I got my Obama job application form in the (e)mail today. And I wanted to encourage everyone else to get theirs by filling out this simple form. (In a few days they'll email you a longer form, with spaces for more jobs and a choice of which agencies you're interested in, but that's also pretty easy.)
During the Bush2 administration, conservatives raised at the right-wing think tanks around DC moved in to staff the agencies, filling them with an ideological crew that tried to push their agenda at every level. As conservative organizations told their members, you can do more than just pressuring the government from outside, you can start pushing the government from inside as well.
Obviously having people outside the government pushing back is crucial, but it would also be nice to see those right-wing hacks replaced with a talented lefty team. So consider filling out an Obama application. Although do be warned -- as the site says, "some positions will require Senate confirmation."
The dust-up on Friday between me and Matt re: insiders vs. outsiders (here and here) reminded me of a post I was thinking about writing a while back.
As those who read my writing now know, I am a bit of a history nut, and I have been thinking a lot about how change has happened throughout American history. If you really look at the dramatic progressive movements in our country, the way change happened was through the intersection of an outside progressive movement and insiders who opened themselves to the ideas coming from that movement.
The greatest periods of progressive change in American history were the following:
-The ending of slavery and other reforms pushed by Lincoln and the "radical Republicans" in the 1860s
-The progressive era reforms in the 1900s and 1910s
-The New Deal programs of the 1930s and 1940s
-The surge of progressive legislation in the 1960s
Every single time an outside movement combined with decent-hearted politicians on the inside who made the change happen. The abolitionists built up a head of steam over a 30-year period, created the political atmosphere where a new anti-slavery party (the Republicans) could emerge and gain power, and then pushed Lincoln to finish the job. (And by the way, along the way, they passed some other great reform legislation as well.)
Starting in the 1880s with the populist movement, and evolving into the progressive reform movement, a popular will was created to pass many major reforms. When an open-minded reformer named Teddy Roosevelt became president in 1901 following the McKinley assassination, he listened to the outsiders and created the national parks system, began busting the corporate trusts, and got the first food and consumer safety laws passed. In the decade afterward, the progressive movement worked with political leaders to pass an income tax, get direct election of U.S. Senators, and enact women's suffrage.
In the 1930s, strong progressive leaders led by John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, A. Phillip Randolph, and Norman Thomas created the political power to allow FDR to get Social Security, labor law reform, banking regulation, rural electrification, the GI Bill, and all the other remarkable reforms of the New Deal passed into law.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement changed the nature of political debate, both on that issue and many others, and helped sympathetic politicians like the Kennedys and LBJ push through historic civil rights legislation. But it also opened the door to a broader progressive movement, as Medicare, Medicaid, the Peace Corps environmental legislation, the 18-year-old vote and many other important reforms made their way into law.
I think the lesson history is that change doesn't happen only by electing better politicians, and it doesn't happen only by building an outside movement. It happens when both things are going on simultaneously, and when the progressive insiders and outsiders are talking to each other and pivoting off each other.
One of the things I worry about with the current yawning chasm between insiders and outsiders is that we sometimes get to a place where each side is so angry with the other that the creative dialogue that drives real change is in danger of being shut down. It isn't that John L. Lewis and FDR always liked each other, or that Martin Luther King, Jr. and LBJ didn't fight at times. But they usually found ways to bridge the gap, to keep talking to each other, to keep figuring out ways to solved problems together. In this moment we can do that too, in part by figuring out innovative ways to have the dialogue, like Stoller and Durbin did with the Legislation 2.0 discussion on broadband, and in part by doing the hard work of understanding the perspectives of each other.
We have a great opportunity for a new progressive movement in American history. The ecountry has rejected Bush-style conservatism and has moved left on a range of key issues. A movement for change is building and growing. All of us just need to be smart and strategic about how we keep building that movement for change, and we need to keep talking to each other about how to work together to make things happen. Progressives don't yet have a governing majority, but I believe that is soon to come, and we better take advantage of it when we have the chance.
