I grew up with uncles and cousins who hunted, family friends whose children went into the military, people who did physical labor and occasionally were injured on the job. It was just sort of assumed that everyone knew the world was a bruising place and that we were the descendants of the people who’d fought back and survived. The major part of civilization was figuring out how to cooperate or at least coexist with each other, and aggression could be channeled into good (military training or sports or debate) or ill (crime or bullying), but it couldn’t be made to disappear.

Much of the left, though, seems to want to pretend that aggressive impulses only naturally arise in the hearts of their enemies. How else to explain everything we’ve been hearing and reading since the horrible spree killing in Arizona? When Barack Obama and other Democrats use hunting or battle imagery, it’s a particularly vivid metaphor that just shows how passionate they are about doing good despite the obstacles; when Sarah Palin and other Republicans (or, heaven help us, Tea Party members) use the same imagery, it’s a literal call to start attacking people and should scare the bejeezus out of us. Non-lefty bloggers of many political persuasions have given such arguments the drubbing they deserve many times over recently, and I didn’t particularly feel the need to weigh in.

Then Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a piece for the LAT yesterday to defend her democratic-socialist crony Frances Fox Piven (via Instapundit via The Corner). Priven had attracted Glenn Beck’s attention by writing this column in The Nation:

So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent.

…

An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.

A loose and spontaneous movement of this sort could emerge. It is made more likely because unemployment rates are especially high among younger workers. Protests by the unemployed led by young workers and by students, who face a future of joblessness, just might become large enough and disruptive enough to have an impact in Washington. There is no science that predicts eruption of protest movements. Who expected the angry street mobs in Athens or the protests by British students? Who indeed predicted the strike movement that began in the United States in 1934, or the civil rights demonstrations that spread across the South in the early 1960s? We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom—and then join it.

Now, Piven mentions several types of group action here, not all of them violent, and you might say that she didn’t choose her words well enough to identify which ones she was really endorsing. But she’s been a professor for decades. She has a PhD from the University of Chicago, an institution not known for encouraging slushy argumentation. And this was an opinion piece for publication, not (say) a dashed-off blog post that was submitted prematurely.

I mean, suppose she’d written the following:

An effective American political movement would combine the fired-up anger of the Greek and British riots with the peaceable techniques of the civil rights movement. It would be purposeful. Its members would make it clear that they would not be cowed, but they would also work to convince their countrymen who are still employed that everyone is part of the same struggle for social justice.

That took me three minutes, tops. If what it conveys is what she meant, Piven could easily have said so. But she didn’t. Coolly placing riots and sit-ins in parallel allowed her to romanticize violent protest without having to say forthrightly that she’s eager to see it here in America, but “An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece…” strains plausible deniability to breaking point. The onus is on Piven to show how her words could be interpreted as opposing violence.

Naturally, Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t think so. She doesn’t see the aggression in Piven’s belief that “unruly mobs” would be justified, but she does see it in the empty big talk of Glenn Beck’s more volatile commenters:

Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans’ jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac.

…

So perhaps economically hard-pressed Americans aren’t wusses after all. They may not have the courage or the know-how to organize a protest at the local unemployment office, which is the kind of action Piven urged in her December essay, but they stand ready to shoot the first 78-year-old social scientist who suggests that they do so.

Look, madam, you‘re the one who wants fundamental social revolution—not American workers or students en masse. If social inequities matter so much to you and Priven and your cronies, why don’t you mob the damned city hall yourselves? You’re smart, articulate, credentialed. You have name recognition among the decision-making rich. If you impressed the American worker with your willingness to put your own comfort and status on the line, you might really start a chain reaction. (I don’t think that would actually happen, but you’re certainly more likely to encourage it through setting an example than through jabbering to fellow-travelers.)

The explanation that people don’t know how to organize doesn’t wash. Everyday citizens belong to churches, charities, and all kinds of other groups that manage to hold meetings and fund drives. They’ve thronged to (orderly) Tea Party demonstrations. The idea that unemployed Americans are standing around thinking, “Jeez, my friends and I feel totally oppressed by the capitalists, but group-formation is for the bourgeois, so I guess we can’t do anything about it but drink more Pabst,” is just asinine. Maybe the reason people aren’t disrupting traffic and getting all screechy is that they’re busy figuring out what they can do about their own circumstances. There’s nothing even the slightest bit wussy about that.

