Note: I just stumbled across this diary from May 2009, and thought it fit perfectly in the role of sketching out more precisely how Obama failed to manifest his promise as even a reluctant Solon. It recalls that he did say he would take the path of fundamental structural reform, if that was what proved to be needed. And it shows just how early on it became obvious that he would not. Much has happened since I wrote this diary. But nothing, fundamentally, has changed. Indeed, the reality of "no change" has dramatically deepend.
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.
This is the second part of two posts analyzing Ukrainian elections. This second part will focus upon many factors that lead to Ukraine's exceptional regional polarization. The first part can be found here.
Two Ukraines
Modern Ukraine is a strange hybrid of two quite different regions. One part, composed of western and central Ukraine, is politically more aligned with the West; it favors, for instance, joining the European Union. This part includes the capital Kiev. The other part of Ukraine, consisting of the Black Sea coast and eastern Ukraine, remains more loyal to Russia and the memory of the Soviet Union. It includes Donetsk Oblast (formerly named Stalino Oblast), the most populous province in the country.
This division is reflected in Ukrainian politics. Take the 2004 presidential election, in which pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko faced off against pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych:
This is the first part of two posts analyzing Ukrainian elections. This first part will focus upon the 2004 presidential election, which showed a remarkable degree of regional polarization. The second part can be found here.
The 2004 Presidential Election, Version Ukraine
In the last months of 2004, Ukraine held a total of three elections. In the first round, candidates Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko received the greatest share of votes. The two then competed in what turned out to be a rigged run-off, with Mr. Yanukovych supposedly winning. After prolonged protests, cumulating in the Orange Revolution, another run-off was held. Pro-western candidate Viktor Yushchenko ended up as the victor of this fair run-off, beginning what would prove to be a troubled presidential term.
This post will analyze the third, and possibly the only unrigged, election. Here is a map of the results:
(Note: This map is taken from the site ElectoralGeography. It's analysis of the 2004 Ukrainian election can be found here.)
A number of commentators have lamented increasing polarization in Washington. Conventional wisdom has it that America is as divided and partisan as it ever has been. Sectional divisions are tearing this country apart and preventing problems such as the deficit from being addressed; the differences between blue America and red America, in this view, are rapidly approaching crisis point.
There is some justice to this view. Polarization has probably increased, by a number of metrics, over the past few elections. Indeed, I previously noted something to this exact effect.
Let's take another look, however, at the hypothesis, using a different type of measurement. Do blue states elect Republican representatives, and vice versa? In a polarized nation, this would probably not be the case.
Here is the House today:
Here is 1894:
As this stark contrast illustrates, perhaps polarization ain't so bad as it used to be.
I get it. It's true. There is an in-group mentality common to virtually every human social group you can name. It's not just the right, it's present on the left as well. But there's still a helluva difference between a group that thinks anyone who's not a member in good standing is going to Hell, and a group that thinks virtually every religion has something good to teach--a group like the Unitarians, where I grew up. And this isn't the only way that left and right may appear similar at one level--often limited to process--but then look quite different when you actually take a closer look, oh, say for example at the substance of what they're about. After all, the left gave us Martin Luther King and the NAACP--both demonized as "Communists" during the height of the Civil Rights struggle--while the right gave us all-Americans like George Wallace and the KKK.
One of the great tests of politics in the present time is just how much reality is able to break through Versailles' profound confusion on just such basic matters. It was demonstrated once again this week in slightly-more-sophisticated-than-usual piece by AP writer Charlest Babington, "Voters hate partisan sniping, but fuel its growth", which Digby took note of on Wednesday. She quoted the following passage:
In a January poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 93 percent agreed there is too much partisan fighting between Democrats and Republicans. In a March Associated Press-GfK poll, 84 percent said it was important that any health care plan have support from both parties in Congress.
Voters' behavior, however, often works against such sentiments.
"People will tell you they don't like partisanship, but their solution is, 'The other side should give in to us,'" said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, author of "Voice of the People: Elections and Voting in the United States."
