As Ezra Klein says, the tax cut deal has something in it to annoy everyone. But seems to me that if there is one class of critters that has not earned the right to bellyache about it, it’s Senate Democrats.

Saturday the Senate blocked a vote on President Obama’s preferred plan. All the Republicans were joined by four Democrats and Joe Lieberman. That much I knew. But I looked it up today, and learned that the four Democrats were Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Jim Webb of Virginia, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

Et tu, Russ?

Conventional wisdom said that the blocked vote proved the President had to cut a deal. I don’t know that was his only option, but that’s what the newspapers said about it. So, he cut a deal, and now some Senate Democrats appear to be dumbfounded.

Sen. Mary Landrieu said she was discouraged by the President, and asked, “But why the president thought he had to give in on this? Why he didn’t have the confidence in a Democratic Caucus to hold the line?”

Because they didn’t hold the line Saturday, when Obama needed the line held? Just a guess.

Other stuff to read —

“How America will collapse (by 2025)” by Alfred McCoy. Worst-case scenarios, maybe, but McCoy is right that when empires collapse, they go fast, or “unravel with unholy speed,” as he puts it. He suggests also that we may witness a great shift in civilization itself that makes sovereign nations a thing of the past. Unnerving stuff.

For a look back at at the time before America went off the rails, see “Pearl Harbor day: How FDR reacted on December 7, 1941.”

As many of you were, I was horrified to learn of this Glenn Beck segment that romanticized poverty during the Great Depression. Looking at a photograph of a Depression-era family eating dinner, Beck said,

BECK: Look at this family. This is — this looks like a sawed off log. This looks like a log cabin. I don’t know what this is. Plywood? Look at the conditions here. Look at this man’s shirt. I don’t think that was — I don’t think that was government health care. Well, actually, that might actually be government health care.

Look at the food. And I can guarantee you, she canned the food. They milked the cow. She made the food. He grew the food. They probably helped. That’s poverty.

Full transcript: http://www.foxnews.com/…

Well, no that’s not poverty. That’s what “prosperity” was for most people a century ago. Poverty was not having a milk cow or any vegetables of fruit to can.

I would love to know more about that photograph, and if it might have been taken by a photographer paid by the WPA Federal Art Project, or if it was distributed by the federal Farm Security Administration to show that the New Deal was working.

But the truth is, poor people during the Great Depression did receive “government run health care” of a sort. In fact, thanks to federal relief programs, many people had better access to medical care during the Depression than they had had during the boom times of the “Roaring Twenties.” It was so much better that life expectancy increased and infant mortality rates decreased during the Great Depression.

For the data, see a study partly funded by the National Science Foundation called “Births, Deaths, and New Deal Relief During the Great Depression.” This wades into statistical analysis of data that goes over my head, but what it says, in brief, is that before 1933 the federal government played almost no role in poverty relief other than veterans’ benefits. After 1933, of course, the federal government became far more pro-active in fighting poverty. The authors of this paper found a correlation between federal “relief” spending and health outcomes.

Another academic paper I found on the web that studied the impact of federal relief programs on infant mortality rates said “Relief spending directly lowered infant mortality rates to the degree that changes in relief spending can explain nearly one-third of the decline in infant mortality during the 1930s.”

Remember what I said a few days ago about “conservatives” wanting to wipe out wipe out the last couple of centuries of history and human development? Beck wants us to go back to the days when even people who weren’t farmers kept a milk cow, some chickens, and grew their own vegetables.

(That wasn’t all that long ago. There’s a story still told in my family of the time my mother’s parents moved about a hundred miles so my grandfather — a miner in those days — could take a new job. This was probably sometime in the 1920s. Since they couldn’t get the family Guernsey on the truck, my grandfather walked the cow to the new home, which took several days. And then, a few months later, he quit that job, they moved back to the old neighborhood, and the cow had to be walked again. He found this task especially onerous because the cow refused to carry him across rivers, so he had to wade.)

You have to be several generations removed from living like that to romanticize it; I’m not, and I don’t.

Update: Reader Richard Ketring adds to the comments —

The picture in question on the Glenn Beck site is from a site called Shorpy and the pic is called pie town sit down. This is from a series of color pics. The Faro Caudill family eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico. October 1940. 35mm Kodachrome transparency by Russell Lee.

Thank you, and yes! Russell Lee was a photographer for the FSA (Farm Security Administration), according to the Library of Congress prints and photographs division. The LoC online catalog has tons of photographs of the Pie Town homesteaders.

