California’s not very fond of Republicans right now. When the two most famous failed Republican leaders get together it’s not pretty:
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Bush’s visit to Stanford was interrupted by protesters, who blocked the only road leading to the Hoover Institution, where Mr. Bush was to meet with fellows before dining with Mr. Shultz.
As a result of the protest, the meeting was switched to Mr. Shultz’s house, and the dinner followed.
The get-togethers with Mr. Schwarzenegger and Mr. Shultz were the most significant events so far in Mr. Bush’s visit.
For Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, Mr. Bush’s visit presented a dilemma: The governor, who is facing a tough re-election fight, did not want to appear too often or too cozy with Mr. Bush, whose approval rating in this largely Democratic state is 32 percent, according to a Field Poll last week. That is even lower than Mr. Schwarzenegger’s, 36 percent in the poll.
America seems to be waking up to the fact that stolen elections, bogus recalls, movie stars and guys you want to have a beer with don’t actually add up to leadership. If they can be wised up to the fact that tax cuts for billionaires don’t actually benefit them, then we might be getting someplace.
I was musing yesterday about the habitual misjudgment on the part of the Bush administration and why it all felt so familiar to me. The unique combination of hubris, emotionalism, and confident assumptions that through little effort the US would “win” by dint of its superiority in both goodness and courage. And that’s when it came to me where I’d heard it before:
From a speech given at the centennial of the civil war by historian Stephen Z. Starr:
Granting the existence of cultural differences between the North and South, can we assume that they would necessarily lead to a Civil War? Obviously not. Such differences lead to animosity and war only if one side develops a national inferiority complex, begins to blame all its shortcomings on the other side, enforces a rigid conformity on its own people, and tries to make up for its own sins of omission and commission by name-calling, by nursing an exaggerated pride and sensitiveness, and by cultivating a reckless aggressiveness as a substitute for reason.
And this was the refuge of the South. For ten years before secession, Northerners were commonly referred to as “mongrels and hirelings.” The North was described as “a conglomeration of greasy mechanics filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists … hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman’s body servant.” And, most fatal delusion of all, Southerners began to credit themselves with fighting ability equal to that of nine, five, or more conservatively, three Northerners.
Once a nation or a section begins to speak and think in such terms, reason has gone out the window and emotion has taken over. This is precisely what happened in the South, and this is why the Cotton States seceded before Lincoln was even inaugurated and before his administration had committed, or had a chance to commit, any act of egression against them. Such behavior is fundamentally irrational, and cannot be explained in rational terms.
We seem to have a little glitch in our national psyche that won’t go away. It isn’t just southern anymore. The misadventure of the last five years has been run by a southern dominant political party, but its architects were elite, cosmopolitan intellectuals. This is an American problem and we are going to have to get rid of it if this country is going to survive.
Uh Oh. The Republicans are starting to fight over the mouldering corpse of Ronald Reagan. The end is nigh.
The elites in the GOP have never understood conservatives or Reagan; they’ve found both to be a bit tacky. They have always found the populists’ commitment to values unsettling. To them, adherence to conservative principles was always less important than wealth and power.
Unfortunately, the GOP has lost its motivating ideals. The revolution of 1994 has been killed not by zeal but by a loss of faith in its own principles. The tragedy is not that we are faced with another fight for the soul of the Republican Party but that we have missed an opportunity to bring a new generation of Americans over to our point of view.
Ah yes. But, remember, it’s because these greedy elites like William Kristol aren’t really conservatives, after all. The real conservatives are putting their tiny little feet down.
It was the populists under Reagan, and later under Newt Gingrich, who energized the party, gave voice to a maturing conservative ideology and swept Republicans into power. We would be imprudent and forgetful to disregard this. But it may be too late, because conservatives don’t want to be part of the looming train wreck. They know that this is no longer Ronald Reagan’s party.
Rats deserting the sinking ship of state. What a bunch of chickenshits.
Update: TBOGG finds some serious right wing doom and gloom over at The Corner.
Reading this interesting article in Forward about the potential consequences of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities (presuming we even know where they are) I am struck once again by the right’s willingness to violate important taboos. (Some of you may not find this surprising considering their rather shocking public obsession with bestiality, but this goes beyond their usual bedroom hypocrisy.)
