Open Left - hegemony

It's the lack of counter-hegemonic infrastructure, stupid!

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

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.

So what you see when ACORN starts to get attacked, the second round, and cleverly through sex, and prostitution scandal, a non-scandal, really, was the inability for people to think outside their own organizational self-interest, which I don't fault them for, to be very clear, at all. But it was not how do we stand up to these attacks, because it was about demobilizing key parts of the progressive coalition. It was like, 'Oh my God, how do I not subject myself to the same treatment, so that I can continue to do my very important work.' And it is very important, so I don't want to be devaluing anyone else's contribution, but I think that structurally, there was no ability for people to get together and call each other, and set up email chains and say, 'This is ridiculous. ACORN needs, We need to stand with ACORN. What's going on. What's the real scoop, blah, blah, blah.

And it's not that the conservative movement is open and based on democracy, but their infrastructure and their ability to talk to each other and their ability to coordinate, especially their biggest resources, you know, having a 24-hour news channel is very helpful, having that coordinate with other pieces, especially on messaging and talking points, gives them a whole set of capabilities and capacity that the left has not decided to invest any resources in.

The point Nathan is making is perfectly compatible with point I made in my diary series, "The Political Duality of Rep and Dem, a long elaboration centered on a simple duality:

Substitute "progressives" for "Democrats" and "conservatives" for "Republicans", and it remains equally valid, and fully congruent with the point Nathan makes.

The "Entitlement Problem": Racing ourselves to the bottom

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:30:00 GMT

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 1037/38 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:

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.
If you feel that public employee retirement benefits should be cut, how should that happen? Should we change benefits for current employees retroactively (is this even legal except through negotiation?) or for new employees? If you favor reducing public employee retirement benefits, do you favor cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits for people who have paid into the system and planned for these promised benefits?
Or we could raise taxes to cover these promised benefits or adopt some combination of benefit cuts and tax increases.
These budget challenges are really social contract challenges. The social contract under which these promises were made no longer works in terms of budget arithmetic.
We need a new social contract about public employee retirement benefits and how they are paid for. We need a new social contract about Medicare and Medicaid benefits if health care cost savings do not solve the problem. Social Security choices are simpler but also reflect the need for a new social contract that reflects the new arithmetic of these programs.
My own opinion is that we can devise better solutions if this discussion proceeds with respect and in acknowledgement that existing arrangements reflect valid promises and social and legal contracts and treat this as a serious arithmetic challenge without blame or heated rhetoric.

Well, that's certainly a nice fantasy, that "without blame or heated rhetoric" part, at least. (The rest, not so much.) But historically, the blame and heated rhetoric are a big part of how we got here. Indeed, blame and heated rhetoric lie at the very core of the culture wars used to accomplish the transition from the economy of 1945-1973 to the economy of 1973-2007, and while it might be nice to fantasize about putting an end to them, it should be noted that Barack Obama has not put an end to the culture wars. Indeed, with figures like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Joe "You Lie!" Wilson and the Teabaggers, the culture wars are pretty much the only thing the GOP and right wing generally has left. Obama himself appears to have no inkling what the culture wars are all about. He appears to believe they are an array of "social issues" that get in the way of solving our "real problems."

But to a very large extent, the culture wars are a war of constructed tribal identity, fronting for elite corporate interests, and their primary historical achievement has been to transform an economy of broadly-shared growth into one of stagnation and diminished prospects for the many. The various issues that are involved are far less significant in the long run than this overarching effect in terms of the upward redistribution of wealth, power, opportunity and possibility.

The anger that the rightwing culture warriors are feeding on is not going away--particularly not with combined under- and un-employment figures of between one in five and one in six. What's needed now is not for folks to just calm down. What's needed is for that anger to be turned against the prime beneficiaries of the culture wars, the elite 1% whose stranglehold on the economy leaves the rest of us scrambling for crumbs year after year, decade after decade.

Levy's call for a rational discussion is both more humane and more progressive than Obama's repeated hinted openness to the bipartisan catfood commission route, where all pain apportionment is done behind locked doors, by those who will feel none of it themselves. But the end result is likely to be much the same. Which is why civility is not the answer. Civility would be just fine, if accountability were for the wealthy and powerful and not just exclusively for the rest of us, along with more than our fair share of blame.

Rather than civilly adjusting our public expenditures to the private penury of the post-1973 world, we should be quite rudely fighting to restore--and even improve upon--the broad prosperity of the pre-1973 era. Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive." Nothing less than that deserves to be "justice." Nothing less than that deserves to be "humane." Nothing less than that should be our bottom line.

Hole-y Hegemony, Dr. Killcourts!

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:00:00 GMT

98000reasons.org says:

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!")
Judges Throw Cases Out?

What could be more populist than giving over absolute gatekeeper power to an elitist judge?

Throw Juries Out, Too!

If you're going to be a populist elitist, why mess around?

Health Courts

In which case, this:

is simply the next logical step!

And a good thing, too, given that people still have funny traditional values when it comes to:

Jury Discretion

No juries? No problem!

Done Quick! Done Right!

Gosh, I wonder how they would have answered if the question asked was this:

DO YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE WITH THIS STATEMENT: As part of any health care reform plan, Congress needs to change the medical malpractice system so that cases are resolved quicker, and more reliably, on behalf of those who are in the wrong.

Questionable question design, much? Ya think???

And finally, the whole point of this long exercise:

Defensive Medicine--That's The Evil!

But This One Just Doesn't Fit!

Hole-y Hegemony! What's that you say? By better than 2-1 people think that legitimate lawsuits are not being heard, because the court system just makes it too difficult?

That certainly doesn't sound like it belongs in the same universe as all those other answers. In fact, it sounds like this question just happened to ask about how people really feel on a fundamental aspect of civil justice that hasn't been the focus of intense conservative "attitude adjustment". After all, in our collective state of cognitive dissociation how people answer this very revealing question doesn't seem to affect much of anything that conservatives are trying to accomplish. So why waste time trying to brainwash people over this?

Once again, a friendly little reminder that movement conservatism is the enemy of rational thought. Not to mention, their health care plan really is "Die quickly." Followed by, "Don't sue."

A Different America -- The Situation of Economic Polarization

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:30:00 GMT

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.
This diary has three parts. First, I present some background on Situationism as it developed in thinking of Jon Hanson, co-creator of the Situtionist blog. Second, I talk about the shift in income polarization as a situational shift. Third, I talk about how both Lind and Obama misread that shift.

Situationism--Some Background

It's long been realized that people tend to focus on content and ignore context. How else could advertising be so powerful an influence? Social scientists--interestingly enough--codified this general awareness in response to being surprised by its power. A 1967 experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris found that subjects attributed pro-Castro attitudes to writers of essays supporting Castor, even when they were told that the essays--including the position to take--were assigned, rather than freely chosen. Subjects ignored the fact that writers were told to write pro-Castro essays, and instead attributed the context-determined arguments to the writers' own attitudes. A decade later, social psychoilogist Lee D. Ross coined the term, "fundamental attribution error" to describe this phenomena.

The broader tendency to ignore situational factors in favor of dispositional ones--not just at the level of individual perception, but as a general pattern of human cognition--has emerged as a central subject of critical scrutiny in the work of Harvard Law Professor Jon Hanson and a network of colleagues who contribute to the blog he co-founded, The Situationist, which is associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School. Their work has a positive, constructive thrust in its concern with understanding situational causation generally, but critiquing and countering naive and overbroad dispositional explanations is necessarily a recurring part of their work as well.

An indication of the power of this approach can be gained from reading a series of ten blog posts Hanson co-wrote with David Yosifon on the subject of what they call "deep capture", which bears a striking resemblance to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Historically--my point here--deep capture of our theories of human action means that dispositionalism underlies, among other things, a theory of consumer choice/sovereignty that in turn casts giant corporations as liberating agents of human freedom. It would take an entire blog post just to fairly summarize their argument (much less my own two cents), but one can get a sense of how their approach works from the introduction to the final installment, combined with the summary of previous ones. Intro:

This is the tenth part of a series on what Situationist Contributor David Yosifon and I call "deep capture." The most basic prediction of the "deep capture" hypothesis is that there will be a competition over the situation (including the way we think) to influence the behavior of individuals and institutions and that those individuals, groups, entities, or institutions that are most powerful will win that competition.
Previous posts in this series (which are summarized at the bottom of this entry), reviewed a sample of the evidence indicating that pro-commercial dispositionism has been widely accepted as the presumptive starting place for policy analysis. The previous post in this series described the strategy of relying on credible third-party messengers. This post suggests how that strategy may have influenced legal theory and law.

Summary of previous entries in the series:

Part I of this series explained that our "deep capture" story is analogous to the (shallow) capture story told by economists (such as Nobel laureate George Stigler) and public choice theorists for decades regarding the competition over prototypical regulatory institutions. Part II looked to history (specifically, Galileo's recantation) for another analogy to the process that we claim is widespread today - the deep capture of how we understand ourselves. Part III picked up on both of those themes and explains that Stigler's "capture" story has implications far broader and deeper than he or others realized. Part IV examined the relative power (measured as the ability to influence situation) of large commercial interests today, much like the power of the Catholic Church in Galileo's day. Part V described other parallels between the Catholic Church and geocentrism, on one hand, and modern corporate interests and dispositionism, on the other. Part VI laid out the "deep capture hypothesis" a bit more and began loosely testing it by examining the role that it may have played in the "deregulatory" movement. Part VII provided some illustrative examples of how atypical "regulators," from courts to hard-hitting news networks, reflect and contribute to deep capture. Part VIII contrasted different cultures for evidence of commercial interests in promoting dispositionism. Part IX described the strategy of employing third-party messengers.

In short, what Hanson and Yosifon have presented is, for all intents and purposes, a non-Marxist account of corporate hegemony. Modern-day corporatism legitimates itself on the presumed basis of "consumer sovereignty" and the "free will" of consumers freely choosing goods and services in the "free market."

But the reality is that "free choice" is actually quite constrained by our situation as consumers. Where, exactly does one go to purchase the continued survival of our planet in comfortably habitable form? Where did that choice go to? While it may be true that we have individual product choices within the situation of corporate capitalism, as a species we very clearly do not have the choice of what situational structures to live in--even if the one we're stuck in will eventually spell our doom.

The Situation Of Income Polarization

With the above commentary in mind, we may now turn to the data on income inequality and see it with new eyes. Prior to the Great Depression, wealth was highly concentrated, and poverty widespread. There was a relatively small middle class. The transformations that came after that produced an unprecedented level of shared affluence, which was widely perceived as part of a natural progression--particularly as it was broadly shared throughout the Western World, and increasingly in East Asia as well. However, the recent resurgence in income inequality strongly suggests that this was not a natural progression of capitalist development, but rather a function of capitalist crisis confronting a combination of social forces which compelled a social bargain that was quite at odds with dispositional myth of individual free choice on which the corporate capitalist order was based.

This, at least, is the meaning I bring when I look at the charts generated by Emmanuel Saez from his collection of income data. Looking at the period from the end of WWII to 1973, we see dramatic growth in the income of the bottom 99%, combined with only modest growth for the top 1%. This was normal for the New Deal era. More than that, it was simply assumed to be just the way things were. There followed a period of about a decade in which the income of both groups was virtually flat. This was a period in which the larger framework of economic assumptions that had previously prevailed was challenged from the right, and abandoned by elites. The results, reflected in Reagan's embrace of "voodoo economics", were clearly visible in the aftermath of this period, as the bottom 99% made modest gains, while the top 1% skyrocketed, until the bubble burst in the late 1980s. Growth for both rekindled under Clinton, slightly less unequal than under Reagan, but nothing remotely like it had been under the New Deal system. And then came the Bush II rollercoaster--which both hit and helped the top 1% a disproproationate amount, while the bottom 99% returned to full limp mode:

In a similar vein, this next chart shows how consumer prices continued rising from 1973 on, while average incomes stagnated for years:

Finally, we see how little growth there's been in average wages, while CEO pay has skyrocketed since the 1970s. Note that the pay scale here is logarithmic. It has to be. A linear scale chart would have to be either far too big, or else illegible:

What these charts show, collectively, is the massive disconnect between the ideology of the free market and the reality of corporate capitalism today, which leads us directly to our next section.

The Situation Of Confusion About Income Polarization

Market competition has one overwhelming long-term impact: it drives down prices. Capitalism is based on capital accumulation, which cannot be accomplished in a condition of perfect market competition. Thus, capitalism is not--as commonly believed--synonymous with free markets. Indeed, it's not even actually compatible with them. Capitlaism depends on the exploitation of market flaws. Competition is fine for everyone else, except the successful capitalist.

This is precisely what we have seen over the past 30-40 years. Most workers have been forced into a global competitive market place, but a relatively small number of elite workers have been spared--most prominently corporate CEOs, and other extremely high-wage workers, most visibly, but not exclusively, in the financial sector. The most powerful of these have not only been able to insulate themselves from competitive pressures, they've been able to monopolize control of money flows, effectively setting their own rates of compensation, along with those of friends and associates who help stability and secure their robber barron redoubts.

The problem, in short, is the capitalist system itself, rationalized in terms of individual consumer sovereignty in order to attack all would-be critics as themselves somehow anti-democratic elitists (perhaps even Stalinist fascists, or Hitleran Communists, whatever.) The broadly shared prosperity of the New Deal Era reflected the superiority of a mixed economy, and subsequent polarization reflects the capitalist looting of that shared prosperity. However, so long as realist criticism is preempted by free-market ideology, grounded in the myth of consumer sovereignty, the prospects for re-establishing an equitable economic order remain extremely remote at best.

Michael Lind understands this basic reality, however much he misunderstands how and why the New Deal economy and politics were overthrown. If I were to quickly sketch out how I think he goes astray it would be this: First, he does not sufficiently recognize the short-comings of the New Deal system, of what it meant for women and minorities, as well as low-income white men, to be left out of the broader social compact--or at best, to offered only relative crumbs. Second, he fails to recognize that post-50s progressive movements aimed at rederessing these grievances were not antagonistic to the central thrust of New Deal gains, and the broad uplift of labor. To the contrary, they took such gains for granted as a fact of life, and sought to build on them. Third, the erosion of union power had begun long before the emergence of such movements--starting when union density peaked in the 1950s--but labor did not suffer the consequences of eroded power until much later, in the 1970s, when corporations turned sharply hostile. Fourth, the very consumerist/individualist/free market ideology that would prove so devastating in the Reagan era had actually been growing in the bowels of the labor movement itself since the early post-WWII era--the more unions won a piece of the good life for their members, the more bourgoise Republicanism began to grow among them, aided and abetted by a variety of government programs which helped working-class urban workers move to the suburbs, become homeowners and join the middle class.

In short, what Lind fails to see is a larger pattern of causation spread out over a longer period of time, running beneath the surface of the sorts of political dramas that have captured his attention. And beyond that, he fails to realize that these patterns all reflect a deeper fact--the inherent tendency of capitalism toward extreme inequality, rationalized in the name of individual freedom. Lind sensed this--but misapprehended what he was sensing--when he wrote:

In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder whether the relatively brief influence of labor unions in the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century was not an exception to the rule of elitism in American politics. You can write a narrative of American history in which, first, agrarian populism and 19th-century labor movements are crushed by repression and bloodshed by the 1900s. Then organized labor, after a brief, unforeseen period of influence from the 1930s to the 1960s, is crushed a second time by neoliberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, leaving an America in which the only significant conflicts are those within the economic elite.

Lind is on to something, but it's not nearly as big as the whole of the story of deep capture Hanson and Yosifon write about, which is really the foundation of the powers Lind is struggling with.

Obama's confusion is far more profound than Lind's. Obama appears to be a total ideological prisoner of the deep capture that Lind at least opposes, though without fully grasping. Obama, in fact, is a true believer on the other side--albeit for "good" reasons: he truly wants to see everyone "be all they can be", just like the Army used to say. The naive belief in dispositionalism lies at the heart of the neoliberal worldview. It explains both the hands-off approach to Wall Street, and eagerness to see them start making money hands over fist, as well as the drive toward school privatization, and willingness to cut deals on health care, the stimulus, climate change, you name it.

The historical reality is the American people remain largely united in the shared values of the New Deal era, but those values have been submerged in the rightwing political shift toward the highly income-polarized present. Obama's naive prescription was to set aside the culture wars--which he associates with the growth of polarization--and reclaim a broad bipartisan majority approach to dealing with non-culture-war issues. However, this prescription totally ignores the fact that income polarization means that political elites and the American people have radically opposite views on precisely the bread-and-butter issues he seeks unity on.

In point of fact, Obama's team of Wall Street economic advisers and Bush's team of Wall Street economic advisers are much closer to one another than either of them is to the great mass of the American people. And if this is less true in other areas, Obama is still quite willing to cut deals that effectively close the gaps between elite power groups, consistently at the expense of the larger public. This is the very essence of Tony Blair's Third Way: Thatcherism done better than Thatcher herself could do it.

Thus, Bill Clinton passed NAFTA when Bush I could not, and Obama will privatize thousands of schools where Bush II's "No Child Left Behind" could not. He will also keep fighting Bush/Cheney's "long war" far longer than they could have, simply by not calling the "war on terror" any longer.

Obama will, from time to time, give lip service to a more comprehensive progressive vision--connecting green jobs and the fight against global warming to the stimulus was an example of this. But he does not live in this kind of deeply embedded, systematically inter-connected world, this kind of holistic vision, however easily he seems to speak of it. Instead, he lives in the fragmented, individualist, neoliberal world where he has done so well as an articulate social climber. And so he finds it very easy to cut deals that cut the legs out from under those who have supported his meteoric rise--on health care, on the stimulus, on giving free reign to Wall Street banksters, on fighting global warming, on any issue you can name.

Sure he would like to cut a deal that will save the planet from catastrophic global warming. But if he can't, no biggie. Because he is a true believer in dispositonalism. And his heart was pure.

AdBusters: Questioning Economics In The Wake Of Crisis

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:30:00 GMT

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.)

In "Neocon Indoctrination - The Mankiw Way", Gilles Raveaud, a co-founder of the post-autistic movement, takes a critical look at some central failings of the only economics textbook that millions of non-economists around the world have ever read. "Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy" by NYT journalist Patricia Cohen addresses the fierce establishment resistance to learning any lessons whatsoever. A number of pieces question the entire logic of growth from various perspectives. Most interesting to me was "Thinking the Unthinkable" by Tim Jackson, from the forward of a report he authored for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, Prosperity Without Growth? The Transition to a Sustainable Economy. And there were brief, but pointed pieces from Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Herman Daly, and Lourdes Benería.

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.
The Ivory Tower--The Internal Rigidity Of Economic "Thought"

For years economists who have challenged free market theory have been the Rodney Dangerfields of the profession. Often ignored or belittled because they questioned the orthodoxy, they say, they have been shut out of many economics departments and the most prestigious economics journals. They got no respect.

So begins Patricia Cohen's piece, "Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy". Despite all the hooplah epitomized by the Newsweek cover, "We're All Socialists Now", Cohen goes on to write:

Yet prominent economics professors say their academic discipline isn't shifting nearly as much as some people might think. Free market theory, mathematical models and hostility to government regulation still reign in most economics departments at colleges and universities around the country. True, some new approaches have been explored in recent years, particularly by behavioral economists who argue that human psychology is a crucial element in economic decision making. But the belief that people make rational economic decisions and the market automatically adjusts to respond to them still prevails.
The financial crash happened very quickly while "things in academia change very, very slowly," said David Card, a leading labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1960s, he recalled, nearly all economists believed in what was known as the Phillips curve, which posited that unemployment and inflation were like the two ends of a seesaw: as one went up, the other went down. Then in the 1970s stagflation - high unemployment and high inflation - hit. But it took ten years before academia let go of the Phillips curve.

One could go farther back, and recall that even after the Great Depression had seemingly discredited all thinking before it, FDR still tried moving back toward a balanced budget in 1937, giving rise to the recession of 1937/38. Keyensian policies were stumbled into well before his actual thinking was embraced.

James K. Galbraith, tells her, "I don't detect any change at all," going on to say that academic economists are "like an ostrich with its head in the sand." And Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale, blames "groupthink" for the failure of academic economists to foresee the financial crisis.

"I fear that there will not be much change in basic paradigms," Mr. Shiller wrote in an email message. "The rational expectations models will be tweaked to account for the current crisis. The basic curriculum will not change."
"I hope I am wrong," he added.

I found this paragraph particularly hilarious, because of the hallucinatory book alluded to in passing:

John B. Taylor, an economist at Stanford and one of President George W. Bush's advisors, whose forthcoming book is titled Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis, said he was planning to update his introductory textbook, Principles of Macroeconomics, because of the crash. But while the revision will include information about the financial crisis, he said, explanations of fundamental principles won't change.

Because there was just soooo much government regulation when they repealed Glass-Steagall!

The next paragraph represents something of a return to reality--a stodgy defense of stodginess. At least it knows what it is!

To Philip J. Reny, chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago - Milton Friedman's intellectual home and free market headquarters - such caution is a good thing. "Academia typically moves slowly and carefully and thoughtfully," he said. "There is a lot of speculation in the press as to why the financial system collapsed," he added, but a lot of "work needs to be done to figure out what really happened, which dominoes are in front and caused others to fall."

Of course, he's absolutely right that a lot of work needs to be done. But the basic logic should be blindingly clear, and it has to do with the repeated historical tendency to swing between "normal" health growth and speculative crisis. (Sorry about that, Taylor, old boy.) On this point, the theorist that everyone points to is Hyman Minsky, who soon makes an appearance (albeit all too brief) in Cohen's piece:

To Mr. Galbraith and L. Randall Wray, an economist at Missouri, the two thinkers whose work is most relevant today are John Maynard Keynes, who argued that the government should spend its way out of the Great Depression, and Hyman Minsky, who maintained that financial institutions could prompt ruinous crashes by taking on too much risk. Neither, Mr. Galbraith said, is part of the core curriculum in most economics graduate programs.
When asked why graduate students don't study Keynes or Minksy, Mr. Reny replied that graduate students work on subjects - like real models of business cycles - that are at the frontier of the field; by contrast Keynes and Minsky are not on the frontier anymore.
Mr. Wray prefers to call such mathematical modeling "the frontier of nonsense."

