(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
This column is a must-read, refuting Robert Shiller:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/09/30/shillers-underwhelming-innovations/
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
No Hot Air
Need an Energy Consultant? Maybe Not.
No Hot Air provides just that: we remove the unnecessary layers of complexity that have arisen around buying gas and power for UK business end-users.
Over a third of UK end-users use third parties to negotiate energy contracts. We'd imagine that another third are active buyers with their own energy managers engaging with suppliers to varying degrees, and the other third, until 2008, didn't think energy prices were worth bothering about.
NHO is for energy buyers who want to think for themselves, but sometimes wonder where to start. That's OK. We're not judgemental. Everyone's been there. Unfortunately, although every business is an energy buyer, only the largest can afford their own energy manager. But at today's prices, everyone is suddenly a large user.
Some businesses do need energy consultants, especially those with an engineering focus that concentrate on reducing use as the number one way to measure results. If a company doesn't have a clue about how much energy they use, has complex multi-site portfolios with supplier issues or has no problem with paying (directly or indirectly,often both) outsiders to resolve key issues that impact profitability, then an energy consultant can help.
In reality, few business users actually need the third party introducers (3PIs) [for Glendale that means Don Marshall] that are a singularity, in global terms, of the UK business energy landscape. They were needed ten years ago. But today, 3PIs are as useful as Filofaxes, The Cones Hotline and Mr Blobby. Pfftt...
3PI's will disagree of course:
They say they can get a better price through competition. Not that competition has no impact at all.
They insist that aggregating consumption to their portfolio will get a better price. Not in a commodity market.
They explain how complex energy buying is. 3PIs owe their existence to arcane rules, inefficient metering and outdated pricing concepts. They have a vested interest in those market inefficiencies continuing, not removing them. NHO [No Hot Air] says energy buying can be far easier and uncomplicated with minimum investment and a little new thinking.
Many 3PIs are far less forthcoming on how they get paid. A 3PI's [Don Marshall's] reason for existence isn't to cut your energy costs - it's to maximise their revenue. They do this by taking a part of the value that should be divided between supplier and end-user. And they often do this in ways that work against everyones' best interests. Except their own.
One of the easiest ways that 3PIs generate revenue is rampant in 2008: Sign clients at today's prices for long term deals. Do they do this because they genuinely feel energy costs will be higher in the future and fixing is prudent? Or do they need either an immediately larger commission or a guaranteed revenue stream for future years?Apparent free choice in energy is in reality affected by how options are presented. One pricing option is only offered by the most reputable 3PIs, self confident enough about the value of their work in other areas.That might explain why most businesses are never told about the option of pricing against an index: 3PIs can't make money out of a default option.
Index pricing was once only for large energy users, but today most suppliers can offer the option to any user. At NHO we don't confuse what happened in the past with forecasting the future. A rear view mirror is not a crystal ball. But we're open minded and unbiased: If we see a story that tells us that prices are coming down, we tell you about it. Readers don't have to act on it, nor on the reverse. But on the other hand, readers don't pay us for the information. We don't have a crystal ball. But no one needs to cross our palm with silver either. We aim to show ways to cut energy costs- and carbon- the old-fashioned way - use less of it.
3PIs will tell you at every opportunity about the dreaded R word: Risk. Maybe that's why they are as hard to get rid of as insurance salesmen. We tell you: Index prices go up and go down. Just like life. Price spikes, however unpleasant, are unlikely to have a major impact on business for anything more than a short term. Markets do dumb things sometimes. But they don't do dumb things all the time. Fix a long term price and - the price is fixed for a long term. A one year fixed price is definitely the best price - on 1 out of 253 UK business days. That's a risk too, and not the kind of odds to go to Vegas - or the board - with. Transparent index prices incentivise enterprises to reduce energy consumption and make efficiency adjustments at times and places where they deliver the higher savings and shorter paybacks. That helps buyers better assess the green options available today, some of which are just free range snake oil.
A fixed price may seem smart sometimes, but if the market turns then the risk is that fixed prices are a significant disadvantage. At NHO, we just don't know: but we won't charge you for the opinion. A fixed price will give you the best price for sure. On that day. Tomorrow? Most energy forecasting is glorified meteorology. Will it rain a week on Wednesday? Which way for oil, gas or coal? Will your pension go up or down? Most people don't worry - it's indexed. Why not energy?
Index prices for energy are the norm in most countries, even for domestic users. Fixed prices are an outdated concept in the UK today - they were born out of the 1990's.
The dawn of UK competition coincided with a collapse in commodity prices. Many end-users mistakenly connected competition with energy price falls. It was mere coincidence. Not that a 3PI would point that out of course.Most countries now have utility competition: but in a world of rising commodity prices, competition is stillborn - < id="trackback">
No Hot Air provides just that: we remove the unnecessary layers of complexity that have arisen around buying gas and power for UK business end-users.
Over a third of UK end-users use third parties to negotiate energy contracts. We'd imagine that another third are active buyers with their own energy managers engaging with suppliers to varying degrees, and the other third, until 2008, didn't think energy prices were worth bothering about.
NHO is for energy buyers who want to think for themselves, but sometimes wonder where to start. That's OK. We're not judgemental. Everyone's been there. Unfortunately, although every business is an energy buyer, only the largest can afford their own energy manager. But at today's prices, everyone is suddenly a large user.
Some businesses do need energy consultants, especially those with an engineering focus that concentrate on reducing use as the number one way to measure results. If a company doesn't have a clue about how much energy they use, has complex multi-site portfolios with supplier issues or has no problem with paying (directly or indirectly,often both) outsiders to resolve key issues that impact profitability, then an energy consultant can help.
In reality, few business users actually need the third party introducers (3PIs) [for Glendale that means Don Marshall] that are a singularity, in global terms, of the UK business energy landscape. They were needed ten years ago. But today, 3PIs are as useful as Filofaxes, The Cones Hotline and Mr Blobby. Pfftt...
3PI's will disagree of course:
They say they can get a better price through competition. Not that competition has no impact at all.
They insist that aggregating consumption to their portfolio will get a better price. Not in a commodity market.
They explain how complex energy buying is. 3PIs owe their existence to arcane rules, inefficient metering and outdated pricing concepts. They have a vested interest in those market inefficiencies continuing, not removing them. NHO [No Hot Air] says energy buying can be far easier and uncomplicated with minimum investment and a little new thinking.
Many 3PIs are far less forthcoming on how they get paid. A 3PI's [Don Marshall's] reason for existence isn't to cut your energy costs - it's to maximise their revenue. They do this by taking a part of the value that should be divided between supplier and end-user. And they often do this in ways that work against everyones' best interests. Except their own.
One of the easiest ways that 3PIs generate revenue is rampant in 2008: Sign clients at today's prices for long term deals. Do they do this because they genuinely feel energy costs will be higher in the future and fixing is prudent? Or do they need either an immediately larger commission or a guaranteed revenue stream for future years?Apparent free choice in energy is in reality affected by how options are presented. One pricing option is only offered by the most reputable 3PIs, self confident enough about the value of their work in other areas.That might explain why most businesses are never told about the option of pricing against an index: 3PIs can't make money out of a default option.
Index pricing was once only for large energy users, but today most suppliers can offer the option to any user. At NHO we don't confuse what happened in the past with forecasting the future. A rear view mirror is not a crystal ball. But we're open minded and unbiased: If we see a story that tells us that prices are coming down, we tell you about it. Readers don't have to act on it, nor on the reverse. But on the other hand, readers don't pay us for the information. We don't have a crystal ball. But no one needs to cross our palm with silver either. We aim to show ways to cut energy costs- and carbon- the old-fashioned way - use less of it.
3PIs will tell you at every opportunity about the dreaded R word: Risk. Maybe that's why they are as hard to get rid of as insurance salesmen. We tell you: Index prices go up and go down. Just like life. Price spikes, however unpleasant, are unlikely to have a major impact on business for anything more than a short term. Markets do dumb things sometimes. But they don't do dumb things all the time. Fix a long term price and - the price is fixed for a long term. A one year fixed price is definitely the best price - on 1 out of 253 UK business days. That's a risk too, and not the kind of odds to go to Vegas - or the board - with. Transparent index prices incentivise enterprises to reduce energy consumption and make efficiency adjustments at times and places where they deliver the higher savings and shorter paybacks. That helps buyers better assess the green options available today, some of which are just free range snake oil.
A fixed price may seem smart sometimes, but if the market turns then the risk is that fixed prices are a significant disadvantage. At NHO, we just don't know: but we won't charge you for the opinion. A fixed price will give you the best price for sure. On that day. Tomorrow? Most energy forecasting is glorified meteorology. Will it rain a week on Wednesday? Which way for oil, gas or coal? Will your pension go up or down? Most people don't worry - it's indexed. Why not energy?
Index prices for energy are the norm in most countries, even for domestic users. Fixed prices are an outdated concept in the UK today - they were born out of the 1990's.
The dawn of UK competition coincided with a collapse in commodity prices. Many end-users mistakenly connected competition with energy price falls. It was mere coincidence. Not that a 3PI would point that out of course.Most countries now have utility competition: but in a world of rising commodity prices, competition is stillborn - < id="trackback">
Friedman -- A Must Read Today
(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
Every once in a while Friedman writes a column which must be heeded. We all must read this and harken to what happened in Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30friedman.html?_r=1
Every once in a while Friedman writes a column which must be heeded. We all must read this and harken to what happened in Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30friedman.html?_r=1
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Smart Grid From No Hot Air, a British Blog
I'm just starting to explore this great blog written in the UK. It covers the same topics as I do.
Sep 22, 2009
Smart Grid Savings
Before we discovered Shale Gas, No Hot Air was very interested in Smart Metering.
We want to help business users control their costs. One way is to avoid long term prices and their associated risk of paying through the nose, or through the teeth of shark consultants, for the sake of a fixed price.
We also wanted to point out the bleeding obvious that the cheapest energy of all, is the energy not used. Why obsess about a few decimal points per kWh on price, when the lowest hanging fruit is wasted energy? So, one thing that hasn't changed since April 2008 is that the best savings are from combined smart metering and index prices.
We haven't done a Smart Meter story for a while. From a UK viewpoint the continual bickering, pointless consultation upon pointless consultation and general inablility to make a decision are symptomatic of all that's wrong in UK energy. If half the energy wasted on deciding the reasons for one of many organisations (DTI,DECC, Ofgem, National Grid, Suppliers, Manufacturers) to avoid making a decision were instead spent on implementation....
We'll leave the depressing news to www.smartmeters.com:
UK SmartMeter Rollout – Not Likely This year or The Next or the Next.....
The UK government is still procrastinating on Smartmeters, and UK energy firms are wasting millions of pounds in dumb pre-pay meter rollouts.The UK Government announced on the 11th of May 2009, the rollout of 46 Million Smart Utility Meters, this was hailed the revolution of the 21st Century. SmartMeters were the answer to see the end of the highly controversial Estimated Billing, a sigh of relief must have been heard across the entire UK population.Estimated billing, you either pay too much, therefore giving the utility an interest free loan; or you pay not enough, only then to be hit with a massive shortfall and demands for payment
Positive news of the potential which we could achieve, or negative news in how much we squander in time wasting comes from the NY Times:
A smart grid pilot project in Fayetteville, N.C., has resulted in an initial 20 percent decline in average electricity consumption
A smart grid is the next iteration of smart meters in that everything down to plug level is just another node on a wireless network. The chance of the UK having a smart grid anytime before 2050 are slim to none judging from the Smart Metering Fiasco. Still, we can dream....
Consert attached controllers on hot water heaters, air conditioners and pool pumps and then let customers go online and set targets for their monthly electricity bill. Smart meters and a wireless communications system provide real-time electricity consumption data to allow the utility to cycle appliances on and off to achieve the savings and help it manage peak demand.
One of the problems of the UK system where financial institutions have sliced and diced every part of the energy chain into miniscule pieces (generator, upstream, terminal operator,national transmission, local network, meter provider, meter operator, data provider, data comms provider, emergency service provider, supplier, billing contractor, energy consultant etc) is that getting a network of people like that to work together makes linking plugs together childs play, especially with the Ofgem mantra of competition solves everything. One of the really pointless discussions is obsession with costs. Any one of the above actors worries about their selfish costs of literally pennies per user per year.But the opportunity costs of not acting are far higher for both energy users (all of us) and the planet (that's all of us too!).
But the crazy thing is that a smart grid is far cheaper overall:
The Consert system, which is based on IBM software, would allow the Fayetteville Public Works Commission to selectively reduce demand among its 80,000 customers without having to, say, shut off everyone’s air conditioners at the same time.
Utilities typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars building so-called peaking power plants that provide electricity when demand spikes, and otherwise sit idle for most of the year.
Keith Lynch, an executive at the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, said the utility hopes the Consert system will help it to cut such capital costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’re looking at building a new gas-fired generation plant, but this solution would mitigate the need to build the size power plant that we had anticipated,” he said.
Sep 22, 2009
Smart Grid Savings
Before we discovered Shale Gas, No Hot Air was very interested in Smart Metering.
We want to help business users control their costs. One way is to avoid long term prices and their associated risk of paying through the nose, or through the teeth of shark consultants, for the sake of a fixed price.
We also wanted to point out the bleeding obvious that the cheapest energy of all, is the energy not used. Why obsess about a few decimal points per kWh on price, when the lowest hanging fruit is wasted energy? So, one thing that hasn't changed since April 2008 is that the best savings are from combined smart metering and index prices.
We haven't done a Smart Meter story for a while. From a UK viewpoint the continual bickering, pointless consultation upon pointless consultation and general inablility to make a decision are symptomatic of all that's wrong in UK energy. If half the energy wasted on deciding the reasons for one of many organisations (DTI,DECC, Ofgem, National Grid, Suppliers, Manufacturers) to avoid making a decision were instead spent on implementation....