I'll also note that this confirms a rule of thumb I live by. Here it is. No matter how brazenly stupid or corrupt you think that insiders might behave, they will not only be worse than you expect, but will continue to shock you with how much worse they are than you expected they would be.
Wow. Having one foot on the insider side of my divide, that's more than a little sobering. But beyond my own worries that I will always be worse than Matt expected I would be, I want to say two things:
1. I think it is very hard to stay in politics, to keep fighting the battle day-in and day-out, if this is how you view the world. Politics is a messy, frequently ugly business, with many disappointments along the way, but good things do happen, too. To get things done in politics, you sometimes have to give people a chance to understand where they are coming from, to understand why they are making the decisions they are. And it's not always pretty, but it's also not always bad, either. I think assuming that a whole class of people, even if that class is political insiders, just suck, is not a useful way of getting things done.
2. I know that my perspective is poisoned by too many years on the "inside," but Matt's rule of thumb is not what I have experienced. That's not to say I haven't been infuriated and disappointed many, many times, because I have. But I have also seen many examples of courage and honor and righteousness by insiders, too. I've seen people put their political careers on the line in doing the right thing. I've seen people stand up to all kinds of pressure and still do the right thing. I've seen people take huge political risks, knowing the odds were against them. And I've seen many times over, good people wrestling with how best to do the right thing weighing a variety of good values that were sometimes in conflict, trying to figure out a path far more complicated and nuanced than it sometimes seemed to those on the outside. I am very disappointed in Pelosi's decision to help Wynn, for example. But I also know a leader has a hundred factors to weigh on how to hold their caucus together, and I don't know all the reasons she did what she did. I think it was the wrong thing to do, but I am not going to condemn her as a person for doing it.
We should battle for what we believe, fight hard for what we think is good policy, and express our disappointment and anger when politicians don't do what we think they should. But I just don't agree that we should be so quick and so automatic in condemning all insiders for everything they do.
(This is a great response to Mike Lux's discussion of how Democrats lost our way in the 1970s. - promoted by Matt Stoller)
On Thursday, Mike Lux posted an excellent diary, "How We Messed Up". As Mike explained:
When I blogged on the launching of OpenLeft on Huffington Post, mentioning that I was an insider joining two great bloggers in Matt and Chris, a reader who was perhaps a bit of a smartass mentioned that since us insiders had screwed things up so badly, maybe I could write about how we had pulled that off.
That actually inspired me to dig up something I wrote a couple of years ago, never published but shared with friends, regarding my thinking about how and why Democratic insiders had messed things up starting back about 35-40 years ago.
This piece doesn't explain everything about how the conservative movement succeeded and ours failed over the last two generations.
While Mike's analysis is deserving of serious study, the last sentence is what I want to focus on. You see, while Mike's attitude is refreshing coming from an insider, his analysis still reflects an insider's-view bias.
The perspective I'd like to present is not to get the insiders off the hook (I'm a lifelong outsider, myself), but to talk about the larger social/cultural context. My argument is that all the problems Mike identified stemmed in part from the failure to do this adequately in the first place. Which is why I don't want to see us repeat that mistake.
In addition, Mike's analysis suffers from a subtle rear-view-mirror distortion. It's a more subtle version of what conservatives often do in creating a fantasy version of the 1950s creating an imaginary collective subject that never actually existed. For progressives, the 1960s and '70s were very much about creating a new pluralistic progressive subject. It's ahistorical to fault that subject for not doing something before it actually formed.
When I blogged on the launching of OpenLeft on Huffington Post, mentioning that I was an insider joining two great bloggers in Matt and Chris, a reader who was perhaps a bit of a smartass mentioned that since us insiders had screwed things up so badly, maybe I could write about how we had pulled that off.
That actually inspired me to dig up something I wrote a couple of years ago, never published but shared with friends, regarding my thinking about how and why Democratic insiders had messed things up starting back about 35-40 years ago.
This piece doesn't explain everything about how the conservative movement succeeded and ours failed over the last two generations. It doesn't address the pacifying and trivializing effect of TV on politics, for example, or the white working class reaction to the changes society was going through. But I think it does give some interesting thoughts on what went wrong. Here it is:
