In Part I, I dealt with the introduction and transition of Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending" This is the first of four installments dealing with each of the four liberal narratives Alexander cites as manifestations of so-called "liberal condescension."
The first purported liberal narrative indicative of an attitude of condescension is a vaguely articulated awareness that conservatives engage in hegemonic warfare in a way that liberals do not. Neither Alexander, nor most liberals--even the examples he cites--actually sees things so clearly and sweepingly. Thus, the examples he points to generally point to, but understate an ongoing reality that liberals have long sensed, but never really come to grips with.
The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.
Alexander introduces and identifies this narrative with Hillary Clinton's statement about a "vast right-wing conspiracy"--that was actually documented as an organized effort to sustain scurrilous attacks on her husband, then the President of the United States. Clinton's claims were later confirmed by David Brock--one of the central actors involved--though he argued that it wasn't all that vast, but Brock was limiting the meaning to those directly involved in trying to dig up dirt to bring the President down, and not all those involved in spreading the propaganda, which clearly was more in line with Clinton's meaning. The fact that such a concerted effort was real, and that Clinton was referring to it after the documentation about it had already been assembled, simply does not matter for Alexander.
But surely, simply telling the truth cannot by itself be proof of condescension, or any other attitude. Something more is needed, and this would be obvious to anyone who hasn't already assumed what they set out to prove.
Political scientist James A. Stimson's aggregate measure of policy mood clearly shows that Kennedy/Johnson came to power in part as a result of a significant leftward shift in political attitudes--which they did not cause. Likewise, Reagan came to power in part because political attitudes had been shifting to the right for more than a decade. Rather than moving America to the right, Reagan was a result of a rightward shift that sharply reversed itself throughout his tenure... and beyond.
Sometimes when things are going horribly wrong, it helps to take a look back and ask if there were early warning signs that should have been taken more seriously. Played badly, this sort of exercise is nothing more than a game of "I-told-you-so." But sometimes "I-told-you-so" is not such a bad place to start. And sometimes, it can be more than that. It can be a way of reviving mistakenly discarded lines of thought that can provide fresh ideas about how to get back on track. It's in hopes of this last alternative that I write the following.
I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
While Obama subsequently tried to backpaddle from that, he was never very convincing to some of us. At the time, the Clinton & Edwards campaigns both pounced on him, and one could credibly argue that their attacks unfairly mischaracterized what he was trying to say. This was the argument made by he St. Petersburg Times at it's Polifact.com website, in a piece titled "Obama not a Reagan Democrat" (more on this below).
But even if he wasn't actually enthusing over Reagan--a fair point, if one reads the full transcript--he was expressing himself in Reaganite language, in effect underscoring the point that he would not be a transformational leader, contrary to everything he was trying to convey to his adoring base.
We at Open Left are taking the New Year's weekend off. Golden Oldies will run in their place. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on January 4th--Chris Bowers
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Oct 06, 2007. Original HERE.
There's a rather far-flung concept in mathematics known as "duality." A few days ago it struck me how this concept can illuminate something very fundamental about the current state of American politics. It's a powerful, and far-reaching concept, but fortunately you don't have to grasp a great deal about it in order to get my point.
Generally speaking, dualities translate concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one fashion. Duality is characteristically an involution operation: if the dual of A is B, then the dual of B is A. As involutions sometimes have fixed points, the dual of A is sometimes A itself.
Ohhhh-kay. Let's try bringing that down to Earth a little bit, shall we?
In mathematics, a dual graph of a given planar graph G has a vertex for each plane region of G, and an edge for each edge joining two neighboring regions. The term "dual" is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if G is a dual of H, then H is a dual of G; in effect, these graphs come in pairs.
That may still sound like Greek to you, but it's a whole lot simpler when see it pictured like this:
See? Each blue vertex (dot) is alone within a plane region defined by red edges (lines), and visa versa. Each red line intersects one blue line, and visa versa.
In effect, the dual graph of G is sort of like turning G inside out.
So what's this got to do with politics? With Democrats and Republicans?
