It's not necessary to nudge the Obama administration leftward until it arrives at socialism. When it comes to the public provision of public goods, Eisenhower Republicanism would be just fine.
In my intro to that diary, I said:
This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Examples of those limits are everywhere, but none is better than the virtual exclusion of single-payer health care from discussion in the health-care debate. Private insurance companies take roughly one third off the top for their bureaucracy, their advertising, their lobbying and their profits, and they don't contribute anything to providing health care. In fact, they are a clear impediment, as millions of people know from their personal experience on a daily basis. They are, at this point, purely parasitical on our diseased political culture. Yet, getting rid of them is politically unthinkable in Obama's mind, in the world he accepts as given. On Democracy Now! on Friday, this was the topic of discussion with Harpers senior editor Luke Mitchell, author of the article "Sick in the head: Why America won't get the health-care system it needs."
Note: Last weekend, I wrote a diary "George Lakoff's 'Obama Code' As A Partial Model", which largely validated Obama's reading of Obama as a progressive, while noting some problematic aspects to his analysis. This weekend I want to take a sharper, more clearly-defined look at the limits of Obama's progressivism, which this diary begins. Not surprisingly, the dividing line is not pragmatism, but good old-fashioned ideology: "neo"-liberalism vs. the real thing. A key distinction of the real thing is public provision of public goods.
Michael Lind is pretty much an old-fashioned centrist, without being stuck in the past. Like David Brock after him, he started out as conservative foot-soldier rising rapidly through the ranks, then grew appalled by what he saw once he rose high enough to finally grasp the rot within. Yet, as Publishers Weekly noted in the review of his watershed book, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America:
It is too late to rescue American conservatism from the radical right, he declares, pointing out the surprising sympathy conservatives have for antigovernment hate groups. Lind doesn't dwell on attacking the left; he did that in The Next American Nation. Given that few politicos today espouse the "national liberalism" he propounds a centrist populism that unites moderate social conservatism with economic class warfare.Lind urges his readers to support neoliberals such as President Clinton.
So what's he doing writing a piece in Salon bewailing "Obama's Timid Liberalism"? Setting the record straight, that's what. Like many others, I was pleasantly surprised by his budget proposal the week before last. To be honest, I was relieved after all that dangerous talk about entitlement reform and center-right "fiscal responsibility." But that still left so much uninspired policy muddle draped in Obama's inspiring rhetoric that it was difficult to know where to begin. Lind knows where:
Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D;, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...
Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?
Oh. OK. Never mind.
It wasn't just FDR and atomic power, Lind reminds us. It was FDR and Social Security, too. And Eisenhower and the Interstate freeway system. The direct public provision of public goods. And it worked. Hello, President Pragmatism! Over here!
As David Sirota recently noted, Nick Kristof, the neoliberal with a heart of gold, has penned another brilliant attack on the vulgar protectionists and their bizarre campaign against sweatshops and for "labor standards."
I think Kristof is very brave for speaking out on this issue and ruffling some left-wing feathers. Needless to say, I heartily agree with Kristof's arguments; but I would take his proposals a step or two further.
In keeping with the spirit of free enterprise and market solutions, impoverished children of the world's shantytowns should be allowed to sell their organs, limbs, etc. on the international market. The income from a kidney sale would be enough to feed one ragamuffin and a good many of his or her relations for more than a year. Would we sooner let a little girl die of starvation than let her sell a cornea or a patch of skin? If anything, these budding young entrepreneurs should be encouraged to make the most of their anatomical capital.
Let's be clear here. Opponents of organ sale are snatching food from the mouths of hungry children. Won't somebody think of the children? Organ markets now!
A more radical proposal would be to have urchins of the Third World rounded up and sold as slaves. Surely their daily ration of slave gruel will be better than eating garbage or nothing at all, their work aprons better than their present shameful nakedness. Would the poor little scamps rather huddle under muddy tarps or enjoy the warmth and comfort of modern slave quarters?
Who but Nicholas Kristof will speak for these precious little ones. Won't these abolitionists think of the children? Slavery now! Slavery forever!
In my first diary yesterday, I questioned whether, as Chris argued, another wave election victory for Democrats, based primarily on the Iraq War, would be enough to produce a genuine realignment, and the overthrow of the conservative coalition. I picked up on David Sirota's diary about a three-country expansion of NAFTA, and agreed that this sort of politics had proven deadly for Democrats in 1994, but disagreed somewhat about why and how.
In my second diary, I looked at Naomi Klein's reframing of "free market" conventional wisdom in her new book, The Shock Doctrine, and a 7-minute trailer for it. The "free market" is not natural, inevitable, noncoercive and beyond politics-as, for example, neocon Frances Fukiyama argued in The End of History--but rather the product of deliberate anti-democratic interventions carried out when societies are helpless to resist.
This is, of course, one of the key dynamics in Iraq. Although Saddam was a brutal dictator, he kept Iraq's basic social contract intact. Iraq was a Western-style welfare state, based on its oil wealth, with a highly educated middle class. The oil law we are trying to impose is central to changing all that, transferring enormous wealth to oil companies, and leaving Iraq with a vastly impoverished public sphere. (Which, of course, opens the way for "faith-based initiatives" of the Hamas, Hezboolah, even bin Laden persuasions.) The oil law is a key requirement of the Iraq Study Group recommendations- recommendations which some have proposed should form the foundation of the Democrats' alternative to Bush's endless war.
The fact that this oil law could be nonchalantly accepted in such a manner is indicative of how poorly we understand the nature of the political struggle we are in. Stealing Iraqs oil wealth-for that is what the oil law does-should be anathema, morally repugnant to us. That it is not is a reflection on our general ignorance of the "free market" dogma and its impact on the rest of the world. We simply fail to focus on the oil law because we do not see that larger movement of which it is part-a movement to extract as much wealth as possible from the poor people of the earth, which is what "free trade" is actually all about.
