The Kind of Hero a Republic Wants

Read Noah Millman at the American Scene and his theory about the difference between "liberal" and "progressive." Millman contends, basically, that liberalism is atemporal and focused on principles, whereas progressivism is context-based and aims at directly improving the future. I'm of two minds on this idea: part of me thinks that he's found an interesting distinction that illuminates a divide in the modern left coalition, and part of me thinks it's a totally false dichotomy that Millman pulled out of his ass two days ago. I may have a real opinion on that later. But meanwhile I want to question this (emphasis mine):

What I think is a fairer criticism to level at progressivism is that it does not have a strong conception of the heroic. We all know what a heroic liberal looks like - like the twelfth man who wasn't angry, and stood his ground against eleven jurors ready to convict in an open and shut murder trial. What's a heroic progressive? By this I don't mean to say, name a person who was arguably heroic who was also a self-identified progressive. Not everybody likes old TR, but he is on Mt. Rushmore and he certainly considered himself progressive. What I mean is: I know how to describe a hero in liberal terms - and, for that matter, in conservative terms - but I'm not sure how to describe one in progressive terms. Indeed, it is when you start to think about the heroic that it becomes clearest why both Ross Douthat and Jacob Levy find progressivism kind of scary: a hero in progressive terms must be somebody who can see the future better, and who has the will to push society forward towards that future. And that is not generally the kind of hero that a Republic wants.

Ahem. May I introduce:

Not exactly a bad starting lineup, eh?

I find it continually amazing -- these people are so out of touch that they really think the "progressive hero" is a difficult or dangerous idea. The American public has always been more comfortable with bold, transformative, aggressive leadership than its sniffling intellectuals like to admit -- this has been true since Andrew Jackson (who was denounced as "dangerous" by none other than Thomas Jefferson, incidentally).

Similarly, Americans hold a firm faith in constant historical progress through technology and social change, despite those same intellectuals' curious insistence that such a view of history has been "discredited". I highly doubt that most people in the United States today, "liberal" or "progressive" or conservative or fascist or whatever, dispute the idea that we should be continually improving our nation -- and that history does, in fact, propel us forward. As opposed to, I don't know, sideways.

(The exception here is of course libertarianism and its radical, atomistic view of society, which I maintain is less of an ideology than a psychosis.)

Sure, the story of most of these progressive heroes -- JFK particularly, sad to say -- is hagiography. But they are nevertheless stories that resonate. Americans like progress; and it is not by coincidence that "progressive" is the most favorably viewed political identification in America. If this is the direction our party's turning towards, a real embrace of progressivism in the sense of optimism and progress, then -- objections of the New Republic set notwithstanding -- it bodes very, very well for our future.

4th Of July: Thoughts On Patriotism

One thing liberal Democrats have always been very, very familiar with is cognitive dissonance. We're good at it. We are comfortable with contradiction; we are large, we contain multitudes, etc. Case in point: national pride.

Now, Howard Zinn scares the fuck out of me, and that's the mark of any good writer. And I have to admit this piece, reprinted in the Progressive, raises vaild points -- read:

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power...

[etc etc etc, manifest destiny, imperialism, etc]

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

Nothing Zinn says is untrue, and to my mind he makes a persuasive argument. America has a nasty habit of taking exceptionalism way too literally, and we use our vigorous national pride to mask a whole host of extremely serious and troubling problems. And this past decade we've see the national symbols appropriated by right-wing militarist freaks and felt an all-too-scary breath of totalitaranism. YET it's both ludicrous and dangerous of Zinn to say we should abandon national allegiance altogether -- first of all, by what authority would we then have governments at all? How could we hold together an infrastructure and a social safety net?

Besides, can we really make the psychological leap to abandon the national pride we obviously feel? Are we just supposed to suppress that? (Analogy: Sex causes STDs, but saying "keep it in your pants" is not a practical solution to the AIDS crisis.) People are hard-wired to feel proud of their societies, and it's healthy to embrace that.

And what about the tremendous accomplishments of the American people? Americans have been, and are, among the most ingenious, hardworking, and warmhearted people in world history. America has won two world wars, invented the plane and the light bulb and the mass-produced car, powers the world's financial, transportation, and communication infrastructures, and continues to produce some of the greatest art and entertainment in human history. My God, George Gershwin alone justifies most of the 20th century. You'd have to be a serious misanthrope not to be proud of this country.

What I'm saying is, Zinn's argument is hopelessly out of touch, and the proper alternative for a liberal is clearly to embrace national identity. So now you feel good, having slain Cognitive Beast #1: The Nagging Left-Liberal Conscience. Yeah! Eat it, Howard Zinn! We've got liberal patriotism! Look at us standing in proud unity with... uh oh.

When the liberal Democrats look at our soldiers in Iraq, they do not see heroes. They do not see liberators. They see oppressors, imperialists, brutal thugs. That's the bottom line. Their distorted vision of America, their self-loathing of their own nation is the prism through which they see everything.

--"Blogs For Fred Thompson", using Zinn as a jumping-off point to contrast Tennessee Dalton's red-blooded patriotism with, uh, those evil liberals and their insidious self-consciousness. How dare they question their national ideas? Bastards!

And NOW we get the good cognitive dissonance I was talking about earlier; because surely we don't agree with this idiot. Right? We're talking about an argument on the level of a fifth-grader here. Not only does this man use the word "special" to describe the United States, he does not seem to grasp the irony in that at all. This is patriotism as myopia. And it hits you, that slippery slope Zinn is hinting at, from national pride into national egoism right down the evolutionary scale to--

JINGOISM! Fuck! And from this angle you see American patriotism in all its repulsive mouth-breathing glory, that sort of schoolyard-bully attitude that says "I'm better 'n you and I don't have to justify it". This brought us "Bring 'em on," "you're either with us or you're against us," and the other greatest hits of the Homer Simpson Presidency -- it's irrational and destructive, as we have clearly seen, time and time again. It whips people up into a fervor and produces awfully nasty side effects. As liberals (who value intellectual honesty, humility, and of course, not blowing things up) we cannot, in good conscience, endorse this kind of thinking.

So now we're caught between a rock and a hard place, aren't we? If you're anything like me you're deeply concerned about the country and you think it has serious emotional issues, but you also love it unconditionally and have no desire to suppress that. This puts us outside the two opposing camps. We want to celebrate America and be wholeheartedly proud, but without the accompanying lobotomy. We want to go to the party but we don't want to get drunk. This, as anyone in college knows, is difficult; and as a result July 4th is always kind of tough on a liberal.

(It's especially tricky for me, having grown up in Canada and holding dual allegiances. Trying to love two countries is bad enough, but it doesn't help that Canadians are so very, very bad at patriotism. We didn't really ask for nationhood or do anything to earn it, after all, and even if we did, our inherent national modesty would certainly frown on celebrations thereof. Canadian pride is pretty much limited to government programs and beer marketing; Canada Day itself can actually be very depressing if you know the right places to look.)

So what do we do this Independence Day? Well, first I intend to sleep late, maybe hit up a mattress sale. (What's more patriotic than bargains, after all?) But at some point take a moment to think over what being American means, to you. Think about the atrocities that have been, and are still being, committed in our nation's name. Also think about the incredible promise this nation stores and the potential that, yes, still lies before us.

I especially suggest you go see some fireworks, because they are both A. awesome, and B. a great place for clarity of thought. Maybe you'll realize, as I am just now, that there's something to be said for a little cognitive dissonance. Maybe, in a huge and multifaceted nation like America, in a country that's wide enough to hold both Howard Zinn and Fred Thompson -- maybe, embracing your own contradictions is a way to celebrate after all.

Happy Independence Day.

Re: "Post-Modern Presidency"

I think Sam is mostly right on the money in his post below (read it if you haven't yet), and I completely agree with his assessment of Bloomberg and the media environment. But I want to question one point that I think it's important for us all to understand -- that is, our understanding of objective truth and how it relates to governance. Sam writes:

Post-modernism made some sense when applied to literary conceits like Justice, Virtue, Love, and all the rest, but it is a terrible paradigm under which to build a functioning government, composed of bureaucrats and cops. It's nonsense to say that truth is unknowable in the context of governance. The government must operate under the premise that truth is knowable, or government policy is governed by nothing but competition to see which narrative is the most compelling.

This is not quite consistent with a liberal worldview. Fundamentally we are relativists; we have always emphatically rejected the idea that human cognition can settle on an absolute truth, and we understand the innate biases present in everyone's psychological structures. (Insert the mandatory Lakoff reference here.) This informs our respect for free thought & free speech, our resistance to blame & demonization, our emphasis on context in interpreting laws (the Constitution included), and our tendency to focus on a pragmatic problem-solving approach rather than a purely ideological one.

