[Welcome Barbara Ehrenreich, and Host Thomas Frank - bev]

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

When I lived in Chicago in the Nineties, I used to listen to an AM radio station that broadcast nothing but recordings of motivational speakers all day long. The idea, as I understood it, was to provide a sort of service to the itinerant salesman, whom Barbara Ehrenreich describes as “lonely and wounded” but still required to “pick himself up and generate fresh enthusiasm for the next customer, the next city, the next rejection.” By listening to a string of these three or four minute pep talks, the city’s sales force would be able to psyche themselves up to face their next prospect.

As for the station’s content, it was pretty much unrelenting sunshine, megadoses of motivation; the main feature distinguishing the various speakers was the homemade theory or idea with which they had souped up the great American idea of positive thinking: Not just positive thinking but positive envisioning. Happy Bible verses. Tricks to make yourself seem like an optimistic person. Words whose letters actually stood for other words that, taken together, were really, really awesome.

Positive thinking is one of those things that you either embrace enthusiastically or else dismiss as a harmless form of escapism, as benign as the Top 40 songs they’re playing on the next station over and just as formulaic. After all, how can you object when someone advises you to direct your feet to the sunny side of the street? 

Well, maybe it’s time we started taking it more seriously. Positive thinking inundates American culture, from megachurch to motivational seminar. As Ehrenreich makes plain in her new book, Bright-Sided, it is not merely masscult banality; it is also ideology. It rationalizes things we ought to find unacceptable; it leads us to expect improbable results and to blame ourselves—for insufficient positivity, of course—when the world somehow fails to comply with our wishes.

In certain reaches of business culture positive thinking is hegemonic, with exhortations to stamp out negativity—and to eliminate negative people—coming from bosses, management books, and so on right down to office tchotchkes.

We are accustomed to brilliance from Barbara Ehrenreich. She describes the darkness in the corners of our business civilization with such effortless genius that you come to expect it; all she has to do, you start to think, is turn on her computer and out come the polished sentences and the penetrating apercus.

But this book is special; it will hit close to home for almost everybody. Positive thinking is something we all know about, or think we know about. And its costs have been staggering. At its feet, in part, Ehrenreich lays Americans’ passivity in the face of downsizing, our acceptance of the bizarre skewing of wealth, and our almost complete failure to anticipate the disaster that was coming from the late real-estate bubble. This is a book that makes large, controversial claims about a beloved American idea.

And it does so in a way that will be hard to forget. If you don’t follow this part of American culture, many of the scenes Ehrenreich describes will be shocking: The motivation gurus selling a form of Xtreme covetousness, in which you are simply supposed to long for an object in order to “manifest,” or receive it. (“Name it and claim it.”) The dealers in motivation who found it appropriate to waterboard an employee. The preachers of a “prosperity gospel” who boast of their own high-living ways and who imagine God intervening in the minutiae of everyday life right down to securing the faithful a good seat at a crowded restaurant. The management book that includes this passage:

Place your hand on your heart and say . . .

• “I admire rich people!”

• “I bless rich people!”

• “I love rich people!”

• “And I’m going to be one of those rich people too!”

What I suspect will be the book’s most noticed chapter describes Ehrenreich’s own experience with breast cancer, and the weirdly sunny, upbeat culture that the disease’s victims have built. The chapter is called “Smile or Die,” and in it Ehrenreich describes how, in some circles, the optimism has been taken so far that cancer is thought of as a “‘a gift,’ deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude.” (“What does not destroy you,” she writes, “. . . makes you a spunkier, more evolved sort of person.”) The problem here, as well as in the culture at large, is that in building up the power of positivity we blame those who fail—in this case, who die—for their own misfortune. They simply weren’t optimistic enough.

Uplift has consequences, and the myth of positive thinking may cost us more than we can afford.

[Welcome David Owen, and Host Catherine Tumber - bev]

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability

With Green Metropolis, New Yorker staff writer David Owen roughs up the American environmental movement’s most sacred cows (including the grass-fed ones). The book expands on a 2004 article Owen wrote for the New Yorker, called “Green Manhattan,” and in the longer work New York City remains his frame of reference.

Eco-friendly suburbanites and small-town residents are only kidding themselves, he argues, as long as they live in sparsely settled, spaciously appointed, auto-dependent communities. If they really want to reduce their carbon footprint in any significant way, they should live in densely-settled, pedestrian-friendly, public-transit-oriented cities like New York.