They talk a lot about the decline of western civilization and worry incessantly about gay marriage and changing gender roles, but they quite casually violate some of the most important taboos of the last half century or more. Big honking important taboos at that.
First, they declare that the taboo against wars of agression, formed in the blood of more than 70 million dead people in the 20th century’s two world wars, is out. Not even a second glance at that taboo. They simply repackage it as “pre-emptive” war, changing the previous definition of troops gathering on the border to somebody some day might want to attack us so we must attack them first.
Then there’s torture. This society used to teach its children that there is no excuse for torture. Indeed, until recently, people who torture were considered to be either evil or sick. We didn’t make exceptions for “except when you suspect the person is a really bad person.” We said torture is wrong. Now we have sent a message far and wide that torture is necessary and even good if the person who is committing it is doing it for the right reasons. Those right reasons are usually that we “know” that the victim has information but is refusing to tell us what it is. How we “know” this is never spelled out. All we know is that if the person is on our side they are “good” and the ones who are refusing to tell are “evil” and that should be good enough for anybody.
Finally, we seem to have crossed the rubicon with respect to nukes. We are openly discussing using them on television, much as otherwise decent people tossed around the idea of torture after 9/11. People like Joe Klein think it’s not only ok for George W. Bush to say nukes are on the table — but it’s desirable becaue then people will think we are crazy and run like hell when we say boo. However, just as with torture, once you start talking about how it might be ok in certain circumstances, then you have begun to break down the taboo against it.
Much of our safety in the post-Hiroshima world has relied on the fact that nuclear war is too horrible to contemplate. It’s not just the horror of the explosions themselves, it’s the visions of radiation sickness and cancer and deformities and half lives of thousands of years. It’s apocalyptic (which may be why the Left Behind faction thinks this is such a great idea.) For the sane among us, letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle is simply unthinkable. It’s not and never can be “on the table” because once you start talking about it as if it’s just another form of warfare somebody is going to do it.
I’m trying hard to think if there are any taboos left after endorsing launching pre-emptive nuclear war and I don’t think there are. The only thing left is actually exploding a “tactical” nuke and considering this administration’s determination to break as many civilized norms as possible we would be fools not to take them seriously.
Hat tip to Gene Lyons for the Forward article. Here’s his excellent piece on this subject. I think this is particularly good:
Once again Bush has denied hostile intent, just as he did for many months after secretly ordering the Pentagon to draft detailed war plans against Iraq. Writing in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh suggests that all systems are go at the White House, including possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. He hints that the neo-conservative ideologues around Dick Cheney have deluded themselves that bombing Iran would lead to internal rebellion and the overthrow of the nation’s Islamic regime.
Yeah, sure it would. Ever noticed how much the neo-cons’ ignorance of basic human psychology rivals only Osama bin Laden’s ?
Via Tristram Shandy I see that TIME’s in-house faux liberal is at it again, this time giving Hugh Hewitt a private lap dance instead of dancing around the pole for everyone to see:
HH: I just have never seen them on PBS. But nevertheless, Joe, what I want to talk about is reverse Turnip Days, moments where candidates were not candid, and I think it hurt them. I want to start with an episode I find odd not finding it here in Politics Lost, which is the Florida recount, and the disastrous attempt by Gore and Lieberman to throw out the ballots of the military. Was that not the sort of authentic moment where we saw the soul of the modern Democratic Party on display?
JK: I think that the Florida recount in general…well, first of all, you’re right about that. I mean, too often, the default position, especially in the left wing of the Democratic Party, is to not respect the military sufficiently, and to assume that anytime the United States would use force overseas, we would be wrong
.
And people wonder why liberals are popularly perceived as being cowards.
Here we have alleged liberal Joe Klein being confronted by alleged human Hugh Hewitt with a comment that the Democratic Party’s [black]”soul” was on display when it argued that illegal ballots cast after election day shouldn’t be counted (for good reason, as it turned out.) Does Joe Klein argue that the the Republicans staged fake uprisings and attempted to get the Cuban community to rise up (among many other things) thus showing that using the Florida debacle as an illustration of the “soul” of a party wasn’t really a smart thing to do? No. Does he point out that the Republican party has a funny way of showing its “soul” when it supports torture? No. Does he laugh in Hugh Hewitt’s supercilious face? Of course not.
