History is Happening Now

November 26, 2008

It’s the Economy, Liberals!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Ian @ 3:34 pm

I can see myself in two years, standing in line at the unemployment office, weaing headphones, listening to a news broadcast about the 2010 midterm elections.

” … After four years as the minority party, the GOP regained control of Congress last week when Republicans won back majorities in both the House and the Senate. The mid-term elections have been widely interpreted as a repudiation of Democrats’ handling of the economy over the past two years, and the new Republican Congressional majorities are expected to push for a more coservative approach to the nation’s economic problems while presenting more obstacles for President Obama as he continues to try to implement his agenda. The GOP’s impressive resurgence came less than two years after the 2008 election, which left the Republicans outnumbered in Congress and unpopular across the country, but the party rose from the ashes by convincing many Americans that Obama and the Democrats have failed in their efforts to guide the economy out of a deep recession. Although the economy clearly eclipsed almost all other issues in campaigns across the country over the past several months, the Republican takeover threatens to undermine or reverse the few accomplishments Democrats can point to during their brief two years of dominance in Washington, on issues ranging from health care and the environment to taxes, civil liberties, education and more. If Barack Obama intends to accomplish anything between now and his reelection campaign in 2012, he’ll need to forge compromises with GOP legislators who are eager to cast him as incompetant and out-of-touch with middle-class Americans suffering from high taxes, and out-of-touch with a business community hamstrung by excessive government regulation. On the other hand, Republicans must convince some Democrats — and especially the more conservative, Blue Dog Democrats — to join them if they hope to pass the proposals they campaigned on, proposals the President has promised to veto. As the clouds of partisan confrontation seem to gather over Washington, political scientists and analysts remain concerned about polls indicating the popularity of both political parties are at dangerously low levels. “People are hurting more now than at any time since the Great Depression, and they simply don’t beleive the politicians care…”

This is what I see in our future if Obama can’t convince the American people that he’s doing a good job of leading this country through our economic situation.

So it’s time for you to ask yourself two questions.

First, do you care about: 

     – Providing health care to the 40-plus million Americans who don’t have it?

     - Reforming our school so our children will be able to compete in a global economy?

     – Breaking our addiction to oil?

     – Stopping the use of torture, once and for all?

     – Protecting our country from terrorist attacks?

I could name dozens of other things you might care about. If you care about any of these things, then the next question you should ask is: Will it be good or bad if the Republicans win back control of Congress in two years?

If you agree with me that it would be very bad for the country if the Republicans regained control of Congress in 2010, then please consider this: I strongly believe the outcome of the Congressional midterm elections will hinge almost entirely on the American public’s perception of Obama’s handling of the economy. If Obama and the Democrats seem to be doing a good job on this single issue, the Dems are sure to maintain their majorities which may even grow. If Obama and the Democrats are perceived as failures, they will almost certainly lose.

Remember what Obama said: We are the change we’ve been looking for.

Now, if we want to implement a Democratic agenda in this country, we must support Obama and the Democrats in their efforts to protect this country from economic catastrophe. And there isn’t much time, so let’s focus.

November 25, 2008

After the Campaign

Filed under: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, netroots, taxes, torture — Lee @ 7:28 pm

I want to link to two significant stories I haven’t seen discussed as fully as I would have expected in the blogs.

(i) From the WSJ:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say

…

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama criticized many of President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies. He condemned Mr. Bush for promoting “excessive secrecy, indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ like simulated drowning that qualify as torture through any careful measure of the law or appeal to human decency.”

As a candidate, Mr. Obama said the CIA’s interrogation program should adhere to the same rules that apply to the military, which would prohibit the use of techniques such as waterboarding. He has also said the program should be investigated.

Yet he more recently voted for a White House-backed law to expand eavesdropping powers for the National Security Agency. Mr. Obama said he opposed providing legal immunity to telecommunications companies that aided warrantless surveillance, but ultimately voted for the bill, which included an immunity provision.

