Last night, Rachel Maddow began with a very sharp insightful bit of commentary, at least for the first 4 1/2 minutes, pointing out that were Eisenhower to run to day, he'd have to do so as a Bernie Sanders-style independent. And she pointed out that this was because America's political spectrum had been pulled far to the right by an organized conservative movement outside of the Republican Party:
Where she went wrong after this point was by claiming that Obama--unlike Clinton--had claimed the center without moving to the right, without triangulation. Well, I've already weighed in saying that Obama is engaged in quintangulation, so you know I'm going to disagree here. But the point is not so much about Obama's rhetoric, because I'd even be willing to agree with Maddow for the sake of argument.
But rhetoric is ultimately not what matters most. What matters is what you actually do. And the tax deal Obama struck with the GOP during the lame duck section was a much more massive chunk of triangulation than anything that I think Clinton would have gone along with. And that's just one (admittedly very large) element in how Obama is moving substantially to the right.
If you want to understand what's going on here, I would argue that you need to recognize a few basic things. First is that the American people have not moved sharply to the right over the past 50-odd years. Here's a chart of the broadest academic measure of public policy mood, compiled by James Stimson of UNC Chapel Hill:
Second, you need to realize that this is not a measure of all political attitudes. It is limited to those issues that cycle between preferences, such as lower taxes vs. more services. It does not include shifts in basic values, so-called "valence issues" of equality regarding race and gender, for example. So what we see here is a long-term fluctuation of trade-off preferences--not a unidirectional trend--and it all takes place in the more liberal region of policy space (currently close to 60% liberal). What we don't see here is dramatically more liberal, and is a pretty dramatic trend, going from norms of accepting racial segregation & the second-class status of women in the 1950s, with homosexuality as something not even talked about in polite society to having had a black and a woman as the two leading candidates in the Democratic primary last time around, with gay marriage slowly being established in state after state around the country.
Third, you need to realize that although attitudes on valence issues of identity--race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.--have shifted dramatically to the left, a large minority is extreme uncomfortable, even threatened by this, notwithstanding their outward acceptance. This manifests in terms of cultural resentment, which cannot generally be honestly expressed, because it's no longer considered socially acceptable to have the public attitudes that correspond to the relatively unchanged deep-seated feelings. This is the basis on which grassroots conservative movement has been organized since the 1970s.
Fourth, the grassroots resentments are further fueled by the other conservative shift--the massive concentration of wealth, which has choked off opportunity for the great mass of the American people--a phenomena readily blamed on subordinate racial, ethnic and gender groups. And this conservative shift--consolidating increased economic and political power into the hands of an increasingly small and concentrated elite of oligopoly powers, largely exempt from the very "free market" they celebrate in rhetoric.
Finally, as I pointed out Tuesday in "GOP: Obama won't be crazy enough on cutting spending in SOTU " the recent abandonment of 70 years of empirical economic experience in the wake of the Great Recession has roots in the identity politics and culture wars of the McKinley era. Meaning, in essence, that the two wings of the conservative movement have converged, without ever winning over the mass of the American people in terms of basic policy preferences.
Rather than successfully opposing this--as Maddow claims--Obama has accomodated himself, and worked tirelessly to redifine liberalism or progressivism in terms of a neo-liberal vision that is, at bottom, aimed at implementing conservative policies in a more technocratically competent manner, with a "human face" that makes it far more palatable to those whose rights and interests are being continually eroded.
The end result of all this is that America's political elite is as out of touch with the American people as the elites in Tunisia, Egypt, or any other Arab nation whose dictatorship we prop up. The Democrats have been stifled, corrupted and compromised, while the GOP is barely able to keep its id in check, and so Obama is able to float above them all, getting 80 and 90% approval for what he says in his State of the Union. But when it comes to actually solving the problems that we face, there is nothing seriously on the elite agenda that can reven remotely come close to getting the job done. And so first Tunisia, now Egypt beckon to us as the face of our future.
I don't see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic "my enemies are totalitarian madmen" strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections.
Tristero's piece is very good, very thoroush, and very worth reading. But it proceeds by basically saying, "Okay, even if that were true:"
Let's ignore all the obvious contradictory examples, like Bachmann and Coburn and Tancredo and DeLay and so on and so on and - solely for the sake of argument - go so far as to entirely concede Matt's point: no one gets elected by being a rightwing loon.
