According to PPP, 35% of the country thinks either that President Obama was not born in America (23%), and / or that George W. Bush had something to do with the 9/11 attacks (14%). My favorite line in their press release is "a very troubled 2% of the population buys into both of those conspiracy theories." Ha!
On the bipartisan front, 25% of Democrats think that Bush was involved in the 9/11 attacks, while 42% of Republicans think that Obama was not born in the United States.
The idea that the left and the right are both inhabited by a "fringe" is a favority mainsteam trope, which PPP plays off of, though it does note that, "It's hard to call a third of the country a fringe." Nonetheless, the "fringe" characterization is a long-standing one, and it's always a handy way to avoid discussing the substance of any sort of criticism from the left. One simply equates the criticism with crazy ranting from the right, and then smiles a knowing "we're all above such foolishness" smile.
But who's to say that the "center", such as it is, is not similarly beset with ludicrous counter-factual beliefs, even though they may not take the same conspiricist forms? In fact, there is substantial evidence that this is the case, and the centrist counterfactual beliefs are far more injurious to the health and welfare of the republic than either the Birthers or the 9/11 Truthers. Here a sampling of such centrist myths, which, to my knowledge, no one has ever thought to poll.
(A) We can provide universal health care, like all other advanced industrial nations, and cut costs to 12% of GDP or less, like all other advanced industrial nations, while still allowing insurance companies to skim 30% off the top.
(B) We can militarily subdue Afghanistan with enough troops and machismo, even though no one in history has ever done this before.
(C) We can successfully deal with global warming without even trying to reduce atmospheric carbon to 350 ppm, which is what the world's scientists say is required.
(D) We can fix the financial system without actually fixing the financial system, simply by trusting the folks who helped bring us the meltdown in the first place.
(E) Money is speech.
(F) Corporations are people, with all the Constitutional rights that entails.
(G) Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on weapon systems that don't work, and/or aren't designed to fight enemies that actual exist means you are "strong on defense," even if you did everything human possible to avoid serving in a war zone when your country called. Questioning the wisdom of doing so makes you "weak on defense", even if you are a war hero.
There are literally dozens and dozen of such crazy beliefs that enjoy strong "centrist" support, at least in Versailles, if not always in America. But does anyone ever thing of them as evidence of some sort of dysfunction? Yet, that surely is precisely what it is--evidence of a deeply dysfunctional political system.
Here's my definition of maturity. Yours may vary, and I'm mature enough to realize that, and perhaps even appreciate it. But here's mine: If you find out you've been wrong about something, and you respond by changing your mind, and feeling grateful for having learned something, then you've shown the cardinal sign of maturity. If, instead, you get really angry, and insist that you "are too right!" then you've shown the cardinal sign of immaturity.
In other words, maturity is when you have an ego, immaturity is when your ego has you.
Here's why I think it's important. The number one problem facing our civilization today is our collective lack of maturity.
A classic example: The Iraq War was a terrible mistake, but those who questioned or criticized it have not gained stature or influence because of their superior good judgment in not going along with a very bad foreign policy blunder. Instead, they've been treated like they should apologize for getting it right. (And even then, the apology should probably not be accepted.) Who is listened to instead? Who is on cable TV, writing on the op-ed pages, taking up space on the Sunday talk shows? Those who got it wrong. The hook-line-and-sinker crowd. But it's not just the media, it's the Obama Administration as well. Who is running America's foreign and military policy? Again: Those who got it wrong.
How about torture? The outing of Valerie Plame? Any of the Bush national security screwups? Any of them? FISA?
On Thursady, AZDem had a recommended diary at DKos, "The Myth of Certainty: Obama, Liberals & Daily Kos " that's arguably a perfect example of the way that a marginally hipper version of High Broderism manifests itself at DKos, and elsewhere throughout the blogosphere and beyond.
As with Broder himself, the diary depends on a simplistic, schematic false equivalency of left and right, which ends up praising shallow centrism as a fount of deep wisdom. Given its origins, it does not end up outright endorsing center-right policies as if they were centrist. It simply praises Obama, so that as he compromises further and further, it will have exactly the same effect, praising him for his centrism as he moves ever farther right ... unless, of course, progressives reject this argument, and pressure Obama so that he does not drift further and further right. What's more, it even goes so far as to label this centrism as "true liberalism."