And claiming absolute truth, after all, is the purview of our enemies. It's the phlegmatic centrists and media drones who (as Sam points out) seem to think they can find truth purely by triangulating between extremes; it's the radical conservatives who think their ideology (Christian or free-market) is Divine Revelation; and it's the psychopath Randian libertarian freaks who think decision-making is rational and human reason and logic are infallible. (For most normal people, it takes about ten minutes of interaction with the public at large to realize "human reason and logic" is a crock of shit. I can only assume that libertarians live in some kind of parallel universe where everyone performs cost-benefit analysis before they buy lunch. But I digress.)

This is a highly postmodern view, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's a more serious and intellectually honest way to look at the world than any that has come before; we should not be advocating for a return to Enlightenment naïveté.

Now, Sam is right to ask how we can run a government under such conditions; after all, it's awful difficult to dispatch troops into war zones when you have nagging concerns about the fabric of reality. But we should not be so quick to retreat into artificial moral certainty -- consider the alternative that Sam dismisses, "competition to see which narrative is the most compelling". Why is this a bad thing?

After all, isn't competition between narratives just empiricism at its finest? Various theories are posed about how something operates, they are compared with evidence, and the theory that most closely approximates the evidence is assumed to be correct -- with the understanding that a better theory may come along at any time. This is how we have come to agree on things like evolution, the existence of global warming, and heliocentric orbit, among others; not because of some arbitrary sense of "right" or "wrong" but because the evidence is conclusive.

There is no reason this attitude cannot also inform a government, especially a Democratic government. Economic policy is the perfect example -- rather than starting from strict adherence to abstract economic laws, like our conservative frends, we instead pragmatically observe how we can best influence the economy and go from there. If this means stepping on Greg Mankiw's doctrines sometimes, that is not a problem (nor does it make us traitors to capitalism). It simply means we are following the evidence.

Nowhere in that process is it necessary to claim that our understanding is "more right" or "more true" than anyone else's. Nowhere in that process do we need to claim that we have perfect understanding, or for that matter any understanding, of the world. All we need is a results-focused hardscrabble pragmatism and we have satisfied the conditions of both our worldview and our governmental duties.

So yes, we in fact can say that "all viewpoints are created equal"; but some are more equal than others. The liberal/progressive/Democratic viewpoint is better not because it is more in touch with objective reality, but because it understands that it's not and is capable of working with that. In that sense we can and should have a post-modern government.

The More Things Change...

Between the bazillions of debates about the state of liberalism and conservatism (which, if the blogosphere is to be believed, undergo Revolution or at least Crises of Confidence about every thirty-five seconds) it's comforting to read somebody like Ross Douthat pointing out that our political alignments are still basically the same as they were in 1965--

I think [conservative writers Poulous and Dreher] are misreading the contemporary American left, though, if they think there's any kind of significant fusionism waiting to happen between disillusioned lefties and the anti-Bush Right. ...Most of the smart young lefties I know aren't interested in some grand convergence with disillusioned populist-conservatives; they're interested in harnessing the kind of "office-park populism" that gave us Jim Webb and Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester in order to dramatically expand social democracy in the United States. For some, this means a return the old-time religion (a higher minimum wage, strong unions, government jobs programs, etc.); for others, it means a smarter, more growth-friendly form of social democracy (think Denmark, rather than France); for most, it means some combination thereof. But the overall model is still bigger government plus cultural permissiveness, not some kind of "small is beautiful" left-conservatism out to defend the permanent things against the ravages of modernity.

The left's vision of an expanded welfare state as both the answer to populist anxieties and the guardian of social liberalism is a perfectly coherent worldview, and it's one that I think has a good chance of accomplishing many of its objectives over the next few decades. (When I say that things are going well for liberals right now, that's what I mean - not just the Dems might trounce the GOP in '08, but that the overall political climate is as favorable to social democracy as it's been in thirty years.) But it's not the kind of worldview that's likely to want, or need, an alliance with the partisans of crunchy conservatism and putting Kansas First.

Douthat is right. Liberalism neither wants nor needs an influx of weepy self-hating post-Bush Republicans who think we can offer them political salvation. George Bush was a bad president but he was not a hydrogen-bomb on the political scene; our principles remain the principles we have held basically since FDR, and conservative thought remains totally anathema to them. Considering the strength of the political coalition liberalism has built today, it would only be to our detriment if we bothered to open the tent to these destructive right-wing freaks, however nonconformist they may be. (And yes, this also applies to "liberaltarianism", one of the most unholy combinations of stupid and unnecessary to ever appear in political thought.)