There were two outside posts (a DKos diary and a Salon article) linked to in quick hits this week that relate to the broader framework involving our discussions this weekend, which have been dealt with both generally and with respect to health care reform.
thereisnospoon strikes a similar theme to one I've been pounding on for years, and re-emphasized again today-that progressive need to organize and engage in hegemonic warfare across the entire range of political and cultural issues. He doesn't use those exact same words, but that's the general drift. Shaller is taking a more narrow look at why conservative/Republican majorities in the Senate translate so much more readily than progressive/Democratic majorities do. Shaller makes some important points that fit neatly into a larger analysis of power as well. Looking at both these pieces, I think it's a hopeful sign that people are writing and thinking more about these subjects. It's long overdo for us actually do something, not just talk. But widespread discussion is a good prelude to action. The more people have been exposed to thinking about it, the more likely we are to have a well-informed foundation. So, I'm here now to do my bit to spur more discussion and improve the potential foundations. The discussion of both can be found on the flip.
In my earlier diary "The big stupid of health care reform", I argued first and foremost that our most basic problem in the health care fight derived from the overall deficiencies of fragmentary, short-term, ad hoc leftwing organizing vs. hegemonic, long-term, strategically pre-planned rightwing organizing. Among other things, I wrote:
Unlike us, the right builds long-term institutional infrastructure. With that infrastructure in place, it's a relatively easy task to pull together a coalition to do whatever it is you want to do. You are not assured of success, of course. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you need to go into battle. And as a result you can afford to go all out, and risk losing everything, because the cost of doing it all over again is not prohibitive. In fact, if you do it right, you can actually gain more from the repeat effort than it costs you.
Compared to that, our organizing methodology is doomed to failure.
Indeed, if ever there was an issue custom-made for shifting the country into a predominantly progressive political direction, it is the issue of health care for all. Indeed, this is precisely why the Republicans rallied to defeat health care reform under Clinton-even though that effort was itself a mixed-up half-measure. If the left realized the need for hegemonic struggle, and then looked around for one specific issue to use as a vehicle to wage such struggle, we would be very hard pressed to come up with something better than universal health care. And yet, instead of seeing this struggle as something that benefits us-as an opportunity to bring more and more people around to seeing things from a progressive perspective-we see it as something that puts us into peril, in panic mode, frightened into giving everything away.
While we haven't organized around this for hegemonic struggle in the past, that doesn't mean there aren't things we can start doing right now to change things-both short term strategies and tactics to make significant gains and reset the terms of terms of struggle, and a long-term shift in thinking based on preserving the state-level single-payer option, so that we can use state-level fights for hegemonic struggle in the future.
ASSUMPTION - This Is the "Last Chance" to Pass Health Care for a Generation: This.... makes zero empirical sense. Last I checked, Democrats will still control Congress and the White House for all of 2010. These are the Democrats making this "last chance" argument - and they are the same Democrats who would get to decide if that's actually true.
ASSUMPTION - Dems Couldn't/Wouldn't Come Back to Health Care Again Soon If This Bill Fails: This is related to the first assumption. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't - but there's the assumption that they would be strongly inclined not to because of the politics of it. I don't get this at all. Seems to me Democrats and the White House are so completely vested in getting something - anything! - done that they'd have to come back to it, and quickly.
ASSUMPTION - We Need 60 Votes to Pass Anything: Again, just not true, even though it's been said over and over and over again. Sure, there are problems with reconciliation - but it's a fact that Democrats could at least attempt to pass a public option or Medicare buy-in via reconciliation.
You remember the Mad MagazineNatinal Lampoon cover, 'Buy this magazine, or we'll shoot this dog'? Well the above arguments basically amount to 'Buy this magazine, or I'll shoot my dog!'
David, you are brilliant and a great writer, but the health care fight isn't just a matter of a few people deciding to do it or not. It's the culmination of movement work, local/state/federal, going back decades. Of fighting and losing in 1993-4, regrouping and rebuilding. Of putting together a coalition, HCAN, that is historic and unusually unified on our side (full disclosure: I'm a founder and co-chair). Of having a President and a strong Democratic (no, not progressive, Lord knows we've learned that well enough) Congressional majority who campaigned to win health care.
