Jerome a Paris wrote a provocative and interesting diary at Daily Kos yesterday. I have a few problems with its construction, which I’ll mention, but it’s worth looking at his overall point. My first problem is that he comes out of the box damning with faint praise by titling the essay Obama is better than the extreme-right. I don’t think this headline really reflects his point, but it does put anyone who might disagree with Jerome immediately on the defensive. He also makes a couple of logical leaps that aren’t supported. For example, he poses the following question.
…is the best way to meet progressive goals to be satisfied with whatever progress Obama is able to extract from an hopelessly conservative Senate, or to push for more, including by threatening such progress when it is on the table as a best-and-final offer?
My answer to this is that it isn’t an appropriate question. It assumes that your options are to be satisfied or to be destructive to the president’s agenda. It is quite possible to push for more, but to be satisfied with the final outcome in the narrow sense that you know you got something positive and did the best you could. To make this explicit, fighting for a better bill out of conference is something that all progressives support. The final product will fall short of what nearly all progressives desire. But it’s possible to be satisfied with what we get to the degree that you support its passage into law. That shouldn’t imply that you’re satisfied in the larger sense. After all, you didn’t get what you asked for. It just means that you support passing the bill rather than seeing the health care bill go down in flames at the last moment. Jerome sets up a false either/or here. But I understand his point, which is to ask us to ponder alternate strategies and how they might impact progressive goals in the longer term.
Jerome also makes another logical leap when he quotes me as saying, “The Republicans are fucking nuts and must be kept out of power for as long as possible,” and then adds this conclusion:
And thus you get Lieberman as the sane alternative to the Republicans – and Obama who nicely looks more liberal than Lieberman.
But there is no causal connection between me and my opinion and Joe Lieberman and his sanity. What Jerome is attempting to say is that somehow our fear of a Republican resurgence leads to the empowerment of Lieberman. Looked at closely, that assertion actually makes no sense. Joe Lieberman would have the same effective veto power if he caucused with the Republicans as he does now caucusing with the Democrats. We’d still need his vote to pass anything, and if not his vote, the vote of at least one other Republican. Lieberman’s power comes from the 60-vote cloture rule, and not from how he is treated by the president or the Democrats. Technically, the other 59 senators in the Democratic Caucus have the same ability to torpedo the president’s agenda, but only Lieberman campaigned for John McCain, and only Lieberman has deep-rooted resentments against the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Yet, despite these flaws, Jerome raises an interesting question in this essay.
But where is the “fucking nuts” left that scares the right to death and makes them want to compromise with Pelosi at all costs? Where are the people arguing for 90% marginal tax rates on the rich, and cancelling the banking licences of banks that charge usurious rates on credit cards, and closing down the insurance licenses of companies that deny care to anyone, and setting minimum wages at levels that allow for decent living standards, and putting taxes on imports from countries that let kids work or have no environmental rules (all things that get very real public support if you actually ask people rather than pundits and lobbyists)?
To be scary, you have to take decisions that have consequences. If you don’t fight for what you say you stand for, you won’t get results, and you won’t get respect. And without respect, you won’t get votes, ultimately.
You might expect a Eugene Debs or Huey Long to come along on the left during these difficult economic times, but we haven’t seen that. There is no political representation for the far left, or even what passes for the mainstream left in most of Europe. We’ve seen left-wing populism before in this country, so its present absence can’t be some cultural thing.
And what is the price we pay for not having our own legions of teabaggers?
These are interesting questions. I’m interested in what people have to say about it. I could see the value of a scary left for moving the country as a whole to the left in the same way that the teabag protesters appear to have moved the health care debate to the right. The problem, for me at least, is that I don’t want to join this hypothetical left-wing teabag equivalent if they are exhibiting the same dishonest and (often) delusional characteristics. To put it in historical terms, I would have seen some value in Huey Long, but I would have supported Roosevelt over Long if they had matched-up in 1936. And this would be particularly true if I felt Long’s candidacy was going to throw the election to Alf Landon. That doesn’t mean that I would have disagreed with Long about everything, but I couldn’t support him overall, and certainly couldn’t support his rhetoric, style, and honesty.
In any case, this country doesn’t have much of a far left and what little it has has no representation in Congress. It’s interesting to contemplate why that is, and why we’re not seeing too many signs of a revival of a populist left even in this economy.