The new president could take a similar approach to revising the rules for CIA interrogations, said one current government official familiar with the transition. Upon review, Mr. Obama may decide he wants to keep the road open in certain cases for the CIA to use techniques not approved by the military, but with much greater oversight.

Is this what Obama meant when he spoke about bipartisan cooperation and a turn away from ideology and a return to getting things done? Apparently, to call for the unambiguous end of the CIA’s use of torture would be shrill, non-pragmatic, ideological, the hallmark of the looney left. If so, consider me all of the above. Let us hope the WSJ is wrong in its assessment, and let us always remember that the Iraq war was implemented in a highly bipartisan way.

(ii) From Reuters:

President-elect Barack Obama may consider delaying a campaign promise – to roll back tax cuts on high-income Americans – as part of his economic recovery strategy, two aides said on Sunday

…

His aides’ comments suggest Obama may be wary of imposing any additional tax burden at a time of deep crisis, despite the outlook for record budget deficits and mounting national debt. He may also be seeking to bolster Republican support for his recovery measures.

“The main thing right now is to get this economic recovery package on the road, to get money in the pockets of the middle class, to get these projects going, to get America working again, and that’s where we’re going to be focused in January,” Axelrod said.

Let’s get this straight: Obama campaigned on the promise of raising taxes on a certain segment of “high-income” Americans. He won. He might be said to have received a mandate from the American people to do so. Does anyone think it’ll be easier to return to this promise in 2011?

(iii) As I’ve written before on this blog, in agreement with Obama’s campaign rhetoric: Real change comes from below, not from above. If we want Obama to live up to his promises, to end the war, to end torture, to dismantle our unaccountable national security state, to fix our economy in a way we approve of, voting for Obama was never going to be enough.

The real work must happen now. Obama may be the nicest guy in the world, but one man doesn’t rule this country. There is a whole system of individuals and organizations responsible for our problems, which have been decades in the making, not the result of the maniac fringe of the Bush administration alone. Only a system can change a system. And a system that theoretically allows a Bush to go unchecked needs to be changed.

As I wrote:

Obama’s weakness, his dependency on large numbers of enthusiastic (mostly progressive, but somewhat cynical and alienated) voters, is our strength. Politicians should ideally fear their supporters. They should be terrified of betraying their supporters because doing so, theoretically, ought to destroy their credibility and careers in the long term.

So here’s to the so-called “netroots.” Keep twisting the screws. Keep putting on the pressure. Make Obama sweat.

This is even more true now than it was during the campaign. Let’s not deceive ourselves here: the netroots are weak in American politics. They wield little influence and are only now learning how to exert power in the political system. But eight years ago, there was no netroots.

Our goal needs to be systemic reform; our horizons in this medium- to long-term project should transcend individual election cycles and parties. We should create a system of government that can push back against and hold accountable a Bush or — god forbid — a Palin in the White House. Our current system is not up to the task.

November 24, 2008

Afghanistan: 2004 and 2008

Filed under: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, NATO, Rory Stewart, Taliban — Lee @ 3:31 am

Rory Stewart is a former British Foreign Service officer and currently the Ryan Professor of Human Rights at Harvard University and the Director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. In the New York Times, he has written an op-ed that bears directly on the conversation Ian and I were having a few posts back.

Stewart writes the following:

President-elect Obama’s emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided.

…

We invaded intending to attack Al Qaeda and provide development assistance. We succeeded. By 2004, Afghanistan had a stable currency, millions more children in school, a better health system, an elected Parliament, no Al Qaeda and almost no Taliban. All this was achieved with only 20,000 troops and a relatively small international aid budget.

When the decision was made to increase troops in 2005, there was no insurgency. But as NATO became increasingly obsessed with transforming the country and brought in more money and troops to deal with corruption and the judiciary, warlords and criminals, insecurity in rural areas and narcotics, it failed. In fact, things got worse. These new NATO troops encountered a fresh problem — local Taliban resistance — which has drawn them into a counterinsurgency campaign.