Likewise, Owen urges cities (including New York) to build on their biggest low-carbon asset—their high population density—and stop placing so much store in green buildings, urban agriculture, and the expansion of city parkland. He even looks askance at New York’s Central Park for taking up too much space that could be given over to intensive urban dwelling. In the process, he skewers the environmental movement’s longstanding hostility to cities and love affair with “nature,” dating back to Thoreau, Sierra Club founder John Muir, and the ’70s back-to-the-land movement.

And in what are, perhaps, the most painstakingly researched sections of the book, he casts a cool appraising eye across the spectrum of green-tech fixes under development, from residential solar panels and LEED-certified buildings to “net-metering,” deconcentrated “distributed” electricity generation, ethanol production, and electric cars. “Nature-conservancy brain” and “LEED brain,” as he calls these environmentalist fixations, are too often driven by PR and do little more than distract from the more difficult task at hand: how to get Americans to kick the car habit and live together more closely, in smaller spaces.

Owen reminds us that New Yorkers are environmentalists without even having to think about it, because they already live this way. “In urban planning in particular,” he says, “the best, most enduringly fruitful concepts have usually arisen accidentally, and have endured not because anyone was wise enough to identify and preserve them but because they serendipitously developed what was, in effect, a life of their own and were therefore able to withstand the best intentions of potential destroyers, including urban planners themselves.” (p. 315)   All the best planning in the world, he argues, will not achieve what only rising fuel costs can bring about, since the other incentive to concentrate population and refine public transit—a federal gas tax—is politically infeasible.

Arguing that Gotham should be a model for other cities concerned about reducing their carbon footprints, certainly packs rhetorical heat. But I wonder how helpful it is for cities with entirely different economic histories and land-use legacies, not to mention cities of much smaller scale (think Peoria: population 110,000), or even shrinking cities that have lost as much as half their populations (such as Detroit or Youngstown or Buffalo).

In some of these places, returning parts of the city to “nature” makes a certain amount of sense. So does planning for future density, which many of these places currently lack. Indeed, over the past decade, planning and design organizations, from Smart Growth America and the Congress for the New Urbanism to the American Institute of Architects, have grown increasingly alive to their environmental responsibilities, rendering the environmental movement itself more complex and city-focused than Owen makes it out to be. I hope we can talk about some of these issues in our salon today.

Owen makes a point, almost in passing, that also deserves further conversation: rather than reducing the carbon footprints of apartment buildings or growing food on precious urban real estate, cities should be focusing on “old-fashioned quality-of-life concerns” such as education, crime, noise, and recreational amenities—the very troubles that drove people into suburbia in the first place.

Traditional environmentalists tend to give short shrift to these issues, he says, because they don’t “feel green.” Yet they applaud suburbanites who strenuously compost, weatherize, and install solar panels on their roofs, which barely makes a dent in addressing our collective dependency on fossil fuel. Owen’s book draws our attention to this hypocrisy—in which he himself participates, as he notes bravely and ruefully—and should inspire a good deal of soul searching. We can only hope that it also will contribute to real policy change.

Suppose you lived in a country whose health care system had become so dysfunctional, wasteful and inhumane that almost everyone with any sense realized it required fundamental reform. Everyone conceded that it cost from 50 to 100 percent more per person than comparable countries, yet if was producing no better and often worse health outcomes. They knew it was gobbling up the federal budget and capturing its GDP at a frightening, unsustainable pace. In addition it left at least 47 million uninsured, millions more underinsured and still more fraudulently insured, forced millions into bankruptcy, while too often treating those it presumably “cared” for in an uncaring, negligent, even reckless and sometimes criminal manner. How would you fix it? Where would you even begin?

The first thing you might do is try to understand how you got into such an indefensible mess, and that’s partly what Maggie Mahar does in her superbly written and exhaustively documented book, Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. But don’t expect a simple diagnosis or easy answers. It’s not a single “reason” but rather a complex history that has seen America’s health care system transformed by a corporate culture whose incentives are at war with basic values of good medicine.