We just aren't going to get this opportunity again in a long time. How long? You don't know and I don't know, but I don't want to find out. I don't want to fight this fight when health care is over 20% of the GDP, when 60 million people are uninsured, when even fewer doctors practice primary care, when private corporations have even further dismantled one of the best public goods our government offers.
What Jeff inadevertantly revealed was a fundamental orientation predestined to produce sub-par, if not totally inadequate results. I'm not blaming him personally for this--the inter-related problems here are much bigger than any one person, organization or even coalition. Let me quickly explain the three problems:
The left can't do the "everyone repeat the same talking point" thing, or the "let's all use the same loaded phrase" thing nor the "coordinated conniption over behaviour routinely seen on our side but unremarked" thing. Those are tactics the right has perfected that work to their strengths. We will get better at dealing with sanctimonious hissy fits by recognizing the right will always be better at staging them, and finding uniquely liberal responses.
First though, a broad understanding of these different tendencies, that they exist at all and exist reliably enough to plan for.
Dan's point was a very good and very fundamental one--the right and left do not just differ on a series of issue positions, they represent entirely different temperaments, different attitudes, different worldviews, different sets of values, and it's simply mistaken to think that what represents strength and a successful strategy for one side translates unproblematically to the other side as well. Just try thinking of how you'd create a conservative strategy on climate change by paying attention to the peer-reviewed science. Not. Gonna. Happen.
Yet, at the same time, I've been writing for years to make what appears to be just the opposite point--I've criticized Democrats and progressives for failing to engage in hegemonic struggle the way that conservatives have. I've echoed George Lakoff's argument that they've failed to frame their arguments in terms of moral values--unlike conservatives--and that they've failed to build an integrated message infrastructure, combining think-tanks and media into an integrated whole.
So which is it? Do I agree with Dan that it's a mistake to try to imitate conservatives,and that we need to find our own way? Or do I stick with my guns, and keep agreeing with Lakoff? Some of both, actually--and I think we need a well-ground, reality-based argument to distinguish ways in which our actions can and should strive to mirror those of the right from ways in which they should definitely should not. For example, on the one hand, repetition can be good or evil--repeating lies is clearly evil, but repeating truths is how we internalize them and make them our own. OTOH, the same is not true of hissy fits. Their roots are toxic, and they are particularly fitted to conservative politics.
Systemic Lessons From The Rightwing Defunding Attack On ACORN
I'm working on an article about ACORN for Random Lengths News, for which I interviewed Nathan Henderson-James, currently ACORN's Director of Online Campaigns, which I also intended to present here at Open Left in some form. I was particularly struck by the following brief part of the interview, where I ask about the difference between how the right defends its own, and how the left generally fails to--and certainly did fail when ACORN was attacked most recently.
Nathan specifically says that he's not speaking for ACORN, but simply offering his own personal views, which, nonetheless do come from someone who witnessed what happened from the inside. And they accord 100% with my views, as someone who witneesed it from the outside. But the importance of what he has to say goes far beyond the case of the recent attacks on ACORN. In fact, they go right to the heart of one of the real reasons why single payer was excluded from consideration--a reason that has nothing to do with the supposed perfidy of everyone you can name and everything to do with the left's failure to organize itself for the true magnitude of the struggle we're engaged in.
OL:The natural thing that came to me was 'wait a minute, Blackwater kills people, and they're still getting hundreds of millions of dollars. I really had to scratch my head over that. And so what I'd like to ask you was, that sort of contrast between how you were savagely attacked, without even having hearings, and the way we have lawsuits, and people invoking state secrets, and all kinds of stuff with Blackwater, and what that says about the difference between the right and the left in terms of how they organize politically to protect their own. Any comments about that?