In this diary, I want to challenge the simplistic terms of AZDem's narrative about certainty, and I want to propose an alternative framework--the Enlightenment framework of critical reason, which an August 2003 congressional report found to be under sustained attack by the Bush Administration. While AZDem wants to push the narrative that other Kossack liberals have run amuck with Bush-like certainty, deludedly attacking Obama for his anti-Bush willingness to hear all sides, I propose a radically different view, one that's much more grounded in the nitty-gritty of the actual historical record.
In my view, the problem is, quite simply, that Obama has not consistently committed himself to re-establishing and rehabilitating the framework of truth-seeking in policy-setting and communicating with the American people. My problem with Obama is not that he listens to conservatives, but that he accepts as valid conservative claims without empirical foundation, while at the same time ignoring progressive points of view--even when well-founded, and when representing substantial majority opinion.
A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.
That's the first line of his June 4 column. And he's absolutely right. But the title of that column is "Rush and Newt Are Winning" and that's absolutely wrong. That's not the root of what's wrong in his column, though. It's just the tip-off.
Dionne continues:
Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don't. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina.
The mention of Steve Forbes provides the opening for seeing what's wrong with Dionne's headline formulation: It's not "the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis". It's our entire political class that's out of whack. Not just Rush-Newt and Steve Forbes and Dick-Liz Cheney and Sarah Palin and Rick Perry and Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and etc., etc., etc. Not just the rightwing crazies, in other words, but the "sensible" Democratic establishment as well. In short, all of Versailles.
If they gave those "personality tests" to the French or British Aristocrats at any time up to the later 20th century, what you'd find would be identical to this theme:
5. Has a sense of entitlement
6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends
7. Lacks empathy
9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes
All the same features that Wall Street exhibits today. It's simply part of an effort by elites in all times and at all places to turn themselves into an aristocracy and to justify their greed and exploitation of the poor by believing they are separate.
The same, of course, goes for Versailles, as was particularly evident when AG Eric Holder's scrupulously honest dismissal of charges against Stevens because of prosecutorial misconduct was egregiously misrepresented by all his Versailles buddies as vindication of his ahem! "sterling character". What better way to thoroughly blacken their own?
Reading Mike's diary, "Next Big Change Up: Health Care Reform" on Friday, it became quite clear to me that there were two different frames at play simultaneously. Within frame one--the big-picture of what Obama is proposing, compared to (a) what the rest of the world does and (b) what's most economically rational for the economy as a whole--this is definitely a rather tepid, centrist sort of approach that's only a first step toward really doing the job. But within the second frame, the framework of American electoral politics (including the institutions related to it) it is clearly pushing the boundaries-hard-and it's being designed with the clear intention to succeed, no matter what. As Mike himself stressed, the lessons of the Clinton's failure are clear, and Obama is moving quickly and boldly in order to not lose the momentum, while leaving details to Congress in order to reduce the number of bites the established special interests can take.
It strikes me that this two-frame view is an example of how we need to become more sophisticated in how we talk about politics in the current Democratic Trifecta era, particularly as we're still way behind the curve in changing the larger media and institutional environments I so lovingly refer to as "Versailles." As long as that hegemonic infrastructure remains firmly in place, there will be sharp differences between how things look seen through one frame vs. the other. These two frames are both objectively real. They are not just ideological constructs that different people buy into, though they certainly do depend in part on ideology for their existence-but only in part.
At this level, ideology can perhaps best be understood as a common framework shared by different actors that configures political space-including who the actors are, what their alliances are, what their current and prospective interests are, etc., etc., etc. Ideology in this sense is not something that's just in someone's head, it's an interactive reality, rooted both in realworld relationships between people and things (individually and collectively) and in how people interpret them. Versailles embodies the smaller frame-it's a set of institutions, inhabited by a group of people, who share a set of ideas and practices in common, all of which sharply limit the realm of the thinkable, so that it routinely includes-or at least deems reasonable- preposterous lies, while excluding all manner of inconvenient truths.