What is wussy—and I’m surprised people on the right haven’t jumped all over this, because it’s one of the most outrageous sentences I’ve ever read—is to say, as Piven does at the end of her editorial, “We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom—and then join it.” Got that, Nation readers? Don’t bother risking anything of yourselves. Wait until the churls have been out getting their heads busted long enough to make the movement a going concern, then get in on it. No one who holds that attitude or lets it pass without comment has moral grounds for bitching that America is no longer a democracy.

*******

BTW, I do agree that it’s stupid for people to say things like “Bring it on biotch [sic]. we’re armed to the teeth” and monstrous to say things like “We’re all for violence and change, Francis [sic]. Where do your loved ones live?” Ehrenreich’s generalized explanation for why people mention guns in the context of economic and political troubles is this: “But there is one thing you can accomplish with guns and coarse threats about using them: You can make people think twice before disagreeing with you.” Fine, point taken. I believe in answering arguments on their merits, and I’m not here to defend threats to someone’s loved ones.

Nevertheless, I think Ehrenreich misses something important: The gun owners I know see learning how to use firearms as a manifestation of, and guns themselves as symbols of, self-reliance. You don’t ask others for help until you’ve exhausted all your own resources. You don’t sit around waiting for the government to clothe, feed, and medicate you, and you don’t sit around waiting for the police to show up when you’re menaced physically. Ehrenreich seems to want a direct causal connection between personal gun ownership and personal economic advancement, when I think what many people actually believe is that the two are both products of individualism. I’m not sure Ehrenreich would be receptive to that argument in any case, but the commenters at theblaze.com sure as hell didn’t help with their viciousness.

*******

One last thing that made me uneasy: What does Piven’s age have to do with anything? Offering to shoot her for her political positions is wrong, but it would have been equally wrong if she’d been thirty-eight or fifty-eight. If Piven has the vigor to write opinion pieces, she has the vigor to stand up to counterarguments.

Several months before 9-11, though we didn’t know it then, Virginia Postrel linked to an education blogger named Joanne Jacobs. “Why, I toil in the vineyards of education myself!” I thought, and clicked through. This was when her site was “readjacobs.com.” Joanne has—excuse the vulgarity—a bullshit detector that’s always switched on. She’s immune to fads and advertising-speak. She’s content to write a five-word sentence when five words alone will convey her meaning (a talent I admire but have never been capable of emulating), which is a real asset when discussing the latest education hoo-hah. Living abroad, I loved visiting her blog and reading whatever she’d posted in her straightforward, no-nonsense voice. This is an American talking to me, I’d think with pleasure. This is someone I can do business with. At that point, Virginia, Joanne, Instapundit, and Andrew Sullivan were the only blogs I read. (I could never get into Kausfiles.)

I mention 9-11 because I associate two posts of Joanne’s very much with the days that followed. Neither of them, assuming my ability to use Google hasn’t atrophied, is available online anymore. The first was about some miscreant in California who’d, maybe, committed a murder-suicide (?) on 9 September or something. His parting comment was, again IIRC, that he would be the big news story of the week. Joanne’s response several days later: “Tough luck, mister.”

About 9-11 itself, she had a post that I read many times over. Again, this is from memory—I’ve tried a bunch of phrases from it to see whether there’s a citation to it somewhere, but I can’t locate it, and yet, I’m pretty sure my unassisted memory is mostly accurate. It said, essentially, the following:

Our culture is global, dynamic, and confident. Their culture is provincial, parochial, and weak. We’re winners. They’re losers, and they resent it.

US support for Israel is a detail. The United States could align its entire foreign policy with the whims of Yasir Arafat, and we’d still be a target.

That’s a paraphrase from memory, but as I say, it’s the gist of it. I thought about it many, many times in the years that followed.

[Added on 24 January: And as it happens, my blog friend Marc at Amritas had the actual citation:

They hate us because we’re big, powerful and rich, while they’re small, weak and poor. Our culture is dynamic, confident, global and free. Their culture…is rigid, defensive, parochial and tyrannical. We’re winners. They’re losers, and they resent it.

