YouTube: October 20

News: October 20

Democrats’ Divide: Should Obama-Era Economic Ideas Prevail in 2021? A more traditional view is competing against a newer approach that has become mainstream among economists. ......... long-term interest rates have fallen precipitously, even as very large budget deficits have become the norm. That implies the United States can maintain higher public debt than once seemed possible without excessively constraining private investment or facing excessive interest costs. ......... you can think of lower rates as a signal that the private sector has less demand for that money .......... “Any economic policy that begins with the premise, ‘Let’s just assume interest rates stay below 2008 levels forever,’ is extraordinarily hubristic and naïve,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Particularly because there is no backup plan if they are wrong and rates ever do revert to pre-2008 levels. At that point, the policies driving the debt will be nearly impossible to reverse, and we could face a severe fiscal crisis.” ............ spending that keeps children well-fed and out of poverty, such as school lunch programs and assistance payments to low-income parents. These appear to have long-lasting benefits for future employment and earning power — creating supply-side benefits, or increasing the economy’s overall potential. ........... universal preschool and an extension of a child tax credit ....... The 10-year window is arbitrary. Aiming for deficit neutrality is arbitrary — it’s arbitrariness on top of arbitrariness.

As a Woman Was Raped, Train Riders Failed to Intervene, Police Say The SEPTA train car near Philadelphia had several passengers aboard but none called 911 while the woman was sexually assaulted, the authorities said.

How the American Right Fell in Love With Hungary Some U.S. conservatives are taking a cue from Prime Minister Viktor Orban — how to use the power of the state to win the culture wars. ........ There, Hungary became the idealized backdrop for Carlson’s habitual preoccupations: Thanks to a barbed-wire fence, Hungary’s border area was “perfectly clean and orderly,” free of the “trash” and “chaos” that mark other borders of the world. Consequently, “There weren’t scenes of human suffering.” He did not bring up the fact that civic groups have repeatedly taken the Hungarian government to court for denying food to families held in immigration detention centers. .......

Next year, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential annual gathering of conservatives in America, will be held in Budapest.

.......... the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that Democrats are replacing white Americans with nonwhite immigrants in order to increase their vote tallies. ......... high levels of immigration threaten the “stability and cultural continuity of the nation.” ........ Dreher writes mainly against what he refers to as “wokeness” — ideas about racial justice and gender identity that he believes lead Americans to hate America and children to reject their parents. ......... “to what extent politics can be a bulwark against cultural disintegration.” .......... The turn toward illiberal democracy — a state that rejects pluralism in favor of a narrow set of values — seemed imminent to him. ......... “I realize that we’re at a point now where we have such cultural disintegration in the U.S. that the choice might actually be between an illiberal democracy of the left or an illiberal democracy of the right,” Dreher told me. “And if that’s true, then I want to understand as fully as I possibly can what the implications are.” ........ the Hungarian government had infected the mobile phones of investigative journalists and political opponents with spyware to track their communications ......... Orban’s announcement that he would welcome the construction of a giant Chinese-funded university in Budapest, worrying that it would be an inroad for spies. .......

the outsize interest that his Hungarian-style “illiberal democracy” has prompted

......... Budapest is to be the “intellectual home,” as he put it, of 21st-century conservatism. ........ Dreher argues that leftist identity politics in America is bringing about a cultural revolution, in which the punishments for transgressors echo those of Soviet totalitarianism. .......

Conservatives compose a minimal percentage of Silicon Valley; their influence is declining in the corporate world; and they are all but absent from mainstream media, academia and Hollywood. But with nearly half of Congress and possibly more government control in the future, conservative cultural power would come from the state.