She then observed:
Uhm yes. They want their agenda to be enacted and they don't like the idea that their opponents are standing in the way. When one party say, wins a super-majority, they think they have a perfect right to expect that it will happen. It's a mistaken idea they learned back in civics class in high school, I imagine.
Now, Republicans have good reason to define bipartisanship as Democrats capitulating because there is a history of doing just that. Democrats, not so much, but that's no reason they shouldn't think that "two way street" might be defined as the Republicans doing the same thing when the Dems are in the majority. (Alas, they have learned the hard way that this is not going to happen.) I fairly sure it's only the vaunted "centrists" who define bipartisanship as a Chinese menu or splitting the baby. Everyone else thinks that elections actually mean something.
While the above passage takes note of one crucial asymmetry between left and right, it's hardly the only one here. After all, the "Democrat's healthcare plan" that passed into law was actually based on the GOP's plan crafted by the Heritage Foundation back in the 1990s and implemented by George Mitt Romney in Massachusetts just a few short years ago. Furthermore, Abramowitz's statement:
"People will tell you they don't like partisanship, but their solution is, 'The other side should give in to us,'"
ignores the rather unsurprising fact that Pew recently found that Republicans were far less interested in compromise:
What is particularly irritating about crank complaints against "political polarization" is how utterly ineffective their proposed solutions to the "problem." The best available political science on the topic (PDF) suggests a major factor (the rise of a two-party system in the South) and a minor factor (increased income inequality):
Using National Election Study data from 1952 to 2000, we explore the relationship between income and voter partisan self-identification. We find that partisanship has become more stratified by income. We argue that this trend is largely the consequence of polarization of the parties on economic issues and the development of a two-party system in the South. The trend is much less a reflection of increased economic inequality.
Back in December, 2007, I wrote a diary referencing the same basic material, but via a webpage summarizing the main findings of the underlying book, published in 2006, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, by political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. While Chris focused his attention primarily on income inequality, the diary I wrote focused on the changes in Southern politics, and was titled, Obama--Yearning For Dixiecrats? since unconsciously, that's precisely what Obama was doing.
The purpose of this diary is to review some of the material I presented in that diary, and buttress Chris's argument that polarization scolds have no idea what they're talking about. More specifically, the data shows that Northern Democrats have barely changed at all in the past 40 years, and thus are the last people one can blame for increased polarization. Rather, the increased polarization comes from Southern Democrats and Republicans--in both houses of Congress. First the House:
As can be seen, there's been modest variation among Northern Democrats since 1969, but their position as of last year was virtually identical to what it was 40 years earlier. In contrast, Southern Democrats grew steadily more liberal up until the mid-90s, and have held relatively steady ever since, while Republicans have just kept getting more and more conservative since the mid-70s. The story in the Senate is generally similar, though not exactly:
What is particularly irritating about crank complaints against "political polarization" is how utterly ineffective their proposed solutions to the "problem." The best available political science on the topic (PDF) suggests a major factor (the rise of a two-party system in the South) and a minor factor (increased income inequality):
Using National Election Study data from 1952 to 2000, we explore the relationship between income and voter partisan self-identification. We find that partisanship has become more stratified by income. We argue that this trend is largely the consequence of polarization of the parties on economic issues and the development of a two-party system in the South. The trend is much less a reflection of
increased economic inequality.
If the main cause for increased political polarization is the rise of a two-party system in the South, then a straightforward option to reduce polarization would be to entirely wipe out one of the two major parties in a large region of the country. I presume the pundits and pols who complain about polarization would not actually advocate for a one-party system in a large swath of the country (at least in public). Anyway, moving to a one-party system in one-third of the country is probably impossible anyway. As such, those complaining about this "problem" better get used to levels of polarization elevated above the 1932-1980 period indefinitely.
However, the secondary cause of political polarization, elevated income inequality, is actually a problem that many pundits and pols, including those in the center would desire to solve:
The problem is that both parties are not advocating for reduced income inequality. Barack Obama's call to "spread the wealth around" when he was a candidate became the most prominent attack ad used by John McCain in the 2008 campaign. This is some thick irony, given that John McCain has long been one of the favorites of anti-polarization pundits (McCain was the third most common guest on Sunday talk shows even before he ran for President in 2008) and anti-polarization pols, such as Joe Lieberman, who complain about political polarization.