U.S. support for Israel is a detail. We could let our foreign policy be dictated by Yasir Arafat, and they’d still hate us.

Thanks to Marc for letting me know.]

One of the most precious things about America is our belief that thinking and behavior make you one of us, no matter where you started out. I mean, the Japanese certainly believe that there’s a Japanese way of thinking, but according to their conception, being genetically Japanese and living in Japan make you think that way, not the other way around. But the idea that signing on to a country’s belief system makes you part of that country all the way down is really rare in the world. America has it. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have it. (England, the homeland of my beloved late grandfather and the source, of course, of so much of our heritage in the Anglosphere, does not, at least not to the same extent.) Perhaps there are other places I’m not thinking of. But I can say after spending eleven years of my adult life abroad that the idea that what you’re born to determines your lot in life—all of it, unalterably—is the most common single belief I’ve ever encountered among people of all nationalities.

Joanne plays her political cards pretty close to the chest. But from what I’ve been able to observe on her blog for the last decade, her view of education is one that should resonate with a lot of Americans: Don’t waste money and resources on quixotic projects with little proven value, but show students at all levels of achievement, income, and social class what they need to do to achieve as much as they can. Then let those who want to do it do it. Present information in orderly units, logically broken down, so that students who apply themselves have the highest probability of mastering it even if their education sucked to that point. Offer extra help where needed. Give reasonable support to parents who want to help their children succeed but don’t understand the system. Maintain high standards. Don’t be afraid of testing just because it’s testing. Value teachers but don’t coddle them.

All of this is to say, Joanne Jacobs celebrated her tenth blog-iversary today, and it’s worth celebrating. Congratulations, and I hope JoanneJacobs.com is around for several decades more.

Happy New Year. I rang it in with the vestiges of the stomach flu and am just now pretty much back to my usual state of figurative, rather than literal, dyspepsia.

It’s now the Year of the Rabbit in Japan, and it, too…Japan, I mean, not the Rabbit…is looking to make a recovery from what’s been ailing it. The Nikkei has been publishing a series of editorials over the last week about Japan’s economic prospects, called “Opening the country and clearing a path,” and this was its sober beginning:

This is a New Year one is hard-pressed to call Happy.

Although the Japanese economy has somehow managed to overcome the Lehman Shock, it’s gotten to the new year without finding any purchase on a path to full-on recovery. Over the past twenty years, the nominal economic growth rate has had an annual mean of a mere 0.5%. The balance of public debt has gone up by a factor of 3.3, the worst among developed countries. Japanese have seen the nightmare of a drop in our economic status threaten our security, as in the dispute over the Senkaku Islands.

This stagnation, once loose in the land, is not the kind of thing that will resolve itself naturally.

The editors preview the contents of the next several days in the series, then identify who they hope is paying attention:

Whether we will move forward with opportunities for an economic renaissance will in large measure depend on our politicians.

Despite the necessity of major surgery, they dispense painkillers. The DPJ administration has continued with those sorts of policies, just like the LDP. Make-nice-with-everyone policies cannot be anything but deleterious. Politicians should learn from the example of the bravery of UK prime minister Cameron (44), who pushes determinedly forward with necessary policies no matter how much hatred is heaped on him.

The other major role in the Japanese renaissance is that of business leaders. Technological might we have, but we’re being outstripped in new products and new services by US enterprises such as Apple and Google. Also, there are plenty of industries in which any number of companies are jockeying for position, with Japan falling behind foreign forces in large-scale research and investment. Aren’t our conservative business practices killing off the untapped power of our workers?

We call on politicians and business leaders to realize that they bear an extremely weighty responsibility in this time of major transition for the Japanese economy.

Installment 2 focused on the need for more Japanese to understand foreign realities that shape markets:

Japanese economic missions now frequently visit India, with which we have a basic agreement through the signing of an economic partnership agreement (EPA). And yet, competition in its markets, to which companies the world over are thronging, is fierce. For example, one local says, “Korean brands like Samsung and LG have even more penetration in India than Japanese brands.”