In first tracing the last 50+ years of this devolution, Mahar describes how doctors gradually lost control of their profession to the corporate MBAs who arrogantly believed that hospital corporations could replicate Walmart. Many CEOs of for-profit hospitals became rich, driven by the need to grow and consolidate. But as they did, the biggest and worst of them — NME, Tenet, Columbia/HCA (Rick Scott), Health South — variously resorted to massive Medicare fraud, kickbacks, pervasive patient abuse and even kidnapping to fill their beds. Many executives should have gone to jail, but almost none, and no one at the top, ever did.

We often hear that “more care is not better care,” and Mahar traces the incentives that lead hospitals, doctors, device and drug makers to “do more” with insufficient attention to whether it actually improves patients or is worth the costs/risks. Contrary to market (and consumer-driven care) enthusiasts, the “supply” side too often drives demand: if hospitals are overbuilt with too many beds, it’s an incentive to prescribe more treatments, longer stays, do more tests and bring in more specialists.

Instead of solving the problem, competition makes it worse, as competing hospitals entice doctors — the doctors bring the patients — with lavish technology centers and technology “wars” — but the more MRIs you have, the more incentive there is to overprescribe their use, driving up costs but with no overall benefit to patients. And then there are the medical “mistakes,” so pervasive that one doctor observes, “Hospitals are dangerous places — especially if you do not need to be there.”

In a chapter on drug and medical device makers, Mahar anticipates the pre-reform price increases announced earlier this week. Big Pharma is not driven by increased demand so much as the need to meet Wall Street expectations, conditioned by years of spectacular profits powered in part by the Medicare drug bill of 2003. Their R&D budgets, which they claim to justify unrelenting price increases, are dwarfed by their marketing budgets and efforts, in which physician integrity becomes compromised by collusion and patients are convinced they must have the latest, more expensive drugs even though their efficacy and value remain unproven.

It’s an overwhelming, dismaying story –and I’ve touched only a tiny fraction — and through it all we read of physicians torn between the traditional ethics of their profession and the incentives and temptations of the money-driven system that surrounds them. Mahar shows the best of them struggling to create islands of ethical sanity, to collaborate and share information (using IT reforms, evidence-based medicine) in a hospital and drug industry that would rather withhold information because it’s “proprietary” or a “trade secret.” We see this system capture and corrupt everyone, including regulators during the last two administrations, even to the extent of censoring critical reports in medical journals.

Mahar summarizes the malevolent forces (178):

If you believe the Dartmouth research which says that one in three health care dollars is wasted, the conclusion is inescapable: the real reason Medicare appears to be headed for bankruptcy is not because the nation is graying, nor even simply because the cost of new technology is skyrocketing. The problem lies not in the cost of progress, but in the way we are using — and overusing — that technology in a money-driven system where device makers, drugmakers, some hospitals, and even some doctors all seem to be selling something — and selling it hard.

The obvious questions are: how do we fix this? Where do we begin? Is there some way to get back to a doctor-patient relationship based on trust, and is that enough? As Mahar notes,

The U.S. is in the only country in the developed world that has chosen to turn healthcare into a largely unregulated for-profit enterprise.

Healthcare is a necessity–like heat or light. This is why most governments regulate it, understanding that we can’t let patients be gouged.

Mahar finished Money-Driven Medicine in 2006, before the current debates on health reform, but she writes frequently on the current reform efforts at her blog, Health Beat. We’ll have a chance to ask how well the House and Senate bills address the problems of money-driven medicine.

So with that, please welcome Maggie Mahar. And as always, please keep comments respectful and questions relevant to the book’s topics.

[Welcome Marc J. Hetherinton, Jonathan Weiler, and Host Henry Farrell - bev]

Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics

Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s new book re-examines the recent course of American politics. They tell us about how authoritarian politics – especially on the right – have helped give rise to increasing polarization between Republicans and Democrats. This is an important contribution to debate among political scientists about polarization, but deserves a much wider readership. If they are right – and the differences between authoritarians and non-authoritarians are the key factor driving polarized politics – then many of the received wisdoms of the punditocracy are flat out wrong. Right wing columnists like Michael Gerson and Clive Crook, who deplore the increasing extremism of American politics and especially of the left, are missing out on the ways in which right wing politics are increasingly based around authoritarianism and intolerance.