Cohen's piece gets a bit fuzzy here, just where it needs to get sharp, so I'll offer my own cut to the chase: Economics as a field is not concerned with a scientific understanding of economic phenomena the way that, say, biology is concerned with a scientific understanding of biological phenomena. Rather, it's concerned with answering questions about economic phenomena. The same could be said about biology, too, of course. But biology benefits from the fact that it is overwhelmingly biologists themselves who set the question-asking agenda. With economics this is also the case--but only after the economists themselves have been pre-selected for their willingness to ask the "right" sorts of questions.

In a highly financialized economy, what could be more pertinent to understand than the risks of cyclical financial crises? Yet, Minsky, who studied them like no one else, is virtually ignored. Why? Because no one wanted to know about that. What they wanted to know was, "How can we make more money?" Which translated into "give us better models" based on ignoring systemic risks. This is what the economic elites wanted, and this is what they got. Call it "courtier economics", if you will.

(BTW, the Wikipedia entry on Minsky has an excellent brief overview of his Financial Instability Hypothesis and its application to the subprime mortgage crisis.)

Cohen ends her piece thus:

A real shift among economists will come only if there is a wholesale collapse, Mr. Wray and Mr. Card agreed. If unemployment is still high three years from now, then you might start to see a paradigm shift, Mr. Card said; economists will "have to say that the market isn't supposed to work this way." But if the economy bounces back in a year, then they will be able to dismiss the financial crash as an anomaly that is unimportant to the larger theory, he added.
A field shifts, Mr. Card and Mr. Wray said, not so much because the wise elders change their minds, (they are too invested in the way things are), but rather because a new generation of scholars comes along and pushes into new areas of research.

But this, I think, is too simplistic. This describes how normal scientific fields operate, based on internal dynamics. But economics is not a normal scientific field. It is the most directly implicated in serving elite needs, and thus, while what Cohen writes is true in some sense, it does not account for the severe constraints on just how much economics can change so long as power relationships in society remain more or less as they are.

Externalizing Economic Non-Sense

In contrast to Cohen's piece, which cocerns itself with the internals of the academic discipline, "Neocon Indoctrination - The Mankiw Way", Gilles Raveaud looks in a different direction--at how economic orthodoxy is spread more generally via a textbook most of whose readers never go on to take another course in economics. Of course the book has tremendous influence on incoming economics students who read it in their introductory courses. But its influence is arguably even more significant for those who never read another book on the subject.

What is most worrisome is that Mankiw's text presents economics as a unified discipline, one entirely committed to the neoliberal agenda. Mankiw believes that markets are the solution to everything - and he would like students to believe likewise. According to Mankiw, if a problem persists, it can only be for one of two reasons: the market is imperfect, or it is nonexistent. No other explanation for persisting economic or social problems is permitted.

He then goes on to discuss two examples: Unemployment as an example of market imperfection, and pollution as an example of market non-existence. The discussion of how Mankiw's explanations fail is not as crisp as it could be, but Raveaud does show that his simplified views gloss over more than they reveal. He grows stronger as he moves beyond pollution to the more general issue of environmental limits:

In fact Mankiw even insists in his textbook that we are not running out of resources because if that were the case, the price of oil would be much higher than it is now. Climate change is a critical issue, caused by ever-growing economic activity - but it doesn't even merit an index entry in Mankiw's book.
Incredibly, in Mankiw's chapter on growth, the only two factors of production cited are capital and labor. Apparently workers and firms somehow do not use land or electricity, gas, oil and coal. They produce with their hands and their brains, and work on machines that run day and night on ... what, exactly? Nobody knows. But you can be sure that it's not energy. As natural resources and energy are absent in Mankiw's model, they cannot become a problem - for economists, that is.

This is where Raveaud really hits his stride, and he gets even stronger when he focus on the triviality of examples that Mankiw uses, which has the effect of removing moral considerations from having any place in economics:

According to Mankiw, since markets are a good way to organize economic activity, supply and demand is just about all you need to know in economics....
But Mankiw's text is all about trivial choices, such as how many slices of pizza you are willing to give up to buy yourself an extra can of Coke. This method is extremely effective in hiding the magnitude of what is at stake. The reactions of the students would be different if the textbook addressed how much health care people have to give up to be able to buy basic food. Also, the very notion of "need" is absent from Mankiw's text. One may wonder how students would feel if we discussed the fact that a millionaire's desire for a yacht will always be met because it is backed by money, while a poor family's need for a roof won't. But such discussions are avoided.
By repeating his trivial examples, Mankiw accustoms the students to the idea of individual choices and preferences. The words "poor" and "rich" are rarely used. But more surprisingly, there is also no mention of the power of corporations to shape tastes. This is because Mankiw's world is a world of small firms operating in perfectly competitive markets. "Corporate America" is not part of the picture. No McDonald's, no Nike, no Microsoft.

Above all, I think this critique is important because I think it provides an insight into part of why Obama seems to occupy a parallel universe which is so impervious to the concerns that bloggers write about constantly, and that seem to threaten a crucial loss of base support in the mid-terms. This comes into sharp focus toward the end of the piece:

Mankiw knows that the vast majority of his students are not going to become economics majors. He is not interested in training economists - his textbook is too simplistic to prepare a student for advanced study in economics. As he explicitly tells his teaching fellows, Mankiw's interest is in shaping the minds of thousands of citizens and future leaders around the world. Mankiw's world is one where "there is no such thing as a society." Rather, the world is made up of isolated individuals. But it is also a world where fairness prevails: everybody gets what they deserve. It is a world where - thanks to the magic of markets, private enterprise and property rights - standards of living rise constantly. It's a beautiful world ... if only it existed.

And that's also the world that Obama seems to think he lives in, along with the vast majority of those that he surrounds himself with.

Obama Quandary Comes Into Sharper Focus: Part Two, Economic Substance

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 23:30:00 GMT

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.

The New Deal Worked, Neoliberalism Doesn't

Lind on the success of the New Deal:

When it came to the private sector, the New Dealers, with some exceptions, approved of Big Business, Big Unions and Big Government, which formed the system of checks and balances that John Kenneth Galbraith called "countervailing power." But most New Dealers dreaded and distrusted bankers. They thought that finance should be strictly regulated and subordinated to the real economy of factories and home ownership. They were economic internationalists because they wanted to open foreign markets to U.S. factory products, not because they hoped that the Asian masses some day would pay high overdraft fees to U.S. multinational banks.
New Dealers approved of social insurance systems like Social Security and Medicare, which were rights (entitlements) not charity and which mostly redistributed income within the middle class, from workers to nonworkers (the retired and the temporarily unemployed). But contrary to conservative propaganda, New Deal liberals disliked means-tested antipoverty programs and despised what Franklin Roosevelt called "the dole." Roosevelt and his most important protégé, Lyndon Johnson, preferred workfare to welfare. They preferred a high-wage, low-welfare society to a low-wage, high-welfare society. To maintain the high-wage system that would minimize welfare payments to able-bodied adults, New Deal liberals did not hesitate to regulate the labor market, by means of pro-union legislation, a high minimum wage, and low levels of immigration (which were raised only at the end of the New Deal period, beginning in 1965). It was only in the 1960s that Democrats became identified with redistributionist welfarism -- and then only because of the influence of the New Left, which denounced the New Deal as "corporate liberalism."
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, the New Deal system -- large-scale public investment and R&D, regulated monopolies and oligopolies, the subordination of banking to productive industry, high wages and universal social insurance -- created the world's first mass middle class. The system was far from perfect. Southern segregationist Democrats crippled many of its progressive features and the industrial unions were afflicted by complacency and corruption. But for all its flaws, the New Deal era is still remembered as the Golden Age of the American economy.

This description is fairly accurate, but has three flaws that I'll pick up on later: First, the "influence of the New Left", which was virtually non-existent, had nothing to do with the Democrats suddenly becoming identified with redistributionist welfarism out of the blue. Republicans-particularly conservatives-had been making similar charges almost from the beginning of FDR's time in office. Second, Southern segregationists didn't just "cripple many of its progressive features", they virtually excluded blacks from the mainstream of its provisions, and perverted aspects of the system to subsidize and reinforce their neo-feudal system of racial apartheid. Third, Lind's account glosses over the fact that New Deal Liberalism's failures on race, and vulnerability to racial and ideological demonization contributed to a larger over-all failure to create a self-reproducing political order.

Still, given how much unprecedented broad prosperity the New Deal system created, it's understandable how those who created it could not imagine that people would ever want to throw it all away. The vastly underestimated the power of the dark side of human nature-something that Richard M. Nixon understood all too well. Which is why I can let Lind's description stand for purposes of contrasting the New Deal's record with that of neo-liberalism. In addition to the paragraph already quoted above, Lind has this to say:

Beginning in the Carter years, the Democrats later called neoliberals supported the deregulation of infrastructure industries that the New Deal had regulated, like airlines, trucking and electricity, a sector in which deregulation resulted in California blackouts and the Enron scandal. Neoliberals teamed up with conservatives to persuade Bill Clinton to go along with the Republican Congress's dismantling of New Deal-era financial regulations, a move that contributed to the cancerous growth of Wall Street and the resulting global economic collapse. As Asian mercantilist nations like Japan and then China rigged their domestic markets while enjoying free access to the U.S. market, neoliberal Democrats either turned a blind eye to the foreign mercantilist assault on American manufacturing or claimed that it marked the beneficial transition from an industrial economy to a "knowledge economy." While Congress allowed inflation to slash the minimum wage and while corporations smashed unions, neoliberals chattered about sending everybody to college so they could work in the high-wage "knowledge jobs" of the future. Finally, many (not all) neoliberals agreed with conservatives that entitlements like Social Security were too expensive, and that it was more efficient to cut benefits for the middle class in order to expand benefits for the very poor.

What's more, lest their be any doubt about where Obama's sympathies lie, Lind points out:

By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated, the neoliberal capture of the presidential branch of the Democratic Party was complete. Instead of presiding over an administration with diverse economic views, Obama froze out progressives, except for Jared Bernstein in the vice-president's office, and surrounded himself with neoliberal protégés of Robert Rubin like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. The fact that Robert Rubin's son James helped select Obama's economic team may not be irrelevant.

"Team of Rivals"? Not so much.

The Obama Agenda Fit

As I wrote above, Lind provides a very neat description of how Obama's agenda seeks to steer clear of the deeper economic problems that neoliberalism can't handle, and how it rationalizes doing so.

His key insight:

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.

Concerning health care, he goes on to elaborate:

Healthcare? New Deal liberals favored a single-payer system like Social Security and Medicare. Obama, however, says that single payer is out of the question because the U.S. is not Canada. (Evidently the New Deal America of FDR and LBJ was too "Canadian.") The goal is not to provide universal healthcare, rather it is to provide universal health insurance, by means that, even if they include a shriveled "public option," don't upset the bloated American private health insurance industry.

The contradiction here is obvious from outside the neoliberal bubble: If the problem is a bloated, overpriced system that fails to provide healthcare for all, the neoliberal "solution" doesn't come close to solving it. The health insurance industry is a pure cost that contributes no value whatsoever in the aggregate. So long as preserving the health insurance industry is a priority, solutions simply aren't possible.

Of course, private insurance need not be incompatible with universal coverage. It simply can't be the driving force. If it plays an ancillary role, if it's heavily regulated, like a municipal utility, with an overhead rate comparable to Medicare, then fine, there's a role for it. But such a form of insurance bears no relationship whatsoever to today's health insurance industry.

As for education:

Education? In the 1990s, the conventional wisdom of the neoliberal Democrats held that the "jobs of the future" were "knowledge jobs." America's workers would sit in offices with diplomas on the wall and design new products that would be made in third-world sweatshops. We could cede the brawn work and keep the brain work. Since then, we've learned that brain work follows brawn work overseas. R&D, finance and insurance jobs tend to follow the factories to Asia.
Education is also used by neoliberals to explain stagnant wages in the U.S. By claiming that American workers are insufficiently educated for the "knowledge economy," neoliberal Democrats divert attention from the real reasons for stagnant and declining wages -- the offshoring of manufacturing, the decline of labor unions, and, at the bottom of the labor market, a declining minimum wage and mass unskilled immigration. One study after another since the 1990s has refuted the theory that wage inequality results from skill-biased technical change. But the neoliberal cultists around Obama who write his economic speeches either don't know or don't care. Like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama continues to tell Americans that to get higher wages they need to go to college and improve their skills, as though there weren't a surplus of underemployed college grads already.

In fact, this whole fallacious bag of horseshit was blown out of the water way back in 1997 in the book The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work by William Wolman and Anne Colamosca, both from the socialist rag, BusinessWeek. Amongst other things, they pointed out how East Asian nations were graduating engineers at rates that would swamp the US, while the incomes of college educated young Americans were stagnating even then. Yet, here we are, 12 long years later, and the neoliberal cult around Obama still hasn't gotten the news.
As for the environment, Lind writes:

Environment? Here the differences between the New Deal Democrats and the Obama Democrats could not be wider. Their pro-industrial program did not prevent New Deal Democrats from being passionate about resource conservation and wilderness preservation. They did not hesitate to use regulations to shut down pollution. And their approach to energy was based on direct government R&D (the Manhattan Project) and direct public deployment (the TVA).
Contrast the straightforward New Deal approaches with the energy and environment policies of Obama and the Democratic leadership, which are at once too conservative and too radical. They are too conservative, because cap and trade relies on a system of market incentives that are not only indirect and feeble but likely to create a subprime market in carbon, enriching a few green profiteers. At the same time, they are too radical, because any serious attempt to shift the U.S. economy in a green direction by hiking the costs of non-renewable energy would accelerate the transfer of U.S. industry to Asia -- and with it not only industry-related "knowledge jobs" but also the manufacture of those overhyped icons of the "green economy," solar panels and windmills.

Of course, hiking the cost of non-renewable energy need not have that sort of downside... if the neoliberals weren't allergic to implementing offsetting non-market measures. But that's sort of the whole point: they're incredibly myopic, because they see the whole world through market-tinted glasses. The world must serve the market, rather than the other way around.

What's Missing From Lind's Analysis

First of all, Lind fails disastrously to comprehend the role of race. Chris has written about this before, and I'll be writing about this tomorrow again, but there's a clear correlation between racial homogeneity and support for the welfare state. It was neither accidental nor peripheral that the New Deal was a form of massive affirmative action for the white working class, much of it on its way to becoming part of the largest middle class ever known. By keeping agricultural workers and domestics outside the realm of coverage for Social Security and minimum wage protections, the New Deal effectively created the black underclass as a separate entity, while whites in very similar circumstances at the time (1935) went on to decades of steadily increasing incomes and various forms of government assistance.

What happened in the 1960s was simply that accelerated outmigration from the South suddenly dumped this long-festering problem on the doorsteps of large northern cities and states. It had nothing at all to do with the New Left, which had no real influence at all within the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the New Deal system repeatedly proved incapable of dealing with rightwing demonization. In addition to kowtowing to Southern racism, they were driven from power by McCarthyism in the early 50s, and Johnson initiated full-scale war in Vietnam precisely because he thought a repeat was inevitable if he were to withdraw instead.

Furthermore, the system of national industrial development and landuse developed during this period directly served to undermine the New Deal system. As described in The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America , the Cold War era saw a massive disinvestment in the Rustbelt, as military production shifted dramatically outward, to the West Coast, Sunbelt and East Coast. This was reinforced by the Interstate freeway system, at the same time that urban cores were disinvested in, while segregated suburbs were heavily subsidized. Amazingly, it was as if the entire New Deal establishment was utterly blind to how it was committing economic/demographic suicide.

Another way in which Lind's analysis fails is that he downplays the significance of the 1970s economic crisis. Although it was nowhere near as bad as the Great Depression in terms of economic hardship, it sent a very clear political signal: the New Deal bargain was far too hard on the holders of capital, once the era of cheap and easy profits ran out. If Keynsian theory had some difficulties with the 1970s, Marxist theory did not: it was one of those periodic crises that Marx wrote about, due to the falling rate of profit, and calling for the further immisseration of labor as capitalism's solution.

All of this is to say that one should not expect Lind's preferred solutions to solve all our problems, since he doesn't fully recognize the problems that New Deal liberalism couldn't or didn't solve. Yet, it's still undeniable that neo-liberalism fails so utterly in comparison to the New Deal model that it's still fair to say the Lind offers an excellent starting point for discussing what is so terribly wrong about the course that Obama has set us on.

Obama Quandary Comes Into Sharper Focus: Part One, Political Process

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:00:00 GMT

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.
First Bromwhich captures how a relatively scarce potential strength has masked a hidden weakness that's now coming into focus:

One of the strangest facts we know about Obama is that his colleagues and students at the University of Chicago Law School came away from discussions very impressed with his abilities, but not knowing what he thought about many issues. This was not torts or contracts. Obama's subject was Constitutional Law.
He has always had a reputation for being fair-minded -- a strength only attainable by someone who is (to begin with) minded. But the cautiousness of his first six months as president shows a pattern of accommodation that often lands him on the far side of actual prudence.

The subtext here is that it's much easier to be fair-minded if you don't actually have anything substantive that you believe in. If you don't have any position yourself, then it's much easier to listen to, and accept everyone else's position. Of course there are limits to how far this can go-as seen by Obama's repeated exclusion of the very progressives whose ranks he initially appears to have come from, and who accurately reflect the base of the Democratic Party-as well as many independents and even Republicans when it comes to bank bailouts, health care reform, and sharply reversing course on Bush's mideast wars, to name just three top issues on which Obama's disconnect has been breathtaking. This reflexive rejection reflects the next topic Bromwhich touches on:

His instinct is to have all the establishments on his side

Of course, this instinct is all wrong at a point in time when all the establishments stand more or less discredited, but I'll save what I have to say in this more critical vein till the end of this post. For now, note the plural, which Bromwhich quickly ticks off as

Wall Street, the military, the mainstream media; the most profitable corporations in all but the most signally failing industries; and that movable establishment (which disappears and reconstitutes itself), the quick-take pulse of popular opinion on any given issue.

This is a rather odd list that could well be the subject of an entire post in itself, but it sets up the following simple argument:

to oppose the bankers on the question of bailouts, to oppose the military on drone assassinations, to exhibit non-pliability against the insurance companies and press for a public option in health care, to defy a bare majority of popular opinion on the importance of keeping Guantanamo open -- to have fought at least some of these battles need not have been hazardous for a president who came into office on a wave of revulsion against his opposite.

Indeed, (leaving aside for the moment all questions of moral or political right or wrong) quite the opposite-not to have fought any of these battles both disappoints and deflates his base, leaving him with less power than he has now as a result of failing to engage on any of these fronts. Most pointedly, he ought to be flooding congressional town halls with supporters of a robust public option, but instead it's the Birthers/teabaggers who are doing so, while he retreats into an ever-thickening haze.

As Bromwhich puts it:

In dealing with some of these issues, Obama has stepped forward and then back. On some, he has not yet taken a first step away from his predecessor.

Surely such minimalism is not "change we can believe in", except to the extent that faith is the evidence of things not seen. This is how I would frame a point that Bromwhich makes a paragraph later:

Alongside Obama's reticence sits a curiously incompatible trait, a certain grandiosity.

Bromwhich's illustration is one I profoundly disagree about-his speaking out on Henry Louis Gates' arrest. The point is much better made by recalling the sweeping campaign promises of hope and change that have fallen prey to his surprisingly Calvin Coolidge-like reticence. Nonetheless, Bromwhich hits the point on the nose when he concludes:

Doubtless a certain grandiosity is an aspect of the man. But if it is bad, all things being equal, to appear grandiose and worse to appear timid, it is the worst of all to be grandiose and then timid.

He then proceeds to a related quandary, which might be dubbed "the fourth-quarter quarterback syndrome":

Occasionally Obama seems even better in ad lib discussions than one had expected -- with voters and reporters, and with other politicians. But he has turned out to be far less canny than he needs to be in making the sort of major speech that explains an issue from the ground up....
His characteristic way of handling confusion in the audience is to come back and give good answers to questions. That is very well, but no substitute for an early explanation.

The prime problem in politics, as opposed to football, is that even when successful Obama's style of come-from-behind play sacrifices both policy substance and political initiative relative to what can be achieved by game-defining first-quarter dominance.

Illustrating this point, Bromwhich writes:

On July 30 the New York Times ran a story about a woman who owns a small business and has followed the president from place to place to ask him a question. Is there, she wanted to know, a single government program that has ever done anything right? (She got that knock-down challenge from talk radio.) Obama replied with two examples, Medicare and Veterans Hospitals. The business owner who had chased him down with supreme confidence in her mockery was surprised to hear those two sober examples. Nobody had told her. Then there is the citizen at another town-hall meeting who said: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."

This is all the more galling, given that I still think George Lakoff was right that Obama has a remarkable natural ability when it comes to framing issues. It's just that he seems to be incredibly indifferent about using that ability on the front end, where it naturally has the greatest game-defining potential. Unless, of course, he intentionally doesn't want to define the game for fear of offending someone, or because, like everyone else, he really has no idea precisely what he stands for.

Neatly tying back to the previous point, Bromwhich writes:

Here, Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.

He then presses on to what I regard as the central problem:

Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.
His aversion to strife was plain from his conduct in the primaries and the general-election campaign. But the degree of avoidance we have seen could never have been predicted.

Particularly given Obama's training in the methods of Saul Alinsky, as Bromwhich goes on to note. Indeed, I would argue-much more strongly than Bromwhich-that the only reason Obama seems to have studied Alinsky is to avoid anything within a ~~country mile~~ Star Trek lightyear of his confrontational methods. Bromwhich calls it "foreshortened form", but "symbolic" or "cartoon" might be more accurate than "foreshortened":

Obama's training, one recalls, was in the community-reform methods of Saul Alinsky; and yet he seems to have adapted the relevant ideas in foreshortened form. The Alinsky process of reform, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out, goes from powerlessness to power in several stages. There is, first, the public recognition of powerlessness; then the airing of injustices, by legitimate polarization and active protest; then proposals of concrete reform; and only at last, power-sharing and reconciliation.
The strange thing about Obama is that he seems to suppose a community can pass directly from the sense of real injustice to a full reconciliation between the powerful and the powerless, without any of the unpleasant intervening collisions. This is a choice of emphasis that suits his temperament.