More troops have brought military victories but they have not been able to eliminate the Taliban. They have also had a negative political impact in the conservative and nationalistic communities of the Pashtun south and allowed Taliban propaganda to portray us as a foreign military occupation. In Helmand Province, troop numbers have increased to nearly 10,000 today from just 2,000 in 2004. But no inhabitant of Helmand would say things have improved in the last four years.

If what Stewart writes is a correct characterization of the situation in Afghanistan, then the continued presence of the U.S. (and NATO) in that country is not improving security — for either us or them — but is actually making things worse. Our presence is not only not improving the national security of the U.S. but may actually be working against our long-term strategic interests — however you might want to define those — by using resources wastefully and without a clearly defined (achievable) objective. Which is to completely ignore the moral case, either for or against the war.

Our presence in Afghanistan is, by this account, only increasing human suffering in the region and doing little to nothing to eliminate the Taliban. Of course, Stewart’s characterization of the situation in Afghanistan may be completely incorrect. Is there some other alternative narrative that better accounts for why we’re in that part of the world? Is Stewart obviously incorrect about any of his facts or judgments? It seems to me the burden of proof rests with those who argue for remaining, given the human misery war always necessarily unleashes, and not with those who argue for stopping what may well be a counterproductive war.

Which isn’t to say that those who argue against continuing the Afghan war can’t make a compelling case.

November 23, 2008

Center-Right? (w/ Update)

Filed under: Barack Obama, David Sirota, Glenn Greenwald, James Kirchick, center-right nation — Lee @ 4:12 am

David Sirota has an interesting graph on his Web site tracking the use of the term “center-right” in political discourse after the election. The upshot, he writes, is that he made a prediction two weeks before the election that “if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever.”

Lo and behold, his prediction bore out:

So we’re not talking about theory anymore – we’re talking about empirical fact. The media has exponentially increased the amount of times it claims that this country is a “center-right nation” – at the very same time public opinion data shows the country is a decidedly center-left nation. In short, we have the two hard data points proving that as the country has become more progressive and validated its progressivism on election day, the media has increased its claims that the nation is conservative.

Sirota is basically correct in his assessment, in my view, though he doesn’t go into detail about why it might be that everyone in the press seems to want to pretend that this country is basically “conservative.” Part of the answer is undoubtedly that many Americans self-identify as conservatives while actually supporting what the press would call “liberal” positions. The demonization of liberals has been systematic and ongoing for decades.

But it is worth pointing out that this demonization is present with most intensity and viciousness not among some fringe groups — as Sirota claims — but in the heart of the respectable mainstream. Witness the case of The New Republic’s James Kirchick, writing in the NY Daily News:

Barack Obama isn’t even President yet, and he’s already angering some of his most devoted followers on the party’s left wing. This is the mark of what could be a very successful presidency.

“With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head,” wrote David Sirota on the popular liberal blog OpenLeft, decrying the serial betrayals of Obama and the congressional Democratic majority. The Democratic Party, he wrote, has “faced no real retribution” for its manifold heresies, something that Sirota believes he and his band of angry bloggers must change. “We better understand why this happened,” he fumed.

Allow me to provide an answer. You don’t matter.

…

Given the intensity of blogger rage over Lieberman, one can understand how their defeat at the ends of their own party would lend itself to hyperbole, but when did the “American people” appoint Markos Moulitsas their spokesman? And while there are many ways to interpret the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, that voters across the country wanted Joe Lieberman to be stripped of his committee chairmanship is not one of them.

Indeed, the only people who seemed to give a fig about Lieberman were the “Netroots.” Along with abandoning Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda, punishing the “traitor” Joe Lieberman was their paramount concern (know that in the minds of Netroots, Lieberman hasn’t only committed treason against the Democratic Party; a quick perusal of the more popular liberal blogs will also find the words “Zionist” and “Likudnik” attached to his name). Most Americans probably recognize Lieberman as the guy who ran with Al Gore in 2000. But to the Netroots, Lieberman is an obsession, an individual who inspires mania. He is the worst thing possible: not only someone who disagrees with them about foreign policy, but a liberal who disagrees with them on foreign policy.