First though, it is necessary to be clear about language. Authoritarianism, as political scientists define it, is different from the every day sense of the word. For Americanist political scientists, authoritarianism does not necessarily denote hostility to democracy. Instead, it refers to a syndrome of attitudes which emphasize traditional authority, depicts politics in black and white terms as a struggle between good and evil, and involves hostility towards groups (gays, immigrants) who are seen as disrupting the social order. Hetherington and Weiler argue that it is best measured by looking at how people think about family and child rearing. Those who emphasize discipline and obedience are likely to be authoritarians. Those who instead want to encourage their kids to be curious and self-reliant are likely to be non-authoritarian.And there are lots of authoritarians in America – there are more strong authoritarians than there are strong non-authoritarians. For Hetherington and Weiler, the story of American politics over the last several decades has been one of a political realignment around the differences between authoritarians and non-authoritarians. It used to be as best as we can tell (the opinion survey research that this book relies on doesn’t have good data before the early 1970s) that authoritarians were not especially associated with any one party. Indeed, the kinds of politics that emphasizes authoritarianism was submerged by the New Deal and debates around it. However, Nixon and his successors saw that it was possible to build a new political coalition, which would make Democratic-leaning authoritarians into reliable Republican voters. They did this by emphasizing race, law and order and ’strength’ in foreign policy. The last few decades have seen this strategy work out. Authoritarian Democrats – especially in the South, but among white ethnic voters in the North too – became Reagan Republicans.

A second important element of their story involves external threats. Some political scientists have argued that authoritarians are likely to be most visibly different from the rest of the population in times of crisis, where they will over-emphasize the dangers posed by threats to social order, external enemies and so on. Hetherington and Weiler argue instead that it is just at these moments that lots of other people start to look like authoritarians. When non-authoritarians are traumatized by a shock such as September 11, they may become more authoritarian in outlook as long as the relevant threat seems politically salient. This is why authoritarian politicians (who are today mostly concentrated in the Republican party) do well in times of external threat – they get not only the regular authoritarian voters, but non-authoritarian voters, who have been primed by the crisis, too.

Hetherington and Weiler argue that there are still some authoritarians left in the Democratic party. They suggest that the battle between Obama and Clinton for the Democratic nomination is best interpreted in terms of authoritarianism, since the two candidates’ actual policies were nearly indistinguishable from each other. Obama was as non-authoritarian a political figure as you could imagine – he tried to appeal to voters using a complex message of healing and unity, and was culturally exotic. To attack him, Clinton started using the language of authoritarianism, depicting herself as strong, rooted in traditional American culture, able to swill beer and with roots in a hard-scrabble town.

This is an interesting and important set of arguments. I won’t focus on the political science elements – but I do want to push them on some questions.

First – how well does your framework explain the dynamics of the Presidential election after the primaries were over? In your postscript, you appear somewhat hesitant, and suggest that many authoritarian voters swallowed their values and voted their economic interests, supporting Obama because of the economic crisis. It may be that events since then (Obama’s loss of support among working class voters) can be explained by a return to authoritarianism, but it may also be that this is explained by the ways in which his economic policies emphasized the soundness of the financial system over visible job creation.

Second, and a follow-on to the first – how do the teabaggers fit into your story? On the one hand, they look like the most obviously authoritarian political movement we have seen in the US in the last few decades. On the other hand, they are mainly mobilized around the kinds of New Deal issues – bailouts, social policy, health care etc – that you see as having been replaced by the authoritarian divide. Do you need to update your definition of authoritarianism to include economic cleavages too? Or does it make sense, alternatively, to re-examine existing attitudes to social policy etc (as many political scientists do) in terms of attitudes towards race, which you see as linked to authoritarianism.

Third – How does this link to politics in the blogosphere? I suspect that you see right wing blogs as often involving strongly authoritarian politics and expressing authoritarian attitudes. How are they distinguished from the left? You take care to distinguish authoritarianism from the kinds of vigorous partisan rhetoric seen in blogs like this one, or dKos (which you mention in passing). You cite Glenn Greenwald as a source. It would be nice to see a more explicit analysis of why you think (as I believe you do) that the kinds of impassioned politics on the online left differ from those of the online right.

Fourth – when you say that events like 9/11 can prime non-authoritarians to become more authoritarian, do you mean to say that they become more authoritarian on only the issues related to the specific threat (e.g. terrorism and foreign policy in the case of 9/11), or authoritarian on a whole host of issues unconnected to that threat (e.g. gay rights etc). Obviously, these are pretty different effects. And if, to quote Michael Bérubé, there are a lot of people thinking everything changed for me on September 11.  I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick then temporary events may have very broad political consequences.