We in the netroots spend a great deal of time bashing the Villagers for the profound disconnect with reality, and the disconnect has rarely been more glaring than over the Stimulus bill and the lack of bi-partisanship in passing it. One of the themes I really admire in Glenn Greenwald's writing is the times he reveals prominent journalists implicitly presuming their own opinions must reflect the broad American polity not merely in the absence of empirical proof, but in direct contradiction to it as polling on that very question had been done.
Friday, on Bill Moyers Journal there were a couple of remarkable segments (transcript here). I doubt I'll have time to discuss the segment with Eric Foner, one of America's top historians, but it was really excellent, a sharp contrast to the almost endless mindless blather one routinely hears about Abraham Lincoln. Foner comes at Lincoln as an historian who's written extensively about much more ordinary people of that time, and so he carries a perspective that much more in tune with how the blogosphere sees power today. But I want to focus on the other segment, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen.
What was so good about the segment was not the content per se, which most of us are generally familiar with, but they way they were able to convey it in the tv medium, in a very distilled, but not dumbed-down manner. And I'd like to use that distilled presentation to link what they were saying to a couple of excellent books from the 1990s that can further illuminate the historical background of what we're living through and fighting against.
They began with a discussion of the Daschle affair....
The death of Mark Felt (AKA "Deep Throat") has Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr., wondering "Could We Uncover Watergate Today?"
Over at Dkos, LithiumCola notes that Downie had been "executive editor of the Post from 1991 (after Ben Bradlee stepped down) to earlier this year, when he retired. Downie therefore held Bradlee's post for most of the Bush Administration. A point which makes his column in Sunday's edition of the Post particularly mystifying, or maddening, at any rate revealing."
LithiumCola goes on to note:
The recently retired executive editor of the Washington Post is musing about what "would" happen if a "story such as Watergate" were to emerge once again.
A wild hypothetical, to be sure.
It put me in mind of an article I wrote for Random Lengths News back in June of 2006, constituting "a conservative list of 25 reasons to impeach President Bush." For by now, one thing, at least, should be blazingly clear: the entire Washington establishment was in on this particular crime spree, every last step of the way.
In an LA Times op-ed, Historian Matthew Pinsker rips apart Doris Kearns Goodwin's pretty little picture of Lincoln's "Team of Rivals" story--that he brought his political rivals :together in his war cabinet, and through his political genius managed them into the team that won the Civil War. That's her story. Reality? Not so much:
Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust.
It may not be nearly as heinous as calling everyone you don't like "the next Hitler," but as a bad historical analogy it could be just as destructive for our side as the Hitler/Munich analogy has been for Republicans. Indeed, there's a striking underlying parallel that Pinsker--who sticks strictly with Lincoln side of things--doesn't even touch: Just as the neocons were inclined to compare anyone who looked at them cross-eyed to Hitler, Obama seems to have no limit to those he'll include in his "team of rivals" approach, despite the very limited circle of those that Lincoln included. Thus, even if the original idea were historical accurate, Obama's application seems as indiscriminate in its way as that of the neocons, who see a world populated with Hitlers--anyone, in essence, who doesn't play ball with us, and doesn't fit the role of Neville Chamberlain.
David's done yoeman's work here-and elsewhere-documenting the pernicious Versailles meme that despite the stunning victory won by Obama and Democrats running for Congress, America "remains a center-right nation" and therefore Obama must not enact his planned agenda. I finally got to the end of the 98-page post-election Democracy Corps report, "The Change Election Awaiting Change", and on page 94, I found something directly relevant to this pernicious Versailles meme: the American people overwhelmingly believe the exact opposite: that Republicans should give Obama the benefit of the doubt, and try to work with him to acheive his agenda.
