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In the diary "Obama, Progressives, and the Question of A Successful Presidency", Robert in Monterey (a historian by training) wrote a comment that I responded to immediately, but felt deserved a good deal more attention than that. Apparently others agreed as well, since it now has 25 "4"s.
First he wrote about the current administration misreading the political landscape, then he wrote about other recent examples of other administrations doing the same, albeit in somewhat different ways. I'm going to reproduce what Robert wrote, and tie it back to my argument in the previous diary about the anomalous nature of the Sixth Party System--but with a bit of a twist, because the origins of this pattern of disconnects starts even earlier. Here's the beginning of Robert's excellent comment:
They've misread the last 8 years
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Obama and Emanuel have quite fundamentally misread what has happened to American politics the last 8 years (and going back even further, of course). Obama's basic view was that Bush was an irritant - remove him and you remove the cause of the infection in US politics. Without Bush out there sowing division Obama believed he could build a stable center.
Rahm Emanuel's role was to be the force behind that work. For Emanuel, the Obama Administration was an outright restoration. He would pick up right where he left off in 2000, cutting deals of a center-right variety and browbeating a weak progressive bloc into accepting it.
Neither of them have understood how much has changed between 2000 and 2008.
Bush was a symptom, not a cause. The right-wing under Bush became even more entrenched and hostile to anything not conservative and not Republican. They deepened their level of crazy. Obama's belief that he can reach out to these people is stunningly, tragically naive.
Similarly, Emanuel and Obama have not quite grasped how progressives have been changed by 8 years of Bush. We learned that the right-wing is to never be trusted on anything, ever, for any reason.
But we also learned to be extremely sensitive to Democratic efforts to sell us out. The Democratic decision to support the Iraq War initiated dramatic change in the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. We learned to never again let our values be abandoned by our party, and we began 6+ years of organizing work to ensure it would never happen again.
Both Obama and Emanuel seem to believe that we will just quietly fall in line when we are asked to support a compromise that has been drawn up along Republican lines. In doing so they are revealing their immense disconnection from the basic political realities of the day.
That pretty much hits all the high points in the Obama disconnnect. While this precise articulation of the Whitehouse failure is invaluable, I want to boil it down to something simpler in order to stress what I believe it shares in common with other Democratic disconnects: First, it is Washington-centric. Second, it is concerned with governance in the now. It does not comprehend how Washington appears to the public at large, nor does it grasp the nature of organized rightwing opposition, which quite unlike it conceives of politics as an unceasing battle--a battle without rules, except as they may be used as weapons, shields, or instruments of deception.
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| The description I've just given matches up with the points I made in the previous diary about the Sixth Party System, in terms of how rightwing power was built outside the normal parameters of political power in America. It never occurs to the DC-Centric Democratic establishment to engage the right wing on its own terms, to battle it out no holds barred. Democrats are always handicapping themselves, most fundamentally by refusing to see how the right is conducting itself--a theme I will expand on more in a later diary.
Here, then, is the rest of Robert's comment, interspersed with my own commentary:
That is a deeply troubling sign. Such a disconnection is what brought down LBJ, who refused to understand the unpopularity of the Vietnam War until it was too late.
In fact, we now know that Johnson himself did not believe in the war, but was obsessed with the idea that he could not afford to abandon Vietnam, for fear of repeating the history of Democratic defeat in the wake of the Korean War:
Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and Senator Richard Russell, Washington, May 27, 1964, 10:55 p.m.
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Russell:.... We never could actually interdict all their lines of communication in Korea even though we had absolute control of the seas and the air. And we never did stop them. And you ain't going to stop these people either.
Johnson: Well, they'd impeach a president, though, that would run out, wouldn't they?
It was Johnson's failure to even consider the possibility of a pro-active strategy that spelled his doom. In a very real, very bizarre sense, the fact that he himself did not believe in the war from the very beginning made him virtually impervious to anyone else's criticism. In a very basic sense, he already agreed with the criticism, but felt that he had no choice--which is why he failed to appreciate how that criticism could eventually become even more damaging to him than the attacks he feared from the right.
Military defeat has repeatedly been the wellspring of rightwing activism, even fascism. Authoritarian followers cannot abide the humiliation, cannot grasp the complexities involved in any conflict, cannot dream that their virtuous leaders can be defeated, except through treachery. They are ripe for blameshifting, scapegoating and projecting of conservative failures onto a liberal shadow elite.
Finally, he mistook what eventually emerged as the nation's moral center for its point of origin on the left. The fact that mainstreet America turned against the war was something he could only fathom by stepping down, and trying to end the war before he left office.
I believe there is a very real sense in which Obama suffers from precisely the same sort of mis-orientation. Like LBJ, he may very well actually agree with progressives when we're coming to believe he's simply playing us--but also like LBJ, he may simply find it inconceivable that he could act on the basis of what he actually believes.