Fifth – and in defense of authoritarians – are they really as limited as you suggest. You argue that they may very literally be at an arrested stage of development, unable to get beyond parental notions of authority. But some of the evidence that you cite suggests that they can make reasonably subtle distinctions. For example, I was surprised to see that two thirds of authoritarians, despite a general animus towards gay people, support gay people being allowed to join the military. This argues, I think, for a more subtle account of authoritarianism than the one you suggest.

[Welcome Paul Tough, and Host Andrea Batista Schlesinger - bev]

“Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s quest to change Harlem and America” is an important book. I think so not because his favorable portrait of the Harlem’s Children Zone provides the answers, but because it inspires so many questions: about the nature of urban poverty, the capacity and means by which public institutions can break cycles of systemic inequality, and how a community can transform. Tough doesn’t answer all of these questions—and some he leaves uninvestigated, such as the tension between learning and performing well on exams—but his moving account of Geoffrey Canada’s project to change the lives of the children of Harlem should be read by anyone who wants to think critically about how poverty, culture and education intersect.

Tough chronicles Canada’s attempts to change his traditional social service agency that can help only a few kids a time through “superheroic” efforts into one that would look comprehensively at the problem of poverty in Harlem and try to rewrite the script. The Harlem’s Children Zone would create a conveyer belt that takes advantage of the best data out there. Instead of starting in high school, HCZ would start in the womb with its Baby College. Instead of focusing on middle-school children at risk, HCZ would offer intensive pre-kindergarten. Those children would move into HCZ’s elementary school, and then middle school.  HCZ would focus on families and try to teach Harlem’s low-income parents the skills to create the environments for their children that come as a matter of course in middle-class families.

Tough synthesizes the research on the importance of early interventions to make clear that the achievement gap can be reversed in the early years; if it isn’t, it likely won’t ever be. This commitment to making a difference in the early years is, in my mind, enough of a reason to look to the Harlem Children’s Zone as a model. Geoffrey Canada is a visionary, and Tough tells this story well. Canada’s own life story is compelling and he seems acutely aware of the limitations and contradictions even in his own work. His analysis is informed and his commitment is inspiring. He isn’t just a speech-maker. He is an institution-builder. Tough also writes about Canada’s partners in the Harlem’s Children Zone: very wealthy businessmen who are committed to results. But the author doesn’t fully investigate the impact of such relationships, nor how HCZ would never truly be replicated without them.

The book inspired in me contradictory emotions. I felt inspired, teary at points, by the stories told and by the commitment to early childhood interventions. As someone who wrote a book, however, on the decreasing value of inquiry in our culture, and the ways in which the obsession with standardized exams prevents young people from developing critical thinking skills necessary to their participation in our economy and in our democracy, I felt frustrated by Canada’s emphasis on test scores. There was so much more I wanted Tough to explore, like: at what cost comes this test preparation? The children
would be good test takers, yes, but would they have the skills to think critically and creatively? Is high achieving the same thing as intelligent? Was the need to perform well on the tests correlated to the skills that HCZ believes children should possess, or about “protecting the brand,” as one of Canada’s board members suggests?

On the cover of the paperback version of the book is a quote from Ira Glass: “This book changed my understanding of poverty in America in the most surprising way. It made me feel hopeful.” Despite all the questions I have for Paul Tough, I did, too.

[Welcome Hillary Rettig, and Host Joe Brewer - bev]

The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way

Today’s book salon focuses on something that I think should get a lot more attention than it does – our psychological well-being as progressive activists.

Hillary Rettig’s book, The Lifelong Activist, seeks to help us build activism sustainably into our lives. In order to do so, we’ll need to take better care of ourselves.

She starts with an aspiration and a challenge, offering this vision:

“Imagine how different the world would be if there were twice – or ten times! – as many progressive activists as there are now, and if those activists were happy and effective and enjoying long full-time or part time careers.  Entire societies and cultures, and quite possibly every society and culture, would be transformed.”