I want to take the opposite approach. I want to basically argue that movement conservatives would be nowhere without this sort of rhetoric. It's not always their dominant form of rhetoric--particularly in its crudest, most blatant form, but it's always somewhere in the mix. As I explained back in May, 2008, in "Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1", conservative elites have been playing this game for centuries now:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:
Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge....
Elites Create Their Demon Others It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group. Because this involves disowning something fundamental of itself, the mechanism involved for the elite is more projective identification than projection, per se:
Projective identification is used to project the bad object into (not onto) another person so it becomes a part of that person.
The person then identifies with that other person, and hence has means to control them.
The person projected into may consequently be pressured to behave congruently with the projective phantasy.
This description captures quite well the enormous investment of time, energy and money we see on behalf of conservatives pushing the meme of "liberal elites", and devising various ways of getting "liberals" to act out their appointed roles.
The more extreme forms of demonizing liberals work very well for conservatives, in large part because they resonate with this broader narrative framework that they have repeated and reinforced countless times over the centuries. Of course, that's not all there is to it. There are cognitive motivations and biases that predispose conservatives to see the world this way. And what Matt is doing is invoking a counter set of cognitive motivations and biases--ones that are generally much sounder and saner, but that totally mislead when one is trying to understand and respond effectively to conservative attacks.
Those biases are the foundations of the dominant 18th Century Enlightenment model of disembodied reason. And late 20th and early 21st century cognitive science has definitively shown those biases to be false. Facts do not persuade people apart from narrative frameworks. When the facts contradict the framework, the facts are rejected, not the frame. Indeed, that's why folks like Matt stubbornly hold onto their false models of reason.
Of course this is all very high-level stuff I'm arguing here. But it dovetails very well with the specific history of movement conservatism, particularly since the New Deal and WWII, as it consistently failed to develop any sort of positive, pragmatic framework for dealing with America's realworld problems, and only managed to win elections by promoting paranoid us-vs-them narratives of seemingly limitless scope--McCarthyism in the early 50s (based on Nixon's smear campaigns that first won him a seat in Congress), racial backlash and the culture wars beginning with Goldwater 1964 and Nixon in 1968, honed to perfection by Reagan in 1980, and systematized by Gingrich in 1994--but never, ever actually solving any of the problems that it promised to.
And yet, when it comes down to it, Yglesias is basically trying to argue that nothing conservatives have done along these lines has been politically successful.
Which is utterly, downright delusional.
Am I twising his argument beyond his meaning? First off, I'd say that if I am, then his argument doesn't hold much punch. But here's what he said in complete context:
There have been plenty of tremendous and troubling leaps made when trying to express outrage over the Islamic Center proposed near Ground Zero (this weekend with Sarah Palin, who called it the "9/11 mosque" on Twitter, for example), but Newt Gingrich may win the award for most offensive analogy.
Building the mosque near Ground Zero, says the former Speaker, is like putting a Nazi sign near the Holocaust Museum.
Gingrich has made this comparison for a couple days now, including this morning on Fox & Friends, when he said:
The folks who want to build this mosque, who are really radical Islamists, who want to triumphfully (sic) prove they can build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists. Those folks don't have any interest in reaching out to the community. They're trying to make a case about supremacy... This happens all the time in America. Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.
Of course the folks behind the Cordoba House Cultural Center aren't radical Islamists. They're exactly the opposite. As Wikipedia notes about Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the spiritual leader and driving force:
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, (born in 1948, in Kuwait) is an Arab-American Muslim imam, author, and activist whose stated goal is to improve relations between the Muslim World and the West.He has been Imam of Masjid al-Farah, a New York City mosque, since 1983.
He has written three books on Islam and its place in contemporary Western society, including What's Right with Islam is What's Right with America, and founded two non-profit organizations whose stated missions are to enhance the discourse on Islam in society. He has condemned the 9/11 attacks as un-Islamic and called on the U.S. government to reduce the threat of terrorism by altering its Middle Eastern foreign policy. Author Karen Armstrong, among others, has praised him for his attempts to build bridges between the West and the Muslim world.
His congregation is Sufi, the mystical branch of Islam, about as far away from fundamentalists as its possible to be.
But in Gingrich's bigoted mind, all Moslems are radical Islamists. That is the very essence of his bigotry: "They" are all the same: evil. For no reason. Just because they are. And he's not just some guy. He's the former Speaker of the House, and a serious potential candidate for President in 2012. In the GOP world, he's as heavyweight as it gets.
Newt is a bigot and he is the face of the GOP.
And not just the clown face of Sarah Palin, but the "serious intellectual" face, as has been for nearly 20 years now.
