Well, I did it. I ended on the worst possible note. At any rate, I’m proud of the book, and I hope you all enjoy it. And thanks for joining me. It was fun!

” your notion that the “middle class” may have been a transitory period”

Charles: It’s because the politics that made the middle class nation were based on a particular reaction to hard times. Not on the authority of experts, but on the particular way we reacted to the Depression. This time around, after conservatives who put Calvin Coolidge to shame ran the economy off a cliff AGAIN, those politics didn’t reappear. Maybe Obama’s failure, maybe the right’s genius–a little of both, as i say in “Pity.” But maybe also time to acknowledge that the politics that made us a middle-class nation were a specific response to a particular historical situation.

But that’s too depressing a note to end on. I want to work for a better response, I just don’t know where to begin anymore. I did my best with this book.

I’ve wondered about Rand’s atheism for a long time. How does it get overlooked so easily? Could it be that her followers think that part of her philosophy can just be ignored? Or that they don’t really read the books they say they do? Or that they just can’t imagine that someone so righteous might also be a ferocious opponent of their religion?

Either way, it’s all moot until someone with a big enough megaphone lets the wingers know that this is the case. One thing I learned writing “Pity” is that the silliest narrative beats no narrative at all. (as someone rightly said up above.)

“Most misused/misunderstood word today — “socialism” or “populism”?”
Most would say “socialism,” given the quite insane way it is applied to Obama and Co.
But I wonder: “populism” is a term that really gets the Washington Dems in a twist. They hate hate hate it! It’s the scariest, worst thing ever! We need to learn the lessons of the Bryan campaign in 1896 and NEVER inconvenience the billionaires! The cons, on the other hand, seem to have no problem with it. Just watch Newt bash the “elites,” or Santorum doing the same. They talk populism constantly.

in other words, back to the 19th century. The era of the middle class was a passing fad.

“Ahh, the lesser of 2 evils…we are sick of that one”
OK, it’s 6:30 here in Washington, so time for me to drop my most depressing idea.
Given the failure of O and the Dems to take advantage of their obvious moment in 09, maybe it’s time to acknowledge that the New Deal, and the social order it ushered in, was a one-of-a-kind sort of thing. When I was growing up in the 70s, we thought the New Deal order was permanent, was just the Way Things Were. Now, though, it looks more and more like a kind of interlude or interregnum between the American norms: extreme inequality, deregulation, financial booms and panics, every-every-everything for the poor billionaire.

“he mistook the country’s hunger for justice for a desire for healing.”

This is very important. I spend a lot of time in “Pity” describing how the right is in the grip of a reality-distorting utopia, a free-market fantasy very similar in some ways to the old fantasies of the Communists.

But the Washington Ds have their own utopian fantasy. Not as systematic as Ayn Rand’s, but close. Everything has to take its place in the grand calculation of “where the center is.” Partisanship / extremism is the problem, and centrism is the solution, in every aspect of human enterprise.

“Is the Tea Party out of gas as a movement now?”
I don’t know if we’ll ever see big demonstrations again like the one in Sept. 2009. Even the ones I attended in 09 and 10 were pretty small by left-wing standards. I mean, at biggest, they would draw like 2000 people.

The TP people have definitely become part of the GOP establishment. They’re all over the place in the 4 still-viable campaigns — including Romney, by the way.

And I suspect that we’ll have fond re-creations of tea party rage for years to come. They’ll probably start selling TP nostalgia souvenirs any day now. And, of course, people will start to claim, “I was there, man.”

Another irony: The Farm Holiday Association, like just about all other farm groups in those days, was organized to try to rescue neighbors and friends from foreclosure. The tea party movement of our own day was founded out of outrage that people were going to be able to ESCAPE foreclosure by some gov’t program! That was what Santelli’s rant was all about — guys on the floor of the CBOT enraged that poor people might evade the wrath of the market-god.

” I loved your description of the Farmers Holiday Association.”
This was a group of destitute farmers in Iowa and Nebraska (and elsewhere on the great plains) who had had enough, and they decided to pull off a kind of farm strike, where they would limit production until farm prices recovered. Of course, that never happened (it can’t happen absent federal farm programs), and so they took it to the streets, dumping out the contents of trucks hauling farm goods. When journalists would interview them, they would compare themselves to . . . the Boston Tea Party!!!

“It was the heyday of promoters, sloganeers, mushroom millionaires, opportunists, adventurers of all kinds. In this mad whirl was launched Mr. Hoover’s campaign. Perhaps foreseeing it, a shrewd man from New England, while in the cool detachment of the Dakota hills, on a narrow slip of paper wrote the historic words, “I do not choose to run.”

Damn, they don’t make guys like that anymore! The idea of doing social criticism during a run for the presidency. !

“1) what really would have happened if we hadn’t rushed into Bailout Mode in 2008″
Well, my thinking is that some version of the bailouts were necessary, but not in the way they were actually done, where all the fools were left in charge. Bill Black can tell you why this is a VERY BAD way to do things.

Many of the big banks should have been wound down, also, and the political price of the gov’t bailing out the banks should have been re-regulation.

“He still wants to cut the budget. What sort of idiot does that In this time.” True that, but consider how fantastically worse it would be were we to adopt the gold standard, God’s Own Currency. That would REALLY crush the economy, and teach you liberals how to behave.

A pale second-best (and you read it here first): The right should promise to put the US on the Euro, so our economy could be run by German bankers! They’d get us back into line.

“She simply claims that these billionaires do not gain a true psychological triumph.”
Hi Bill. It’s funny how many of those billionaires are drawn to looting and fraud even though it’s a hollow victory for them!

“An FDR moment”: The funny thing is, the right figured this out right away. They knew we were living through a kind of slightly milder 1930s and started reacting to it immediately. think of Glenn Beck coming to Fox News, for example, and immediately starting his Orson Welles / Martian invasion act. Or the immediate effort by the usual DC suspects to build up a protest movement of their own. They were going to harness the outrage this time around!

“And, when you suggest to journalists that they go after a group of companies acting in concert to swindle the public (ALEC) they get all nervous that they aren’t covering “both sides.”
Oh, Spocko, this is the story of my life. I like to think that by approaching things from my admittedly idiosyncratic position, I can come up with different and innovative ways of looking at things. (Like “Pity.”) What I discovered instead is that I am “outside the consensus” and that my opinions need not be paid any attention. That is the stupid weakness of our journalistic system: It literally punishes originality.

Charles: This is exactly right. We discuss economics as a moral issue, a culture-war issue. Instead of our precious values and traditions being besieged, it’s our precious free market economy. And the harsh calvinism is indeed remarkable. Lots of the people I write about actually ROOT for some kind of end-of-the-world economic scenario, which would wreck gummint for good and teach all those liberals about the ways of the Lord.

“Should he immediately have turned to Rubin, Summers, et. al.” It’s true that O didn’t have a lot of time to really fashion a thought-through alternative to Bushism, but like you, I think he didn’t have to go Rubin, Summers, Geithner. He could have talked to Jamie Galbraith. Or our own Bill Black. There were plenty of people out there who knew what was going on, and who could have steered him away from the disastrous road he went down. One of my other critiques of the Washington Dems is that they totally lack imagination and creativity, and O has been a real disappointment in this regard. Just reappoint people from the Clinton years, and call it statesmanship!

Mauimom: I’ve always viewed the suspension of the culture wars as a temporary expedient during the Big Recession. I’m sure they’ll be back with us soon. However, I didn’t count on it being so soon!

Hi June. Santorum fascinates me, all the really in-your-face working-class language that he uses, in service of (of course!) an agenda where extreme inequality is no problem and public education is really questionable. I still can’t believe that the GOP would actually nominate him, or even let him get into the lead. But again: the authenticity problem! Romney can’t attack him from the left, since that would expose Romney as inauthentic. Authenticity is the only legitimate critique!

These guys are fascinating.