Details Aren't the Devil

Cross-posted at Alien The Right's Field.

Democratic candidates offer a wealth of ideas, explained in rich detail. Republicans offer a few vague platitudes and promise to get back to us after the election.

Steve Benen says that, infuriating as it may be, the Republican approach may be savvier:

I’m not sure Republicans are wrong about this. When a GOP candidates says, “Vote for me — and I’ll work out the details later,” I’d love for there to be consequences. There never are. In 2000, Bush’s vague and ambiguous tax plan didn’t make any sense. Al Gore tried to make it a campaign issue, but the media ignored it and voters didn’t care. In 2004, Bush said more than once that he could privatize Social Security without raising taxes, raising the deficit, cutting benefits, or raising the retirement age. How did he propose to pull that off? He didn’t — he just mentioned ideas and goals without any details. There were no political consequences.

In fact, American voters don’t seem to care all that much about the details in advance. A candidate talks about what he or she finds important, and how he or she would approach the issue if elected. Voters either agree or disagree. If a candidate were to make some kind of outlandish campaign promise — free ice cream for everyone, every day, for four years — there would probably be a higher expectation to explain how that might work, but a more general policy prescription needs a lot fewer support materials.

One of the neat tricks Republicans managed to pull off during much of the past decade or two was to earn a reputation as both the party of principles and the party of ideas. Logically, those two things may be connected, but as Benen's analysis suggests, in a practical sense it can be difficult to wear both hats at the same time. When you spend a lot of time on wonky policy details, it can be hard to express basic foundational principles in a clear way. At the same time, when all you talk about are principles, your rhetoric can be so divorced from reality that it becomes meaningless.

This is just an impression, but I think that Republicans, having achieved a reasonable sense of balance between principles and ideas for quite some time, are tilting over into meaningless abstractness at this point. Much of this has to do with the exhaustion of the Goldwater conservative movement, which seems finally to have reached its Waterloo in the era of Bush the Lesser. Movement conservative ideas simply came to their logical and practical limits -- if the ideas worked, Bush would have implemented them successfully. They didn't and he couldn't, and all the rest of what conservatives say about it is just excuse-making. Does anybody really think there's a future in social security privatization or "health savings accounts"? Honestly?

Bush knew that conservatives couldn't simply slash away the social insurance state, but the price of a politically-feasible transition was too much for the right's ideology to bear -- as the Part D debacle proved. And that was just a preview of the costs that would be associated with any privatization of social security. There just isn't any way to remake America along Goldwater-conservative ideological lines. You can't go back again. There are new, young conservatives out there with some interesting (if embryonic) ideas of their own, but they aren't influential enough yet to have much impact on the presidential race, so what we're left with is a field of candidates repeating the rhetoric of conservative years past, even as that rhetoric has lost its relevance to the details of governance.

Republicans are usually the party that attracts those who crave transcendence and the appeal of pure ideology. Democrats are usually the party of pragmatism, ideological muddle, and practical government. There's nothing wrong with that basic dichotomy. A party gains an advantage when it is able to reach beyond its basic mode and do a little bit of what its opponent can do -- a strong GOP has at least some good, wonky ideas, and a strong Democratic party has at least some ability to appeal to the voters' civic-spiritual side.

My point is that Benen may be right, but he's thinking of a Republican party that was able to achieve that balance more effectively. Even just in the past couple of years it has lost the balance. Both its domestic agenda and its foreign-policy credibility have come undone. I'd like Democrats to talk about principles more, but let's let them be the party of details, too. In the end, details do matter.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:35 AM 233 comments

  So What's Happening Here?

What does it mean that Barack Obama is currently the third choice of Iowa Republican voters in the general election -- after Romney and Giuliani but before Thompson and McCain? What does it mean that, as the campaign goes on, abortion apostate Rudy Giuliani is losing strength not among conservative voters, but among Republican-leading independents?

Of course it's far too little data to draw any real conclusions. But for the sake of positing a theory, let's go back to the Fabrizio poll we discussed about a month ago. As you may recall, the poll described, among other things, the emergence of two very interesting constituencies within the GOP coalition: "Heartland Republicans" and "Government Knows Best Republicans." My capsule description:

The former, constituting 8% of the GOP electorate, are "more pragmatic and less ideological," worried about gas prices but supportive of government action on economic issues and climate change, and somewhat Midwestern. The latter group are 13% of the party, the "strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems," as well as being "skeptical of the Patriot Act" and of military spending generally, heavily female, and "more likely to be found on the coasts."

So here you have a good 21% of 2000 Republican voters with distinctly moderate -- we might even say progressive -- politics. And who, in the current crop of GOP presidential candidates, represents them? McCain has glued himself to Bush on the war. And Giuliani's standing with R-leaning independents has sunk precisely during the time in which he has run away from his previous reputation as a moderate and made a name for himself as one of the most belligerent, partisan candidates in the race.

There's at least a fifth of the Republican party up for grabs if the GOP's own candidates continue to amp up the partisanship and crowd each other on the right side of the spectrum. One data point -- that Iowa poll -- suggests that Barack Obama, with his "post-partisan" rhetoric, might be the Democrat best positioned to peel their support away from the GOP. But all the Democratic candidates might be well advised to take note of them. I'm not saying they should flee the Democratic base -- far from it. Rather the point is that candidates should be confident that in making the case for progressive values, they're actually taking the fight to the Republicans.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:25 PM 1 comments

  Is Hillary Our Nixon?

My question has nothing to do with secret tapes, dirty tricks, or paranoid anti-Semitism. What I'm thinking of is a comparison to Nixon's relationship with the conservative movement.

After 2004 it became fashionable in progressive grassroots circles to portray Howard Dean as a sort of Goldwater of the left. The comparison was in many ways apt -- while Dean was in no sense an ideological radical like Goldwater, he was the early prophet and catalyst for a self-conscious movement that aimed to re-invigorate and re-partisanize a major political party -- a party that had, in recent years, drifted from its historical principles and found itself consistently wrong-footed by the opposition. After Dean's defeat, we reassured ourselves by remembering how badly Goldwater was beaten in 1964, yet how the movement he founded eventually went on to become the single most powerful political force in America.