Nathan Henderson-James:
From a progressive's political point of view I think what this-this is a a personal observation, not an organizational observation- This is my own personal, this is not an ACORN position--is that it really points out how the progressive movement is not a movement. It is a bunch of people who share a political vision for America, but do it from the feet of several independent organizations that do not have an infrastructure that allows them to communicate quickly with each other, and create ways so that they can function much more as if they wre part of a unified movement, rather than a bunch of organizations that share a bunch of policy goals, but have a huge set of different methodologies for achieving those goals.
All this talk about Democrats worrying over deficits in the midst of a recession (forget the GDP, FDR got the GDP going up by the end of 1933, and nobody claims the Great Depression ended the year he took office) is so crazy one scarcely knows where to begin. (The 1937/38 recession, perhaps?) And targeting Social Security and Medicare? So almost at random...
On Friday, I stumbled across an early October blog post by Stephen Levy--one of the leading experts on California's economy, particularly in terms of the role of government spending and investment. In it, he wrote:
Most current public pension and health care benefits were negotiated at a time when private sector pay and benefits were growing. In recent years many private sector employees have seen their pension and health benefits decline as companies went out of business or changed benefit arrangements. As a result, public employee retirement benefits now seem high in comparison to what is happening in the private sector.
In fact, it's not just public employee retirement benefits. Perhaps the main reason we have an "Entitlement Problem" is because private wages and benefits stopped growing for the bottom 90% of income earners about 30 years ago. (And even the next 9% hasn't done well by historic standards.) The lack of broadly-shared economic progress in the era of conservative Voodoo Economics is the great unspeakable truth of our times. And this great stagnation makes taxes, public employee benefits and social insurance--such as Social Security and Medicare--seem like much bigger factors than they would be if we still had the sort of broad economic prosperity that "socialists" like FDR and Harry Truman gave us, and which persisted until around 1973--as could readily be seen from the following pair of charts from my earlier diary, "The One Percent Economy--Part One: The What"
First, the "socialist" economy of the New Deal Party System Era (plus a few extra years of spillover):
Note how the slowest growth rates were from the top 1%.
Then, the economy we've had since Democratic dominance gave way to divided government:
Levy was trying to make a relatively modest point in trying to achieve a relatively modest goal of rationality and civility in dealing with the economy we've got. Me, I want to change that economy. But first, let's hear Levy out:
According the the Institute of Medicine, 98,000 people die every year from preventable medical errors--and this number doesn't include those seriously injured. This is the sixth leading cause of death in America, equivalent to two 737s crashing every day.
Trial attorneys see first-hand the effects medical errors have on patients and their families. The best way to have fewer medical maslpractice cases is to reduce the number of medical errrors. If less people need to seek legal recourse, that means patients are getting safer. Patients that are safer also means lower costs to the health care system.. Everyone can support this.
They ask you to contact Congress opposing "tort reform" being included in health care reform. Takes about a minute.
On the other hand, here's a verrrrry interesting poll from Clarus Research Group on "Health Care Reform and the Legal System"--interesting because it shows how successful a 30-year-or-so campaign for "tort reform" can be, and still leave a wide-open gapping hole. There's 18 questons overall, and I provide a quick look and comment to half of them.
To start things off, here are two broad-spectrum questions, which show the general success of the conservative war on courts:
Too Quick To Sue?
It's a core article of faith of the conservative war on courts that folks are just too litigious--even though it's corporations that file far more and bigger lawsuits.
Better or Worse?
And, of course, lawsuits are ruining the country! ("Leave the corporations and the police state alone!")
Throughout the month of August, I responded to several Salon columns by Michael Lind--published on Tuesdays--the following weekend. This week, I responded to Lind's column the same day, in "[I Should Be] Looking For The Next FDR With Michael Lind". Out of that came a very clarifying comment by John Emerson that inspired me to write a followup diary this weekend. But as I started work on it, I realized that I first needed to finally correct a long-standing oversight, and discuss the importance of social science situationism, not to be confused with the revolutionary Situationist Internationale. The Situationist blog associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School explains:
There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else.Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception.Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong."The situation" refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. "Situationism" is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation.
