Yesterday, in Quick Hits, Mark Matson linked to an article at the American Prospect, "Forget Populism", which is, essentially, a direct attack on one of the Prospect's founders, Robert Kuttner [who is singled out by name], and which would be far more at home in the New Republic. The article, by one Kevin Mattson, reads like your typical, standard-issue anti-populist screed: populists are angry; anger is bad; angry people can get elected, but they can't govern; the people are stupid, and I'm smart; so go back to sleep; nothing to see hear; move along.
Such screeds are invariably deeply dishonest. For one thing, they are everything bad that they accuse populists of being, except that they use a different linguistic mode. But if one looks beyond the style to the substance, one finds all the demonization commonly attributed to populists, and virtually none of the sober-minded, responsible rationalism claimed as a birthright by their critics. They invariably refuse to take populism seriously, resorting to sneering just when they ought to be thinking [emphasis added]:
Populism's simplicity is its central fault. Its philosophical premise -- if there is such a thing -- is that "the people" are the embodiment of virtue, uncorrupted by power and wealth the way elites are.
But, of course, this sneered-at premise is almost self-evidently true in the sense that populists express it. The original populists of the 1880s and 1890s did not cause the severe and systemic economic distress that afflicted them, and so much more of the nation: The elites did, even though they did it mostly unwittingly, babbling along about the wonders of they system even as it impoverished millions of the most hardworking people it was supposed to benefit. Not all members of the elite were responsible, of course, but the elites of business, politics and civic affairs all collectively failed as a class to ensure that the Constitution's mandate was fulfilled: to promote the general welfare.
However much self-congratulatory anti-populists prattle on about their own superiority, they never seem to get around to grappling with the objective failures that give rise to populism in the first place. Nor do they even use a consistent standard when they argue that populism is a failure. Typically, Mattson argues that populism didn't work, because Populists failed to gain political power. Following some quotes of Populist rhetoric, he writes:
Good stuff. Yet it didn't work, not even back then. The Populist Party won slim margins in 1892 and suffered the fate of most third parties in America (in this case fusing with the Democrats before crumbling); Bryan lost the 1896 election.
He then pretends to go beyond this crass dismissal:
Another week, another perplexing Michael Lind piece in Salon, "Can Obama give 'em hell before it's too late?". First, the good part, to dispel the false impression that I'm constantly bad-mouthing him. Toward the end of his article he imagines the sort of speech that Obama ought to give, in the spirit of FDR during the 1936 campaign. "A Rooseveltian or Trumanesque campaign speech, addressing the concerns of the American majority, invoking the heroic history of American reform and naming the enemy, practically writes itself," he says. This is how it begins:
"My fellow Americans, we say that healthcare is a right of all citizens. The other party says that it is a privilege for those who can afford it. If you agree with them that healthcare is a privilege, not a right, then vote for them. We would like to persuade you to join us, but if we can't, then we are going to defeat you.
"Decades ago our opponents tried to block Social Security and Medicare, using the same bogus arguments that they are using today against healthcare reform. They said Social Security and Medicare would bankrupt the country. They were wrong. Once we fix the cost inflation of our broken medical sector, with some minor tweaks Social Security and Medicare can be made solvent forever.
"Decades ago, our opponents said that Social Security and Medicare would turn the United States into a fascist or communist police state. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. And not only are they wrong, they are hypocritical. Many of our opponents who claim absurdly that universal healthcare will bring tyranny to the U.S. have defended some of the greatest assaults on civil liberties and the rule of law in American history during the previous administration.
"They can draw a Hitler mustache on me. They can draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa, for all I care. They are wrong and we are going to defeat them.
"We won the elections and we are the majority. We would like to build the biggest consensus possible, but progress is more important than consensus. Our job is to help the American people, not split the difference between right and wrong by giving a veto to the party that the American people have rejected....
I agree totally. That would be a great speech. Where I differ from Lind is not in terms what the Democrats need to do. It's in terms of understanding why they don't.
Once again this week, Michael Lind has written a piece for Salon that's distorted by his own preconceptions, and ghosts from his political past. This time, however, the main thrust is sounder, and the preconceptions considerably less odious. Yet the misconceptions remain significant enough that they warrant serious attention-as does his main thesis. In "Liberalism without labor unions?" Lind attacks the notion that the party can survive by effectively marginalizing the core economic concerns of its traditionally working-class base. On this point, Lind and I are in complete agreement, no questions asked. Indeed, I'm inclined to think that my critique goes deeper than his in some ways--but that's an issue for another time. At any rate, I can point to repeated pieces by Chris Hedges that I think make this case much better, and more deeply than Lind has done.
That said, if we want to change the Democratic Party, so that it truly represents those that it should represent, then we need an analysis that gets the problem right, not just in its broad sweep, but also in its breakdown into actionable chunks. And this is where my problems with Lind come to the fore.
