The Obstacles to Liberal Progress

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Scott Lemieux comments on White House incompetence:

It’s true that we dodged a bullet during the Democratic primaries when the prospect of Mark Penn running the White House political shop didn’t come to pass.

Unfortunately, Obama’s political team seems about as incompetent. As DeLong says, it’s especially remarkable that Obama’s political team is urging a focus on cosmetic, short-term deficit rather than stimulus and job creation.

Political science can’t resolve a lot of questions definitively, but this is one of them: any political advisor who thinks that spending cuts matter more to the electorate than employment and economic growth is a complete incompetent who is stealing his or her employer’s money.

And this all has to come back to Obama; if he can’t find political advisors who are familiar with even the most basic research relevant to their field, he’s getting exactly the advice he deserves.

Unfortunately, while many elite Democrats deserve exactly what’s going to happen to them in the 2010 midterms, the country (and especially its poor and unemployed people) doesn’t.

And I assume the gravy train that ensures that overpaid Democratic political advisors are never punished for failure will continue unabated.

I'd venture that because Obama is many things but stupid is not one of them, he finds the politically and economically bad advice of his political advisors personally preferable to the economically and politically good advice of his economic advisors.

President Obama knows that the consequences of choosing spending cuts over stimulus will be both economically and politically catastrophic, yet chooses spending cuts anyway.

Either he still thinks that one more surrender to the repugs will finally bring them around to his side (which theory threatens the "he's not stupid" assumption) or he believes that this is truly the end of America, it can't be saved, and he wants history to remember him making a final futile but heroic gesture toward ... cutting the deficit.

In a long but brilliant essay at The Nation, "The Kabuki Presidency: Why a Progressive Presidency is Impossible, for Now," Eric Alterman explains that there is much, much more at work here.

But the truth, dear reader, is that it does not much matter who is right about what Barack Obama dreams of in his political imagination. Nor is it all that important whether Obama's team either did or didn't make major strategic errors in its first year of governance: in choosing to do healthcare before financial reform; in not holding out for a larger, more people-focused stimulus bill, in eschewing a carbon tax; or in failing to nationalize banks and break up those that are "too big to fail." Face it, the system is rigged, and it's rigged against us. Sure, presidents can pretty easily pass tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful corporations. They can start whatever wars they wish and wiretap whomever they want without warrants. They can order the torture of terrorist suspects, lie about it and see that their intelligence services destroy the evidence. But what they cannot do, even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress behind them, is pass the kind of transformative progressive legislation that Barack Obama promised in his 2008 presidential campaign. Here's why.

Alterman explains, but if I may interject with my first thoughts upon reading that paragraph:

Because electing Barack Obama was deceptively historic. It was a genuinely enormous accomplishment that ranks among the greatest American accomplishments of all time.

But it was merely the tiniest first step on a long, long haul up the steepest of mountains: restoring progressive, effective government.

What is often mistaken for - and derided as - liberal "disillusion" that Obama is not the magic solution to all our problems is actually the inability of virtually anyone to grasp the gargantuan task Obama faced.

Alterman goes into impressive detail about the still-not-completely-known disaster the Bush Maladministration left behind, then writes:

But the "broader pattern" here, Krugman notes, is one of "the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology." As a result of this ideology's ruinous effects, we are likely being lulled into a similar sense of "false security" about any number of aspects of our public life and the government's regulatory responsibilities. These failures have the potential to despoil almost every aspect of President Obama's positive agenda, not unlike an oil gusher spewing its poison into a pristine Louisiana wetland.

Alterman covers the insidious and overwhelming pollution of our government by corporate money, by an outdated Senate system that distorts minority power, by lobbyist corruption, by the devotion of Republicans to eliminating government that gives them power over Democrats who want to improve it, by the massive conservative Noise Machine and its eagerness to spread blatant lies that serve its anti-government purpose, by lobbyist corruption, by the disappearance of objective mass media, by the hijacking of the political center to the radical far right, by the 40-year assault on American Democracy by wealthy right-wing interests.

Alterman concludes:

All of the developments discussed above represent significant structural impediments to a progressive-minded president seeking to carry out his democratic mandate, even one who comes to Washington with ostensibly impregnable majorities in both houses of Congress. What's more, the opponents of progressive change do not have to win any actual arguments among Congress, the media or the larger public; they merely have to make the price of winning so high that it no longer looks worth it. Obama "won" the healthcare fight. But in doing so, he gave away much of the store to conservative and corporate interests and sacrificed much of his party's popular mandate. By placing virtually the entire rest of his agenda on hold for most of the first crucial year of his presidency, he lost the opportunity to attempt to secure a strong bill to deal with global warming and weakened his hand at the table vis-à-vis financial reforms, whose final structure mirrored the weaknesses of the healthcare effort. (He also failed to address immigration reform, and gave up entirely on the Employee Free Choice Act, the American labor movement's top priority, among many, many progressive priorities to which he gave such eloquent voice during the campaign.)