We'll leave the depressing news to www.smartmeters.com:
UK SmartMeter Rollout – Not Likely This year or The Next or the Next.....
The UK government is still procrastinating on Smartmeters, and UK energy firms are wasting millions of pounds in dumb pre-pay meter rollouts.The UK Government announced on the 11th of May 2009, the rollout of 46 Million Smart Utility Meters, this was hailed the revolution of the 21st Century. SmartMeters were the answer to see the end of the highly controversial Estimated Billing, a sigh of relief must have been heard across the entire UK population.Estimated billing, you either pay too much, therefore giving the utility an interest free loan; or you pay not enough, only then to be hit with a massive shortfall and demands for payment
Positive news of the potential which we could achieve, or negative news in how much we squander in time wasting comes from the NY Times:
A smart grid pilot project in Fayetteville, N.C., has resulted in an initial 20 percent decline in average electricity consumption
A smart grid is the next iteration of smart meters in that everything down to plug level is just another node on a wireless network. The chance of the UK having a smart grid anytime before 2050 are slim to none judging from the Smart Metering Fiasco. Still, we can dream....
Consert attached controllers on hot water heaters, air conditioners and pool pumps and then let customers go online and set targets for their monthly electricity bill. Smart meters and a wireless communications system provide real-time electricity consumption data to allow the utility to cycle appliances on and off to achieve the savings and help it manage peak demand.
One of the problems of the UK system where financial institutions have sliced and diced every part of the energy chain into miniscule pieces (generator, upstream, terminal operator,national transmission, local network, meter provider, meter operator, data provider, data comms provider, emergency service provider, supplier, billing contractor, energy consultant etc) is that getting a network of people like that to work together makes linking plugs together childs play, especially with the Ofgem mantra of competition solves everything. One of the really pointless discussions is obsession with costs. Any one of the above actors worries about their selfish costs of literally pennies per user per year.But the opportunity costs of not acting are far higher for both energy users (all of us) and the planet (that's all of us too!).
But the crazy thing is that a smart grid is far cheaper overall:
The Consert system, which is based on IBM software, would allow the Fayetteville Public Works Commission to selectively reduce demand among its 80,000 customers without having to, say, shut off everyone’s air conditioners at the same time.
Utilities typically spend hundreds of millions of dollars building so-called peaking power plants that provide electricity when demand spikes, and otherwise sit idle for most of the year.
Keith Lynch, an executive at the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, said the utility hopes the Consert system will help it to cut such capital costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’re looking at building a new gas-fired generation plant, but this solution would mitigate the need to build the size power plant that we had anticipated,” he said.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Baseline Scenario
This stuff couldn't be made up. Especially the second article.
The Baseline Scenario
The G20 Summit in Pittsburgh: Should You Care?
Posted: 24 Sep 2009 12:50 PM PDT
On Thursday evening and all day Friday, heads of government from countries belonging to the G20 will meet in Pittsburgh. On paper, this looks important – 90 percent of world economic output and 67 percent of world population will be at the table: the G7 (US, Canada, Japan, UK, Germany, France, and Italy), plus the European Union, the largest emerging market countries (including China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa) and a few others. And unlike the G7, which is really a club for rich industrialized countries, every continent and almost all income levels are represented in the G20.
The last time this group met – in London at the beginning of April – they had one of the most productive summits in living memory, agreeing to triple the resources of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so that it could help troubled countries, while also projecting an image of determination to “do whatever it takes” to avoid a Second Great Depression.
There could still be dramatic moments at or around the summit. There will be some street protests, mavericks could rock the boat (President Sarkozy of France is always threatening to do this), and there is always scope for mini-drama and quirky photos when so many heads of government rub shoulders.
But in terms of the economic agenda – and this meeting is supposed to be about the global economy – the likely deliverables look thin. Three issues are up for discussion.
First, whether the countries can agree on “rebalancing” global growth, which means – in its current iteration — that the US would commit to save more and China would commit to save less. But “commit” will not mean that the countries agree to any penalties if they fail to comply. The US may well save more as it struggles along the road to recovery – after all, households have been saving very little for over a decade – but this won’t be much or at all affected by any agreement at Pittsburgh.
Second, whether lower income countries can have more representation at the International Monetary Fund. This is a long-standing issue, which should eventually help the IMF rebuild the legitimacy that was sorely damaged by its handling of the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, real progress on this issue is blocked by some rich West European countries, who are overrepresented at the IMF for historical reasons and who would lose out in any reshuffle; they will not be in Pittsburgh and there is no sign of any new concessions from this side.
Third, to what degree and precisely how financial regulation will be tightened around the world. Here there is scope for a deal, with the US pushing for higher capital requirements for banks, while the Europeans (and Mr. Sarkozy in particular) are demanding changes in how bankers are compensated. These are crucial question, but here we face our greatest potential disappointment.
The open secret is that even the US is not pushing for significantly higher capital requirements – the US Treasury view is that our largest banks currently “have enough capital,” even though Citi and JP Morgan have roughly only about as much of an equity cushion against losses as did Lehman Brothers the day before it failed. So the US proposal is largely meaningless – which does not prevent the continental Europeans from opposing it; many of their banks are very thinly capitalized but their governments don’t want to draw attention to this fact.
The Europeans want, instead, to focus on how bankers are paid. Compensation systems in big banks encourage reckless risk-taking, but more this is more of a symptom than a cause. Unless the underlying causes are tackled – the excessive size of our biggest banks, their thin level of capital, and the revolving door that has top Wall Street people running bailout strategy in Washington – changing compensation rules would just increase the effort that smart lawyers and accountants put into figuring out new ways to pay people.
If the G20 fails to deliver, is it really possible that we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes with regard to building up vulnerabilities in our financial system? Amazingly, the answer is: a definite yes. How can this happen, with so many smart people in government? Unfortunately, it is not about having clever individuals on the job; it is about their incentives, their world view, and whether or not they really face pressure for change.
During World War I on the Western Front, well-educated British generals with great practical experience insisted on repeating the same mistakes again and again, at great cost. Democratic oversight, in that context, was worth little. If you delegate to “experts” and they fall into dangerous groupthink – and are allowed to construct sophisticated sequential cover-ups – expect the worst.
By Simon Johnson
This is a slightly edited version of a post that first appeared on the NYT’s Economix. If you would like to reproduce the entire post, please contact the NYT for permission.
Just Baffling
Posted: 24 Sep 2009 11:27 AM PDT
PPIP finally launches, Mike Konczal lays bare the subsidy, everyone just move along … hey, wait a second!
From the Times article: “[FDIC] officials announced that they had reached a deal to sell $1.3 billion in mortgages from Franklin Bank, a Houston-based lender that failed last November and was taken over by the F.D.I.C.”
Konczal, of course, also caught this:
“The first argument is that it would take banks that were otherwise healthy and allow them to start lending again in the middle of a credit crunch. We taxpayers pay to help unload these loans onto other private markets, so that the bank can start lending again.
“But as financeguy points out, the bank in question, Franklin Bank, is dead. FDIC took it over around a year ago, with its balance sheet deep in the red and after losing double digits in loans since 2007. It took a huge gamble in the real estate market, and it got destroyed. This isn’t an otherwise healthy bank with one bad asset on it.”
But I think he is altogether too cool about this. Let me try for a little more indignation. Our government is providing large subsidies to private investors to buy toxic assets. The only possible justification for these subsidies is that they are necessary to restore health to the banking system, by taking toxic assets off the balance sheets of banks. But these toxic assets are already the property of the U.S. government. This means that the government owns 100% of the upside and 100% of the downside on those assets.
Or at least it did until last week. Then it gave half the upside to an investment fund – “Residential Credit Solutions of Fort Worth, a three-year-old company founded by Dennis Stowe, a veteran of the subprime mortgage industry” – and kept all of the downside to itself. What could they possibly have been thinking?
(And wasn’t there supposed to be an auction in there somewhere? The Times story doesn’t mention one (although that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one). Without an auction, how do we know this isn’t more of a giveaway than it already looks like?)
By James Kwak
Notes From Calgary
(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
The problem oil sands has with environmentalists. Implies that such oil is banned by the US. Presented as a PR problem. Some of the comments after the article are excellent.
Keep in mind we're talking of oil, not natural gas, in this article, I believe.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Yedlin+Energy+sector+losing+battle/2019740/story.html
The problem oil sands has with environmentalists. Implies that such oil is banned by the US. Presented as a PR problem. Some of the comments after the article are excellent.
Keep in mind we're talking of oil, not natural gas, in this article, I believe.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Yedlin+Energy+sector+losing+battle/2019740/story.html
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Tech Tip -- Just Upgraded My Memory Myself!
(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
Replaced 2 512 mb with 2 1 gb's.
Called Dell 10 days ago; got great live service; she walked me through what my two computers now had; what was needed; shipped the parts UPS.
Then http://www.dellsupport.com/ provided me with the manual for my laptop and http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/Dell PartsFamily.aspx?c=us&cs= and some more which has an ambiguous letter, but you can find it...has a movie which just shows how to ground yourself before handling the parts, but shows exactly how the new modules click in with a firm click so you know you've done it right.
Now, after powering up, everything is quick, quick.
It's like gaining ten years of life. And I had a good laptop before this!
I feel like I've just climbed Mt. Everest!
Replaced 2 512 mb with 2 1 gb's.
Called Dell 10 days ago; got great live service; she walked me through what my two computers now had; what was needed; shipped the parts UPS.
Then http://www.dellsupport.com/ provided me with the manual for my laptop and http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/Dell PartsFamily.aspx?c=us&cs= and some more which has an ambiguous letter, but you can find it...has a movie which just shows how to ground yourself before handling the parts, but shows exactly how the new modules click in with a firm click so you know you've done it right.
Now, after powering up, everything is quick, quick.
It's like gaining ten years of life. And I had a good laptop before this!
I feel like I've just climbed Mt. Everest!
Aggregation
(c)2009 F. Bruce Abel
In England deregulation of natural gas began way before it started in America. Here is the best blog so far -- called "No Hot Air" -- on why villages and towns do not need the energy consultant nor the fixed contract with the unknown supplier. Herein also the pricing against index option, a concept that I am not familiar with at the moment.
http://nohotair.typepad.co.uk/no_hot_air/want-an-energy-consultant.html
No Hot Air
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http://nohotair.typepad.co.uk/no_hot_air/coming-july-2009-wwwigasandelectriccom.html
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Need an Energy Consultant? Maybe Not.
No Hot Air provides just that: we remove the unnecessary layers of complexity that have arisen around buying gas and power for UK business end-users.
Over a third of UK end-users use third parties to negotiate energy contracts. We'd imagine that another third are active buyers with their own energy managers engaging with suppliers to varying degrees, and the other third, until 2008, didn't think energy prices were worth bothering about.
NHO is for energy buyers who want to think for themselves, but sometimes wonder where to start. That's OK. We're not judgemental. [Engligh post, remember?] Everyone's been there. Unfortunately, although every business is an energy buyer, only the largest can afford their own energy manager. But at today's prices, everyone is suddenly a large user.
Some businesses do need energy consultants, especially those with an engineering focus that concentrate on reducing use as the number one way to measure results. If a company doesn't have a clue about how much energy they use, has complex multi-site portfolios with supplier issues or has no problem with paying (directly or indirectly,often both) outsiders to resolve key issues that impact profitability, then an energy consultant can help.
In reality, few business users actually need the third party introducers (3PIs) that are a singularity, in global terms, of the UK business energy landscape. They were needed ten years ago. But today, 3PIs are as useful as Filofaxes, The Cones Hotline and Mr Blobby. Pfftt...
3PI's will disagree of course:
They say they can get a better price through competition. Not that competition has no impact at all.
They insist that aggregating consumption to their portfolio will get a better price. Not in a commodity market.
They explain how complex energy buying is. 3PIs owe their existence to arcane rules, inefficient metering and outdated pricing concepts. They have a vested interest in those market inefficiencies continuing, not removing them. NHO says energy buying can be far easier and uncomplicated with minimum investment and a little new thinking.
Many 3PIs are far less forthcoming on how they get paid. A 3PI's reason for existence isn't to cut your energy costs - it's to maximise their revenue. They do this by taking a part of the value that should be divided between supplier and end-user. And they often do this in ways that work against everyones' best interests. Except their own.
One of the easiest ways that 3PIs generate revenue is rampant in 2008: Sign clients at today's prices for long term deals. Do they do this because they genuinely feel energy costs will be higher in the future and fixing is prudent? Or do they need either an immediately larger commission or a guaranteed revenue stream for future years?Apparent free choice in energy is in reality affected by how options are presented. One pricing option is only offered by the most reputable 3PIs, self confident enough about the value of their work in other areas.That might explain why most businesses are never told about the option of pricing against an index: 3PIs can't make money out of a default option.
Index pricing was once only for large energy users, but today most suppliers can offer the option to any user. At NHO we don't confuse what happened in the past with forecasting the future. A rear view mirror is not a crystal ball. But we're open minded and unbiased: If we see a story that tells us that prices are coming down, we tell you about it. Readers don't have to act on it, nor on the reverse. But on the other hand, readers don't pay us for the information. We don't have a crystal ball. But no one needs to cross our palm with silver either. We aim to show ways to cut energy costs- and carbon- the old-fashioned way - use less of it.
3PIs will tell you at every opportunity about the dreaded R word: Risk. Maybe that's why they are as hard to get rid of as insurance salesmen. We tell you: Index prices go up and go down. Just like life. Price spikes, however unpleasant, are unlikely to have a major impact on business for anything more than a short term. Markets do dumb things sometimes. But they don't do dumb things all the time. Fix a long term price and - the price is fixed for a long term. A one year fixed price is definitely the best price - on 1 out of 253 UK business days. That's a risk too, and not the kind of odds to go to Vegas - or the board - with. Transparent index prices incentivise enterprises to reduce energy consumption and make efficiency adjustments at times and places where they deliver the higher savings and shorter paybacks. That helps buyers better assess the green options available today, some of which are just free range snake oil.