As before, Lind is confused over the fact that minorities are disproportionately more working class than whites--as, too, as women. The centrality of this misconception cannot be ignored, when his second paragraph reads thus:
Note: Damn! I TRIED to get this up before David weighed in. At least you should know that I haven't even read his diary yet.
As nautilus1700 notes in quick hits, Nate Silver has posted a response to David, which I'm certain David will respond to. But I wanted to try and slip in first to maybe spur another branch of conversation. I feel I've got a bit of a stake in this, since I began writing about two contrary notions of progressivism quite a ways back.
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:
As Glenn Greenwald points out , there's been a dramatic sea-change in the rules of effective political rhetoric. Glenn cites three examples over the course of one week's time--GOP Rep. Robin Hayes, VP nominee Sarah Palin, and GOP Rep. Michelle Bachmann--all attacking Democrats' patriotism, then denying it, turning tail and running away.
There's clearly something interesting -- and different -- happening here. It's not that right-wing politicians are accusing liberals and Democrats of being unpatriotic, anti-American subversives. There's nothing new about that. To the contrary, that McCarthyite accusation has virtually been a central plank -- one could say the defining plank -- in the GOP platform for the last three decades, at least.
What's different -- markedly so -- is that once they do it, they feel compelled to backtrack, deny they said it or meant it, rescind it, and -- in the case of Palin -- actually "apologize" for it.
There's no doubt about it, as Glenn's book, Great American Hypocrites documents, demonizing liberals while buildging up phony conservative heros has been central to the GOP's political strategy for decades now, and the fact that it's falling apart so dramatically is big news indeed. How big? Well, Glenn goes on to quote Zogby saying,
If Obama wins like this we can be talking not only victory but realignment.
Are there common dreams, common hopes, or common causes? Like the common cold are common interests to be avoided? Our Founders struggled mightily with these questions and decided to err on the side of keeping democracy at bay; not eliminate it, but keep it sedated and safely tethered to the porch rail.
Sheldon J. Wolin explores what our Founders hoped for and what they feared in his new book, "Democracy, Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Totalitarianism". This is a rich book that is impossible to skip even one sentence. So I've been writing about it a little at a time.
In Chapter 11 "Antecedents and Precedents", he wonders how we Americans got to the point where we allowed a coup to take place in the election of 2000.
In a comment thread in my diary, Emily's List Backing Anti-Semitic, Homophobic Campaign???, debcoop wrote a comment that inadvertantly helps focus our attention on the underlying problem--the narrow-minded focus of Emily's List's mission that ultimately leads to this sort of boneheaded move as a sort of reductio ad absurdum result.
Emily's list is far from alone in this-the problem is endemic. The basic problem, as I will argue below, is that groups like Emily's List are not guided by the mission of building progressive power for all of us to share. Rather, they are guided by a focus on individual politicians using a limited set of criteria--criteria that in the end often fail to add up to a united progressive front. It is custom made for schemers and demagogues to take advantage of-and over the years they have increasingly done so, at the expense of the true progressives that we ought to be supporting.
Here's the text of debcoop's comment in its entirety. My response is on the flip.
Electing Pro choice Democratic women is Emily's List mission
I think electing women to office is an inherent good in and of itself.
And one of the dilemmas of the women's movement has long been whether it is sufficient to support seemingly progressive and seemingly feminist men...so much so that women never get a chance to be elected.
In NY State, where I live, it has long been noted by women's organizations here that there are lots of progressive men in office.
But believe it or not, until Hillary Clinton there had been no statewide female public offical. And that in the liberal bastion of NY!
So to say that women should suck it up for a progressive man and not challenge him...is like saying never go after power for yourself..only for others.
Also remember that when you look at the membership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus...it is mostly minorities, women and Jewish men. So when a women is running in a progressive district
there will often be a man there with their claim in already.
I have to say I trust people's unconscious responses to be revealing re Steve cohen's outburst...But if you are asking me from what I have gleaned about Tinker...I do think the race seems more about her than the issues. However what I object to is the idea that female candidates must once more defer for the greater good...which oddly enough too often means leaving the boys in charge.
In Part 1, I took note of the reportage casting Fox News as "populist" highlighted by Kargo X, and wrote:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies. A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.
While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort. He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making. But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.
I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government. Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics. The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:
Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."
But hey, no one could have predicted that Fox would use these appearances for PR purposes, right?
So there you have it. For everyone who was so sure this was brilliant, because the candidates were "reaching out," apparently we forgot that the traditional media would still have an opportunity to define for America to whom they were reaching out. Fans of the candidates assured us that it was (pick one): 1) swing voters; 2) open-minded conservatives (ha!), or; 3) people who had lost their TV remotes. But gosh darn it if the Fox PR machine hasn't schooled us all. It was populists! Which means both Clinton and Obama -- and all Democrats, by extension -- are elitists.
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:
Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge. It was not inevitable that it would have such a weak response. But, then, the consultant class that crafted it really is part and parcel of the Versailles elite. So what could we expect?
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