History is Happening Now

December 8, 2008

Not a Time to Draw Conclusions?

Filed under: Lawrence Summers, Steve Hildebrand, center-right nation — Lee @ 4:36 am

Steve Hildebrand has written a short but fascinating article in The Huffington Post chiding the “left wing” of the Democratic party for criticizing Obama’s cabinet choices.

Hildebrand writes:

This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making. Some believe the appointments generally aren’t progressive enough. Having worked with former Senator Obama for the last two years, I can tell you, that isn’t the way he thinks and it’s not likely the way he will lead. The problems I mentioned above and the many I didn’t, suggest that our president surround himself with the most qualified people to address these challenges. After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people – not just those on the left.

As a liberal member of our Party, I hope and expect our new president to address those issues that will benefit the vast majority of Americans first and foremost. That’s his job. Over time, there will be many, many issues that come before him. But first let’s get our economy moving, bring our troops home safely, fix health care, end climate change and restore our place in the world. What a great president Barack Obama will be if he can work with Congress and the American people to make great strides in these very difficult times.

What I find most fascinating about this post is its tacit mischaracterization of the intentions of the “left.” Hildebrand implies, though he doesn’t outright come and state, that the left is demanding either (i) the elimination of non-left viewpoints form Obama’s cabinet or (ii) an overall leftward tilt of said cabinet.

In fact, the progressive critique of Obama’s cabinet has been build precisely on pragmatic grounds, here and elsewhere. When Obama appoints highly ideological key architects of our financial crisis — like Lawrence “Credit Default Swap” Summers — to key posts of his economic team, he is very precisely making an unpragmatic choice.

What the left would like, I suspect, is some recognition that it has been uniformly pragmatically correct on a number of important issues — from the Iraq war through the dangers of financial deregulation. This recognition need not come in the form, as Hildebrand suggests, of a majority stake in an Obama administration. No, rather what progressives demand (or maybe I should say “request”: we lefties are so polite) is some stake, some voice. What we have seen emerging instead amounts to a sort of Clinton restoration, a return to the neoliberal nineties. Which may seem like a less bad thing than the last eight years — the nightmarish naughts — but is still pretty bad when you consider what Clinton-era liberals were wrong about: supporting the Iraq war (when it came), systematically embracing economic deregulation, stalling the Kyoto protocol (and other meaningful climate change initiatives), pushing hard for NAFTA before even health care reform, and so on. These were heartfelt positions (especially NAFTA, whose pragmatic effects were highly destructive), not artifacts of political necessity or tragic triangulations born of a triumphant Republican party. The Clintonites genuinely believed in these disastrous (and ultimately highly unpragmatic) policies.

I am fascinated by the need (a kind of reflexive urge) respectable Democrats feel to chastise us extremist divisive conclusion-drawing Americans who care about meaningfully curbing greenhouse emissions, who thought invading Iraq was wrong from the very beginning, who think that laissez-faire economics (especially in finance) can be hideously destructive, who believe in full civil rights for gay Americans, who believe that universal health care is vitally important, and so on. No, Obama won, Hildebrand is saying, so we should just be quiet and trust in our new Leader to lead us.

That’s what leaders do: they lead. Us? We follow.

Well, sorry Mr. Hildebrand. This American is watching and is drawing conclusions. And not out of some ideological mania, but from a vantage point of pure pragmatism. When President-elect Obama selects cabinet members whose ideological commitments (and track records of failure) may hinder his ability to “get our economy moving, bring our troops home safely, fix health care, end climate change and restore our place in the world,” I think it’s my place to say so and to persuade you that it’s so. Doing this seems like the absolute minimal condition for political rationality and honesty.

I see no reason to keep my real opinions, based on the best evidence I can marshall, out of the realm of public discourse. Mr. Hildebrand certainly offers none backed by any evidence.

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.

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