Lawrence E. Harrison, on page 55 of “The Central Liberal Truth” compares a “Progress-Prone Culture” with a “Progress-Resistant Culture.” As one might expect many of the comparisons are opposites. Mr. Harrison points out that there are two rules for deciding which category a particular culture belongs in:

“(1) Does the culture encourage the belief that people can influence their destinies?
(2) Does the Culture promote the Golden Rule?”

Texas is far from a “Progress-Prone Culture.” Those women you wrote about have no influence over their destinies and I can testify that Texas does not promote the Golden Rule.

I listened to that interview too and cringed in my car as I heard that woman descend into her “Those people shouldn’t be doing better than me.” bit, but noticed, as you did, that she seemed more exhausted than hateful. I don’t know if this gives more reason for hope or not; if it means that some set of circumstances — local politics or national policy — could bring this woman together with her Mexican neighbors and her past her fears and resentments. It does certainly seem to be one of those places where the contradictions in capital, or rather the contradiction between the Republican party’s business segment’s interests in immigrant labor and the cultural conservative segment’s interests in narratives of resentment, is acting as a moderating influence on those racial politics.

On the competency versus charisma point, I get frustrated about how these keep being played, particularly in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s speeches this weekend, as opposed categories. NPR kept interviewing Clinton supporters who talked about Obama “seducing” democrats, as if (Obama’s) charisma was essentially a form of snake charming, and (Clinton’s) competency was all about substance and not at all about appearances. Charisma matters, not just because we need to capture the hearts of those who can’t be bothered with policy discussions, but because people of all bacgrounds and predispositions really do need to feel inspired to put in the work for positive change.

First, pretty much everyone values competence only in areas where they care about and agree with the goals. Your competence at getting flowers to grow in your yard interests me very little. Your competence at stealing my stuff and not getting punished is more likely to make me hate you than to make me admire you.

Second, “competence” is not just partisan because conservatives don’t care; it’s partisan because conservatives largely don’t agree with it. In the name of “competence”, there has been a huge transfer of actual power from “people I know, and basically agree with” to “people I don’t know, who don’t care about my interests” for almost everyone, but particularly for conservatives. Note, for example, public schools; 50 years ago, local communities controlled them; now, they are almost entirely controlled by education experts. In the process, they’ve become several times as expensive, and much less reflective of the values of the people whose children enroll in them; how much the median education they provide has changed is unclear, but it’s not commonly perceived as having improved. Hayek’s critique is on point; centralized “competence” is rarely as well-informed as decentralized decisionmakers are.

Or, to put it in it’s briefest form: the competence of my local protection racket isn’t something I value much.

I thing you are generally right. Bush certainly didn’t run on competence; he ran on emotion and religion; a call to an American identity straight out of Rambo movies. Unfortunately that is a more powerful lure for the “average” American.

Of course, that scares the heck out of me too. As the world gets more complicated it becomes easier to blame problems on unseen forces and far-reaching conspiracies. That, in turn, makes those who sell themselves based on a grand narrative and overarching vision more tempting than those who sell themselves based on experience and skill. In the end, the actor and storyteller has the advantage….

This sounds a great deal like the way I’ve heard Japanese people talk about their government. Not that they were always enthusiastic about it, but enough people tried to explain to me that while politicians come and go, the Tokyo University technocrats that actually run the country stay the same, for me to be convinced that it’s at least a significant attitude. It’s sometimes hard to avoid the Ruth Benedict fallacy of seeing Japan as America’s bizarro-world other, but I have symnpathy for where that belief came from. On the other hand, the fact that Japanese politicians seem to fight over even smaller increments of real policy alternatives than our “I’m not Bush” candidates in the US seems to me a good example of Ferguson’s “Anti-Politics machine” model of how expertise produces a kind of TINA consensus in negative ways (as you point out, the competence or lack of Tokyo University folks doesn’t have much to do with Japan’s economic malaise).