As far as I'm concerned as many conservatives as possible should go down with George Bush's ship. These people, it has been consistently demonstrated since Warren Harding, destroy everything they touch; they are menaces to society, plain and simple. And for us, as liberals and Democrats we are not obligated to give their ideas any quarter, no matter how many puppy-dog eyes the Reason kids make at us; the social-democratic plan we operated on under FDR and LBJ seems to be working again just fine. We progressives, and whatever government we end up with in 2008 -- and if you're a betting man you're betting it's Democratic -- would be stupid to listen to Rod Dreher or anyone else who suggests we should build some funky postmodern left-right coalition. Remember the old rule: don't fix what ain't broke.

Any Future for Academe?

There are a couple of great accounts by Harvard bloggers of their graduations: Ryan and Pablog deserve a read. These images are haunting me today -- the weirdly forced ceremony, the sense of total detachment -- (the thought that in two years I'll be dealing with this) -- and they got me thinking about the value of academia & formal education in today's political climate. Are we wasting our time at Harvard?

With that in mind I present this fascinating essay by Henry Farrell (of Crooked Timber, also an assistant prof at GWU), using Michael Bérubé's argument with David Horowitz to explore "different kinds of procedural liberalism" in academic environments as vs. politics. It's lengthy, but worth reading at length. The bits that got me:

Bérubé’s ideal academy is one that has a place for conservatives, and for people whom he disagrees with radically. Indeed, this is key to the “pragmatic anti-foundationalism” that underpins his specific form of procedural liberalism. Substantive liberals – those who believe in the importance of equality etc – don’t have a monopoly on the truth. Therefore, we need procedural liberalism too, where “any reasonable proposition can and should be debated from any reasonable angle.” This is a pretty uncontroversial claim in itself...

When one is acting as a scholar, one has a clear duty to be faithful to one’s vocation, to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, and to give due respect to viewpoints that are not one’s own. The duty of the professor to the student is not to impart the professor’s values to the student, but rather to help the student to understand his or her own values more clearly... The duty of the politician, in contrast, is precisely to use argument to express one’s own beliefs and, where possible, to sway others towards them so that one’s political goals can be achieved.

The academic can of course act as a politician, but only outside of the classroom. Not only are his roles as educator, and as a citizen engaged in politics distinct from each other, but they are profoundly different; as Weber describes it, they serve different gods. The political realm is one of unending struggle between different and antithetical ethical standpoints, each of which has adherents who want it to win. Here, it is incumbent on the politician to ensure that her point of view prevails, and to use whatever means are available in the electoral system to do so. While the truly responsible politician recognizes the tensions between lofty aims and the morally compromised tools that she must employ, and even that her own point of view is not unassailable, she fails in her responsibility as a politician unless she participates actively and wholeheartedly in the political struggle. The scholarly realm (within the social sciences) is one of debate where one starts from the premises that no point of view is foundationally right. Thus, the teacher imparts two important kinds of moral lesson to her student – lessons that allow the student to clearly articulate his own views to himself, and lessons that allow the student to recognize in principle that no point of view provides an account of the world that is complete and foundationally grounded.

So. Basically, what Farrell says here is that academic liberalism is incompatible with argumentative political liberalism (or any political ideology). In theory. But Farrell goes on to take case studies of people who don't adhere to these norms:

In practice, however, even within small-l liberalism, I suspect that there are limits to the accommodation that should be granted to specific individual students... Students who persistently and belligerently refuse to recognize in principle that other points of view may potentially hold some truth prevent seminars from becoming genuine intellectual exchanges, and need to be discouraged, if necessary in very strong terms, from so doing. They’re acting to stop the university from doing what it should be doing, from providing a proper environment for people to pursue the academic vocation.

Farrell then differentiates -- and this is where I depart from him -- between bomb-throwing types like David Horowitz, who deserve only scorn, and students/academics with legitimate intellectual cases for conservative/extreme positions. He writes:

a liberal (in the broadest sense of the word) academic should deal with Horowitz in a very different way than she would deal with John, or with a conservative scholar within the academy who was arguing in a reasoned and honest way that conservatives should get more of a voice. She should deal with him as a political actor, using the tools of political debate. She should under no circumstances take him seriously, where taking him seriously would give him political traction. She should, however, take the aforementioned conservative scholar very seriously indeed, and do her best to push students like John [a loud, aggressive, conservative] to adhere to the basic rules of academic argument, without at the same time asking them to change their substantive values.

