| The project of forging cross-ideological consensus is fraught with at least three sorts of fundamental impossibility.
First, aristocratic conservatives don't believe in the proposed ideal. Consensus is not at all their thing. Therefore, whatever desiderata they lay out will not and cannot lead to the procedural liberal's desired end, except in the sorts of atypical examples referred to in the first diary in this mini-series. Whatever the rationalization provided may be, the underlying reason is that aristocratic conservatives cannot compromise on core normative issues-to do so threatens them existentially in at least three different ways: (A) It threatens the normative core that Perlstein referred to in the first diary. (B) It threatens the permanent disruption of the protective order that maintains the always-threatened world of the RWA authoritarian follower. (C) It threatens the dominant position of the SDO authoritarian leader.
Second, the desiderata that aristocratic conservatives lay out will necessarily be asymmetrical, whether overtly stated or not. Ultimately, the asymmetry is grounded in the existential nature of conservatism: Believing that they are inherently virtuous (or at least deserving in the case of completely amoral SDOs), any means, however foul, is ultimately justified. Believing that others (conservatives of other traditions, such as Islamic fundamentalists, as well as Western liberals) are inherently evil (or at best, morally irrelevant), any means on their part, however virtuous, are ultimately meaningless, if not outright deceitful, and thus, evil.
Third, any attempt to create a generalized cooperative framework will fail on two counts: First, to the extent it is cooperative with aristocratic conservative demands, the capacity to produce genuinely acceptable results in a liberal framework will be fatally compromised. (For example, not prosecuting, or even investigating war crimes.) Second, to the extent ir succeeds on liberal/procedural grounds, it will be rejected by aristocratic conservatives if it threatens their existential core.
We now consider some specific examples.
(1) Adoption of rightwing frames. Obama has a recurrent habit of repeating rightwing frames. As a general habit, this doesn't get the heart of what I'm talking about, but it's in the neighborhood and serves as a good generic introduction. My point being that to show that he gets how conservatives think he doesn't have to mimic-or even reinforce-their thinking. What's much truer to the liberal, reality-based tradition is the ability to reference those frames and then problematize them. A classic example of this was Obama's embrace of the historically false conservative narrative around "gun rights" and the Second Amendment.
The simplest, most reality-based way around this is simply to say that no hunter even needs Constitutional protection because no one is interested in taking away their guns in the first place. You don't go hunting with a Saturday night special, and no self-respecting hunter would even want to go hunting with an assault rifle. There's a real opportunity here for someone who's comfortable in approaching the entire subject with a sense of humor about how absurdly the issue has been portrayed. Not that you want to do a 5-minute shtick on it. Just that you're confident enough in your audience's common sense that you can cut right through the NRA BS.
(2) Rick Warren.
When Obama invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, he was giving a platform to a political activist, not just a religious leader, who had a clear record of rejecting even private dialogue with those he disagreed with-not to mention someone who had sandbagged him during the campaign. A consistent liberal approach to building cross-ideological consensus would have required Obama to either reach out to a less polarizing, less overtly political figure, or to ask Warren to engage in some outreach of his own, reversing his past refusal to meet with Soulforce before speaking at the Inauguration.
(3) FISA flip-flop.
What can I say? A total disaster with absolutely no upside whatsoever. No consequences for lawless behavior is a classic authoritarian value, directly at odds with the liberal principles that we are a government of laws, not men, and that all are equal under the law.
(4) Stimulus Flaws.
The stimulus package was clearly inadequate in terms of size, which Obama did nothing to fight for. It was also inadequate specifically in terms of offsetting state deficits, which in turn meant inevitable drastic cuts in education, health care and social services generally-all programs with strong, broad appeal at the state and local level, that could have been used to leverage "moderates" into supporting a far more effective stimulus package. Rather than making strong, principled, fact-based arguments on either of these counts, and promoting a true, reality-based framework for striving towards consensus, he attempted to lure conservatives in by giving away the store-including the tax cuts they were sure to argue for.
Instead of gaining anything for all these concessions, Obama instead strengthened his opponents hands, and indeed encouraged "moderates" who could have been allies to instead position themselves in opposition. In addition to the above, he further exacerbated matters by agreeing with false arguments that various stimulus items-such as birth control-were not actual stimulative, when in fact they were more stimulative than the GOP's beloved tax-cuts. He could have used these attacks to create a teachable moment, explaining to the American people how all government spending has a stimulative effective. He could still have agreed to remove the contested items, but he could have extracted a price for doing so--at the very least, a GOP admission that it was actually stimulative would have been nice. Instead, he gave way without gaining anything in return.
In short, there were severe shortfalls in the size of the stimulus, which threatened its effectiveness, and ensured a great deal of avoidable hardship, while simultaneously allowing conservatives to advance some key narratives, not just without challenge, but even, in some cases, with overt agreement.
(5) Excusing Torture
This could warrant an entire diary unto itself. But I'll try to be brief, and just hit a few high points:
(A) "Looking forward not back" is a rightwing trope devised to prevent rightwing crooks from paying the price for their crimes. The fact that it's never invoked to pass over Democratic transgressions is a dead give-away to what's going on-a classic case of authoritarian thinking, where one group-liberals and Democrats-must always be punished, whether they did anything wrong or not, while another group-conservatives and republicans-must never be punished, even when they admit to or even brag about clearly breaking the law.
(B) While it's clearly desirable to look forward, it's just as clear that failing to hold people accountable for their actions is not forward-looking in the least: It virtually ensures future wrong-doing on an even more massive scale. This is precisely what happened form Watergate to Iran/Conta and from Iran/Contra to Bush's torture regime.
(C) Not only does Obama embrace of this rightwing trope serve to block prosecution, it serves to block investigation, and the establishment of an official record of what happened. This, in turn, actively facilitates the future return of torture.
(D) The "reflection not retribution" trope is a double lie. It's conservatives who think of justice primarily in terms of retribution. Liberals think of it alsp in terms of deterrence, as well as the possibilities for restitution, repentance, redemption and and reconciliation. By repeating the rightwing frame of "retribution" Obama is actively denying the other aspect of justice that liberals have long upheld as being vitally important, even as conservatives have derided them.
Furthermore, at the very least, the granting of pardons would ensure no punishment whatsoever-and hence no retribution, while clearly marking the conduct itself as illegal and not to be repeated under any circumstances. Any serious concern for the future prevention of torture would have to include some such guarantee as a bare minimum. That fact that such deterrence does not even remotely figure into Obama's think, and that it is in fact deliberately obscured by this formulation is a clear demonstration that conservative double-standards, exempting them from all responsibility, are taking absolute precedent over any real concern for reality-base liberal equal justice. This is not the foundation for any sort of cross-ideological consensus, it is simply yet another black check for future conservative lawlessness and predation.
There's another lie in Obama's invocation of "reflection", since he is doing nothing to further any sort of process of reflection-even though reflection by itself is an utterly hollow and powerless alternative. This mendacious alternative doesn't represent anything whatsoever that is real, much less efficacious. It's just a piece of hollow alliterative rhetoric, utterly without meaning, except to insult the intellect.
This brief review is not intended to be anything more than briefly illustrative of how time after time Obama's gestures toward bipartisan and/or cross-ideological "reconciliation" or "consensus" are actually nothing more than conservative-defined forms of liberal capitulation that cannot possibly be the foundation for anything more equitable in the future. They are, instead, a gold-plated get-out-of-jail-free card. Nothing more, nothing less.
The next and last installment will concern alternatives: what a genuine cross-ideological approach would look like that truly reflected core liberal values. |
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