The challenge quickly becomes apparent – to live fulfilling lives while promoting progressive social change.  If we do not take our own personal well-being into consideration, we’ll suffer emotional burnout and grow distant from the causes we care most about.  This kind of attrition is all-too-common today. And it’s something we can change.

A quick aside about myself… I am a cognitive scientist who works intimately with progressive activists – professionals and engaged citizens alike – to bring insights from research in political thought and behavior to their advocacy efforts.  I work extensively with political frames and the understandings that come with them.  With this in mind, I’ll make an observation about Hillary’s challenge to us that involves the way many progressives frame themselves.

A common frame that colors how we view activism is the Heroic Sacrifice Frame.  It tells us that there is only one kind of activism, that of the zealot who puts their own wants and needs aside to give themselves fully to a bigger cause.  Caring for one’s self, in this view, is a sign of weakness.  One cannot be too selfish when there’s so much suffering in the world.

This frame often becomes internalized as the core of our political identities.  We feel that we only have two choices – push ourselves to burnout or become a sellout and give up.  In truth this is a false choice.  Such reasoning exists within the Heroic Activist Frame.  It is not the only way possible to think of ourselves as activists.

Instead, we could (and arguably should) strive for a balanced and healthy life.  Being an activist does not require us to hurt ourselves.  We can nurture ourselves along with the causes we care about.  And, in doing so, we also become more effective as activists!

This alternative perspective makes sense through the Life Well-Lived Frame, which promotes the understanding that activism arises naturally as part of living a good life.  At the center of this perspective is an authenticity of personal values in one’s life path.  It can be captured by Gandhi’s call to be the change you seek to see in the world.  Only when we exemplify progressive sentiments about personal fulfillment and well-being in our own lives can we share this desired condition with others.

The feelings we have about our struggles are shaped in profound ways by the frames that give meaning to our activist experiences.  Giving in to the Heroic Sacrifice Frame is like putting one’s self in the trenches day in and day out.  This leads to perpetual conditions of imbalance and stress in our lives that, in a very real sense, is like the trauma experienced by the soldier who has seen grown sick from war.

There is a better way for us.

Conservatives may have more money to fuel their fight because of their ties to big corporations.  But we progressives must depend upon a different kind of wealth.  Our personal well-being is the life blood of our movement.  We care so much for others that we owe it to them to take care of ourselves.  Burn us out and we are not simply replaced by another infusion of cash (as happens with the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world).

We must preserve and nurture the precious reserve of our own passion in order to advance our vision of a more progressive world.

[Welcome Matthew Kerbel,  and Host Dave Karpf - bev]

For members of the Firedoglake community, I expect Matthew Kerbel’s Netroots:Online Progressives and the Transformation of American Politics will prove to be equal parts familiar and insightful.  The familiarity comes from the rich descriptive account he provides of the netroots community itself.  Unlike many of his contemporary academics, Kerbel has clearly done the legwork of getting to know progressive blogging communities like FDL, DailyKos, OpenLeft, and others.  In offering a detailed account of the goals, values, and achievements of this community, Kerbel portrays the netroots as it is; rather than perpetuating the easy stereotypes so often provided by defensive political pundits and the like.

The insights come from the broader academic framework he provides.  In chapters that compare the netroots to previous technologically-mediated social movements in American history, compare the progressive netroots to the conservative “rightroots,” and discuss the netroots community as a venue for social capital-building, Kerbel provides a scaffolding of sorts for viewing the very activities that Firedoglake participants are engaged in, yielding valuable insights in return.  I highly recommend the book.

One particularly refreshing element of Kerbel’s work is his decision to focus on the netroots as a social movement rather than focusing on blogging more generally.  For several years now, academic researchers have gotten stuck in an intellectual cul-de-sac of sorts, asking what impact blogging in the abstract has on politics or equating all blogging with the rarely-defined term, “citizen journalism.”  Firedoglake provides a fine illustration of the flaws in this framework: FDL features both high-quality journalism from Marcy Wheeler and company, and cutting-edge political advocacy through FDL-action’s Whip count tool.  FDL is a hub for a political “community-of-interest,” and that makes it different from a random wordpress blog.  Some blogging (but not all) offers an alternative venue for journalism.  Some blogging (but not all) has a real impact on elite decision-makers and public narratives. By focusing on the political Netroots rather than the abstract architecture of blogging software, Kerbel is able to add considerably to our knowledge of the substantive achievements of Netroots progressives over the past several years.  I expect it’s going to be an important book for years to come, specifically because of the serious attention he pays to the actual achievements of this community.