Instead of "emphasis", I would simply call it what is: denial.

Finally, Bromwhich goes on to argue, Obama has so far failed to recognize the need to define policy and thereby set the agenda:

And, good as Obama is in person, a resonant speaker, an impressive master of details once the details are in, he has not yet explained a single major policy in advance with the accessible clarity Paul Krugman brought to health care simply by listing its four elements: regulation, mandate, subsidy, public option. Such explanations should not have to wait for the intervention of a sympathetic columnist.
Somewhere at the bottom of the missteps of the last few months is a failure to recognize the depth of the popular ignorance a president of the United States confronts on any issue.

From a more realist/leftist perspective, one might also add "a failure to recognize the depth of hegemonic indoctrination a president confronts" when he wants to make change that's opposed by masters of hegemony. More on this below.

The reason Bromwhich gives is what might be called Obama's desire for symbolic national leadership, of a sort exercised by Israel's President or Britain's Queen, as opposed to their prime ministers:

The party, for years, wanted a leader to assure their unity; they thought Obama was the one. Yet he has made it felt in many ways since becoming president that he would be disappointed to identify himself as leader of his party.
His political fortune will now depend on his readiness to reverse that posture. To take control of his presidency, he must give up the ambition to serve as the national moderator, the pronouncer on everything, the man with the largest portfolio.

Here is where I depart from Bromwhich to the left, and can no longer do so parenthetically. What's really needed, I would argue, is for Obama to do what Roosevelt did, once it was clear that he would have no partners from the GOP side: He must both lead the party and the nation, and shift the center decisively to the left. And if he still wants to be bipartisan, then just recall that Lincoln did the exact same thing.

This connects back to two previous points at which I raised a more left/progressive perspective. First, that this is a time to stand against political establishments, not with them, given their justly earned states of disrepute. Second, that Obama faces not just ignorance among the citizenry, but hegemonic mythologizing, disinformation and narrative misdirection to the point of demonization.

The first point should be obvious with respect to the financial sector, but it's also true of the military, despite the absurdly high faith-based confidence the public places in it. The reason is two-fold: First, the military has been doing things that people really don't like: fighting Bush's wars, kicking out gays, abusing the troops (stop loss, refusing or delaying needed medical treatment for veterans, etc.) Second, it's quite possible to make major changes in military policy and practice within the framework of repairing deep damage done to it by the Bush Administration. Not only is this true, it would be relatively easy to sell.

The problem is not that such a confrontation would be difficult to pull off-it wouldn't be, particularly if one were to start with dramatic actions to benefit the common grunt. The problem is, Obama really has no interest in such confrontation, not just because he's averse to confrontation, but because he appears to genuinely believe-ala Burkean conservative ideology-that those who have substantial institutional power in society ipso facto have a fundamentally legitimate claim to it, and should only be questioned in the most unusual circumstances, and even then most respectfully.

The role of hegemony is much more difficult to get across. It's like trying to teach fish about water. They can't for the life of them figure out what you're talking about. But that's precisely why it's so fundamental, so important. Obama is nothing if not a cerebral wonk. Sure he can give a passionate speech, but when he does, he does it with a wonkish purpose in mind. And thus, despite his instinctual abilities to connect with people emotionally and narratively, he remains firmly grounded in the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism that divorces reason not just from emotion, but from the reasoner, and everything that goes with them-not just their emotions, but their life experience, their bodily existence, their place in history and society...everything that makes them specifically who and what they are in their own particularity.

Enlightenment rationalism is the foundation of 18th and 19th Century liberalism-as well as today's neo-liberalism, the subject of part two in this diary set. The "New Liberalism" born in Britain in the 1870s, which lies at the heart of New Deal Liberalism, is a different creature altogether because it realizes the irreducible importance of material pre-conditions, and thus takes genuine and serious account of the material world, instead of remaining content with clever models of it. Because it attends to the material world in a way that 18th and 19th Century liberalism does not, New Deal Liberalism-aka social democracy-is much better prepared to grasp the reality of hegemonic struggle. And this is, in the end, perhaps the most fundamental reason why Obama has lost his way. Quite simply put, old-style liberalism is simply incapable of recognizing its ideological enemies, even as they stare it right in the face.

Colorblind Racism & The Conservative Racist Attacks On Obama, Sotomayor As "Racist"

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 GMT

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.
The Frameworks Involved: A Quick Review

From the first diary in this series, here are three frameworks to keep in mind. First is this functional overview of Social Dominance Theory (SDT):

Colorblind racism is an ideology, meaning it functions primarily in the realm of "Legitimating Myths" in the chart above. It's four central frames are:

(1) Abstract liberalism.

The frame of abstract liberalism involves using ideas associated with political liberalism (e.g. "equal opportunity," the idea that force should not be used to achieve social policy) and economic liberalism (e.g., choice, individualism) in an abstract manner to explain racial matters.

(2) Naturalization.

Naturalization is a frame that allows whites to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting they are natural occurrences.

(3) Cultural Racism.

Cultural racism is a frame that relies on culturally based arguments such as "Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education" or "blacks have too many babies" to explain the standing of minorities in society.

(4) Minimization of Racism

Minimization of racism is a frame that suggests discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities' life chances ("It's better now than in the past" or "There is discrimination, but there are plenty of jobs out there).

And, finally, Todd Rudd, Senior Researcher at the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University speaks of "Identifying conditions, processes, practices, policies, ideologies, and interactions that lead to racial inequality" and identifies five of them:

Individual racial animus
Implicit Bias ("symbolic racism")
Colorblind racism
Institutional racism
Structural Racialization

The first two primarily impact attitudes on the left side of the SDT chart, colorblind racism, as already mentioned, impacts the realm of legitimating myths, and the last two impact the institutional elements on the right side of the SDT chart.

With all that in mind, we now turn to consider Rush Limbaugh, who not only plays on the implicit biases of his audience, but who also exhibits the individual racial animus of a classical racist.

Limbaugh's Racism

Lest anyone doubt that Limbaugh is a racist, here's John Amato on Rush referring to LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as a "shoeshine boy". And here's a column listing Limbaugh's "Top 10" racist quotes. A couple of them are disputed, as they derive from a book that fails to give an air date for them (see WikiQuote), but Limbaugh's routine racist stereotyping is far more substantial than one or two disputed high-profile quotes. Indeed, it's the non-sensational everyday drip-drip-drip of his racist contempt that's by far the most corrosively evil thing about his racist attitude.

Indeed, it's the non-sensational everyday drip-drip-drip of his racist contempt that's by far the most corrosively evil thing about his racist attitude. That, and the fact that his prominence encourages millions of listeners to think that their own racism is perfectly fine and normal, and not even racism at all--it's the Barack Obamas and Sonya Sotomayors who are racists!

There are others who are far more over and obsessive about race, and Limbaugh's hatred and contempt is dispensed against anyone who dares contradict him-calling anti-war Iraq Veterans "fake soldiers", for example-but none of this detracts from the fact that Limbaugh is, without questions, one of the most prominent racists in America, and has been for nearly two decades. It's the normalization of his racism that I want to focus on here, because it's reflective of a larger normalization of racism that eerily co-exists with the mythology of America as a "post-racial" society... if not now, then very, very soon.

Interlude: The Numbers Case Against The "Post-Racial" Myth

As I've noted before, the numbers say, not so much. For example, in my diary, "(Black America)--Invisible Nation", from March 2008, I cited an April, 2005, Princeton University press release about a study that found that "Black applicants without criminal records are no more likely to get a job than white applicants just out of prison, according to a Princeton University study of nearly 1,500 private employers in New York City."

Now that's discrimination. And it lines up with the fact also cited in the same diary that black unemployment routinely runs at about twice the rate of white unemployment:

Also from that diary, I presented public opinion data from the General Social Survey about recent attitudes (2000-2006) towards Black's lower economic status:

Attributed Causes For Blacks' Lower Economic Status
Cause	View	EXT LIB	LIB	Mod Lib	Mod	Mod Con	Con	Ext Con	TOT
Discrimination	YES	51.0	48.7	43.2	36.2	27.9	24.9	24.4	35.4
Discrimination	NO	48.4	51.3	56.8	63.8	72.1	75.1	75.6	64.6

Precise wording:

266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think
these differences are: a. Mainly due to discrimination?

As I wrote at the time, "Three out of four conservatives say 'no.' Even almost half of 'extreme liberals' say 'no.' They are not just mistaken. As the information above shows, they are downright delusional." And, of course, this fits right into the framework of colorblind racism, in the "Minimization of Racism" frame. And in the "Cultural Racism" frame, we have the following:

Attributed Causes For Blacks' Lower Economic Status
Cause	View	EXT LIB	LIB	Mod Lib	Mod	Mod Con	Con	Ext Con	TOT
Lack of Will	YES	36.6	37.0	41.1	51.1	50.3	57.0	65.4	49.2
Lack of Will	NO	63.4	63.0	58.9	48.9	49.5	42.9	34.6	50.8

Precise wording:

266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are: d. Because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?

"Lack of will!' That's a classic cultural explanation. Those lazy slaves! They almost destroyed the South! As I wrote in that diary:

That's what almost two out of three extreme conservatives say the problem is, and more than half of all moderates agree! Lack of will is why those employeers choose white convicts over blacks with a clean record. Yesirree!

A related economic indicator is homeownership-which blacks have long been disproportionately excluded from, only to be particularly targeted during the recent housing bubble:

But economic numbers are actually rather positive compared to the numbers around policing and incarceration. Given the history of slavery in our country---followed by decades of near-slavelike sharecropping, and the widespread use of convict labor, surreptitiously secured-we should be deeply troubled by the fact that racial inequities are by far the most stark when it comes to incarceration and punishment generally. Consider the following, from a recent paper, "Post-Racial Racism: Crime Control and Racial Stratification in the Age of Obama":

The public security system in the United States produces shocking racial disparities at every level, from stops to arrests to prosecutions to sentencing to rates of incarceration and execution.6 The United States today places almost one in every thirty of its residents under correctional control in a racial pattern that produces state prison populations two-thirds black and Latino.7 Racial differences in the penal context dramatically exceed those in every other social domain: "Whereas racial disparities in unemployment and infant mortality stand at roughly two to one, and the disparity in unwed childbearing is three to one, the differential with respect to imprisonment is eight to one."8 Even so, however, for the last two decades and more, the Supreme Court has assured us that these dramatic, persistent racial inequalities do not denote the presence of racial discrimination. McCleskey v. Kemp famously shrugged off the most sophisticated and exhaustive survey of criminal sentencing thus far undertaken when it rejected the claim that racism tainted Georgia's death penalty machinery. 9 Though it accepted that Georgia imposed the ultimate penalty on blacks who murdered whites at twenty-two times the rate for blacks who killed blacks, the Court nonetheless opined that these statistics proved "at most . . . a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race."10 McCleskey's dismissal of the evidence rested on a particular conception of racism as rooted in the episodic expression of individual malice.11 Even crediting the Court's conclusion that intentional racism is largely absent from contemporary crime control, though, the dismal numbers in McCleskey and beyond cry out for explanation.

The conservative Supreme Court majority's refusal to see racism despite overwhelming statistical evidence is about as pure a demonstration of colorblind racism as one could hope to find. So long as there is no evidence of overt racial bias in a particular case, that's all that matters to them.

What Limbaugh and Obama Share In Common

Such is the stark reality that Limbaugh's hate-soaked shuck and jive is intended to distract us from. And Limbaugh is merely acting off the same underlying script that dominates racial discourse in our society today. On one level, Obama is the polar opposite of Limbaugh. Limbaugh is angry white man, accusing the almost-too-calm black President of being an angry racist, just like him. Such is the level of absurdity and polarity. (Glenn Beck is right there with Limbaugh, too.) But on a deeper level, Limbaugh and Obama are both reading off the same script to the extent that Obama largely accepts, and even reinforces the framework of colorblind racism. If we were to extend the analogy with America circa 1900, Obama is much like Booker T. Washington, seeking accommodation within a segregated system. It's not nearly so blatant, of course, and his position is far more elevated. But he is every bit as much concerned with fitting into an existing framework of understandings as Washington was, and every bit as much at odds with the sort of sweeping intellectual challenge that WEB DuBois mounted as an alternative.

Recall again are colorblind racism's four central frames:

(1) Abstract liberalism.
(2) Naturalization.
(3) Cultural Racism.
(4) Minimization of Racism

Obama famous race speech in Philadelphia turned on contrasting his own minimization of racism in sharp contrast to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom he criticized for failing to join him in his minimization. Of course, Obama doesn't always do this-which is a source of some consternation. His comments on the Gates Affair were an example of this. But so was his speech at the 100th Anniversary of the NAACP. He also strikes themes of naturalization and cultural racism from time to time (in Bill Cosby mode, for example.)

But what's clearly most important is the near religious ferocity that Obama exhibits toward the frame of abstract (classical) liberalism. This can be seen in his individualist, personal aspirational style. It can be seen in his casual self-identification as a "free trader" who looks back on his promise to renegotiate NAFTA as a bit of irrational campaign exuberance. It can be seen in his love affair with Wall Street, and his enthusiasm for continuing Bush's "free market" assault on public education. None of these things has been good for black people as a whole, much less America.

The shortcomings of 19th-Century liberalism were recognized by Dickens, and began to be addressed by the "New Liberals" back in the 1870s. The theory did not work as advertised, there needed to be a broader focus on material preconditions and group welfare, or else the promise of individual flowering would never be realized by the large mass of people. In America, there were three distinct waves of political reform that grappled with these shortcomings-the Progressives, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights/Feminist/Great Society reforms of the 1960s, and of those three, Obama seems most comfortable only with the earliest, most process-oriented and most minimal. It should be quite clear, as LBJ himself foretold, that the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act after it, meant that the Democrats would lose the South. Obama sees himself as a survivor in the aftermath of that, not as a figure to challenge it.

To underscore the meaning of this, here is further quote from "Post-Racial Racism":

Several scholars have persuasively argued that the rise of mass imprisonment reflects a backlash against the civil rights movement. They point to the triumph of Richard Nixon's "southern strategy," whereby the Republican Party gained ascendance by attracting previously Democratic voters from the South as well as the working and middle classes nationally through coded appeals to racial fears-with "crime" serving as a potents synonym for the threatening presence and demands of nonwhites.12 According to Vesla Weaver, "Nixon's strategy was based on the linkages between racial conflict and lawlessness; indeed, in viewing [one of his own campaign ads], he remarked triumphantly that it 'hits it right on the nose. It's all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.'"13 Weaver continues: "Conservatives pitted toughness on crime against vigorous advocacy of civil rights by building a durable connection between black activism and crime."14 Rather than breaking this connection, Democratic politicians almost immediately acceded to it, engaging with Republicans in a "punitive bidding war," as Naomi Murakawa put it, that over decades created the carceral state we face today.15

The conservative racial narrative has not only been constructed around crime and incarceration, but also around white victimhood, in the form of affirmative action-a palpable absurdity, as the above information about unemployment rates and job hiring discrimination indicate. But progressive push-back on affirmative action has never come close to the relentless conservative attack. And facts? Well, when have conservatives ever needed them?

Indeed, Democrats have utterly failed to build an overarching progressive narrative of any scope that goes significantly beyond Horatio Alger, as discussed in my diary "Misreading History While Trying To Make It--Achievement Narratives And Obama's Limitations ". They even fail to effectively challenge white supremacist attacks on affirmative action by explaining its role in enabling individual achievement when presented with a golden opportunity. In an op-ed for the newspaper I work for, Random Lengths News, Bobby Grace, an LA County deputy DA, noted the failure to do this as one of three significant failures of the Sotomayor hearings:

Second, it was also disappointing that the Senate did not discuss the role that affirmative action played in making Sotomayor the next Supreme Court Justice. Judge Sotomayor grew up poor, and lived in housing projects in the Bronx borough of New York. She attended Princeton University and Yale Law School on scholarships and she has attributed her admission to both those institutions through affirmative action programs. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was an editor of the Yale Law Journal while in law school. She is a great example of how affirmative action gives those blocked from opportunity due to race or poverty a chance to rise to whatever level their talent can take them. Affirmative action gave Sotomayor the opportunity to attend Ivy League schools; but her own abilities carried her from there. Discussing affirmative action would have been valuable to the country especially at a time when many feel that affirmative action is no longer necessary. Sotomayor's career drives home the point that unless schools and individuals take steps to promote the poor and the disadvantaged, advancement will not take place.

White supremacists like Pat Buchanan lambasted Sotomayor repeatedly for being an "affirmative action baby," and virtually nothing was done to counter them. This is typically par for the course, but Bobby Grace is absolutely right-this should have been a golden opportunity to set the record straight. Instead, it merely served to show once again the power of internalized colorblind racism. The most charitable explanation is simply that people thought it would be "too controversial" to go there, and since they didn't need to in order to get her confirmed, they simply chose to stay silent. But that assumption that telling the truth would be "too controversial" is itself a testament to the power of colorblind racism.

White Identity

The white victim identity has been continuously built up by conservative affirmative action narratives, so much so that it's instructive to point out that shortly after the highly publicized Ricci case, which overturned existing law in favor of the white firefighters of New Haven, another case went exactly the opposite way-finding that there indeed was a serious pattern of discrimination against minority firemen in the obscure local of New York City. From Black Agenda Report, here's some of what Glen Ford had to say:

Some right-wingers may have wishfully thought that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was dead - that it was no longer a legal safeguard against tests that resulted in disproportionately bad outcomes for Blacks. They were wrong. Last week, a Federal District Court ruled that Blacks and Hispanics were discriminated against in two entrance exams for the New York City Fire Department. The judge ruled that the tests, administered in 1999 and 2002, not only disproportionately failed non-white applicants, but did so by asking questions that had little or nothing to do with fighting fires.
The tests were not quite as bad as the old Jim Crow voting test question, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" - but many of the questions were nearly as irrelevant. According to one constitutional law professor, the New York test was similar to others in big cities around the country, dealing with arcane firefighting details that only the children and grandchildren of firefighters would be familiar with - in other words, a kind of trivia for the families of firemen. Which is just the kind of test a bunch of white guys who want to put their relatives on the public payroll, would put together.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is still in effect - at least until its next confrontation with the right-wingers at the U.S. Supreme Court. The legal reasoning goes like this: if a test results in a disproportionate number of failures among Blacks or Hispanics, then it must be shown that the skills and knowledge being tested are necessary for doing the job. If not, then the test amounts to illegal discrimination....
Police and fire departments have remained disproportionately white, not because whites are inherently better at fighting fires and crime, but because the hiring and promotion systems have been rigged in their favor. The Civil Rights Act was designed to un-rig the system. That's not reverse discrimination, that's justice.

White victim identity is designed in part to deny that simply reality, but it is not limited to conservative affirmative action narratives, although that is a major contributing source. The mere fact that whites are not fully in charge in any situation can be enough to trigger outbreaks of white victim identity display. And this is precisely what happened with police officer Crowley once Obama criticized his actions.

Obama acted reasonably quickly, and very smoothly to defuse grievance on behalf of Crowley himself and the department that instantly backed him up, but conservative activists could not let such a narrative-building moment go. And this was not limited to conservative movement and media figures. Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter got into the act, "Big time," as America's #2 war criminal would say.

McCotter's trajectory was particularly interesting, as he was caught on YouTube by Mike Stark in Birther hunting mode, telling Stark he didn't have time to say "yes or no" to whether Obama was a natural-born US citizen, because he was too busy working on health care.

The whole Birther fantasy is, of course, yet another symptom of white victimhood. A black man wins the presidency-thus damaging every white male ego in the land. How to turn injured pride into a claimable victimhood? Simple! Assert that Obama is not just black... he's a furriner! And no amount of proof to the contrary will be believed!

But McCotter had bigger fish to fry:

U.S. Rep. McCotter drafts resolution demanding Obama apologize for saying sergeant 'acted stupidly'
by Jonathan Oosting | MLive.com
Monday July 27, 2009, 11:22 AM
U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican who represents Michigan's 11th district west of Detroit, plans to introduce a House resolution today demanding President Barack Obama apologize for remarks he made last week about Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley.
"The problem that we have is that the president injected himself in a situation where he admitted bias, admitted a lack of knowledge of all the facts, and nevertheless made a pronunciation that officer Crowley had done something impoper," McCotter told Steve Courtney this morning on WJR AM-760.
McCotter said that President Obama, who nominates the nation's top law enforcement official (the Attorney General), sets a dangerous precedent by weighing in on matters best handled by local authorities.

It was a great ploy. It even got him on Hardball. But the resolution was a joke:

Whereas on July 16, 2009, Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Sergeant James M. Crowley responded to a 911 call from a neighbor of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates, Jr. about a suspected break-in in progress at his residence, which had been broken into on a prior occasion;
Whereas on July 22, 2009, in responding to a question during a White House press conference President Barack Obama stated: "Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don't know all of the facts involved in this local police response incident";
Whereas President Obama proceeded to state Sergeant Crowley "acted stupidly" for arresting Professor Gates on charges of disorderly conduct;
Whereas, as a former Constitutional Law Professor, President Obama well understands that all Americans are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and their actions should not be prejudged prior to being fully and fairly judged by an appropriate and objective authority after due process;
Whereas, President Obama's nationally televised remarks may likely detrimentally influence the full and fair judgment by an appropriate and objective authority after due process regarding this local police response incident and, thereby, impair Sergeant Crowley's legal and professional standing in relation to said incident; and
Whereas, President Obama appeared at a daily White House Press briefing on July 24, 2009 to address his denouncement of Sergeant Crowley and stated: "I could have calibrated those words differently" but "I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station."
Whereas, President Obama's refusal to retract his initial public remarks and apologize to Sergeant Crowley and, instead, reiterate his accusation impugning Sergeant Crowley's professional conduct in the performance of his duties;
Now therefore be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives-
Calls upon President Obama to retract his initial public remarks and apologize to Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Sergeant James M. Crowley for having unfairly impugned and prejudged his professional conduct in this local police response incident.

That bolded paragraph there? That's where McCotter tried to insinuate that President Obama couldn't say anything bad about a white man unless the white man had been convicted in a court of law.

Pretty fucking incredible! Even the President of the United States gets his own personalized Black Code!

