Gentrifiers in Portland exchange greetings. Perhaps they're discussing the virtue of their Priuses.

Sandra Tsing Loh wrote a excellent piece in the Atlantic snarkily speculating what this recession will do to America’s culture leaders, the Xers, she calls them (a.k.a. David Brooks’s bourgeois bohemians and Richard Florida’s creative class).  Reared in America’s upper- and upper-middle class Valhallas, these college-educated, socially conscious idealists, having never tasted the bitter foot of Maslow’s hierarchy, have heretofore devoted their lives to the maximization of self-expression.  When one is accustomed to an easy life of economic privilege, one becomes too easily inclined to view the concern for things like economic development (the creation of actual wealth) as crass—dare I say unsophisticated!— hobbies.

Having splurged on overpriced liberal-arts degrees, pricey socially conscious clothes, and fashionably “fair-trade” this-that-and-the-other, the once trendy interest in all things eclectic and environmentally sustainable is no longer financially sustainable.   The lofty eclectic idealism has, over the past few decades, morphed this left-leaning bohemianism from an identity once defined by a distaste of consumption into an identity defined by its taste in consumption.

Wither the free-range chicken bistro?  Now that carelessly accrued credit card debt is out of fashion, how can one survive without a steady diet of the moral superiority digested from politically-charged cuisine choices?  Will the forced economic sobriety of our current economic affairs force America’s left-leaning culturally-righteous to reexamine their once-proud disregard of economics—that crass topic!?

Bid farewell to the increasingly progressive, self-righteous, self-congratulatory, overwhelmingly white, and socially stratified Portland.  Hello, diverse, affordable, yet bland, Cleveland.  Farewell to the ritzy Rive Gauche Xanadus, hello to the staid skid-rows bereft of artisan boutiques and scarily “authentic”.

Loh writes,

This economic catastrophe is teaching the Xers that their prized self-­expression and their embrace of personal choice leads to … the collapse of capitalism. Time to inculcate not those self-satisfyingly hip and rebellious values—innovation! self-fulfillment!—cherished by the creative class (a class, after all, that includes in its ranks those buccaneering entrepreneurs who’ve led us down the primrose path), but those staid and stolid values of the bourgeoisie: industry, sobriety, moderation, self-discipline, and avoidance of debt.

Hear, hear!  Perhaps now economic development will actually get a fair hearing when policymakers are forced to consider feel-good measures as taxes on plastic bags and carbon emissions, favored by the elite self-expressionistas, but opposed by the lower- and lower-middle classes, and by nearly every family on a budget.  Fewer can afford the luxury to sacrifice economic well-being for the sake of a political statement.

Today The Post and the Gray Lady are publishing several good op-eds on Obama’s policies and methods.

Michael Gerson argues that Obama’s promise of change now rings hollow.  While Gerson’s criticism of Obama’s governing style and the Limbaugh affair are largely irrelevant, he rightly notes that the President is continuing with business-as-usual, i.e. promising everything for the price of nothing:

The pledge of “honesty” and “sacrifice” has become the deceptive guarantee of apparently limitless public benefits at the expense of a very few…. None of this is new or exceptional — which is the point. It is exactly the way things have always been done.

Charles Krauthammer argues that Obama’s stem cell and science policy is unsophisticated and contains a significant logical contradiction:

[The President declared] that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.” Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the “use of cloning for human reproduction.”

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science?

Eugene Robinson defends Obama’s method of confronting all challenges (i.e. banking, health care, entitlements, infrastructure, education, etc., etc.) all at once.  He astutely dismisses the critics:

What these critics really want, though, is to delay or derail the progressive reforms that voters elected President Obama to carry out.

Judging by the scarcity of fiscal discipline over the past few years, it’s probably wise to characterize the opponents of the all-at-once agenda as really just opposing the agenda part, not the all-at-once part.

We, however, still hold by our belief that when governments rushes policy, the results are rarely wise (e.g.).

David Brooks (a conservative!) praises Obama’s nascent education policy as recognizing the importance of familial influence, teacher accountability, and charter school competition.  He writes that the President “has broken with liberal orthodoxy on school reform more than any other policy”.

Sen. Christopher Dodd is declaring any auto bailout dead for the remainder of this Congress.  GOP opposition appears to be too strong and the President has already announced his opposition.

