There’s a difference between trying to win the game and trying to change the way the game is played. They aren’t mutually exclusive goals, but they require different strategies. Think about a baseball player. Maybe he doesn’t hit particularly well when he is behind in the count. So, he develops a tendency to swing at pitches early in the count in an effort to avoid striking out. After the scouts notice this tendency, pitchers stop throwing them hittable pithes early in the count. The hitter then has to adjust his strategy by laying off the few hittable pitches he sees so that the scouts will reevaluate the proper strategy for getting them out. It’s a season-long, even career-long battle of shifting strategies. But none of it has much practical application to any specific at-bat, where the goal remains to avoid making an unproductive out.
To apply this to politics, each issue is like a different pitcher. One pitcher may throw very hard, forcing you to cheat on the fastball but making you more susceptible to off-speed pitches. Another pitcher may use trickery, making the batter wait longer before deciding to swing. Likewise, a president and the leaders in Congress may pursue dramatically different strategies on financial reform than they used on health care. And climate legislation may be pursued with another set of tactics. Yet, what happens on one bill will have an impact on what happens on the next, just like one at-bat influences how both the pitcher and the batter approach the next one. Political strategies are crafted in large part by what the majority expects the minority to do in reaction. But, in America, one thing the majority must do (to overcome the filibuster rule) is to divide the minority. The need to accomplish this on every piece of legislation creates a path-dependency. But this path-dependency should not be confused with some ideological commitment to Third Way politics. Despite large majorities in Congress, the Democrats don’t have the ability to overcome a kind of consensus on the way government and businesses should share responsibility for meeting societal goals. That consensus creates a path dependency that means that the Stimulus Bill can only be so big, that health care must be provided through private insurance companies, and that there are real limits on how fast we can reduce carbon emissions.
When the Obama administration seeks to pass legislation to address these issues, they face a situation where they will either get on base or they will make an out. They might hit a single, get hit by a pitch, or smash a grand slam, but their course of action is still limited by constraints that they must recognize and anticipate. Yet, even as they go about the concrete goal of passing legislation at the 60-vote threshold, what they do and how they do it can mold the playing field to their advantage in the next at-bat. So, it’s important to try to shift public perceptions your way over time so that the consensus in Congress shifts over time. If you want to pursue progressive goals in an ideological way, you don’t do that by trying and failing to pass legislation. You do it by having success after success until the pitchers are afraid to oppose you. Think about Barry Bonds. In 2004, pitchers walked him a record 232 times. Yes, I know he was cheating, but set that aside for the purposes of the example. Now, to take this to a more mundane level, progressives may or may not agree on ends, let alone means. To what purpose are we playing this game? With health care, were we looking to create the most efficient balance between cost and quality, or were we trying to give immediate help to those with preexisting conditions and those who are priced out of access to health care. What if those two goals are mutually exclusive? What side do we come down on?
There’s a long term struggle to change the constraints on policy options that is an important progressive goal. But helping people in need right now, not in some indeterminate future, is also a progressive goal. It’s a goal familiar to every church that operates a soup kitchen or an addiction recovery program. It’s a goal familiar to issue activists for affordable housing, access to health care, and against predatory lending. That is the place where the president is coming from. Contrary to Paul Rosenberg, Obama did not turn his back on God or progressive politics when he disowned Jeremiah Wright. Rosenberg fashions himself a ‘populist’ progressive and contrasts that with ‘corporate’ progressives. It’s generous for him to allow the rest of us who don’t see the world in his myopic way the continued use of the term ‘progressive,’ but he doesn’t understand the difference between practical progressivism and ideological conflict.
Third Way politics as practiced by the DLC is an electoral and fundraising strategy as well an affirmative ideological stance. It pursues its policies because it wants to, not because of existing constraints. As such, Third Way politics is the enemy of progressive policies of all types, whether they be populist, practical, urban, or academic. The difference can be seen in what Evan Bayh pursues versus what the administration pursues. For DLC types like Bayh aren’t practicing defensive politics but a coherent set of policies that they actually believe in.
It’s this failure to differentiate between the Art of the Possible and corporatist ideology that creates no end of bad analysis on the left.