I rest my case.

Colorblind Racism: The Missing Framework For The Missing Teachable Moment

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:30:00 GMT

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.
Social Dominance Theory

SDT explains the maintenance of group dominance by men over women, elders over youth and arbitrarily defined socially dominant groups over arbitrarily defined socially subordinate groups. Such groups are commonly defined in terms of race, ethnicity, religion and cultural identity more generally. SDT explains the general mechanisms of how institutions, individual attitudes and legitimating social mythology interact with one another to perpetuate and reproduce group dominance. By highlighting general mechanisms, it enables us to see beyond the specifics in any one example.

This chart displays the general structure of the theory:

In the center is the realm of "legitimating myths" (LMs) which include both "hierarchy enhancing legitimating myths" (HE-LMs), which serve to legitimize, promote and intensify the dominance of one group over all others, and "hierarchy attenuating legitimating myths" (HA-LMs), which serve to challenge group dominance and promote equality. It is the persistence of HE-LMs in general, even when new HA-LMs are introduced, and old HE-LMs fall out of favor, that largely account for the persistence of group dominance over time, even when major shifts in attitudes and relative social and power relations. The persistence of HE-LMs in turn justifies and mystifies the persistence of practices--institutional and individual--on the right-hand side of the chart, which perpetuate group-based hierarchy. Although not shown on this chart, this in turn influences socialization and group status on the left-hand side of the chart, feeding into attitudes in the form of SDO (social dominance orientation).

Colorblind Racism

The second theory is colorblind racism, a theory which illuminates those specifics of how white supremacy has reconfigured itself in the post-Civil Rights Era. While it touches on all three realms addressed by SDT-attitudes, practices and legitimating myths, it is the third realm that is central to its explanatory power. What it more, its influence as an integrated set of legitimating myths can be seen as facilitating a range of other sorts of white supremacist practice. In his book, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies four central frames at the core of colorblind racism: "The central component of any dominant racial ideology is its frames or set paths for interpreting information," Bonilla-Silva writes. These four are:

(1) Abstract liberalism.

The frame of abstract liberalism involves using ideas associated with political liberalism (e.g. "equal opportunity," the idea that force should not be used to achieve social policy) and economic liberalism (e.g., choice, individualism) in an abstract manner to explain racial matters.

(2) Naturalization.

Naturalization is a frame that allows whites to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting they are natural occurrences.

(3) Cultural Racism.

Cultural racism is a frame that relies on culturally based arguments such as "Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education" or "blacks have too many babies" to explain the standing of minorities in society.

(4) Minimization of Racism

Minimization of racism is a frame that suggests discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities' life chances ("It's better now than in the past" or "There is discrimination, but there are plenty of jobs out there).

Colorblind Racism's Sustaining Role Re Other Racial Processes

It's important to understand that color-blind racism encompasses much more than these four central frames, which lie at its conceptual core. It sheds light on a wide range of phenomena, and has generated a variety of different empirical studies, and even new methodologies that get at the particular forms that colorblind racism takes.

For example, this presentation, by Todd Rudd, Senior Researcher at the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University speaks of "Identifying conditions, processes, practices, policies, ideologies, and interactions that lead to racial inequality" and identifies five of them:

Individual racial animus
Implicit Bias ("symbolic racism")
Colorblind racism
Institutional racism
Structural Racialization

From the perspective of SDT, the first two manifest predominately as attitudes related to SDO, colorblind racism manifests predominately in the realm of legitimating myths, and the last two manifest predominately in the realm of social/institutional practices. The first two categories can generally be distinguished by identifying the first as conscious, the second as subconscious, however this first approximation generally fails to account for people whose behavior clearly indicates both animus and denial. I would argue that figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Jeff Sessions cross the line from implicit bias to racial animus regardless of how much they may deny any conscious racial hostility. Persistent refusal to acknowledge their own bias, and projection of their biases onto the racial other are two unmistakable signs of outright animus, rather than implicit bias.

The second two categories are distinguished by whether the focus is intra-institutional, focusing on the history, practices and outcomes of a single institution (institutional racism), or if the focus is inter-institutional (structural racialization). The first is much more widely recognized, and can be combated, to a certain extent, by instituting specific institutional practices, many of which are now under attack under the color-blind racist rubric of "reverse racism". The second is less focused on by white people, but needs no introduction to people of color, who experience it on a daily basis. I've done a couple of diaries this year dealing with reports that studied multiple factors in geographical areas -- this one on the racial geography of opportunity in the New York City region and this one on health factors in South LA vs. West LA. These reports exemplify how one can identify the impacts of structural racialization in order to begin formulating means of combating it.

To sum up: colorblind racism directly involves symbolic racism as one of its components, while serving to minimize all racial processes and to also naturalize the effects of institutional racism and structural racialization. Colorblind racism not only minimizes the significance of racial animus by observing how much less prevalent and prominent its overt expressions are compared to 40 or 50 years ago, but also by not considering how even minimal expressions of animus can interact with other racial processes. What's more, the overall minimalization of racial problems serves to set up minorities for the accusation that they are the ones who are actually racist-seeing racial bias where it doesn't exist, being obsessed about race, and unable to "transcend" it (unlike white folks like them), refusing to be judged by a "colorblind" standard, etc.

Projecting Racism

This is the most pernicious aspect of colorbind racism: it provides the foundations for routinely labeling minorities as "racist" and while routinely absolving white people of actually racist attitudes, activities or rationales. Not all those who buy into colorblind racist ideology go this far, of course. But the potential is clearly there for a complete flipping of who is racist and who is not. And this has clearly been one of the long-term goals of conservative hegemonic struggle, even if very few people have been conscious of it. With the election of Barack Obama, heightened by the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, this potential has clearly been activated both by outspoken racists such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Pat Buchanan, and by more coded racists, such as Jeff Sessions.

Abstract Liberalism

Of the above four frames, abstract liberalism deserves special attention, because it is particularly distinctive of this kind of racism-appealing both to those with malignant and relatively benevolent attitudes on race. In discussing it, Bonilla-Silva describes liberalism in historical terms, as the ideology of a rising bourgeoisie, which only got around to extending its "universal" principles to the general populace within European-based liberal democracies rather late in the game, and never even considered that it applied to people living in the countries it turned to for raw materials and slave (or very low-wage) labor.

The idea of treating individuals "equally" when they are born into communities that have been subject to centuries of wildly disparate treatment derives a great deal of plausibility from the fact that liberal ideals have a great deal of appeal for those who benefit from them--as is always the case with HE-LMs. But the myth of meritocracy is particularly appealing because it tells us that we are the masters of our own destiny, as well as telling us that those who don't succeed are just "losers" who deserve their fate.

And yet, history tells us this is clearly not the case. People's life-chances are largely determined by cultural and historical events over which they have no control. Those born in a war-ravaged country do not have the same life-chances as those born into peace and prosperity. Those raised in a rich cultural environment, with a top-flight educational system, and social networks going back three, four, five generations are much better prepared to succeed than those deprived of such advantages.

One can readily embrace the ideal of moving toward a world in which abstract liberal ideals are realized, a world in which equal opportunity is a reality for all, and yet fully recognize that that world can never be self-sustaining in and of itself. It will always be dependent on the past that it has emerged from, and it must take honest account of that past, settling its centuries-old debts to the best of its ability--an ongoing process that will never be done, because the present is inherently always indebted to the past.

In the diary that follows, I am going to look closely at the dynamics of colorblind racism here at Open Left, both for their own sake, and to lay a foundation for better appreciating the more complex and extreme dynamics seen in the actions of conservative/GOP racists attacking Obama and Sotomayor.

Neo-Confederates And Hegemonic Ignorance

Paul Rosenberg — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time, knows what's what:

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?

Salon War Room's Alex Koppelman? Not so much:

Is the media really ignoring Sessions' past?
Media Matters, a liberal press watchdog, believes major newspapers are "disappear[ing]" the history of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. The senator is currently leading his fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, but a little more than 20 years ago, the same committee rejected his nomination to become a district court judge over allegations that he had a history of racist statements....
In this case, Media Matters focused on five newspapers -- the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal -- and noted that in their July 14 coverage of Sessions' opening statement at the Sotomayor hearings, none mentioned his past.
That's true -- but it's not true that those papers have ignored Sessions' own history in front of the committee, or failed to inform their readers about it. In fact, according to a search of Lexis-Nexis, four out of the five had previously covered the issue in some detail; two of those published profiles of him that focused on the episode. The only paper not to mention it, according to a search of its Web site, was the Journal.

The notion that Session's racist record can covered once, and then it's all good is nothing short of bizarre. The fact that Sessions is even in the Senate ought to be cause for such embarrassment and outrage that the GOP either forced him to resign, or else refused him membership in their caucus. (But, of course, if they did that, who would be left in thc caucus?) The fact that Sessions is the GOP's ranking member on the Judiciary Committee? That's just icing on the cake. And the media has a say in this. If they reported honestly on who Sessions is, what he has said and done, and how a GOP-majority Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination 23 years ago, and did that every time he opened his mouth to attack Sotomayor, or any other minority, exactly how long do you think that the GOP would sit on its hands and do nothing about him?

Put simply, the national corporate media is aiding and abetting the continued power and influence of neo-Confederate white supremacy. And Alex Koppelman sees nothing wrong with that.

Fortunately, Salon readers are not so totally clueless. There's this:

I disagree
with you Alex. No matter what ran in the past, even if it was the day before, these major newspapers should include all the relevant comments Senator Sessions has made in the past right alongside the comments that Senator Sessions made in the present. It's like saying, all right, I had a banana yesterday and some ice cream today and tomorrow I will eat some chocolate sauce, so that's the same as having a banana split. It isn't the same by a long shot.
runfastandwin

And this:

The media fails because it lacks context.
And that moots Koppelman's entire point. It would be a true service by the media to note the context of Sessions' questions, and his own history and hypocrisy to ask the questions that he does. That would be holding these pompous blowhards more to account, and maybe they'd blow less hard and be less pompous if that were to happen with great regularity.
-- lemecdutex

And this:

Let Me Give You Some Advice Salon
Don't fuck with Media Matters. You guys certainly haven't earned the right. Your "reporting" and commentary 7 out of 10 times is poor at best. The only reason I even visit this site is to read Glenn Greenwald.
One of the biggest complaints about the MSM is they don't put things in context. Context matters. Do you think just because someone reads the Washington Post, they know Sessions complete history? Just because a media outlet has noted something before, doesn't mean its readership is up to date on the information....
-- PietroMaximoff

Just to sample the creme of the crop.

The message is clear: (1) Ignoring white supremacy is condoning white supremacy. (2) Context is everything.

To paraphrease Brad DeLong, "Why can't we have a non-racist media?" (Even I know that asking for an anti-racist media would just be too, too much.)

A MyDD Golden Oldie: Obama, MLK and Hegemony (A Departure From My Ongoing Series)

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:15:00 GMT

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.
Prologue: Why Is He Being So Mean?

My earlier posts on hegemony here at MyDD are "Hegemony Is The Enemy--Prelude--Milton Friedman" and "Hegemony Is The Enemy--Intro" (Also available at Patterns That Connect.)

I started my series on hegemony because I wanted to talk about the issue of political realignment, which I wanted to talk about as a way of framing the last election and the next. The history of political realignments (Jackson's election in 1824, Lincoln's in 1860, McKinnley's in 1896, FDR's in 1932) is a history of changing political discourse. But it's hardly the be-all and end-all of that phenomena, which is why I took up the series.

How does this relate to Obama, and the issues Chris raised? Simple: realignments, as I showed in "What A Dem Landslide Could Mean", come about as a result of two consecutive wave elections in the House. But they culminate in a Presidential election. In most cases, the President involved is a charismatic, epoch-defining figure: Jackson, Lincoln, FDR. McKinnley was definitely the odd man out. Obviously, Obama has the potential to be such a figure as well. And his critics, such as Chis and I, are every bit as aware of that (perhaps even moreso) as his enthusiastic supporters.

The criticism I'm offering here is in terms of hegemony, in terms of the common sense face of a dominant ideology, and it finds Obama clearly lacking. But that's hardly the end of the matter, on at least two counts. Before explaining, I need to flesh out the idea of hegemony a little. Here's how Wikipedia introduces the concept:

Hegemony
Hegemony... is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; more broadly, cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. The cultural control that hegemony asserts affects commonplace patterns of thought: hegemony controls the way new ideas are rejected or become naturalized in a process that subtly alters notions of common sense in a given society.
Hegemony results in the empowerment of certain cultural beliefs, values, and practices to the submersion and partial exclusion of others. Hegemony influences the perspective of mainstream history, as history is written by the victors for a congruent readership. The official history of Communism, re-writing history, erasing people's names and images from official state photos, provides a richly-exampled arena of cultural hegemony.

In America, the passage of different groups from despised outsiders into accepted parts of the whole is not a challenge to the core of hegemonic power. The basic logic of group hierarchy is rearranged, revised, and given new form, but not rejected. We've still had just one Catholic President. The first Muslim elected to Congress was openly challenged to prove he is not a terrorist sympathizer or enabler. Blacks still fill our prisons. Innocent unarmed blacks are still murdered by our police. New Orleans is still a wasteland, fifteen months after Katrina. This is what "normal" looks like. Hegemony is alive and well.

As I said, this post criticizes Obama for failing to challenge hegemony. But that's hardly the end of the matter, on at least two counts. The first, more broadly, is that no break in party systems has truly challenged the core of hegemony. Jackson's populism was deeply racist, even Lincoln ran merely on a platform of restraining slavery's expansion while preserving the union, McKinnley was a great leap backward, and FDR saved capitalism from itself. In short, these breaks have somewhat redefined the hegemonic discourse, rather than challenging its very core. It would be unrealistic to expect any Presidential candidate to do more.

The second, narrower point is that Presidents can evolve. Lincoln and FDR are the most dramatic examples. Lincoln in 1860 was not about freeing the slaves. In a few short years, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. FDR came into office pledging to balance budgets, and eager to work closely with big business, but big business walked away from him, labor came to the fore, and balancing budgets proved impossibe--the recession of 1937-38 was the final proof of that.

And so, this criticism of Obama is hardly meant as an attempt to consign him to the dustbin of history. Despite whatever I say here, he may still turn out to be a remarkably progressive President. My darkest fears may not be realized. And yet, no one knowledgeable doubts that Lincoln was a better President and a better man because of Frederick Douglass urging him on. No one doubts that Eleanor Roosevelt had a similar influence on FDR. One need not be a hostile critic of such figures to be ahead of them, and lead them farther in the ultimate direction that history remembers them most favorably for.

Neither Chris nor I have a close or privileged relationship. It falls to us to be blunt and straightforward. But those more favorably inclined toward Obama ought to think long and hard about what we say, because it ill serves him to be comfortable with what he is and what he has done so far. If Lincoln or FDR had been, and had remained comfortable with themselves as they were when elected, history would not remember either of them kindly today.

Of course, I want much more than for history to think kindly of President Obama. I want more than just another realignment--though that is the bare minimum I think we need to survive the challenges of the century ahead. I want more than mere survival. I want renewal, reawakening, rebirth. I want a true challenge to the hegemonic order. And Obama excites many people because he seems to promise that. But it's a promise he does not fulfill.

The Close Up

Put simply, I see Obama posturing as two things: (1) a uniter who (2) stands outside the conventional discourse and tells it like it is. He is, in short, the black, Democratic John McCain. The examples Chris cites are evidence that Obama is only a uniter within the bounds of hegemonic discourse. He is not interested in uniting everyone, though he uses pseudo-univeralist language. Nor is he interested in criticizing the conventional discourse. He just wants to goose it a little bit, create a little buzz while defining the outer limits of what's acceptable.

Chris cites examples regarding Obama on the war and on the role of religion. More has been written about Obama and religion at Talk2Action, which has an entire category, "Demonizing `Secularism,'" which neatly frames the problem with Obama. For example, Frederick Clarkson's article from last July, "Barack Obama Steps In It" begins:

Senator Barack Obama's big speech at an event sponsored by Call to Renewal, a group headed by Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Religious Right Gets it Wrong, and Why the Left Doesn't Get It -- has received very mixed reviews and is the buzz of the blogosphere. There is much in Obama's speech that hits the right notes regarding the role of religion in a democratic pluralist society, but the speech is indelibly marred by propagating one of the central frames of the religious right.
The Washington Post reported:
Sen. Barack Obama chastised fellow Democrats on Wednesday for failing to "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people," and said the party must compete for the support of evangelicals and other churchgoing Americans. "Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," the Illinois Democrat said in remarks prepared for delivery to a conference of Call to Renewal, a faith-based movement to overcome poverty... At the same time, he said, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square." As a result, "I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy."

The problem here should be self-evident. Some of those responding to Chris's post claimed that Obama was simply responding to a perception that was "out there" and that needed to be addressed. But here he is clearly propagating perceptions created by the theocratic right.

Furthermore, Obama did this at an event sponsored by Jim Wallis's organization, and, as Wallis's book title makes clear, his whole schtick is based on a triangulation strategy that assumes the basic truth of the rightwing frame.

Clarkson continued:

The controversy that has erupted in response to Senator Obama's speech has helped to catalyze some things Talk to Action colleague Bruce Wilson and I have discussed for some time. (He will undoubtedly have much to say about all this as well.)
Obama and Jim Wallis before him are wrong to scapegoat "secularists" for the problems mainstream Christians and others have had in finding their voices. They are also wrong to allege that non-religious people are somehow chasing religious expression from public life. It is long past time to call a halt to this nonsense. Let's start today.
But before we abandon, and begin to more formally oppose the frame, here is how it works: The religious right frames much of how they view politics in America as a struggle in America between Christianity and secular humanism; between faith and no faith; between religiosity and secularism. The words differ a bit depending on who is doing the talking, but the the frame is always the same. Indeed, it has been one of the central features of the religious right's rise to power for decades and has been articulated by every major leader from Jerry Falwell to Sun Myung Moon.

Naturally, this frame is false. There is no epochal political struggle between Christianity and secular humanism. The struggle is between rightwing theocrats, yearning for the good old days of the divine right of kings, when power flowed unambiguously from top down, and American secular democracy, based as it is on Locke's social contract theory, in which legitimate power derives from the consent of the governed, and flows unambiguously from bottom up.

Next, Clarkson presents a long excerpt from one of the premier researchers into the religious right, and rightwing authoritarianism and conspiricism more generally. I quote it in full, together with a following remark by Clarkson. Together, these set up the discussion of hegemony:

Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst at Political Research Associates writes that the conspiracy theory alleging that Christianity is under attack by "secular humanists," goes back several decades.
The idea that a coordinated campaign by "secular humanists" was aimed at displacing Christianity as the moral bedrock of America actually traces back to a group of Catholic ideologues in the 1960s. It was Protestant evangelicals, especially fundamentalists, who brought this concept into the public political arena and developed a plan to mobilize grassroots activists as foot soldiers in what became known as the Culture Wars of the 1980s. A popular theologian named Francis A. Schaeffer caught the attention of many Protestants in a series of books and essays calling on Christians to directly confront sinful and decadent secular culture with its humanist values... [Evangelical scholar] George Marsden argues that this new focus on secular humanism "revitalized fundamentalist conspiracy theory"... Two leading activists of the Christian right, Gary Bauer and James Dobson, called the battle pitting secular humanists against Christians over the moral foundation of America a "great Civil War of Values". The idea of a conscious and coordinated conspiracy of secular humanists has been propounded in various ways by a variety of national conservative organizations, including the Christian Coalition (Pat Robertson), the Eagle Forum (Phyllis Schlafly), Concerned Women for America (Beverly LaHaye), American Coalition for Traditional Values (Tim LaHaye), Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (Fred Schwarz), and the John Birch Society (Robert Welch). By framing this set of claims as a conspiracy to provoke a "Culture War," conservative Christians transform political disagreements into a battle between the Godly and the Godless, between good and evil, and ultimately between those that side with God and those that wittingly or unwittingly side with Satan.

What is remarkable is that this basic frame has been internalized and propagated by many people who are unaffiliated with the religious right. Indeed it has been actively promoted by one of the leaders of the the revival of what is calling itself the religious left -- Jim Wallis.

That's Hegemony In Action, Folks!

What Berlet has described is a longterm process of rightwing infrastructure-building and narrative propagation. What Clarkson has added is a comment about how this narrative has spread. Both can be understood in terms of the concept of hegemony, going beyond the introductory passage presented above. The chief theoretician of hegemony was Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist imprisoned by Mussolini, whose Prison Notebooks contain the most penetrating elaboration of the idea of hegemony. The Wikipedia entry on Cultural Hegemony elaborates further:

The analysis of hegemony (or "rule") was formulated by Antonio Gramsci to explain why predicted communist revolutions had not occurred where they were most expected, in industrialized Europe...
Gramsci argued that the failure of the workers to make anti-capitalist revolution was due to the successful capture of the workers' ideology, self-understanding, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling) culture. In other words, the perspective of the ruling class had been absorbed by the masses of workers. In "advanced" industrial societies hegemonic cultural innovations such as compulsory schooling, mass media, and popular culture had indoctrinated workers to a false consciousness. Instead of working towards a revolution that would truly serve their collective needs, workers in "advanced" societies were listening to the rhetoric of nationalist leaders, seeking consumer opportunities and middle-class status, embracing an individualist ethos of success through competition, and/or accepting the guidance of bourgeois religious leaders.
Gramsci therefore argued for a strategic distinction between a "war of position" and a "war of movement". The war of position is a culture war in which anti-capitalist elements seek to gain a dominant voice in mass media, mass organizations, and educational institutions to heighten class consciousness, teach revolutionary analysis and theory, and inspire revolutionary organization. Following the success of the war of position, communist leaders would be empowered to begin the war of movement, the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support....
Gramsci did not contend that hegemony was either monolithic or unified. Instead, hegemony was portrayed as a complex layering of social structures. Each of these structures have their own "mission" and internal logic that allows its members to behave in a way that is different from those in different structures. Yet, as with an army, each of these structures assumes the existence of other structures and by virtue of their differing missions, is able to coalesce and produce a larger structure that has a larger overall mission....
Influence of Gramsci
Although leftists may have been the primary users of this conceptual tool, the activities of organized conservative movements also draw upon the concept. This was seen, for instance, in evangelical Christian efforts to capture local school boards in the U.S. during the 1990s, and thus be able to dictate curriculum. Patrick Buchanan, in a widely discussed speech to the 1992 Republican Convention, used the term "culture war" to describe political and social struggle in the United States.