He agrees with Hewitt. Indeed, this line is his foremost Scotty McClellanesque robotic talking point lately, called into use no matter what the question about the Democrats, whether it’s about “soul” or nuclear war. Is there anyone in DC who can deprogram this guy? Or, at least officially relabel him a conservative so he an no longer be used as a liberal or “left of center” counterbalance on talking heads shows? Then he’ll be able to officially join the right wing noise machine and he can take Hewie to the Conservative Prom.
Here are some highlights of Joe’s bumps and grinds. It’s true that he teases poor Hewie with some feints toward Democrats by saying the Swift boaters were wrong and a few other things, but he always comes back with a big gyrating bounce right where it counts:
JK: No, no. Hugh, in the past year, I’ve stood for the following things. I’ve taken the following positions. I agreed with the President on social security reform. I supported his two Supreme Court nominees, and I support, even though I opposed this war, I support staying the course in Iraq, and doing whatever we have to do in order to stabilize the region.
HH: All right. There are two critical aspects…
JK: So where do you put me on the spectrum?
HH: I’m going to put you as an old liberal with some hope of coming around.
JK: You know, I keep on getting hammered by the left.
HH: Oh, I know, but they’re crazy now, Joe, as you write in this book. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. Your descriptions of the Democratic Party made me chuckle. It’s lost. It’s off the cliff.
JK: It made me cry.
[…]
JK: Well, you know, I also run in the kind of faith based circle. In fact, one of Bush’s nicknames for me is Mr. Faith Based.
HH: Well, that’s good.
JK: And at the very end of the book, I acknowledge Bill Bennett as giving the best advice on how to judge a presidential candidate.
HH: At a Christian Coalition meeting. Yeah, it’s a great anecdote.
JK: And Bill’s a good friend of mine. But I’ve kind of got to give these guys cover. You don’t want to be praised by what you call a traditional liberal, do you?
[…]
JK: But can I just say this about the President? You were saying this before the break. Let me say that of all the major politicians I’ve covered in presidential politics in the last two or three times around, he is the most likely to stick with an issue, even if the polls are bad, and to govern from the gut as you said. I don’t always agree with the decisions that he makes, but I think he is an honorable man, and when I’ve criticized him, I’ve tried to criticize him on the substance, and certainly not on his personality, because I really like the guy.
[…]
HH: When Michael Moore shows up in Jimmy Carter’s box, the presidential box…
JK: Disgraceful!
HH: Disgraceful?
JK: Utterly disgraceful. I mean, one of the problems that I have with being called a liberal by someone like you is that there are all these people on the left in the Democratic Party who are claiming to be liberals, and I don’t want to be associated with them.
HH: And Michael Moore is one of them?
JK: Oh, yeah. I mean, Michael Moore is reprehensible.
HH: How about when Al Gore shouted he betrayed us, he betrayed us? Was that reverse turnip time?
JK: Yeah, I thought that was pretty terrible. I mean, I think that Democrats have gotten so frustrated by their inability to win elections, that they’re beginning to get pretty harsh and stupid.
HH: What’s going on at the Daily Kos, and at Atrios, and these left wing bloggers? Do you read them?
JK: Only when they attack me, which is just about every day.
HH: Yes, they do. So what’s happened…
JK: You know, last Sunday on Stephanopoulos, I said that we can’t keep…that we have to keep the nuclear option on the table when dealing with Iran, if for no other reason than to make them worry a little bit, that we might be so crazy as to use it. That gets translated the next day by a number of left wing bloggers into me supporting a nuclear attack on Iran.
HH: Well, doesn’t the Democratic Party have to distance itself from this fever swamp?
JK: Well, I think the Democratic Party has to, and I think the Republican Party has to distance itself from Creationists, and extremists on their side. You know, I was up with Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire last week, and someone asked him about intelligent design. And he said I think it’s a perfectly fine philosophy, it just shouldn’t be taught in science classes, because it has nothing to do with science. And those are the kind of politicians…I’ve always really respected Newt, because he’s a man of honor, and he is a real policy wonk, and he really cares about stuff.
HH: We’re out of time. Joe, will you come back when you’re done with the hectic of the book tour?
JK: Sure.
HH: Because I would love to continue this on. In fact, as often as you want, you’ve got the open invitation to be our responsible Democrat on the show, because they’re hard to find.