Thus the need to distinguish between different kinds of procedural liberalism, which should work in different spheres of activity. As Weber argues, different spheres of social life are governed by different principles; the vocation of the academic is not that of the politician. While a small-l liberal should recognize that it’s healthy that both politics and the academy are populated by a wide range of viewpoints, including some that she is violently opposed to, she should recognize that these viewpoints interact in very different ways in the two spheres, and that the proper standards for vary dramatically from the one to the other.

I find this contention, that more "serious" conservatives deserve greater respect in academia than their political-activist counterparts, rather silly and more than a little depressing. Because the point that Farrell doesn't grasp here is how contested this "procedural liberalism" really is.

Procedural liberalism, the idea that you cannot grasp absolute truth -- which Farrell isolates as the root of academic discourse -- is now a partisan position, and a characteristically liberal/progressive one at that. In this day and age, to make any statement that involves subjectivity, context, or hints at relativism immediately identifies the speaker as a liberal, and places them within this political fight. It thus cannot function as the overarching modus operandi that it is intended to.

After all, the whole conservative ethic, Republican Party and all, is predicated on pure value judgments and an understanding of the world that operates with absolute confidence; this is why it encloses religious fundamentalism, militarism, and economic orthodoxy so well. It's not by coincidence that conservatives are so often derided as thinking of things in "black and white" -- they do.

And this kind of conservatism stands, at its most basic logical structures, in active opposition to procedural liberalism. It rejects context (hence, constitutional orginalism) and change (hence, the same-sex marriage fight). It cannot abide any suggestion that gods are fallible or principles imperfect; it cannot conceive of its opponents as anything other than traitors or lunatics. (George Lakoff explains both these mindsets, and shows how they operate, very well in Moral Politics.) It is sworn to destroy the entire field of academic discourse. An intellectual scorched-earth policy.

Understandably, this places academic procedural liberalism in a pretty bad situation. It claims to neutrality, and to containing within itself a healthy intellectual debate, even while it is being attacked at the roots by this toxic, destructive absolutist conservatism that has zero interest in "reasoned argument," whihc is in fact quite seriously opposed to it.

I keep picturing the opening scene from Cold Mountain, where the Confederate soldiers stand vigilant guard in their trench, helplessly unaware that the Union is tunneling underneath them planting explosives.

FURTHERMORE, academic liberalism is totally incapable of engaging this strain of conservatism, since all the Weberian principles that underly liberalism -- and this is Farrell's mindset -- insist on friendly coexistence and healthy disagreement. If you permit this kind of conservatism to continue, it disrupts and discredits procedural liberalism, but if academics oppose it they abandon their own core principles. To actively defend liberalism, then, becomes anathema to liberalism. And as a result we get Henry Farrell, who even as he recognizes the threat from a showman like Horowitz remains unable to address the threat from conservatism itself, making limp, tepid prescriptions like the one I quoted above:

A liberal should...take the conservative scholar very seriously indeed, and do her best to push John to adhere to the basic rules of academic argument, without at the same time asking them to change their substantive values.

Unfortunately, if you do not change the substantive values of these people, they will destroy academia and liberal thought as we know it. That has been their stated goal from the beginning. But out of loyalty to his increasingly frayed intellectual system Farrell cannot argue for their destruction. Nor should he be expected to; he'd be a traitor to his ideas.

As a result the academic establishment stands entirely undefended against conservatism, waiting to be destroyed.

--

This will sound bleak, but I don't see a way out of this paradox. Academics are damned if they do and damned if they don't. An institution like Harvard, which will undoubtedly defend its claim to anti-foundational neutrality, will at best become marginalized and increasingly irrelevant as intellectual/political production is left wholly to the activist spheres and people who are more willing to stick up for their ideational systems. We are already seeing that marginalization of the elite universities ("bastions of liberalism," "Kremlin on the Charles" etc.), and it's not a short leap from that to the marginalization of academia as a whole.

As a result, and this will sound apocalyptic, I have to question whether -- for us -- it's worth spending our time on academic pursuits. What (aside from a leg up in the job market) is a B.A. from Harvard going to get us? What about an M.A.? It doesn't look like it's going to prepare us very well to engage our nation's critical issues, that's for sure. If anything I suspect it might saddle us with some totally unhelpful intellectual baggage.

(Speaking personally, I know I'm deathly afraid of getting caught in academia, winding up 30 years from now bearded in an ivory tower writing silly articles about 19th century art and refusing to ever leave Cambridge because my faithful cat would get lonely. This is a realistic scenario for me.)

So what do the rest of you think? Can we wring value from our Harvard experiences, and can we fend off the conservative threat while maintaining the integrity of procedural liberalism? And if not, what is the alternative?

