Liberals Can Win

The Great Liberal Prosperity is at death's door. People are furious and desperate. Liberalism's enemies are rabid and at each other's throats. This is the best environment for liberal change in 80 years. All the pieces are there; all we have to do is pick them up and use them.

Erik Loomis sees a much larger point behind President Obama’s apparently endorsing repeal of the odious Defense of Marriage Act:

… it’d be nice if Democrats realized that the strategies behind the gay rights movement–pushing for a program with refusal to compromise long-term goals, grassroots organization, building support among the young–would probably work for other parts of the Democratic agenda.

I think the White House does realize it, which is why Obama does everything he can to prevent such liberal-making activities from ever taking place.

Digby:

What's wrong with his commentary is his telling those young people that they should see his argument as a template for their own role as engaged citizens. I can't think of anything more antithetical to his message in 2008 than "don't set up a situation where you're guaranteed to be disappointed." It's actually rather stunning.

And it's completely wrong in terms of the role of average citizens (and especially young activists) in the political process. They are supposed to push for what they believe in with passion and single minded commitment. They shouldn't worry about "what can pass" congress or the limits of the political process. That's the job of politicians and political hacks.

Clearly, the president is more than a little bit annoyed by liberals on the outside who are agitating for difficult change and expressing their ire at what they perceive to be his unwillingness or inability to fight for it. But it's as much a part of the process as his meeting with John Boehner on the terrace and hammering out an agreement. It's as much a part of the process as Boehner making deals with his own coalition and Obama and Pelosi making deals with theirs. It's the responsibility of engaged citizens to agitate for what they believe particularly when the Party that represents them is not even publicly articulating their beliefs. Otherwise, it won't get said at all. And if that's the case, then these "necessary compromises" aren't compromises at all, are they?

Presidents have had to face this before. As Dday wrote in this addendum to his earlier post on this subject, FDR was met with strong resistance from liberal activists when Social Security was passed as a lesser bill than they believed was necessary. But it was that energy, translated into hard core political involvement, that resulted in Social Security being strengthened and expanded over the years. Certainly, if left to the devices of cautious politicians, it's doubtful that it would have happened on its own.

SNIP

If you want people to push the boulder up the hill --- and come back again if it slips --- they need to have the idealism and energy and passion that only comes from believing that your cause is worth fighting for over the long haul. Saying "don't set up a situation where you're guaranteed to be disappointed," is hardly going to inspire that. President Obama sounds petulant in that video --- complaining about the Huffington Post is beneath him --- and telling everyone to lower their expectations is about as inspirational as lukewarm soup.

And it's a very far cry from "now go out and make me do it."

Or "yes we can" ...

Erik Loomis again:

Progressive change in this country (at least after the Civil War) has almost always happened through mass movement politics eventually electing politicians to office to enact desired changes or forcing reluctant politicians to go along. Think Civil Rights, environmentalism, or the labor movement. Today, the gay rights movement is succeeding because of collective action changing people’s minds and making politicians realize that supporting it is good politics.

I think I and left neo-liberals all more or less want the same things–a more robust economy, better jobs, universal healthcare, sensible transportation policy, a vigorous fight against climate change, etc. But it seems that left neo-liberals sometimes feel that mass movements are outdated and irrelevant for creating this change. Certainly they are right that we need smart people working in think tanks and creating policy, but Henry is right that this does not create a self-sustaining politics.

Does policy follow grassroots politics or can successful policy be created without a grassroots base? I’d argue for the former–being right about policy rarely matters in American politics. It’s about how many people you can get out to support you, regardless of a position’s merits. Conservatives understand this well. The Tea Party supports terrible policy on nearly every issue. But that hasn’t stopped it from moving the nation significantly to the right.