What we don't often talk about is the fact that that movement didn't really manage to get one of its own elected until sixteen years later. Richard Nixon, meanwhile, was nobody's favorite -- and certainly not the activist base's. But he was a hard-working career insider, a skilled and determined politician, and he horse-traded his way to the nomination in 1968, defeating conservative favorite Ronald Reagan, who was judged too inexperienced really to be president.

I've been pondering this for a while, and Jerome Armstrong's frustrated ruminations on the Hillary steamroller brought it to mind again. Jerome calls the race "Hillary's to lose" and regrets both the failure of purported netroots favorite John Edwards (I like Edwards, but I don't entirely accept this premise) to gain more traction, and Barack Obama's refusal to engage the netroots in a solid partnership. I suppose if one were to draw parallels to 1968, there would be obvious points of comparison between the two Democratic fields -- you have the institutional candidate (Humphrey), the progressive activists' favorite (McCarthy), and the rock star mistrusted by those same activists (RFK).

All interesting enough. But a more instructive comparison for the progressive movement might be between Hillary and Nixon. The right wing, never particularly fond of Nixon, turned on him with a vengeance after he had been in office for a couple of years. If we wind up with a President Hillary, the progresssive grassroots/netroots could find itself in a similar state. After all we've done, why are we going back to this? Why are we going back to Bill Clinton and triangulation? Echoes of: Why are we going back to Eisenhower and Keynesianism and internationalism? What really makes the parallel amusingly complete is how Hillary's right-wing enemies, like Nixon's on the left, see her as the embodiment of extremism, while her own party's activists view her as little more than a self-interested centrist.

It's only a general comparison, but it's worth considering. I still would like to see the question of "what is the netroots" problematized, and also to see that question framed within a broader examination of "what is the progressive movement?" Conservatives do this sort of exercise all the time, and I think it's good for them. We may find that the grassroots this time around is not so much weak as it is divided. Either way, though, if we do wind up nominating nobody's favorite centrist insider, we might remember that history says such setbacks are by no means fatal.

Labels: Democrats, Hillary Clinton, movement building, progressives, Richard Nixon

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:39 AM 5 comments

  On the Courage of Politicians

This Daily Kos diary is interesting, in how its author channels his/her frustration over the Iraq funding vote through both a very important insight and a completely useless cliche.

The cliche is that "we are, indeed, a one-party state in this country." It's a lazy sentiment driven by a cranky defeatism, and it demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to analyze, with competence, American politics as they actually function. The United States, for various reasons, has almost always had two large coalition parties, each vying against the other for overlapping constituencies, but each also veering out in various directions, sometimes with great thrust and surprising radicalism, and each party also contradicting itself with regularity. If anything, the American parties have in recent years arguably become more disciplined, more "party-like" in the European sense than ever before. In fact, that development is closely related to the current crisis.

The insight in theyrereal's diary is contained in this observation:

Who do the Democrats fear?

Do they fear us? Obviously no. Not one stinking bit.

Do they fear the American people in general? Same answer, only with laughter.

The diarist veers in the wrong direction with the next sentence, arguing that what the Democrats fear is something called "The Corporatocracy Gang of Which George Bush is the official Figurehead." Not that "coporatocracy" and "gang" are necessarily bad ways to describe the Bush administration. But the analysis is headed into the weeds. Let's bring it back on track.

I write a lot about the various dilemmas facing the conservative movement and the Republican party. They are serious, complex problems, but I don't want to come across as a pollyanna. If there is one thing that the cave-in on the Supplemental has demonstrated, it is the continuing power of the machine built by the modern American conservative movement. That's the answer to theyrereal's question. Who do the Democrats fear? They fear that machine.

That's why something so apparently remarkable can happen -- how, at a time when the American public hates the Iraq war with more intensity than ever before, and when the President who owns the war is himself less popular than ever, the party that was given a majority with a clear mandate to end the war can, to its own humiliation, completely give up on trying to do so. The Democrats folded because they felt unable to call the right's bluff, because they fear what Bill O'Reilly and the American Enterprise Institute will say about them, and how Chris Matthews and the Washington Post will take up the same talking points -- Pelosi and Reid found it in themselves to resist that pressure for a time, but couldn't summon the courage to withstand an intensified and ongoing barrage of it. They folded because in the end they didn't trust their newfound party unity to hold up to the more practiced discipline on the other side of the aisle. They folded because they felt too exposed.

It isn't to let them off the hook, but let's consider the possibility that the progressive movement still has a good way to go before we can really counter the effects of what the conservative movement has built. And even when we have the institutions, it'll take a while for the politicians to catch up.

The single-best piece of advice for progressives is still Franklin Roosevelt's admonishment to that group of labor leaders who visited him in the Oval Office with a demand: "You have convinced me. Now go out and find a constituency and make me do it." This is the principle around which the entire conservative media and political edifice is built.

The lesson of the 2004 election was that the fortunes of a political movement cannot ride upon the fate of a presidential campaign; if anything, it should be the other way around.

Likewise, the fortunes of a political movement cannot be made dependant upon the courage of politicians. The point of a political movement is to make the courage of politicians irrelevant.

(Cross-posted at The Daily Gotham and The Albany Project.)

Labels: conservatives, Democrats, Iraq, progressives, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:59 AM 2 comments

  It's Not Liberals Who Should Worry About Evangelicals

The American left has been subject to a good deal of unproductive speculation and fear-mongering when it comes to the question of evangelical Christians. We've been forced to listen to vacuous scoldings from the bobbleheaded purveyors of the conventional wisdom, who - evidence be damned - insist that Democrats must get right with something called "values voters" if they're ever to have chance at political success again. And from our own ranks we've been capitivated by waves of hysteria over the barbarians at the gates, as we fixate on the most titillatingly scary fundamentalists we can find.

An example of the latter phenomenon was last year's documentary Jesus Camp, which focused on an extremist Pentecostal summer camp in North Dakota. As an anecdotal record, the film was fascinating, but it blundered badly in its misconceived attempt to use the camp as a stand-in or leading indicator for American evangelicals generally. Framing the camp scenes with commentary from liberal radio host Mike Papantonio, the filmmakers moved directly from disturbing scenes of children being emotionally manipulated to dark warnings about how such radicalism is on the verge of taking over America. The film failed entirely to provide any useful context, to challenge its viewers to understand why fundamentalists see the world as they do, what differences there might be among fundamentalists and evangelicals generally, and whether the grandiose claims made by a Becky Fischer should in fact be taken at face value.

