Ezra Klein links to a Slate article by Ben Eidelson that, I think, is quietly devastating to the idea that the Senate filibuster has somehow destroyed the democratic process. Eidelson shows that from 1991 to 2008, in the typical successful filibuster, the senators behind the filibuster (i.e., opposing the cloture motion) represented states comprising 46 percent of the U.S. population. If filibustering Senators represented 51 percent of the population, then we would conclude that the typical successful filibuster was supported by senators representing a majority of Americans. In that case, at least by small-r republican principles, the filibuster would protect the will of the majority.

Everyone should read Matt Yglesias’s post,”How Close Were We, Really?“ which makes a point that I’ve been mulling. The fact that health care reform blew up so quickly after the Brown win implies that whatever consensus had been achieved between the Senate and House, it was significantly incomplete, weak, or both. House liberals apparently were not prepared to pass anything coming out of conference that didn’t reverse the problems they have with the Senate bill. But it’s unclear whether moderate senators or representatives would have stayed on board in that event. If the last week shows nothing else it reveals that a whole lot of members of Congress were decidedly un-excited about supporting anything resembling either chamber’s bill.

Last week, I spent some time looking at the living standards of the middle class, showing that they have improved notably over time and giving evidence that they are better than or comparable to middle-class lifestyles in other industrialized nations. I will be returning to this issue in a later post in order to address the “two-income trap” argument of Elizabeth Warren, which was raised by Reihan Salam and by Rortybomb.

For now though, I want to talk about the living standards of the poor. It’s important to make the distinction between trends (which I’ll discuss today) and absolute levels of material well-being (which I’ll discuss in a later post) because things can have improved a lot at the same time that they are still not all that great.

I spent a chunk of time on the train to New York yesterday reading through bloggers’ reactions to Democrats’ reactions to the Brown victory. And I’m confused.

irst, an awful lot of liberal bloggers seem all too eager to advance a pernicious stereotype about the Democratic Party — that it is feckless, weak, wimpy, cowardly, unprincipled, etc. Look, it’s not that every Democrat was scared away from health care reform by the Brown win. As far as we know, very few were.

There will be a mountain of analysis regarding the Brown victory in Massachusetts last night and what it means for health care reform. But what is striking to me this morning, skimming my RSS feeds, is the same thing I have found striking throughout the past year — how willfully ignorant liberal advocates of health care reform continue to be about public opinion on the Senate- and House-passed versions of health care reform.

There’s no need for extended analysis of the polling to make my point. Start with the basic favor/oppose trend for health care reform:

I am minimally qualified to comment on the crisis in Haiti, but one of Talking Points Memo’s readers has what sounds to me like an important perspective on American involvement in reconstructing the country over the coming years (not months). Since Haiti is in our backyard, the reader says, we will have to assume nation-building efforts on the scale of Iraq or Afghanistan if Haiti is not to devolve into chaos. More after the jump…

I will be posting soon on the living standards of the poor, but I first wanted to take some time to respond to Mike Konczal of Rortybomb. Mike argues that incomes have stagnated since 1999, which coincides with a dramatic rise in consumer borrowing. Kevin Drum picks up his post and runs with it. Let me start out by saying that I wasn’t so much objecting to Mike’s (or more specifically, Raghuram Rajan’s) hypothesis as I was objecting to general claims that wages have stagnated.

But Mike’s analysis has some problems.

My last post tackled inequality trends in the U.S. and how progressives ought to think about them. Now I want to look at middle-class living standards.

In the course of basically agreeing with Dalton Conley that progressives should be more concerned with poverty than inequality, Kevin Drum argues that what got lost from the Conley analysis is the stagnation of the middle class (“sluggish middle class wages in a country that’s been growing energetically for decades”). And yesterday he endorsed the views of economist Raghuram Rajan, who blames the financial crisis on “the purchasing power of many middle-class households lagging behind the cost of living.”

Happy New Year everyone! I am very late to this debate, but I wanted to weigh in on the conversation launched by Dalton Conley’s pre-holiday American Prospect article on progressivism and inequality. In case you missed it, Conley argued that progressives shouldn’t care that much about inequality and that we should instead care about the poor. Inequality, he showed, has grown between the rich and the middle, but not between the middle and the poor. Bruce Bartlett, weighing in from the right, agreed.

To read the first part of this post, click here.

Let’s examine Hacker and Pierson’s definition of “the center.” When they compare activists to independents, changes in the distance from independents may be due to growing extremism among activists. However, the distance may grow without activists changing their views at all if independents change their views.

Ever since Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Off Center, all good progressives know that the growing political polarization has been one-sided, with Republicans pulling public policy “off center” through various nefarious means. Right?

Well….yes and no.

If you’ll forgive me for egregiously mixed metaphors, I want to draw attention to an implicit assumption among many health care reform advocates related to controlling healthcare spending: that if not for the politics involved, it would be fairly easy to rein in costs.

That’s because, the argument goes, there is easily identifiable inefficiency in the way we currently spend health care dollars.

I was going to title this post, “Ed Kilgore, You are Dead to Me,” but then again, I like Ed a lot, and he’s far more knowledgeable about politics than I am, and I don’t disagree with much of what he’s said about the filibuster.

Just as Ed isn’t “hell-bent on eliminating the filibuster,” neither would I shed many tears if it were to go away. I, too, object to how routine filibuster threats have become. That said, I do think that its elimination would have the potential to hurt progressive aims.

A CNN poll out this week must have been a disappointment to some progressives. According to the poll, a majority of the public – 56 percent – supports the use of the filibuster in the Senate, versus 39 percent who oppose it. I wouldn’t bet the farm that this majority would hold up against any number of equivalent questions worded differently, but the results should at least prompt us to stop and think about the growing end-the-filibuster strain on the left.

In my last post, I noted that progressives need to turn their attention toward the medium- and long-term fiscal crisis the country faces. How massive is the challenge we face? The following chart, from Keith Hennessey, an ex-Bush policy advisor, says it all.

If health care reform is signed into law in the coming months, progressives will need to focus sincerely on a problem to which they have paid only lip service over the last few months, one that reform is sure to exacerbate: the perilous fiscal health of the federal government.