From the above, it should be clear that rightwing theocrats have been waging their own "war of position" against what they see as a secular hegemony.

However, if we go back further in time, we discover that these movements have roots in specific theological traditions, laced with strands of racism and heresy, at war with other more mainstream theological traditions. "Secular humanism" as their enemy was a rather late arrival on the scene. And, of course, Sun Myung Moon is about as anti-Christ a kind of guy you could ever wish for.

Whatever their self-understanding is, the GOP has long known better: these are forces to be used and controlled. They "have their own `mission' and internal logic that allows its members to behave in a way that is different from those in different structures," but in the end they're all part of the larger army, which is decidedly oriented toward serving Mammon, "big time" which is the "larger overall mission" they serve knowingly or not.

The GOP could turn out wrong in the end. The servant could replace the master. Hegemonic orders can fragment, due to their own internal contradictions. But so far, that has not happened, and theocratic right is best understood as part of the existing hegemonic order, notwithstanding its fantasies to the contrary.

OTOH, "secular humanists" are true outsiders, challengers to the hegemonic order simply by virtue of their relative immunity to all manner of religiously-framed narratives. It makes no difference how respectful of others' religious beliefs we may be, the mere fact that we stand apart, outside the spell of true belief, makes us a potential source of trouble, difficult to anticipate and counter. More importantly, because of our outsider status, we make extremely convenient scapegoats, onto which all manner of sins may safely be projected.

When Obama buys into the theocratic frame, he effectively buries all the contradictions within it. He endorses the notion that the real dividing line is not within the Christian community, between diverse, but honest religiously-motivated believers, and an extremist political fringe, and instead propagates the extremists' line that the dividing line is between all people of faith, and an intolerant secular minority, whose identity and very existence he never even bothers to specify. (Note the parallels to McCarthy, with his blank "list of names.")

This is one of the most powerful manifestations of hegemonic discourse--the shifting of lines, the projecting of conflict points, the burying of true disputes, and the elevation of red herrings and scapegoats. The fact that no specific offenders are named only makes matters worse, not better. For if someone specific could be named, then they could--in theory at least--fight back, and dispute what is being said. But, in fact, there are no such figures, or, more properly, no one who takes such a position has anything remotely close to the power to enforce it, beyond deleting comments on their blog.

We're talking about bogeymen, folks.

Obama's Words, Again--And A False Equivalence With History

With this background behind us, let's turn again to Obama's words and their significance. A number of commentators on Chris's MyDD story tried some version of psychologizing the whole thing away. Chris was just being "thin-skinned." Or he was misinterpreting Obama, who was simply stating these positions in order to refute them. Chris and others pointed out this is hardly the way to frame political rhetoric.

Don't Think of An Elephant, and all that. Another tack critics took was to praise the fact that no one specific was being named as an offender--no harm, no foul, the reasoning goes. The comeback was simple: he's undermining the brand, not just of "progressives" or "secular humanists," but more broadly, of Democrats:

blogswarm hit it perfectly:

Re: The Two Obamas and Me, Part One
It's not like he's naming any names.
Yes, he is naming and the name is Democrats. It isn't any one person, it is everyone else.
by blogswarm on Tue Dec 05, 2006 at 01:47:41 AM EST
Re: The Two Obamas and Me, Part One because we're all alike -- one formula. come one, get thicker skin. by Laurin from SC on Tue Dec 05, 2006 at 01:55:10 AM EST
....
Re: The Two Obamas and Me, Part One Obama is the one saying that we are all alike -- except for him. That is the problem with triangulation, that is why the DLC lost every single major primary in 2006. by blogswarm on Tue Dec 05, 2006 at 02:05:48 AM EST

This is precisely how hegemony works. Instead of developing your own institutions, your own analysis, your language, you accept those that are imposed on you. And perpetuate fighting with enemies pre-selected for you--enemies who ought to be your allies.

Some claimed that this was really no different from Bush using the phrase "compassionate conservative." Laurin from SC wrote:

Bush's theme of "compassionate conservatism" clearly implied that standard conservatism wasn't, in fact, compassionate. Why else would there be a reason to distinguish his particular brand of conservatism?
It's the same strawman technique is a slightly different form of delivery: obliquely communicate the stereotype and how the given candidate rises above that stereotype. I'll grant you that Bush's "compassionate conservatism" rhetoric better nested the conservative strawman than Obama's outright stenciling of the liberal strawman.
But the idea is the same.

However, it's not the same--although it did rankle Dobson and some others at first. First, an implied criticism is not the same as an overt one. Corporations sell "New, Improved!" products all the time, untroubled by the concern that it implies their previous products were inferior and old-fashioned. They sell "Low-Fat," "Low-Cal" and "Low-Carb" products, unconcerned that people will shun their standard product line.

But that's only part of what's wrong with this false equivalence. You can't understand a phrase in isolation from purposes it was created for, especially when it's part of a larger, carefully-crafted narrative. To get the full picture, we need to look beyond mere words themselves to the part they play in a larger hegemonic project--that of rewriting both secular history and the core of Christian religion.

The idea of "compassionate conservatism" came from Marvin Olasky, who peddled the idea that the impoverished rat-infested slum-dwelling masses of the late 1800s weren't really poor, because their lives were filled with God, but then the welfare state came along, gave them food stamps, housing assistance and the like, and turned them into lost souls. It's nonsense, of course. Private charity, much of it church-based, simply couldn't cope with the magnitude of need in the late 1800s. That's why state-level welfare services appeared in the early 1900s, followed by federal services during the Great Depression. What's more, no level of government welfare service--federal, state or local, has ever prevented private charity from continuing.

More insidiously, however, Olasky's claim amounts to this: the poor are poor because they lack Godliness. The wealthy and middle-classes are more Godly than the poor, and they can help the poor by sharing a bit of their Godliness with them. It's hard to imagine a more insulting, anti-Christian belief system. This is precisely what the Scribes and Pharisees believed. Jesus would have nothing to do with it. His mission was to the poor and the outcaste. They were the children of God. The wealthy and middle-class were the ones bereft of true Godliness--precisely the opposite of what Olasky claims.

The perversion of Christianity into its exact opposite ("Who would Jesus bomb?") is a sure sign of hegemony at work. So, too, is the recasting of wretched 1890s slum-dwellers into happy Holy campers, and the New Deal into a wholesale attack on the poor. It's not enough to just look at single phrases in isolation, one has to examine the whole narrative project of which they are a part.

Of course, most folks have never heard of Olasky's work. Why should they? Once his work had laid the foundations, Bush's money-fueled political machine soon left Olasky in the dust. The media never even questions where the idea of "compassionate conservatism" came from, much less what it means. But there was no way to tell in advance that this sort of super-marketing campaign would take over. Hegemonic narrative rewriting goes on all the time, never knowing when one effort will get a tremendous boost, a boost that may even make most of the original work involved utterly superflous. Still, a very large core of activist true believes have heard of Olasky, have accepted his grotesque fairy tales as gospel, and have mobilized to take advantage of all the faith-based pork that Bush could manage to send their way.

Indeed, the fact that commentators at MyDD are ignorant of all this history only goes to show how effective the machinery of hegemony is. If the folks at MyDD don't know this, then who in the world does? Not very many people, you can bet on it. Even fewer know the cultural logic that connects "compassionate conservatism" to authoritarianism, as outlined by Ira Chenus in the article "`Faith-based initiatives' Signal Authoritarian Trend", which draws parallels back to 1820's America, when the old established lines of social authority came to be increasingly difficult to discern.

In contrast to the obscure backstory of "compassionate conservatism," how many people have heard the secular-bashing memes that Barack Obama repeats? And how much backstory do they need? This is one of the essential functions of hegemony: to bury its own contradictions, and advance manufactured ones it can pin on rouge elements, external enemies and internal corrupters. Call it "the blame game." Hegemonic discourse plays it all the time. Except, of course, for those rare occasions where blame-shifting just won't work. That's when you get the post-Katrina vapors over "playing the blame game." Any other time, it's job one.

King vs. Obama

Amongst other things, Obama said, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square." But who ever did such a thing? Quite the opposite. What we'd like is for believers to bring their religion into their politics, rather than bring their politics into their religion. And no one illustrates this point better than Martin Luther King, a true counter-hegemonic exemplar who could teach Barack Obama lessons till the cows come home. Consider, for example, what King had to say about the Vietnam War, and about God's judgement:

Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be. A sort of the policeman of the world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems like I can hear God saying to America, "you [America] are too arrogant. If you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power and...place it in the hands of a nation that does not even know my name, be still and know, that I'm God.
And it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, some times, it means you walk the streets, with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means loosing a job, it means being abused, and scarred. It may mean having a 7-8 year old child ask," Daddy why do yo have to go to jail so much?" I' have... learned that being a follower of Jesus Christ, means taking up the cross. My Bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. For the crown we wear there is a cross that we must bear. Let us bear it, Bear it for truth. Bear it for Justice. Bear it for Peace.

That's what real God-talk and real progressive talk, and real counter-hegemonic discourse sounds like.

And I haven't heard anything remotely resembling that from Barack Obama. Have you?

What Would Real Transformation Look Like?

It may seem terribly unfair to hold Barack Obama up to the example of Martin Luther King. But he asked for it. He's the one who doesn't want to be judged by the standards of mere mortal politicians, who muck around getting bills passed, and pursuing other time-wasting tasks. King did not adapt himself to the hegemonic discourse of his day. And it wasn't just about Civil Rights. His commitment to non-violence was even more out-of-step. After all, even the Eisenhower State Department knew that segregation was a loser in the Cold War struggle for Third World credibility. Civil Rights was the way to go. But non-violence? Sure, it was a great relief, tactically. But King actually took it seriously. And eventually that meant coming out against the Vietnam War. The longer you look at the examples of Martin Luther King and Barack Obama, the less and less you see in common between the two--at least since Obama joined the US Senate.

I don't expect Obama to be Martin Luther King, but a few lessons could surely be learned. Such as:

(1) Don't accept your adversaries' terms of debate. (See, for example, King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail.")

(2) Don't hesitate to explain your thinking in detail. (Again, see, "Letter From Birmingham Jail.") If people take you seriously as a leader, they should want to walk a mile in your shoes. They should be eager for it. Giving them pablum instead is a grave disservice to yourself as well as them.

(3) Don't be afraid to reach unpopular conclusions. You gain far more enduring, substantial support by going where reason, conscience, and spiritual guidance take you than by worrying about what others will say. Be in it for the long haul, and you will haul others along.

To be honest, I don't expect Obama to come anywhere near these lessons. But those who are supporters of his ought to think long and hard if it isn't very much in his interests, their interests, and the interests of America's future for him to be confronted with these lessons in a way that he is willing to hear. Real transformation would be a politician willing to take a long, hard look at how he's fallen short--after all, we've all fallen short--and what he can do to redress it.

Changing More Than Congress--Altering The Online/Offline Ecology Of American Politics

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:00:00 GMT

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....
Some Themes From the TPMCafe Discussion

Striking the theme of blogger's outsider roots, and continued outsider status, Amanda Marcotte wrote that this was a good thing, really:

Blogs were built up for a lot of reasons, but as Eric notes, most of us got into this, especially in the beginning, because we wanted to vent. We had no ambitions to change the world, and when we started to get pulled in that direction, most of us shrugged our shoulders and said you can't turn destiny away when it starts knocking on your door.
But like many of the bloggers Eric interviews note, ours is the energy of outsiders. The metaphor people grasp for more than anything is punk rock, and it's apt (especially the way that people who break into the mainstream are berated for selling out). So, instead of being mad at Obama for keeping us at a distance, I humbly suggest that he did us a favor. If he'd brought the bloggers into his inner circle, then it would be a lot harder for us to criticize him and hold him accountable for what appears to be a long 4-8 years of selling out progressive values because the skittish Democratic mindset is kicking in.
Being outsiders actually makes us better allies to the Democrats when they actually deserve it. There were Clinton camps and Obama camps, but both camps jumped all over Chris Matthews for his relentless sexism towards Clinton, which is easier for us to do as we're independent and don't have to worry too much about whether our words reflect poorly on this campaign or that campaign's message.

In his diary "Why Elections Will Continue to Lean Left Due to the Web", Greg Mitchell. editor of Editor & Publisher offered a view from his perch as an internal critic of the journalism establishment, citing the way in which the internet performed an important, here-to-fore missing journalistic function:

I guess I feel that the uprising on the left side of online, pushed also by generational and demographic changes, will keep the country at least somewhat to the left for many years. And you can quote me. In fact, I predicted that last year even before the current rise of Twitter.
I could go on and on, but let me just mention one reason for feeling this way: fact-checking and instant counter-punditry online. And I'll just cite one dramatic example.
Last fall's four major candidate debates could have swung the election, narrowly, to McCain. Obama's lead was not strong and we've seen before what can happen, with Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and Bush in 2000. Indeed, the performances by Obama or Biden in the four debates were not particularly strong. But the ticket won going away. For several reasons, of course, but I'd argue that online activity around the debates had a lot to do with it.
Why? You may recall that each of the debates ended with the TV commentators, by and large, claiming the Republican candidates (even Palin) surprisingly "held their own" and maybe even gained an edge. In elections past, this likely would have given the GOP a nice bump in the days that followed and led to a deadlock in the next polls.
But this year that "momentum" was blunted, even reversed by one big factor: the Web. Popular liberal sites immediately fact-checked the Republicans' statements and analyzed why those candidates had, in reality, lost ground. Even more importantly, this time around, various news organizations sponsored scientific instant polls and focus groups - and in every case (even over at Fox), they showed a landslide of public opinion in favor of the Democratic debater. Not even close. Palin, for example, had "held her own" against Biden only in the minds of the pundits.
The results not only came quickly, they were disseminated quickly via the Web, so the next day's news summaries all had to cite them.
It must have been humiliating for most of the TV pundits. One minute they were assuring viewers that McCain and Palin and held their own or more -and within a few minutes they had to cite polls showing that their analysis had been wholly wrong. Whoops.

In a follow-up diary, Eric picked up one of Amanda's themes, arguing that the outsider spirit live--and even has some impact on policy:

Generally, I think Amanda's right that the blogs can maintain an energy and passion by continuing with its outside status, even with a Democrat in the WH. (And I think lib bloggers have proved wrong their conservative critics who claimed they'd simply roll over for Obama in the WH and act as cheerleaders.) They key is that the blogosphere was never created (way back when) to be an appendage of the DNC. There are plenty other Beltway institutions that will robotically cheer Dem politicians no matter what they do. Instead, the blogs were created to give voice to liberalism in America. And if liberals today don't like some of the things they see in government, then the blogs are still quite willing to document that and give a cohesive voice to the left; a voice that did not exist the last time a Democrat was in the WH.
So I'd suggest that the question Armando raised about whether Obama will continue to receive the type of unquestioning love from the blogs (the kind of love he enjoyed last year) is being answered, and the answer is no. (See Amanda's comment re: DOMA.) And those critiques, I'd argue, are paying off. Witness the announcement about Obama extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

But Duncan Black offers a more nuanced view, seeing blogging's impact as perhaps more cultural--creating a liberal narrative--and seeing the major limit of blogging's impact coming from congressional staffers who still don't quite get a clear sense of how bloggers could be more valuable through working more closely together:

To me, since the beginning, the blogosphere's key feature has been to provide a sustained and cohesive unapologetic liberal narrative not found elsewhere. While I certainly hope that the Obama administration moves the country in a more progressive direction, and I will continue to push for this, like Amanda I don't have any sense bloggers are owed some sort of seat at the table.
The important failure of Democrats, particular the more liberal Dems who are obvious allies, to engage the blogosphere effectively comes not from the Obama administration but from members of Congress, and their staffs, who have never understood well enough the power of having alternative ways of getting information and messages out. Liberal blogs have never been empowered by those they have been trying to aid.
Arguably liberal bloggers can, and some have certainly tried to, do more to empower themselves, to leverage what influence they have to greater ends. And, arguably, we should. But few of us started ranting away on the internet with the expectation that we would be sitting down with members of Congress or administration officials. We didn't start blogging because we thought it would change the world.

Three Waves and A Wall Redux

If all these bloggers have valuable insights--and they do--what they don't have is any sort of definitive stance with respect to larger historical forces. And that's the new element I hope to add to this mix. This is not to say that I claim to know what will happen, much less what must happen. But I do think I have a sense of some major macro-historical factors that indicate something of what may happen, of possibilities that exist now which did not exist eight or 12 or 16 or 60 years ago. I wrote about them before in an early 2008 series "Three Waves and A Wall: 2008 And The American Future. As I explained in the first diary in the series,
the three waves are:

The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.

The rise and fall of successive world powers-Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us-described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.

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 wave helps explain why the GOP is in such total disarray. Were it not for the wall (described below) and its disorienting effect on Democrats, we'd be in the midst of a full-fledged realignment more similar to the aftermath of the 1932 election than anything seen since, except, perhaps the aftermath of the 1964 election, when Lyndon Johnson managed to push through an impressive array of programs largely intended to fulfill ambitious first stirred in the early post-1932 period.

The last time we had such an election was the anomalous 1968 election, which ushered in an era of divided government, the only such period in American history. Although nothing is written in stone, the pattern of history strongly suggests that the 2008 election will usher in a period of Democratic dominance lasting roughly 36 years. However, the example of 1896, which began a period of Republican dominance, clearly warns us that there's no assurance the dominant party will be internally unified or coherent.

The second wave indicates that we're at the end of a period reactionary politics that typically follows a stinging defeat at the peak of imperial power (the Vietnam War). The previous three dominant world powers turned their politics in a decidedly more egalitarian direction once the reactionary period came to a close.

The financial collapse of fall 2008 was tailor made for ushering in this change, however (as part of the "wall" described below), Barack Obama turned out to be much more deeply committed the worldview of finance capitalism than anyone seemed to previously realize, and this has lead to a significant blockage of this otherwise expected transition.

The third wave is very much associated with values of democratic participation, self-expression, gender equaltiy, and environmentalism, which have infused the online world not just in America, but around the world, including, as we have recently seen, such supposedly "other" cultures as Iran.

Then there was what the waves were crashing up against--the wall, as described in Part Four:

these forces stand opposed by a powerful obstructing wall, which I have referred to repeatedly under the rubric of hegemony, which has both an institutional and an ideological aspect. The ideology is authoritarian, anti-modern, anti-reason, and anti-democracy. Over the past decade, it has sought to overturn one election (1996) by hounding an elected President into acts of desperation for which it then sought to remove him from office. It sought-successfully, to steal another election in broad daylight by usurping the popular will and preventing the counting of ballots, based on legal "reasoning" by the Supreme Court which were declared null and void for any other purposes. It virtually ignored a mass murderer responsible for killing 3,000 Americans, and fraudulently took us to war with that mass murderer's chief ideological rival. It sought to turn the entire executive branch-but especially the Department of Justice-into an arm of the Republican National Committee, in a quest to establish permanent one-party rule. It sought to undermine the separation of powers, the architectural keystone of Constitution. It sought to nullify the right to habeas corpus, dating back to 1215 and the Magna Charta. It sought to turn the Federal Government into an instrument for taxing the public in order to amass enormous private wealth for friends of the President, Vice President and the Republican Party.
In short, it sought to turn America into a neo-feudal, pre-modern state. This agenda is so deeply and profoundly anti-American that the nation as a whole is in revolt. Approximately 50 percent of all Americans strongly disapprove of President Bush's job performance. At this point, four things, above all, are keeping back the tide of sweeping change. One, a deeply intimidate political "opposition" that is more like the GOP's hapless sidekick than a real opposition party. Two, a press corps[e] that functions primarily as a palace propaganda machine. Three, a broader array of institutional power, from politicized churches, to propagandistic "think tanks" to ideologically lock-step federal judges, that is militantly opposed to allowing even the slightest moves in the direction of changing course. Four, a public that has long been starved of any truly oppositional political discourse, so that it has an extremely difficult time formulating anything it wants in positive terms that are recognizable to more than a fragment of the public at large.
This is the nature of the wall.

Today, I would be inclined to put that somewhat differently. The Democrats are not simply intimidated, as I wrote in the passage above, they are also deeply constrained by having internalized a good deal of rightwing GOP ideology. But for the most part, the descriptions I offered in early 2008 still serve our discussion today.

Our Place In the Macro-Picture

So how does the framework just described relate to the future of blogging as discussed at TPMCafe? Simple answer? It tosses us into a multi-dimensional blender, and says, "Have fun!" While many people feel an understandable sense of let-down, the framework above suggests that we're just passing through a phase that's deceptively slow-moving and static. The fact that Obama's major policy initiatives are both disappointingly centrist and diminutive will not be the end of the story, given the dynamics of history at play.

For example, thinking only in terms of the first wave, for the moment-as if it could be considered in isolation-we need to let go of our disappointment that this isn't going to be 1933 with FDR's Hundred Days. Truth be told, FDR's Hundred Day wasn't all that hot, either. The first New Deal wasn't nearly as progressive as the second one, passed after the first one had largely fizzled and business elites had turned against Roosevelt. And though there's some small hope that we might follow a similar path, that hope, too, should be set aside. A much more plausible guide for what we're going through would be the rather decisive, but deeply ambiguous realignment of 1896. Not that we're living through an exact re-run-we aren't-but that a similar set of tensions are at play. Consider these three points:

(1) Like the Republican Party after 1896, the Democratic Party today is deeply divided against itself, which can potentially cripple its ability to definitively set the political agenda for new roughly-36-year cycle.

(2) Unlike the post-1896 era, there is presently little potential for something like the bipartisan Progressive Movement to emerge. Moreover, to the extent it is possible, this would not be a progressive movement, even in the somewhat conflicted sense of the original Progressive Movement. The record of Washington bipartisanship in recent years has routinely been retrograde, and shows every sign of continuing to be so.

