid for that service by its primary beneficiaries. Or, at least insist on not getting kicked in the balls by them.

For those of you who don’t remember (or never read) the book, it’s about a dystopian parallel US in which a parasitic, vaguely socialist government has so squelched the ability to profit from innovation that the wealthy & powerful (who Rand treats as ‘ubermenschen’) go on strike. The book contains a lot of Rand’s usual melodramatic dreck[1], all leading up to a final chapter which is essentially a monograph on objectivism – Rand’s tortured attempt to legitimize self-gratification and solipsism by calling it a philosophy. The title itself is what one of my philosophy professors used to call a ‘clever move’ (by which he meant a bullshit maneuver), in that smuggles in the notion that business leaders are akin Atlas (the Greek god who held the world on his shoulders) without even the barest nod to explaining why we should think of them as such. In the book, these demigods, blessed with talent yet cursed with the affliction of having to carry the weight of the rest of (apparently useless) humanity on their shoulders, give a collective “who gives a shit?” shrug. And the world falls apart.

It’s extremely tempting to dive into a juicy deconstruction of Rand’s ‘philosophy’ and a disquisition on the toxic impact that she’s had on US politics and culture, but that’s a topic for another rant (suffice it to say that Alan Greenspan, her once-lover and lifelong acolyte, is a committed objectivist; when he famously admitted that he failed to properly regulate the mortgage securitization market because his model was flawed, the model to which he was referring was objectivism). Likewise, it would be an amusement of the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel variety to rail against the simplistic suckers whose need for elegant, sanitary solutions to life’s complexities causes them to fall for her trauma-driven worldview[2]. But we have bigger fish to fry at the moment.

‘Atlas Shrugged’ owes its resurgence to the same misguided, self-pitying nonsense that underpins the “thinking” of the Tea Partiers – and the Bachmans, Becks, and the rest of the usual gang of idiots on the right – to wit, the slovenly, red-headed step-meme of Reaganism which takes its form in the absurd notion that anything connected with the federal government can only have sprung from Lucifer’s dark loins.

But as I look back on the past 30 years or so of American history, I notice two interesting things: a prominent trend line of less “government meddling” in the business of the gods of the free market, and an almost identical decline in our nation’s middle class. I also notice a dramatic corrosion of our collective appreciation for our civic institutions – not just government (although it has come to be taken as a given, even on the left, that government is an evil), but also of people with a college education, of professionals, of cultural heroes (not to be confused with the freak show of modern celebrity). In short, of many all of the things to which from which we once derived a positive sense of national identity, and which served as a repository for our trust. That trust has been replaced by cynicism – a collective disgust, really, of anything that smacks of having more power than Joe the Plumber or a failed governor from a backward state.  Obviously, these things are connected; as people’s sense of personal control over their destiny has eroded, so too has the social contract that was once pinned to the table, as it were, by our institutions.

One of the more frustrating dynamics for Progressives is that despite the indisputable fact that America’s prime innovation – the first virtue from which all of our success as a nation has sprung – is its form of government, a sizeable number of our countrymen have been wangled into a fevered commitment to its dismantling.  The cognitive dissonance generated by hearing people declare themselves patriots while simultaneously berating all of the fruits of that innovation makes a lot of us crazy…it’s the moral equivalent of taking a knife to one’s own nubbins on the theory that removing dangling flesh will improve our ability to chase down a mate. This is the kind of theory we might expect to hear from Cosmo Kramer or Ray Hueston (Zach Galifianakis’ character in HBO’s brilliant Bored to Death). The line between absurdist humor and political discourse seems to be blurring at an alarming rate.

In thinking about all of this, it occurs to me that what we’ve really seen over the past 30 years isn’t Ayn Rand’s vision of the best and most talented walking away from business because of government encroachment, but something akin to a precise reciprocal: the best and the brightest running from government service – to a large degree from any institutional affiliation – and being replaced by the worst, least talented, and (most importantly), least conscientious among our countrymen.

The danger – tragedy, really – is that crapping on government is the most elegant kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Ask yourself – what sensible person in his or her mid-20’s, reared in the full bloom of the Reagan message and its debt-fueled “economic growth”, whose attitudes towards government started to coalesce right around the time that Newt Gingrich was doing everything he could to bring down Bill Clinton, would have any interest in going into government service? I’m not just talking about politics – which is of course a shit-show of the highest magnitude, but for which one at least receives the compensation of celebrity and partisan support. I’m talking about the career positions that really touch people’s day-to-day lives – the people who man government agencies, and upon whose good faith and judgment elected leaders assume when they do their best to craft meaningful policy.

So, in an era in which the respect that was once accorded to people to committed to a career in public service has transmuted into contempt, in which the middle class has been successfully manipulated into a self-destructive orgy of misplaced rage, and in which the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, what’s good ol’ Uncle Sam, the guy who was born of our collective belief in our ability to form a more perfect union, to do?