Joe loves you too big guy. You know just what to say to guy like him.
For the record, I can’t speak for everyone in the left blogosphere, but I can say that I criticized Klein’s comment about leaving nuclear war on the table as being insane because you don’t want pre-emptive war (especially nuclear)on the table, not because I thought he actually wanted nuclear war. I think the first is stupid and insane, and the second is stupid, insane and evil. Klein wants it known that he is only stupid and insane and I’m happy to grant him that. Evil would require some actual substance.
Update: And, btw, he goes out of his way to support, of all things, gun control, which has pretty much been jettisoned by the Democratic Party. I’m beginning to think he’s a paid agent of Richard Mellon Scaife. Everything he says, whether in “favor” of Democrats or against them is Karl Rove’s dream.
Former National Security Agency Director Lt. General William Odom dissected the strategic folly of the Iraq invasion and Bush Administration policies in a major policy speech at Brown University for the Watson Institute- America’s Strategic Paralysis . “The Iraq War may turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history. In a mere 18 months we went from unprecedented levels of support after 9-11..to being one of the most hated countries…Turkey used to be one of strongest pro-US regimes, now we’re so unpopular, there’s a movie playing there- Metal Storm, about a war between US and Turkey. In addition to producing faulty intel and ties to Al Qaida, Bush made preposterous claim that toppling Saddam would open the way for liberal democracy in a very short time… Misunderstanding the character of American power, he dismissed the allies as a nuisance and failed to get the UN Security Council’s sanction… We must reinforce international law, not reject and ridicule it.”
Odom, now a Yale professor and Hudson Institute senior fellow, was director of the sprawling NSA (which monitors all communications) from 1985-88 under Reagan, and previously was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s assistant under Carter. His latest 2004 book is America’s Inadvertent Empire.
Even if the invasion had gone well, Odom says it wouldn’t have mattered: “The invasion wasn’t in our interests, it was in Iran’s interest, Al Qaida’s interest. Seeing America invade must have made Iranian leaders ecstatic. Iran’s hostility to Saddam was hard to exaggerate.. Iraq is now open to Al Qaida, which it never was before – it’s easier for terrorists to kill Americans there than in the US.. Neither our leaders or the mainstream media recognize the perversity of key US policies now begetting outcomes they were designed to prevent… 3 years later the US is bogged down in Iraq, pretending a Constitution has been put in place, while the civil war rages, Iran meddles, and Al Qaida swells its ranks with new recruits.. We have lost our capacity to lead and are in a state of crisis – diplomatic and military.”
That’s harsh. Maybe they can charge him with a federal crime, like that woman who exercised her free speech in front of important people yesterday.
Kevin Drum links to this post by Mark Schmitt today in which Schmitt artfully deconstructs the McCain myth.
The most important point is this:
[The] whole analysis is based on the cult of authenticity of which McCain, and to a lesser extent Bush, have been the greatest beneficiaries….But as McCain demonstrates, authenticity is itself a pose, one he adopted and has now discarded.
I think it’s cute that so many political journalists don’t understand this. They so want to believe that the glamorous flyboy manly man is the real deal. But, he just originated the stage role that the second rate George Bush played in the TV series. Like all actors, some are better than others.
And that’s the way to get McCain. As Schmitt says:
I assume that McCain’s gamble is that he has so strongly established the “straight-talk express” brand with the general electorate that he can perform the ritual obsequies of the Republican nominating process and still emerge with his reputation intact. But he can’t. [There are] too many Republican activists who simply aren’t going to stomach his nomination, and he can’t spend two years in his current mode and expect the independent moderate voters in New Hampshire and elsewhere to remember what they kind of liked about him for a period in 2000.
You folks are going to love this. More from World O Crap on the Daddy’s Lil’ Virgin movement. Apparently there is some special chastity jewelry available for man and girl to exhange in the covenant ceremony:
The Heart to Heart™ program, created by jeweler Joe Costello, differs from other abstinence programs in some important, unique ways. […]
First, the “key to her heart.” This beautiful heart has a smaller heart in the front. Behind that heart is a keyhole. When making the covenant with your daughter, you explain that the covenant is between her, you and God. Since God has placed her in your care as a parent, you and only you can hold the “key to her heart.”
