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On Tuesday, Chris wrote a diary, “On the progressive divide “, commenting on a piece by Peter Daou, “On the Left, a False Choice Fuels the Growing Civil War Over Obama”. I want to stress that although President Obama is the focus of this discussion, this is really about something much bigger: it’s about how we understand history and politics and the meaning of being progressive. I’ll have much more to say about that in other diaries this weekend. While this diary is adversarial in approach, contrasting two different sides of an ongoing argument, the next diary on progressivism is decidedly not.
“There is a civil war on the left over Barack Obama,” Daou wrote. “The fault lines are jagged, and depending on the issue, porous, but broadly, the split is along two fronts…” Slightly editing Dao’s presentation of the two-fold divide he proposes for consistency (both internally and with Chris’s clearer format) we start with this:
1.- Those who believe that Obama’s progressive critics are going too far, reinforcing rightwing attacks and undermining his presidency.
versus
- Those who believe that critiquing — and occasionally opposing — the president on issues such as gay rights, civil liberties and national security is healthy and necessary
2.- Those who argue that an incremental approach is the best we can hope for and that Obama’s list of accomplishments is impressive
versus
- Those who say that in the long run, watered-down legislation, half measures and empty ‘bipartisanship’ are worse for America (and the Democratic Party).
Chris commented on Peter’s piece and went on to suggest a third front, which was actually developed by Peter in his piece, but not clearly articulated as such. Here’s what Chris wrote [empahsis added]:
I agree with Peter’s premise that this is largely a false choice. There is no reason why you can’t work toward an ideal aim while, in the face of powerful entrenched opposition, accepting whatever victories you can manage along the way. In fact, as Peter notes, selling the core values that undergird your completed vision for the country is necessary in order to make your incremental victories as large as possible:
Strikingly, this civil war is premised on a false choice: that an incremental legislative approach and a well-articulated grand ideological vision are mutually exclusive. They’re not. Rapid, sweeping changes may not be feasible in the face of entrenched interests and steely GOP obstructionism, and credit should be given to the president for seeking and achieving solid wins. But neither is the White House prohibited from standing up for core Democratic ideals and presenting them powerfully and unflinchingly, explaining to the public in clear terms why Democrats have the better plan for America. Nor does the glacial pace of progress in Washington obviate the need to reverse George Bush’s radical excesses, something the Obama administration has failed (so far) to do.
Perhaps this civil war keeps raging not because people fail to understand that this is a false choice, but instead because there is a third dimension to the argument.
Maintaining the same standard form, this divide is:
3. - Those who believe that the Obama administration achieved as much incremental progress as was possible over the last 18 months, or very close to it;
versus
- Those who think significantly more could have been achieved had the Obama administration been more progressive and / or aggressive.
As can be seen by Chris’s own quotation of Daou, his “third dimension” is actually just a formalization of Daou’s own argument. And it’s a very good point, I think. It strikes me as both a perceptive and a fairly accurate neutral portrayal of the divide.
But is the divide itself a neutral one?
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| Or are there much more conservative forces on the pro-Obama side? Forces that are pleased to see whistleblowers prosecuted while war criminals walk free, for example? Or forces pleased to Wall Street bailed out, while tens of millions of Americans lose their homes? I’m not saying that everyone supporting Obama is pleased with these outcomes. That would be absurd. But it’s equally absurd, I think, to simply assume that everyone supporting Obama deserves to be called “a progressive.” And for that reason, I think it’s worth looking at other ways that one might express the difference between the two views of Obama expressed in progressive circles.
Active Progressive vs. Passive Conservative Issue Framing
For example, focusing more narrowly on a point that’s subsumed in this third dimension, but that’s worth focusing on separately, particularly given Obama’s strong rhetorical gifts, and the enormous power of the bully pulpit, we have:
4. - Those who believe that Obama’s continued active use and/or passive acceptance of conservative framing is not important–or who deny it entirely;
versus
- Those who believe that Obama’s failure to articulate a clear progressive alternative view of issues and their inter-relationship is a terrible failing–or else evidence that he’s not a progressive.