That’s right, you non-mattering demonic liberals you — i.e. arguably a supermajority of the U.S. population — by supporting the withdrawal of the military from Iraq you are in favor of “abandoning Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda.” If you happen to think that Joe Lieberman should be published for deploying the vilest of attacks against Obama — who made a point of helping defend Lieberman against Ned Lamont and his netroot supporters — then you’re some kind of (implicitly anti-Semitic, or anti-Semitic by association) nut.

Personally, I don’t really care that Lieberman has been allowed to keep caucusing with the Democrats. There is something to be said for reconciling after a tough election with your opponents. What bothers me is that Obama’s cabinet is increasingly shaping up to be precisely the sort of center-right cabinet that commentators like Kirchick are ready to praise.

Shouldn’t an Obama cabinet include officials who are unapologetic liberals? That is, not a cabinet of only liberals, but a cabinet where the voices of what Kirchick would call the Democratic party’s “left wing” (the Kuciniches or even Edwardses of the party) are audible. The so-called left wing partly contributed to helping get Obama elected. Is it unfair to ask for a voice — not dominance, mind you, but just a voice — at the table? Is there some left voice in Obama’s cabinet I’ve missed? If the left doesn’t get a voice, how should it respond?

Update (11/23)

Glenn Greenwald addresses the question posed by my post and comes to a conclusion I largely agree with:

So many progressives were misled about what Obama is and what he believes. But it wasn’t Obama who misled them. It was their own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered.

…

It goes without saying that there will be Obama policies, both in the foreign policy and domestic realms, that are vastly superior to what we’ve seen the last eight years and to what we would have seen had McCain/Palin won…

But Barack Obama is a centrist, establishment politician. That is what he has been since he’s been in the Senate, and more importantly, it’s what he made clear — both explicitly and through his actions — that he intended to be as President. Even in the primary, he paid no price whatsoever for that in terms of progressive support. As is true for the national Democratic Party generally, he has no good reason to believe he needs to accommodate liberal objections to what he is doing. The Joe Lieberman fiasco should have made that as conclusively clear as it gets.

The point isn’t that this reality should just be passively accepted and nothing done about it. The point is that for anything to be done about it, the reality needs to be accepted. The campaign we began earlier this year with Accountability Now and are now vigorously developing and pursuing — to devote all resources and energies to defeating incumbents in primary challenges — is grounded in the premise that one’s political beliefs and principles will be ignored until there is a price to pay for ignoring them. Democrats don’t perceive there is a price to pay for ignoring progressives, and so they do. That isn’t surprising. What would be surprising is if, under those circumstances, anything else happened.

November 15, 2008

Our Strategy for Afghanistan

Filed under: Afghanistan, George Packer, Iraq — Lee @ 5:59 pm

George Packer has conducted an interesting interview over at The New Yorker with David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert whom Packer has previous written about. Whatever you think about our presence in Afghanistan — I think it is a mistake, and counterproductive to our national security interests, among other sorts of interest — it’s well worth reading the interview carefully.

A key quote:

PACKER: So, on the military side, three additional brigades isn’t the answer? Or isn’t the only answer?

KILCULLEN: That’s right. The first thing we have to do is to “triage” the environment: figure out the smallest number of Afghan population centers that accounts for the greatest percentage of the population. Once we understand that lay-down (e.g., in the South, it’s two towns that account for eighty per cent of the population, but the east is more rural, so it’s a different calculation there), then we tailor a security plan for each major cluster of population, and for the key communications—roads, essentially—that link them together. Then we will have an idea of the extra troops we need, if any. But we can start right away with the troops we have.

Also, there are assets beyond (or, at a pinch, instead of) combat troops that would make a huge difference, without “breaking the bank” for combat troops elsewhere. These include construction engineers, aid and development personnel, aid project money, intelligence analysts, helicopters, trainers and advisers, mentors for local mayors and district officials, surveillance assets and so on—so it’s not necessarily a straight zero-sum between having combat troops pull out of Iraq so we can send them to Afghanistan. (In any case, if you accept the argument that a key part of our grand-strategic problem is that we are over-committed in Iraq—and I do accept that argument—then it makes no sense to pull troops out of Iraq just so we can go and re-commit them somewhere else. We need to be reducing overall force commitment everywhere, not just moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. That would be tantamount to un-bogging ourselves from Iraq just so we can re-bog ourselves in Afghanistan).

