First off, RapsodiaStellare cleverly excerpted the best parts of thereisnospoon's diary:
And each and every one of you is being taken for fools. You work for an election or two to put chosen leaders in place, and expect those leaders to work their "leadership" magic to ram reforms down the throats of the corporate sector, failing to understand just how fully the corporate sector holds the cards. It's not the campaign contributions: it's the persuasion money....
If you want to win, you will ORGANIZE. You will organize in the same way the Right has done for the last 40 years, and you will spend money on persuasion, where it really matters. You will, in short, make the politicians as afraid of you as they are of them. The Right has built vast networks of think tanks, newspapers, periodicals, cable news channels, and political advocacy organizations to spread their finely tuned, well-honed messages. Their politicians may fail them, and their actual policies may be deeply unpopular, but their message machine nearly always works its magic to get them what they want, even when Democrats are in power....
What we had were labor unions and the AARP delivering generic hopeful messages without an ounce of the power or creativity that one might find in a random Budweiser ad.
Of course, it's not quite that simple. People at the grassroots can try to organize all they want, but without institutional support-or worse yet, with active opposition from seemingly sympathetic institutions-the task is extremely daunting. The right took decades to begin getting its institutional house in order after the Great Depression hit, massively discrediting the conservative establishment of that era. The grassroots rightwing activism of the McCarthy Era suffered many of the same problems that face progressives now. Individuals like you or I were powerless to create institutions like the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Times, or Fox News, and no amount of railing at them to "ORGANIZE" could change that reality. But still, we can quicken things somewhat by becoming clear about what is needed, and starting to pool our resources to bring it into being. We can stop giving money to the Democratic Party to either piss away in the next election cycle, or piss on us afterwards, and instead put that money into independent efforts and into institution-building. So maybe it is as simple as that, after all.
But there is another part of the diary where thereisnospoon gets a bit carried away with the power of his profession:
The problem is people like me, and the people I work for. I'm what they call a Qualitative Research Consultant, or QRC for short. Here's my website. There's even a whole association of us who meet regularly to discuss ideas and tactics. Together with the AAPC, the MRA, the AMA, ESOMAR, and a whole host of other organizations you've never heard of, we have more power and control than you know. We're extremely good at what we do, and we do it all behind the scenes, appealing to and manipulating your subconscious brain in ways that your conscious brain has little to no control over.
Give us a little money to test some things out, and we can work magic. Our business is persuasion, and we're very good at it. Just watch PBS Frontline's series, The Persuaders to get just a small inkling of what you're up against. We can make a company that earns a 38% gross profit margin manufacturing purely propriety products seem hip, cool and progressive. We can take sugar water and sell it back to you as a health drink, and even Whole Foods shoppers will believe it. We can take 30 different brands of vodka with almost exactly the same ingredients, and make you understand instantly just what kind of person drinks which brand, and how much you should expect to pay for each, without a moment's thought.
All that and more may be true, but this is not:
For a little coin, we can even make poor people hate inheritance taxes, just by using a few little words that work. The biggest difference between Obama and FDR/LBJ is that people like me weren't really around back then. As the TV show Mad Men can show you, our industry was just getting off the ground in the mid-1960's. And while it's true that the Democratic ad consultants of the 1980's and 1990's and early Aughts were wildly ineffective, that says far more about the prevailing consultant class in the Democratic Party than about the power of ad consulting in general.
So here's what you have to understand. If the health insurance and financial industries really felt scared by any particular politician or political party, or their lobbying efforts were inadequate, they could throw them out of power in a heartbeat. With a wave of their hand and a few billion dollars or so in our direction, the pharma companies and Goldman Sachs could absolutely destroy the Democratic Party in 2010 and beyond. The only reason they don't do so is that it's cheaper and easier to buy a few key Democrats off instead, and intimidate the rest. Plus, they don't have to run the risk of a right-wing populist backlash, either.
