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.