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Examples of this would include:
(A) The “war on terror”–which Obama has de-branded, but not fundamentally altered or questioned in any way. His changes have been purely cosmetic: pushing for a more multi-lateral approach with more sweet-talk, along with more drone attacks and targeted assassinations. Obama has made no attempts to move in the more realistic, pragmatic direction–which also happens to be progressive–of (1) treating terrorism as a criminal matter, not a military one, just like every sane nation in the world (Israel isn’t sane); (2) seeking to reduce tensions and grievances that terrorists can and do exploit; and (3) aggressively supporting alternatives to terrorists in the Moslem world, without requiring them to follow our line, rather than representing the views of the people they arise from.
(B) Healthcare/Federal Deficits. Here the main failure was two-fold: First, Obama failed to address healthcare for all as a moral responsibility. Second, he failed to address healthcare as the driving force in our long-term deficit situation–thus perpetuating two major problems by failing to raise a common solution to both.
Healthcare costs in America are driven by multiple monopolies–insurance companies, drug companies, for-profit providers–that not only fail to provide care for all Americans, but also produce costs far in excess of other roughly comparable countries with longer life expectancy. In turn, these high costs drive up the cost of government-paid healthcare: Medicare, Medicaid and S-Chip. Over the long term, these higher costs dominate the US budget outlook. As I noted in my mid-June diary, “Long-Term debt–it’s ALL about health care, and we’d be fine if we spent like ANYONE else “, we would have no problem if our healthcare costs were similar to the average costs of comparable countries:
(C) The Stimulus/Green Jobs/Global Warming. As with Healthcare/Federal Deficits, Obama failed on two fronts: He failed to make the moral argument, and he failed to make connecting argument whereby two or more problems share a common solution by seeing things in terms of a larger picture. As I’ve written about on several occasions, George Soros put his finger on the big-picture solution in talking with Bill Moyers in October 2008:
GEORGE SOROS: Well, deal with the mortgage problem. Reduce foreclosures. Recapitalize the banks. And then work on a better world order where we work together to resolve problems that confront humanity like global warming. And I think that dealing with global warming will require a lot of investment.
You see, for the last 25 years the world economy, the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right? Than he’s been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It’s finished. It’s run out of – can’t continue. You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.
BILL MOYERS: Putting more money in, building infrastructure, converting to green technology.
GEORGE SOROS: Instead of consuming, building an electricity grid, saving on energy, rewiring the houses, adjusting your lifestyle where energy has got to cost more until it you introduce those new things. So it will be painful. But at least we will survive and not cook.
BILL MOYERS: You’re talking about this being the end of an era and needing to create a whole new paradigm for the economic model of the country, of the world, right?
GEORGE SOROS: Yes.
(D) The failure of conservative economics. Quite simply, Obama was incapable of identifying and describing the spectacular failure of conservative economics, because he himself remains a true believer, and has surrounded himself with a whole army of true believers. This subject is so vast, that I won’t even try to sketch out the main failings. Instead I’ll do the opposite, and site a simple boneheaded example that Adam brought up in his Thursday diary, “Mixed messaging”, from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on The Kudlow Report:
Now, this president understands deeply that governments don’t create jobs, businesses create jobs. And our job as government is try to make sure we’re creating the conditions that allow businesses to prosper so they can hire people back, get this economy going again.
Michael Steele couldn’t have said it better.
Disagreements In Political Perception
Stepping back a bit, there are also fundamental disagreements in political perception, which can be said to lie behind the differences in perceiving or not perceiving Obama’s rhetorical failings:
5.
- Those who believe that Obama is a progressive, and that his accomplishments are comparable to FDR in both significance and kind.
versus
- Those who believe that Obama is a neo-liberal, and that his accomplishments are comparable to Tony Blair-neutering his party and consolidating–rather than reversing and repudiating–the radical policies of his predecessors.
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This is arguably the strangest divide, aince Obama himself has repeatedly made it clear that he’s not in the tradition of FDR (though he does give occassional lip service), and that he is a neo-liberal in the tradition of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Blair is arguably the more instructive figure, since we Americans can see him more clearly at an appropriate distance, and the parliamentary system provides for more clear-cut dividing lines.
When Obama first gave his career-making speech at the 2004 DNC, it was possible to interpret him, in part, as defending liberalism against false accusations, as he attacked stereotyped images of red states and blue states. By now, however, it’s quite clear that he believed those characterizations (see, for example, his later remarks about “1970s style anti-military love-ins”) and was explicitly rejecting them, in parallel to how Blair’s “New Labour” rejected the Labour Party’s traditional commitment to socialism.