A much better starting point for understanding the political dynamics of American evangelicalism is Frances FitzGerald's excellent article in the current New York Review of Books, which examines how, over the past two or three years, moderate and progressive evangelical leaders have begun to take a more assertive role in public discourse. While not downplaying the pernicious influence of right-wing fundamentalism, FitzGerald observes that evangelicals as a whole are not nearly as conservative as many liberals fear, or as the right-wingers would like to believe. And in this context, the rise of the centrists holds a great deal of promise.

FitzGerald's article is worth reading just for its brief history of political evangelicalism in America, which demystifies the process by which groups like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family have successively risen to positions of influence in US politics. But her critical point is that only a portion of American evangelicals can be described as genuinely right-wing fundamentalists. This has important ramifications:

[T]he polls that distinguish "traditionalist" evangelicals— defined as committed churchgoers who hold conservative religious beliefs—from their less observant and less theologically conservative brethren reveal significant ideological differences between the two groups. According to these surveys, traditionalists, who make up half of the evangelical population and represent the core constituency of the religious right, have far more conservative views on all issues than the rest.

Statistically, the extreme conservatism of the traditionalists skews the picture of the community as a whole. In fact, "modernist" evangelicals—defined as those who go to church infrequently and don't hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible—have more liberal views on all issues, including abortion and gay rights, than the American population as a whole, but there are relatively very few of them. "Centrists," or those who fall somewhere in the theological middle and make up almost half of all evangelicals, are no more conservative than Americans generally except on abortion and gay rights, and even on these issues they are far more moderate than the traditionalists.[9] In other words, half of the evangelical population doesn't see eye to eye with the other half. In the future the division may become more acute because while the Christian right leaders have become more ambitious and more aggressive as a result of their victories, centrist leaders have, for the first time, begun to assert themselves.

FitzGerald documents the recent efforts of ministers like Gergory Boyd, Joel Hunter, and Rich Nathan - mega-church pastors who have begun to de-emphasize sexual politics and the culture war, and to take strong positions on the centrality of poverty, racism, peace, global warming, and international development as issues of concern to Christians. She also documents how centrists and progressives have been able to assert these issues through the National Association of Evangelicals, working with people like Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice-president for governmental relations, who has

supported the experienced evangelical aid organizations World Relief and World Vision in lobbying for a major increase in US aid for development, debt relief for the poorest countries, cuts in domestic agricultural subsidies, and the inclusion of labor standards and human rights conditions in trade agreements. (Two years ago World Vision campaigned against the Central American Free Trade Agreement because it lacked such protections.) Centrist leaders have also lobbied the administration for more money to fund the global campaign against AIDS, and for a variety of human rights causes, including the deployment of a strong United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur.[12]

Even Rick Warren, the empire-building author of The Purpose-Driven Life, has focused his political interventions on such causes.

As FitzGerald acknowledges, we have yet to see these efforts result in a significant shift in the voting patterns of evangelicals - who supported Republicans in 2006 at the same rate as in other recent elections. But the right-wing evangelical political machine has been churning for 28 years, since the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979. The centrists and the progressives have only really been politically engaged for two or three years now. And clearly, there is fertile ground upon which they can work.

The darkest fear of most Republicans - the thing that lurks beneath their beds at night - is that the Democrats might one day neutralize abortion as a political issue. At the conservative summit, Laura Ingraham - with almost an audible shiver - asked audience members to imagine what would happen "if the Democrats became the pro-life party." Democrats shouldn't turn against their basic commitment to freedom of choice. But they don't have to. A prevention-first approach to the issue, combined with a real willingness to work with evangelicals on the other issues that matter to many of them - poverty, social justice, care for the environment - could very well be enough to break half of them away from the grip of the Republican party.

A sober look at the facts suggests that the trends in political evangelicalism should be a source of nightmares for Republicans, not for Democrats.

UPDATE: I posted this at Daily Kos. Some interesting comments. It's fair to say there's a great deal of skepticism over arguments like the one I'm making.

UPDATE #2: Now also cross-posted at Diatribune.

Labels: Democrats, evangelicals, Francis FitzGerald, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:07 AM 0 comments

  As the Immigration Worm Turns

The immigration issue continues to plague Republican candidates. Under the strain, Mitt Romney recently did what he does best in times of trouble: he flip-flopped:

"I don't think there should be a special pathway to citizenship for those that are here illegally," he said. "It makes no sense at all to have a border which is basically concrete against skill and education but wide open to people to just walk on in who have neither."

That position sets the former Massachusetts governor apart from a major rival, Arizona Senator John McCain, as well as President George W. Bush, both of whom back a guest-worker plan that gives undocumented workers the opportunity to become U.S. citizens. It also sets him apart from some of his own former positions.

Bolded text = LOL.

Another paragraph caught my eye:

Romney's decision to shift his stand demonstrates how a big issue sometimes boils up from the voters, forcing candidates to adjust their messages. "For Republicans it's immigration; for Democrats it's trade," Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel (news, bio, voting record) said March 28 at the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in Washington. "Both issues reflect the unease Americans feel about the effects of globalization."

Good to see Rahm acknowledging the need for the Dems to account for their constituents' concerns on trade. And if Romney needs to change his tune on immigration, so be it. But - and I say this without actually looking at polling data, so I could be off base - it seems to me to be a case of two very different situations. Republicans are being pushed by their base to take a stance on immigration that will actually harm them electorally, while the Democratic base is pushing the party toward a more popular trade policy than the one they had previously embraced.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, immigration, Mitt Romney, Presidential election, Republicans, trade

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:59 AM 0 comments

  How They'll Try to Destroy Obama

Mike Allen has a post at the Politico about "the coming effort to dismantle" Barack Obama. Seems that strategists - from both parties - have been leaking information outlining points of attack in their upcoming offensive against the Senator from Illinois. Donna Brazille claims Obama is prepared for the onslaught but there's no doubt that his rivals are hoping to achieve what one of them calls a "souffle effect," whereby his media goodwill is deflated.