An important part of my core differences with Lind spring from a situationist perspective. I don't think that many people's basic attitudes have changed as much as he does, nor do I think that some of the actors he identifies are responsible for the changes he associates them with. Rather, I think that the political/economic situation has changed dramatically, and that we need to adopt political practices that take account of that changed situation, and seek to modify its impact.
One of the clearest ways to get a handle on that change is from the various presentations of changes in income and wealth concentration from the work of US Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Here's an example:
It's my primary contention that people living in a highly income-polarized society--as we do today--will act in ways quite different from those living in a more income-equalized society, such as predominated during the Post WWII New Deal Era, and even into the 70s and early 80s. It's my second contention that while changes in attitudes and actions have taken place, and vast ideological structures have been erected, these are more reflections of a changing economic situation, and have substantially less to do with changes in core attitudes. It's my third contention that the neoliberal trap Obama is caught in--which Lind wrote about in the column I agreed with most--is itself a manifestation of old-style non-situationist thinking, which systematically misapprehends the foundations of human action. In short, the problem goes much deeper than the Team of Rubins.
My strong focus on economic matters this weekend is partly due to the current issue of AdBusters, "Thought Control in Economics". While some of the pieces are little more than comments, and could have been written decades ago, others help put together a picture of possibilities beyond the conventional thinking in economics, which still seems incapable of really coming to grips with the financial crisis we're still struggling to get out of. Journalist Deborah Campbell's piece The Post-Autistic Movement provides a brief, episodic history of this decade's emergence of an heterodox opposition to the model-obsessed market fundamentalist establishment, tracing developments that are clearly political as much as they are intellectual, from France to Britain and America.
Someone called the reigning neoclassical dogma "autistic!" The analogy would stick: like sufferers of autism, the field of economics was intelligent but obsessive, narrowly focused and cut off from the outside world.
(The Post-Autistic Economics Review--eventually renamed the realworld economics review--is up to issue 48. This is no mere passing fad.)
On the flip, I focus on two of pieces mentioned above that deal directly with the hegemonic stranglehold of conventional economics and its limitations. Another diary later today will focus on prosperity vs. growth.
This is part 2 of a two-part diary on two new articles that provide insight into the newly visible weakness of Obama's politics. Although I have serious disagreements with some of their content, their main thrusts are both accurate, they complement one another, and though they reinforce arguments from the left, they both primarily grounded in pragmatist arguments. In part one, I examined "The Character of Barack Obama", by David Bromwich, which was really more about the process side of Obama's politics. In this part, I turn to Michael Lind's critique of Obama's cult-like faith in neoliberalim, asking, "Can Obama be deprogrammed?".
The main thrust of Lind's piece is unassailable: New Deal liberalism worked. Neoliberalism does not. New Deal liberalism produced the broadest prosperity, the largest and most affluent middle class in the history of humanity. Neoliberalism produced a bubble economy in the 1990s that briefly balanced our federal budget, but utterly failed to stop the erosion of our manufacturing base and our rising trade imbalances.
By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the "Third Way." The term was misleading, because New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968 and its equivalents in social democratic Europe were considered the original "third way" between democratic socialism and libertarian capitalism, whose failure had caused the Depression. According to New Deal liberals, the United States was not a "capitalist society" or a "market democracy" but rather a democratic republic with a "mixed economy," in which the state provided both social insurance and infrastructure like electric grids, hydropower and highways, while the private sector engaged in mass production....
The transition from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism began with Carter, but it was not complete until the Clinton years. Clinton, like Carter, ran as a populist and was elected on the basis of his New Deal-ish "Putting People First" program, which emphasized public investment and a tough policy toward Japanese industrial mercantilism. But early in the first term, the Clinton administration was captured by neoliberals, of whom the most important was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Under Rubin's influence, Clinton sacrificed public investment to the misguided goal of balancing the budget, a dubious accomplishment made possible only by the short-lived tech bubble. And Rubin helped to wreck American manufacturing, by pursuing a strong dollar policy that helped Wall Street but hurt American exporters and encouraged American companies to transfer production for the U.S. domestic market to China and other Asian countries that deliberately undervalued their currencies to help their exports.
