Hippie Punching is All They Have Left

It's one thing for someone you care about to insist on doing something stupid despite your strong warnings; you figure that after they get burned they'll learn their lesson, admit you were right and follow your advice the next time.

But when your badly burned friend insists on repeating the mistake and blames you for it, it's hard to keep caring.

Steve M:

I'm looking for evidence that the administration is taking the arguments of its left-wing critics seriously. I'm not seeing it. What I'm seeing is the administration getting hammered from all sides, but mostly from the right, and not really being willing to take on the right. And you know -- what do you do when your boss chews you out every day at work? You go home and, as soon as the dog does something to annoy you, you kick the dog.

Well, the right is Obama's boss. And Krugman and FDL and "the professional left" are the dog. Lefty critics are the annoyers the White House isn't afraid of. I'd love to think the lashing out at the left is a sign that lefty critics have gotten to the administration, but I think it's just a case of punching down.

Digby:

There's been no pivot. It's been a straight line from the very beginning. The rhetoric's exactly the same as it was the week before the inauguration. And to the extent they've changed it's only in some snall details --- carbon pricing, for instance, has been jettisoned in return for asking for a tax on corporate jets.

I get that it seems baffling that the administration wouldn't be more flexible in the face of changing circumstances, particularly when it comes to something as major as this ongoing economic crisis, but that does appear to me to be the case here.

Brad DeLong, who presumably has access to the thinking at the upper levels of the administration wrote this the other day:

SNIP

And now it is the late summer of 2011. Our big question still is: how is Obama going to use executive branch authority to reduce unemployment? There are lots of options: adjourn congress and do some recess appointments to get the Federal Reserve more engaged in actually pursuing its dual mandate, quantitative easing via the Treasury Department, shifting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their do-nothing position by giving them a microeconomic stabilization mission, talking about how a weak dollar is in America's interest.

And this time what I am hearing back is only:

Hippie punching.

It is difficult to read this in any way but as a group of people inside a bunker who (1) have been wrong about the situation, (2) are scared to use the powers they have to try to make things better, and (3) really do not like being reminded that they were wrong about the situation.

That seems to me to mean that the Obama administration right now has one and only one macroeconomic policy idea: hope that the country gets lucky.

I suspect that's right. Economic disaster wasn't in the original plan and they just don't have the capacity or desire to change course. After all, the 2008 campaign was allegedly the apotheosis of human organizational achievement because they ignored all "distractions." It proved their strategic brilliance. Why ever "pivot"?

I'm being glib. But I do think they have stuck to their plan because they are essentially control freaks who think they can mold the world to their vision of what they want it to be instead of recognizing and adapting to changing circumstances. What that adds up to in reality is "hope the country gets lucky."

The political consequences are almost as dire.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

It's true that many online progressives have been fed up with the Obama Administration for some time now. That's been apparent all over the liberal blogosphere. But in fairness to the Administration's defenders, most of those folks were never the types to do the grunt work of attending meetings, licking envelopes, running data scanners, managing difficult personalities, taking care of volunteers, and especially phonebanking and walking door to door in rain, snow and blazing sun talking to strangers while carrying campaign literature anyway. It's easy to vituperate meaningless insults into a an online ether. It's a lot harder to herd cats thanklessly in an unpaid capacity in a hectic organization, and do the boring hard work that it takes to push Democrats to victory, and conservatives into electoral oblivion.

But the Administration is seriously whistling past the graveyard at this point. They are reaching a tipping point. If folks like Marta Evry and I are ready to hop off the train, it's not just angry cheetos-munching bloggers they're going to lose. They're going to lose the activist base that powered them to victory in 2008. If they think it's going to come back just out of fear of Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry, they're sorely mistaken.