Indeed, this sentiment is much more far-reaching than the core support for Obama's agenda in the first place. The reason is simple: the American people believe in democracy, they believe in elections, and they believe in giving their elected leaders (not the unelected Versailles punditalkcrazy) the opportunity to act on their electoral mandates. Here's the finding (click for a fill-width version):
Republicans are losing, and they know it. So what to do? In the Washington Post, after his customary thicket of lies, David Frum gets down to his serious advice: Cut and run everywhere else to "save" the Senate, and run on partisan gridlock--as a positive policy. Talk about the politics of the past! While McCain and Palin have been running a very gross version of an appeal to the politics of the past-all the way back to McCarthy, at least-Frum's appeal goes to the underlying mechanics of political power, trying block the transition to a new party system, which a realigning election portends.
In my "Three Waves And A Wall" series, I described the three waves as follows:
The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.
The recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
The first of these three waves is the most regular, and divides US history as follows:
Continuing my series of diaries that touch base with my February diary series, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future", I want to reflect a bit on the impact of online organizing and communication-primarily the latter. Arianna Huffington has a piece up, "The Internet and the Death of Rovian Politics", in which she argues that McCain's been done in by the new information infrastructure, which has made the old-style Rovian smear tactics increasingly difficult to pull off:
"We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told me. And YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion, is one of the causes of its demise.
Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed.
But the McCain campaign hasn't gotten the message, hence the blizzard of racist, alarmist, xenophobic, innuendo-laden accusations being splattered at Obama.
This is certainly a very big part of what's going on, even if it's not the whole story....
David's been tearing things up lately with a series of posts on how Versailles is freaking out over the fear that Obama just might keep a campaign promise or two. Well, no, it actually goes a bit deeper than that. But not much.
The reality here is something I wrote about in a diary series last February, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future", and now that the election is upon us, with early voting well underway, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit that series and some of what it had to say. I started things off in a more down-to-earth way with "The House Vote and the Shape of Things To Come". Now I want to pull back and talk about things from a broader perspective.
My premise in the series was simple: we are living through a time in which powerful historical forces for change on three different time-scales are pressing us forwards, and confronting an historically unusual barrier, for America-the power of rightwing hegemony infused into the conventional wisdom. In the initial diary of the series I described the three wave thus:
You may think you've heard enough about [not-] Joe the [not-] Plumber already, and maybe you have. But this isn't really a diary about Joe. It's a diary about Versailles, my term for our contemporary version of the world apart in which the French ruling class lived, until the abandandoned people of France rose up and took away all their power, and a good number of their heads. Versailles is bigger than the Beltway, it includes the vast majority of the corporate media. In some ways, its an alien state of mind. It's bigger than what Digby and others dub "the Village," as it includes many unseen support personel, as did the original Versailles. It's full of experts who are wrong about everything, and never suffer any consequences as a result. It's dominated by Republicans, but it's a very bipartisan place. In fact, that's the key to its power, and the real point of this diary. I want to use Joe the Plumber to illustrate how the double mythos of Versailles keeps logos--and reality--at bay, and how we suffer as a result.
One mythos is that of St. Ronald and the wingnut right. The other is the bipartisan mythos. When the first mythos fails--in Iraq, for example, the second mythos backs it up, keepling logos, reality and the DFHs at bay.
The fact that Obama hasn't flip-flopped after all on a timelime for withdrawal from Iraq has someone feeling mighty testy, according to the Washington Post:
Michael E. O'Hanlon, a Democratic defense analyst at the Brookings Institution who has been an outspoken supporter of the war in Iraq, said he could not believe that Obama would put such a definitive timeline into print before a trip to Iraq, where he is to consult with Iraqi leaders and U.S. commanders.
"To say you're going to get out on a certain schedule -- regardless of what the Iraqis do, regardless of what our enemies do, regardless of what is happening on the ground -- is the height of absurdity," said O'Hanlon, who described himself as "livid." "I'm not going to go to the next level of invective and say he shouldn't be president. I'll leave that to someone else."
Huh. Well, I'm livid too, not least about the fact that Mike O'Hanlon has been critical to the project of keeping my country in a pointless war that will apparently never end. You'd hope that O'Hanlon would at least take into account the fact that the Iraqis seem to be demanding a timeline for US withdrawal; you'd hope, but of course you'd be wrong.