Calm Down, Stoller

Matt Stoller's feeling bad at MyDD this afternoon, complaining about the Iraq capitulation and the continuing omnipresence of sellout DLC Dems. It's the usual stuff, the same cognitive dissonance any progressive Democrat runs into, and I think we all understand his frustration. But Stoller has a bit of a lapse this time and takes his logic in a very destructive direction. Read:

Progressives are in a bit of a bind these days. The Republicans are still sadistic extremists, and with the challenge to Hagel in Nebraska, they will remain that way for at least another few cycles. Despite the victory in 2006, liberal Democrats are still cut out of power and policy-making... [many valid examples...]

Now, this might sound depressing, and it is. But it's also a reality of politics these days, and it's the consequence of 35 years of organizing by the right wing and only around eight years on our side. The people in charge of the political system are the swing votes and the people that those voters want to work with. Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel have positioned themselves to be this swing vote, and they have chosen to basically throw some crumbs our way (minimum wage) while voting with the Republicans on the big issues, like Iraq...

The ultimate point here though is that we are not a partisan movement and should no longer think of ourselves as such. We are an ideological movement. We have ideas, and want to see those ideas driven with power. This means that we need to get down to the hard work of disabusing ourselves of candidate-centric politics, and work to create primary challenges wherever possible, as well as keep building forums for the dissemination of new ideas.

I respect Matt Stoller immensely, but this is horseshit. First: modern progressivism, i.e. the ideology espoused by the blogs and many young/outsider Democrats, would be suicidal to reject partisanship. The only way progressives have ever managed to claw their way into power has been on the backs of people like Howard Dean or the 2006 netroots candidates (Tester, Webb, etc); the only way we have made any difference has been through Democratic-led legislation.

Second: a pragmatic partisanship is at the very core of this progressive belief system. For Stoller to call for a transformation to "ideological movement" is nonsensical and redundant -- our ideology holds that ideas are useless until they're implemented, and as a result we focus on results as the ultimate source of value, hence our interest in political gamesmanship and the destruction of conservative infrastructure. A puritan idealism would be totally in contradiction with our ideals.

(This, after all, is how progressives strive to avoid the marginalization that ruined the 1960s New Left -- we come down hard on the Kucinich-vintage flower children who present ideas without regard for their practicality. One must keep one's eye on the ball.)

Third: we obviously need to protect and promote our ideas, and obviously the results of the Democratic Congress thus far are unsatisfactory, but there is no equivalent need for a departure from "candidate-centric politics". What other type of politics does Stoller have in mind exactly? You can't pry a person's leadership apart from their principles, and you can't keep ideas in a vacuum -- attempts to do that have led to the mute, soulless centrist technocracy that I always thought we opposed.

Ultimately: To reject partisanship is to neuter the progressive movement.

I'm troubled that Stoller, one of the leading lights and sharpest minds of online progressivism, would find himself going down this kind of alley. It speaks to an exhaustion, almost a giving up of hope; a retreat into the easier territory of wonky debate or (at best) interest-group-style scratching at the shins of political leaders. And I can understand why that's tempting given the shock of the Iraq defeat, the crushing vapidity of the presidential race thus far, and all the other things that embitter us daily; I can understand wanting to get away from the Democratic Party and all the problems it entails.

But what this proposal amounts to is a reach for the ceremonial hara-kiri sword. We can't give up on partisanship any more than Harry Reid can give up on legislating -- it's a dirty job, but it's our duty to our beliefs and our country. And Stoller (who incidentally is a Harvard grad, and a resident of my proud Mather House) needs to clear his head, man up, and get back to work.

The Reid Disconnect

Many people seem concerned about Harry Reid's recent observation that the war in Iraq is lost -- from Tom DeLay, who's carping about "treason", all the way over to my good friend Jess Coggins, who is "not sure this is a good political strategy". David Broder (a man whose judgment we all respect so very much) called Reid an "embarrassment", Joe Lieberman said exactly what you expect, and BLAH BLAH BLAH into that familiar media steam cycle that happens whenever anybody says anything provocative -- Drudge headlines it, Rush and O'Reilly blow some gaskets, within a day Wolf Blitzer and the rest of the mainstream media dutifully report on the "controversy," and so on into infinity until we meet our next patsy (Sean Penn?). We know the drill. It's a GAFFE, gentlemen! Put on your GAFFE MASKS!

(Note for clarity: this cycle applies when conservatives say dumb things too. Just replace "Drudge" with "Media Matters," "Rush and O'Reilly" with "Daily Kos diarists," and "the mainstream media" with "nobody.")

