On Wednesday, Matt wrote a diary, "Obama's Consolidation of the Party", that got quite a bit of notice, not just here, but elsewhere across the blogosphere. Mike and Chris both weighed in to compliment Matt and add a few thoughts of their own.
But I called it "A Rather Strange Post", and the time has come to elaborate further on why I said that--not so much focused on what Matt said, but on what he's describing, and the challenge of making sense of it.
Matt set up his post by saying:
Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.
He went on to talk about "Voter Registration," "Obama Organizing Fellows," "Money: MyBarackObama.com," "Field: MyBarackObama.com," and "Message and Politics: MyBarackObama.com." A recurrent them throughout the post was how Obama had managed to centralize power, while largely ignoring and/or marginalizing (other?) progressive groups and constituencies.
I only took on part of my concerns in my comment, the heart of which was questioning Obama's non-partisan schtick:
Like it or not, the aspiration to create a non-partisan politics is at odds with the very structure of our political institutions, from the winner-take-all single-member districts that define most of the legislative bodies in the country, to the electoral college. Also, like it or not, where one party systems do exist, the result is invariably tyranny.
There are, of course, powerful yearnings to be free of partisan strife. There are also powerful yearnings to eat so much ice cream that your [sic] burst.
I got deeper into historical specifics in responding to Chris's post when I wrote:
A Return to the Failed Policies of the Early 1900s
As I wrote several months ago--Obama is an early-20th Centrury progressive, not a post-Vietnam one. The former focused a great deal on process, and trusted that substantive equity would naturally follow. The downside of this is that these policies have already been shown to fail.
I'm not saying that they didn't do anything good. But I am saying that they were inadequate to the scope of the problems they faced, which meant that they failed in the long run--if not sooner.
Time to flesh this all out, in hopes of encouraging a more enlightened debate.
In Part One, I presented the argument for viewing conservatism as a form of identity politics, showed how differences on issues between liberals and conservatives are much smaller than differences on candidates, and showed that conservatives--even self-identified extreme conservatives--support welfare state spending. In Part Two, I examined two cognitive models that distinguish liberalism and conservatism., both of which show reasons why conservatism is associated with a constricted notion of identity, while liberalism is more diffuse.
Now, in Part 3, I address how to construct a diverse liberal identity. The key to doing so lies in weaving together issues, values and narratives, and doing so with a diversified messaging and organizing strategy. To bring things solidly down to earth, I will focus on two key concepts that I believe have tremendous potential for liberal politics, both in 2008, and for decades to come. These concepts can be expressed in a simple pairing: "dignity and security for all."
As I will explain, there is more than just a rhetorical echo of another famous liberal formulation, "liberty and justice for all." In a very real sense, dignity is the lived foundation for justice, just as security is the lived foundation for liberty (this is a key aspect of Locke's social contract theory). What's more, when these concepts are presented together, they represent a fuller and more robust expression of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" --freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Thus, what I am arguing for is a new articulation of core liberal values in a form that pro-actively responds to 40+ years of rightwing slander, as well as the realworld challenges of the 21st Century. To accomplish a lasting political realignment--along the lines seen in 1930/1932--we will need to change the basic contours of the politically possible, which means the politically imaginable. Fortunately, we've done it before. We can do it again.
STATE BLOGS