A fixed price may seem smart sometimes, but if the market turns then the risk is that fixed prices are a significant disadvantage. At NHO, we just don't know: but we won't charge you for the opinion. A fixed price will give you the best price for sure. On that day. Tomorrow? Most energy forecasting is glorified meteorology. Will it rain a week on Wednesday? Which way for oil, gas or coal? Will your pension go up or down? Most people don't worry - it's indexed. Why not energy?
Index prices for energy are the norm in most countries, even for domestic users. Fixed prices are an outdated concept in the UK today - they were born out of the 1990's. The dawn of UK competition coincided with a collapse in commodity prices. Many end-users mistakenly connected competition with energy price falls. It was mere coincidence. Not that a 3PI would point that out of course.Most countries now have utility competition: but in a world of rising commodity prices, competition is stillborn - <>only the largest multi-million pound end-users were offered index prices that performed even better. But today, the default option is the best option over time. No guarantees. But no buyer remorse. No second-guessing. No tiresome benchmarking. No blaming a consultant for high prices - but not paying commission for it either. The same prices as everyone else. Choose your supplier on service, which includes reducing volume and cost - price is irrelevant. In 2008 what was once a small spend is now a big spend - fixed or index. 3PIs are moving down the value chain to target inexperienced smaller gas and electricity users because at today's prices they make serious money from fixed contracts - the longer the better. But they won't make any money selling end-users the default option. Even they haven't figured out a way to make money by advising clients to do nothing. NHO is advertiser supported. Among those advertisers will be energy suppliers. But they won't pay NHO a commission for anyone's energy use. We think we can make money out of No Hot Air. But not at your expense.
In England deregulation of natural gas began way before it started in America. Here is the best blog so far -- called "No Hot Air" -- on why villages and towns do not need the energy consultant nor the fixed contract with the unknown supplier. Herein also the pricing against index option, a concept that I am not familiar with at the moment.
http://nohotair.typepad.co.uk/no_hot_air/want-an-energy-consultant.html
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Need an Energy Consultant? Maybe Not.
No Hot Air provides just that: we remove the unnecessary layers of complexity that have arisen around buying gas and power for UK business end-users.
Over a third of UK end-users use third parties to negotiate energy contracts. We'd imagine that another third are active buyers with their own energy managers engaging with suppliers to varying degrees, and the other third, until 2008, didn't think energy prices were worth bothering about.
NHO is for energy buyers who want to think for themselves, but sometimes wonder where to start. That's OK. We're not judgemental. [Engligh post, remember?] Everyone's been there. Unfortunately, although every business is an energy buyer, only the largest can afford their own energy manager. But at today's prices, everyone is suddenly a large user.
Some businesses do need energy consultants, especially those with an engineering focus that concentrate on reducing use as the number one way to measure results. If a company doesn't have a clue about how much energy they use, has complex multi-site portfolios with supplier issues or has no problem with paying (directly or indirectly,often both) outsiders to resolve key issues that impact profitability, then an energy consultant can help.
In reality, few business users actually need the third party introducers (3PIs) that are a singularity, in global terms, of the UK business energy landscape. They were needed ten years ago. But today, 3PIs are as useful as Filofaxes, The Cones Hotline and Mr Blobby. Pfftt...
3PI's will disagree of course:
They say they can get a better price through competition. Not that competition has no impact at all.
They insist that aggregating consumption to their portfolio will get a better price. Not in a commodity market.
They explain how complex energy buying is. 3PIs owe their existence to arcane rules, inefficient metering and outdated pricing concepts. They have a vested interest in those market inefficiencies continuing, not removing them. NHO says energy buying can be far easier and uncomplicated with minimum investment and a little new thinking.
Many 3PIs are far less forthcoming on how they get paid. A 3PI's reason for existence isn't to cut your energy costs - it's to maximise their revenue. They do this by taking a part of the value that should be divided between supplier and end-user. And they often do this in ways that work against everyones' best interests. Except their own.
One of the easiest ways that 3PIs generate revenue is rampant in 2008: Sign clients at today's prices for long term deals. Do they do this because they genuinely feel energy costs will be higher in the future and fixing is prudent? Or do they need either an immediately larger commission or a guaranteed revenue stream for future years?Apparent free choice in energy is in reality affected by how options are presented. One pricing option is only offered by the most reputable 3PIs, self confident enough about the value of their work in other areas.That might explain why most businesses are never told about the option of pricing against an index: 3PIs can't make money out of a default option.
Index pricing was once only for large energy users, but today most suppliers can offer the option to any user. At NHO we don't confuse what happened in the past with forecasting the future. A rear view mirror is not a crystal ball. But we're open minded and unbiased: If we see a story that tells us that prices are coming down, we tell you about it. Readers don't have to act on it, nor on the reverse. But on the other hand, readers don't pay us for the information. We don't have a crystal ball. But no one needs to cross our palm with silver either. We aim to show ways to cut energy costs- and carbon- the old-fashioned way - use less of it.
3PIs will tell you at every opportunity about the dreaded R word: Risk. Maybe that's why they are as hard to get rid of as insurance salesmen. We tell you: Index prices go up and go down. Just like life. Price spikes, however unpleasant, are unlikely to have a major impact on business for anything more than a short term. Markets do dumb things sometimes. But they don't do dumb things all the time. Fix a long term price and - the price is fixed for a long term. A one year fixed price is definitely the best price - on 1 out of 253 UK business days. That's a risk too, and not the kind of odds to go to Vegas - or the board - with. Transparent index prices incentivise enterprises to reduce energy consumption and make efficiency adjustments at times and places where they deliver the higher savings and shorter paybacks. That helps buyers better assess the green options available today, some of which are just free range snake oil.
A fixed price may seem smart sometimes, but if the market turns then the risk is that fixed prices are a significant disadvantage. At NHO, we just don't know: but we won't charge you for the opinion. A fixed price will give you the best price for sure. On that day. Tomorrow? Most energy forecasting is glorified meteorology. Will it rain a week on Wednesday? Which way for oil, gas or coal? Will your pension go up or down? Most people don't worry - it's indexed. Why not energy?
Index prices for energy are the norm in most countries, even for domestic users. Fixed prices are an outdated concept in the UK today - they were born out of the 1990's. The dawn of UK competition coincided with a collapse in commodity prices. Many end-users mistakenly connected competition with energy price falls. It was mere coincidence. Not that a 3PI would point that out of course.Most countries now have utility competition: but in a world of rising commodity prices, competition is stillborn - <>only the largest multi-million pound end-users were offered index prices that performed even better. But today, the default option is the best option over time. No guarantees. But no buyer remorse. No second-guessing. No tiresome benchmarking. No blaming a consultant for high prices - but not paying commission for it either. The same prices as everyone else. Choose your supplier on service, which includes reducing volume and cost - price is irrelevant. In 2008 what was once a small spend is now a big spend - fixed or index. 3PIs are moving down the value chain to target inexperienced smaller gas and electricity users because at today's prices they make serious money from fixed contracts - the longer the better. But they won't make any money selling end-users the default option. Even they haven't figured out a way to make money by advising clients to do nothing. NHO is advertiser supported. Among those advertisers will be energy suppliers. But they won't pay NHO a commission for anyone's energy use. We think we can make money out of No Hot Air. But not at your expense.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Cramer Last Night -- Eureka Moment on AIG
This was a golden performance by my favorite Jim Cramer last night. He pins it just right on Hank Greenberg:
Jim: Listen up! Those who run AIG (AIG)… If I were you, I would do a gigantic secondary offering right here in the high $40’s… we read about how cash strapped this company is practically every single day… now we have a GAO that to me pretty much confirms it… the situation is pretty darn hopeless… but the report was dismissed… and AIG’s stock has been powering higher and higher until the secondary chatter today… which I think maybe I started when I was buzzing around about it in the TheStreet.com, Real Money section… torpedoed the stock… now I do not know what really drove it down.. it has been up endlessly… but I, it does not matter… the stock is still up huge from where it started.. and AIG’s management needs to take advantage of the move that ended today… while it still can… and sell a bunch of new shares… that way the company will not have to fire sale meaningful divisions… that could be worth much more if people believed that AIG were not in short term trouble… and that was my Eureka Moment...
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
AIG (AIG) has got a narrow window of opportunity to raise this money… and even though there was chatter today that the government won’t allow it… I don’t care… it is the right thing to do…. AIG has been what we call in the business an up stock… meaning that it has been one way up since they did the split, the 20 for 1 reverse split… and that is because of endless unconfirmed rumors and just gossip that something good is about to happen… emanating, frankly, from someone who should be made to, let’s say be quiet immediately… Hank Greenberg, he is the man who sowed the seeds of AIG destruction even though he created the company.Now, we cannot blame everything on Greenberg’s successors… which is what he seems to want us to do… I mean Greenberg is the guy who set up the rogue London office… he is the one who commanded the company to insure financial products, not just physical ones… as always when I talk about AIG I urge you to go back to the December 2007 analyst meeting… to see just how long this company was doing stupid, stupid things… like ensuring banks to allow them to get around European capital requirements… Greenberg somehow takes no responsibility whatsoever… is never called out on this… and shamelessly hypes the company as under valued at every media outlet imaginable… this man is really off the reservation.The second reason why AIG is running despite of what I consider pretty horrible news… is the uncharacteristic hyping by its new CEO, Robert Benmosche, got in just like his predecessor did and said a lot of rosy things before doing any homework… AIG is an incredibly complicated company and you cannot just wing the valuation… I did not get Benmosche’s point at all when he insisted that the company would have no problem in paying off its huge obligations to the government… excuse me… they are unfathomable… most likely unpayable… Benmosche is a legit insurance guy out of Met Life… he should know better… but the last guy who ran it, Ed Liddy, he was out of Allstate, he did not seem to get it either… he came in all rosy and positive too.Now, I am not looking for someone to say look, this is the worst company in the world… it is a total ward of the state… just the total dregs of the earth… I am not asking the CEO to say that… I am simply saying keep your mouth shut and try to fix it for heavens sake… Greenberg and Benmosche goosed what had looked like to be an excellent short… and it has created a brutal short squeeze… that is what is really moving it up… you cannot borrow the stock… in the past the vast majority of all reverse stock splits have led to almost immediate declines when they were completed… the short sellers looked at those odds and went nuts with this thing after the 20 for 1 reverse split… with short selling representing 50% of the trading in the stock for weeks on end after the split… and that is what is going on… those guys are caught.
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
The Bottom Line!: AIG’s run on huge volume… but it is still thin given the fact that most of it is owned by the government… if I were running the company I would go out there tomorrow morning to take advantage of the short squeeze… take some money in… I think the secondary is a natural… but I also think that AIG’s management may not know how the stock market works… and therefore may not grasp that all the hype that has given the shares new life… from both Benmosche and Greenberg… remember, you have got to divide the stock by 20 to figure out the price… have given you a once in a lifetime opportunity that you should not even have… if AIG, if I were you… I would simply bang the market right here… the worst case scenario, you break the short squeeze… but AIG still gets the money… they do this, and maybe the government… meaning you and me, the taxpayers…. has finally a shot of getting some of its money back.
Jim: Listen up! Those who run AIG (AIG)… If I were you, I would do a gigantic secondary offering right here in the high $40’s… we read about how cash strapped this company is practically every single day… now we have a GAO that to me pretty much confirms it… the situation is pretty darn hopeless… but the report was dismissed… and AIG’s stock has been powering higher and higher until the secondary chatter today… which I think maybe I started when I was buzzing around about it in the TheStreet.com, Real Money section… torpedoed the stock… now I do not know what really drove it down.. it has been up endlessly… but I, it does not matter… the stock is still up huge from where it started.. and AIG’s management needs to take advantage of the move that ended today… while it still can… and sell a bunch of new shares… that way the company will not have to fire sale meaningful divisions… that could be worth much more if people believed that AIG were not in short term trouble… and that was my Eureka Moment...
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
AIG (AIG) has got a narrow window of opportunity to raise this money… and even though there was chatter today that the government won’t allow it… I don’t care… it is the right thing to do…. AIG has been what we call in the business an up stock… meaning that it has been one way up since they did the split, the 20 for 1 reverse split… and that is because of endless unconfirmed rumors and just gossip that something good is about to happen… emanating, frankly, from someone who should be made to, let’s say be quiet immediately… Hank Greenberg, he is the man who sowed the seeds of AIG destruction even though he created the company.Now, we cannot blame everything on Greenberg’s successors… which is what he seems to want us to do… I mean Greenberg is the guy who set up the rogue London office… he is the one who commanded the company to insure financial products, not just physical ones… as always when I talk about AIG I urge you to go back to the December 2007 analyst meeting… to see just how long this company was doing stupid, stupid things… like ensuring banks to allow them to get around European capital requirements… Greenberg somehow takes no responsibility whatsoever… is never called out on this… and shamelessly hypes the company as under valued at every media outlet imaginable… this man is really off the reservation.The second reason why AIG is running despite of what I consider pretty horrible news… is the uncharacteristic hyping by its new CEO, Robert Benmosche, got in just like his predecessor did and said a lot of rosy things before doing any homework… AIG is an incredibly complicated company and you cannot just wing the valuation… I did not get Benmosche’s point at all when he insisted that the company would have no problem in paying off its huge obligations to the government… excuse me… they are unfathomable… most likely unpayable… Benmosche is a legit insurance guy out of Met Life… he should know better… but the last guy who ran it, Ed Liddy, he was out of Allstate, he did not seem to get it either… he came in all rosy and positive too.Now, I am not looking for someone to say look, this is the worst company in the world… it is a total ward of the state… just the total dregs of the earth… I am not asking the CEO to say that… I am simply saying keep your mouth shut and try to fix it for heavens sake… Greenberg and Benmosche goosed what had looked like to be an excellent short… and it has created a brutal short squeeze… that is what is really moving it up… you cannot borrow the stock… in the past the vast majority of all reverse stock splits have led to almost immediate declines when they were completed… the short sellers looked at those odds and went nuts with this thing after the 20 for 1 reverse split… with short selling representing 50% of the trading in the stock for weeks on end after the split… and that is what is going on… those guys are caught.