What we have here is a leading counterinsurgency expert saying that not only is our presence in Iraq counterproductive, but that adding brigades is not — necessarily — the answer to improving the lives of Afghani citizens and routing out the Taliban.

Read the whole interview. It’s quite interesting.

November 9, 2008

First Comes a Sense of Betrayal

Filed under: Uncategorized — Lee @ 4:21 pm

Over at AlterNet, Mark Ames reports on his forays into the right-wing mediasphere, commenting on the curiously conciliatory tone coming from neoconservatives who defamed Obama in the most nasty way during the election, people who called liberals traitors, etc.  The Bill Kristols and Brit Humes and Karl Roves and John McCains of the world who spent months whipping up a frenzy among certain segments of the American public have called for reconciliation and even civility in the wake of Obama’s victory.  But foot soldiers of the right are confused about this new koombaya attitude on the part of their cynical leaders:

Like the much more numerous Freepers, the mob at Pajamas Media is outraged because they have been betrayed. It’s not just that the liberals betrayed them, but that the leaders they’d followed — Fox News, right-wing bloggers, and the Republican elite who have been mobilizing their pitchfork fury — now find their savagery a liability, and they’re abandoning them. It’s the fury of having been played for a sucker — and the “real American” mob has been played for the biggest sucker in American history, as is clear from their sense of abandonment.

It is an incredible spectacle to behold: the Republican elite abandoning a 20-year narrative at the snap of a finger just to make sure that it is positioned well in the new Obama dynamic. The Republican elite has clearly decided that the “Real America” mob it had exploited had become a liability, but still it’s amazing how seamlessly and quickly it can throw its own audience overboard.

Ames is far too sanguine about this state of affairs, as are people like Olbermann, whose post-election show was dedicated to gleefully calling O’Reilly, Kristol, and Limbaugh losers.  Fair enough.  One can’t blame people who hated the Bush years for taking a day or two to celebrate, but by calling the extreme right in the country a bunch of “losers” who are “insignificant,” they perfectly feed into the narrative of resentment and fury and isolation and despair people like Limbaugh cultivate among their listeners.  The true believers, the ditto-heads, who were booing at McCain’s attempt at a civil concession speech, are running to buy up guns, afraid that Obama is going to make owning guns illegal, occasionally (as Ames mentions) talking in their online forums about the need to prepare for the inevitable conversion of America into a totalitarian socialist state.

There were a lot of people out there who believed the vile propaganda places like Fox News and the National Review were spewing during the election (and over the last eight years).  Now that these cynical conservative establishment sycophants turn around, and put on a friendly face, celebrating America’s final victory over racism, declaring (as Bill Bennett did on CNN) that no black person can ever claim to be afflicted by racism ever again, kowtowing before the new establishment power like sniveling cowards, they will find that their followers — who I suspect are often sincere, if misguided people — are not going to turn on a dime at their command.  More likely, they’ll feel more isolated, resentful, and furious than ever.

Those of us who are on the left need to reach out to these people, I think.  I don’t know how, but their fears need to be addressed and assuaged.  We may think their beliefs are wrong, but we need to take them seriously.  If we don’t, when a true-believing demagogue next arises to stoke their rage, they will be much better armed than they were even just a week ago.

November 7, 2008

Against Summers (w/ Update)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Lee @ 3:19 am

President Elect Obama has begun the process of selecting his staff and cabinet members.  Rahm Emmanuel, the basis for the character of Josh Lyman on the West Wing, has accepted a position as chief of staff.  Robert Gibbs, who recently (and deliciously) ripped Sean Hannity apart over Obama’s supposed “Ayers problem,” is going to be the press secretary.  These seem to me like awesome selections — from the little I have learned about each of these men — but other names being floated around are less terrific.  Lawrence Summers, supposedly at the top of the short list for SecTreas, is a fairly problematic figure, in my view.