Lind is also very astute in capturing how Obama's agenda seeks to elide the deeper economic problems that neoliberalism is not prepared to tackle, and how it seeks to rationalize doing so:
Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama's team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to "market failures," the private sector will not provide.
But there is another layer that Lind gets wrong-a layer dealing with race from the New Deal forward on the one hand, and the nature of post-50s progressive politics on the other. I'll first review what Lind gets right, and why it's important to advance this perspective, then I'll look at what he gets wrong, and what its significance is.
A couple of articles on Obama appeared this week that deserve to be taken very seriously in terms of gauging the newly visible weakness of his politics. Although I have serious disagreements with some details of both of them, their main thrusts are both accurate, they complement one another, and though they reinforce arguments from the left, they are primarily grounded in the very same tradition of pragmatism that Obama himself tries to lay claim to.
The first, by Michael Lind at Salon, concerns Obama's cult-like faith in neoliberalim, asking, "Can Obama be deprogrammed?". Given the multiple crises we now face that all have substantial economic components-economic recovery, health care reform, global warming-as well as the historical centrality of economic policy in American politics, it's far to consider this the single most important policy fundamental one could focus on. Lind points out tellingly that that neoliberalism hasn't delivered in the past, except in terms of transitory illusions, and can't be expected to deliver now. This contrasts dramatically with the success of New Deal liberalism, Lind point out, which may need updating, but remains much sounder in its fundamentals than neoliberalism ever dreamed of being.
The second, by David Bromwich at Huffington Post, (highlighted by David Mizner in a quick hit) strikes deeply at the question of Obama's process, under the potentially misleading title, "The Character of Barack Obama".For Bromwich is not writing about character so much as he's writing about political process, bringing together matters of temperament, judgment and political philosophy. These are all things that others have raised before-present company included-but Bromwich has fit them together in a way that seems more than the sum of its parts, even as it says almost nothing about the substance of Obama's challenges or policies.
While Versailles might claim that Lind is arguing from the left, two points would dispute that interpretation. First, solid supermajorities of the American people support the welfare state spending that's a prime legacy of the New Deal policies he champions. Second, Lind's argument is empirically driven by looking at realworld performance that ideology-driven neoliberals simply refuse to deal with. Thus, it's much more accurate to situate Lind at what could be called the "deep center". Meanwhile, Bromwhich's criticism is simply far too process-focused to sustain any sort of ideological labeling. Both, in short, could well be embraced by a substantial majority of the American people-as many or more as voted for Obama in the first place.
To be sure, as a leftist, I would take them considerably further. But they are sufficiently free of the narrow-minded ideological fetters of Versailles that I'm quite happy to support them both as a reasonable starting point for actually undoing the damage that Obama was elected to clean up. What stands in the way of this is quite simple: the political establishment culture (aka Versailles) and Obama's bizarrely deferential attitude toward it.
Because Lind's thesis is more fully understandable from the brief description already given, I'll begin my discussion with Bromwhich in this first installment, before returning to Lind for a closer look in part two.
In the first two diaries of this series, I've first reviewed the nature of colorblind racism and its role in facilitating other forms of racism today, and then applied that analysis to an earlier discussion here at Open Left. Now it's time to turn our attention to the recent conservative racist attacks on high-status minorities as "racists"-specifically, attacks against President Obama and Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor. Put simply, my argument is that colorblind racism serves as the scaffolding that enables white supremacists-such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, etc.--to project their racism onto the minority figures whose highly visible success puts the lie to their ideology of white superiority.
Racists have always projected the disowned, loathsome aspects of themselves onto racial others. Now that racism itself has come to be seen as socially unacceptable, it's only natural, in one sense, that racists should project their racism onto racial others as well-particularly onto individuals whose very existence refutes their worldview. Yet, the functional logic involved cannot dissipate the bizarre aspects of hearing Rush Limbaugh, such a well-confirmed racist, hurl that charge at prominent people of color, and not be roundly condemned as himself being a racist.