Korean enterprises have increased their market share by offering up products that respond to local needs, such as refrigerators that can be locked. That’s an example that demonstrates the strength of having company employees that are dug in locally.

Every year, Samsung Electric sends a bunch of employees to places throughout the globe and grooms them as territory specialists. Many Korean businessmen stationed abroad have family living with them long-term, even in India and the Middle East, and so they continuously expand their network with the locals. Japanese enterprises, with their preponderance of unaccompanied transfers* and their short tours of duty, have a tendency to be weak at making inroads. Japanese enterprises must also make haste to address [customers] from the human angle.

Installment 3 focused on the need for technological compatibility with world markets:

Japan has had some bitter experiences. Japanese prowess led the way in the development of car-navigation systems that used US military satellites; but each of the companies vied to produce proprietary technology and kept its specifications under wraps, and they thereby ended up creating a closed market. As a result, it was not only high in functionality but also high in price. By contrast, low-cost dumb terminals have become mainstream overseas, with Japan now in the position of playing second fiddle to foreign enterprises.

Further reasons that Japan is behind in standardization are that it has placed excessive faith in manufacture and been late to make the transition to digital technologies. Products such as gasoline-powered cars and household appliances will sell abroad provided their functionality and quality are good. At the same time, integrated products such as cell phones can’t be used if they’re incompatible with [regional] standards.

Installment 4 braved pitchforks by outlining why Japan needs to reform its farm policies, which produce mind-boggling drag on the economy:

Japan’s national territory is small, and there’s a lot of mountain and forest land; those are facts. However, they’re not the only things hobbling agricultural productivity. One main reason that no agricultural sector that can withstand market liberalization has grown up is a failure of government policies.

Isn’t it time we junk old ways of thinking, change direction, and start proclaiming loftier goals, sufficient to develop the rice-growing sector into an export industry? It’s necessary to rethink the subsidy system and make determined strides toward stout-hearted reforms that will lead to the expansions of scale that include rice growing. The TPP negotiations that the US is spearheading will not wait around for Japan as it dithers over opening its markets.

In order to boost our competitiveness, we must quickly rethink our farm system, which makes it difficult to lease farmland and throws up barriers to new entrants in the agricultural sector. And concerning reform of the agricultural cooperatives that have grown up over the now-subdivided rice-growing sector, we must deepen the debate to include the perspectives of consumers.

It’s no misstatement to say that the agricultural sector is a crucial industry that takes responsibility for the feeding of the citizenry. Even if Japan decides to participate in the TPP and takes steps toward opening its markets for agricultural products, continuing the necessary level of domestic production and [adopting] policies to support maintenance of its ratio of food self-sufficiency will be indispensable.

Based on considerations of protection, what will be critical will be a vantage point that asks, “Who are the farmers we should be protecting?” If we proceeded from the fact that rice farmers with other income make up the majority of domestic farmers, it would seem that most farmers are office employees who work for private enterprise and public employees who work in government offices.

Only 14% of Japanese farm families actually depend on agriculture as the mainstay of their income, say the editors.

The last installment calls for Japan to bring in foreign knowledge:

In the Japan, the number of foreigners who have specialized knowledge or technical know-how is extremely low. Foreigners living in Japan who hold residency qualifications for “technology” and “research” numbered 202,000 at the end of 2009. That’s one person for about every 300 people in the workforce.

The ratio of direct investment from abroad to GDP is just shy of 4%, very low compared with the US’s 18% and the ROK’s 10%.

The editors call for Japan to learn from the thinking of the engineers of the Meiji Restoration, when Japan first made its major transformation to industrialization. Note, too, that the main editorial one day last week main editorial a few days ago was headlined “Speed up the policy and business pushback against the ROK”:

ROK enterprises have noticeably increased their felt presence in global markets. Japan and Korea resemble each other in the structuring of the electronic, the automotive, and other industries. To the extent that it’s our greatest rival, Korea’s rise cannot be ignored. In both policy and business practices, we need to push back against Korea.

This year for the first time, there’s a product for which the global [market] shares of Japan and Korea look to be inverted. It’s the lithium-ion battery essential for computers and cell phones.