Obviously, if America is to be rescued from the grip of its current democratic dysfunction, then merely electing better candidates to Congress is not going to be enough. We need a system that has better, fairer rules; reduces the role of money; and keeps politicians and journalists honest in their portrayal of what's actually going on. And yet most of these items often do not even make it to the primary points of the progressive agenda. This is, in many ways, understandable. Ending the Bush/Cheney administration, and defeating the neocon, Christian conservative and corporate base one whose behalf it acted, required emergency measures of a largely defensive nature. And the chance to replace George W. Bush with Barack Hussein Obama—both for symbolic and in many respects, pragmatic reasons in 2008—appeared so enticing (and exciting) that I think we can all be forgiven for losing ourselves in the romance of focusing 100 percent of our political time, money and energies on making this man America's forty-fourth president.

But the fact remains; the 2008 election was not a "game change" after all. For genuine change of the kind Obama promised and so many progressives imagined, we need to elect politicians willing to challenge the outdated rules of the Senate; willing to fight for publicly financed elections and, in the absence of that, against the Supreme Court's insistence on giving corporations the same free speech rights as individuals. We must work to transform our culture so that once again the idea of the public good becomes ennobled and the belief that it makes no difference which side you're on—that of citizens or that of corporate profits—concerns the people who craft legislation. We need smarter organizations that pressure politicians as well as pundits and reporters, not necessarily to see things our way, but to hold true to the ideals they profess to represent in the first place.

SNIP

Indeed, with regard to almost every single one of our problems, we need better, smarter organizing at every level and a willingness on the part of liberals and leftists to work with what remains of the center to begin the process of reforms that are a beginning, rather than an endpoint in the process of societal transformation. As American history consistently instructs us, this is pretty much the only way things change in our system. Over time, reforms like Social Security, Medicare and the Voting Rights Act can add up to a kind of revolution, one that succeeds without bloodshed or widespread destruction of order, property or necessary institutions.

What's more, one hypothesis—one I'm tempted to share—for the Obama administration's willingness to compromise so extensively on the promises that candidate Obama made during the 2008 campaign would be that as president, he is playing for time. Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I'd say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental "change" that is not possible in today's environment. This would be consistent with FDR's strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.

To borrow from Hillel the Elder: "If not now, when? If not us, who?"

Read the whole thing. About halfway through, it gets so depressing you might be tempted to give up. At that point, I stopped and wrote this:

All due respect to Alterman, I've heard this song before. Whites will never grant civil rights to blacks. Men will never let women gain true power. Homosexuals will never be accepted in society.

Yet at the peak of antediluvian, wingnut freakazoid power, we elected a black man as president. The rational among us knew early in the primary - or at latest, after his vote for FISA secrecy that summer - that he was a conservative, corporate creature. But the symbolism was irresistible, and he was the closest thing to progressive we were going to get.

Obama is the first step. We have to make the most of it, ensure it leads to a second, and a hundredth, and a thousandth step, because that's what it's going to take to restore Liberal Democracy in America.

That doesn't mean giving in. It doesn't mean giving up. It means digging in and powering up. It means turning every defeat and disappointment into a spur to work harder: to make more liberals, to build and expand the grassroots, to spread the liberal word about what is necessary and how to accomplish it.

The forces ranged against us are enormously, almost unimaginably powerful. But they are not unbeatable. Our election of a black man as president - even a conservative corporatist one - proves that.

Liberalism faces in 2010 a crisis greater than the one it faced during the Bush Interregnum, when it seemed the conservo-fascist takeover of America was complete. The crisis we face now is greater even than that of the Wilson Administration's unconstitutional Palmer Raids that sent native-born American citizens to prison for years for daring to criticize - not threaten, merely criticize - the government.

The crisis we face is greater now because what we hoped was a huge and final victory has been revealed as a small and preliminary one. We are exhausted and cannot face the long, hard slog before us. So much easier to admit defeat and lie down to rest. We tried. It was too much.

I won't give up. American Democracy is Liberal Democracy, and I won't let anyone forget it. Smirky/Darth came very very close to killing it, but electing Obama stopped the hemorraging. Liberal Democracy is still flat on its back and weak, but it's alive.

It's up to us to get it back on its feet, healthy, strong and ready to fight.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....