But the noteworthy thing in this case is how the left responded. The normal procedure says that "respectable" Democrats go on a talk show and politely distance themselves, while embarrassed liberal bloggers sit in stony silence as they wait for the stupidity to clear, or at most point out that Sean Penn does not actually speak for us. (Surprise!) This case: totally different.

The blogs have been lit up, especially Daily Kos, with passionate defenses of Reid -- many of them coming from soldiers through groups like VoteVets. Diarists (always a better gauge of general sentiment than the front-pagers) have called it "speaking truth to power", "clear and consistent", and "stating the obvious". And while Reid's Senate colleagues have been more careful, we haven't seen the usual volume of condemnation; save one article shit out by the Politico and dutifully linked by Drudge, there's been basically none of the "flustered Democrats reject comments" stories you normally see. Jon Stewart described it well last night as Democrats' "creepy, creepy solidarity".

My God, if Reid or Daschle or Dick Durbin or anybody had said this two or three years ago, they'd have been lynched. Boom. Career over. Yet this time around, in progressive politics there's a tacit acceptance of the remarks (by the insane political-kabuki standards of the Beltway press corps, at least). Why is the left so unconcerned about Reid's admittedly inflammatory contention that the war is lost? Could it be because... no, I can't say it... stop yourself, Kolic...

BECAUSE IT'S TRUE.

Holy hell, people, think about it! We clearly have not won, and will not win, this war. Any ounce of military or geopolitical common sense tells you that; at this point it's a walking definition of "unwinnable." Ergo -- and follow me closely here, I'm using Harvard-caliber logic -- if we cannot win, we lose. Sucks to be us.

This explains the reaction I'm talking about. Progressives like truth. We like science, and logic, and the reality-based community. We have a very hard time letting go of it, and we naturally want to stick up for it, even if that truth hurts sometimes (see: global warming). I certainly think this way; when Reid first made his remark, my reaction was "what else is new?". It's just common sense.

Whereas conservatives have never been friends with truth. They see it as an enemy and prefer to defeat it. Lying, misdirection, total cuckoo-bananas denial: all of these things are perfectly acceptable so long as they serve the right goals. (See: everything the Bush administration has ever done. Seriously, think about it.) It's a perfectly understandable consequence of their ideology, which holds that ideas supersede context, and thus that belief supersedes reality.

And that's the fundamental disconnect. The right wing and its enablers are upset because Democrats are being honest. Damn liberals are letting reality win! For our part, progressives seem to be sick and tired of playing the game on conservative terms, and we're gonna stick up for the truth when Harry Reid says it, no matter how bluntly. This is a positive trend and should be encouraged.

Because after all, the war in Iraq may be lost, but the conservative war on reality is still going strong. And that's one conflict in which we should all be firmly defeatist.

Liberalization of Society

In today's NY Times there is a piece of op-art with a bunch of charts showing the progression of certain thoughts and feelings over the past 30 years. It is interesting to note which ones have changed the most. See them all here.

1) This bodes well for Hillary, although 23% is still sizable and it seems to have stagnated/increased since the early 90s...

2) Maybe Old Media is, indeed, dead. Interestingly enough, this also corresponds with public confidence in the press, which is below Congress!

3) Less fundamental aversion to the "homosexual agenda"

It occurs to me that we should thank George W. Bush--

--for conveniently laying out a road map of the way a Democratic government should operate. Think about it. Every single thing President Bush has done or tried to do, without exception, has failed. With every stroke of his pen he fucks our country up a tiny bit more. His brand of conservatism, be it neo- or theo- or "compassionate", has the same success rate as Charlie Brown's kite.

Hence, the solution for a Democratic government is fairly simple. With a big tip of the hat to George Constanza: whatever Bush would do, do the opposite! He cut taxes on the rich? Raise 'em. He tried to privatize Social Security? Increase entitlement funding. He started a stupid war? Stop a stupid war, preferably several. Keep that up for a few years and we're golden!

...I mention this, half-seriously, after seeing the immense reaction to the latest report from "Third Way," a bunch of phlegmatic 1992-vintage centrists who believe that Democrats will be forever doomed by the Demon Pessimism or something. It's a silly report from a silly think-tank, and it's really not worth our time -- which every blogger ever, of course, pointed out at length and in excruciating detail. (I love the Internet.) But the response that struck me most, aside from a gripping Kos diary on the middle-class squeeze, came from Whiskey Fire:

The wingnuts have had their fun, and they've dug us into a huge fucking hole. Our way is "up." The "Third Way" is what, sideways? We'd still be buried in shit.