What's more, at the same time that Newt's spouting his bigoted hatred, other conservatives are busy trying to whitewash themselves and their movment, in a continuing effort to deny their racist past, as well their present. For example, the pseudo-intellectual James Taranto at the WSJ:
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sun Jan 20, 2008. Original HERE.
I had a wonderful post on this subject, what got et when the site went down yesterday. It did go down, didn't it? It wasn't just me? So you'll just have to make do with this vastly inferior version.
Regardless of his intentions, Obama has been doing a pretty good job of splitting the left for some time now. Secular humanists, peace activists, Boomers, gays, all have had their turns feeling particularly spurned, while his version of triangulation has many even more nervous than the Clinton version made them. Many think he's got the perscription exactly backwards-Democrats don't suffer from being too much like the always-combatative Republicans, but from being too wimpy, too reluctant to stand up and fight for what they belive. And many think that now's not the time to reach out with a hand of friendship, just when they're sinking like a stone.
In this diary, I'm not going to try to solve all the differences just mentioned. Rather, I'm just going to look at one prominent example from the last week, and look at how it could have been handled differently, so that the divisions generated would have been among conservatives, not progressives. It's a very logical strategy to pursue on two counts: First, as a progressive, Obama should naturally want to unify progressives. Second, given that only some conservatives are genuinely interested in cooperation, while others are dedicated to oppostion, it makes perfect sense to reach out specifically to those who are reachable in a way that clarifies their differences from those who are not.
I am not suggesting a Machiavellian manoeuvre here. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting a clarifying manoeuvre to bring hidden differences out into the open, in order to preempt yet another round of Machiavellian maipulations to prevent the very sort of cooperation that Obama advocates for. What I'm going to do is recall Obama's remarks about Ronald Reagan, which have once again divided progresssives, and then I'm going to suggest two possible alternatives that could have found broad acceptance among progressives, while causing legitimate, and clarifying consternation among conservatives.
The first alternative questions the efficacy of Reagan's conservativism, and pushes the case that Eisenhower is a better, more substantial model to follow. Eisenhower isn't generally thought of as a conservative, but that's beause movement conservatives are actually reactionaries, who have kidnapped the "conservative" label. Eisenhower's model of gradual adaptation, not seeking to radically alter what has become part of the organic fabric of society (such as Social Security) is perfectly in line with the main thrust of Edmund Burke's thinking. Joseph de Maistre, not so much.
The second points out a number of liberal inconsistencies in Reagan's record, and casts doubt on whether he'd be accepted today as a true heir of himself. The example of Mike Huckabee is instructive in this regard, too.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sun Jan 20, 2008. Original HERE.
I had a wonderful post on this subject, what got et when the site went down yesterday. It did go down, didn't it? It wasn't just me? So you'll just have to make do with this vastly inferior version.
Regardless of his intentions, Obama has been doing a pretty good job of splitting the left for some time now. Secular humanists, peace activists, Boomers, gays, all have had their turns feeling particularly spurned, while his version of triangulation has many even more nervous than the Clinton version made them. Many think he's got the perscription exactly backwards-Democrats don't suffer from being too much like the always-combatative Republicans, but from being too wimpy, too reluctant to stand up and fight for what they belive. And many think that now's not the time to reach out with a hand of friendship, just when they're sinking like a stone.
In this diary, I'm not going to try to solve all the differences just mentioned. Rather, I'm just going to look at one prominent example from the last week, and look at how it could have been handled differently, so that the divisions generated would have been among conservatives, not progressives. It's a very logical strategy to pursue on two counts: First, as a progressive, Obama should naturally want to unify progressives. Second, given that only some conservatives are genuinely interested in cooperation, while others are dedicated to oppostion, it makes perfect sense to reach out specifically to those who are reachable in a way that clarifies their differences from those who are not.
I am not suggesting a Machiavellian manoeuvre here. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting a clarifying manoeuvre to bring hidden differences out into the open, in order to preempt yet another round of Machiavellian maipulations to prevent the very sort of cooperation that Obama advocates for. What I'm going to do is recall Obama's remarks about Ronald Reagan, which have once again divided progresssives, and then I'm going to suggest two possible alternatives that could have found broad acceptance among progressives, while causing legitimate, and clarifying consternation among conservatives.