[shrug]

Really…we’re committed to the peace process. This time we mean it…really…really….

.

Israel Plans 1,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem

.

And:

Netanyahu Sharply Insists on Building in Jerusalem

Need I say more?

[UPDATE]

Perhaps I should at least quote my dear, departed grandfather:

“Ulcers are what you get from kissing the asses of the people who shit on you.”

I don’t know about anybody else, but my tummy’s starting to feel a little queasy….

There is an old, decidedly un-PC joke which goes:

Q:   What do  you say to a woman who has two black eyes?

A:   Nothing – she’s obviously not a very good listener.

Although it will no doubt offend some for being misogynistic & crass, the deep truth from which this bit of barroom bonhomie derives its comedic punch (as it were) has nothing to do with gender. No, what triggers a grimacing chuckle is the recognition of the universal truth that when first and second bruisings don’t engender wisdom, words are hardly likely to make much of a difference.

That same truth is why Barack Obama is starting to look a lot like a one-term President. Because even as The Chosen One admits that he got shellacked, even as the alarm clock goes off on another Groundhog Day, the lesson fails to sink in.

Unlike the unfortunate victim of spousal abuse in that tired old joke, his walk-on-water-liness doesn’t have just one black eye; he’s sporting enough of them to fill a Morman nuclear family. Starting with the stimulus, on to the salvation of the nation’s largest remaining manufacturing industry, through health care and cap & trade (remember cap & trade? It was supposed to be the opening move in a large-scale policy shift and set an example for the rest of the world. It was also supported by the vast majority of Americans) and right through financial reform, the BarackStar has continued his noxious habit of assaulting The Right’s fist with his face.

And now, to paraphrase the original Great Manipulator Communicator, there he goes again.

In one of the most stunningly crass examples of un-patriotism and anti-statesmanship that I can remember since Newt Gingrich ascended the steps of the Capital building in 1994 and announced that he was looking forward to using his newly-acquired power to destroy the institutions of government, Senate minority leader McConnell announced just two days after the election that the only thing he plans to do during the next two years of his long taxpayer-funded career is to undermine one of the other co-equal branches of government. For political gain.

Disgusting.

And the cool-calm-and-collected-one’s response? “Why don’t you fellas come on up to the White House. You can sip slurpees while I root around and see if I can’t find another eye for you to punch.”

Even more disgusting.

Let’s first establish a baseline for the conversation. The Democratic Party didn’t get its collective asses kicked because the country disagrees with their values. In poll after poll, American’s cultural attitudes come down squarely on the side of the angels – we believe that the free market requires proper regulation to work effectively, we want to invest in education and infrastructure, we’re horrified at the death of the middle class, we don’t care very much about the sexual orientation of two people who love each other and want to get married (or who are willing to serve in the military), we want to do what we can to make the world a fairer place than “nature red in tooth and claw”, we’re willing to give up a little of what we have to make the world a better place for our children…the list goes on. Yet despite this cultural tailwind, Democrats can only seem to win elections after the other side has power long enough to demonstrate its complete contempt for those values.

So it’s obvious that the problem isn’t that the Democrats don’t understand the aspirations of the country; they get them just fine. The problem is that nobody trusts them to translate those aspirations into action. Nobody trusts them to lead.

And who’s to blame them?

We live in a football country. Unlike the rest of the world, which revels in a “beautiful game” that reflects the existentialist principle of sound and fury signifying nothing, Americans keep score. That’s probably not even a strong enough way to say it, actually – we don’t just keep score, we absolutely depend on scores to make sense of our increasingly complex world. And not just final scores – we watch, and keep track of, and endlessly rehash & dissect every play. Every gain and loss, every pass & handoff, every penalty, every first down, every field goal, touchdown, extra point and safety, who gets injured, who trash talks their team, who gets fired for it, how much it costs them in lost income when they get fired and yadayadayada. We even have an entire $3 billion industry built on using the statistics generated by the game to imagine how different combinations of players would lead to different outcomes. This is not to say that we’re not hugely invested in who wins or loses– we have our tribal loyalties just as does your average soccer hooligan. What it says is that simply winning or losing doesn’t satisfy our need to understand what’s going on; we need to justify the outcome with an understanding of how we got there.

Because we spend so much more time watching sports than we do thinking about the finer points of managing the social contract, and because both sports and politics are competitive fields of battle, it should surprise no one that one of the primary ‘hints’ that we take about who we should believe (and believe in) is how they play the game. People who play the game more successfully inherently engage our sympathies and win our trust.

As smart as Obama is, and as much more intelligent and well-educated as Progressives are than our right-leaning brethren, we Just Don’t Get it when it comes to understanding that what the vast majority of our countrymen need in order to trust us with the reins of power is to see us fight hard and score points.

Which is why we’re all sporting a couple of shiners this week.