That's why Barack Obama can't renege on his deal with PhRMA: PhRMA almost singlehandedly destroyed Hillarycare in 1993, and spent the money to tip the balance of the elections in 1994. They can easily do it again. So could Goldman Sachs and the rest of the financial vampires. .
Some bits in there are true, but as a whole this passage vastly overstates the power in the hands of persuaders, and vastly understates two things: (1) The untapped power of a mobilized, unified progressive vision, and (2) The voter suppressing impact of elected Democrats rushing to the right (1994 was THE classic example of that). Still, I very much agree with the larger point about the power of persuasive rhetoric. That's what George Lakoff has been writing about for years, and I've repeatedly endorsed his message. It's just that I think that the corporate practitioners are more illustrative than they are necessarily powerful. They're powerful, are right-but largely because they are largely unopposed. And that's the most important lesson for use to reflect on right now, IMHO.
One further point is that we have a desperate need to clear our heads of pseudo-progressive static, such as that being used to jam clear thinking about what's going on with health care reform. One of the links in his diary is to a very good piece by Amanda Marcotte, "Non-voters need results to vote, not scolding". It's somewhat ironic, since thereisnospoon links to her piece thus:
That's partly because the American political Right never quits and never gives up. They know that organization is the key to their success, and they don't trust politicians to do their work for them. Democrats, on the other hand, get disappointed and quit when our politicians don't pan out the way we wanted. That's why we lose.
What makes this ironic is that thereisnospoon is confusing two different phenomena, which Amanda is trying to differentiate between: activist disappointment and quitting vs. voter disappointment and quitting. She's responding to these two posts by Mattand Sir Charles that fail to distinguish between progressive bloggers (plausible indicators for progressive activists attitudes) and Democratic voters. By this late date, anyone who pretends to any sort of political expertise damn well ought to know that what's going on here is a structural feature of the American electoral system that's been in place for roughly 100 years. We are the only advanced industrial nation with a pronounced and persistent class skew to our rates of voter participation-a skew that persistently under-represents progressives views, and like any feature of the political system that has endured this long, there is nothing accidental, incidental, casual, or individual about this.
Sure it's specific individuals who are not voting, but their non-participation is not fundamentally a result of individual choice. They are responding rationally to the fact that their votes don't make a difference, that politicians don't listen to people like them, and that paying attention to politics only gets their hopes up in order to dash them--an extra helping of bitter disappointment that they really don't need in their lives. This is clearly visible in the following date from the American National Election Study, which shows a clear rational foundation for this:
The above perceptions are responding structurally to the abiding structures of American politics, which progressives have pushed against from time to time, but have not fundamentally altered. With the election of Barack Obama and a healthy Democratic trifecta, it could have been hoped that some of these structures could have been altered significantly enough to begin a process that would eventually produce a different fundamental alignment. A few examples include:
(1) Genuine election reform. The 2000 election should have been the occasion for this. Instead, Democratic weakness and Republican pscho-aggressiveness only served to make things worse. Project Vote regularly posts here at Open Left about their work and the work of others to try to accomplish this, but it has never been embraced by the Democrats nationally, nor has it become a significant national priority for progressives as a whole. Significant aspects: (1) Enfranchisement: Drastically restrict, if not totally eliminate felony disfranshisement. (2) Registration reform: (a) Strictly enforce the National Voting Rights Act so-called "motor voter" provisions that actually apply to all social service offices. (b) Enact universal same-day registration. (3)
(2) Significantly boosting the organizing capacity of unions by passing EFCA.
(3) Significantly enhancing future demographic trends favoring Dems through comprehensive immigration reform.
(4) Enhancing political participation via a post-election continuing campaign that engages previously marginal voters, takes their views and priorities seriously, and uses their engagement to alter the political calculus in Washington. A no-brainer example: organize with schoolteachers, parents, students and principals to ensure stimulus funding sufficient to cover 100% of school needs during the recession, until full recovery is achieved. Snowe and Collins were easy pickings had such a strategy been used, and possibly three to five other senators could have been swayed as well. Most importantly, the entire tenor of the stimulus debate and its aftermath would have been totally different.