To put it bluntly, the poster child for anti-polarization used an attack on the very concept of reducing income inequality as one of the main messaging points of his campaign, even though a reduction in income inequality is the only course of public policy that has been demonstrated to reduce political polarization.
In fact, one entire party isn't even advocating for reduced income inequality. The Blue Dogs, the exalted bearers of bi-partisan in the Democratic Party, prominently proclaim fiscal conservatism--which is largely synonymous with income inequality, and thus polarization--as their core value.
Until the cranks who complain about political polarization start actually advocating for a policy course that would reduce political polarization at its root cause--income inequality--then it is difficult to consider them anything except charlatans. Right now, most of the most prominent anti-polarization scolds take opposing a reduction in income inequality as their core value.
In my previous post, I noted that almost all the counties President Barack Obama won have become more Democratic since 1992, while almost all the counties Senator John McCain won have become more Republican since 1992.
In fact, comparing maps of the 2008 presidential election and the county changes from 1992 indicates a striking correlation.
Here is the 2008 presidential election:
Here are the changes from the 1992 presidential election:
I will attempt to analyze what this means below the fold.
The New York Times posted a very interesting map of Afghanistan's recent election. Before continuing, I must note that my purpose is not to question whether irregularities or fraud might have denied Abdullah Abdullah victory; I am simply analyzing the data as it appears.
There's a lot of data here, and interpreting it is fairly difficult; few people know much about Afghan politics and demographics. This map indicates the margins each candidate won. Kabul is the big red circle. In total, Karzai won 55% of the vote, essentially doubling the vote of the second-closest candidate.
Compared to a similar maps of U.S. elections, several things stand out. The first is the extent to which polarization is apparent. Afghani society is very clan-based, and elections can reveal polarization like nothing else.
Liberals need to understand that the psychological differences they have with conservatives go beyond mere opinions or factual beliefs, but to issues of thinking style, temperament and even core personality traits. There is ample psychological research that demonstrates that conservatives and liberals are not merely "flip sides of the same coin" like most centre-fetishizing village types believe. Instead, there are deep asymmetries between the camps, and an awareness of that is vital to finding strategies that accent liberal strengths and exploit conservative weaknesses.
In my view, the problem that progressives face is multi-faceted. Here are just a few examples:
First of all conservative's authoritarian tendencies predispose them to follow orders. This makes it relatively easy to organize for fighting--be it physical, political, military or whatever.
Second, the conservative's cognitive strengths and propensities are specifically related to fighting. Among other things, they tend to see the world in black-and-white terms, and seeing things in black-and-white terms is much more conducive to fighting.
Third, this is reinforced by their value tendencies--their heightened orientation to identify with high-status ingroups and demonize and despise out-groups. This makes it much easier to organize for mass attacks on whatever target is identified.
Fourth, conservatives tend to experience divergent ideas as well as individuals and groups as a form of existential threat. In their minds, gay marriage really does threaten to destroy marriage as we know it (and the more marriages they've had, the more threatening this may be, however hypocritical--or even downright silly--it may seem to us.
I could go on, but you get the point. Conservatives really are wired for fighting, in multiple different ways. OTOH, liberals are wired for lots of things, too. We've definitely wired for understanding how stuff works, we're curious, we're interested in exploring what we don't know. And since we don't know how to fight as well as conservatives do in a hard-wired sense, then why shouldn't we be interested in that?
Plus, of course, we're wired for humor. It's no accident that Al Franken is a very funny guy--and yet funny with a long history of serious intent.
So how do we make the most of these--and other--liberal strengths? This is an open thread for discussing your ideas in answer to that question. I'm going to integrate the results of this discussion into the diary I'm working on for tomorrow.
p.s. One thing Dan said that I disagree with--though in a somewhat subtle way:
Too often over the past number of years, you find liberals lamenting the "circular firing squad" while grudgingly admiring the lock-step conservative façade and wishing to emulate it. No. No. No.