According to the Smithsonian magazine, the Pie Town homesteaders were refugees from the Dust Bowl. The Smithsonian also says —

Never mind that I now also knew—in the so-called more rational and objective part of my brain—that the Thoreauvian ideal of self-reliance had foundered badly in this family. For Doris and Faro Caudill (and their daughter, Josie, who was about 8 when Lee took his pictures), the PieTown dream became closer to a nightmare. Faro got sick, got lung trouble, the family moved away (just two years after the pictures were taken). Faro sought work in the city, Faro ran around. An acrimonious divorce ensued. Doris ended up married to another man for 39 years. She even went to Alaska to try the American homesteading dream all over again. There is a beautiful book published several years ago about the Caudills and their saga, but especially about Doris: Pie Town Woman, by Joan Myers, a New Mexico author.

In 1942, when Faro Caudill hitched the gate at his PieTown homestead for the last time, he scrawled on the wood: “Farewell, old homestead. I bid you adieu. I may go to hell but I’ll never come back to you.”

And yet what you also get from Myers’ book about Doris in her very old age, not long from her death, is a deep longing to be there again, to have that life again. She told the author she’d like to have hot and cold running water, though. “As old as I am, I like to take a bath now and then. We would take a bath on Saturday night. We had a number three bathtub. I’d get the water all hot and then I’d bathe Josie and then I’d take a bath and then Faro would take a bath. . . . You kind of wore the water out.”

Yes, Glenn, good times.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
–T.S. Eliot

… except, I think the world will go on. I see little hope that America will pull out of its nosedive, however.

The creatures about to re-infest the House will hasten the deterioration of the U.S. economy. On issue after issue, what Republicans want to do is exactly the wrong thing, and nobody seems willing to stop them. What the economy sorely needs — to raise taxes on the very well off; to extend unemployment benefits; more stimulus spending to get the economy moving; and health care reform — will be blocked.

Republican economy theory boils down to this — what’s good for rich people is the right thing to do. And kicking the less fortunate in the teeth is an even better thing to do.

Senate Republicans blocked a vote on extending only middle-class tax cuts; it’s all or nothing, they said. Meanwhile, the best thing one can say about the deficit commission recommendations is that they probably won’t go anywhere.

Still, the recommendations regarding Social Security won’t die. Of all the Big Budget issues we’re facing now, Social Security is the least problematic, yet that’s the one people want to talk about. Why? Paul Krugman writes,

The answer, I suspect, has to do with class.

When medical expenses are big, they’re big; even the very affluent are grateful when Medicare pays the bills for their mother-in-laws bypass or dialysis. The importance of Medicare, in short, is obvious to all but the very rich.

Social Security, by contrast, is something that matters enormously to the bottom half of the income distribution, but no so much to people in the 250K-plus club. A 30 percent cut in benefits would represent disaster for tens of millions of Americans, but a barely noticeable inconvenience for VSPs and everyone they know. A rise in the retirement age would be a vast hardship for people who do manual labor, but if anything a gift to VSPs, who don’t want to step aside in any case. And so on down the line.

So going after Social Security is a way to seem tough and serious — but entirely at the expense of people you don’t know.

Matt Bai has an piece on the deficit commission in the New York Times that misses a lot of points, but I want to point to his definition of “American exceptionalism” —

It isn’t simply that America, by virtue of symbolizing liberty, has a unique responsibility to shape the affairs of humankind. It’s also the belief that free markets can create a kind of endless prosperity, driving an economic and military dominance that exempts Americans from having to accept constraints or trade-offs.

This fantasy is what’s killing us. Bai continues,

For much of the Industrial Age, and especially between World War II and the oil crises of the 1970s, this was, in fact, reality. Wages and profits rose, the social safety net and the nation’s military reach both expanded, and government lived largely within its means. College education, suburban lawns, good pensions and blissful security all became part of the pact with the middle class, as much a part of the constellation of entitlements as Medicare and Medicaid.

That was the legacy of the big government spending program called “World War II.” That and the entitlements given to veterans after, such as the GI Bill and mortgage assistance, was the foundation of the prosperity enjoyed by the Greatest Generation. They spent their childhood in the Depression but retired to luxury condos in Florida.

And the good life began to stall in 1972, at the point the white middle class was in full revolt against “welfare” and “tax and spend liberals.” And life in America has gotten tougher and tougher ever since, and “liberals” continue to be blamed for it, even though Washington hasn’t been genuinely “liberal” since the 1960s. But the worse things get, the more American voters embrace the very policies that are making things worse.

Bai doesn’t make that connection, and he doesn’t seem to consider that many of the “sacrifices” recommended by the Catfood Commission would take us further down the road to ruin. They are Very Serious People, after all, so they must know what they’re talking about.

I don’t hear any whimpering yet, although that may be because we don’t hear the voices of the very poor and the growing number of formerly self-sufficient workers who have been dumped by the economy. Yes, some sacrifices need to be made, but not by the people who are being forced to make them. The ones who should be sacrificing have exempted themselves, because they have the power to do so.