His focus on netroots achievements yields an immediate result in the opening chapter, which offers a series of pithy insights that receive elaboration over the course of the book (and probably provide good starting points for our discussion with the author):

• “Technology facilitates political change – eventually”
• “The power of the internet rests with the ability to understand and use its decentralized structure”
• “The Left is better situated than the right to take advantage of open source Internet politics”
• “The progressive blogosphere is neither particularly ideological nor extremist”
• “The netroots are an elite movement”
• “The Internet does not need to penetrate society in order to be a politically influential vehicle”
• “Netroots activists oppose the Democratic establishment as strongly as they opposed the Bush administration”
• “Netroots activists oppose mainstream journalists as strongly as they opposed the Bush administration and oppose the Democratic establishment”
• “Netroots activists gauge their effectiveness on how well they influence political outcomes, media narratives, and political engagement”
• “There is evidence that the netroots are making progress toward their political objectives”
• “There is only limited evidence that the netroots are making progress toward influencing mainstream media narratives”
• “The evidence of netroots community building is strong”
• “Netroots bloggers practice and seek a politics of community facilitated by Internet interactions”

The book is engaging, readable, and not-too-long (158 pages).  Chapter 2 offers a look at the deep historical roots of the moment we now find ourselves in.  Kerbel demonstrates that, throughout American history, moments of technological change have been accompanied by dramatic changes to the practice of American politics.  Chapter 3 discusses how the “vertically-integrated” conservative blogosphere, relying as it does on earlier institutions of movement conservatism, is less well-suited to the decentralized structure of the web than the their “horizontally-integrated” progressive counterparts.  Chapters 4, 5, and 6 then provide a detailed look at netroots achievements based on the community’s own stated goals of affecting political outcomes, media narratives, and developing a strong progressive voice within the democratic coalition.  It is in these chapters, and in the concluding seventh chapter, that FDL community members are most likely finding themselves shaking their heads in familiarity at events that they themselves helped make happen.

Some FDL members may have already heard Matt talk about his book at a Netroots Nation panel this past summer titled “academic studies of the netroots.”  Chris Bowers, the chair and coordinator of that panel, memorably described it as “the meta-panel to end all meta-panels.”  I think that’s a good lens for us to view the book, and to think about this book salon.  Matt Kerbel has decades of experience observing how technology affects political communication, and his newest book tells us how the netroots are moving America into an era of “post-television politics.”  For the next couple of hours, let’s put our meta-blogging hats on and see what we can learn about the netroots social movement that we are ourselves engaged in.

Welcome, Matthew Kerbel!

[Welcome T. R. Reid, and Host Merrill Goozner - bev]

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

T.R. (Tom) Reid, the former Washington Post foreign correspondent whom I came to know and admire in the early 1990s when we were both stationed in Tokyo (I for the Chicago Tribune), is the ultimate medical tourist. Only instead of looking for cheaper health care, he went looking for cheaper, more effective and universal health care systems.

Regular visitors to this website won’t be surprised by what he found. Every other country in the advanced industrial world — and quite a few in the developing world — do a better job than us, and for a lot less money. The U.S. not only ranks near the bottom for every standard indicator of health (longevity, years of good health, infant mortality), it pays nearly twice as much for the privilege. And for all that money ($2.4 trillion and counting), it fails to cover everyone, leaves millions of Americans in medical bankruptcy after receiving care, and kills well over a hundred thousand people a year through easily avoidable medical errors and the delayed and denied care that results from lack of coverage.

Okay. You knew all that. What is unique about “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care” (and the PBS documentary “Sick Around the World” made from his travels) is his insistence that there isn’t a single solution to America’s health care woes. He found that there are a host of alternatives models that could serve our polyglot nation well, whether single-payer or competitive insurance markets on the payer side, or government-run or privately-delivered care on the provider side.

But other nations have one thing in common that America doesn’t have. Most foreign countries start from the moral imperative that health care is a right. Everyone has to be covered by the national system, whatever it is. “Having made that decision, the other nations have organized health care systems to meet that fundamental moral goal,” he writes near the end of his journey. “If the United States made the same moral choice to provide universal coverage, then we, too could design a fair, efficient, and high-quality health care system for all Americans.”