Amen. Writer Thers links to Greg Anrig at TPMCafe, who makes the same argument more politely and intellectually. And it's quite true; the way our political climate stands right now, the kind of reflexive sunny moderation that brought Bill Clinton to power is not only anachronistic, it may well be counterproductive.

The utter and unmitigated failure of Bush Conservatism has left us with a great opportunity: to cast liberalism in stark relief as America's natural and functional governing philosophy. (Which, incidentally, it is.) And these "Third Way" types, for reasons that I do not fully understand or even slightly care about, seem content to waste the moment blithering about "optimism" and advocating watered-down swing-voter-chasing half-assed politics -- which in practice amounts to a grand kowtow to insane Republican ideologues. From our perspective it seems fairly obvious that this is not where we should be going.

What I fear is that our leaders and our presidential candidates, still inhaling Beltway exhaust fumes, do not understand this. It is all too easy to picture them falling back into that comfortable lobotomized triangulation that Grandmaster David Broder taught them. Certainly, Senator Clinton has the half-ass thing down, and my God, Senator Obama can blither with the best of them ("Hope!" "Children!" Always fucking Morning in America with this guy). Even John Edwards, suddenly the self-styled revolutionary leftist, shows hints of right-wing-talking-point infection. Gah.

There's time yet. But it's incumbent on the grassroots supporters -- by which I mean, you -- to remind this party and these candidates that we have our beliefs; that we do not take kindly to appeasers; and that when it comes down to it, we expect them to firmly say No Way to the Third Way.

I know how dumb that sounds. It is, in fact, an egregiously dumb phrase. But, these are people who take Joe Klein seriously. When in Rome...

Good and Bad Populism

Thanks to Markus for posting that video below. I think it highlights what will be one of the key challenges for Democrats in the new Congress: responding to the (entirely valid) economic concerns of the public that produced the current wave of populist sentiment without resorting to self-destructive or myopic policies.

I happen to agree with most of what Jim Webb says in the video: the middle class really is facing some severe challenges, and the poor and working class aren't benefiting from the current economic expansion. The GOP lost in large part because it continues to deny this basic reality. But there are huge--I repeat, huge--differences between some of the solutions one can foresee to address this problem. Lou Dobbs proposes, among other things, giving up on free trade and stopping immigration cold. Other Democrats propose implementing a single-payer health care system and jacking up taxes on investment.

I think these solutions all share a common flaw: they're highly intrusive, heavy-handed attempts at government intervention in the economy that aren't particularly well-targeted to actually solving the problems that working people face. If we implement them and they have unpalatable side effects (as they almost certainly will), the Democrats will be punished at the ballot box, and rightly so. Accepting Lou Dobbs's diagnosis of the problem facing the public doesn't mean we have to accept Lou Dobbs's solutions, which amount to economic nationalism (see Peter Beinart's excellent take on this).

Here are some examples of what I consider to be far better solutions: implement the Mitt Romney/Massachusetts legislature health care plan on a nationwide level, and fund it sufficiently so that the poor get their care fully paid for and all working families get a little help buying their health insurance plan. You could pay for this by ending the preferential tax treatment of employer-sponsored health care, which subsidizes expensive plans for the wealthy to the tune of over $100 billion a year. Pass a massive expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, so that a job paying $6 an hour ends up paying maybe $10 or $11 an hour--far more than any minimum wage increase would ever do. Instead of closing our borders to trade, make real (rather than superficial) investments in job retraining, and increase unemployment benefits conditional upon successful completion of a retraining program. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ideas out there along these lines that I'm not even aware of.

I guess my main point is this: to Democrats, I'd say let's not let the arrogance of power get to us before our new majority is a week old. Markets work and we abandon them at our peril. I'm proud to call myself a liberal in no small part because the word implies an unflinching belief in the power of people to make their own choices, economic and otherwise. Yes, working people face real problems that we have a moral obligation to do something about. But the difference between a market-friendly approach to solving social problems and a market-unfriendly approach is akin to the difference between setting a broken arm and amputating the whole damn thing.

Also, to Republicans, I respectfully say: please do yourself a favor, get your head out of the sand, and stop ignoring the plight of working people. (As always, conservatives Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam are making sense.) If you don't deal with pro-market Democrats, sooner or later you're going to find people like Lou Dobbs and Sherrod Brown setting national economic policy, and that's in nobody's interest.