.............. recently, some Jesuits had come down in favor of referring to God as “they.” ........ like in Oregon, where 15-year-olds can be treated with puberty-suppressing drugs or cross-sex hormones without parental permission (the age of medical consent in Oregon is 15) ........... The Republican Party “seems to exist mainly to ratify whatever the Democrats were advocating about five years ago.” ............ “If not for the First Amendment, then it’s all about power. And all the power in America now is against people like me.” ......... In his book “Why Liberalism Failed,” Deneen also argued that the antidote to the disenchantments of modern liberal society was to be found in the closeness and custom of local communities. .......... The president, the speaker of the House and six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic (a seventh was raised Catholic) .......... In its quest to liberate the individual, it has turned the things that traditionally constitute the self — family, community, religion — into arbitrary impositions from which we seek to be freed. ..........

People, especially Americans, pick up and move, leave their families and neglect to form new ones, eroding the local networks and customs that regulate economic relationships.

A new aristocracy, whose members believe they’ve earned everything they have and therefore feel no obligation to anyone else, has created a society that claims to be all about freedom but in which most people feel little control over their lives. ............ Catholics, he said, are often left-wing on economic issues and right-wing on social issues ..........

Free markets might have been good policy in the 1950s and ’60s, when they were functioning well for Americans, he went on, but now they had been gamed by giant corporations and the ultrarich.

................ The birthrate in the United States had plummeted since 2008; millennials said they wanted to have children but couldn’t afford it. ........ Catholicism’s insistence, as developed in the work of Thomas Aquinas and his modern adherents, on the social nature of human existence has always been at odds with Protestant ideas about individual autonomy. ....... promoting “substantive moral principles” might allow the state to intervene in areas like health care, guns and the environment, where “human flourishing” would take priority over trying to divine the 18th-century meanings of terms like “commerce” and “bearing arms.” ........... Orban pushed out the Soros-backed Central European University and used hostile takeovers to transform the media, outlet by outlet, into a conservative (and government-friendly) landscape. ...... Orban was elected in 2010 with the help of a political machine that remains beholden to him. For most of the last decade, his party, Fidesz, has held a supermajority in the Hungarian Parliament, thanks to the way he has intertwined politics and business and the changes the party made to election laws, which bolstered its representation. Along with what has been described as perfect party discipline — no one breaks rank — this has enabled Orban to govern with great efficiency. He has put in place numerous policies to counter a low birthrate and encourage Hungarian, not immigrant, babies: There are subsidies for family cars; women who have four or more children will never pay income tax again; and some older citizens who leave their jobs to take care of grandchildren are compensated by the government. .......... just a front for a kleptocracy — he has shuffled millions in E.U. subsidy money into contracts with family members and close friends — his penchant for positioning himself as the sine qua non of the global culture wars suggests the true objective may simply be power. ............. Legutko, 71, has argued that democrats can behave much like communists. While allowing that liberal democracy is superior to communism, he nonetheless maintains that certain characteristics of communist ideology — the belief that it will eventually prevail worldwide, that it is the apotheosis of human nature, that it represents the culmination of history — are true of liberal democracy as well. .............

What Marxists and liberals had in common, he continued, was “this notion of history’s progress, you cannot go back, you made the omelet, so the eggs are no longer there.”

........ According to Legutko, liberal democracy would not tolerate the family, the church and other nonliberal institutions that Poland was trying to preserve. ......... Legutko says that the efforts to change traditional understandings of gender lead to “social engineering.” ......... “But you can insult Catholics in Poland and the judge will say, Well, that’s individual opinion, or artistic performance,” he said. ................ “You say something about gay activists, and immediately you’re punished, because that is hate speech.” The control of language, Legutko insisted, was another similarity between liberal democracy and Communism. “The language is being dictated to you by the powers that be, and if you do not conform, you’re being punished.” .......... The introduction of bills in state legislatures to control or ban the teaching in public schools of what conservatives describe as Critical Race Theory was arguably the first attempt by postliberals to use the power of the state in cultural regulation. ............ he observed that it wasn’t a powerful state that had made America, in many respects, “the greatest country in the world.” It grew to dominate “because it was the land of the free, and unlimited possibilities,” Kalnoky said. Europe had never had that. “And we will never have it, I dare say,” he said. “But the States may want to hold onto it as much as possible.”