God not trusting her enough to let her be responsible for her own heart.
You then explain to the child that you will hold the key to her precious heart until the day of her wedding. On that day, you will give her away like at all weddings, BUT in doing so you will also “give away” the key to her heart to her now husband. The key and lock are actually functional and your son-in-law will place the key in the heart to open it.
Nothing at all Freudian going on here!
Inside will be a small note that had been placed in the heart on the day you made the covenant. That note can say something like, “I do not know your name or what you even look like, but this is my promise to save myself for you this day. Love, Melanie.”
Or, the note could say something like, “I’ve been saving myself for you for many horny years, so the sex tonight had really better be worth it!. Oh, and make sure my Dad gives you the key to my chastity belt too. Love, Melanie.”
Read it all.Doctor assassination advocate Randall Terry, of all people, is peripherally involved in this scam, proving once again the the forced birth movement has less to do with fetuses than with vaginas.
Jane had a great post up today about GOP nepotism and the inevitable decline in quality that always results from second and third generation copies.
This is exactly the kind of second-generation junk thinking being produced on the right by people like Ben Domenech, Jonah Goldberg and George W. Bush — people who vault into to highly paid, influential positions despite a complete and utter lack of talent or skill purely because of who their parents are and their willingness to say just about anything. Badly. A group who have tragically confused the wingnut welfare system for some kind of meritocracy, who think their megaphone comes as the result of skill and don’t acknowledge that both privilege and think tank underwriting are largely responsible for the opportunity to appear on the stage in the first place.
I always like the articles these pissy rich kids write about the welfare state and how it doesn’t encourage people to refine themselves and their ideas by engaging in competition. One need look no further than this article and those by people like Herbert Spencer scholar Jonah Goldberg (oh and let us not forget his work on Upton Sinclair) to see the utter hypocricy involved in this argument by those who are usually making it: nobody would pay for their crap if it wasn’t being underwritten by someone with a political agenda, and there is no need for their work to rise to anything above sub-mediocrity in order to keep getting subsidized.
It turns out that it isn’t only those of us in the fever swamps who’ve noticed. Kevin Drum excerpts a review of “The Making of the Conservative Mind” written by one of the old guard writers from the halcyon days of National Review:
Hart is clearly uneasy about the rise of the younger generation, which, under the editorship of Richard Lowry, has been generally enthusiastic about the Bush administration. “Perhaps surprisingly, none of these now prominent figures at the magazine had been known for books or even important articles on politics or political thought,” he sniffs. “Where they stood on the spectrum of conservative thought — traditionalist, individualist, libertarian, skeptical, Straussian, Burkean, Voegelinian — was completely unknown.”
I don’t think Jonah and K-Lo will want to have a beer with this guy.
There is much to recommend Michael Tomasky’s essay today in The American Prospect. I agree with Atrios that it is important that the Democratic party give people something to believe in. Politics without heart is nothing more than crass deal making.
Tomasky prescribes a Democratic philosophy of the common good and posits that this is the basis of liberalism — sacrifice for larger universalist principles. What’s not to like? Certainly on a rhetorical level it’s a positive philosophical message that serves as an umbrella for Democratic policies. The rub, of course, is in determining what the common good is in the first place.
Perhaps I’m a cynic, but I suspect that for most people, the common good is really the idea that what will be good for me will also be good for others. Very few people knowingly vote against their own self-interests. Tomasky admits this himself, in a way, with his argument (and I think it’s a logical one) that policies are more easily sold when they benefit all rather than a few. FDR made sure that social security was universal for just that reason. He knew very well that while people may believe in the common good, altruistic self-sacrifice is rarely really on the menu. (I’m not talking about fancypants Tragedy of the Commons, Prisoner’s Dilemma stuff here, although it’s quite relevant.) I’m just saying that policies that benefit the most people always go down easier. That’s why Republicans lie about their tax policies, after all.
The problem is that a political party cannot be all things to all people. And here’s where the politics of the common good becomes complicated.
Tomasky charts the history of the New Deal through its dissolution in the late 60’s, which he characterizes as a golden age of liberalism except for all those problems with, well, equality and civil liberties. He praises those who broke down those barriers but throughout the piece betrays a subtle distaste for those who still labor on behalf of civil rights and civil liberties. Like most liberal intellectuals of a certain age (although he’s younger than most) he clearly believes that the New Left pretty much destroyed the party and by 1980 had left a legacy of rapacious, singleminded, special interest groups that have made it impossible for real liberalism to reassert itself.