The whole piece gives the impression that Allen was just letting himself be spun by a bunch of canny operatives, and then went on to re-post their talking points. A number of the criticisms of Obama are weak, or already well-known. But, for the record, here's what to expect:

Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili? Why did he make up names in his first book, as the introduction acknowledges? Why did he say two years ago that he would “absolutely” serve out his Senate term, which ends in 2011, and that the idea of him running for president this cycle was “silly” and hype “that’s been a little overblown”?

In interviews, strategists in both parties pointed to four big vulnerabilities: Obama’s inexperience, the thinness of his policy record, his frank liberalism in a time when the party needs centrist voters and the wealth of targets that are provided by the personal recollections in his first book, from past drug use to conversations that cannot be documented.

The "experience" thing is a known-known - it's already being debated ad nauseum and can hardly be seen as some surprising new "gotcha." Likewise the so-called "thinness of his policy record." The book stuff and the name stuff I hadn't heard before, and I suppose the right-wing outrage machine is capable of gearing up dudgeon about pretty much anything, so it's worth watching if those attacks are taken up by people besides some of our dim-witted Democratic consultants.

The "liberalism" thing I find both deeply irritating and weirdly tone-deaf. This had better not come out of the mouths of any Democrats, because it's straight-up Joe Lieberman, and any Democratic candidate whose operatives are caught mouthing this crap can kiss his or her grassroots/netroots support goodbye. The idea that any Democrat would be apologizing for or even bad-mouthing values that once again have been proven right, that should be defended now more than ever, that offer the only real values-based alternative to the vapididy and corruption of the right, is frankly too enraging to even contemplate on a Saturday morning.

But let's look at what Allen cites as examples of this supposedly crippling liberalism:

“Audacity of Hope” advocates civil unions for gay people (a position held by most national democratics), declaring tartly that Obama is not “willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.” He says he doesn’t “believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing people into the relationships we think are best for them – or by punishing those who fail to meet our standards of sexual propriety.”

He writes that Bill Clinton and conservatives turned out to be “right about welfare as it was previously structured.” He adds, “But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty.”

Gee. So we've got:

1. Support for civil unions, and


2. A retrospective endorsement of the Clinton/conservative position on welfare reform - albeit with the caveat that "work alone does not ensure that people rise out of poverty."

Allen and the knuckle-dragging "strategists" may be unaware that support for civil unions is now the majority position in America, and it's the "moderate" position, since momentum is rapidly shifting towards the understanding that all people deserve fully equal marriage rights. Liberals support full marriage equality. Obama's not taking the liberal position, but the majoritarian compromise position.

And if Democratic candidates are no longer allowed to observe that "work alone does not ensure that people rise out of poverty," then frankly I'm not sure why we even have a Democratic party anymore.

All this crap is just so 1994. I'm dead tired of it, and any Democratic candidate worthy of even an ounce of respect is not going to stand for this kind of weak-kneed, unprincipled caving to a right wing that has never been so discredited as it is today. Don't fall for it when it comes from the right, and blow it out of the damn water when it comes from the right's stooges in the Democratic party.

Labels: 2008, Barack Obama, Democrats, liberalism, Mike Allen, Presidential election, The Politico

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:14 AM 2 comments

  The Hillary Syndrome

Am I the only person in America whose opinion of Hillary Clinton is just "meh"? For both left and right, she's the ultimate love-her-or-hate-her polarizing figure, and for the life of me I've never understood why. I mean, she's a competent centrist Senator, somewhat calculating like most successful politicians. I don't support her for president because I don't agree with the direction in which her faction wants to take the Democratic Party, but that hardly makes her the Antichrist. Yet so many progressives seem to see her that way - I've even heard good liberals say they'd vote for McCain over Hillary. That's just fucked up on so many levels.

And speaking of antichrist, the right's hatred of Hillary has long operated at a truly cosmic level. I just don't get it. She made a few missteps as first lady. She represents a kind of successful woman that conservatives like to disdain (even as many conservative women have had very similar career trajectories). Okay, I get that. But how did she become the ultimate transcendent evil?

Anyway, the early reviews - most blogs still yet to comment - on candidate Hillary:

Newsmax: Hillary will save the GOP

The Corner: "Americans, lock your doors."

Free Republic (comment): "I would even vote for McCain against the Princess (or Witch) of Darkness" [See? Now the super-pure leftists and the wingnuts are converging].

Redstate (comment): "Disingenuous from the get-go."

Daily Kos: Senator, we need to talk.

Steve Gilliard: "Yawn."

We'll see the magazines' view next week, though I guess it's all pretty predictable.

If weird.

Labels: 2008, Daily Kos, Democrats, Free Republic, Hillary Clinton, Newsmax, Presidential election, Redstate, Steve Gilliard, The Corner

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:39 AM 0 comments

  The Big Blograiser

A&S is joining, in our own humble little 20-readers-per-day way, the rollout for the combined fundraiser/blograiser for New York State Senate candidate Craig Johnson. Craig is running in a special election to replace Republican Michael Balboni, who was named to a post in Governor Spitzer's administration.

Control of the State Senate - Republican-held for nearly a century - is in the balance. If the Democrats win this seat, they will be within two of taking the Senate, which should be close enough to trigger the Senate Republicans' final collapse. In turn, a Democratic Senate would significantly help advance Spitzer's ambitious reform agenda.

The most exciting feature of this fundraiser is that it is being organized, like many other aspects of this race, through a close partnership between the New York State Democratic Party and the progressive grassroots/netroots. The new co-chair of the NY State Dems, Dave Pollak, is someone I know personally, and I can attest that he is passionately committed not just to electing Democrats, but to electing good, honest, progressive Democrats. He was initially hired by the party to head up their outreach to the grassroots, as he's a longstanding grassroots guy himself. The fact that he is now party chair is a clear signal that the New York Democratic Party is ready for an unprecedented relationship with the progressive grassroots. They've been very clear about this - they want a partnership with us. This fundraiser is not the first step we've taken in building that partnership, but it is the biggest one so far.

If you'll be in NYC on Feb 1, come to the live fundraiser at Prey! 4 W. 22nd Street at 6:00 pm. Governor Spitzer, barring unforseen circumstances, is expected to be there. Or follow along on the blogs - I'll post once or twice from the event, but the main liveblogging will be at Daily Kos, The Daily Gotham, and the Albany Project.

Either way, CONTRIBUTE!

We've been trying to crash the gate. Now the gate has been thrown open for us - but we need to accept the invitation.