I've altered this diary significantly from my original intention, for a number of reasons, but the functional purpose remains the same-I want to illuminate the nature of racism today, it's relationship to racism's past, and how we may more effectively combat it.
One last thing to keep in mind before taking the jump: Although the old racism has largely passed away, just as slavery did after the Civil War, the new racism largely determines how we see race, just as the Southern segregationist view of race came to dominate racial understanding in America toward the close of the 19th Century.
Yes, we have a black President. But people are genuinely shocked when, in an unguarded moment, he acts like a normal black man. What's more, he knows it was a gaffe, in the Versailles sense: he accidentally told the truth.
Last weekend, in the discussion of my diary "More Than Gatesgate", a couple of troubling response patterns emerged. One was quite clearly an example of what's come to be known as "colorblind racism," the other was something more subtle. I want to discuss both those responses in some detail in a followup diary, as well as the much more virulent, in-your-face racism of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others, which I will look at in a third diary. But before plunging into that discussion, I think it's absolutely necessary to refresh people here on the nature of colorblind racism, since that is the centerpiece of my approach to understanding what was going on, and what was being misunderstood. Of course, what played out here at Open Left clearly pales in comparison to the outright racist attacks now being launched against President Obama, which I also want to address in terms of an integrated framework, where the relationship of colorblind racism to other factors it enables is substantially different. To do this, I'm going to heavily plariarize a diary of my own from earlier this year, "A Three-Ring Circus On Race This Week", while also bringing in additional material and setting up the discussion for the two diaries that follow.
In that earlier diary, I discussed two different theoretical constructs. The first, Social Dominance Theory (SDT), is more general, a theory of group dominance in hierarchically organized societies that is entirely general in nature. The second is Colorblind Racism. SDT was initially developed as a way of describing how hierarchical societies are organized, not how they change, but it does provide ready insight into how change can come about, as various elements are replaced or reprioritized even while overall functional relationships remain largely intact, as I will discuss below. Colorblind Racism should be seen in terms of SDT as a replacement ideology. It took the place of pre-Civil Rights Era racism, which took somewhat different forms in the North and South, but in both places involved assumptions of racial inferiority which were backed up in custom and law.
While it presented itself as a break from the racism of the past-which in some respects it certainly was-it nonetheless continues to function as a means for maintaining the same system of group dominance-blacks over whites, with other races taking on a middling position. This formulation does, however, allow for exceptional individuals to rise above the general condition of their racial group, but (a) this individual success does not translate back into fundamental change in group status, and (b) neither does individual success guarantee that one will be treated commensurate with that success in any given situation-as, for example, when you're a black Harvard professor who has trouble getting into your house, and someone-however innocently--calls the cops on you.
The Sotomayor Hearings - Branding the Neo-Confederates
If you read the liberal blogosphere, you know about Senator Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions's history of dubious racial statements. If you're following on most of the mainstream media, you don't. You might even buy the Alabama Republican's not-so-subtle assertion that Sotomayor is a "racist" -- discriminating against whites -- while Sessions is above any considerations of color. This will change only if some Democratic Senator on the judicial committee (though probably not Al Franken) calls Session on his game, and calls him on his history.
Sessions, as you may know, was rejected for a federal court seat after calling the NAACP "un-American" because it "forced civil rights down the throats of people." He also called a white attorney a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases on behalf of African Americans. And during a murder investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, he joked, as black former assistant US Attorney Thomas Figures testified in Sessions's original hearings, about how he had no problems with the Klan until he discovered they were pot smokers. He also warned Figures to "be careful what you say to white folks." It's ugly stuff, and consistent with his racially charged questioning of Judge Sotomayor: He said she should have voted with a fellow Puerto Rican judge whose opinions he endorsed, asking, "Is there any instance in which you'd let your prejudice impact your decisions?
Note: While searching for a link from another past diary, I came across this, and was startled at how well it speaks to the growing sense of disappointment with Obama that many progressives are starting to feel. It was written in December, 2006, apparently just before Obama made his decision to run for President
Chris Bowers posted a very important frontpage story here at MyDD last night, "The Two Obamas and Me, Part One". In it, he drew a distinction between the Obama who first attracted widespread, enthusiastic netroots and grassroots progressive support, and post-Senate election Obama who has often reiterated rightwing stereotypes of the left, in order to position himself more favorably.