So please, Mike, go fuck yourself. How's that for going to the next level of invective?
Or why not just march over to Iraq, Mike, and punch out al-Maliki for daring to demand a withdrawal timeline?
The Post, again, for the full context of what set O'Hanlon off:
Ahead of today's speech and a planned trip to Iraq, Obama wrote an opinion article in yesterday's New York Times, saying that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's call last week for a withdrawal timetable is an opportunity the United States must embrace.
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"Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis' taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country," Obama wrote, pledging that he would stick to his plan to begin the withdrawal of one to two combat brigades per month upon taking office.
In the good old days of the original Versailles, at least they had duels, so that a certain percentage of these insufferable fools killed themselves off as a direct consequence of their own foolishness.
This is the nucleus of a project or research idea for American Blogger - but it's also a topic on which the Open Left community can likely provide a great deal more insight than I. Here's what I'm thinking about:
Thanks especially to Chris Bowers' and Paul Rosenberg's interests and expertise, on Open Left we've seen a strongly data-oriented approach to political forecasting, strategy, and activism.
Folks like Chris and Paul have mined the internet for data, and this data shapes their political analysis, supports their arguments, and lends credibility to their political commentary.
They and others have aggressively 'trawled the tubes' for publicly-available datasets about American political knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors; demographic and geographic information; financial data; polling breakdowns; and more.
This body of data is foundational to the good work done in the progressive blogosphere - especially here at Open Left and at fivethirtyeight.com. And though this data is being put to great use by some, the unwashed majority of us don't give much thought to where it comes from and to whom it is available.
As a response, I propose that we develop a "Progressive Data Bank":
a place where many types of relevant raw data, basic analysis, and guidance on how to use and apply this information, can all be shared broadly, to democratize the enterprise of political analysis and further a wide range of progressive aims.
On Tuesday, December 18, 2007, conservatives in the U.S. Senate made history. They forced the 62nd cloture vote in this session--just before reaching the half-way point! That's like Barry Bonds hitting 120 home runs in one season. Talk about performance-enhancing steroids! Eat your heart out, Barry!
Maybe Congress should be investigating itself? At the very least, Democrats should be doing some serious soul-searching and ask themselves if their confrontation-avoiding strategy--failing to force the GOP to filibuster--is really working for them, since the GOP strategy is not only working so well, it is redefining what "normal" is, and feeding a narrative in which Democrats shoulder all the blame for "not getting anything done," for being in "disarray," and just generally being wimps.
Which is why this all fits into the category of "Polarization Watch," which is sort of a theme for me just now.
For example, the report also notes that, as a second line of obstruction, Bush has vetoed six bills and threatened 84 vetoes. In contrast, while Republicans held the majority, Bush went longer without a veto than any President since Arthur Garfield.
Referring to the record-breaking cloture vote, the report notes:
The record vote came in a dispute over funding for military action Iraq. The $516 billion budget package for 2008 had already passed the House of Representatives, providing funding for nearly every federal agency. Conservative senators threatened to filibuster the entire package unless it added $20 billion in war funding to the House bill, and removed language intended to bring the troops home.
A review of the 110th Congress reveals that this performance was typical.
Here's a nifty little chart, putting their record in perspective:
In Part 1, I showed that our current party system, with divided government as the overwhelmingly dominant norm, is extremely atypical of American history. While there is strong reason to believe that the public is deeply disenchanted with the Republicans, and signs of a realignment seem strong, one of the foremost obstacles before us is the structures of power and institutions of expectation, every bit as much as those of concrete fact, which are premised on the idea of opposing precisely the sort of change that American history tells us is both natural and proper, given how badly the Republicans have screwed up.
In this follow-up post, I want to basically complete the argument by taking a look inside the party systems, to look at how power ebbed and flowed within them. No two are the same, but there are commonalities-and, of course, ours is nothing like any of the others, though it does have a tantalizing hint.
In a shameless attempt to entice you, here's what our party system looks like, charting the distribution of power from one session of Congress to the next:
And so, if bar charts turn you on, before you get therapy, please, join me on the flip...
