Barack Milhous Nixon
I know, but bear with me.
tristero at Hullabaloo makes the excellent point that today's Democrats - not the Blue Dogs and DINOs and other corporate cocksuckers like Rahm Emanuel, but actual real Democrats like the members of the Progressive Caucus - are to the right of Richard Nixon.
Nixon was a criminal nutcase who started the whole republican "let's start shitting on the Constitution and see how long it takes people to notice" fad, but he also:
- established the Environmental Protection Agency
- signed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts - the original ones
- opened a dialogue and peace talks with an existential enemy that really did have weapons of mass destruction
- instituted wage and price controls
- proposed a "negative income tax" to provide livable incomes to the poor and unemployable.
Face it: Democrats are the new conservatives, and their leader is President Obama.
tristero explains:
Among the most important ways to defeat movement conservatives is to refuse to take their bullshit seriously, even for a moment. In fact, when they are given undeserved influence and respect, as they were in the months before Bush/Iraq, innocent people die.
On the other hand, dialogue with conservatives, genuine conservatives, is not only possible, but something liberals are having right now, every day. A prime example is the intense argument many in the blogosphere are having with the current president of the United States. I'm not kidding or being a smarty-pants: Whatever his personal beliefs, Obama governs as a centrist and even, in some areas, like a conservative. Therefore, it is no surprise at all that it has been very, very difficult to introduce genuinely liberal ideas into this administration, and that Van Jones' resignation is a genuine loss to liberals.
Read the whole thing, because it's a revelation that will lift the weight of the world off your trembling liberal shoulders.
We have to stop dealing with Obama as if he were one of us. We have to see him clearly as the right-of-Nixon conservative he truly is.
Because only then can we stop mourning over liberal "betrayals" that exist only in our imaginations and start the kind of hard-nosed, real-world, practical negotiations that got Nixon's signature on world-changing legislation.
And by practical I do not mean radical wingnut "compromises" with republicans, who have no place in the real dialogue between Obama and liberals. I mean understanding that we have to stake out the furthest-left liberal position imaginable to ensure the eventual compromise with conservative Obama ends up within hailing distance of the actual center.
If we'd stood our ground six months ago and demanded single-payer as the liberal position, instead of letting Obama use even the public option as a bargaining chip, today Rahm Emanuel would be begging the Blue Dogs to vote for the strongest public option as the only alternative to single-payer.
The liberal Democrats who ran Congress in 1969-74 knew exactly who they were dealing with, and negotiated accordingly. So should we.
Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ...
Posts
1 comment:
Don't discount this analysis as sour grapes over a lost cause. Universal medical care has probably been a lost cause issue since the git.
Access to physicians is the latest social status standard. Access to anything is the latest social status standard. Reporters merely pick the issue of the day that delivers the greatest conflict through confrontation.
Nixon surrendered the domestic social agenda to open China for U.S. business interests. He may have had all the vision of the ages in his mind - unfortunately he had a diseased character and no respect for those who refused to pay homage to his vision or management.
Post a Comment