Labels: Craig Johnson, Democrats, fundraising, New York, State Senate

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:12 PM 0 comments

  Everyone's Favorite Subject: Republicans in Disarray

Two tales - via Daily Kos, so you've seen them already, but for the record...

Revolt at the RNC: Mel Martinez is not a popular man.

And,

Iraq war uniting Dems, dividing Republicans:

A generation ago, a war—Vietnam—launched a realignment of American politics. Now, it seems increasingly clear, Iraq is doing the same. In 1968 college students flocked to the New Hampshire primary to protest Lyndon Johnson's policies, sparking a civil war in the Democratic Party on foreign policy that lasted for a generation. By contrast, Vietnam united the GOP around an anti-communist crusade that endured for decades. "Ronald Reagan was gung-ho about Vietnam," says Craig Shirley, a GOP operative and Reagan biographer. "It solidified his world view, and the party's."

Now a mirror image is developing. Democrats seem to be uniting around a theme—the primacy of global diplomacy and congressional review. Republicans, by contrast, have lost the unity that they had during the cold war and the early years of the war on terror.

As Republican divisions grow, Democrats, pressed by their antiwar grass roots, are drawing together.

Eventually the Republicans will get their act together. But the more the Democrats can stay focused and keep pressing the political attack, the longer they can delay that regrouping. And, the more united and on-message the Democrats are, the harder they'll make it for the right to frame the Dolchstosslegende.

Labels: Democrats, Dolchstosslegende, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 6:45 PM 0 comments

  Fuss Magnets at Last

The New York Times gives us this report of one scene among many in today's Democratic takeover:

There were comparisons to “Alice in Wonderland,” “Star Trek,” “The Twilight Zone,” and all manner of clichés to convey the strangeness engulfing Washington this week as the Democrats prepared to assume control of Congress after 12 years in the minority wilderness. But nothing distilled the new aura of things like this conceit: Steny Hoyer, Rock Star.

“Here he comes, here he comes,” a member of the press throng effervesced when Mr. Hoyer of Maryland, the incoming House majority leader, strode into the room as if he owned the place. Which, in effect, he does — at least the larger, plusher office he is inheriting, which used to belong to Tom DeLay, Mr. Hoyer was compelled to point out. (Not that anyone’s keeping track.)

Mr. Hoyer surveyed the conference room and held his arms slightly apart, as if to frame the unusual site before him: a crush of 60 or so reporters, camera operators, TV types and assorted security people, staff members and hangers-on to befit the status of an emerging fuss magnet.

It's both funny and, inasmuch as it reminds us of the breadth of political egos, sort of irritating. But it's also really important.

For six years we have been told, again and again, that the Democrats had no agenda, no plan, no ideas. While there was some truth to the Democratic identity crisis, the major blame for this perception lay in the fact that the American media simply do not cover minority parties. If you don't have the power to make something happen, you're simply not interesting. In a great piece at the Washington Monthly last May, Amy Sullivan discussed this phenomenon:

When reporters do write about Democratic victories, they often omit the protagonists from the story completely, leaving readers to wonder why Republicans would change course out of the blue. A Washington Post article about the Ethics Committee rule change simply noted that "House Republicans overwhelmingly agreed to rescind rule changes," in the face, apparently, of phantom opposition. Or journalists give credit to maverick Republicans rather than acknowledge the success of a unified Democratic effort: The Associated Press covered Bush's reversal on Davis-Bacon by writing, "The White House promised to restore the 74-year-old Davis-Bacon prevailing wage protection on Nov. 8, following a meeting between chief of staff Andrew Card and a caucus of pro-labor Republicans." Or Bush is blamed for his own defeats, without any mention of an opposition effort, as with Social Security privatization.

Nor are reporters paying attention to Democratic policy proposals, as the party tries to develop a national agenda to run on. Congressional press secretaries say that reporters won't write about their efforts unless or until Democratic legislation comes up for serious consideration. "A lot of reporters tell me, 'Yeah, I'll write about that when it's on the floor,'" complained the Democratic communications director for a Senate committee. "So then some columnist writes that Democrats have no ideas and everybody in America says, 'You're right--I haven't read about any.'"

As a result, it's easy for talking heads to paint Democrats as a bunch of complainers who attack Republicans while putting forward no ideas of their own.

This is a vicious circle in American politics, the trap that parties fall into when, lacking power, they fail to set the agenda - and, by failing to set the agenda, are unable to gain power. If none of your policy proposals stand any chance of becoming law, why would America's lazy and star-struck journalists report about them?

It seems the only way this particular narrative is going to change is with a Democratic victory in November. "They'll have to pay attention to us if we win," [Rep. Louise] Slaughter told me.

That's why "Steny Hoyer, Rock Star" is such a big deal.

Labels: Amy Sullivan, Congress, Democrats, Media, Washington Monthly

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:32 PM 0 comments

  What's the Deal with those Peacenik Dems?

Over at the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti ponders the mystery of the partisan divide in American foreign policy. "Never have the differences between the two parties on issues of war and peace been so distinct," he frets.

For Continetti, American politics is currently divided between a "peace party" and a "power party:"

Together, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq seem to have accelerated a shift begun some 30 years ago: The Democratic party is increasingly linked with the attitudes, tendencies, and policies of peace, whereas the Republican party is increasingly linked with the maintenance and projection of American military power.

His analysis traces this partisan divide to the years after the withdrawal from Vietnam, using historical poll data to note general bipartisan consensus on both getting in and getting out of that war. For Continetti, the mysterious split began during the Reagan years, when registered Democrats tended to oppose Reagan's arms buildup, his meddling in Central America, and the dispatch of Marines to Lebabon - while Republicans tended to support these policies. Under George H.W. Bush, registered Democrats supported the Gulf War less enthusiastically than Republicans, while Democratic representatives in the House and Senate mostly opposed the war resolution.

Then, Continetti kind of undermines his whole point, when he observes that, during the Clinton Administration, it was the Republicans who opposed the use of American military power abroad. But, see, it's not because Republicans were a "peace party:" no, they felt this way "when they thought the 'national interest' was not at stake."

But, of course, it's not possible that, when Democrats oppose an adventure abroad, it's because we don't think that the national interest is at stake.