While the Progressives were generally hostile to the Socialists who had a strong base in the recent immigrant class, they nonetheless shared some concerns in common, and their political competition sometimes resulted in genuine progress. This cannot be said of present-day DC-based bipartisanship. However, a similar alliance of techno-elitists and scruffy grassroots radical types definitely can be envisioned not just on net neutrality and related new media issues, but also, potentially, on campaign finance reform. This, in turn, genuinely could start to move mountains. This was brought up in a discussion thread on Chris's dairy, "I Got The 'Make Them Do It' Blues". Yoda made a comment raising the issue of the Clean Elections model and the surprising depth of ignorance about it on progressive blogs. (Yes, I take the hint. I'll be writing something about it soon, I promise). A few other commentators joined in as well. In particular, bruorton added:

I came on the thread to make exactly this point. Time to start coalescing the movement for public financing -- perhaps a timely addition to OpenLeft's excellent projects list? It is entirely possible, starting now, that we could propel this into a 2012 campaign issue.
First, it will need to be a 2010 campaign issue. One opening is the public perception of corporate lobbyists, which led to pledges in the '08 primaries to take various steps to block them from the WH. There is also Lessig's Change-Congress.org which could be a key player here.
This could be a real rallying cry for the many Democrats who do not see the dramatic changes in government they were expecting.

As disappointment with Obama's diminutive agenda sinks in over the next few weeks, months and years, substantially canceling the concentrated power of money in our politics could well emerge as the defining issue long enough for something truly transformational to be done. This is one way, of many that next few years of this highly-contested realignment could unfold.

(3) Directly contrary to Teddy Roosevelt among the Republican leadership of the 1896 era, the Democrats' most charismatic leader, Barack Obama, is aligned with the party establishment against the reformers, despite some very sparkling rhetoric to the contrary. The firmness of this alliance has yet to be seriously tested. If progressives in the Democratic Party mounted serious pressure, Obama might shift his allegiances somewhat, but this is yet to become a serious possibility--although that could be about to change (or is that merely the perpetual illusion with Obama?).

If we add the third wave of post-materialism to the mix, we can add:

(4) Just as Obama's charisma connected to the party establishment reverses the historical precedent of the 1896 era, there is a linked reversal in realm of post-materialist values. Obama is much more in tune with the expressive nature of such values, even though he is actually less supportive of the substance. This relates to the discussion above of his distancing from the blogosphere on the one hand, coupled with his sophisticated use of other online technology, and it contrasts with the more politically progressive members of Congress, and their failure to develop more effective partnerhips with progressive bloggers, also referenced in the TPMCafe discussion, by Duncan Black.

It's as if there were a cross-wiring of the natural connections one would expect from the macro-historical patterns. History, however, is filled with such examples. History is conflictual, not logical. Nonetheless, the existence of such contradictions always holds out the potential for resolution. Furthermore, if the blogosphere is to play a role in resolving such contradictions, we damn sure need to get much clearer on what they are and how they work.

And now to Wave 2:

(5) The attempt to preserve existing levels of elite privilege, most notably in the concentrated power of the financial sector, is almost certainly doomed to fail. The manner in which it will fail, and the fallout that follows from the failure, are far less certain. Nor is the time-frame in any way certain. But the continued well-known (though routinely denied) problems of the financial sector have strong historical parallels from earlier historical examples. Such levels of inequality are simply not sustainable, unless we set off on a new historical tangent, in which case the result is likely to be deeply confrontational, if not bloody.

Connecting all the above with my previous diary, Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours", it is at least plausible that the creation of Progressive Block refusing to vote for fatally compromised legislation could trigger a much broader realignment of forces, resolving some of the contradictions referred to above. Underlying this potential is the objective reality that Obama's stated goals cannot be realized by the strategy of top-down bipartisan compromise.

This strategy has already produced a fatally undersized stimulus package, and is on the verge of producing similarly inadequate climate change legislation, with a similar fate facing health care reform. While there may be short-term political gains to be made just from passing anything, no matter how inadequate, such a strategy cannot hold for long. Whatever else it may be, it is definitely not a strategy for ensuring political dominance for a roughly-36-year-cycle of American political history.

The question, quite simply, is whether the various tensions at play can be tamed and contained by the political establishment, or if they will swing increasingly out of control, forcing actions that will in turn create further openings for progressives to bring pressure to bear, and advance new political agendas. The brief survey above is meant to suggest some of the tensions at play beneath the surface of the current play of GOP disarray and Democratic disappointment.

But we would be remiss to also not add the increasing role of international relations that are increasingly liberated from Washington control, and increasingly close to the American people. The Iranian election aftermath is the big example of this so far, but it's unlikely to be the last, though others will surely take much different forms. The simple fact is, we are finally becoming the global village that Marshall McLuhan wrote about, not just in fact, but in common experience. Iran's meaning is dense, dynamic, complex and immediate-it is half like a mirror to us, half like a lover ("I'll Be Your Mirror" as Nico sang.)

I would like to have made this a much tighter, neater narrative, but the very messiness I'm wallowing in is part of the point. That's no excuse really, just an admission that I'm not really on top of this, still struggling in early stages of trying to make sense of how a wide ranging confluence of forces is not about to leave us alone. But if I wait to have it all figured out, I know it will be too late.

The group mind is orders of magnitude smarter than any of us, and that's the biggest point of all to be made here. It's not so much that bloggers can change the world. It's that bloggers are part of the emerging world mind , and because we are here that world mind has a different configuration than if we didn't exist. We're a long, long way from having the influence that the brain-dead troglodytes of Versailles have, but as Greg Mitchell notes above, we have enough influence that we may well have kept them from pocketing the election for McCain-Palin. Thus, however painfully obvious it is to us how much power we don't have, our very presence has altered the world mind in ways we can't usually perceive.

If there are things we can do to be significantly more powerful, those things will primarily be by way of making stronger connections with others-and by way of taking leaps that usually can't be foreseen in advance. It's not us, individually, or even collectively as the blogosphere that has real power. It's larger interconnectivity of which we are a part. And if DC right now can't make heads nor tails of us, we should probably worry more about the larger circle of people in the world we have yet to connect to who make us feel the same way. There's an enormous world of outsiders out there, and our job is to include them all.

It's with this sense of our own intermediary place in the scheme of things that I conclude with some tentative suggestions about things we might do, collaborating with others, to alter the shape of the emerging global mind, the ecology of our shared imaginary landscape. None of this can we do alone. Or even do at all. At best, we can facilitate a coming together that creates it. In that spirit, here's a sample list of three briefly-described suggestive ideas:

(1) Intensifying connections between blogs, advocacy groups, experts and geographically specific constituencies capable of directly lobbying representatives at every level from city councils, up through state legislatures and on to Congress.

"Senator Dorgan Supports The Public Option"

In the effort to pass a public health care option, state blogs are going to be key. Today, North Decoder, a great state blog out of North Dakota, shows why.
Elected officials are very responsive to local media. As such, North Decoder has been pressing the state's two Democratic Senators to make a public statement on the public option. Entering today, Stand with Dr. Dean listed both Senators Conrad and Dorgan as "unknowns" on the public option. However, due to the efforts of North Decdorer to push Conrad and Dorgan to provide answers, we can now put Byron Dorgan in the "yes" column.

not

(2) Developing a coherent methodology of policy preference polling

Locating Consensus for Democracy - A Ten-Year U.S. Experiment

(3) Developing a multi-skill training program for citizen activists to empower people to do everything from citizen journalism to running a statewide campaign.

and

cannot

None of the above can be done by bloggers alone. We cannot will them into existence. Which is why I offer them only as a list of suggestive ideas. My point is not that we should do these particular things, but to suggest that there is an entire realm of activities we can engage in that we have not even begun to consider that could substantially empower common citizens to become much more powerful political actors. And it would be a very good idea indeed for us to spend some time thinking about new ways to empower the other 290-some-million citizen outsiders in America today.

Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours"

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:00:00 GMT

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....
[continued on the flip]

So, you don't get to know what is in the bill until it is too late. Further, you get no chances to improve the bill. Yet further, Collin Peterson and his corporate interests get pretty much everything they want.
Keep in mind that this is on top of a bill which will not result in any more renewable energy than the business as usual model, and that will actually expand coal. And the Senate will probably only make it worse.
Without a hardline group of progressives willing to join with Republicans and defeat Democratic legislation unless that legislation meets certain progressive criteria, every legislative fight will follow this process of backroom deals with corporate interests resulting in an inexorable right-wing slide.

This is where things stand today, and it reflects the continued lack of progressive engagement in a Gramcian "culture war"--a struggle to gain coordinated control of reality-defining cultural institutions. The lack of a hardline progressive block in Congress is just one aspect of a much larger failure to think and act strategically beyond the limits of one particular campaign, legislative battle or issue.

Chris goes on to describe what's needed to change the congressional dynamic, and what he describes--however briefly--is an excellent starting point for grasping what it would look like for progressives to finally begin responding in kind to the rightwing culture war of the past 30+ years. As Chris explains:

Further, this group of progressives, which I call a Progressive Block (and yes, the "k" is intentional), needs to publicly draw clear lines in the sand long before draft legislation is introduced. Such public announcements allow the netroots and grassroots to help organize around the line in the sand. Otherwise, given the backroom nature of these dealings, there is no way for the progressive activist base to play any meaningful role in the legislative process, and all negotiation power is ceded to corproate lobbyists.
We either have the Progressive Block, which continues to give us leverage in the health care fight, or we have this disastrous climate change bill path where already weakened legislation gets dominated by Collin Peterson. The choice is ours.

The choice is ours, but to make that choice effective--one that exists as a real, living possibility, we need to break it down into bit-sized pieces that individual citizen-activists can actually do something about. So I want to begin by picking Chris's description apart a bit to look at the different elements involved. Here's my first stab at doing that:

(1) We need a Progressive Block of legislators with sufficient numbers to block legislation that doesn't meet the basic standards they set. Without the mathematically potential nothing else makes much sense. Some totally different strategy would have to be devised. Fortunately, the Progressive Caucus does provide a large enough group of votes. Of course, this doesn't mean we can count on having such a block. But it does mean that creating such a block is at least theoretically possible with the existing Congress. This in turn means that netroots/grassroots activists can lobby existing members of the Progressive Caucus to join in such an effort, preferrentialy as a matter of principled commitment, but if not on a case-by-case basis.

(2) We need that Progressive Block to be capable of coming up with such basic standards. Just because people may agree in principle doesn't mean that they can actually reach agreement on a common set of standards for any given piece of legislation. This sort of capacity is most likely to increase with practice, as people learn to work together more effectively. It cannot be assumed to exist from the beginning, but it can be assumed that if people work on it in good faith, this capacity can be developed and strengthened over time.

(3) We need them to be willing to follow through, and actually block legislation that fails to meet their standards. This is probably the most difficult aspect of the congressional side of things to begin with. The existing dynamic so strongly favors special interests and those congressmembers who work closely with them that it's extremely challenging to get a group of progressives to be willing to walk away from legislation that gives them at least some of what they want--especially after the long drought of the Bush years. Yet, without this willingness, we have nothing. Therefore, netroots/grassroots activists can play a crucial role in helping to fortify the resolve of congressmembers, so that they are wiliing to make this commitment--and to stick by it.

(4) We need them to publicly announce these standards well in advance of drafting legislation. Compared to the first three, this should be relatively easy to achieve. But that doesn't mean it can be overlooked. Being early on the scene is vital--especially since the special interests have already been on the scene for decades prior to any conceivable legislation. No matter how early we may start our organizing, we are boujnd to be playing catch-up.

(5) We need netsroots and grassroots individuals and organizations to mobilize around the announced standards. Right now, these exist primarily in the form of potential participants. How far that potential is from reality can be seen in the spectacle of environmental groups like the LCV organizing on behalf of the highly compromised climate change bill, just to get something passed. At this point in time, it's probably the case that those most willing to mobilize in support are those with the least institutional capacity. While far from ideal, this simply reflects why this whole strategy is necessary in the first place.

We need to simply accept this as a matter of fact, and tell ourselves, "That's fine. We need all the new blood we can find." Particularly when it comes to environmental activism, local activists are a far more tough-minded lot, IMHO, and increasingly many reflect an environmental justice attitude, that fundamentally integrates race and class into its thinking.

(6) We need effective means for these activists to bring pressure to bear on Senators and Representatives in every step of committee proceedings, up to and including House/Senate conference committees, as well as on floor debates and votes. We certainly have a variety of the tools we need to do this, with varying degrees of experience in using them. The potential is there to turn our scattered experience into dependable, well-run lobbying campaigns, including public media components as well as organized lobbying efforts. Nut this will clearly take a great deal of organized netsroots/grassroots effort in order to make it successful. The upside is that the efforts involved in making this a reality will pay off in the form of organizational capacity that can make itself felt in other ways as well. For example, this sort of organizing helps create a strong foundation for supporting the development of progressive candidates who come directly from the ranks of progressive organizations.

As I said before, this is just a first stab. A bare-bones outline, if you will. There's certainly room for a good deal more detailed breakdown of (5) and (6), for example. And there's need for discussion of more general organizing principles, such as the development of messaging that's coherently grounded in progressive frameworks. On the congressional side, we would be greatly aided by the reinstatement of the Office of Technology Assessment, which provided a solid reality-based baseline for legislation prior to its destruction by Newt Gingrich in 1995. But I wanted to kick off this discussion with a relatively concise, manageable list of things we need, so as not to recreate feelings of overhwelm and helplessness. It is a big job. But it can be cut down into smaller, more manageable little jobs. And we can organize ourselves to get them done. As Chis said in his original post, "The choice is ours."

Demos Reports: Airline Deregulation Isn't Good For You. Thoughts On Transportation & Freedom Ensue

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Warning: Don't let the beginning of this diary fool you. It's actually about hegemony & the liberal vs. conservative view of "freedom".

Demos has a new report out, Flying Blind: Airline Deregulation Reconsidered, and what do you know? Surpise! Surprise! Deregulation doesn't work for the airline industry either!

While the report focuses attention on the current sorry state of the airline industry, and its underlying structural problems that lie behind the recent rash of airline crashes and near-misses such as the crash of the Continental/Colgan flight to Buffalo, it traces current conditions back to the decision, 30 years ago, to deregulate the airline industry.

How's this for an astonishing fact: Since 2000, U.S. airlines have reported net losses of more than $33 billion--almost twice their accumulated profits from 1938 to 1999!

Of course, the trump card for the deregulators is the claim of low fares, and broad affordability, but the executive summary notes:

[Economist Alfred] Kahn [the "father of airline deregulation"] and others have taken refuge in the argument that deregulation has produced lower airfares and wider access to air travel. The Demos report concludes that even this benefit is widely overstated. "While the price of flying has come down over the past thirty years," the report notes, "it decreased at a comparable rate from the 1940s through the 1960s. In any event, low airfares are as much a problem as an achievement if they leave an industry without the resources to maintain service standards and make crucial investments in equipment, technology, and human capital."

If anything this understates the case. If deregulation has resulted in net industry losses, those fare reductions were paid for by the airlines creditors! What kind of a business model is that? Considering the amount of technological innovation, and the increased traffic volume, it seems altogether possible that fares would have fallen more without deregulation! Heck, the food might even have been edible!

This is only one industry, but the story's the same everywhere you look: the deregulation mania has been a disaster for America. Sure, stupid regulations can be a pain in the ass. But that's about stupidity, not regulation per se.

This is an excellent report, but we need to build on this and other detailed reporting on specific failures of de-regulation to develop a new narrative stressing the positive value of smart, far-sighted regulation in crafting systems that work for everyone. If freedom means anything, it's not just freedom from arbitrary restraints, it's freedom to do things of one's own choosing, and the capacity to do things depends in part on soundly-functioning systems, from cars that won't blow up to government that won't get you killed for reasons they lie to you about. That's why smart regulations expand our freedom, rather than restricting it.

A few juicy tidbits from the report on the flip--along with some broader thoughts on history, transportation and freedom.
First, as promised, the tidbits:

STATISTICAL HIGHLIGHTS:

Out of roughly 150 low-cost airlines founded since 1978, fewer than a dozen are still operating; they account for only about 10 percent of current airline capacity.

Before deregulation, there were 11 major trunkline carriers; today, the country has six large mainline carriers-American, United, Delta, Continental, US Airways, and Southwest. The first three, along with their regional partners, control two-thirds of domestic air travel.

More than 100,000 pilots, mechanics, flight attendants, ticket agents, cargo handlers, and other airline workers who lost their jobs since 2001.

The number of people on the payroll of the legacy airlines dropped 26 percent between 1998 and 2006.

DOT Data for US Airways, United, Delta, American and Northwest show labor costs falling by nearly a third, on average, between the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2006.

According to the U.S. DOT, 2008 total baggage-fee charges by U.S Airlines came to more than $1.1 billion-a figure that is expected to triple by 2010.

In 2007, more than a quarter of all flights were delayed, accounting for 112 million lost passenger hours.

More than 100 communities have lost air service over the past decade.

And now, some recommendations:

The report makes clear an urgent need for Congress and the relevant executive agencies to make a thorough-going study of the industry's troubles. The authors recommend creation of a federal task force to examine the industry's problems and propose solutions. Specifically, they call on the task force to:

Develop a plan to moderate the booms and busts and build a more stable domestic airline industry. Here, the remedies could include capital-reserve requirements and bankruptcy reform.

Expedite (and establish stable financing for) a modernized Air Traffic Control (ATC) network.

Develop coordinated national and regional transportation plans, with provision for high speed rail networks to eliminate the need for excessive short-haul air traffic.

Devise a code of customer service that would, among other things, protect passengers from wildly varying prices and establish more uniform procedures for ensuring remuneration and rebooking when a flight is delayed or cancelled.

Promote more equitable and stable labor practices and return to the pre-deregulation practice of pattern bargaining in order to discourage airline competition based on low wages and high-pressure working conditions.

Insist on uniform airline safety standards, including mechanic credentials and oversight of maintenance facilities.

Develop new regulations to curtail airline consolidation and promote genuine competition where feasible, while, at the same time, cracking down on monopoly pricing and the other abuses of concentration on routes that are incapable of supporting more than one or two carriers.

Get that?

Develop coordinated national and regional transportation plans, with provision for high speed rail networks to eliminate the need for excessive short-haul air traffic.

Another federal program to give Americans more freedom! More choices! More freedom of movement! More opportunity!

First interstate commerce. Then the canals. Then the railroads. Then the highways. Then air travel. Then the interstate. Now high-speed rail. Over and over and over again, the federal government has played a vital role in promoting American's freedom of movement, which is one of the fundamental foundations on which all others freedoms draw.

It's time we started crafting narratives like that, and repeating them over and over and over again. Not just because they're true--which they are--but because knowing the truth about what makes us more free helps us continue to make ourselves more free.

A Broader View on Freedom & Transportation

In his book, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, George Lakoff explains that the concept of freedom is rooted in the bodily experience of physical freedom to move, that liberals and conservative flesh out the concept of freedom in different ways, making freedom a deeply contested idea, that traditionally the liberal idea of freedom has predominated, but that conservatives have harped on it incessantly for the past several decades as part of their struggle for political dominance. Lakoff argues that liberals and progressives need to reclaim the concept of freedom as their own, articulating why their concept is the better one.

It's only natural that transportation issues--which also involve freedom of movement--should be one arena in which liberals and progressives take up Lakoff's advice. Adding a bit of social history to Lakoff's mix, it helps to consider the following: Conservatives argue from the position of inherited, unearned privilege and power. From this point of view--that of the pre-modern feudal aristocracy--democracy itself is a theft of their "freedom", the freedom to do whatever they damn well please, whoever gets hurt, or even killed in the process. Rule of law generally, and democracy in particular restricts their "freedom", which they think of primarily in terms described as "negative liberty"--freedom from restraints. But liberals and progressive argue from the position of commoners, and for commoners, the rule of law generally, and democracy in particular expands their freedom, which they think of primarily in term of described as "positive liberty"--freedom to engage in pursuing their hopes and dreams.

Naturally, freedom includes both freedom from and freedom to. The question is, which of these two concerns predominates over the other? Hardline conservatives go so far as to claim that freedom to doesn't exist. Liberals and progressives, OTOH, tend to see freedom from as a component of freedom to. For example, freedom from government coercion and restrictions embodied in the First Amendment protect ones freedom to speak, assemble and worship as one pleases. The value of the former is entirely dependent on the value of the later. It is freedom to that is essential. Freedom from is merely a means to an end--vitally important in real life, to be sure, but philosophically derivative.

Transportation issues are one way of making the abstract, philosophical priority of freedom to quite concrete. Generally speaking, people travel much more because of positive liberty (the desire to go somewhere), rather than negative liberty (the desire simply to escape). Even the desire to escape--to "get away from it all"--is usually informed by at least some notion of where one wants to go, even if it's as vague as "out west" or ~~"hiking the Appalachian Trail"~~ Argentina.

More importantly, people take it for granted that getting where you are going is more important than the rules and regulations one must have in order to get there. The "rules of the road" are generally accepted as the, well, "rules of the road". And this is precisely the liberal/progressive idea of freedom in a nutshell.

The issues of airline regulation, with which this diary began, are but an expanded version of the "rules of the road". The careless dismantling of those rules and the price we've paid for that failed experiment are an object lesson of the wrongheadedness of the conservative view of freedom. "Freedom from" is not the be-all, end-all and cure-all. Quite the opposite, it only makes sense in service to "freedom to." The more deeply we think and talk about the nature and history of transportation, the more conscious we become of the essential logic of the liberal/progressive view of freedom.

And that's a very big thing, indeed.

We also much better understand why America is an essentially liberal/progressive country based on liberal/progressive values and ideas. After all, we are a land of immigrants, a land of people who traveled here to live out their dreams, and bequeath greater freedom to their children.

And that, perhaps, is even bigger. It's high time we stopped letting conservatives pretend that they're the real Americans. They're not. We are. But they can become real Americans. If only they'll take off their imaginary crowns, and join the rest of us commoners, in the real world of our common dreams.