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
The Bottom Line!: AIG’s run on huge volume… but it is still thin given the fact that most of it is owned by the government… if I were running the company I would go out there tomorrow morning to take advantage of the short squeeze… take some money in… I think the secondary is a natural… but I also think that AIG’s management may not know how the stock market works… and therefore may not grasp that all the hype that has given the shares new life… from both Benmosche and Greenberg… remember, you have got to divide the stock by 20 to figure out the price… have given you a once in a lifetime opportunity that you should not even have… if AIG, if I were you… I would simply bang the market right here… the worst case scenario, you break the short squeeze… but AIG still gets the money… they do this, and maybe the government… meaning you and me, the taxpayers…. has finally a shot of getting some of its money back.
Aggregation of Electricity
In researching electric aggregation for villages such as Glendale, Ohio, I concluded that a human doesn't have the time to check on Duke's filings with the Ohio Public Utilities Commission and their plans for making and selling and pricing power over the next two years. This would be necessary to compare Dominion's fixed price offer with Duke Energy's current rates plus projected changes to their FPP (see earlier blog). Turns out that Duke got an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that such info is a trade secret! But I'm still going with Dominion because I "feel" it will be cheaper for a couple of years. Goodbye regulation, hello gambling.
(Didn't Madoff ((justifiably)) say that his methods were trade secrets?)
Now the language from the PUCO order, or at least an Order which routinely now declares "trade secret" on the information that a well-informed residential customer needs to know when deciding whether to switch to a competitive supplier:
* * *
(5) On May 15, 2009, Duke filed a motion for a protective order, regarding the audit report. According to Duke, this report includes trade secret information. [*3] Specifically, the audit report contains a description of Duke's fuel procurement strategy, emission allowance strategy, coal contract information, purchased power information, generation information, and general business strategy. The confidential information in the report, Duke asserts, if publicly disclosed, would give its competitors access to competitively sensitive, confidential information which could allow the competitors to make offers to sell coal, etc., at higher prices than the competitors might offer in the absence of that information and to the detriment of Duke and its customers. Further, Duke contends, disclosure of this information would enable competitors in the wholesale power market to ascertain the manner in which Duke plans, manages, and operates its generating facilities, the fuel purchasing strategy, the purchased power strategy, the emission allowance strategy, and the costs associated therewith, and would enable them to ascertain Duke's positions with respect to electric generation capabilities. Further, Duke claims, this information would provide power marketing competitors with knowledge that would allow them to manipulate the market place so as to cause [*4] consumers to pay more for electricity than they otherwise would. Finally, Duke reasons that Duke would be placed at a competitive disadvantage in negotiations for fuel contracts, allowing competitors to adjust their prices, either to win contracts or to set prices artificially higher to take advantage of an overall short market, forcing consumers to pay higher prices for power. Duke confirms that this information is not known outside of Duke and is not disseminated within Duke except to those employees with a legitimate business need to know and act upon the information.2009 Ohio PUC LEXIS 479, 3-4 (Ohio PUC 2009)
(Didn't Madoff ((justifiably)) say that his methods were trade secrets?)
Now the language from the PUCO order, or at least an Order which routinely now declares "trade secret" on the information that a well-informed residential customer needs to know when deciding whether to switch to a competitive supplier:
* * *
(5) On May 15, 2009, Duke filed a motion for a protective order, regarding the audit report. According to Duke, this report includes trade secret information. [*3] Specifically, the audit report contains a description of Duke's fuel procurement strategy, emission allowance strategy, coal contract information, purchased power information, generation information, and general business strategy. The confidential information in the report, Duke asserts, if publicly disclosed, would give its competitors access to competitively sensitive, confidential information which could allow the competitors to make offers to sell coal, etc., at higher prices than the competitors might offer in the absence of that information and to the detriment of Duke and its customers. Further, Duke contends, disclosure of this information would enable competitors in the wholesale power market to ascertain the manner in which Duke plans, manages, and operates its generating facilities, the fuel purchasing strategy, the purchased power strategy, the emission allowance strategy, and the costs associated therewith, and would enable them to ascertain Duke's positions with respect to electric generation capabilities. Further, Duke claims, this information would provide power marketing competitors with knowledge that would allow them to manipulate the market place so as to cause [*4] consumers to pay more for electricity than they otherwise would. Finally, Duke reasons that Duke would be placed at a competitive disadvantage in negotiations for fuel contracts, allowing competitors to adjust their prices, either to win contracts or to set prices artificially higher to take advantage of an overall short market, forcing consumers to pay higher prices for power. Duke confirms that this information is not known outside of Duke and is not disseminated within Duke except to those employees with a legitimate business need to know and act upon the information.2009 Ohio PUC LEXIS 479, 3-4 (Ohio PUC 2009)
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Comments on Brooks on Kristol
And oh the comments on Brooks's paean to Irving Kristol, obviously his favorite mentor.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/opinion/22brooks.html
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
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Three Cheers for IrvingBack to Article »
By DAVID BROOKS
Irving Kristol thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age, but he was able to pick a side without losing his clarity.
Comments are no longer being accepted.
163 Readers' Comments
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Replies
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of 7Next
1.
George Neal
Steilacoom, WA
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Nice job! It's always a pleasure to read of someone who has a bias, but is non-ideological and pragmatic. Thansk for so many insights into people I rarely read about!
Recommended by 43 Readers
2.
soso
Canada
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Finally, the shackles locking the minds of decent conservatives is off.
Recommended by 10 Readers
3.
RoughAcres
New York
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
wow... first President Obama on David Letterman, and now this.Nice listening to/about people who THINK for a change.Thanks.
Recommended by 27 Readers
4.
Barbara
NY
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
A nice tribute, but it breaks what you state was Kristol's practice. Where's the scrutiny and the skepticism?
Recommended by 19 Readers
5.
Matthew
Portland, OR
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
It is a pity Irving Kristol's ability to rationally analyze and compromise wasn't passed on to many of his political heirs.
Recommended by 120 Readers
6.
Tim Connor
Wheaton, IL
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
It is particularly fitting that David Brooks would defend the man who made the following statement:"Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…"David Brooks is the greatest modern practicioner of using apparent earnestness to mask systematic misrepresentation to justify the often inexcusable behavior of his patrons and benefactors --who happen to be the same powerful interests served by Iring Kristol.I have news for you David. We are held accountable for our actions. And you cannot be forgiven if you do not repent.
Recommended by 413 Readers
7.
Ortrud Radbod
Antwerp, Belgium
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Irving Kristol was a reactionary right wing revanchist. Don't sugar coat him, Brooks. Don't even try.
Recommended by 306 Readers
8.
Richard Bowes
Manhattan
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
For what it's worth Edmund Burke was Anglo Irish.
Recommended by 15 Readers
9.
MNW
Connecticut
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Somehow I think Irving Kristol would approve of the following comment from an enlightened Norwegian.A Real Socialist StateAs a Norwegian, looking at the U.S. health care debate from the outside, I cannot help but laugh sometimes. It seems like the word “socialism” has become a swear word. In Norway, we just re-elected a “socialist” government. That does not mean that we live in a communist state. We have full-fledged capitalism over here, and we are just about the richest country in the world, per capita. But we have chosen to let the state supply world class health care to all inhabitants.To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us. In Norway, you get the same care no matter if you are a homeless drunk or the C.E.O. of one of the biggest companies. And that’s how it should be. They say that the measure of a country’s success lies in how it treats its most unfortunate citizens.— Gjert MyrestrandYour hero would approve of your climbing aboard, Mr. Brooks. Have a nice day.
Recommended by 438 Readers
10.
mickster
Seattle, WA
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
There seems to a confusion on the right. Buckley is dead, Kristol is dead. How to separate out the kooks from the conservatives.We now have Rush, Oreilly, Beck, Hannity as radio/tv talking heads angling for very large amounts of money 50million+ dollars. Competing to be most outrageous. I can say something every more farout and outragreous than you. Vieing for market share and massive dollars for just running one's mouth that pleases the right wing in its current ephemeral form changing moment by moment, hour by hour. The race amongst the pundits seems to be who say the most outrageous thinkg about obama. The audience is open, wide open let the bidding start with the clain that obama want's to destroy this country. Yes start fro here. Its important to note that nothing can be said about obama that will unbelievable to the right wing true believers.
Recommended by 107 Readers
11.
Southernlight
Australia
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
RIP Mr. Kristol. Our world loses its light yet again....Thanks for the column Mr. Brooks. It was inspiring.
Recommended by 25 Readers
12.
Jim
New York
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
If Mr. Kristol was indeed able to see the flaws in his belief systemn and was therefore not an idealogical purist what happened to his followers? Somewhere along the line they must have been asleep during his lectures on the values of improving the human condition. That is unless you count improving the Human condition of a priviliged few at the expense of the many.
Recommended by 123 Readers
13.
Basil Marasco, Jr.
Rochester, NY
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Mr Brooks, I've often wondered if the purpose of becoming as well-educated as you are is to be able to know the difference, for example, between what is "creative" and what is "destructive", or at least what is "creative in most cases" and likewise destructive.I now suspect that the purpose of SOME students' education is to develop a talent for fusing antonyms together in order to debilitate the real meaning of each and so leave a debate muddled beyond usefulness or benefit.Does the concept of "destructive creativity" lend itself to mathematical evaluation? Can an example of it be proven to be clearly more destructive than creative? Or vice versa? Or is it just a beguiling little phrase that comes in handy when suggesting that the American middle class--between the post-war boom, the benefits of the New Deal, and organized labor--had just gotten too secure? That a "job for life" was the flawed element of our market economy and that the education gotten between the ages of 5 and 18 should never have been considered sufficient?Pray tell, what is "destructive creativity"? Why not devote an entire column to it, complete with history (if any), definitions (preferably free of ambiguities), and examples. Above all, I'd like to know how to avoid the "destructive" part of it.
Recommended by 89 Readers
14.
Thomas W.
Germany
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Are the 'conservative predispositions of the people' the predispositions of those in constant terror that the majority will find out that the majority has been taken for a ride, and who, as a result, cannot quite bring themselves to believe in democracy, while at the same time praising democracy and trying hard to bring it to other failed states?If Irving Kristol indeed favored the insurance view on governmental activity in labor markets, health and life insurance and retirement benefits, then he was a very innovative and progressive thinker indeed - discovering what Bismarck knew and what the german conservatives knew after WWII, and what the founders of the state of Israel knew.I sincerely doubt that the final analysis is in on whether it was The Grand Inquisitor or his counterpart who understood better what it means and takes to not be a schmuck.
Recommended by 21 Readers
15.
vballboy
Highland NY
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
I wish you condolence for losing an admired intellectual leader of neoconservatism.That said, while fiscal restraint in government spending appears a primal focus of modern neoconservatives, I am still baffled at how supposed neoconservatives quietly let the Bush Administration commit America to years of spending for an unnecessary Iraq War and GWOT. This long term, some would even say endless, commitment requires spending hundreds of billions every year which does not sit well with me in the greater context of fiscal conservatism.How is spending on near-endless war morally or ethically acceptable whereas spending on certain other political ideologies considered heinous? The spend-thrift logic is not clear on this...
Recommended by 191 Readers
16.
AT Lardner
Granada, Spain
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
"Don’t fall for fantastical notions that have nothing to do with the way people really are"...hmmm, I am grateful that Irving Kristol knew (and, we are to surmise) David Brooks knows "the way people really are". Obviously a clear indicator of "detached attachment"...
Recommended by 23 Readers
17.
jcoyle
paris
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
As one who has learned much from Irving Kristol's writing, I would tend to sum up David Brooks's three sources of Kristol's excellence--ethnic, philosophical and moral--as a particular ability to see and absorb wisdom. Perhaps this is another way of stating his self-description as having detached attachment. Reinhold Niebuhr had a similar talent, the ability to distance himself from the world around him, seeing it more whole and clear, as if he were an historian writing about the distant past. All this leaves me wondering why many of Kristol's closest collaborators and followers in neo-conservatism--I think especially of Norman Podhoretz and Irving's son, Bill--seem not to have absorbed this distancing capacity and constant sense of the brokenness of humanity.Joseph S. CoyleParis
Recommended by 52 Readers
18.
OETKB
Reading, Ma
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
As John McEnroe is inclined to say, "You can't be serious." We see none of his disciples having the inclination to take the general public into consideration on any policy as you intimate. By your reckoning his son, William, should be trumpeting Medicare For All. From a purely business point of view it would serve the cause of open markets by providing more capital. Forget the 45,000 who die each year needlessly from lack of insurance or the over the top bankruptcies because people become seriously ill. Neocons start wars, deepen poverty, despoil the environment and take no responsibility for their actions. Even after abundant evidence their cloistered ideas don't work, it is somebody else's fault, and there is no adjustments in their thinking. Yes an influential political philosopher has died but let's not use his passing to idolize unsubstantiated ideology over critical thinking. May he rest in peace.