In the course of the comments, some counter-arguments were raise, many knee-jerk and fatuous, but some serious, and deserving of serious replies. Chris himself has said he will have more to say, and so I make no attempt to speak for him, or answer all the serious objections raised. Instead, what I want to do is add a perspective to reinforce where Chris is coming from, as I understand him, which is the same place I'm coming from on this. That perspective is the subject of an ongoing series I'm doing on hegemony, a complex concept that is nontheless deftly summarized as "a dominant ideology in drag as common sense."
In my view, the concept of hegemony is most useful in clarifying where Obama stands, and what he stands for. He is, in my view, a hegemonic figure in drag as a counter-hegemonic figure. Jump to the flip if you're interested in why.
The week before last (week of June 15), TPMCafe hosted a book club discussion of Eric Bohlert's Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, which was as much a forward-looking discussion of the future of blogging as it was a backwards-looking discussion of the Eric's book and the history it covers. One reason for this was that everyone pretty much agreed-Eric got it where earlier authors did not. So discussions of the past linked more naturally to forward-looking speculation than to criticism of Eric's narrative.
That forward-looking discussion links quite naturally, I think, with my earlier diary, Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours", and where I want to go next-into a deeper look at what it will take to change the dynamic, not just of Congress, but of American politics more generally. An added factor is the perspective I articulated in my series "Three Waves and A Wall: 2008 And The American Future, dealing with the confluence of macro-historical forces in our time, which I'll briefly recapitulate below.
But before doing that, I just want to note that Eric's first post, "The Rise of the Liberal Blogosphere", kicks off by mentioning Chris as the very first blogger he talks about:
In the introduction of my book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, I highlighted a YouTube clip from 2006, right after the mid-term elections, when blogger Chris Bowers is talking into the camera (I think) of Matt Stoller and Bowers answers the question: What does it take to be a liberal blogger? He starts listing all the requirements: "If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can become a full-time progressive blogger, as long as you're wiling to do nothing else in your entire life."
There's more about Chris in that diary, so if nothing else, you should read it for that. But there's actually a lot more, with folks like Amanda Marcotte, Armando Llorens, Greg Mitchell and Duncan Black weighing in. I want to cite a few of the things they said, before adding my two cents about how the blogosphere--along with the rest of the online new media--may be able to help do even more than any of the contributors to that discussion have imagined. This is not, I hope, because of an over-inflated sense of the blogosphere's importance, but rather, because of a larger sense of its place within a broader inter-active, flat-hierarchy media environment and how that plays into some much, much bigger historical forces at work....
In Chris's diary, "Backroom Deals, Inexorable Right-wing Slides ", Chris described the disastrous legislative end-game of the climate change bill, and briefly indicated the sort of determined progressive opposition that would be necessary to prevent this dynamic from repeating endlessly with every major piece of legislation.
In this diary, I want review what Chris said in light of my old hobby-horse, the lack of progressive engagement in a Gramcian "culture war" (aka "hegemonic struggle")-a struggle to gain coordinated control of reality-defining cultural institutions. Expanding on his discussion of missing in our congressional battles so far-and what it would take to change that-provides an excellent re-entry point to thinking about hegemonic struggle more generally, as well as thinking about winning specific legislative battles.
In other diaries this weekend, I want to further this exploration, reflecting on the confluence of changes happening in the media, the internet, and the world at large. To begin, I turn first to Chris's description:
While environmental groups and climate change activists have repeatedly vowed that the bill needs to be strengthened, no amendments will be allowed on the floor debate that will actually allow the bill to be strengthened. Instead, the backroom deal means that coal and agribusiness get their concessions, but there isn't even a chance for green groups to try and make the bill better....
And if you want to know what the final language of the bill is before it is voted on, good luck with that. Not only is the bill already 1,201 pages, but the deal hasn't even been finalized....
