Reading Paul Rosenberg is a bit like reading Hegel. Take for example this excerpt from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.
Immediate certainty does not make the truth its own, for its truth is something universal, whereas certainty wants to deal with the This. Perception, on the other hand, takes what exists for it to be a universal. Universality being its principle in general, its moments immediately distinguished within it are also universal; I is a universal, and the object is a universal. That principle has arisen and come into being for us who are tracing the course of experience; and our process of apprehending what perception is, therefore, is no longer a contingent series of acts of apprehension, as is the case with the apprehension of sense-certainty; it is a logically necessitated process.
You and I have no idea what any of that means because we haven’t read what comes before it and Hegel is using ordinary language in novel ways. In order to decipher his meaning, we first have to learn his terminology. So, it’s no wonder that Jamelle Bouie needs help understanding how Rosenberg can credibly argue the following:
…Barack Obama’s manic embrace of discredited conservative ideas…has helped enormously in extending the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Era.
When Rosenberg talks about “conservative ideas,” “hegemonic continuity,” and “the Nixon-Reagan Era,” he’s not referring to what you and I would assume he’s referring to.
He tried vainly to explain himself yesterday, but his central motif (built on his idiosyncratic definition of ‘context’) withered on the vine and petered out…left largely unexplained. So bad, in fact, was his effort, that his very incoherence protects him for direct rebuttal. If we don’t know what he means, we can’t very well explain why he’s wrong. His refusal to abide by the norms of usage began right at the beginning with this Clintonian whopper.
First off, it should be clear that I didn’t actually argue “that Barack Obama has manically embraced ‘discredited conservative ideas’ and ‘helped enormously in extended the hegemonic continuity of [the] Nixon-Reagan Era'” I simply offered that as a characterization.
He goes on to explain that he thought of making an argument to justify his assertion and that he may still someday try to justify his assertion, but he’s not going to do that now. Instead:
…hopefully this post can provide good enough justification for my characterization, so that we can have a more enlightening discussion than has happened so far.
So what follows is not going to be an argument but a ‘justification.’ You see, making a flat assertion that Obama is manically pursuing discredited conservative ideas is not an argument because no effort was put into justifying it. But making an effort to support that assertion is not an argument either. It’s a justification.
The point here isn’t to critique the substance of what Rosenberg has asserted, justified, or argued, but to mock the way in which he does it. For Rosenberg has constructed what I might generously call a philosophical system. It’s as though he studied Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer, and learned nothing from Nietzsche’s perspectivism:
There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties”; for example, “I think,” or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, “I will”; as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as “the thing in itself” without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that “immediate certainty,” as well as “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself,” involve a contradictio adjecto. I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free our selves from the seduction of words!
But you ignore that philosophical aside. We’re not in class. The point is that Rosenberg is debating himself. We can choose to learn his particular language and try to grasp his usage. But that’s hard enough with people like Hegel who had something important to say. Rosenberg doesn’t have anything important to say.
As best as I can tell, he wants a wholesale rejection of neoliberalism in all its aspects, and he thinks Obama’s failure to move forcefully in that direction is undermining our opportunity to have a true realignment in this country that puts a permanent end to the era that started with the Democratic crackup in Chicago in 1968. So, it doesn’t matter what progressive improvements Obama achieves. He doesn’t get credit for them because he’s making those improvements in a way that perpetuates the post-1968 era that Rosenberg hoped would end with his election. Now, I’m not saying that there is nothing in that to debate or discuss, if only Rosenberg could discuss anything coherently. But, anyway, I hope I have helped explain for Jamelle Bouie why Rosenberg expresses himself in this strange way and why he makes these odd arguments. He is waging, or attempting to wage anyway, an ideological battle that has absolutely zero interest to the vanguard of Obama’s revolution. Part of that ideological battle, I agree with. Part of it, I sympathize with.
But I have a simple rule of thumb. I look at what can plausibly be forced through the 111th Congress and I judge Obama’s performance by how short of that measure he falls. He has not yet been defeated on any bill he has initiated or endorsed. On the controversial measures, he’s received no more than a few votes above the minimum required. The stimulus passed with 60 votes, as did the health care bill. If Rosenberg were arguing that Obama could have done better, I’d agree with him. But he wants things an order of magnitude better.
That’s the fundamental reason why Obama hit dribblers in the press conference: because neo-liberalism is all about the dribblers. Don’t swing for the fences, it says. Don’t go for single-payer–or even for a robust public option that would lead to single-payer over time–even though it’s what’s needed to dramatically cut the over-priced costs of healthcare “system”. Don’t go for a $1.3 trillion stimulus, even though that’s what the macro-economics tells you is needed to really jolt the economy out of the recession, preserve necessary state and local services and put people back to work sooner, rather than much, much later. Don’t go for a dramatic shift to clean energy, energy efficiency and massive investments in green jobs, even though that’s what the science says is absolutely necessary to avoid a coming climate catastrophe.
Unstated is the possibility that Obama could not get Congress to authorize a $1.3 trillion stimulus package, or a single-payer health care system, or a public option, or a suitable climate bill. Unstated is the fact that Paul Rosenberg couldn’t do it either. Setting aside the public option which at least had a puncher’s chance if the president really fought for it, the other items on Rosenberg’s list don’t pass the laugh-test in Washington, DC. Obama actually has directed tremendous resources towards clean energy, but evidently Rosenberg has something much, much larger in mind. Need I remind you that that the Stimulus Bill passed with 60 votes. As for a single-payer system, no one who watched the 16 month battle to pass health care reform can possibly be under any delusions that single-payer can pass through Congress in this country, or even that the Democrats could hold together enough to credibly make that their opening position. Rosenberg isn’t interested in the Art of the Possible, or in making what gains are available.
In his mind, Obama can’t be a progressive because he operates in a neo-liberal context (with ‘neo-liberal’ meaning something different to Rosenberg than what it means to the rest of us). But, from the point of view of the organizing left, Obama is going about things exactly as a progressive would. That’s because on-the-ground community organizers aren’t waging an ideological battle, but a battle for resources and opportunities. It’s not all or nothing. It’s get what you can and come back and ask for more. The best progressive isn’t the one who excels at the ‘seduction of words’ or who builds the most elaborate philosophical systems for understanding political change, but the one who gets a clinic opened or gets the police to focus on their neighborhood crime problem or who gives the working poor access to health care subsidies.
Down on the street, the rest is just wankery.
[The subject of this post is Paul Rosenberg, and should not be interpreted to reflect on the other authors at OpenLeft]