Michael Lind On The Hegemonic War Against Social Security

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Today, the trustees who oversee Social Security and Medicare issue their annual report, and Michael Lind has an excellent preparedness guide posted at Salon to help you deal with the inevitable propaganda assault. It's got the catchy title, "Let's cut Social Security to pay for banker bailouts!" because that is, at bottom what the privatizers are all about this time around, as Lind explains:

By the way, the huge expansion of the deficit and debt in the last year has had nothing to do with Social Security (without which not only retirees but the economy as a whole would have been much worse off). Indeed, thanks to the modest stimulus and the much larger bailouts, the contribution of Social Security to long-term deficits -- always pretty small -- has just gotten a lot smaller in relative terms. Anyone who says that the costs of the bailout mean we must now cut Social Security is literally saying that in order to bail out the bankers who created this crisis we need to slash benefits for American retirees.

But in addition to a hand-guide to the standard bogus arguments, Lind includes some of the backstory about how the modern assault on Social Security got its start:

Who is behind this disinformation campaign? The deficit hawks include billionaires like Ross Perot and Pete Peterson, Republican conservatives, libertarians and "fiscally conservative" Blue Dog Democrats. This coalition has campaigned against Social Security for more than a quarter of a century.
In 1983, in the Cato Journal published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Stuart Butler, a transplanted British Thatcherite, and Peter Germanis published their manifesto "Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy." Small-government conservatives, they argued, should learn from Lenin, who sought to shape history rather than wait patiently for the inevitable evolution of socialism: "Unlike many other socialists at the time, Lenin recognized that fundamental change is contingent both upon a movement's ability to create a focused political coalition and upon its success in isolating and weakening its opponents."

You really do have to ask yourself why it is that the right is so in love with authoritarian Soviet leaders. Lenin in this case, Trotsky as the father of neo-conservatism. When it gets right down to it, they really have no use at all for Edmund Burke. And why should they? Once Social Security and the rest of the New Deal and Great Society institutions became part of the organic fabric of American life, Burke would have defended keeping them in place. And that would never do for this rapacious crowd of sociopaths.

Lind's account continues on the flip

Our two Leninist libertarians went on to argue: "First, we must recognize that there is a firm coalition behind the present Social Security system, and that this coalition has been very effective in winning political concessions for many years. Before Social Security can be reformed [destroyed], we must begin to divide this coalition and cast doubt on the picture of reality it presents to the general public." Because the "political power of the elderly will only increase in the future," Butler and Germanis argued that any plan to phase out Social Security should assure the elderly and near-elderly that they would get their benefits: "By accepting this principle, we may succeed in neutralizing the most powerful element of the coalition that opposes structural reform."

Of course, it's worth noting what's totally irrelevant to this calculus-that is, whether or not the "firm coalition behind the present Social Security system" actually represents the overwhelming majority of the American people, as well as basic fiscal prudence. In short, one must ask if regarding Social Security as supported by a "firm coalition" is not in itself a symptom of delusional thinking, which is incapable of seeing anything in terms other than coalition politics. My point here is that those who do not believe in the existence of the common good (as opposed to special interest benefits) are ontologically incapable of serving it. This was true of Stalin, and it's equally true of Stalinist movement conservatives.

Lind continues:

While pursuing a divide-and-rule policy to "neutralize" the elderly and other supporters of Social Security, the authors of the Leninist strategy called for libertarians to build up a counter-alliance consisting of institutions that could profit from the privatization of Social Security: "That coalition should consist of not only those who will reap benefit from the IRA-based private system ... but also the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public [emphasis added]." They continue: "The business community, and financial institutions in particular, would be an obvious element in this constituency. Not only does business have a great deal to gain from a reform effort designed to stimulate private savings, but it also has the power to be politically influential and to be instrumental in mounting a public education campaign."

There is a very clear and obvious asymmetry here: the existing system benefits the nation as a whole, as well as tens of millions of individuals who receive modest, but utterly vital monthly checks-both for retirement, and survivor benefits. The opposing coalition would consist entirely of affluent special interests. It's a classic case of organizing the few to pillage the many. It's what real conservatism has always been about, dating back to ancient Sumeria and the earliest Egyptian pharohs-if not beyond.

Lind Again:

In true cunning Leninist fashion, the opponents of Social Security would disguise their revolutionary goal by pretending to be interested only in modest, piecemeal reforms: "The first element consists of a campaign to achieve small legislative changes that embellish the private IRA system, making it in practice a small-scale Social Security system that can supplement the federal system." Only when all of the pieces were in place -- when the concerns of the elderly had been "neutralized" by reassuring words, when banks and other businesses seeking to cash in on Social Security privatization were part of the libertarian alliance, and when business-funded campaigns of "education" [that is, propaganda] had convinced most Americans that Social Security was untrustworthy, would the Leninist right reveal its true colors: "If these objectives are achieved, we will meet the next financial crisis in Social Security with a private alternative ready in the wings -- an alternative with which the public is familiar and comfortable, and one that has the backing of a powerful political force."

Hello Shock Doctrine!

I mean, really. Is this the ultimate smoking gun, or what? Twenty-six years ago, Butler and Germanis, in a journal they must have expected few if any non-libertarians to read, laid out the elements of the dishonest and cynical campaign against Social Security that the right has pursued ever since, right up to George W. Bush's support in his second term for the partial privatization of Social Security. Stuart Butler is still at it; only last year he called, again, for abolishing Social Security as an entitlement and turning it into a program for the poor that would be funded or not from year to year at the whim of Congress.

You need to read the whole thing, but this should be enough to give you the flavor and to explain what I take to be the moral: These are deeply immoral people, and all who make these sorts of arguments are either evil or dupes. There is no good faith negotiating with the likes of these, and those who believe otherwise are themselves second-order dupes.

Hegemonic warfare is no more a disinterested marketplace of ideas than Stalin was the heir of Benjamin Franklin, and Tom Paine.

On The Nature Of Hegemony And Militarism

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 10 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

A lot of folks got angry over my diary, "Obama's Somnambulant Embrace of Jingoistic Militarism". In doing so, they inadvertently helped illustrated the point I was trying to make: that Obama's uncritical parroting of standard military-praising rhetoric is politically quite dangerous. Most of those commenting seemed to be utterly oblivious to the fact that I was trying to talk about language, how it shapes our perceptions, how it hides or reveals aspects of the truth. Instead, they were fixated on the object of the language-the military-or better still, on me for daring either to criticize Obama and/or to criticize the troops.

All of this behavior exemplifies aspects of how hegemony works, how it makes it impossible for us to communicate clearly with one another, instead contending endlessly with distorted and misleading assumptions built into what we take to be our "common sense" understanding.

What is hegemony? It's ideology in drag as common sense. To reinforce hegemony, one does not have to explicitly say "I agree with the hegemonic position that XYZ." It's enough to simply repeat a piece of conventional wisdom, particularly in a situation where a more thoughtful, critical observation had the potential to spark critical reflection, even dialogue. And this is exactly what Obama did at his "100 days" press conference, responding to the question:

During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?

By saying, in part:

Enchanted? Enchanted. I will tell you that when I -- when I meet our servicemen and -women, enchanted is probably not the word I would use. (LAUGHTER) But I am so profoundly impressed and grateful to them for what they do. They're really good at their job. They are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices on our behalf. They do so without complaint. They are fiercely loyal to this country.

One of the folks attacking me, Querent, wrote about that quote:

This quote in no way "lets the Republicans off the hook for decades of slandering Democrats' patriotism". There is no connection between what he said and what you said it meant. Republicans are not mentioned. Neither are Democrats. The absence of a connection is so obvious that I find it unbelievable that you think there is one.

The connection, of course, is framework of hegemonic discourse, the framework in which only Republicans and conservatives love the troops, and loving the troops is synonymous with sending them off to be killed fighting wars that conservative chickenhawks insist on comparing to fighting off Hitler (whom the conservatives of the 1930s looked at with admiration).

To Querent, the very subject, not just of this one diary, but of the vast majority of what I'm writing about this weekend is quite literally invisible.

There is no framework of background assumptions that everyone has to negotiate. Everyone knows that!

Then you say it "tacitly endorses the jingoistic hegemonic discourse they've employed to radically subvert the very essence of our national identity as a republic." It doesn't. It's not related to jingoistic, hegemonic discourse in any way, except in your overheated imagination.

Of course that's absurd. Praising the bravery, loyalty and dedication of troops is one of the most time-honored ways of evading any question about the morality of what they're being used for. War-mongers have been doing this for thousands of years. And when someone who is not a warmonger does this, they are nontheless reinforcing the hegemony of warmonger discourse.

And that's just exactly what Obama did.

None of those words or concepts appear there, nor does anything about our national identity. You interpolated all of that. And you completely misinterpreted what the President said.

Again, it's not necessary for any specific term from the hegemonic discourse to appear in any particular passage. That's the nature of hegemony: invoke part of it, and you invoke the whole. That's the whole point.

Let me clarify a couple of things. I never supported the Iraq war. At this point in time, I can't really see much point in resuming the Afghan war, either, and I am not in any way in favor of bombing anybody with drone missles, let alone wedding parties and other innocent civilians. I am also not willing to give the President a pass on either of these stupid policies.

In which case, having seen through all of these specifics, Querent ought to be able to see through the whole, right?

Well, not so much. In fact, that's why Gramsci had to develop the concept of hegemonic discourse in the first place.

Furthermore, my saying you were full of shit was not an indication that I was "upset". I wasn't upset.
The fact is that what the man said, and what you said it meant, indicated, implied, or "tacitly endorsed" are totally and completely unconnected, and what he said did not, in fact, mean, indicate, imply or "tacitly endorse" any of the stuff you said it did. You pulled a bogus connection between the two out of thin air, and tried to present them as synonymous. You can argue that the "context" provides the connection, but it doesn't. You just made it up.

Again, remember, what Obama did--praising the troops, and not even in response to a question about them, but TWISTING the question he was asked--is a time-honored warmonger tactic to distract attention and discussion from what the troops are being used to do. I did not invent that. There is nothing arbitrary in relying on that long history to consider the implications of what Obama is saying.

And this:

Stuff like this makes you look like a loony. When you then try to defend it with condescending remarks about the education, literacy, or ability to reason of people who point out the fatuousness of your remarks, you look like an ego-crazed loony. If that's the way you want to present yourself, knock yourself out. But don't be surprised when you lose the respect of people who otherwise agree with you. Like me.

That's simply a direct expression of how hegemony is supposed to work: It defines common sense. And anyone who questions it, who speaks against, must be crazy--" a loony"--"an ego-crazed loony".

Such is the power of hegemony.

21 Percenters Rool! Conservative/Military/Media Hegemony In Action

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Under the headline, "Some Things Never Fail to Surprise," Josh Marshall asks:

Can it really be true that the list of Americans who will appear on the Sunday shows this weekend is David Petraeus, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and John McCain?

Link says yes:

• ABC, This Week: Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of CENTCOM; Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
• CBS, Face The Nation: Former Vice President Dick Cheney.
• CNN, State Of The Union: Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of CENTCOM.
• Fox News Sunday: Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of CENTCOM; former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA).
• NBC, Meet The Press: Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan; Asif Ali Zardari, President of Pakistan.

Josh says: "I guess it really is a center-right nation."

You betcha!

So I guess they won't be discussing NYT reporter David Barstow's Pulitzer Prize

his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

The Pulitzers were announced on April 20, but somehow the Sunday shows just haven't been able to squeeze him in to discuss how they and their network bosses were in the tank for BushCo's criminally fraudulent war, that has actually inflamed hatred and boosted terrorist recruitment against the US. No, the Inspector General's report supposedly clearing BushCo of all wrongdoing was quietly withdrawn this week, and the only national TV interview Barstow has had was on Democracy Now! just this Friday.

And I guess they also won't be discussing former Afghan prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai's call for an investigation into charges that US soldiers are trying to convert Afghans to Christianity, following a report on Al Jazeera. That, too, will only be discussed on Democracy Now, as it was on on Wednesday.

These are two different stories that deal with the workings of hegemony and the military, and they won't get any discussion whatsoever in the corporate media, even though one of them won the top journalistic prize in the nation. What clearer demonstration of hegemony at work could you possibly ask for?
Molitary/Media Hegemony

From Democracy Now! with David Barstow, here's most of the intro before the interview proper begins:

AMY GOODMAN: We begin our show today with New York Times reporter David Barstow. He recently won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for exposing how dozens of retired generals working as radio and television analysts had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to military contractors that benefited from policies they defended.
Barstow uncovered Pentagon documents that repeatedly refer to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration themes and messages to millions of Americans in the form of their own opinions.
The so-called analysts were given hundreds of classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points and given free trips to Iraq and other sites paid for by the Pentagon.
David Bartow wrote, quote, "Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse-an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks."
The officials appeared on all the main cable news channels-Fox News, CNN and MSNBC-as well as the three nightly network news broadcasts.
The Pentagon program started during the build-up to the Iraq war.
BILL O'REILLY: You met with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
MAJ. GEN. PAUL VALLELY: Special briefing on Thursday. Very interesting. A lot of good information, especially about post-Saddam, post-regime time, what are we going to do then? And it's a very well laid-out plan.
AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon continued to use retired generals to counter criticism on various issues, ranging from Guantanamo to the surge in Iraq. In some cases, analysts would appear on cable news programs live from the Pentagon just minutes after receiving a special briefing.
WOLF BLITZER: This is just coming into CNN right now. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired US generals. Our own military analyst, retired US Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh of that meeting. He's joining us now live from the Pentagon.
MAJ. GEN. DONALD SHEPPERD: The message needs to be, imagine an Iraq-imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt for tourists, combined with oil and water and land and resources. Imagine the effect of that. That's the message that has to get out to the American people.

So, Major General Paul Vallely assures us, via Bill O'Reilly, that there's "a very well laid-out plan" for post-Saddam Iraq, and Major General Donald Shepperd assures us, via Wolf Blitzer, that Iraq is terrorist threat number one, with Zarqawi about to overthrow Saddam and blow us all to smithereens.

Good to know!

I quote that at length because it's such a clear and comprehensive demonstration of how seamlessly and integrably the use of retired military officers fit into the strategy of lying the US into an illegal war that not only had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but that actually inflamed terrorist tendencies and empowered bin Laden by destroying his most prominent ideological rival.

Of course, any astute observer at the time just had to know that something fishy was going on. As "W" Blitzer himself told us:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired US generals.

What possible reason was there for Rumsfeld to hold such a meeting, except for feeding a propaganda operation? Especially when he goes right on to say:

Our own military analyst, retired US Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh of that meeting. He's joining us now live from the Pentagon.

In short, this was not a "hidden operation" in any meaningful sense of the words. It was blatantly right out there in the open for all to see. This is not to detract from Barstow's work. Being able to see the obvious right in front of you is one thing. Digging deep behind the scenes, and getting a wide-ranging detailed story about everything that's going into it, and how it fits together snugly with everything else--that's a whole different matter.

But the fact that even now the obvious surface of this story remains studious ignored--now that's the essence of hegemony in action. You want to know about war? Ask a retired general! It's just common sense! That's hegemony: ideology in drag as a common sense.

And here's a discussion of the Pentagon's whitewash report, denying any wrong-doing, and how they had to retract it:

AMY GOODMAN: Let's begin by talking about this report that has been retracted by the Pentagon. Explain exactly what it said and where it was and how it was retracted.
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, on January 14th of this year, as you pointed out, the inspector general came out with this long-awaited report that was-essentially, a group of members of Congress, after the stories ran, asked for the inspector general to take a look at this program that I wrote about and look at a couple of key questions. One was, did it violate longstanding laws that we have that forbid the Pentagon from targeting the American public with propaganda? And another was this question of whether or not the special access that was granted to the military analysts who participated in this program, whether that access was used to help them in the competition for contracts related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.
And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, General Barry McCaffrey, who's probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors. Well, I had written 5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors, either as someone who sat on the boards of publicly traded companies, as a consultant to many defense contractors, and as an advisor to a private equity firm in New York that invests heavily in the biggest defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, it became pretty clear that there was something wrong with this report.
What we've learned in the last few days is that a couple of different independent inquiries happened inside the inspector general's office in the wake of that report, in the wake of concerns that were being raised by members of Congress and others that there was something wrong with this report. And as they dug deeper and deeper and deeper into it, they just found more and more factual errors, flaws in methodology. We learned that the people who did the initial report didn't even bother, apparently, to read all of the emails that we had pried loose over the course of a two-year Freedom of Information Act battle with the Defense Department. So, ultimately, they came very reluctantly to the conclusion that the only thing that they could do was simply to rescind the entire report.
We'll see where it goes from here. There are some members of Congress who are saying, "We need to know more about why that inspector general's report went so far off the track."

If there really was any seriousness to turning over a new leaf now, in the aftermath of the GOP trifecta driving America into the ditch, then certainly part of what's required would be getting to the bottom of a whitewash like this and taking harsh corrective action to deter the possibility of it ever happening again. But, of course, if the original Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the program itself can't even break through in the corporate media, it's pretty damn obvious how dead set against change the establishment really is, no matter how badly the BushCo system has damaged America.

This is the sort of routine, all-pervasive business-as-usual, institutionalized attitude that typifies what's meant by hegemony, and that stands in rock solid opposition to even considering the sorts of sweeping changes that are necessary to get our military back into a properly functioning condition.

Forget real change not being on the table. It's not even on the shopping list. Heck, it's not even in stock at the grocery store.

Military/Theocracy Hegemony

Here's part of the introduction to the Democracy Now! segment on prostelization by and within the military:

AMY GOODMAN: The former prime minister of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, has called for an investigation into allegations that US soldiers are trying to convert Afghans to Christianity. He said, quote, "This is a complete deviation from what they are supposed to be doing."
His comments come after a report on Al Jazeera showed footage of soldiers at Bagram Air Base discussing how to distribute Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari. The US military is denying it allows its soldiers to proselytize to Afghans. The military claims the Bibles shown in the video had been confiscated and destroyed and were "never distributed." Admiral Mike Mullen told a Pentagon briefing Monday, quote, "It certainly is, from the United States military's perspective, not our position to ever push any specific kind of religion, period."
The Pentagon has also sharply criticized Al Jazeera for releasing the year-old footage, which was shot by filmmaker and former soldier Brian Hughes. Military spokesperson Colonel Greg Julian said, quote, "Most of this is taken out of context. This is irresponsible and inappropriate journalism. There is no effort to go out and proselytize to Afghans."
Well, on Tuesday, Al Jazeera released unedited footage of the US soldiers' Bible study in Bagram to counter the Pentagon's allegations. These excerpts from the unedited video show military chaplain, Captain Emmit Furner, leading the discussion on the definition of the US Central Command's General Order Number One that explicitly forbids active-duty troops from trying to convert people to any religion.
CAPTAIN EMMIT FURNER: By all means, do as scripture tells you to do and share the word, but be careful how you do it. Do it professionally; represent the Christian faith in a professional manner. Proselytizing is against the rules. That means going out and just actively seeking out somebody. I'm not going to say a lot about it. Just be careful. Remember to represent the Christian faith in a respectable, professional manner. And there are ways to win people to Christ that not overbearing or offensive to people. There are ways to do it.
Why do you think there's a general order against it, proselytizing? Do we know what it means in order to proselytize?
SOLDIER: You mean, Army [inaudible] a general order?
SOLDIER: It's General Order Number One.
CAPTAIN EMMIT FURNER: Number one, man.
SERGEANT JON WATT: You cannot proselytize, but you can give [inaudible].
CAPTAIN EMMIT FURNER: Alright, let's talk about it. What do you think? Our ability to interact with the culture here is important for our mission in this country, so we can eventually hand this thing back over them to let them do their own thing. The more that we win over the hearts and minds, the better we're going to be in accomplishing our mission to eradicate insurgents and Taliban and everybody else who's bad. We want more on our side, and we're not going to have more on our side if they see us as Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, critical people. I'm not saying you don't share the word. That's what you do as a Christian. But you share the word in a smart manner: love, respect, consideration for their culture and their religion. That's what a Christian does is appreciation for other human beings. But at the same time, I'm not telling you not to share the word of God. I'm telling you to share the word of God, but be smart about it, please....
AMY GOODMAN: The initial report aired by Al Jazeera included footage of Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, calling on soldiers to hunt people for Jesus.
LT. COL. GARY HENSLEY: The Special Forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians: we hunt people for Jesus. We do. We hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into kingdom. Right? That's what we do. That's our business.

In short, this is a candid look at how forces within the military are continuing to act as Crusaders, in direct contradiction of our claims that we are doing no such thing. This is, quite frankly, the most counter-productive thing we could possibly do. And yet, it goes on, and when it is exposed, rather than take any steps to try to put a stop to it, the military simply denies it. How has anything changed? How can anyone expect anything to change, when Obama has made it transparently clear that kissing up to the religious right is one of his highest priorities?

The discussion begins:

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Sharlet, first you. Talk about your reaction to these videotapes and the response by the military that it's taken out of context.
JEFF SHARLET: I think that's anything but the truth. You know, what we see on that videotape is really just the tip of the iceberg. When Mikey Weinstein, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, came to me and said, "You know, you should be writing about this subject," I was a little skeptical that it could be as widespread as they said. But in more than a hundred interviews at every rank, I encountered that same kind of thinking. And the same kind of thing that you see there on display with Lieutenant-Colonel Hensley is replicated over and over and over, from private to general. But most frighteningly, it's concentrated in the Officer Corps.
AMY GOODMAN: You write extensively about Hensley. Tell us who he is and the significance of this videotape.
JEFF SHARLET: Well, Lieutenant-Colonel Hensley, that you see in that videotape, you know, talking about hunting people for Jesus, was at the time the top chaplain, top military chaplain in Afghanistan. And I don't know if you can quite make it out on that videotape, if you look closer at the T-shirt he's wearing, it shows his affiliation with a sort of fundamentalist group called Chapel NeXt. And you can see a sort of a Christian cross inscribed over a map of Afghanistan.
And if you follow that-I mean, the rest of that footage is just as equally disturbing. At one point, speaking of the sort of the apocalyptic times that he believes we're in, he says that, you know, the US soldiers there have a mission basically to, you know, carry out the work of God. And then he declares that we, meaning the US military, "We are the new Israel," and repeats this for emphasis, "We are the new Israel."
You know, I would have thought that was-this guy was just a kind of a rogue, a maverick, if I didn't speak to so many other officers with just the same attitude. In the story, I talk about Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Young, who is also in Afghanistan at Kandahar Air Base, and he was quite plain in boasting about a PowerPoint presentation he had given to Afghan warlords explaining that American government was based on Christianity, that our Christian god was what made it great, and Afghanistan had a choice if it wanted to achieve democracy. And of course that choice was going to be for Jesus.
These people don't even know that they're crossing the line between church and state.