Yet, without coming out and saying it, he is quite obviously aware of the polarizing racial and cultural politics that were at work in the 1980’s when the realignment truly kicked in:
By 1980, Reagan had seized the idea of the common good. To be sure, it was a harshly conservative variant that quite actively depended on white middle-class resentment. But to its intended audience, his narrative was powerful, a clean punch landed squarely on the Democratic glass jaw. The liberals had come to ask too much of regular people: You, he said to the middle-class (and probably white) American, have to work hard and pay high taxes while welfare cheats lie around the house all day, getting the checks liberal politicians make sure they get; you follow the rules while the criminals go on their sprees and then get sprung by shifty liberal lawyers. For a lot of (white) people, it was powerful. And, let’s face it, manipulative as it was, it wasn’t entirely untrue, either!
Can you have a “common good” comprised of only the interests of resentful “regular” racists? I sure hope not.
I’ve always wondered what the Democrats are supposed to have done differently in light of this? Accede to this racist vision of the common good? Lower the boom on welfare and crime instantly to show how much we resented black people too? Tell Jesse Jackson to STFU?
Considering the huge sociological changes that came about in the post war world, (crescendoing in the 60’s) wasn’t it entirely predictable that there would be a backlash? Democratic special interests are responsible for all that, to be sure. But the alternative would have been to not pursue those goals in the first place. The forces that were pushing for equality were being pulled just as strongly from the other side. There wasn’t just a New Left; there was the New Right too. As Thomas Mann, writing on a different subject today spells out:
The seeds of this partisan era were intially planted in the 1960s, with the counter culture, the war in Vietnam, the rise of conservative activists in the 1964 Goldwater campaign, the Voting Rights Act, and the beginning of the economic development of the South. Roe v. Wade set the stage for the political mobilization of religious conservatives within the Republican party. The tax-limiting Proposition 13 in California and the Reagan presidency lent the Republican party a more distinctive economic and national security platform.
Party realignment in the South, fueled by these developments associted with race, religion, economic development and patriotism, radically altered the ideological and regional composition of the two parties. That process was extended to the rest of the country by the increasingly distinctive positions taken by the national parties and their presidential candidates on a number of salient social and economic issues. As these developments played out over time, party platforms became more distinctive, those recruited to Congress were more ideologically in tune with their fellow partisans, congressional leaders worked aggressively to promote their party’s agenda and message, and voters sorted themselves into the two parties based on their ideological views.
Action, reaction.
But Tomasky’s view that the “special interests” overreached is not an uncommon view and it isn’t new; it’s partly what spawned the DLC. And that’s why in some ways, I feel a sense of deja vu. If I didn’t have this herniated disc and an aversion to tequila I’d think I was still in my 20’s and I was reading the New Republic. Or pieces of it anyway. Tomasky admits as much and condemns the DLC’s failure to follow through with its “responsibility” agenda by settling for welfare reform and failing to go after the corporate big spenders. (I don’t remember that last part of the DLC agenda, to be perfectly honest, but then again, I hadn’t given up tequila, so maybe I forgot.) In any case, he sees the DLC’s failure as one of too much faith in markets and not enough in government, which I think it quite right. But from where I sit, the DLC’s failure also stems from its insistence that instead of working with the embarrassing coalition that forms the heart of the Democratic party, they needed to marginalize them. It didn’t work then, and I don’t think it’s going to work now.
Tomasky admiringly mentions “Crashing the Gate” in this context and I too like Markos and Jerome’s book very much. I think it’s one of the most important books in the last decade about Democratic politics. But I think the weakest part is its condemnation of the special interest groups and not because I have any particular affinity for them as institutions. It’s just that I’ve heard it all before. Democratic “special interests” have been the bête noire of every Democratic strategist since 1980. The Republicans have made a fetish of them, and the Democrats have seen them as being stubbornly unwilling to “sacrifice.” (This is not to say that I don’t endorse pressuring them to stop with the outdated “bipartisan” tactics, as with the Sierra Club and Naral endorsing Chaffee. They might as well be wearing a mullet and singing “Power of Love” with that nonsense.)