(5) Bail out Main Street, rather than Wall Street--which should have been drastically re-structured instead. Remind people, by vivid, massive demonstration, why Democratic policies are better for the mass majority of the American people, and show them, by the stark contrasts of results, that Republican policies are disastrous failures.
You get the picture. These are things that people in the blogosphere have written about many times, things that are almost entirely absent from political discourse in the traditional political media. And this is the perennial problem we face: progressive activists may well understand what could be done to engage and mobilize voters who instead are allowed to drop away due to bitter disappointment. And yes, the the solution to this problem is to organize to organize the voters to continue pressuring the politicians to keep the promises they never intended to keep. That's not an easy sell, to be sure. But there are openings to make it easier to grasp, and that is what our job as activists should largely be about.
Schaller's piece was a reflection on an earlier piece of his "A Teachable Moment (Lost?)" and one by John Aravosis ,"The GOP had at most 55 Senators during Bush's presidency". Reflecting on what they both wrote, Shaller writes:
the essential, underlying question we are both asking is the same one. Only our answers differ.
Aravosis' answer revolves around an intangible, namely, political resolve:
What the GOP lacked in numbers, they made up for in backbone, cunning and leadership. Say what you will about George Bush, he wasn't afraid of a fight. If anything, the Bush administration, and the Republicans in Congress, seemed to relish taking on Democrats, and seeing just how far they could get Democratic members of Congress to cave on their promises and their principles. Hell, even Senator Barack Obama, who once famously promised to lead a filibuster against the FISA domestic eavesdropping bill, suddenly changed his mind and actually voted for the legislation. Such is the power of a president and a congressional leadership with balls and smarts.
I don't disagree with John. But as I said yesterday, I think there is something more systematic, specifically in the way that the conservative agenda is buffered by the power system in Washington in many ways and to a greater degree than is the progressive agenda. There are exceptions to this rule, but overall, I think there's an obvious and semi-permanent asymmetry at work here.
Part of this is not ideological, mind you, other than in the literal fact that conservatives tend to want to do less or change less rapidly or less dramatically than progressives do. And because the status quo "wins" whenever nothing is done, or at least generally survives when only little or incremental changes are made to it--this is a staple assumption of game theory and social choice theories, btw--well, that means there is a built-in advantage for (most) conservative policies and for conservatism as a philosophical approach to governance. This may not be fair, you say. But it is the ineluctable state of political nature, so to speak.
And, indeed, that is true. Which is why Mike Lux's book is true: because of the built-in asymmetry, great progress is only made in brief spurts when the pressures for progressive reform build up to a level that overcomes this "normal" state of asymmetry favoring conservatives. And it's our job as progressives to build the movement infrastructure, first to help build the pressures for progressive reform, and second to help capture the much larger pressures that arise in times of crisis, and channel them in a progressive direction.
We are in an historically unfortunate and weakened state. The period since 9/11 has been a time of fighting against very heavy odds, simply to limit the folly of Bush/Cheney's delusionally misdirected war on terror. It's really no wonder that we weren't prepared to fight on health care, global warming, financial regulation and the economic stimulus virtually simultaneously. We should have, of course. We should have been building the same sort of hegemonic warfare machine as the right has been building for the past 30-40 years.
But given that the vast majority of folks in the left blogosphere have only been politically active since 9/11, it's foolish to be finger-pointing and self-recriminating. We should note that historical lack without wallowing in it, but with a firm resolve to begin doing something about it. That should be the top New Years resolution for one and all of us in the year ahead. It's an election year. I know it will be very difficult. But don't just think about winning the elections in November this year. Think about laying the groundwork to hold politicians of both parties accountable. |
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