Recommended by 292 Readers
19.
audreygoodman
Cherry Hill, NJ
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Three cheers to you, for emulating this giant in your own thought and writing. No matter how negative or positive you are about a government policy or economic plan, you can stand somewhat detached and point out its imperfections.This long-time liberal can agree with Irving on several things--that no policy or law can really change the way people think or feel, and that any system of economics or politics will have some overlooked or unintended negative consequences.Accepting the imperfections in human efforts as well as human beings is a big step in becoming mature. I'd hope that we could start getting there and stop yelling at each other sooner rather than later, but know I have to be patient about that too.
Recommended by 32 Readers
20.
Mike
ct
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
He wa an influential thinker who will be missed by many. My condolences to his family.
Recommended by 11 Readers
21.
Mark
ny
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Kristol was an avid supporter of the invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy debacle in US history. Yet, somehow Mr. Brooks fails to mention this fact. We may forgive some mistakes but we cannot forgive one that has cost the lives of so many Americans and Iraqis and cost trillions of dollars. For this alone Irving Kristol was an abject failure, unworthy of the eulogy that Brooks gives him here.This country has to start dealing with facts.
Recommended by 348 Readers
22.
Jeff-for-progress
Washington, DC
September 22nd, 2009
9:45 am
Brooks is rapidly becoming the Dr. Joyce Brothers of American conservatism. It reminds me of the scene in Mel Brooks movie "High Anxiety," where before a conference of psychologists, Brooks (the Mel one), is the Director of the "Institute for the Very, Very Nervous," thanks Brothers, for giving them all "a very nice living." What one sees in Kristol's career is a pattern of economic opportunism. Which Brooks who has followed on the conservative gravy train has tried to paint here as a Profile in Courage.His disingenuous analysis also seems to be particularly self-serving, especially when he says: "So while others were marching to barricades, picking out bits of the truth that confirmed their own prejudices, editing contrary evidence and working themselves up a righteous lather, Kristol would adopt an attitude of smiling forbearance. He was able to pick a side without losing his clarity."Which reminds me of Brooks most recent previous column where he picks out a bit of truth about teabaggers getting lunch from Family Reunion people on the Mall and listening to soul music and coming to the conclusion that race had little to no relation to the opposition to Obama. I suppose Brooks identifies with the supposed Kristol forbearance in holding on to his economically lucrative views, without losing his clarity, from where his next paycheck was coming from. Hint: racism is seldom a black and white thing, but usually is triggered by a disproportionate amount of imappropriate passion given to an issue where the offender is the racial target. Yes, this sort of thing happens with blacks as well, as several episodes of inappropriate response that have occurred with Al Sharpton protests. But, Brooks, supposes that somehow his is the "neutral" point of view. Fat chance.Finally, E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post while acknowledging Kristol's sense of bonhomie, as Brooks does, noted that in a 1968 New Republic article ("Why I Support Hubert Humphrey") that he opposed Richard Nixon, for precisely the same reasons that the current crop of conservatives have become so ideologically distempered:"(T)o my mind, the election has already narrowed itself down to the choice between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon as President of the United States. These are the only two candidates who make a nationwide, "majority appeal" to the American electorate. In these pages, I need not explain why the prospect of electing Mr. Nixon depresses me. Suffice it to say that he appeals to the wrong majority to govern the United States in these times--a majority whose dominant temper will be sullenly resentful of the social changes we have been experiencing and impulsively reactionary toward the crises we shall inevitably be enduring."It would seem that Barack Obama represents the type of moderate liberalism that Hubert Humphrey did and that the current state of mean spirited racially tinged conservatism is reflective of "the wrong majority" sullenly resentful of the changes we have been seeing." However, this time Kristol had switched his allegiance since 1972 to the sullen resentful side of a wrong majority, and persisted in clear-eyed fashion, and to to oppose the right majority, which he once persuasively argued for. This hardly calls for three cheers, although Kristol's opposition to Joe McCarthy and his previous support for Hubert Humphrey might, in the spirit of not speaking ill of the dead, elicit one cheer. The other two cheers in the title, appears to me, David cheering for himself.
Recommended by 82 Readers
23.
Martin
Apopka, Florida
September 22nd, 2009
9:46 am
Hardly three cheers for Irving. As the literal father of William Kristol and philosophical father of the tragic neoconservative movement, the legacy of Irving Kristol one of death and destruction, corruption and war crimes. As an American Jew, I cannot be proud of any sort of link with this man.
Recommended by 166 Readers
24.
qualquan
Evanston
September 22nd, 2009
9:46 am
It is no surprise Brooks loved fellow Neocon Irvine Kristol. They both readily sacrificed America's interest in championing the horribly expensive budget and economy busting Iraq war based on transparent lies.
Recommended by 112 Readers
25.
roberto
toscana
September 22nd, 2009
9:46 am
quite a man! so what has gone wrong with his followers, the neo-con? could it be that the man was all and that his neo-con ideals were, shall we say, flawed and destined to be "manipulated" and leave a questionable legacy(!)salutiroberto
Recommended by 13 Readers
of 7Next
Log In
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/opinion/22brooks.html
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
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Three Cheers for IrvingBack to Article »
By DAVID BROOKS
Irving Kristol thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age, but he was able to pick a side without losing his clarity.
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163 Readers' Comments
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Newest
of 7Next
1.
George Neal
Steilacoom, WA
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Nice job! It's always a pleasure to read of someone who has a bias, but is non-ideological and pragmatic. Thansk for so many insights into people I rarely read about!
Recommended by 43 Readers
2.
soso
Canada
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Finally, the shackles locking the minds of decent conservatives is off.
Recommended by 10 Readers
3.
RoughAcres
New York
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
wow... first President Obama on David Letterman, and now this.Nice listening to/about people who THINK for a change.Thanks.
Recommended by 27 Readers
4.
Barbara
NY
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
A nice tribute, but it breaks what you state was Kristol's practice. Where's the scrutiny and the skepticism?
Recommended by 19 Readers
5.
Matthew
Portland, OR
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
It is a pity Irving Kristol's ability to rationally analyze and compromise wasn't passed on to many of his political heirs.
Recommended by 120 Readers
6.
Tim Connor
Wheaton, IL
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
It is particularly fitting that David Brooks would defend the man who made the following statement:"Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…"David Brooks is the greatest modern practicioner of using apparent earnestness to mask systematic misrepresentation to justify the often inexcusable behavior of his patrons and benefactors --who happen to be the same powerful interests served by Iring Kristol.I have news for you David. We are held accountable for our actions. And you cannot be forgiven if you do not repent.
Recommended by 413 Readers
7.
Ortrud Radbod
Antwerp, Belgium
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Irving Kristol was a reactionary right wing revanchist. Don't sugar coat him, Brooks. Don't even try.
Recommended by 306 Readers
8.
Richard Bowes
Manhattan
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
For what it's worth Edmund Burke was Anglo Irish.
Recommended by 15 Readers
9.
MNW
Connecticut
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
Somehow I think Irving Kristol would approve of the following comment from an enlightened Norwegian.A Real Socialist StateAs a Norwegian, looking at the U.S. health care debate from the outside, I cannot help but laugh sometimes. It seems like the word “socialism” has become a swear word. In Norway, we just re-elected a “socialist” government. That does not mean that we live in a communist state. We have full-fledged capitalism over here, and we are just about the richest country in the world, per capita. But we have chosen to let the state supply world class health care to all inhabitants.To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us. In Norway, you get the same care no matter if you are a homeless drunk or the C.E.O. of one of the biggest companies. And that’s how it should be. They say that the measure of a country’s success lies in how it treats its most unfortunate citizens.— Gjert MyrestrandYour hero would approve of your climbing aboard, Mr. Brooks. Have a nice day.
Recommended by 438 Readers
10.
mickster
Seattle, WA
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
There seems to a confusion on the right. Buckley is dead, Kristol is dead. How to separate out the kooks from the conservatives.We now have Rush, Oreilly, Beck, Hannity as radio/tv talking heads angling for very large amounts of money 50million+ dollars. Competing to be most outrageous. I can say something every more farout and outragreous than you. Vieing for market share and massive dollars for just running one's mouth that pleases the right wing in its current ephemeral form changing moment by moment, hour by hour. The race amongst the pundits seems to be who say the most outrageous thinkg about obama. The audience is open, wide open let the bidding start with the clain that obama want's to destroy this country. Yes start fro here. Its important to note that nothing can be said about obama that will unbelievable to the right wing true believers.
Recommended by 107 Readers
11.
Southernlight
Australia
September 22nd, 2009
6:53 am
RIP Mr. Kristol. Our world loses its light yet again....Thanks for the column Mr. Brooks. It was inspiring.
Recommended by 25 Readers
12.
Jim
New York
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
If Mr. Kristol was indeed able to see the flaws in his belief systemn and was therefore not an idealogical purist what happened to his followers? Somewhere along the line they must have been asleep during his lectures on the values of improving the human condition. That is unless you count improving the Human condition of a priviliged few at the expense of the many.
Recommended by 123 Readers
13.
Basil Marasco, Jr.
Rochester, NY
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Mr Brooks, I've often wondered if the purpose of becoming as well-educated as you are is to be able to know the difference, for example, between what is "creative" and what is "destructive", or at least what is "creative in most cases" and likewise destructive.I now suspect that the purpose of SOME students' education is to develop a talent for fusing antonyms together in order to debilitate the real meaning of each and so leave a debate muddled beyond usefulness or benefit.Does the concept of "destructive creativity" lend itself to mathematical evaluation? Can an example of it be proven to be clearly more destructive than creative? Or vice versa? Or is it just a beguiling little phrase that comes in handy when suggesting that the American middle class--between the post-war boom, the benefits of the New Deal, and organized labor--had just gotten too secure? That a "job for life" was the flawed element of our market economy and that the education gotten between the ages of 5 and 18 should never have been considered sufficient?Pray tell, what is "destructive creativity"? Why not devote an entire column to it, complete with history (if any), definitions (preferably free of ambiguities), and examples. Above all, I'd like to know how to avoid the "destructive" part of it.
Recommended by 89 Readers
14.
Thomas W.
Germany
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Are the 'conservative predispositions of the people' the predispositions of those in constant terror that the majority will find out that the majority has been taken for a ride, and who, as a result, cannot quite bring themselves to believe in democracy, while at the same time praising democracy and trying hard to bring it to other failed states?If Irving Kristol indeed favored the insurance view on governmental activity in labor markets, health and life insurance and retirement benefits, then he was a very innovative and progressive thinker indeed - discovering what Bismarck knew and what the german conservatives knew after WWII, and what the founders of the state of Israel knew.I sincerely doubt that the final analysis is in on whether it was The Grand Inquisitor or his counterpart who understood better what it means and takes to not be a schmuck.
Recommended by 21 Readers
15.
vballboy
Highland NY
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
I wish you condolence for losing an admired intellectual leader of neoconservatism.That said, while fiscal restraint in government spending appears a primal focus of modern neoconservatives, I am still baffled at how supposed neoconservatives quietly let the Bush Administration commit America to years of spending for an unnecessary Iraq War and GWOT. This long term, some would even say endless, commitment requires spending hundreds of billions every year which does not sit well with me in the greater context of fiscal conservatism.How is spending on near-endless war morally or ethically acceptable whereas spending on certain other political ideologies considered heinous? The spend-thrift logic is not clear on this...
Recommended by 191 Readers
16.
AT Lardner
Granada, Spain
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
"Don’t fall for fantastical notions that have nothing to do with the way people really are"...hmmm, I am grateful that Irving Kristol knew (and, we are to surmise) David Brooks knows "the way people really are". Obviously a clear indicator of "detached attachment"...
Recommended by 23 Readers
17.
jcoyle
paris
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
As one who has learned much from Irving Kristol's writing, I would tend to sum up David Brooks's three sources of Kristol's excellence--ethnic, philosophical and moral--as a particular ability to see and absorb wisdom. Perhaps this is another way of stating his self-description as having detached attachment. Reinhold Niebuhr had a similar talent, the ability to distance himself from the world around him, seeing it more whole and clear, as if he were an historian writing about the distant past. All this leaves me wondering why many of Kristol's closest collaborators and followers in neo-conservatism--I think especially of Norman Podhoretz and Irving's son, Bill--seem not to have absorbed this distancing capacity and constant sense of the brokenness of humanity.Joseph S. CoyleParis
Recommended by 52 Readers
18.
OETKB
Reading, Ma
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
As John McEnroe is inclined to say, "You can't be serious." We see none of his disciples having the inclination to take the general public into consideration on any policy as you intimate. By your reckoning his son, William, should be trumpeting Medicare For All. From a purely business point of view it would serve the cause of open markets by providing more capital. Forget the 45,000 who die each year needlessly from lack of insurance or the over the top bankruptcies because people become seriously ill. Neocons start wars, deepen poverty, despoil the environment and take no responsibility for their actions. Even after abundant evidence their cloistered ideas don't work, it is somebody else's fault, and there is no adjustments in their thinking. Yes an influential political philosopher has died but let's not use his passing to idolize unsubstantiated ideology over critical thinking. May he rest in peace.
Recommended by 292 Readers
19.
audreygoodman
Cherry Hill, NJ
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Three cheers to you, for emulating this giant in your own thought and writing. No matter how negative or positive you are about a government policy or economic plan, you can stand somewhat detached and point out its imperfections.This long-time liberal can agree with Irving on several things--that no policy or law can really change the way people think or feel, and that any system of economics or politics will have some overlooked or unintended negative consequences.Accepting the imperfections in human efforts as well as human beings is a big step in becoming mature. I'd hope that we could start getting there and stop yelling at each other sooner rather than later, but know I have to be patient about that too.
Recommended by 32 Readers
20.
Mike
ct
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
He wa an influential thinker who will be missed by many. My condolences to his family.
Recommended by 11 Readers
21.