…

If it can be said that large-scale restructuring takes time, the response is that each company should then expedite its selection of business sectors. Hitachi has made a tie-up with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on hydroelectric generators. Toshiba is also focusing on investments in nuclear power generation, and when it comes to semiconductors, it will specialize in the memory business, its strength, while contracting out production of its unmonetizable system LSI’s (large-scale integrated circuits) to Samsung Electric.

…

Another way is to look for profit streams that would distinguish Japan from Korea. This year Panasonic, in televisions and white-appliances, steered away from operations in which per-unit share cannot be captured. It changed its organization to center instead on business that deals comprehensively with house and office-building interiors. The strategy is to look to sell design, construction, and maintenance bundled.

Many of the statistics cited are recent: Japanese youth don’t see a good chance of bettering their circumstances through hard work. Japan is publishing fewer academic articles on physics and chemistry than the PRC, and the literacy rate of its fifteen-year-olds is lagging behind that of Shanghai, Korea, or Hong Kong. But there’s nothing new about the ideas, except the comprehensiveness and relentless directness with which the Nikkei has expressed them. The system by which elected officials, unelected federal functionaries, and leaders of key industries simultaneously work with one another to their mutual enrichment and push against each other to keep reforms from happening was identified decades ago. It’s all very well to tell the government that it will play a key role in helping the Japanese economy adapt to external reality; it’s another thing entirely to convince those who actually populate key ministries in Kasumigaseki that their endless “administrative guidance” is choking economic development at the root and that they need to lay off the control-freak-ism. And for the love of Pete, if someone finds a politically viable way to deep-six the current farm-subsidy system, please tell us in America about it. We’re all ears.

Also note that many of the elements of the Japanese government and corporate systems that the poor Nikkei is pleading to have changed are the very things that used to be held up as the reasons Japan was going to overtake the West—and, indeed, the very things that were seen as the key to the success of Korea and the other Tiger Economies as they “followed Japan’s example.” Now they’re moving away from that example, and in the process they’re leaving Japan behind.

That said, I wonder whether the efflorescence of Korea might not, in fact, turn out to have a salutary effect. Yes, the PRC is a bigger, splashier, sexier topic for business and news coverage, but my feeling is that stories about Korea resonate a good deal more in Japan. (Don’t ever actually tell a Japanese person he seems to find it easy to identify with the Koreans, or vice versa, of course.) Korea’s a small, mountainous East Asian country that was poor and unfree in the recent historical past. Koreans value education and are good with technology. What edge, the Japanese might justifiably wonder, does the ROK have over Japan that’s helping it to grow in prosperity while Japan levels off?

But don’t count it out yet. The ability of the Japanese to grit their teeth through hardship is astounding, but they’ve also been known to adapt very swiftly to new realities when it was borne in upon them that they had no other choice. If Korea seriously starts kicking Japan’s ass in industries that have become a matter of national pride, it may turn out to be the kick it’s been needing.

* There’s actually a word for this in Japanese, 単身赴任, which you learn in third year or so when you study Japanese as a foreign language, along with 定年退職 (retirement at the designated age) and 終身雇用 (lifetime employment). Well, okay, maybe it’s more like an expression than a word, but anyway, it refers to being transferred to a different city by yourself while your wife and children hold down the fort in your hometown. (Except for the wife-and-children part, that’s what Atsushi’s former company did to him in 2004, and the separation was pretty much the impetus for my starting this blog. Atsushi was yanked from one of the Tokyo offices of his bank and rusticated to Kumamoto for a few years, put up in a tiny one-room apartment rented by the company, and expected to come home to Tokyo on weekends however he decided to manage it in order to stay sane.)

This may also be a good place to mention, if I haven’t recently, that it’s important to bear in mind that the lifetime-employment system and its corresponding worker fealty to the company are far from universal in Japan. If I recall correctly, we were already learning when I started college in 1991 that the salaryman contingent was only 30% of the Japanese workforce. There was always plenty of turnover at smaller firms, including subcontractors for flagship manufacturing companies of the big-guns keiretsu, and in service jobs. If you were hired out of college onto the management track at the Nichigin or Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, you were going to stay put for life. But not everyone down to the last elevator or gas-station attendant lacked mobility.