Paying A Price
Posted on November 24th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Glenn Greenwald is correct that it is a bit mystifying that there have been as many complaints from the left about Obama’s appointments as there have been. Surely they understood, as I have come to understand, that he is an establishment-accommodating, consensus-oriented politician, so how can anyone be all that surprised or upset? That is how he won, and that is how he has ascended so quickly in politics. More idealistic Democratic politicians, such as Russ Feingold, probably never could have done what Obama has done, which seems to me to be an indictment of our system rather than evidence of the impracticality of Feingold’s refusal to compromise civil liberties or sign off on an unjust war, but the point stands. Then again, I am a bit surprised that there haven’t been more complaints. There are two distinct questions here. It seems to me that there should be fewer bewildered cries of betrayal, because there should have been no illusions about Obama, but there should be far more criticism of Obama’s selections and decisions when progressives find them dissatisfying for well-founded reasons. In other words, there ought to be even more criticism of the probable Brennan selection, but much less gasping in surprise and asking, “How could Obama do that?”
In Greenwald’s post, there is an excerpt from an email from Digby, and I thought this quote was the most telling:
Liberals took cultural signifiers as a sign of solidarity and didn’t ask for anything.
This is what conservatives and progressives both seem to be reduced to in election after election: looking for cues that so-and-so is “one of us” and allowing that to make up for the rather uninspired, conventional policies the pol pursues. The problem with this is that the pols who seem to be most adept at giving these cues are also the ones most likely to take their core constituents for granted. Indeed, they are bound to take those constituents for granted, because they know that the cultural signifiers have bound the constituents to their politicians in such a way that they end up being the least likely to rebel against the pols. The response Digby describes here is much the same as what we have seen with conservatives and Bush and again with the conservative reaction to Palin.
Greenwald makes a fair point that progressives did not hold out for concessions or courting from Obama, but gravitated to him over the course of the primaries and now do not have much reason to expect that much from him. The conservative response to Bush in the 2000 primaries was somewhat similar, in that Bush became the rallying point for conservatives who were lured into thinking that Bush, previously considered a moderate, was now a “real conservative” alternative to McCain. Whatever progressives may have thought of Obama early on, perhaps the possibility of defeating Clinton was so tempting that they had no interest in holding out for more from Obama.
It is this, it seems to me, that is at the heart of what is wrong with most calls for “pragmatism.” At every stage, the “impractical” purist hears that he should not withhold his support from the marginally preferable candidate under any circumstances. He is urged to be realistic, and so he and those like him do not insist that the candidate make strong commitments on policy positions that are deemed by someone to be out of the mainstream. The candidate pays some minimal lip service to the purist’s “values,” and this is supposed to count for something. In the name of pragmatism, the purist decides that he has to support the candidate, because the candidate represents the best chance of advancing his views, but even before the election is held the purist has already given so much away in the name of pragmatism and realism that he and those like him have no leverage at all. Having yielded and given away their support in exchange for nothing more than lip service, the purists are scarcely in a much better position than before. They can take satisfaction in being on the winning side, but for the most part this means that they will bear the burden if the public turns against the candidate after he is elected and otherwise they will scarcely get much of anything. The purists-turned-pragmatists will receive the blame for enabling the administration in whatever it does, but they will receive no credit or acknowledgement that their support was important enough to merit meaningful concessions to their concens. Having refused in the first place to exact a price for their support, they have made their support worthless and ensured that they will have no influence.
Filed under: politics
It seems to me that you unjustifiably elide the force of the pragmatist argument. You assume that purists have an effective mechanism “to exact a price for their support”. If they don’t have that, the question of whom to support does come down to the choice of the marginally preferable candidate.
In any event, for a real purist, why would the question of price enter into it? Principles are not for sale. If you reply that you can’t get everything you want, that’s a pragmatic argument, isn’t it?
Greenwald, like many liberal bloggers, finds himself in an uncomfortable position. For the past 8 years, his job has been made simple by the egregious nature of the Bush administration. It’s easy to be a purist when you can’t get anything you want. Now that liberals have a President who wants economic policies that reverse the upward redistribution of wealth, a balanced foreign policy with withdrawal from Iraq, the Freedom of Choice Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, the end of torture of prisoners, the closure of Gitmo and secret prisons, and forward-thinking environmental policies, the purist must still insist he feels betrayed. I believe him, I just don’t see why I should share his sense of betrayal.
They could withhold their support from candidates that do not make significant concessions. Few seriously attempt to use this mechanism for fear of what “the other side” will do, which is why it has not been effective. In the end, most set aside their reservations, and they end up getting nothing or next to nothing. Perhaps this is inevitable in a system that seems geared against representing the full range of political views in this country.
