The hated middle
Over at the Monkey Cage, Andrew Gelman creates a new conceptual category: One thing I realized is that everybody hates Starbucks. From the left, Starbucks is a creepy bit of corporate America, whereas the right sees the ubiquitous chain of coffee shops as a snobby overpriced slice of big-city liberalism. Not everybody feels that way, ...
Over at the Monkey Cage, Andrew Gelman creates a new conceptual category:
Over at the Monkey Cage, Andrew Gelman creates a new conceptual category:
One thing I realized is that everybody hates Starbucks. From the left, Starbucks is a creepy bit of corporate America, whereas the right sees the ubiquitous chain of coffee shops as a snobby overpriced slice of big-city liberalism. Not everybody feels that way, of course—let’s not forget the zillions of latte-swilling customers out there—but the Seattle-based sugar-and-caffeine-dispensary does seem to be disliked by both ends of the political spectrum.
As is White House economist Lawrence Summers, who is despised on the left for his Wall Street connections, his links to the bank bailouts, and, of course, that infamous “pollution memo”—while also being mocked on the right for being an economic redistributionist who couldn’t even hold down the job of president of Harvard (a post that traditionally has a turnover rate closer to that of Popes than that of manager of the Steinbrenner-era Yankees).
This raises an interesting question — what foreign policies fall into this category as well? Off the top of my head, I can think of a fair number of them:
- Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan
- Obama’s policy on detainees
- Obama’s policy on government transparency
- Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize
I’m sensing a trend here….
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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