Of course Continetti is right in discovering partisan differences on foreign policy questions. But his framing is ludicrous. Even the notion of a "peace party" and a "power party" is fallacious - as though power were something that could only be exercised by endorsing every single war and intervention dreamed up the neocons in the Pentagon. Continetti's dishonesty pervades the piece, as when he describes Democrats in Congress as "emphasiz[ing] negotiation without the threat of force" - as if any Democrats support unilaterally removing the threat of force from every diplomatic problem. Force is always implicit in negotiation. The difference is that Democrats believe in negotiating at all.

But Continetti's point is to try and paint the Democrats as inexplicably opposed to the projection of American power, based on Democrats' mixed feelings about neoconservative adventurism. The party divide about which he is so disingenuously mystified is not the product of some dovish Democratic mutation. It's the product of a carefully orchestrated and viciously partisan effort to sell the Republican party as the patriotic party, versus the traitorous Democrats.

If the divide began in the Reagan years, perhaps it's because the entire Reagan mythos was based on the Rambo story of American resurrection, which was in turn based on the stab-in-the-back myth of Vietnam. The Reagan revolution needed to demonize liberals as pacifist, and therefore traitorous.

With the return of the neocons under Bush the Lesser, we've seen this pattern repeated with far greater intensity. Continetti dishonestly traces the current partisan divide to 9/11 (this, particularly, is an infamous lie), and to "the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq." But that's not when the partisan divide began. The entire country was united after 9/11. Opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan was marginal at best. And, despite all the flagrant foolishness and dishonesty peddled in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the war resolution passed both houses of Congress by large majorities.

Even the 2004 election, which Continetti frames as a referendum on the Iraq war, was not that. Only as the war dragged on and slipped dramatically futher into failure during 2005 and 2006, have mainstream Democrats felt comfortable opposing it.

Yes, prior to the invasion, registered Democrats preferred to build support among our allies and give weapons inspectors time to work, and yes, over the course of the war, Democrats have increasingly observed that things are not going well. These are reality-based positions. They reflect reasonable attitudes.

The partisan divide that Continetti observes is not a Democratic phenomenon. It's the result of a massive and intense campaign to energize the Republican base by tying the "culture war" to the cause of American interventionism abroad. It's the product of a highly focused effort to help the GOP defeat the Democratic Party in elections by using politics beyond the water's edge to demonize the domestic opposition. It's the product of a conservative movement that has taught its base to march in lockstep.

The neoconservative movement has a number of problems at the moment, and that base is eroding as Rovian jingoism loses steam. What we're left with, for now, is the lamentations of neocon intellectuals trying to retroactively frame their bastardization of American political discourse as a problem of the perfidy of the left. Their attempt to make their own reality in Iraq and in Washington has failed. But they can still find comfort in the land of make-believe between the pages of the Weekly Standard.

Labels: Democrats, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Matthew Continetti, Neocons, Neoconservatives, Republicans, Weekly Standard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:23 AM 0 comments

  Dreaming Big Dreams: How Obama Could Change the Game

Right now we’re stuck in a 51-49 paradigm, electorally speaking. This suits conservatives just fine. They’ve only ever had one truly unifying, game-changing star in the modern era, and he was an actor – and when his magic disappeared, they resorted to the Atwater-Rove approach: divide and conquer. It’s a truism that conservatives win by dividing America, while progressives can only truly win by uniting it. We can muddle along, hoping to hold our blue states and swing Ohio, and we might win next time, but the math won’t change and in four or eight years the conservatives will be back, governing with undimmed arrogance, no matter how small their margin of victory – because for them, power is its own mandate.

Back in the mid-nineteenth century, the Whigs found themselves in the same dilemma. They were trapped at the wrong end of a 51-49 paradigm, losing a series of agonizingly close elections. Despite their dynamic ideas for national development, the Whigs’ only Presidential victories came with a pair of popular generals running non-ideological campaigns (Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848). Each died in office and was succeeded by a mediocre vice-president; more importantly, for our purposes, each man’s victory came in spite of, and as a distraction from, the dire state of the Whig Party. Only with the destruction of the party was a northern Whig leader able to emerge and, under the banner of the Republican Party, address the critical issue of the time, build a progressive plurality, and win a decisive election in 1860. Lincoln frustrated the bold radicals and reformers of his day. But he did force America to make a choice, and the way he led the nation to the decision point made possible the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the Union.

I’m not by any means saying that Obama is Abe Lincoln. (Though, circa 1858, Lincoln was no Lincoln either.)

What I want to argue is that truly successful presidential candidates – and truly transformative presidents – are not those who will tell party activists a laundry list of what we want to hear. They are those who will speak the broad language of consensus and inclusion, all while framing the American story as the story of their values. I believe this is what Obama is doing.

The outline is this:

1. Define America’s values in terms of your values.
2. Tell the story of America as the story of the march of those values.
3. Frame the current political situation as a key moment, in which we are called to action in order to uphold our inheritance of those American values.
4. Define your political opponents as the forces of complacency in the face of that call.
5. Ask Americans to make a choice.

I’ll go through these step-by-step, looking at Obama’s rhetoric:



Obama has been accused by many in a resurgent progressive movement of that pernicious political sin: centrism. But as George Lakoff recently pointed out, not all centrisms are the same. There’s the kind of centrism where you reduce yourself to an egotistical institution of one (Lieberman centrism), or the kind where you go foolishly chasing after your opponent’s rhetoric (Harold Ford centrism). But then there’s kind where you work to activate the majoritarian progressive values of what Lakoff terms “biconceptual” Americans. Rather than defining yourself around some elusive concept of the center, you define the center around your progressive values.

In this era of divide-and-conquer conservative politics, there’s a hunger for national consensus. And unity is a good thing: a necessary – though not sufficient – condition for effective progressive governance in America. This does not mean full unity – 100% consensus. It means broad consensus, framed around the centrality of progressive values to the American experience. It means transcending the 51-49 paradigm.

In his speech to the DNC, Obama’s call for unity attracted a great deal of attention:

There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. […] We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Less remarked upon, but even more important, was the paragraph which preceded this, where Obama defined the very idea of national unity around core progressive values:

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up, with out benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief – I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper – that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.

In Obama’s formulation, national unity itself is a progressive value – and the progressive value of mutual responsibility is at the very core of the American national idea (and at the core of majoritarian religious belief). This mutual responsibility, meanwhile, is what makes possible the flourishing of the individual which is also central to the American project. As he said in his commencement address at Knox College: “We’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity.” This is America defined as a progressive project.



