Yes, everyone hates liberals. But that’s not the end of the story
by digby
In other poll news, for the fifth year in a row virtually no one thinks President Obama is too conservative. Only 9 percent of the country would prefer a more liberal president. This is up a whopping two points from early 2010, a year after Obama was inaugurated. This is the fundamental problem for American progressives: the country just doesn’t support a more robust progressive movement than we have now. Until we change that, fantasies of expanding Social Security and electing Elizabeth Warren are going to remain just that.
So let’s change it.
I would just add that changing it begins with people educating the public about these things that sound like fantasy. You talk about it until people get used to hearing it at which point it changes from “fantasy” to possibility and finally, after a while, sounds like conventional wisdom — at least for a fair number of citizens. People will never know that expanding social security, for instance, is even possible unless someone like Elizabeth Warren starts advocating for it.
So yeah, people don’t identify as “liberal.” In fact, they think they’re supposed to loathe liberals so even if they are Democrats who agree with every item on the progressive agenda most are unlikely to take on that hated label. But if popular politicians like Elizabeth Warren make the case for progressive policies and wear the liberal/progressive label proudly … well, anything can happen.
None of this is news to progressive/liberal activists of all stripes. Everyone knows there is work to be done. But the right wing is busy destroying all the hard work conservatives did over decades making them the default ideology in the country. There is a lot more room to move than there was just a decade ago. So I’m hopeful.
Unfortunately, we have some bigger structural problems to worry about, as Paul Rosenberg discusses in this interesting essay in Salon discussing the wrongheaded assumption among the chattering classes that the Republicans are going to “move to the center” and we’ll have Tipnronnie nirvana. He cites the work of political scientist Thomas Ferguson:
Political action of any sort requires an investment of time and energy, simply to understand what’s going on, Ferguson argues, building on the 1970s work of Samuel Popkin, a non-trivial investment whose burden for average citizens is routinely minimized, overlooked, and/or ignored by most political scientists. A vibrant muckraking press, or a vital labor movement can both lower those costs and make specific benefits more tangible, but even so, there is much more for small special interests to gain by investing not just time and energy, but also pots of money—which is why blocks of big donors play a much larger role in determining the contours of political power, forming the defacto core of political parties.
Among other things, Ferguson notes that if donor groups in neither party will invest in an idea, it will never be seriously debated, no matter how popular it might be. Thus, when it comes to agenda setting, median voters need not apply. They do not create the cafeteria menu, they merely order from it.
A decade earlier, in 1986, Ferguson co-authored a book with Joel Rodgers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, in which they marshaled evidence showing that Democratic elites abandoned liberalism well before Clinton, during Carter’s term in office. Among other things, they traced the rightward-shifting influence of those elites via precursors to the DLC, the vehicle which ultimate lead Clinton to the White House. While the conventional wisdom portrays Mondale and Dukakis as liberal candidates, whose electoral failures pressed home the need for Democrats to move right “toward the center”, Right Turn helps to highlight how the rightward shift of Democratic Party elites contributed to those losses in advance, rather than following from them afterwards.
“Basically the GOP moved steadily to the right; Dem elites followed right along, pretty much, on economic issues,” Ferguson said of this period, when I asked him to comment for this article. (Indeed, his latest work on the 2012 election shows this same basic dynamic still at play.) “Democratic financing in that period never varied,” he added, “Always led by investment bankers, high tech types, defense.”
Thus, what actually happened—and continues even now—was a rightward shift of the entire political class, regardless of public opinion generally. The “center” elite journalists are talking about is not the center of public opinion, as it pretends to be, but rather, the self-referential center of elite opinion, which they are tasked with helping to construct, legitimate, normalize, and ultimately present as existing without any conceivable alternative.
This is why we need popular political leaders like Warren to go outside the parameters of elite opinion and speak directly to the people. Democracy doesn’t seem to be all that adequate in the face of the ever rightward course set by the moneyed elites of both parties. But it is at least something of a countervailing force. And anyway, what choice do we have but to try?
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