The idea that a military infested with this sort of theocratic Crusader mentality can do anything effective to help stabilize Afghanistan over the long run would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. But we don't get within a Star Trek lightyear of a serious discussion of the problem with a President who's "so profoundly impressed and grateful" to the servicemembers he's met,
and goes on to praise them as "fiercely loyal to this country." Fiercely loyal theocrats? As Rachel Maddow would say, "Really?"

Finally, here's just a snipped of what Mikey Weinstein had to say:

AMY GOODMAN: Mikey Weinstein, Air Force veteran, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, talk about how common this is and this videotape, what is your understanding of it, and how you experienced this in the military, if you did.
MIKEY WEINSTEIN: Well, Amy, there's a couple things. The first is, is that everyone remembers Eisenhower's famous farewell speech, which was warning America of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. What we're really faced with here is a fundamentalist-Christian-para-church-military-corporate-proselytizing complex.
A few months ago, a four-star general, a commander in the US military-I won't give his exact name, but commands hundreds of thousands of troops-asked me, "How bad is it, Mikey?" And I'll tell your viewers today, and I'll show them, exactly what I did. I said, "General, hold your pen six-and-a-half inches above your desk. Now drop it," as I've just dropped that pen. I asked him why it dropped. And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Why did it drop?" He said, "Well, gravity." That is how bad this is. It is that ubiquitous. It is that-it is in the very particulate of the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is our US military. It's everywhere. We're about two inches away, you know, from a fundamentalist Christian America through our US military.
You know, I've come from a conservative military Republican family with three generations of Military Academy graduates. Three of my kids have graduated from the Air Force Academy. The only journalist that has grasped this and moved it into the mainstream media has been Jeff Sharlet. And he was incredibly, you know, skeptical when we first started talking a couple of years ago.
And I beg everybody out there to at least just do two things. You know, read Jeff's book-you know, it's more than ten pages, so you actually have to read it-The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, or Empire, or whatever you want to say, and then the Harper's cover story by Jeff.

This is a deeply serious problem, the ongoing subversion of our military to a theocratic purpose that's expressly contrary to our secular Constitution, and once again, the corporate media totally ignores it.

This is hegemony folks, hegemony of the most dangerous sort. And there's barely a whisper of complaint from the Democratic Party establishment, much less a hint of strong corrective action.

It would be too "controversial." The conservatives would get angry at us. Very, very angry at us.

And it would all be our fault.

Don't believe me? Well, just ask David Petraeus, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and John McCain!

Obama's Somnambulant Embrace of Jingoistic Militarism

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 09 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

In response to the dorkiest question in his "100 days" press conference:

During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?

Obama went out of his way to say:

Enchanted? Enchanted. I will tell you that when I -- when I meet our servicemen and -women, enchanted is probably not the word I would use. (LAUGHTER) But I am so profoundly impressed and grateful to them for what they do. They're really good at their job. They are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices on our behalf. They do so without complaint. They are fiercely loyal to this country.
And, you know, the more I interact with our servicemen and women, from the top brass down to the lowliest private, I'm just -- I'm grateful to them.

This sort of cringe-inducing pandering (see, we Democrats don't hate the troops! Honest!) not only lets the Republicans off the hook for decades of slandering Democrats' patriotism, and tacitly endorses the jingoistic hegemonic discourse they've employed to radically subvert the very essence of our national identity as a republic, it also actively participates in the brainwashing on which the exploitation of young recruits depends. In striking contrast to Obama's blithe platitudes, author Susan Galleymore talks about the reality, and her recently-released book, Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror:

She just did a brief interview at the end of Friday's Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: My final guest is Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak Out About War and Terror author Susan Galleymore, who went to visit her son in Iraq. On this day leading up to Mother's Day, your comments?
SUSAN GALLEYMORE: Well, I want to just reiterate everything that David Barstow just said, because I feel like we, the people, don't understand what's going on in these wars. We don't understand who the people are that we are fighting. We don't understand who the Iraqis are. We don't understand who the Afghan people are.
And we, the mothers of this country, need to learn. So, what I would like to say to mothers this Mother's Day is, instead of going out for brunch, say to your family, "Let's stay home and learn who these people are. Let's learn what these wars are about. Let's learn why, for example, someone like Anwar Jawad would have her whole family slaughtered on the streets by people, our troops, our troops. So let's learn. Let's learn who the Afghan people are."
Why did we just have 150 civilians killed in Afghanistan? They called it a random shooting incident in Baghdad when people are killed in the street. What do they call it when we bomb people in Afghanistan, civilians, women and children? We need to understand this. And I want the mothers of the United States to understand that we can stay home, instead of go out for brunch, and learn about this. And we can learn why our children in the military want to get out of there so desperately.
AMY GOODMAN: You visited your son in Iraq.
SUSAN GALLEYMORE: I did.
AMY GOODMAN: Did he know you were coming?
SUSAN GALLEYMORE: He did. He wasn't very pleased about it. But I wanted to say to my kid, "Don't do anything in this country that you will be ashamed of, because it will haunt you for the rest of your life." And we see that now with the young people coming home killing themselves, you know, traumatized. We need to understand why that is happening.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Susan Galleymore, for joining us. Her book is called Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War and Terror, in this lead-up to Mother's Day.

Our military has horribly misused and abused by the Bush Administration. Not only was the invasion and occupation of Iraq totally unrelated to 9/11, but even the invasion of Afghanistan was so ill-advised and badly conceived that it bungled what could have been the relatively easy capture and trial of bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda's top leadership.

Yet, rather than question any of this, Obama instead indulges in mindless soft-core jingoist blather to "prove" that he's not a commie pinko Kenyan Islamic terrorist. He acquiesces in the hegemonic discourse, rather than challenging it.

A key component of this hegemonic discourse is the lie that the Vietnam anti-war movement was also anti-troop, when the reality was exactly the opposite: there was a anti-war movement within the military, and anti-war veterans routinely lead anti-war marches in the US.

This week marked the 39th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, where four anti-war protesters at Kent State were murdered by the Ohio National Guard. An interview with one of those who had been wounded, Alan Canfora, was played on Democracy Now! this week. While it had long been a matter of dispute whether orders had been given or not, that is no longer in dispute, as Amy Goodman explained:

AMY GOODMAN: Two years ago, one of the survivors of the massacre, Alan Canfora, released enhanced audio recordings from the day of the shootings. By listening closely, a voice in the background can be heard yelling, "Right here! Get set! Point! Fire!" Following the command, the sounds of shots being fired can be heard. The National Guard fired sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds. The FBI has never determined whether an order to shoot was given.

However, the reason I bring this interview up in this context is something that Canfora said, just in the course of telling his story, about how the death of a friend, who had been fighting in Vietnam, fueled his anti-war activism:

ALAN CANFORA: My name is Alan Canfora. I was a member of the Kent State Students for a Democratic Society in 1968, '69. Forty years ago, we raised hell on this campus. We planted the seeds of revolt, which blossomed a year later, when four days of protests culminated with the shootings by the National Guard. Only bullets could silence our voices here at Kent State in 1970....
AMY GOODMAN: And were you shot first?
ALAN CANFORA: I think I was. I think was the first student shot. I was waving a black flag of protest that day. I carried that black flag as a symbol of my despair and my anger, because only ten days earlier I attended my friend's funeral. He was killed in Vietnam at age nineteen. So that was very fresh in my memory, and that's why I joined the protests and I helped lead the protests May 1st through 4th in 1970. And that's what led to me being shot.

This is painful, terrible, complex truth that's repressed and denied by the conservative demonizers of the anti-war movement, and by his refusal to challenge the edifice of lies they've constructed over the years, and his willingness to join in their mindless blather, rather than ask the sort of hard questions that being a citizen of a democracy requires, President Obama joins in the project of conservative hegemony, to bury the truth, rather than learn from it, and thus to ensure that thousands more shall also die needlessly, wearing the uniform he praises, and many, many times more than that shall die by our bloody hands.

A longer interview with Susan Galleymore on KPFK's morning show can be heard here. I highly recommend it.

Judicial Activism Done Right--Religious Right, That Is

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

How is this not judicial activism?

A federal judge has ruled that a history teacher at a Southern California public high school violated the First Amendment when he called creationism "superstitious nonsense" in a classroom lecture. The judge, James Selna, issued the ruling after a 16-month legal battle between a student, Chad Farnan, and his former teacher, James Corbett. Mr. Farnan's lawsuit said Mr. Corbett had made more than 20 statements that were disparaging to Christians and their beliefs. The judge found that Mr. Corbett's reference to creationism as "religious, superstitious nonsense" violated the First Amendment's establishment clause. Courts have interpreted the clause as prohibiting government employees from displaying religious hostility.

As Digby notes:

So a public school teacher is in violation of the first amendment by speaking disparagingly against a religious belief? Really?

Here's the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I guess someone can interpret that to mean that a teacher speaking in a classroom is establishing a religion or prohibiting its exercise by disparaging one, (or maybe because that comes first in the clause such an interpretation supercedes the very clear provision against abridging the freedom of speech) but it sure looks like a stretch to me. In fact, it seems like a ruling that could only be made in bizarroworld.

Bizarroworld, indeed. But that's really just par for the course.
[In the previous diary, I wrote:

the majority of my diaries this weekend will revolve around confronting hegemony on three fronts:
(1) Supreme Court nominations & conservative hegemony in law.
(2) The military, the media and the war.
(3) The meltdown and economics.

This is the first dealing with conservative hegemony in law.]

Note that the issue here isn't whether the teacher was out of line or not. There's a difference between challenging a student and ridiculing them that's entirely independent of the content being taught or discussed, and although regulations can always be abused, I see nothing inherently wrong with regulations intended to maintain dignity and civility. But these come nowhere near anything like a First Amendment issue.

No, the issue here is whether a teacher "displaying religious hostility" can even remotely be considered to be "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion, and if so, how this can be maintained with a straight face at the same time that government is distributing funds to "faith-based organizations." How can the former be "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion, while the later is not establishing a religion? The double standard is simply too glaring to be ignored.

And, finally, how can judges possibly have reached such a contradictory state of affairs without engaging in "judicial activism" and "legislating from the bench"?

The answer to all this can only be that all such discourse is fundamentally a sham, intended to provide a veneer of rationality to what is essentially lawlessness enshrined in law.

And, as I said before, it's just par for the course. Indeed, it can well be argued that conservative judicial activism is the norm in American constitutional law. This is not to say that it necessarily occurs blatantly and pervasively, but it is to say that when it does does occur, it is often decisive, far-reaching, and beyond remedy--at least within the framework of constitutional law itself, and often far beyond it.

Consider a few prominent examples:

(1) The Dredd Scott decision held that blacks were not citizens, despite no language to this effect in the Constitution, and decades of their exercising political rights to the contrary. It also went directly contrary to the slaveholder's precious doctrine of "states' rights"--just in case anyone might miss the utter lack of any consistency in the argument being made.

(2) Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which it was held that corporations were protected by the 14th Amendment, and

(3) Plessy v. Ferguson which held that African-Americans were not. (Of course, the courts denied that this is what they had done in Plessy, but no sane person can believe them as a matter of fact.)

(4) Bush v. Gore, which held that an unspecifiable class of ballots is entitled to equal protection, but that a specifiable class of voters is not, and that further held that George W. Bush, alone of all the people who ever lived did not have to have standing in order to sue.

Finally, consider the very essence of the conservative narrative complaint--the liberal judicial activists "make law" rather than "interpreting it". Such a formulation, naturally, depends on the fiction that a clear and unambiguous line can be drawn between the two.

However, this fiction is most certainly not just a fiction, but a falsehood. While it's clear that some examples clearly lie on one side or the other of this line--the conservative decisions cited above, for example, all involved making law--it's quite impossible to divide the close cases. Thus, the narrative is necessarily vacuous, and exists for purely political purposes, in order to demonize liberal--or even merely insufficiently rightwing--judges, justices or nominees.

A further demonstration of the bad faith of this narrative is the simple fact that judges are supposed to "make law". As Wikipedia explains, in the entry on common law:

Common law refers to law and the corresponding legal system developed through decisions of courts and similar tribunals (called case law), rather than through legislative statutes or executive action.
Common law is law created and refined by judges: a decision in a currently pending legal case depends on decisions in previous cases and affects the law to be applied in future cases. When there is no authoritative statement of the law, judges have the authority and duty to make law by creating precedent.[1]
The body of precedent is called "common law" and it binds future decisions. In future cases, when parties disagree on what the law is, an idealized common law court looks to past precedential decisions of relevant courts. If a similar dispute has been resolved in the past, the court is bound to follow the reasoning used in the prior decision (this principle is known as stare decisis). If, however, the court finds that the current dispute is fundamentally distinct from all previous cases, it will decide as a "matter of first impression." Thereafter, the new decision becomes precedent, and will bind future courts under the principle of stare decisis.

American law is based on English common law, and thus, as noted above, it is the duty of judges to make law when there is no statute or case law precedent.

I'll have more to say in a followup diary, but this should clearly establish the general points that conservative narratives about liberal "judicial activism" are political in nature, not well founded in fact, and lacking in good faith. They serve a hegemonic function, in that they enable a routine stigmitization of non-conservative legal thought, which in turn supports the consolidation of conservative political power via the court system, under the deceptive guise of apolitical law.

Barack Obama: Legitimate Disappointment And What To Do About It

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 09 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

There are lots of ways people express disappointment with Barack Obama on lots of different subjects. There's a similar diversity of responses defending him, on the one hand, as well as those deriding people for ever having expected anything more. Without denying any of this diversity, I'd like to argue non-exclusively a case for disappointment, and what should be done about it. This case goes back to several statements, and the overall tone conveyed in David's 2006 piece on Obama for The Nation, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington".

The general outlines of my argument are these:

(1) There many defenders who still insist that Obama is a great progressive leader, and anyone who doesn't see that unrealistic, rigid, and/or an ideologue.

(2) There are many detractors who say that anyone who ever thought Obama was a progressive was delusional.

(3) My position has always been that Obama's conciliatory, risk-averse style was inherently problematic, but not necessarily fatally so, particularly since he showed signs, and gave verbal assurances that he was capable of a much more confrontational approach, if that should prove necessary. Thus both (1) and (2) were plausibly defensible positions at one time, before Obama took office. But that time has now passed.

(4) The case for legitimate disappointment now rests on the fact that Obama has not lived up to the promise of taking a harder line, if necessary--quite the opposite, he has been conciliatory in ways that undermine the prospects for even the sorts of change that he himself still advocates for.

(5) The proper response should not depend on trying to figure out "what Obama really thinks" or "how he feels" or anything else to do with his personal disposition. The response should have to do with changing the overall political situation in which he's acting. (The disposition/situation dichotomy is a major theme this weekend, up to and including the extensive theoretical work of Harvard law professor Jon D. Hanson on the situationist perspective.) This does mean making one judgment about his disposition: he's a whole let less proactive in changing the political landscape than a lot of his supporters took him to be. Which is why I've repeatedly said that he reminds me of JFK. In the long run, JFK's relatively timid disposition was overwhelmed by the changing situation. So may it be again.
Here are two key passages from David's article where Obama makes his case for a flexible progressivism that's non-confrontational in preference, but not rigidly so.

In the first passage, Obama even goes so far as to reject the "non-confrontational" perception. The issue is not confrontational vs. non-confrontational, he argues, but whether one lets confrontation emerge organically:

Many progressives wonder whether Obama will show that an outsider can force real change in government, or that the Senate club has become so insulated that Mr. Smith can no longer go to Washington. But that question brings another one: whether Obama wants to challenge the club in the first place. "There's no doubt that I will be staking out more public positions on more issues as time goes on," Obama said cryptically. Does that mean he is going to be more confrontational? "The question is not whether you end up being confrontational," he said in a tone that made clear he had been pondering that idea long before I brought it up. "The question is, Do you let confrontations arise as a consequence of your putting forward a positive vision of what needs to happen and letting the confrontation organically emerge, or do you go out of your way for it?"

Now, I want to make very clear that I have no problem whatsoever with the position Obama stakes out in the bolded passage above. In fact, more than that, I heartily endorse it--despite, or even because of the fact that I'm at least two orders of magnitude to the left of Obama. Indeed, I see this exact same philosophy regarding confrontation in the politics of many figures whom I most admire. It was certainly there in Martin Luther King's philosophy, as spelled out quite explicitly in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, as I discussed in my December 2007 diary "Martin Luther King and The Moral Imperative For Polarization". And it was there in elected political figures like Ron Dellums and Paul Wellstone.

It's just common sense, really. If your politics is both morally-based and reality-based, then the firmest possible foundation for success is to focus on advancing what you stand for, rather than throwing yourself off-balance by picking fights based on strategy or tactics divorced from your core vision. Heck, forget progressive politics. This is just martial arts 101. (And my sister's the black belt in our family.)

But how has this promise worked out in practice? Not very well, it would seem.

On issue after issue where naturally allowing confrontation to unfold would have both advanced the cause of justice and put a solid majority of the American people on his side, Obama has ducked--and actually weakened his political position. He's done this most notably on the stimulus, reducing its size and effectiveness in a fruitless effort to gain more GOP support, on the issue of torture, where a clear majority of American people wants either criminal or general fact-finding investigations.

His bottom line rationale in both these cases seems to be that conflict on these issues would make progress on other "more important" issues more difficult. But this rationale effectively contradicts the heart of what the bolded passage above. Indeed, Obama's actions indicate that he's quite willing to avoid confrontation, despite the fact that doing so weakens his position overall. Of course, I'm sure he doesn't see it that way. But that's largely because his governing style shows a distinct bias to over-value the power of Versailles insiders--in direct contradiction of his campaigning style and strategy. Forget "having the courage of his convictions". Obama seems utterly oblivious to the primary source of his own political power. It's like Sampson insisting on a daily haircut--a buzz-cut at that.

In short, what I'm pointing to here is that Obama's failure to deliver is quite plausibly explicable in terms of his perception of his political situation, and the radical disjuncture between that and what we might reasonably take for granted given both his campaign rhetoric and his campaign practice of grassroots mobilization.

This is where Obama's relative lack of political experience comes into focus as genuinely problematic--not because he it means he's political incapable (the standard argument), but because it means we have had an inadequate track record on which to judge how he might perceive his own situation, and therefore how he might act within it.

This is further reinforced, and given added specificity by the following passage:

Shifting back to how he sees himself in the Senate, Obama seemed to amend his previous statement about what kind of leadership progressives can expect from him. "I am agnostic in terms of the models that solve these problems," he said. "If the only way to solve a problem is structural, institutional change, then I will be for structural, institutional change. If I think we can achieve those same goals within the existing institutions, then I am going to try to do that, because I think it's going to be easier to do and less disruptive and less costly and less painful.... I think everybody in this country should have basic healthcare. And what I'm trying to figure out is how to get from here to there." He went on to tell me about his support for other structural changes such as public financing of elections, forcing broadcasters to offer free airtime for candidates, adding strong labor protections to trade pacts and major efforts to create a more just tax system.

It's important to note that the bolded passage above referred to Obama describing his outlook within a two-fold framework: (1) that of being a senator, and (2) that of working for change in a fundamentally stable situation, where there is demonstrably less pain in the present situation than there would be in the process of structural change. Given that framework, there's a certain inherent pragmatic logic that one might philosophically disagree with, but would still have to respect as having legitimacy, especially if it comports with his basic temperament, and is held in good faith.

However, that two-fold framework no longer obtains for a number of the most important issues that Obama confronts. Equally importantly, some of his political timidity doesn't even involve matters of "structural, institutional change," about which he seems disturbingly unclear.

For example, on the promisory side, "forcing broadcasters to offer free airtime for candidates," is not a "structural, institutional change." It's a rather modest functional reform. It might face fierce special interest opposition, but that fact alone does nothing to alter the nature of the proposed reform itself. Full public financing of elections--with free public airtime as part of the package--now that's "structural, institutional change."

On the delivery side, Obama appears to regard EFCA--which he has barely even given lip-service to since taking office--as another example of "structural, institutional change." But that's utterly mistaken. Indeed, part of the beauty of EFCA is precisely that it's not that sort of change, but rather an example of procedural change with the potential for vast and sweeping changes over time, but ones that will necessarily unfold in a relatively organic, gradualist fashion. One might even argue that EFCA is an ideal example of a Cass Sunstein Nudge, in the best possible sense.

Again, it seems quite likely that Obama just doesn't see things this way, else his actions would be quite different. One doesn't have to believe there's some flaw in his character, causing him not to deliver. It's quite sufficient to posit that he simply perceives his political situation in very different terms, and is responding consistently, given that perception.

What all the above implies is two-fold: First, that progressives need to focus on the political situation, more than on Obama disposition. Second, in a somewhat contradictory manner, that progressives need to focus on Obama's perception of his political situation. The apparent contradiction is lessened, however--though not resolved--by observing that Obama's perception appears to be highly dependent on his social surround: bring pressure to alter the consensus around him, and his perception will change as well.

Easier said than done, of course. But it does at least afford some conceptual clarity of what we are up against, and some guide as to how we might strategize to make him act differently. If the goal is to "make him do it" ala FDR, then we need an accurate understanding of what that would entail. This analysis in a attempt to improve that understanding, and advance the discussion so that others might improve it further.

A Final Word On Confronting Hegemony

The above analysis also provides some insight into one of the benefits of a hegemonic analysis. The more that background assumptions are made problematic--which is one of the key components of hegemonic analysis--the greater the possibility for a shift in Obama's perception of his political situation. This is not the only purpose for a hegemonic analysis, nor is hegemonic analysis all that's needed to move Obama. It's merely an indication of how the two are related--and not necessarily the only way they are related, either.

With that in mind, the majority of my diaries this weekend will revolve around confronting hegemony on three fronts:

(1) Supreme Court nominations & conservative hegemony in law.
(2) The military, the media and the war.
(3) The meltdown and economics.

In the spirit of the above discussion, Obama and his policies are not the prime targets of these forthcoming diaries, but they are not unrelated, either, even when they are not directly implicated.