Obama begins the commencement address with a self-deprecating story about his first press conference as a U.S. Senator, when an earnest reporter asked him, “What will be your place in history?” It’s a funny story, and a great starting point for a graduation speech, but it’s also a canny way for Obama to begin his telling of the American story. He goes on: “In other eras, across distant lands, this question could be answered with relative ease and certainty.” Servants in Rome, peasants in medieval China, subjects of King George: all knew their place, and none had the freedom to build their own lives.

“And then America happened.”

This is covenant theology, stated directly. In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn explains how Puritan covenant theology came to broadly influence the founders of the American republic as they tied together the disparate strands of reason, law, and radical opposition that led to the Revolution. It was the idea “that the colonization of British America had been an event designed by the hand of God to satisfy his ultimate aims.”

We all know the many crimes committed and tragedies allowed in the name of the American project. But by locating the origins of America in a covenant, Obama and other “prophetic” progressives (to use Cornell West’s term) can tell a story of America that amounts to an ongoing struggle to redeem that covenant, despite our national sins. In America, “destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared.” This is antithetical to the reductionist conservative version of American history, always seeking to shrink our national project to its narrow origins. This America is built around an advancing American Dream: a “collective dream” that

...moved forward imperfectly – it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It’s answered by us.

Obama refers again and again to faith. But it’s not an empty rhetorical gesture aimed at “values voters.” It’s central to his story of America. Faith refers to redemption, and the story of America is the story of the collective, progressive redemption of the American covenant. It is, as he says in the DNC speech, “an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.”



Redemption, in turn, is tied to action. Action has always been a core progressive value, in contrast to conservative complacency. The great progressive Presidents – Lincoln, both Roosevelts, JFK – have always centered their politics around a call to action.

Obama frames it thus:

The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them.

The story of American greatness is the story of collective action for the common good.

We have faced this choice before.

At the end of the Civil War […] we had to decide: Do we do nothing and allow captains of industry and robber barons to run roughshod over the economy and workers by competing to see who can pay the lowest wages at the worst working conditions? Or do we try to make the system work by setting up basic rules for the market, instituting the first public schools, busting up monopolies, letting workers organize into unions?

We chose to act, and we rose together.

[During the Depression], we had to decide: do we follow the call of leaders who would do nothing, or the call of a leader who … refused to accept political paralysis?

We chose to act – regulating the market, putting people back to work, and expanding bargaining rights to include health care and a secure retirement – and together we rose.

When World War II required the most massive homefront mobilization in history and we needed every single American to lend a hand, we had to decide: Do we listen to skeptics who told us it wasn’t possible to produce that many tanks and planes? Or, did we build Roosevelt’s Arsenal for Democracy and grow our economy even further by providing our returning heroes with a chance to go to college and own their own home?

Again, we chose to act, and again, we rose together.

Today, at the beginning of this young century, we have to decide again. But this time, it is your turn to choose.

This is where Obama turns the call to action to confront the challenges progressives want to address today: globalization, the education crisis, the health care crisis, the environmental crisis, the task of keeping America secure while rebuilding our ties to the world and restoring America’s international credibility.

Obama issues challenges to Americans generally, and to both political parties. But note the quiet but important imbalance between those calls:

Every one of us is going to have to work more, read more, train more, think more. We will have to slough off some bad habits—like driving gas guzzlers that weaken our economy and feed our enemies abroad. Our children will have to turn off the TV set once in a while and put away the video games and start hitting the books. We’ll have to reform institutions, like our public schools, that were designed for an earlier time. Republicans will have to recognize our collective responsibilities, even as Democrats recognize that we have to do more than just defend old programs. [Emphasis mine.]

Here he sets up a unifying call to action. But, politically, his demands are very different for the two parties. This is not moral equivilance: he is calling for the Democrats to innovate, and for the Republicans to abandon conservatism and accept the core progressive principle. It feels like centrism, but it has much more substance.

The call to action means embracing progressive values and rejecting conservative complacency. Here is where he frames the opposition.



Obama has defined the American story as an ongoing process of collective action to redeem the common progressive values embodied in the American covenant. He has argued that we now face a choice whether to continue that effort against the challenges we face today. Now he must define the contemporary political opposition standing in the way of that choice.

He must explain how conservatism is bad for America.

Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government – divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, and it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it – Social Darwinism – every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity.

Here Obama takes on the very heart of the modern conservative movement – the better to drive a stake through it. He doesn’t duck away from defining and confronting the conservative philosophy. He takes it head on. He has already set up its refutation:

It doesn’t work. It ignores our history.

In short, conservatism is un-American.

What is conservatism? It is complacency in the face of challenges which demand action. It’s a form of weakness. From his speech to the Take Back America Conference:

It’s the timidity, it’s the smallness of our politics that’s holding us back right now – the idea that there are some problems that are just too big to handle.

Conservatism is a kind of political cowardice. Again, he confronts the conservative philosophy head on:

They don’t believe that government has a role in solving national problems because they think that government is the problem.

And we have seen the results of that philosophy, in a country ravaged by a quarter-century of conservative ascendancy and six years of total conservative government. As Lakoff says, a successful progressive candidate must use the trauma inflicted by conservative government to make the case for progressive politics. Obama, again referring to faith, points to how conservative government has very nearly derailed the American Dream:

Our faith has been shaken by war and terror and disaster and despair and threats to the middle-class dream and scandal and corruption in our government.

In an era when it seems that conservatives have seized the national agenda (and how often have we heard that conservatives have “ideas” and Democrats do not?), Obama defines conservatism as inherently hollow, weak, and empty. It is a kind of social coma into which the nation falls when we do not choose to take action.



All of this puts Obama in position to ask Americans to make a bold and very specific choice in the 2008 election. But, one year before the first primary ballots are cast, he has not yet made that clarion call. This seems to be what frustrates many progressives. It seems to me that many of us are only happy when a candidate takes up arms at a political Alamo. That’s a recipe for principled defeat. By contrast, I believe that what Obama is building – if he follows through – is a broad progressive victory.