I understand what he's saying, and agree with it in a fundamental sense: We need to find ways of acting that are true to our values and cognitive styles and strengths. That's the main post of his diary, and I agree 100%. But it's also true that learning how to adapt and use different tools for different jobs--to think situationally--is also a liberal strength. And so while it's a bad idea to want to be like that all the time, I think it's a good idea to be able to act like that on occassion, when it would be particularly good to do so. We maybe don't want to be fast-ball pitchers. But we want to be able to throw one when we need to.
That chart certainly caught my attention, in no uncertain terms.
In the book, the authors, Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, explain:
Of course, we do not argue that preferences for disciplining children are causally related to individuals' vote choice. It is absurd to think that spanking children led people to vote Republican in 2004. Indeed, if favoring corporal punishment actually caused people to vote for the more conservative candidate, liberals never would have been elected president. It is only very recently that alternatives to spanking children have been widely employed. Instead, support for spanking likely emanates from a particular worldview which that has a range of ramifications, including political ones.
By worldview, we mean a set of connected beliefs animated by some fundamental, underlying value orientation that is itself, connected to a visceral sense of right and wrong. Politics cleaved by a worldview has the potential for fiery disagreements because considerations about the correct way to lead a good life lie in the balance. Specifically, we demonstrate that American public opinion is increasingly divided along a cleavage that things like parenting styles and "manliness" map onto. We will call that cleavage authoritarianism.
Although authoritarianism in general has long been associated with the right, the authors refine their definition and their argument to such an extent that they capture a distinct phenomena that's noticably different from the broader race- and gender-based culture wars first set in motion in the 60s. They focus on using the NES (National Election Study) four-item authoritarianism index introduced in 1992. It asks people to choose between desired pairs of attributes in children:
The pairs of attributes are independence versus respect for elders, obedience versus self-reliance, curiosity versus good manners, and being considerate versus being well behaved. Those who value "respect for elders," "obedience," "good manners," and "being well behaved" score at the maximum of the scale. Those who value "independence," "self-reliance," "curiosity," and "being considerate" score at the minimum.
In particular, the authors show a great deal of recent movement on issues they show are connected to authoritarianism. One of their most striking tables of data comes from an analysis of items on two Pew Surveys, from 2003 and 2007, in which there is clear evidence of increased polarization on 10 of the 14 items related to authoritarianism, while the other items show a slight average decrease in polarization. I reproduce it on the flip.
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.
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.
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.
During the primaries, Mark Schmitt wrote a piece in the American Prospect, "The 'Theory of Change' Primary", in which he argued:
Perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure.
A good way of understanding that method, Schmitt argued, was in terms of a "theory of change," a term from the philanthropic/non-profit world, which will be explained on the flip. What's most noteworthy about this argument is that it represents a sophisticated way of interpreting Obama's seemingly centrist tendencies as covertly progressive. Thus, an important question naturally arose: was it simply a way for progressives to deceive themselves--a sophisticated form of wishful thinking?
This week saw the appearance of another installment along the same lines, an article by Andrew Levison at The Democratic Strategist, "Obama the Sociologist". I want to stress that both pieces are thoughtful, and have some useful insights. But I believe that both are deeply colored by wishful thinking, and contain some very flawed analysis as well.
Above all, what I think that both of them miss--as described in yesterday's diary, "Obama The Conservative"-- is a very straight-forward sense in which Obama acts and thinks like a procedural conservative, an orientation that's sometimes compatible with progressive aims, but always vulnerable to the veto power of established, substantively conservative interests--and never moreso than during a time of crisis, such as that we are now experiencing, a time in which confrontation is far more likely to succeed in producing both minimally necessary and maximally achievable change.
My analysis shares in common with these authors the sense that there's a more progressive side to Obama that his procedural conservatism masks. But by fully acknowledging a degree of conservatism--not just centrism--in his procedural approach to politics, it helps explain elements of substantive conservatism as well, which progressives generally have been reluctant to fully acknowledge, and have therefore been ineffective in responding to.
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