The Failure of Post-Partisanship

As we get closer to the short strokes on health care reform, Digby points to a sharp analysis of the conservative opposition and President Obama's ability to beat it.

If you want to understand Palin and the teabaggers etc, you have to understand the conservative movement. Nobody understands it better than Rick Perlstein, who is interviewed here on the subject of Obama and the conservative movement. Here's an excerpt:

Question: What’s a modern example of synergy between corporate and religious conservatives?

Rick Perlstein: Well, healthcare is a fascinating example of this question of how religious conservatives and business conservatives can act in coalition. Being on the mailing list of, the American Family Association, Don Wildmon’s organization, I’m beginning to, get the emails saying that, healthcare - that, basically, a national healthcare program is an imposition on Christians. It’s going to fund abortions. It’s going to violate the sanctity of the traditional family. So, you see a pure example of kind of a right-wing Libertarian business conservatives using the leaders of the religious right in quite an effective way to undermine a mass constituency for a reform which, in the end, is actually quite conservative. I mean, what could be more, what could be more judicious than, like I said, letting people change their jobs if they have an entrepreneurial idea? What could be more strengthening of the traditional bonds of family and society than families not going bankrupt because someone in the family gets sick?

But, there are very powerful interests who basically benefit from the status quo, and they're able to take advantage of this preexisting distrust that’s very American of anything having to do with an expanding state. And again, historically it’s the same thing you saw with Social Security. It’s the same thing you saw with Medicare. It’s the same thing you saw with the idea that the United States in the 19th century should have a central bank. The same thing you saw when the government began talking about financing internal improvements like canals, the interstates which were seen as a Communist plot by some people.

So, the challenge for progressives, the challenge for people who believe that this is not only an important goal but an imperative goal, national healthcare, is not to imagine that this kind of irrational fear is going to go away, but simply to bull through it. Force healthcare down people’s throats whether they want - whether they like it or not, and watch what happens ten, twenty, thirty, forty years from now when, again, conservatives come to power promising to uphold the ideals of Obama’s healthcare program just like George Bush promised to uphold Social Security and promised to honor FDR, and just like conservatives of every generation - or I should say reactionaries of every generation say, “Well, the liberals that we’re dealing with now are unacceptable extremists. The ones we had last generation weren't so bad.”

That takes guts and a certain tactical vision --- which Perlstein also discussed:

Question: Has Obama succeeded on his promise of being a “post-partisan” President?

Rick Perlstein: Well, the problem with Obama’s post-partisan agenda is that he came into it, he came into his presidency at a time when millions of Americans, perhaps even tens of millions of Americans don’t consider a Democratic president legitimate, don’t consider liberalism legitimate, don’t consider the idea of the state forming new programs to help people legitimate. So, he’s in a situation a lot like Abraham Lincoln faced in 1860 when you had millions of Americans who didn’t even consider what was going in Washington to have anything to do with them.

So, the big question for me was always was this post-partisan idea --- this idea that you could kind of bring adversaries across a table and get them to agree to each other and agree with, to get them to agree with each other and achieve social progress --- was that a deep-seated belief of his or was that, in a certain sense, a tactic? Not a cynical tactic, but a tactic. And I would be very with him if it were a way of thinking about politics, if it were a tactic, because the job of transformative leader is not to cue to the center, but define their own values as the center, as common sense.

And if he ... I believe in the agenda he’s putting forward, for example, universal healthcare, cap and trade and green jobs as a way to, solve our energy problems while growing the economy. I think these are reasonable, while liberal, goals and if he presents them as reasonable and the reaction to them as one could knew they were going to - because there are these millions of people that don’t consider a liberal president legitimate - was irrational, extreme, that presented him an opportunity to say, “My program is rational, but my opposition has chosen extremism, has chosen unreason,” and be willing to take the hit.

There's always going to be a minority of the country, thirty percent, 35 percent, even 40 percent who disagrees with him radically. disagrees with him strongly. But if he’s still willing to pass his program with that 60 percent margin, the rest of the country will eventually catch up. The reactionaries will understand as they did with Social Security, as they did with women getting the vote, freeing the slaves, Social Security - that actually these things were in their interests. They’ll accept them as part of the established order of American society, and in fact, 20, 30, 40 year down the road the Republicans and the Conservatives will be campaigning to save universal healthcare just like they campaign to save Social Security.

But the problem is this doesn’t really work unless you make this kind of tactical shift. If people say that you're illegitimate and your liberal agenda is extremist socialist destroying the America that we all grew up with, you have to be willing to say, “This is unreasonable. This is extreme.” And if you aren’t able to say, “This is unreasonable and this is extreme,” then you're granting your opposition an undue influence. You’re basically negotiating with the unnegotiatable. And as Abraham Lincoln said quite eloquently in his 1860 speech at Cooper Union, you can’t win that way.

No you can't. And it remains to be seen if Obama has the will to blast past these barriers and take the win with an extremely hostile opposition getting ever more radical in deeply stressful times. We just don't know yet.

I have never shared Perlstein's quandry with respect to Obama's post-partisan vision. It seemed obvious to me from his life story that he genuinely believed in his ability to transcend partisanship. It makes him somewhat eager to split the difference, I think.

But that doesn't mean he doesn't also see the value of placing his political adversaries in the role of unreasonable extremists. His administration has done that with some success, I would say (and a lot of help from the crazies) but they haven't yet explicitly positioned their policy positions as the reasonable, mainstream alternative and I think it's because they are flummoxed without any bipartisan support. The political establishment can't see anything being "reasonable" if the Republicans are rejecting it.

He needs to say it anyway, as Perlstein prescribes. I would predict that citizens in the middle are well prepared to see total obstructionism as an unreasonable position, even if the Villagers see it as a sign of liberal extremism. After all, to them all partisanship is a sign of liberal extremism.

At Down With Tyranny, KeninNY has a good analysis of Obama's failure as a pragmatist. He concludes:

The result, however, is that he's got his culture war, and no weapons with which to fight back. In my darker moments what I foresee is the wreckage of this administration being used by the forces of darkness as proof of the failure of progressive ideas -- when nobody tainted with progressive ideas seems to have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Meanwhle, the "centrists" who are responsible for the carnage will as always conclude that they need to hunker ever farther toward the center, which has moved so far right as to be no longer visible to the naked eye.

Read the whole thing.