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Michael Tomasky's article, Against Despair: How our misreading of history harms progressivism today adopts the pose of an historically informed adult reprimanding childish activists for their petulance. But it's really nothing more than one long distraction from the actual facts at hand. FDR and LBJ weren't perfect paragons, we're reminded, and Rome wasn't built in a day.
What this misses is the real crux of the problem: Obama's crippling ideological and imaginative limitations as a child of Reagan--something that simply has no parallel in FDR and LBJ, for all their shortcomings. Like other attempts to portray FDR as a centrist Democrat, no different than Obama, this is simply historically false. If FDR was not always a good Keynesian, for example, it was because Keynesianism was just being invented and no one in America really understood it yet. When Obama's not a good Keynesian, it's because he's unwilling or afraid to simply and repeatedly state facts and push back against lies.
Of course it's quite true that Roosevelt was not as progressive as many of his contemporaries, starting with his wife. And it's true that he backed some conservative ideas as well--though the most significant examples were budget-related ones that largely reflected the primitive state of economic knowledge at the time. But it's also true that he had a much more ideologically diverse group of advisers than Obama, including staunch progressives like Frances Perkins who have no equal in Obama's inner circle.
FDR also had a history of reformist activism from his earliest days in the New York Senate, when he lead a group of insurgents who refused to support the Tammany Hall candidate for US Senate. Although he later mended fences with Tammany somewhat, there was a clear pragmatic purpose for that--getting elected Governor of New York--and the underlying animus never really went away. Tammany Hall supported Al Smith for the Democratic nomination for President in 1932, after which the New Deal effectively crippled Tammany Hall, and though it managed a resurgence under Carmine De Sapio in the early 1950s, his torpedoing of FDR Jr.'s run for NY Attorney General lead to Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement in organizing the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, which eventually drove De Sapio from power.
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| More important than all this, however, is the simple fact that FDR was proactive, trying all manner of different approaches to the problems confronting the nation, while Barack Obama so far has proven reactive, selecting ideas only from a relatively narrow menu of options, all preselected with more thought given to his political opposition than to his base--be it about labor issues, civil liberties, war and peace, or the environment. We saw this once again this week with his Oval Office speech in response to the oil spill, whose utter lamitude was clearly revealed by Rachel Maddow's far superior version.
Tomasky's argument, in essence, is that progressive legacies take time to build, and that we are judging Obama's progress so far through an historically distorted lens. But the counter to this argument is simply that Obama is not building a progressive legacy at all--indeed that he's continuing the Reaganite/neo-liberal dismantling America's progressive legacy. In short, it's not the speed that's the problem--it's the purpose. Obama himself has defined his purpose as trying to build consensus, whereas FDR was trying to find solutions to dire problems. Obama, in contrast, readily ignores the problems if they would get in the way of his quest for consensus. Again, compare his speech with Maddow's.
I would argue that Tomasky has things exactly backwards: It's Obama who is trapped in a short-term perspective, lacking in a historical sense. Consider, for example, what happened after health-care passed. It was clearly a very imperfect bill, but at least in the final days Obama finally started acting like a passionate advocate, and the idea that this could be a first step to be improved upon down the road--which previously seemed like an implausible bad faith argument--really seemed palpably plausible. There was a sense of potential momentum in the air--a sense based precisely on the kind of long-term perspective that Tomasky claims progressives are lacking, but that quickly started ebbing away again because Obama made it blindingly clear that he was still intent on pursing his failed, ahistorical policy of pursuing consensus for its own sake, even where none was possible.
Here's Tomasky's take on this period:
It's one thing to be disappointed in policy outcomes, or even angry about them. But more and more it seems that we are in an age of liberal despair-as reflex and first instinct, as motif and explanation, even, it sometimes seems to me, as fashion. Criticism of legislation and proposals is always proper and necessary, as is the application of whatever pressure people can apply to try to produce more progressive outcomes. But I've read and heard many critiques that then race right past that into outright desolation. One noticed it in the days after the passage of the health-care bill in late March. There was a brief geyser of euphoria, and then, in two or three or at most five days, skirmishes broke out over why Obama didn't make more recess appointments than the 15 he shoved through on March 27. By March 31-10 days after the House passed health-care reform-when Obama announced his since re-thought plan to open many coastal areas to offshore drilling, things on the liberal side were more or less back to the dour normal.
Well, why the hell not? Obama's timidity in making recess appointments--and the utter abandonment of Dawn Johnsen--are clear indications of a lack of fighting spirit. Whatever one might say about FDR and LBJ, neither were lacking in that regard, and that was key to all that they did accomplish. The off-shore drilling announcement went well beyond this, however, underscoring his repeated naive embrace of questionable (at best) conservative ideas in the vain hope of gaining support from people who hate his guts and only want him to fail. Tomasky's argument, no matter how compelling it might be in the abstract, suffers from a fatal, fundamental disconnect from reality: It takes no account of Obama's delusional obsession with an impossible concensus.
But there's another problem, as well. So far, Obama has confronted problems stemming from three different business sectors: finance, health care and energy. In all three cases, the basic conflict is not between left and right. The conflict is between special interests and the common good--including the vast majority of business interests outside of each of those sectors in turn. This is part of what progressives find so frustrating. Obama wants to build concensus? Great! How about buidling a concensus among everyone that's been victimized by these habitual bad actors? Out in the real world, conservatives as well as liberals saw their home equities vanish almost overnight because of Wall Street malfeasance. Conservatives as well as liberals have had life-saving medical care denied to them by faceless insurance company bureaucrats. Conservatives as well as liberals sat in the dark when Enron forced rolling blackouts onto California, cursed when speculators drove gas prices up to $5 a gallon, and are appalled at BP's never-ending Keystone Cops routine in the Gulf.
In short, Obama actually could have made progress in his goal of getting beyond left and right, if only he hadn't been so obsessed in seeing things in terms of left and right to begin with. If he'd seen things in terms of the special intersts vs. the common good, that framing in and of itself would have served to bring left and right together--at least in the population at large. And that coming together in the population at large could then be used to pressure politicians in DC. But Obama is far too much of insider politician, far too much of a machine man for anything like that.
Which brings me to my finaly point. There is something that Tomasky has right: liberal despair is a poor match to rightwing rage (Tomasky calls it "a joyful rage"). And this is certainly correct. But surely Tomasky must understand that it's hard for partisan supporters to muster rage against a president of their own party. If they have to pass through a period of frustration and despair first, who should be surprised at that? Rather than lecturing activists on their emotional lives, Tomasky ought to be counselling the Administration on what happened to LBJ when he lost his base of partisan support by fighting a war he didn't believe in to "protect his right flank". But, then, if Tomasky were to try to talk sense to the Obama Administration, then he, too, might find himself getting filled with frustration and despair. Fortunately for him, he shares their delusion. In his essay, he notes that he supports the war in Afghanistan. No frustration and despair for him! No siree! |