In this respect, most people are not really purists, but there are plenty of people who claim that they are advancing toward the same goals that the purists want incrementally by way of pragmatic compromises. On the whole, these people are kidding themselves, and those goals recede farther into the distance in part because of these pragmatic compromises. Principles are not for sale, but their votes certainly are, and they are cheaply purchased.
I am referring to purists a bit ironically, which I didn’t make very clear, and I probably should have chosen a different word all together. This is what more radical critics on left and right are often dismissively called when they refuse to compromise core principles for the sake of “getting things done.” The Bush administration got a lot of things done–they managed to do many terrible, unjustifiable things, and those who resisted them were for a long time treated as the fringe and the administration and its lackeys were at “the center.”
The problem with the pragmatists is not just that they make what I think are unacceptable compromises, but that they end up endorsing the establishment understanding of what counts as reasonable, responsible and serious discourse and who belongs as part of the political “center” and who doesn’t. This is an understanding geared toward the preservation of the unchallengeable bipartisan consensus in foreign affairs and national security in particular and the unrepresentative political system as a whole.
To be clear, Greenwald is not making any claim that he and the left have been betrayed. He is arguing precisely the opposite against others on the left who have been more inclined to say this. One of the advantages of coming at these questions as a strong progressive or conservative is that you expect little or nothing from the political class.
“Then again, I am a bit surprised that there haven’t been more complaints.”
Gee, maybe it’s because none of the appointees have done anything disagreeable yet seeing as how they have yet to be appointed and confirmed. Also; I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Barack Obama hasn’t been inaugurated yet, either, so he has yet to make any poor policy decisions as President.
Not sure the division is as black and white as it seems. Can’t I be a purist and a moderate? Is there no value in building true consensus? It would have stopped some of the most egregious excesses of the past eight years, for example.
“Gee, maybe it’s because none of the appointees have done anything disagreeable yet seeing as how they have yet to be appointed and confirmed. Also; I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Barack Obama hasn’t been inaugurated yet, either, so he has yet to make any poor policy decisions as President.”
That’s poorly thought-out sarcasm. The reason “purists” should be complaining, or at least feel a sense of unease, is that the appointees do have a record, and Obama presumably took that record into account when he chose them. So far he’s chosen centrists, and this probably means something. Obama himself has a record, both as a senator and as a candidate and he’s already said and done things which should make lefties feel uneasy on certain issues–he backtracked on FISA, he panders to AIPAC, he wants more troops in Afghanistan, and for all the mileage he’s received for opposing the Iraq War, apparently it doesn’t matter that his VP and Secretary of State didn’t have the good judgment to oppose it as he did. .
“I believe him, I just don’t see why I should share his sense of betrayal.”
You shouldn’t, Mithras, but only because he has none.
Maybe you should try to read Greenwald (or the post above) before you ascribe a “sense of betrayal” to him. The case is, in fact, the opposite.
Finally, Greenwald’s (and others) “liberal purity” comes from many different places (and may be a subject for discussion), but to assume that it arises out of some juvenile impetus to remain a contrarian is sloppily reductive and, frankly, offensive.
Another complaint, this time by Ramzi Kysia.
Two things:
1) Past actions are often prelude to future actions, but in this case, we are talking Obama’s policies being implemented by experienced Washington hands. Only time will tell how that works out; and
2) It takes purists – zealots, really – to move the political center. To the extent that purists remain dissatisfied they may yet be serving their, and possibly our, ends.
Jake
The number of actual, agrieved “progressives” who could have/would have witheld their support for Obama without some kind of “concession package” is vanishingly small. How many votes did Nader get, even in 2000? In this election, that small body of voters would not have made a difference, nor could they have organized themselves to present a plausible argument for refusing to support Obama. Who exactly are these people anyway? It is a tiny fraction of Obama’s support, even from the left.
There is simply no parallel between the leftist “progressive movement” and the modern conservative movement, which succeeded in getting the GOP nomination in 1964 (Goldwater), and then the Presidency in 1980 (Reagan). To compare Obama in 2008 to Bush in 2000 is utterly ignorant of this history. Conservatives had already mainstreamed themselves for decades, largely by utterly marginalizing left-liberals and progressives to a tiny fraction of even the Democratic party. Conservatives, beginning in the 1950’s, went to war against leftist and progressives, and they won hugely. However, in the process they actually began to abandon the very goals they set out to accomplish, primarily the one of shrinking the size of government. Reagan himself abandoned that project, and Bush simply represented the inevitable slide into big government “conservatism”, which is of course a betrayal of the very meaning of conservatism as a political movement.