I’m not surprised Tom returned from his globe-spanning quest talking about values and morals. There has always been an aw-shucks common touch to his witty and entertaining dispatches from foreign shores, whether in print or on the air. There are plenty of charts and data sprinkled through the book (and even an appendix where you’ll learn the difference between a quality-adjusted life year and a disability-adjusted life year). But he understands that the road to changing a person’s heart goes through neither their wallet nor a cost-benefit analysis.

He poses as the naïve wanderer, who willingly suspends disbelief and his preconceived biases to see what others too often miss when discussing foreign “models” of providing health care. What the U.S. dialogue is missing, he repeatedly finds, is that health care is a social good, like education or picking up the garbage or providing clean water. And until the politicians treat it like a social good and not like a market commodity, the nation will never solve its health care mess.

Tom starts his journey by taking his bum shoulder, injured in 1972 while in the Navy, to his American orthopedist, who recommended total shoulder arthroplasty. Lamenting the fact it would cost tens of thousands of dollars (exactly how much remains opaque in our system) and involve months if not years of rehab, our intrepid correspondent then takes his shoulder through a good cross-section of the world’s health care systems: from India with its massage therapists to Germany with its range of options, including the same total replacement if he wanted it, to Great Britain’s stiff upper lip. Some worked, some didn’t. Each had flaws. He found waiting lines in Canada. Poorly paid physicians in Japan. Expensive policies in Switzerland. But everywhere there was a high degree of satisfaction because of one basic principle: everyone had equal access to whatever care was being offered.

Let me finish this introduction by highlighting one other important message in his book, which deserves special attention because it has been largely overlooked or dismissed in this year’s debate. Unlike far too many health care pundits, he learns through his visits to other countries about the close connection between universal coverage, disease prevention and overall population health. In our non-system, people shift insurers with every change in jobs and they eventually wind up in a government program — Medicare — when they hit their medically high-cost years. That means private insurers have no incentive to keep people well. Prevention is an extra cost whose benefits will be reaped by a different insurer.

But in other countries, where a person is either covered by the government or is likely to remain with the same insurer for life, everyone has an incentive to invest in prevention — the patient, the doctor, and the insurer. And the result is better overall population health.

With both the Senate and House nearing a crescendo of activity on this all-important issue, it’s timely that we’re spending our Saturday evening discussing health care and Tom’s new book. Welcome, Tom, to FDL’s book salon. Care to make an opening comment?

[Welcome Steve Fox, and Host John Holowach - bev]

Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

Marijuana has become mainstream. Breathless stories about it in TIME, Newsweek, and all major media outlets proclaim that it is either a potential savior of the economy, the scourge of teen development, or just a plant that happens to have a bad rap.

Regardless of the angle, weed has grown into the light of day and the public has become more conscious of it than ever, often finding that the current drug war set against it is cruel and unfair. A recent Gallup poll found that 44% of the US population wants marijuana to be legalized, the highest ever. Combine that with the explosion of the medical marijuana marketplace harming Mexican drug cartels, as well as the Obama administration offering a directive to stop prosecuting legally recognized marijuana dispensaries, and there is the potential for a dramatic sea change in the way the United States, indeed the world, deals with the green stuff.

Part and parcel of this new paradigm is getting people information. Enter Marijuana is Safer by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert; each one an integral member of a drug policy reform organization, and their creds show. Part social examination, history lesson, and reform presentation, Marijuana is Safer makes the case for how different a world could be without the $60 billion a year drug war, most of which goes to eradicating marijuana from our society.

Serving as introduction, education, and illumination, the book is easy for anyone to jump into, whether you are a newcomer to drug policy or a long-standing veteran. Particularly telling is the first section contrasting the world’s favorite mind-altering substance -alcohol- and marijuana, examining it from every prismic angle. While familiar to those who have been engaged in the drug war fight for some time, it still manages to illustrate new things, often in a way that had been previously unexamined.

Tonight we welcome Steve Fox, co-author and the Director of State Campaigns for the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). I hope we’ll get a lively discussion going and shine a light for the readers.

[Full disclosure: I am the director of HIGH: The True Tale of American Marijuana and have been fighting the drug war for about eight years now. My documentary was previously the subject of an FDL Movie Night]