Mark
ny
September 22nd, 2009
7:34 am
Kristol was an avid supporter of the invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy debacle in US history. Yet, somehow Mr. Brooks fails to mention this fact. We may forgive some mistakes but we cannot forgive one that has cost the lives of so many Americans and Iraqis and cost trillions of dollars. For this alone Irving Kristol was an abject failure, unworthy of the eulogy that Brooks gives him here.This country has to start dealing with facts.
Recommended by 348 Readers
22.
Jeff-for-progress
Washington, DC
September 22nd, 2009
9:45 am
Brooks is rapidly becoming the Dr. Joyce Brothers of American conservatism. It reminds me of the scene in Mel Brooks movie "High Anxiety," where before a conference of psychologists, Brooks (the Mel one), is the Director of the "Institute for the Very, Very Nervous," thanks Brothers, for giving them all "a very nice living." What one sees in Kristol's career is a pattern of economic opportunism. Which Brooks who has followed on the conservative gravy train has tried to paint here as a Profile in Courage.His disingenuous analysis also seems to be particularly self-serving, especially when he says: "So while others were marching to barricades, picking out bits of the truth that confirmed their own prejudices, editing contrary evidence and working themselves up a righteous lather, Kristol would adopt an attitude of smiling forbearance. He was able to pick a side without losing his clarity."Which reminds me of Brooks most recent previous column where he picks out a bit of truth about teabaggers getting lunch from Family Reunion people on the Mall and listening to soul music and coming to the conclusion that race had little to no relation to the opposition to Obama. I suppose Brooks identifies with the supposed Kristol forbearance in holding on to his economically lucrative views, without losing his clarity, from where his next paycheck was coming from. Hint: racism is seldom a black and white thing, but usually is triggered by a disproportionate amount of imappropriate passion given to an issue where the offender is the racial target. Yes, this sort of thing happens with blacks as well, as several episodes of inappropriate response that have occurred with Al Sharpton protests. But, Brooks, supposes that somehow his is the "neutral" point of view. Fat chance.Finally, E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post while acknowledging Kristol's sense of bonhomie, as Brooks does, noted that in a 1968 New Republic article ("Why I Support Hubert Humphrey") that he opposed Richard Nixon, for precisely the same reasons that the current crop of conservatives have become so ideologically distempered:"(T)o my mind, the election has already narrowed itself down to the choice between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon as President of the United States. These are the only two candidates who make a nationwide, "majority appeal" to the American electorate. In these pages, I need not explain why the prospect of electing Mr. Nixon depresses me. Suffice it to say that he appeals to the wrong majority to govern the United States in these times--a majority whose dominant temper will be sullenly resentful of the social changes we have been experiencing and impulsively reactionary toward the crises we shall inevitably be enduring."It would seem that Barack Obama represents the type of moderate liberalism that Hubert Humphrey did and that the current state of mean spirited racially tinged conservatism is reflective of "the wrong majority" sullenly resentful of the changes we have been seeing." However, this time Kristol had switched his allegiance since 1972 to the sullen resentful side of a wrong majority, and persisted in clear-eyed fashion, and to to oppose the right majority, which he once persuasively argued for. This hardly calls for three cheers, although Kristol's opposition to Joe McCarthy and his previous support for Hubert Humphrey might, in the spirit of not speaking ill of the dead, elicit one cheer. The other two cheers in the title, appears to me, David cheering for himself.
Recommended by 82 Readers
23.
Martin
Apopka, Florida
September 22nd, 2009
9:46 am
Hardly three cheers for Irving. As the literal father of William Kristol and philosophical father of the tragic neoconservative movement, the legacy of Irving Kristol one of death and destruction, corruption and war crimes. As an American Jew, I cannot be proud of any sort of link with this man.
Recommended by 166 Readers
24.
qualquan
Evanston
September 22nd, 2009
9:46 am
It is no surprise Brooks loved fellow Neocon Irvine Kristol. They both readily sacrificed America's interest in championing the horribly expensive budget and economy busting Iraq war based on transparent lies.
Recommended by 112 Readers
25.
roberto
toscana
September 22nd, 2009
9:46 am
quite a man! so what has gone wrong with his followers, the neo-con? could it be that the man was all and that his neo-con ideals were, shall we say, flawed and destined to be "manipulated" and leave a questionable legacy(!)salutiroberto
Recommended by 13 Readers
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Log In
The Rights of Corporations
(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
In light of what Wall Street has done to us, the following case in the Supreme Court seems a slam dunk. But under the Roberts Court it looks like the result will go the wrong way!
Lest we forget the differences between an individual and a corporation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/opinion/22tue1.html?_r=1&hp
In light of what Wall Street has done to us, the following case in the Supreme Court seems a slam dunk. But under the Roberts Court it looks like the result will go the wrong way!
Lest we forget the differences between an individual and a corporation:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/opinion/22tue1.html?_r=1&hp
Monday, September 21, 2009
Krugman -- In This Case Populism is Good Politics
He's off health care for a moment. Still good as ever. Limit compensation system on Wall Street before the world of finance collapses, if it hasn't already.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1&hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1&hp
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Baseline Scenario
The Baseline Scenario
Protect Consumers, Raise Capital, And Jam The Revolving Wall St-Washington Door
Posted: 20 Sep 2009 04:32 AM PDT
Ben Bernanke has a great opportunity to lead the reform of our financial system. His standing in Washington and on Wall Street is at an all-time high, as a result of his bailout/rescue efforts. He is about to be reappointed with acclaim for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. And he has a lot to answer for.
Look, for example, at his speech of May 17, 2007, which discusses some of the problems in the subprime market and contains the memorable line: “Importantly, we see no serious broader spillover to banks or thift institutions from problems in the subprime market; the troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been institutions with federally insured deposits” (full speech; marks in the margin are from an anonymous and careful correspondent.)
Three points jump off these pages.
With the kind of analytical capacity and world view demonstrated in this speech, there is no way that Fed can be regarded as capable of protecting consumers vis-a-vis financial products going forward. The Fed’s claims to that effect undermine their legitimacy and plausibility. They failed consumers completely, and they should reflect deeply on the organizational culture and internal incentives that brought them to this sad point. “Give us another chance” is not convincing; there is too much at stake.
If the Fed is capable of such mistaken views as Bernanke expressed in May, 2007, you must assume that regulation will break down again in the future. Tightening the rules on bank behavior is fine, but the banks will down the road again fool the Fed, other regulators, and perhaps even themselves on the true risks they face. It is therefore essential that our financial system carry much more capital than has been the case in the recent past. We should go back to pre-1935 or even pre-1913 levels (see slide 40 in this presentation). In a New York Times op-ed today, Peter Boone and I call for at least tripling current capital requirements as the right goal (of course, this should be phased in over a few years.)
The intellectual capture of Washington by Wall Street was well underway in May 2007; it is now complete. This is why the banking barons felt no need to show up and show respect for the President on Monday. They have so many of their people (mindset-wise) placed throughout the administration, and the principle of revolving between Wall Street and Washington so well established, that they know: If they ever need another massive bailout, the people standing behind this or any future President will say there is no alternative. That’s why Peter and I also call for a 5 year gap between holding a responsible position on Wall Street and a top job in Washington, and vice versa. Stop with the political appointment of regulatory “doves” and end the notion that you can go directly from a failing bank to directing efforts to rescue such banks.
Ben Bernanke can play the broad reformist role of Marriner Eccles, chair of the Fed during the Great Depression. Or he can go back to being a cheerleader for the financial sector, following in the discredited footsteps of Alan Greenspan.
This is his choice.
By Simon Johnson
Protect Consumers, Raise Capital, And Jam The Revolving Wall St-Washington Door
Posted: 20 Sep 2009 04:32 AM PDT
Ben Bernanke has a great opportunity to lead the reform of our financial system. His standing in Washington and on Wall Street is at an all-time high, as a result of his bailout/rescue efforts. He is about to be reappointed with acclaim for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. And he has a lot to answer for.
Look, for example, at his speech of May 17, 2007, which discusses some of the problems in the subprime market and contains the memorable line: “Importantly, we see no serious broader spillover to banks or thift institutions from problems in the subprime market; the troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been institutions with federally insured deposits” (full speech; marks in the margin are from an anonymous and careful correspondent.)
Three points jump off these pages.
With the kind of analytical capacity and world view demonstrated in this speech, there is no way that Fed can be regarded as capable of protecting consumers vis-a-vis financial products going forward. The Fed’s claims to that effect undermine their legitimacy and plausibility. They failed consumers completely, and they should reflect deeply on the organizational culture and internal incentives that brought them to this sad point. “Give us another chance” is not convincing; there is too much at stake.
If the Fed is capable of such mistaken views as Bernanke expressed in May, 2007, you must assume that regulation will break down again in the future. Tightening the rules on bank behavior is fine, but the banks will down the road again fool the Fed, other regulators, and perhaps even themselves on the true risks they face. It is therefore essential that our financial system carry much more capital than has been the case in the recent past. We should go back to pre-1935 or even pre-1913 levels (see slide 40 in this presentation). In a New York Times op-ed today, Peter Boone and I call for at least tripling current capital requirements as the right goal (of course, this should be phased in over a few years.)
The intellectual capture of Washington by Wall Street was well underway in May 2007; it is now complete. This is why the banking barons felt no need to show up and show respect for the President on Monday. They have so many of their people (mindset-wise) placed throughout the administration, and the principle of revolving between Wall Street and Washington so well established, that they know: If they ever need another massive bailout, the people standing behind this or any future President will say there is no alternative. That’s why Peter and I also call for a 5 year gap between holding a responsible position on Wall Street and a top job in Washington, and vice versa. Stop with the political appointment of regulatory “doves” and end the notion that you can go directly from a failing bank to directing efforts to rescue such banks.
Ben Bernanke can play the broad reformist role of Marriner Eccles, chair of the Fed during the Great Depression. Or he can go back to being a cheerleader for the financial sector, following in the discredited footsteps of Alan Greenspan.
This is his choice.
By Simon Johnson
For Natural Gas Geeks
See the Ohio Supreme Court wrestle with two natural gas cases which shifted costs to the customer charge and away from the variable charge. Very interesting if you're a geek on these matters:
http://www.ohiochannel.org/media_archives/supreme_court/media.cfm?file_id=122135&
And this is what showed up on my bill the first month the Duke Energy rate case was settled:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-M00Hz3T-P6ddQP330af8soaUeQhlZCCpvzJkJkH25Z249JTizG_VK68AZxu8y1hprLgLsSZxM_6lhMPcCnOOCCdHjQX_9zDjnbpR4F4ILrDX92418pJ5sDJ6MarjTxRti2EX5PX-oMU/s1600-h/20080606+ebill+laurel+for+may+usage1_Page_2.jpg
http://www.ohiochannel.org/media_archives/supreme_court/media.cfm?file_id=122135&
And this is what showed up on my bill the first month the Duke Energy rate case was settled:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-M00Hz3T-P6ddQP330af8soaUeQhlZCCpvzJkJkH25Z249JTizG_VK68AZxu8y1hprLgLsSZxM_6lhMPcCnOOCCdHjQX_9zDjnbpR4F4ILrDX92418pJ5sDJ6MarjTxRti2EX5PX-oMU/s1600-h/20080606+ebill+laurel+for+may+usage1_Page_2.jpg
From MyBestTime
I liked this. Moms cause good children:
http://mybesttime-mybesttime.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://mybesttime-mybesttime.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Sam Tenenhaus on Bill Moyers Friday Night
(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel
This interview Friday night caught my eye and now my imagination. When I review the transcript below I notice that it keys more of my "labels" than any other blog I've done.
Tenanhaus pops up -- I knew someone would -- as an apologist for the evil William F. Buckley and thereby sets a new world-view of Buckley. I assume Tenanhaus's book does also.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus. SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill. BILL MOYERS: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television? SAM TANENHAUS: I'm afraid they're radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side. BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?
SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance. And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we're seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We're seeing it now-- they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.
BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it's a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, "creedal documents" they're sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.
BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says--
SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there's a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we've seen is that certain groups among us-- and sometimes it's been the left-- have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that's what we're seeing now.
BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?
SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.
BILL MOYERS: There's a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they're against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don't want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying "Don't touch my Medicare." You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.
SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it's very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. "Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won't take my Medicare away. Don't know Medicare is a government program?" That's not really what's going on, I think. I think there's something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we've become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, "We all expect too much from government." We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life". So, when people say, "Don't take my Medicare away," what they really mean is, "We're entirely dependent on this government and we're afraid they'll take one thing away that we've gotten used to and replace it with something that won't be so good. And there's nothing we can do about it. We're powerless before the very guardian that protects us."
BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what's the dominant force that's going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, "We want reform and we want the government involved?" Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?
SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we'll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here's another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell's theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight's about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces-- were really Republican issues. Today, when we look at the great questions -- how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They've vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That's one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they're not simply in retreat, they're outmoded. They don't act like it, you know?
SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don't. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, "The Democrat Socialist Party." This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, "The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right." I think we're hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.
BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there's been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don't think of them as conservative anymore-- Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla-- they've all left the movement. And so, it's become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it's ideologically depleted. That what we're seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley's phrase. There's a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble -- the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way. And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you're well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, "You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They're anti-communists. And they're helping our movement." Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, "Enough." Buckley himself had matured politically. He'd run for Mayor of New York. He'd seen how politics really worked. And he said, "We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe." So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its "drivel" were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that's what we may not see if we don't have that kind of leadership on the right now.
BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the '60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley's seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint-- to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.
SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act--
BILL MOYERS: Really?
SAM TANENHAUS: …but you may remember that in the late '70s, he supported a national holiday for Martin Luther King-- BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I remember that. SAM TANENHAUS: …where someone like John McCain did not. I once heard Buckley give a lecture -- brilliant lecture in New York City -- about the late '90s in which he talked about the importance of religion in American civil life. And it was Martin Luther King who was the object.