I have crazy Republicans in my own backyard who terrify me, too--and getting rid of them will actually make a more immediate impact in my county, my state, and my personal life. I don't have to lift a finger to help the President in order to help the Democratic Party, and neither do folks like Marta. I won't be traveling to Nevada or Arizona for the President's re-election campaign like I did in 2008. I'll be sticking in my own California backyard, helping local progressive Democrats win office. People whose positions and negotiation styles I know I can count on. People who can make progressive dreams come true in California, since it has become abundantly clear they will not come true in Washington, D.C. Not even with 60 Democratic Senators and a big majority in the House.

And I know I'm not alone in this. If the Administration wants to take a bet that there aren't enough people like me and Marta out there to make a difference to their field campaign, they're free to do so.

But it would be a bad bet.

This is nothing new, as Digby explained during last year's congressional campaigns:

Unfortunately, the Democratic political establishment, timorous and afraid of their own shadows as always, are petrified that Real Americans might make that same absurd connection. So nearly forty years on from the chaotic '72 Democratic convention, the left, whether Netroots or "Professional" are still seen as disruptive, scary hippies and it is assumed they are loathed by all decent people. Just like the idiotic right wingers, they conflate "the left" with that carefully nurtured anachronistic wingnut fantasy of the "smelly, dirty, hairy" leftist and are scared to death of being tarred by it. And it is why many in the left blogosphere defiantly took the moniker "DFH" which stands for Dirty Fucking Hippie.

The blogosphere's subsequent adoption of the term "hippie punching" is a shorthand to describe how Democrats like to debase the left in order to appeal to so-called Real Americans. It's a sort of proxy bullying, in which the Party attempts to prove their middle of the road bonafides by attacking what they believe Americans see as their out-of-the-mainstream fringe. (It's like a gang initiation where you have to beat up your childhood best friend to prove your loyalty to the new crowd.)

Needless to say, this is neurotic and delusional. Nobody is ever convinced and the Republicans spend huge amounts of time and money to make sure of it. No matter how much they distance themselves from the left, they will never be able to escape being associated with it and by demeaning their own largest political faction they ensure that a certain number of Real Americans continue to believe there is something truly distasteful about them --- and by extension, the Democrats in general. After all, if the party leadership is repulsed by their own voters, even if they aren't literally "fragrant, hirsute pie wagons," there must be something awfully wrong with them. What kind of party would even associate with such people?

When the administration complained about liberals and "the professional left" they were plugging into a long-standing meme in Democratic politics that goes all the way back to the 1980s. Aside from 1992 campaign, when Clinton managed to eke out a win in a three way race with his DLC poll tested triangulation technique, it hasn't really worked very well for the Democrats over the long term. Instead, it's created a nation in which identifying with the left is equated with something viscerally unpalatable.

That's the background to Susie's question. The situation was unusual because nobody ever brings it up in polite, establishment company (of course, DFHs are rarely invited into polite establishment company, so the opportunity doesn't happen very often.) This tension has been around for a very long time but it hasn't been articulated until fairly recently.

What we know is that the way the Republicans treat their base is substantially different than the way the Democrats treat theirs. The GOP may go to some trouble to downplay the Christian Right, for instance, but they would never publicly insult them to gain respectability among the beltway chattering class or big donors. They see them as an asset to be managed rather than a target to be used to prove their mainstream bonafides. It's a very different approach.

Maybe this will still work out well for the Democrats in the long run. I doubt that anyone cares what a bunch of bloggers think about anything, so this kerfuffle will hardly change the course of history. But the Democrats, of all people, should remember that it only takes a few lefties to peel off to a third party run to throw an election to the other side. It's not like it hasn't happened before (and for many of the same reasons.) It could easily happen again and there won't be anything the DFH bloggers can do about it.

As I've written many times before, I will vote for President Obama next year, and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I will do so in the firm knowledge that as much as he hates me and all my Dirty Fucking Hippie friends, my sitting out this election - or supporting a suicidal third party run - is exactly what the repugs want.

And when in doubt, always do the opposite of what the repugs want.