Consider the premier legislative example of healthcare reform. The Blair/Third Way model makes perfect sense of what Obama did: enact a 1990s Republican proposal. In contrast, the FDR model produces a welter of confusions–including the pretense that this conservative (Heritage Foundation product) plan can be the foundation for further future improvements just the same sort of way that Social Security was improved. Of course, anything can happen, but Obama’s approach made such a future evolution far more difficult and unlikely than it easily could have been. Indeed, the whole idea of Jacob Hacker’s original public option proposal was precisely to create such a foundation for policy improvement over time, and Obama never once showed any sign of embracing that logic, even when he did give rhetorical approval to the public option at various points in time.
The pretence of Obama as progressive champion comparable to FDR also requires further differences in patternings of political space, as Obama supporters and critics pay attention to different things. Perhaps most striking is the issue areas that supporter seemingly can’t see at all, producing the following divide:
6.
- Those who ignore, excuse or support Obama’s Bush-like record on war crimes, civil liberties, prosecuting whistleblowers, expanding the war in Afghanistan, continuing the war on terror, bailing out and protecting Wall Street, privatizing public education, expanding off-shore oil drilling, and enabling the enemies of Social Security and Medicare (not to mention his foot-dragging on gay rights, and his appointment of Supreme Court nominees who are arguably more conservative than the justices they are replacing).
versus
- Those who regard Obama’s record on these issues as clearly not progressive, and not excusable or dismissable by any rationale that can be considered progressive.
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This divide is virtually self-explanatory. The less said about it, the better… for Obama defenders, that is. “America is a center-right nation” is basically all they’ve got–as if bailing out Wall Street no strings attached weren’t as popular as the Bubonic plague. It’s one thing to make occassional tactical concessions under extreme political pressure. But Obama’s record in these areas has been nothing of the sort. He is validating and consolidating extreme conservative practices that have demonstrably failed during the Bush years.
Another way in which this divide has reflected a patterning of political space is that Obama’s defenders have selectively portrayed the presidency in ways that are frankly astonishing, given that recent example of eight years under George W. Bush. This is actually best understood in terms of two dichotomies. First:
7.
- Those who defend Obama by claiming the President is relatively powerless.
Versus
- Those who live in the real world. (I tried to think of a nicer, more “neutral” way to phrase this, without straying into Orwellian territory. I struck out.)
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On the later view, see Glenn Greenwald’s devastating basic civics lesson.
And second:
8.
- Those who focus almost entirely on legislation and say Obama has done as much as he can, given the political constraints
versus
- Those who notice his record in areas of executive action, where there’s no gun to his head, but he continues to act like Bush anyway–or at least fails to act like a progressive.
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Prominent examples of the later include his escalation of the Afghanistan War, his prosecution of whistleblowers, his support for the Honduran coup, and his disastrous off-shore oil drilling policy.
Conclusion
The point of all the above is fairly simple: I want to show that there are a multiplicity of divides between Obama’s crticis and his defenders, and that the defenders are systematic in keeping their focus sharply narrowed, either arbitrarily, ideologically or both. Critics, OTOH, are systematic in looking at things more broadly, generally reflecting a more reality-based, pragmatic orientation. This sort of divide previously had defined the difference between supporters of G.W. Bush versus his criticis, and continues to define the difference between Versailles and the outside world.
The first three expressions of the divide, considered in isolation, give rise to a more “balanced” “neutral” interpretation of the nature of the divide. But this limited number of ways of looking at the divide is itself arbitrarily and ideologically narrowed from a much broader range of differences. As such, it actually replicates the underlying conceptual biases of the pro-Obama side. Only a consideration of all the different aspects of the divide can provide us with a truly objective picture of the nature of the divide, as opposed to a Versailles-style “balanced” and “neutral” interpretation.
In particular, any discussion of the “progressive” divide that refuses to seriously consider Obama’s starkly anti-progressive actions in a range of different areas (war-fighting, civil liberties, Wall Street bailouts, off-shore oil drilling, education, etc.) must ultimately be deemed limited at best, and downright dishonest at worst. This is not to say that Obama is an anti-progressive. “Self-hating progressive” might be more like it. Or who the hell knows? Ultimately, what’s in Obama’s heart and mind is irrelevant. Our willingness and ability to honestly confront and criticize what he’s done, however, is of utmost importance. As I said in the beginning, this much less about Obama himself than it is about how we understand history and politics and the meaning of being progressive.
Let the real discussion begin. |
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