Where does this disconnect between left neo-liberalism and grassroots liberalism come from? A couple of suggestions. First, the failure of the anti-Vietnam movement to stop the war seem to have convinced many that putting bodies in the streets isn’t going to make much of a difference in Washington. That the anti-Iraq protests faded so quickly in 2003 suggests that many people believed that sustained protests weren’t going to do anything positive. Second, as Henry notes, the liberal interest group dynamics of the late 70s and 80s created squabbling that precluded much useful from getting done. Combined with the fizzling out of the labor and civil rights movements in the face of revived conservative opposition and perhaps it seemed that grassroots politics were not the route for policy-oriented liberals to create change.

It’s not that left neo-liberals and grassroots liberals can’t come together. The Obama campaign was an amazing grassroots campaign, where you had left neo-liberals ready to support all sorts of policies with their technocratic expertise and millions of Americans (or at least hundreds of thousands) waiting to do what their president asked to see universal health care, job creation, immigration reform, etc.
And then after the election, Obama and his team allowed the grassroots movement to slip away. Obama, clearly never comfortable with being the head of a mass movement, preferred the politics of the Beltway to that of the street. Like so many other left neoliberals, he failed to understand what both labor unions and right-wing activists know well–politics are primarily won in the street, next to the water cooler, at the local bar, and on the airwaves, not in meetings of intelligent people.

So to sum up–being right about policy is often irrelevant unless you have a mass movement of people behind you ready to engage in collective action to see those policies enacted. And I don’t think left neo-liberals often understand that. This is why I get so outraged when, for example, left neo-liberals support education “reform” that weakens teacher unions. We probably all agree that there are bad teachers out there and it would be great to get rid of them. But by weakening the one educational institution that can best mobilize people to protect our schools from conservative attacks, these reforms often further right-wing politics even if they theoretically achieve a left neo-liberal policy point.

Kevin Drum:

"If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade." It still is.

Here’s a place to start, from Left in Alabama:

ADP Chair Mark Kennedy spoke in Huntsville last night. In this video segment, he lays out his plans to rebuild the party: training, candidate recruitment, a state party that gives help instead of just taking money, and finally... a warning to county committee and chairmen who "just meet every 2 years to collect qualifying checks."They have a few months to clean up their act before the ADP finds people to replace them.

Those were strong words in a no-nonsense speech that blended practical politics with the more idealistic notions that "we're all in this together" and are people who believe in "the fundamental rights of all people."

The reaction from the crowd was favorable. Judge Kennedy was swamped with folks before and after his speech and everyone I spoke with had a favorable - or even enthusiastic - reaction to our new ADP Chair.

On the flip is a partial transcript of his speech and the actual YouTube video. It's a must-read and must-watch for the rank and file party folks who are out there every election putting up signs, knocking on doors, making calls, etc.

If Judge Kennedy can pull it off, we'll finally have a state Democratic Party that's more a help to campaigning than a hindrance. That's the best news I've heard all year!

Kentucky liberals will recognize that as the get-off-your-worthless-asses strategy we have been demanding for years, but not getting. For Kentuckians, and those in other states whose state party chairs are not Alabama’s Mark Kennedy, it’s the hard work of building from the ground up, one voter at a time.

Down with Tyranny had an excellent piece last year that begins with the observation that progressives seem to be dividing into two mutually distrusting camps:

between those who accept the Obama agenda as, realistically, the most we on the left can reasonably hope for, at least in this time and place, and those who regard what we've seen in this administration as a betrayal so intense that it's not that much better than an openly right-wing administration -- and in some ways worse, since so many ideas that we cherish for reform, such as health care reform and economic stimulus, have been so mishandled as to (wrongly) discredit the ideas.
But there's a third camp that no one seems to recognize. Maybe that's because I'm the only one in it. If so, so be it. Here's where I stand:

Yes, Obama has betrayed the people who got his ass elected. He is hell-bent on destroying what's left of liberal democracy. Every liberal who bites her tongue at the continuation of illegal, unconstitutional and inhuman Smirky/Darth policies is a collaborator in the destruction of American Democracy.

But that doesn't mean giving up. That means doubling and tripling down.

Liberals don't sit around waiting for Big Daddy to rescue us - we go out and do what has to be done to save ourselves.