It brought down Gerald Ford who did not quite understand either public outrage at his pardon of Nixon nor did he grasp the rise of the New Right.
Ford, of course, wasn't a Democrat, but he also misread both rightwing organizing and the country's moral center. Like Johnson, he too, thought that it was just some crazy liberals he'd be offending--in Ford's case by pardoning Nixon--when he was actually going against a broad consensus on what was right and proper.
It brought down Jimmy Carter who did not understand quite a few things, from the divisions in the Democratic Congress to the goals of the New Right to the economic shifts under way to the malaise of the American voter.
Carter was truly unique. Not only did he have the DC-centric myopia about the country as a whole, he had an outsider's clumsiness in dealing with the DC insiders. What he excelled at was diplomacy, which was no small achievement, but not enough to make him a political success.
It brought down George H.W. Bush who did not understand how radical and movement-oriented the GOP was becoming, that they would refuse to fall in line as they had under Reagan, and that he was at the opening scenes of a great demographic shift that would empower Democrats like Bill Clinton.
Bush I was smart enough to realize that he was no Reagan. So he figured that he couldn't just talk tough, he had to act the part--which meant picking fights with carefully selected fall-guys. Two wars in four years--that just had to make him safe, right? With 90% approval ratings after the second one, it sure did seem so. But unfortunately for Bush I, reality just didn't deliver the same jolt that pure theater does. This was symptomatic of something I mentioned in the previous diary--as conservatism increasingly began to fail, it's true believers required headier and headier delusions to keep themselves properly intoxicated. Once he started talking about a "new world order," he was definitely a goner.
What constitutes the larger historical framework for the time period discussed here? It's longer than the Sixth Party System, and I would suggest another cycle that I've written about before in my diary series Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future:
The rise and fall of successive world powers-Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us-described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.
Further explaining this cycle I wrote, in part:
Furthermore, Phillips goes on to make three further points that are extremely important for us: - Each power experiences an unexpected shock at the height of its powers that lets it know it is not invulnerable, after all. Vietnam was not an anomaly.
- Each power reacts the same way--a reactionary politics of denial sets in for a period of several decades, during which the elites do better than ever, while the larger masses see their fortunes either stagnate, or decline.
- Finallty, in each case, after several decades, an egalitarian reversal sets in.
Phillips writes:
... the popular reactions in mid-eighteenth-century Holland and early-twentieth-century Britain against opulent aristocratic and financial elites raise a different possibility: the emergence during the first third of the twenty-first century of a U.S. radicalism seeded by economic and political pessimism. We have seen how a portion of the Dutch people, seeking a return to lost values, mounted a "Patriot Revolution." Major elements of the British population, seething against wealth and unfairness, used the new Labor Party to build a British welfare state-worker and lower-middle-income circumstances improved markedly-around the much higher tax rates imposed by war and politics on the upper and upper middle classes.
On further reflection, however, I think we can amend this account somewhat. After all, before we lost in Vietnam, we also lost in Korea. Oh, it was called a draw. But when you're the most powerful nation on Earth, and you don't win, you lose--as Senator Russell intimated above. It's just that simple. Harry Truman wasn't even renominated by his own party in 1952. What more proof do you need?
This may not have triggered the full dynamic that Phillips describes--and there are good reasons for that, given how much the New Deal had clearly achieved--but it did trigger the beginnings of a serious rightwing reactionary movement, commonly referred to as "McCarthyism". And this mass movement was pivotal in helping the GOP win its only trifecta of the Fifth Party System, support that Eisenhower felt uneasy with, but dared not eject outright (hence, in part, Nixon as his Vice President). Throughout the New Deal era, rightwing forces had tried to mobilize themselves, but all their efforts fell far short of any sort of national success. In 1950 through 1952, this all changed. And although it dissipated within a few years, it was much easier to remobilize in support of Goldwater in 1964.
This is the larger historical framework within which all the presidential disconnects Robert mentions are situated. He goes on to conclude:
I still find it unlikely that Obama would face a primary opponent in 2012. But he doesn't need to face one to lose the election. Obama's unwillingness to understand American political reality is causing him growing political problems. It is very much alienating his base, and as a result he will have slammed shut his own window for reform and change, and will have made his reelection bid unnecessarily difficult.
Again, I would argue that what underlies this grim prognosis is that like all his predecessors that Robert names, Obama fails to grasp the fundamental dynamics of what is happening in the country at large. And right now, those dynamics are heading dangerously close to genuine fascism. So writes Sara Robinson at Orcinus, and she's one of the real experts who--along with her blogmate David Neiwart--has long been warning us off of using the F-word too loosely. So what's changed now? That's what I'll be discussing in the next diary. |
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