The first alternative questions the efficacy of Reagan's conservativism, and pushes the case that Eisenhower is a better, more substantial model to follow. Eisenhower isn't generally thought of as a conservative, but that's beause movement conservatives are actually reactionaries, who have kidnapped the "conservative" label. Eisenhower's model of gradual adaptation, not seeking to radically alter what has become part of the organic fabric of society (such as Social Security) is perfectly in line with the main thrust of Edmund Burke's thinking. Joseph de Maistre, not so much.
The second points out a number of liberal inconsistencies in Reagan's record, and casts doubt on whether he'd be accepted today as a true heir of himself. The example of Mike Huckabee is instructive in this regard, too.
If he [Obama] had started out stronger the evolving dynamic would have been different
The Republican Senators would have come over because they would be under public pressure not to screw the country. Instead he handed them the dynamic and they got to push those 3-4 Republicans to go with their party instead of the people. It's known as whipping the vote. He let the whip fall out of his hands and into their theirs.
Someone here linked to these Harry Truman quotes. Obama must not have ever read them..because he violated each precept.
"Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don't ever apologize for anything."
"I don't like bipartisan. Whenever a fellow tells me he's bipartisan, I know that he's going to vote against me."
He let them carry the battle to him. He let them put him on the defensive. And he apologized.
And he didn't know that this was the Republican definition of bipartisan....voting against you.
I believe that her point is inarguable, self-evident. One can spin whatever sorts of theories one wants about Obama's grand strategy--and I've got a post in the works on that. But one thing should be blindingly clear: it's just been refuted, "big time" as war criminal Dick Cheney would say. If one wants to argue that Obama's bipartisan strategic vision is not to blame, then all the blame has to go to how it was executed--and it surely could have been better done. But if it had been better executed, wouldn't that have only postponed the inevitable??
I had a wonderful post on this subject, what got et when the site went down yesterday. It did go down, didn't it? It wasn't just me? So you'll just have to make do with this vastly inferior version.
Regardless of his intentions, Obama has been doing a pretty good job of splitting the left for some time now. Secular humanists, peace activists, Boomers, gays, all have had their turns feeling particularly spurned, while his version of triangulation has many even more nervous than the Clinton version made them. Many think he's got the perscription exactly backwards-Democrats don't suffer from being too much like the always-combatative Republicans, but from being too wimpy, too reluctant to stand up and fight for what they belive. And many think that now's not the time to reach out with a hand of friendship, just when they're sinking like a stone.
In this diary, I'm not going to try to solve all the differences just mentioned. Rather, I'm just going to look at one prominent example from the last week, and look at how it could have been handled differently, so that the divisions generated would have been among conservatives, not progressives. It's a very logical strategy to pursue on two counts: First, as a progressive, Obama should naturally want to unify progressives. Second, given that only some conservatives are genuinely interested in cooperation, while others are dedicated to oppostion, it makes perfect sense to reach out specifically to those who are reachable in a way that clarifies their differences from those who are not.
I am not suggesting a Machiavellian manoeuvre here. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting a clarifying manoeuvre to bring hidden differences out into the open, in order to preempt yet another round of Machiavellian maipulations to prevent the very sort of cooperation that Obama advocates for. What I'm going to do is recall Obama's remarks about Ronald Reagan, which have once again divided progresssives, and then I'm going to suggest two possible alternatives that could have found broad acceptance among progressives, while causing legitimate, and clarifying consternation among conservatives.
The first alternative questions the efficacy of Reagan's conservativism, and pushes the case that Eisenhower is a better, more substantial model to follow. Eisenhower isn't generally thought of as a conservative, but that's beause movement conservatives are actually reactionaries, who have kidnapped the "conservative" label. Eisenhower's model of gradual adaptation, not seeking to radically alter what has become part of the organic fabric of society (such as Social Security) is perfectly in line with the main thrust of Edmund Burke's thinking. Joseph de Maistre, not so much.
The second points out a number of liberal inconsistencies in Reagan's record, and casts doubt on whether he'd be accepted today as a true heir of himself. The example of Mike Huckabee is instructive in this regard, too.
In my last post, I wrote about the dramatic failure of free market economics-a failure clearly documented in cold, hard statistics. Now I want to show that this ideology is also wildly unpopular-also using cold, hard statistics. There are ways of presenting it that make it more appealing. When you get down to brass tacks and ask people what they want, virtually no one wants the libertarian's "night watchman" state, no one wants to shrink goverment down to the size that Grover Norquist can drown it in a bathtub. And this is not just the result of a new progressive mood in the land. This is the way it's always been. As with so many other things, reality and the Versailles political discourse are 180 degrees opposed to one another.
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