| One way to explain how I differ from Lind is to look at the subhead of his piece. Now writers generally don't get to choose their headlines and subheads. I don't know what Salon's policy is. But regardless of who wrote it, I do think it captures the flavor of Ling's argument: "Why can't Democrats mobilize the public for healthcare reform? Blame the demagogy gap."
In contrast to that, I would point out that there are two quite distinct meanings of the word "demagogue":
1 : a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power
2 : a leader championing the cause of the common people in ancient times
Put simply, a definition 1 demagogue is nothing but a pale imitation of a definition 2 demagogue. And for me, the difference between real and fake is not best characterized in terms of a gap. More and better fakery on the left is not whats called for here. I don't think for a moment that that's what Lind is calling for--despite passages such as this:
The most dangerous deficit that the United States faces is not the budget deficit or the trade deficit. It is the Democrats' demagogy deficit.
Rather, Lind's problem is that he fails to clearly articulate what he does mean, in part because he he misunderstands the players today, as well as misunderstanding past history. I've argued before that he misunderstands liberals, progressives and the left. But he also mischaracterizes the right as well. For example:
The irony is that the modern conservative movement started out by opposing the very populism it later embraced. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was influenced by the philosopher Albert Jay Nock, a family friend who despised mass democracy. Buckley's never-published philosophical manifesto, written in the 1950s and early 1960s (he allowed me to read the manuscript), was a critique of the mass society, inspired by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of the Masses."
Don't look now, Michael, but they still despise mass democracy. It's not only why they won the 2000 election 5-4 wihtout a hint of shame, or why they're forever at war with voter registration drives, it also goes back to the Straussian roots of neoconservatism, with its ferverent belief in the rule of the few and the need for "noble lies" to keep the lower orders in line. It's not just the neocons---every species of conservatism contains some version of this same belief. Conservatism is elite rule, and mass submissiveness.
Furthermore, Buckley also started off as a big apologist for the leading mid-century American demagogue, Joseph McCarthy. He and Brent Bozell co-wrote a book defending McCarthy, McCarthy and His Enemies, in 1954. In short, that's not irony you're looking at, Micheel. It's the same old conservative double standard that they've always believed in.
If Lind is still confused over what conservatism is, he's equally confused about who the post-1950s progressives are. First we get yet another round of his muddled version of 50s and 60s politics--not even coming close to realizing that the intellectuals he cites from the 50s were the establishment that activists from the 60s were partially struggling against:
While the right was rejecting its gloomy elitism and embracing the mass society and populist politics, liberalism was moving in the other direction. Liberal intellectuals, shocked by McCarthyism and the rejection by the voters of the urbane Adlai Stevenson for Dwight Eisenhower, concluded that the American people themselves were the problem. In "The Age of Reform" and other works, the influential liberal historian Richard Hofstadter argued that the Progressive and Populist movements, far from being the precursors of New Deal liberalism, were reactionary movements by downwardly mobile professionals or farmers suffering from "status anxiety." Seymour Martin Lipset and other sociologists and historians including Daniel Bell and Peter Viereck argued that many members of the working class had "authoritarian personalities" and that populism here as in Europe could lead to fascism. Although more accurate historians and pollsters demolished their caricature of working-class Americans as proto-Nazis suffering from "status anxiety," the damage had been done. The New Left of the 1970s and 1980s, clashing with socially conservative blue-collar "hard-hats," were if anything even more hostile to the white working class, and sought allies instead among blacks, immigrants and various "social movements," most of them staffed and run by members of the college-educated upper middle class.
I've already critiqued this misrepresentation of history in my diaries "A Stuck Pig Squeals: Michael Lind's Analytical Confusion Reflects Traditional Southern Apologetics" (in sections "Evil Liberal Bigots Called Conservatives Crazy!" [Parts 1 & 2]) and "Who's Calling Who Crazy? Centrist/Extremist Theory & The Marginalizaiton of The American Majority". So let me just add that in fact, a good deal of the New Left were white working class--at least in upbringing. Many SDSers, like Tom Hayden, were the first in their families to go to college, and that's where a good deal of their radicalism came from. In contrast, it was George Meany and Richard Daley who sold out their supporters, whose sons were the principle victims of the senseless war that they mindlessly supported.