The point being that leftist progressives have no base, no party, no legitimate leaders in public office, except a few marginal figures like Feingold. They have no power, in other words, unlike conservatives. They have Daily Kos, Mother Jones, the Nation, and a few bloggers. But even those guys are for the most part very realistic supporters of Obama, recognizing that he’s not himself a leftist progressive, and yet that he represents a huge shift in that direction, or at least back to a kind of pragmatic FDR liberalism. Daily Kos prides itself on being pragmatic, directed towards electing Democrats of every stripe, and not being terribly fixated upon ideological purity. It’s not that they don’t care about ideology and a progressive agenda, but they recognize that a movement has to be created, and politicians elected – meaning mainstream Democrats – who are at least sympathetic to their goals.
Now of course there are progressives who disagree, who want a progressive revolution, and want Obama to instigate one. Well, that’s no his job, and most progressives understand that. They understand that plain old mainstream liberalism has to establish some credibility first, after years of being bashed by conservatives to the point where the public is very uncertain of its capacity to lead.
The problem with this debate is that even the terms “progressive” and “liberal” seem undefined. If by “progressive”, one means “Naderite/Green party radicals”, well, such people never supported Obama to begin with. I know some of those people, and they recognized Obama from the beginning as not being interested in their goals. ANd they are a tiny group made even tinier by Obama’s success. If one merely means good-hearted liberals, well, those are Obama’s people still, and the course he’s pursuing is one that makes them happy. If one means Kossites, well, those people are huge supporters of Obama for the very pragmatic reasons you decree.
The problem with your argument, Daniel, is that I think you are projecting your own problems with the GOP onto the Democratic side of the street. I know you support the Constitution Pary and its ideological purism, and you see the progressives in a similar light. Well, they aren’t, except for the Naderite/Green wing, which I guess really is similar to your own Constitutionalist wing of the right. But just as the GOP can completely ignore the support of the Constitutionalists, so can the Democrats completely ignore the support of the Naderite/Green people. But the term “progressive” on the left these days is a very loose one, not confined to socialist purists or the anti-corporate conspiracy folks. And the vast majority of those who seem themselves as sympathetic to progressivism in this looser sense are very happy with Obama’s pragmatic approach.
I also disagree that it takes zealots to move the political center. It takes pragmatists to do that. Zealots only move the center when they become pragmatists, as the conservative movement did in the 1970s and 80s.
Conradg: excellent response above. I think Daniel should consider your notion that he’s “projecting” as a second-guess against his evaluations of the progressive movement.
And then for Daniel himself, I would only quibble with the last paragraph: “Having refused in the first place to exact a price for their support, they have made their support worthless and ensured that they will have no influence.”
I don’t think it’s that simple anymore. The progosphere has changed a lot, and witness already the leverage they’ve exerted in Congressional primaries and races. Unlike (or at least much moreso than) previous decades, the dissatisfied now have an easy place to gather for solidarity and action-planning.
It’s certainly clear that if the Democrats don’t make the netroots happy, there will be more heated primaries against incumbents and accelerated turnover of “Democrats who don’t” into “Democrats who will.” Especially when there’s a majority in Congress already, it’s not very risky for the netroots to “pick their battles” like that, and they WILL. (In fact, they will anyway, if even if they’re broadly satisfied – the zealots now are building an effective incremental mechanism for change in the House.)
To add a plank to conradg’s observations, there IS a critical distinction between the zealous bases in regards to identity politics. It’s true that both bases subscribe to “identity affinity” in large numbers. However, the Republican base has tended toward a much more authoritarian regard for their leaders (”if he does/wants it, ‘it’ must be right and good!”), whereas the Democratic base hasn’t reflected such an instinct.
Greenwald and John Dean have both written quite a bit about this, and any honest assessment of the parties’ bases should take them into account.
..what a load of tripe. Listen – at least Greenwald is trying to do something. Daniel describes critically what the mechanisms might be.
The rest of you are bean- counters, in a system that doesn’t even work! “What can be done to turn the existing personality- based politics into a true democratic movement?” Is that something you should answer with: “continue in the same way and believe real hard that ’someone’ is going to do ’something’ that benefits ‘people’”? Seriously – shut the hell up and think, if at least for a short while. It might hurt at first, and won’t fill your tummy with butterflies and sugerpuff, but you have to bloody do it anyway, now won’t you?