As Max Blumenthal at the The Huffington Post reports, Summers is famous around the world for writing a memo — while president of the World Bank — suggesting that the bank should encourage polluting industries to migrate to “LDCs” [Least Developed Countries], claiming that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that,” as he put it, though he later claimed to be joking.  Jose Lutzenberger, while Brazil’s secretary of the environment, replied to Summers in a letter by suggesting that “[y]our reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane… Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in.”  For his candor, Lutzenberger was canned, and for his brilliant logical reasoning, Summers was awarded the position of secretary of the treasury under Clinton and given the presidency of Harvard.

The issue with the Summers memo is not merely his assumption that LDCs ought to have been (and ought to be) lining up to absorb our toxic waste — the waste that we want to produce — but more crucially the system of international relations within which our friendly “encouragement” happens.  I mean, societies often have to choose between polluting more and growing an economy and polluting less and growing less quickly, and if you want to develop fast economically, there is a price in air pollution.  Because pollution often affects the whole community  — i.e., I breath in the toxic pollution you produce, my cancer is cause partly by the chemical plant down the river — I believe that pollution and growth need to be balanced through democratic deliberation.  But in the context of World Bank activities, “encouragement” usually meant — and means — conditional assistance, in concert with the IMF — e.g., “reduce your anti-toxic waste regulations or else we don’t help you with your debt and/or inflation problems.”  Of course, now that the US financial system is suffering the consequences of excessive liberalism and deregulation, Summers has reverted to the reflexive interventionism of mainstream economists — when it comes to our economic crises — and (rightly) supported the $700 billion bailout package.

Since there are so many other more palatable names on the docket for SecTreas, and Summers is such a controversial figure (and not only because of this memo), I think we should level pressure against his selection.

Update

Dylan Matthews, at pushback, contests Blumenthal’s account of the Summers memo controversy.  It seems that Summers took responsibility for a memo that someone else wrote, but which he signed, in the context of internal debate about the effects of free-market policies and pollution.  The memo was then leaked with official-looking letterhead to The Economist.  I don’t know how convincing of a defense this is, given that the memo only gave offense in the context of the Bank’s actual, arguably coercive policies, policies quite consistent with the anti-regulatory character of the memo.  But anyway, I thought I’d link to the defense, get some debate going, if only with myself.  And as I said, there’s lots to criticize Summers on beyond the memo, whatever the final version of the story turns out to be.

November 5, 2008

Obama

Filed under: Uncategorized — Lee @ 1:30 am

I am so glad this election season is over — and am obviously pleased with the outcome.  I feel emotionally, mentally, and intellectually exhausted.  In the months to come, I hope to use this space to blog about the medium and long term of American politics, now that the urgency of discussing the daily news cycle will wane, with a special focus on economic questions, my favorite sort.

November 4, 2008

Say No to Prop 8

Filed under: Uncategorized — Lee @ 12:58 am

History has not been happening much this past week, and for that I apologize.  I’ve been too busy with my “day job” to write substantial posts here, and I’m frankly burnt out on election coverage.  If you haven’t yet decided who you’re voting for tomorrow — assuming you haven’t already voted — I don’t have much to tell you.  Good luck deciding.  As a sort of penance for my blogo-negligence, I am proud to link to a streaming version of “Smallitics,” an episode of the Stanford Storytelling Project, a radio/podcast program I serve as the fiction editor for.  For this episode, I interviewed a fellow English grad student from Montana who recently married her partner of seven years.  It is unclear what will happen to their marriage should Proposition 8 — which would define marriage in the California state constitution as between a man and a woman –  pass, but I think it’s worth listening to their story, whatever your views on marriage.  To make my views clear:  I think homosexual partners who want to commit to each other for life should be allowed to have their desire recognized in exactly the same way that heterosexual couples can.  If you live in California, I encourage you to vote no on Prop 8.  Prop 8 is a hideously discriminatory depredation of human dignity.  Just say no.

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