But Lind goes even more off track when he gets contemporary in the next paragraph:
Whereas progressives and populists alike had been able to invoke the people against the interests, the mid-century liberals and many of their successors on the center-left to this day fear the people even more than they fear the interests.
There is simply zero evidence for this. But it fits neatly into the story Lind wants to tell, which continues:
They worry that if liberals rile up the crowd against Wall Street, the rampaging mob, like the torch-bearing Transylvanian villagers in the old Universal Pictures Frankenstein movies, might turn on the universities or carry out political pogroms against minorities.
Which is why Tom Hayden, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jesse Jackson and Eleanor Smeal were all over cable news demanding that the Dems bail out Wall Street. Yes, I remember it like it was just yesterday!
Oh, wait...
The logic of what comes next is impecable. There's just one problem, the "liberalism" Lind speaks of is not American liberalism. It's Fox News liberalism ala Alan Colmes:
When passion and polemic are ruled out as uncivil, when appeals to the people and their tradition are ruled out by liberalism's own theory of itself, it is hard to see how there can be a popular liberal politics, as distinct from a politics of brokering among interests or elite reforms from above. It follows that liberals should focus on keeping the public calm, while carrying out reforms on their behalf -- but without their participation -- on the basis of negotiations among politicians, public-spirited nonprofit activists, and enlightened interest groups. The Obama administration's approach to healthcare reform has followed this script exactly.
Or Versailles liberalism ala Joke Line, as Glenn Greenwald discusses, also in today's Salon:
I'm ambivalent about whether even to acknowledge this obviously disturbed, Cheneyite rant from Joe Klein. On the one hand, I don't want to be dragged down into what is, for him, quite clearly a deeply emotional and personal matter (having its roots in things like this, this and this); I don't think very many people care about petty feuds and engaging them isn't the purpose of what I do here. Moreover, Klein's commenters (as usual) have done a thorough and masterful job of demolishing what he wrote, as have several others. On the other hand, when someone like Klein -- first in a secret club composed of several hundred journalists, editors, bloggers and other peers and colleagues, and then using a megaphone like Time -- repeatedly calls you a military-hating, unpatriotic, ignorant, Limbaugh-like, "mean-spirited, dishonorable, graceless, bully" who doesn't care if America Stays Safe, and that then is "reported" in various places, it's probably prudent to say something. So I'll just make a couple of general points illustrated by all of this that I think are worth making:
(For the full context of this, see dday.)
The upshot here is that it's not the least bit about about being "liberal". It's all about being Versailles:
It's never personal for me; if, tomorrow, Joe Klein writes something commendable, I'll praise him (as I've done -- quite lavishly -- in the past when warranted). But for way too long, these individuals were permitted to spout their received wisdom, enforce their orthodoxies, and fulfill their assigned functions with no checks, no scrutiny and no effective criticisms. Even now, with the democratization of punditry brought about by the Internet, the rewards they can offer (to join their club, to have access, to be invited, to be given platforms, to be one of them) and the punishments they can dole out (to be denied all of that and be shunned) make many people who could hold them accountable reluctant to do so. Even well-intentioned people who begin as outsiders can be deterred by those influences; it's human nature.
Last year, after I wrote critically about a well-known journalist who frequently appears on the TV and is considered "liberal," he emailed me (after first asking me to agree that our conversation would be private) to warn that I should be more "careful" about attacking "allies" if I wanted to expand my platforms and get on television. That's how the culture works. Those are the weapons which politicians -- and journalists -- use to try to punish those who criticize them and reward those who refrain from doing that. But for people who are indifferent to those "rewards" and affirmatively want to be without them, establishment journalists can't control or otherwise deter them from shining a negative light on what they do. It's natural that they're angry about that and bitterly resent those who do it, but that's just the nature of accountability.
In short, I want to cheer on Michael Lind when it comes to him arguing what the Democrats ought to be and do. But when it comes to describing what they currently are, he seems not just hopelessly confused, but downright perverse, still the prisoner of his ideological past, unable to tell the difference between elitist insiders and us DFHs who've been battling against them for decades now.
I would like to join him in a search for next FDR. It seems to me that nothing clarifies what's missing better than to see it materialize in the flesh.
I've got a two-part plan for doing it: First find Tom Joad, then FDR. |