BILL MOYERS: What changed him? I mean, because he was writing in the National Review about, endorsing the White Supremacy scheme of the country at that time.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, he actually did that, Bill, a little bit earlier.
BILL MOYERS: '50s?
SAM TANENHAUS: '50s. He did more of it. In the early '60s, even a great thinker and writer like Garry Wills, who was still a part of the "National Review," though he supported the civil rights movement, thought it might weaken the institutional structures of society, if it became too fervent a protest. Now, what the Republican Party did was to make a very shrewd political calculation. A kind of Faustian bargain with the South. That the southern whites who resisted civil rights legislation-- Aand as you know, Lyndon Johnson knew, when he signed those bills into law, he might lose the solid south as it had been called, the Democrats might lose them for a generation or more. And yes, the Republicans moved right in, and they did it on the basis of a state's rights argument. Now, however convincing or unconvincing that was, it's important to acknowledge that Republicans never-- conservatives, I should say, northern Republicans are different-- but conservatives within the Republican Party, because the two were once not, you know, identical-- thought that a hierarchical society and a kind of racial difference-- a sense of racial difference, established institutionally, was not so bad a thing. They were wrong. They were dead wrong. But that sense of animus is absolutely strong today. Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there's no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.
BILL MOYERS: When you heard Joe Wilson shout out, "You lie," and you saw who it was, did you think "the voice of conservatism today"?
SAM TANENHAUS: No. I thought "This man needs to read his Edmund Burke." Edmund Burke gave us the phrase "civil society." Now, people can be confused about that. It doesn't mean we have to be nice to each other all the time. Bill Buckley was not nice to his political opponents. What it means is one has to recognize that we're all part of what should be our harmonious culture, and that we respect the political institutions that bind it together. Edmund Burke, a very interesting passage in his great book, the "Reflections on the Revolution in France," uses the words "government" and "society" almost interchangeably. He sees each reinforcing the other. It is our institutional patrimony. When someone in the floor of Congress dishonors, disrespects, the office of the President, he's actually striking-- however briefly, however slightingly-- a blow against the institutions that our society is founded on. And I think Edmund Burke might have some trouble with that.
BILL MOYERS: There's long been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this coalition that we call "conservative." I mean, you had the Edmund Burke kind of conservatism that yearns for a sacred, ordered society, bound by tradition, that protects both rich and poor, against what one of my friends calls the "Libertarian, robber baron, capitalist, cowboy America." I mean, that marriage was doomed to fail, right?
SAM TANENHAUS: It was. First of all, this is absolutely right, in the terms of a classical conservatism. And here is the figure I emphasize in my book is Benjamin Disraeli. What he feared-- the revolution of his time, this is the French Revolution that concerned Edmund Burke-- half a century later what concerned Disraeli and other conservatives was the Industrial Revolution. That Dickens wrote his novels about-- that children, the very poor becoming virtual slaves in work houses, that the search for money, for capital, for capital accumulation, seemed to drown out all other values. That's what modern conservatism is partly anchored in. So, how do we get this contradiction?
BILL MOYERS: Why isn't it standing up against turbo-capitalism?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, one reason is that America very early on in its history reached a kind of pact, in the Jacksonian era, between the government on the one hand and private capital on the other. That the government would actually subsidize capitalism in America. That's what the Right doesn't often acknowledge. A lot of what we think of as the unleashed, unfettered market is, in fact, a government supported market. Some will remember the famous debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney said that his company, Halliburton, had made millions of dollars without any help from the government. It all came from the government! They were defense contracts! So, what's happened is the American ethos, which is a different thing from our political order-- that's the rugged individualism, the cowboy, the frontiersman, the robber baron, the great explorer, the conqueror of the continent. For that aspect of our myth, the market has been the engine of it. So, what brought them together, is what we've seen in the right is what I call a politics of organized cultural enmity. Everybody--
BILL MOYERS: Accusatory protest, you call it.
SAM TANENHAUS: Accusatory protest. With liberals as the enemy. So, if you are a free-marketeer, or you're an evangelical, or a social conservative, or even an authoritarian conservative, you can all agree about one thing: you hate the liberals that are out to destroy us. And that's a very useful form of political organization. I'm not sure it contributes much to our government and society, but it's politically useful, and we're seeing it again today.
BILL MOYERS: It wasn't long ago that Karl Rove was saying this coalition was going to deliver a new Republican majority. What happened? It finally came apart. Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I believe it had come apart earlier than that. I really think Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 sealed the end of serious conservative counterrevolution. We forget that election. It seems like an anomaly, but consider, Bill Clinton won more electoral votes than Barack Obama, despite the presence of one of the most successful third party candidates, H. Ross Perot, another Texan, in American history. But that's not the most important fact. The most important fact is that George H. W. Bush got less of the popular vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover got in 1932. That was really the end. But what happened was the right was so institutionally successful that it controlled many of the levers, as you say. So, what happened in the year 2000? Well, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office. Then September 11th came. And the right got its full first blank slate. They could do really whatever they wanted. And what we saw were those eight years. And that is the end of ideological conservatism as a vital formative and contributive aspect of our politics.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Because it failed so badly. It wasn't conservative. It was radical. It's interesting. Many on the right say, "George Bush betrayed us." They weren't saying that in 2002 and 2003. He was seen as someone who would complete the Reagan revolution. I think a lot of it was Iraq. Now, I quote in the book a remarkably prescient thing. The very young, almost painfully, 31-year-old, Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1835, he said you cannot export democracy, even then, to lands ruled by despotic priests. And he happened to mean Catholic, not Islamic priests. But he said you actually have to have a civil society established in advance. He said that's why the United States had become a great republic so shortly after the Revolution. We had the law of English custom here. You see? So, we were prepared to become a democracy. There were conservatives who tried to make that argument before the war in Iraq. Francis Fukayama was one, Fareed Zakaria was another-- they're both well outside that movement. There were people in the Bush Administration who tried to argue this -- they were marginalized or stripped of power. What America saw was an ideological revanchism with all the knobs turned to the highest volume. The imperial presidency of a Dick Cheney and all the rest. And we saw where we got.
BILL MOYERS: Here's another puzzle. Back to what we were talking about earlier. You say in "The Death of Conservatism" that, "Even as the financial collapse drove us to the brink, conservatives remained strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land." And the paradox is, it seems to me, they are driving the conversation that you say they don't hear.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, they have many mouths, Bill, but they don't have many ears. The great political philosopher, Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her great essays on Socrates, whom she wrote about a lot -- that the sign of a true statesmen, maybe particularly in a democracy, is the capacity to listen. And that doesn't simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side. Barack Obama is perhaps a genius at this. For anyone who has not heard the audio version of "Dreams from My Father," it's a revelation. He does all the voices. He does the white Kansas voices, he does the Kenyan voices. He has an extraordinary ear. There's an auditory side to politics. And that capacity to listen is what enables you to absorb the arguments made by the other side and to have a kind of debate with yourself. That's the way our deliberative process is supposed to work. Right now, at a time of confusion and uncertainty, the ideological right is very good at shouting at us, and rallying the troops. But, you know, one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years, the 1950s and '60s, I think as an intellectual movement, is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, and carrying guns, and threatening to take the society down, or calling President Johnson a murderer. Remember it was William Buckley, who said, "We're calling this man a murderer in the name of humanity?" It was the conservatives who used political institutions, political campaigns, who rallied behind traditional candidates produced by the party apparatus. They revitalized the traditions and the instruments and vehicles of our democracy. But now we've reached a point, quite like one Richard Hofstadter described some 40 years ago, where ideologues don't trust politicians anymore. Remember during the big march in Washington, many of the protestors or demonstrators insisted they were not demonstrating just against Barack Obama, but against all the politicians-- that's why some Republicans wouldn't support it. They don't believe in politics as the medium whereby our society negotiates its issues.
BILL MOYERS: What do they believe in?
SAM TANENHAUS: They believe in a kind of revolution, a cultural revolution. They think the system can be-- what some would say hijacked. They would say maneuvered, controlled, that they can get their hands back on the levers. An important thing about the right in America is it always considers itself a minority position and an embattled position. No matter how many of the branches of government they dominate. So, what they believe in is, as Willmoore Kendall, this early philosopher said, is a politics of battle lines, of war.
BILL MOYERS: So, here, at this very critical moment, when so much is hanging in the balance, what is the paradox of conservatism as you see it?
SAM TANENHAUS: The paradox of conservatism is that it gives the signs, the overt signs of energy and vitality, but the rigor mortis I described is still there. As a philosophy, as a system of government, as a way all of us can learn from, as a means of evaluating ourselves, our social responsibilities, our personal obligations and responsibilities. It has, right now, nothing to offer.
BILL MOYERS: Now, they disagree with you. They think you have issued a call for unilateral disarmament on their part-- that brass knuckles and sharp elbows are part of fighting for what you believe in, and therefore, you're calling for a unilateral disarmament.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, that's what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style, is when it's always living on the verge of apocalypse. That defeat is staring you in the face, and the only victories are total victories. Because even the slightest victory, if it's not complete, means the other side may come back and get you again. This is not serious responsible argument. Much of my book is actually about the failures of liberalism in that noontime period of the 1960s. And many of the conservatives simply ignore that part of the argument.
BILL MOYERS: How to explain this long fascination you've had with conservative ideas, and the conservative movement. Why this fascination?
BILL MOYERS: Well, I think it has been the dominant philosophy, political philosophy in our culture, in America, for some half-century. What particularly drew me first to Chambers and then Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals, who were also men of action. Conservatives have kind of supplied us in their best periods-- the days when NATIONAL REVIEW and COMMENTARY and THE PUBLIC INTEREST were tremendously vital publications, self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They were contributing so enormously to who we were as Americans. And yet, many liberals were not paying attention. Many liberals today don't know that a great thinker like Garry Wills was a product of the conservative movement. It's astonishing to them to learn it. They just assume, because they agree with him now, he was always a liberal. In fact, he remains a kind of conservative. This is the richness in the philosophy that attracted me, and that I wanted to learn more about, to educate myself.
BILL MOYERS: The book is THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM. Sam Tanenhaus, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for joining me.
SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, it's my great pleasure to be here.
This interview Friday night caught my eye and now my imagination. When I review the transcript below I notice that it keys more of my "labels" than any other blog I've done.
Tenanhaus pops up -- I knew someone would -- as an apologist for the evil William F. Buckley and thereby sets a new world-view of Buckley. I assume Tenanhaus's book does also.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL, Sam Tanenhaus. SAM TANENHAUS: Oh my pleasure to be here, Bill. BILL MOYERS: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television? SAM TANENHAUS: I'm afraid they're radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side. BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?
SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance. And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we're seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We're seeing it now-- they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.
BILL MOYERS: What gives them their certainty? You know, your hero of the 18th Century, Burke, Edmund Burke, warned against extremism and dogmatic orthodoxy.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, it's a very deep strain in our politics, Bill. Some of our great historians like Richard Hofstadter and Garry Wills have written about this. If you go back to the foundations of our Republic, first of all, we have two documents, "creedal documents" they're sometimes called, more or less at war with one another. The Declaration of Independence says one thing and the Constitution says another.
BILL MOYERS: The Declaration says--
SAM TANENHAUS: …says that we will be an egalitarian society in which all rights will be available to one and all, and the Constitution creates a complex political system that stops that change from happening. So, there's a clash right at the beginning. Now, what we've seen is that certain groups among us-- and sometimes it's been the left-- have been able to dominate the conversation and transform politics into a kind of theater. And that's what we're seeing now.
BILL MOYERS: When you see these people in the theater of television, you call them the insurrectionists, in your book, what do you think motivates them?
SAM TANENHAUS: One of the interesting developments in our politics, in just the past few months, although you could see signs of it earlier, is the emergence of the demographic we always overlook in our youth obsessed culture: the elderly. That was the group that did not support Barack Obama. They voted for John McCain. It was also the group that rose up and defied George W. Bush, when he wanted to add private Social Scurity accounts. It was a similar kind of protest.
BILL MOYERS: There's a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they're against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don't want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying "Don't touch my Medicare." You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.
SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it's very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. "Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won't take my Medicare away. Don't know Medicare is a government program?" That's not really what's going on, I think. I think there's something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we've become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, "We all expect too much from government." We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life". So, when people say, "Don't take my Medicare away," what they really mean is, "We're entirely dependent on this government and we're afraid they'll take one thing away that we've gotten used to and replace it with something that won't be so good. And there's nothing we can do about it. We're powerless before the very guardian that protects us."
BILL MOYERS: So, how do you see this contradiction playing out in the health care debate? Where what's the dominant force that's going to prevail here at the end? Is it going to be, "We want reform and we want the government involved?" Or are we going to privatize it the way people on the conservative side want to do? The insurance companies, the drug companies, all of that?
SAM TANENHAUS: I think what we'll see is a kind of incremental reform. Look, we know that health care has become the third rail of American politics, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. The greatest retail politician in modern history, Bill Clinton, could not sell it. But here's another thing to think about. In the book I discuss one of the most interesting political theories of the modern era, Samuel Lubell's theory of the solar system of politics. And what he says is what we think of as an equally balanced, two-party system, is really a rotating one-party system. Either the Republicans or Democrats have ruled since the Civil War for periods of some 30-36 years. And in those periods, all the great debates have occurred within a single party. So, if you go back to the 1980s, which some would say was the peak of the modern conservative period, the fight's about how to end the Cold War, how to unleash market forces-- were really Republican issues. Today, when we look at the great questions -- how to stimulate the economy, how to provide and expand and improve a sustainable health care system, the fight is taking place among Democrats. So, in a sense what Republicans have done is to put themselves on the sidelines. They've vacated the field and left it to the other party, the Democratic Party, to resolve these issues among themselves. That's one reason I think conservatism is in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they're not simply in retreat, they're outmoded. They don't act like it, you know?
SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don't. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, "The Democrat Socialist Party." This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there. William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, "The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right." I think we're hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.
BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there's been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time. The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially philosophical in their outlook. Now, there are conservative intellectuals, but we don't think of them as conservative anymore-- Fareed Zakaria, Francis Fukayama, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, the great Columbia professor, Mark Lilla-- they've all left the movement. And so, it's become dominated instead by very monotonic, theatrically impressive voices and faces.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to William Buckley, and now the icon is Rush Limbaugh?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it's ideologically depleted. That what we're seeing now and hearing are the noise-makers in Buckley's phrase. There's a very important incident described in this book that occurred in 1965, when the John Birch Society, an organization these new Americanist groups resemble -- the ones who are marching in Washington and holding tea parties. Essentially, very extremist revanchist groups that view politics in a conspiratorial way. And the John Birch Society during the peak of the Cold War struggle was convinced, and you're well aware of this, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent, who reported to his brother Milton, and 80 percent of the government was dominated by Communists. Communists were in charge of American education, American health care. They were fluoridating the water to weaken our brains. All of this happened. And at first, Buckley and his fellow intellectuals at NATIONAL REVIEW indulged this. They said, "You know what? Their arguments are absurd, but they believe in the right things. They're anti-communists. And they're helping our movement." Cause many of them helped Barry Goldwater get nominated in 1964. And then in 1965, Buckley said, "Enough." Buckley himself had matured politically. He'd run for Mayor of New York. He'd seen how politics really worked. And he said, "We can't allow ourselves to be discredited by our own fringe." So, he turned over his own magazine to a denunciation of the John Birch Society. More important, the columns he wrote denouncing what he called its "drivel" were circulated in advance to three of the great conservative Republicans of the day, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, from your home state of Texas, and Tower read them on the floor of Congress into the Congressional record. In other words, the intellectual and political leaders of the right drew a line. And that's what we may not see if we don't have that kind of leadership on the right now.
BILL MOYERS: To what extent is race an irritant here? Because, you know, I was in that era of the '60s, I was deeply troubled as we moved on to try to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by William Buckley's seeming embrace of white supremacy. It seemed to me to taint-- to leave something in the DNA of the modern conservative movement that is still there.
SAM TANENHAUS: It is. And one of the few regrets Bill Buckley ever expressed was that his magazine had not supported the Civil Rights Act--
BILL MOYERS: Really?
SAM TANENHAUS: …but you may remember that in the late '70s, he supported a national holiday for Martin Luther King-- BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I remember that. SAM TANENHAUS: …where someone like John McCain did not. I once heard Buckley give a lecture -- brilliant lecture in New York City -- about the late '90s in which he talked about the importance of religion in American civil life. And it was Martin Luther King who was the object.
BILL MOYERS: What changed him? I mean, because he was writing in the National Review about, endorsing the White Supremacy scheme of the country at that time.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, he actually did that, Bill, a little bit earlier.
BILL MOYERS: '50s?
SAM TANENHAUS: '50s. He did more of it. In the early '60s, even a great thinker and writer like Garry Wills, who was still a part of the "National Review," though he supported the civil rights movement, thought it might weaken the institutional structures of society, if it became too fervent a protest. Now, what the Republican Party did was to make a very shrewd political calculation. A kind of Faustian bargain with the South. That the southern whites who resisted civil rights legislation-- Aand as you know, Lyndon Johnson knew, when he signed those bills into law, he might lose the solid south as it had been called, the Democrats might lose them for a generation or more. And yes, the Republicans moved right in, and they did it on the basis of a state's rights argument. Now, however convincing or unconvincing that was, it's important to acknowledge that Republicans never-- conservatives, I should say, northern Republicans are different-- but conservatives within the Republican Party, because the two were once not, you know, identical-- thought that a hierarchical society and a kind of racial difference-- a sense of racial difference, established institutionally, was not so bad a thing. They were wrong. They were dead wrong. But that sense of animus is absolutely strong today. Look who some of the great protestors are against Barack Obama. Three of them come from South Carolina, the state that led the secession. Joe Wilson and Senator DeMint, Mark Sanford who got in trouble. These are South Carolinians. And there's no question that that side of the insurrectionist South remains in our politics.
BILL MOYERS: When you heard Joe Wilson shout out, "You lie," and you saw who it was, did you think "the voice of conservatism today"?
SAM TANENHAUS: No. I thought "This man needs to read his Edmund Burke." Edmund Burke gave us the phrase "civil society." Now, people can be confused about that. It doesn't mean we have to be nice to each other all the time. Bill Buckley was not nice to his political opponents. What it means is one has to recognize that we're all part of what should be our harmonious culture, and that we respect the political institutions that bind it together. Edmund Burke, a very interesting passage in his great book, the "Reflections on the Revolution in France," uses the words "government" and "society" almost interchangeably. He sees each reinforcing the other. It is our institutional patrimony. When someone in the floor of Congress dishonors, disrespects, the office of the President, he's actually striking-- however briefly, however slightingly-- a blow against the institutions that our society is founded on. And I think Edmund Burke might have some trouble with that.
BILL MOYERS: There's long been a fundamental contradiction at the heart of this coalition that we call "conservative." I mean, you had the Edmund Burke kind of conservatism that yearns for a sacred, ordered society, bound by tradition, that protects both rich and poor, against what one of my friends calls the "Libertarian, robber baron, capitalist, cowboy America." I mean, that marriage was doomed to fail, right?
SAM TANENHAUS: It was. First of all, this is absolutely right, in the terms of a classical conservatism. And here is the figure I emphasize in my book is Benjamin Disraeli. What he feared-- the revolution of his time, this is the French Revolution that concerned Edmund Burke-- half a century later what concerned Disraeli and other conservatives was the Industrial Revolution. That Dickens wrote his novels about-- that children, the very poor becoming virtual slaves in work houses, that the search for money, for capital, for capital accumulation, seemed to drown out all other values. That's what modern conservatism is partly anchored in. So, how do we get this contradiction?
BILL MOYERS: Why isn't it standing up against turbo-capitalism?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, one reason is that America very early on in its history reached a kind of pact, in the Jacksonian era, between the government on the one hand and private capital on the other. That the government would actually subsidize capitalism in America. That's what the Right doesn't often acknowledge. A lot of what we think of as the unleashed, unfettered market is, in fact, a government supported market. Some will remember the famous debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, and Dick Cheney said that his company, Halliburton, had made millions of dollars without any help from the government. It all came from the government! They were defense contracts! So, what's happened is the American ethos, which is a different thing from our political order-- that's the rugged individualism, the cowboy, the frontiersman, the robber baron, the great explorer, the conqueror of the continent. For that aspect of our myth, the market has been the engine of it. So, what brought them together, is what we've seen in the right is what I call a politics of organized cultural enmity. Everybody--
BILL MOYERS: Accusatory protest, you call it.
SAM TANENHAUS: Accusatory protest. With liberals as the enemy. So, if you are a free-marketeer, or you're an evangelical, or a social conservative, or even an authoritarian conservative, you can all agree about one thing: you hate the liberals that are out to destroy us. And that's a very useful form of political organization. I'm not sure it contributes much to our government and society, but it's politically useful, and we're seeing it again today.
BILL MOYERS: It wasn't long ago that Karl Rove was saying this coalition was going to deliver a new Republican majority. What happened? It finally came apart. Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, I believe it had come apart earlier than that. I really think Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 sealed the end of serious conservative counterrevolution. We forget that election. It seems like an anomaly, but consider, Bill Clinton won more electoral votes than Barack Obama, despite the presence of one of the most successful third party candidates, H. Ross Perot, another Texan, in American history. But that's not the most important fact. The most important fact is that George H. W. Bush got less of the popular vote in 1992 than Herbert Hoover got in 1932. That was really the end. But what happened was the right was so institutionally successful that it controlled many of the levers, as you say. So, what happened in the year 2000? Well, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office. Then September 11th came. And the right got its full first blank slate. They could do really whatever they wanted. And what we saw were those eight years. And that is the end of ideological conservatism as a vital formative and contributive aspect of our politics.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
SAM TANENHAUS: Because it failed so badly. It wasn't conservative. It was radical. It's interesting. Many on the right say, "George Bush betrayed us." They weren't saying that in 2002 and 2003. He was seen as someone who would complete the Reagan revolution. I think a lot of it was Iraq. Now, I quote in the book a remarkably prescient thing. The very young, almost painfully, 31-year-old, Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1835, he said you cannot export democracy, even then, to lands ruled by despotic priests. And he happened to mean Catholic, not Islamic priests. But he said you actually have to have a civil society established in advance. He said that's why the United States had become a great republic so shortly after the Revolution. We had the law of English custom here. You see? So, we were prepared to become a democracy. There were conservatives who tried to make that argument before the war in Iraq. Francis Fukayama was one, Fareed Zakaria was another-- they're both well outside that movement. There were people in the Bush Administration who tried to argue this -- they were marginalized or stripped of power. What America saw was an ideological revanchism with all the knobs turned to the highest volume. The imperial presidency of a Dick Cheney and all the rest. And we saw where we got.
BILL MOYERS: Here's another puzzle. Back to what we were talking about earlier. You say in "The Death of Conservatism" that, "Even as the financial collapse drove us to the brink, conservatives remained strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land." And the paradox is, it seems to me, they are driving the conversation that you say they don't hear.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, they have many mouths, Bill, but they don't have many ears. The great political philosopher, Hannah Arendt once said, in one of her great essays on Socrates, whom she wrote about a lot -- that the sign of a true statesmen, maybe particularly in a democracy, is the capacity to listen. And that doesn't simply mean to politely grow mute while your adversary talks. It means, in fact, to try to inhabit the thoughts and ideas of the other side. Barack Obama is perhaps a genius at this. For anyone who has not heard the audio version of "Dreams from My Father," it's a revelation. He does all the voices. He does the white Kansas voices, he does the Kenyan voices. He has an extraordinary ear. There's an auditory side to politics. And that capacity to listen is what enables you to absorb the arguments made by the other side and to have a kind of debate with yourself. That's the way our deliberative process is supposed to work. Right now, at a time of confusion and uncertainty, the ideological right is very good at shouting at us, and rallying the troops. But, you know, one of the real contributions conservatism made in its peak years, the 1950s and '60s, I think as an intellectual movement, is that it repudiated the politics of public demonstration. It was the left that was marching in the streets, and carrying guns, and threatening to take the society down, or calling President Johnson a murderer. Remember it was William Buckley, who said, "We're calling this man a murderer in the name of humanity?" It was the conservatives who used political institutions, political campaigns, who rallied behind traditional candidates produced by the party apparatus. They revitalized the traditions and the instruments and vehicles of our democracy. But now we've reached a point, quite like one Richard Hofstadter described some 40 years ago, where ideologues don't trust politicians anymore. Remember during the big march in Washington, many of the protestors or demonstrators insisted they were not demonstrating just against Barack Obama, but against all the politicians-- that's why some Republicans wouldn't support it. They don't believe in politics as the medium whereby our society negotiates its issues.
BILL MOYERS: What do they believe in?
SAM TANENHAUS: They believe in a kind of revolution, a cultural revolution. They think the system can be-- what some would say hijacked. They would say maneuvered, controlled, that they can get their hands back on the levers. An important thing about the right in America is it always considers itself a minority position and an embattled position. No matter how many of the branches of government they dominate. So, what they believe in is, as Willmoore Kendall, this early philosopher said, is a politics of battle lines, of war.
BILL MOYERS: So, here, at this very critical moment, when so much is hanging in the balance, what is the paradox of conservatism as you see it?
SAM TANENHAUS: The paradox of conservatism is that it gives the signs, the overt signs of energy and vitality, but the rigor mortis I described is still there. As a philosophy, as a system of government, as a way all of us can learn from, as a means of evaluating ourselves, our social responsibilities, our personal obligations and responsibilities. It has, right now, nothing to offer.
BILL MOYERS: Now, they disagree with you. They think you have issued a call for unilateral disarmament on their part-- that brass knuckles and sharp elbows are part of fighting for what you believe in, and therefore, you're calling for a unilateral disarmament.
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, you know, that's what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style, is when it's always living on the verge of apocalypse. That defeat is staring you in the face, and the only victories are total victories. Because even the slightest victory, if it's not complete, means the other side may come back and get you again. This is not serious responsible argument. Much of my book is actually about the failures of liberalism in that noontime period of the 1960s. And many of the conservatives simply ignore that part of the argument.
BILL MOYERS: How to explain this long fascination you've had with conservative ideas, and the conservative movement. Why this fascination?
BILL MOYERS: Well, I think it has been the dominant philosophy, political philosophy in our culture, in America, for some half-century. What particularly drew me first to Chambers and then Buckley is the idea that these were serious intellectuals, who were also men of action. Conservatives have kind of supplied us in their best periods-- the days when NATIONAL REVIEW and COMMENTARY and THE PUBLIC INTEREST were tremendously vital publications, self-examining, developing new vocabularies and idioms, teaching us all how to think about politics and culture in a different way, with a different set of tools. They were contributing so enormously to who we were as Americans. And yet, many liberals were not paying attention. Many liberals today don't know that a great thinker like Garry Wills was a product of the conservative movement. It's astonishing to them to learn it. They just assume, because they agree with him now, he was always a liberal. In fact, he remains a kind of conservative. This is the richness in the philosophy that attracted me, and that I wanted to learn more about, to educate myself.
BILL MOYERS: The book is THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM. Sam Tanenhaus, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for joining me.
SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, it's my great pleasure to be here.
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