But it’s very easy to say you believe in the common good until you are told that your particular needs must be sacrificed, postponed, deferred to benefit everyone else. Promises to pick them up later are not very compelling — as two great thinkers (John Maynard Keynes and George W. Bush) have both observed, “in the long run we’ll all be dead.” These are the contentious issues that make people uncomfortable and are therefore the most likely to be shunted aside by timid politicians if given half a chance. It’s a lot to ask.
Tomasky asks:
So where does this leave today’s Democrats? A more precise way to ask the question is this: What principle or principles unites them all, from Max Baucus to Maxine Waters and everyone in between, and what do they demand that citizens believe?
As I’ve said, they no longer ask them to believe in the moral basis of liberal governance, in demanding that citizens look beyond their own self-interest. They, or many of them, don’t really ask citizens to believe in government anymore. Or taxes, or regulation — oh, sort of on regulation, but only some of them, and only occasionally, when something happens like the mining disasters in my home state earlier this year. They do ask Americans to believe that middle-income people should get a fair shake, but they lack the courage to take that demand to the places it should logically go, like universal health coverage. And, of course, on many issues the party is ideologically all over the place; if you were asked to paint the party’s belief system, the result would resemble a Pollock.
At bottom, today’s Democrats from Baucus to Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.
I’m not sure that Baucus and Waters actually agree on those things, but whatever. Let’s suppose that Waters and Baucus simply agree that the common good is good government. They both sign on to universal health care. They agree on taxes and regulation. They agree to get the money out of politics. They agree that the future of the country depends upon all children getting good educations and they commit to devoting the time and energy to doing that. They go to the people and say, “this is the common good, and it’s what we both believe we should fight for.” Huzzah.
But then somebody (a Republican, no doubt) says, what about affirmative action? What about abortion? What about the ten commandments? What about wiretapping? Immigration? The war? And lets assume that Waters and Baucus, being from different regions with very different constituencies, have different views on those things? Who is asked to look behyond his or her special interests on those things? Who decides what is the common good?
Tomasky has an answer for that. He says that the special interest groups must justify their goals in universalist terms or not be taken seriously by anyone. He uses the example of an affirmative action argument, saying that it is a good thing that even corporate America embraces. I suppose one can make a similar argument about immigration. I’m not sure these arguments have much salience, but you can make them, saying that in a globalized economy we are all in this together and we need to be able to compete. (Or something like that — Clinton used to say “we don’t have a person to waste.”) If that’s all it takes, then I guess most special interest groups shouldn’t have any problems complying. It’s “framing” in service of an argument that lends itself very well to economic issues.
But how do you frame abortion as being for the common good? Or religion? How do you parse the fourth amendment? The war? These are huge issues — represented I might add, by special interest groups that can’t easily trust Max or Maxine to do whatever they think is right for “the common good.” How do we construct arguments that will quell these contentious controversies with appeals to a common good when people can’t find common ground? (And at what point are we talking about the common good of the party vs the common good of the country?)
Tomasky offers no compelling examples of “common good” rhetoric pertaining to these questions, so I think it’s fair to assume that this is where the sacrifice comes in.
I don’t mean to be dismissive. I think it’s important to embrace big ideas and big philosophy and reach for some inspiration. The Democrats have been issuing stultifying laundry lists for as long as I can remember and I couldn’t be happier that people are thinking in these terms. But I can’t help but feel that we always end up back at the same spot somehow. The unions, the womens groups, the civil rights groups, trial lawyers, consumer advocates — the whole array of narrow special interests being held responsible for the fact that half of this country really resents the hell out of minorities, women and working people getting a fair shake. And the Democrats continue to pay the political price for that resentment.
I’m all for finding our way out of it. Tomasky’s message has real resonance; I like it very much. But I think that if the party stopped trying to figure out ways to get the “special interests” to shut up and started giving them some respectful assurances that they aren’t going to be the sacrificial lambs in whatever the new paradigm turns out to be, they might find a little bit more cooperation.
I believe in the common good and I agree that it expresses the essence of the liberal philosophy. But the heart and soul of the Democratic party lies in its committment to freedom and equality for all Americans. I think we need to find a way to convince a majority of Americans that the common good is best served by not compromising those principles.