Armando has described how, in 1860, Lincoln rhetorically seized the political moment for his progressive values – challenging voters to choose between his vision of America, and the dead-end of the Southern position. Armando frames Lincoln's opponent Douglas as the “uniter” candidate, but, in fact, Lincoln’s challenge to the South was a challenge to an American majority: to make a choice, to unite behind one agenda or the other. He called the Democrats’ bluff. But he did so, not with the ferverent impatience of John Fremont, but by laying the groundwork for a majoritarian consensus about the meaning of America.

The time will come when Obama will have to ask Americans to make a choice, not just in their hearts, but with their votes. If he has done his work right, he will have made it possible for a solid majority to choose the progressive vision.

Many progressives are concerned by the fact that Obama has proposed few specific policy ideas. I’m not personally worried about that: hilzoy has pointed out how, in his short time in the Senate, Obama has been behind a remarkable number of good, solid, wonky ideas. But in the election, on the level of ideas, Obama will have to be both bold but not overly specific. JFK didn’t have to explain how we would get to the moon. But he had to say we would get there. Obama will need to clearly frame the election as a referendum on key progressive ideas like affordable health care for all Americans, a thorough commitment to education, and a decisive move to confront the massive threat presented by global warming.

But the real choice Obama will have to demand is bigger and broader. He will have to ask Americans to vote to endorse the progressive vision of American history and society he has laid out. He will have to tell us: “A vote for Obama is a vote for the notion that we are all in this together. It is a vote for the understanding that government can improve our lives, and we all have a stake in it.”

After so many years of muddling through on conservative turf, trying to get along in the 51-49 paradigm, Obama will have to ask us to reject the conservative project, and endorse the progressive story of America. For now, he is building consensus – as he should. But when the elections come, then he will have to frame them around a choice: clearly, boldly, and confidently. My dearest hope is that he will do so.

Did Obama come up with all this on his own? Of course not. Millions of ordinary Americans, over the course of centuries, wrote this story. But Obama tells it eloquently, and effectively, and urgently, in a way that I’m not sure any other potential Presidential candidate can. The progressive story may sound obvious to us, but in recent years the complacent conservative narrative of America has choked it out in public discourse. That’s why, if he does indeed follow through and ask Americans to make a clear choice, to take action in defense of our common progressive ideals, I believe Americans will do so, and Obama will have changed the game.

(Paul)

Labels: 2008 elections, Barack Obama, Democrats, progressives

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:06 PM 2 comments

  Don't Hate the Game

The Poor Man points approvingly to this great comment by Phoenix Woman, who laments the traditional distaste among so many on the American left for serious engagement in electoral politics.

I think the eagerness to eat our own stems from a fundamental difference in how the right and left operate in this country. The farther left one goes, the more likely one is to have a very cynical and morale-destroying view of politics, one that serves to keep one from engaging. [...] This distaste for deep involvement in democracy is part and parcel of American progressivism and has been since its inception. (I used to be part of an e-mail list called "Socialist Liberty", filled with the sort of people who equated Paul Wellstone with Jesse Helms; whenever any prominent Socialist or Communist such as David McReynolds dared run for political office, even as a Socialist or Communist, he or she would get TONS of flak from other Soc/Coms for selling out and buying into a corrupt system that needed to be left alone to die of its own foul weight.) And this distaste has only got stronger: Many lefty/progressive groups over the years have got out of electoral politics altogether, even as righty/religious groups have got MORE political...

The bitter irony of the American left's long distaste for/retreat from electoral politics -- a stance that only in the last couple of election cycles is starting to turn around -- is not just that this is happening even as the right-wing churches and other conservative groups are getting more involved in Republican politics; it is that money and time spent in politics pays better dividends in terms of getting what you want than in almost any other field of endeavor. Here's an example, paraphrased from memory from a writer whose name escapes me (otherwise I'd be linking directly to him):

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett want to spend thirty-odd billion on charitable causes around the world, when just one billion given to, say, DFA would ensure that truly progressive Democrats not only took over the party, but had the resources to go fully mano-a-mano with the Republicans in every single district -- and that would ensure the election of politicians who would back policies that would do much more lasting good than even a thirty-odd-billion-dollar charity could accomplish.

Based on my own experience, the self-defeating leftist rejection of serious politics is an obvious and corrosive phenomenon, but what I also like about Phoenix Woman's post is the way she ties it to the same problem from a different angle: the problem with "non-political" philanthropy. The massive amounts of money given in charitable endeavors could in very many cases be more efficiently and more effectively focused on achieving change in government.

The whole point of being a liberal or socialist is the belief that truly universalist, collective action is the surest way to guarantee human well-being and happiness, and that government is the only feasible organizing point for that action. But to use government to protect and improve people's lives, you have to control government. Leftist rejection of political engagement is a form of self-rejection, and an abandonment of the very message we should be trying to send to folks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The commenters at the Poor Man's site pretty much savage Phoenix Woman (consensus: "she's full of shit") - largely, it seems, on the basis of a couple of questionable historical points she makes about Saul Alinsky, and about the German Socialists. The only substantive argument against her point, though, seems to be that the left doesn't reject politics, either because Hey: who are all those people "putting their bodies on the line" during the anti-Globalization movement?? - or, because, Hey: campaigning for the Greens is doing electoral politics, numbnuts!

Well, I put my body on the line (literally) for all kinds of causes in my college and post college days. I realize now that my time would have been far better spent learning to organize a precinct and practicing voter contact and campaign strategy.

And sorry, but working for the Green Party does not constitute serious engagement in electoral politics. In fact, it demonstrates a pigheaded refusal to understand electoral politics. There's a (very minor) place in the American political ecology for third parties, but except for a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century that's been a side issue at best - and the Greens are, for all intents and purposes, completely useless to the American body politic.

The way it works in American politics is: there are two major parties. A social movement that wants to make policy picks one of the parties, works to gain influence within that party while still maintaining a broad enough coalition to win elections, and . . . wins elections. That's it. That's all it takes. But it's hard work and by its nature involves a constant give and take between principle and compromise.

If you want to improve the world, that's the game you have to play, no matter how ugly, disappointing, or impure it can seem. As progressives, we have the opportunity to use the Democratic party to achieve our policy goals. So there are two kinds of progressives in this country: those who take that opportunity seriously, and those who don't. I have no use for the latter.

(Paul)

Labels: Democrats, electoral politics, government, Greens

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:36 AM 0 comments