In the New York Times, David Brooks rightly denounces any bailout as government meddling in the process of creative destruction.  He distinguishes between Detroit and Wall Street:

This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends.

Granting immortality to Detroit’s Big Three does not enhance creative destruction. It retards it. It crosses a line, a bright line. It is not about saving a system; there will still be cars made and sold in America. It is about saving politically powerful corporations. A Detroit bailout would set a precedent for every single politically connected corporation in America. There already is a long line of lobbyists bidding for federal money. If Detroit gets money, then everyone would have a case. After all, are the employees of Circuit City or the newspaper industry inferior to the employees of Chrysler?

The Wall Street intervention also garnered much wider political support since it threatened the entire national (and international) economy.  Though a GM bankruptcy would certainly damage the ever-ailing state of Michigan and its close rustbelt neighbors, it is not a national threat.  Furthermore, banking is a fundamentally profitable business, but an epidemic of a lack of confidence brought sound institutions (momentarily) to the brink of failure.  The Big Three, however, have been hemorrhaging money for years.

Brooks and other have suggested a more sensible alternative: use government funds only to mitigate the social consequences of automaker bankruptcies, e.g. fund worker retraining programs and extend unemployment benefits for those downsized.  Letting the Detroit automakers file for Chapter 11 is not such a bad idea after all.  They can shred their existing labor contracts and shed unnecessary plants, models, and employees.

Foreign automakers who have set up shop in the South have shown that it is certianly possible to manufacture cars in America for a profit.  It is time for Detroit to emulate them.  As much as President-elect Obama promises changes, a government garantee is unlikely to force the Big Three to change.

David Brooks, while assuming that the poll numbers will carry Obama down the street to the White House, thinks the nation is on an inevitable political swerve from the big-spending Right to the big-spending Left:

Over the past decade, liberals have mounted a campaign against Robert Rubin-style economic policies [of free-trade and balanced budgets], and they control the Congressional power centers. Even if [Obama]’s so inclined, it’s difficult for a president to overrule the committee chairmen of his own party. It is more difficult to do that when the president is a Washington novice and the chairmen are skilled political hands. It is most difficult when the president has no record of confronting his own party elders. It’s completely impossible when the economy is in a steep recession, and an air of economic crisis pervades the nation.

David, you’ve got a lot of ‘splainin to do.

First, I will concede that the Democratic Party is much more xenophobic and jingoistic on trade than it was during the Clinton years (see the recent votes on CAFTA and the trade agreement with Korea).  The party’s adherence to balanced budgets is a bit unknown, since the GOP has also found it shamefully convenient to buy political advantage through wasteful spending (the bad, the ugly).

However, it is fair to say that while the record shows that Sen. Obama is an obedient servant of the Democratic leadership, it is not fair to say that Barack Obama himself is as obedient.  While he was starting his political career in Chicago, he frequently bucked the South Side Chicago political machine in the pursuit of his own political ambitions, paying no heed for the establishment’s requests that he “wait his turn.”

To curry favor with the Left, he has established a starkly partisan voting record on the Hill, but since his nomination, he has morphed toward a more centrist view (see the FISA vote, his new-found “discovery” of the Second Amendment).

Brooks is right though.  With a wobbly economy and no shortage of government promises, if financial reality coexists with campaign promises (either Obama’s or McCain’s) the National Debt is set to explode.

Computer geeks were social pariahs who later became millionaires and culture creators, notes David Brooks:

People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

The meek shall inherit the earth?  Boomers railed against the establishment in the 1960s only to inherit power in the decades to come.  Powerful countercultural movements seem emerge in a pattern:

1. Founders note public criticism of the establishment.
2. Founders formally define their movement as the opposite.
3. Movement gains popularity among influencers and early-adopter types.
4. Movement overcomes the establishment in power/popularity.
5. Movement becomes the establishment (mass popularity or at least faces public acquiescence).
6. Movement is overthrown as the next group or generation starts with step 1.

Though this applies to organized movements, it can apply to disparate movements as well.  The point is that not every anti-establishment group is as powerless as it seems.  Some will go on to become the very powerful groups they despise.

Future cultural divides, writes David Brooks, will not be along religious lines, but between the theistic and the atheistic:

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.

Read it.