So, I have little hope that the state of the nation won’t get a lot, lot worse, and it will get so much worse that “better” will be only a relative term.

Following up the last post — with the Constitution, the Founding Fathers gave us a structure of government and governing principles that succeeding generations could apply to their own circumstances to govern themselves. Making the structure and principles work in the real world was another process that involved a lot of trial and error.

There was much stumbling around in the early years, but little by little various precedents took hold and became the standard procedure because they were practical and workable. Judicial review is a good example. The notion that the Supreme Court would be the final arbiter of the constitutionality of law probably wasn’t on anyone’s mind at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and truth be told the idea didn’t completely take hold until the latter part of the 19th century. But today the SCOTUS is assumed to be the final arbiter of constitutional questions.

Dana Milbank writes today about the constitutional “repeal” amendment that would allow a group of states to nullify a federal law with which they disagreed. This is not without precedent; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison tried to annul the Alien and Sedition Acts by asking states legislatures to vote to, in effect, veto the law on constitutional grounds. Not many state legislatures complied, however, and the Alien and Sedition Acts eventually just expired.

But all this happened before Marbury v. Madision and the precedent of judicial review, which mightily pissed off Thomas Jefferson. But as a practical matter, I suspect that if Madison and Jefferson’s idea of state legislatures deciding constitutionality of federal law had taken hold, state legislatures would end up spending most of their time debating federal laws. Can you imagine the pressure state legislatures would feel from interest groups to nix laws they don’t like?

So, from the perspective of political theory, one could argue that such a process of state nullification was very much in keeping with the Founding Father’s intentions. In fact, one could argue that states could do this anyway, if they chose to, and an amendment isn’t required. But just because something can be done doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it.

Anyway, Milbank writes,

The mechanics of the amendment are also a bit odd. It would allow the repeal of any federal law – from civil rights to health care – if two-thirds of the states say so. But that could mean that the 33 smallest states, which have 33 percent of the population, have the power to overrule the 17 largest states, which have 67 percent of the population.

Does anyone doubt that much of the civil rights & liberties legislation of the past several years would be the first items on the agenda?

Update: I want to expand on this a bit — as is nearly always the case, what we’re facing here is the difference between living in the real world and living in never-never land. The anal insistence that any function of government not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution amounts to encroaching tyranny ignores the fact that we’re not living in the 18th century any more.

When the Constitution was written, there was no air traffic. There weren’t even any railroads yet. The “right to bear arms” referred to owning muzzle-loading muskets that could only fire as quickly as the shooter could load and fire — three rounds a minute was the standard.

No one knew what germs were, or what caused most diseases. The Founders would have been baffled by health safety inspections. Health care was not a “right,” but the fact is that medicine was so primitive in those days most of the time you were no better off with a doctor’s care than without it.

No one was dependent on an energy grid or a telecommunications network.

Jobs could not be “outsourced.” In fact, not many people worked for a salary, anyway. Most men were independent farmers or artisans (e.g., silversmith, shoemaker, tailor), aristocrats supported by family wealth and plantations, or live-in servants or slaves. Nearly everyone lived in proximity to where they worked; any sort of commuting was rare.

National security consisted of enrolling most men into state militias that could be called up in case of invasion or Indian attacks. The regular military consisted of a standing army of maybe 600 officers and men and a naval fleet of six wooden frigates. Just about any army in Europe could have crushed us were it not such a nuisance to get men and ordnance across the Atlantic Ocean in enough numbers to do the job.

As a nation, we’ve been through a lot of stuff that would have been unimaginable to the Founders. We’ve increased in size several times, and within our borders are lands the Founders didn’t even know existed. We’ve experienced a Civil War, waves of immigration, two World Wars, the Great Depression. We live in a world in which nuclear war is possible. We live in a world in which dumped industrial waste can kill hundreds of people. We live in a world in which a sloppy slaughterhouse in Minnesota can give a fatal dose of e coli to a child in Florida. We live in a world in which a worker in China can take a job away from one in North Carolina. We live in a world in which medical science can extend one’s life by many years, but at great cost. We live in a world in which most people depend on a job, and a paycheck, to live. We live in a world that is fighting with itself over issues of race and sexual orientation that 18th century white men simply did not consider.

This world we live in didn’t exist in 1787, and the delegates of the Constitutional Convention couldn’t have imagined it.

As a nation, we have gained much in experience and knowledge since the Constitution was written. We, the People have seen many things, lived through many things, learned many things. The problem is, much of the nation does not trust that experience and knowledge. The modern world is frightening and baffling to them, and they want to retreat to a previous time that never existed, or at least never existed as they imagine it.

When some teabagger starts thumping his chest over protecting the Constitution, what he’s really saying is that he wants to wipe out the last couple of centuries of history and human development. And I bet they could do it, too, if they aren’t kept in check.