There is a recommended diary at Daily Kos by a user named puakev that does something I’ve been wanting to do all year. It goes back and looks at how liberals and progressives reacted and interacted with the FDR administration during its first term. It is almost spooky how closely the rhetoric and landscape matches what we’re seeing today. I kind of suspected as much, but it’s interesting to see it confirmed. It’s a must read.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I don’t think he mentioned about Huey Long thinking FDR was a sellout. And that Huey Long probably would have challenged FDR from the left in ’36.
Never mind .. he did mention Long .. I got his diary confused with something else.
I have some disagreement on how he distinguishes liberals from everybody else. Liberals were generally pretty happy with FDR. Radicals weren’t. What has changed is that yesterday’s liberals are today’s radicals — if you believe that FDR was right and Reagan wrong, that makes you a radical in today’s Washington. How many Democrats do we have today who we’d consider to be left of Henry Wallace, who was the freaking Vice President? Zero, that’s how many.
This distinction matters. A lot. As does the fact that FDR took over after over three years of severe economic distress, whereas Obama took over three months in. That’s a serious political advantage for Roosevelt that Obama does not enjoy. IOW, Obama’s critics are arguing merely for policy that would have been merely centrist in the 1930s, but they are doing it under political circumstances not nearly as favorable for structural change as existed back then.
Most liberals would agree that today’s far left are radicals. Only those living in that fringe seem to find that confusing. To normal liberals Jane Hamsher and many other bloggers are radicals. Your average liberal has been hounded off sites like FDL and other rabid foaming at the mouth radical leftist sites so their views are not likely to be represented there. I used to post comments about all of the Obama administration’s accomplishments in response to some of the ridiculous posts about Obama=Bush, but because of the hatred and vitriol I get in response I’ve just stopped bothering.
It’s very difficult to change people’s minds, whether on the right or left, by reciting facts to them, unfortunately. I just watched Hamsher and Greenwald on Ratigan’s show and I just felt a visceral negative reaction to them. Is it just me, or did they have to look so smug about things?
I think they’ve boxed themselves into a corner by always assuming the worst motives of Obama and the administration so that even when they do things that they agree with, they have to attribute it to some kabuki dance rather than a demonstration of what the administration really feels.
Greenwald always was a smug, arrogant little son of a bitch, but that’s who he is, and I can empathize; I’m an arrogant little shit, too, although not really smug. His sarcasm and way of dealing with critics and presenting the facts is similar to the way I operate. It’s not going to convince some people who get turned off by that, as I remember arguing with people on other forums about Obama being a socialist and stuff lol. I know many people who stopped posting whenever it was about politics because I would be right there. I’d cite different instances of George Bush I or Reagan doing something they considered “far left,” and do it with a sarcastic tone. It turned them off, I guess, but really, I think it just pisses people off that they’re wrong so they go after the attitude instead.
And when you’re not wrong about a lot of things–and Greenwald is rarely wrong (although sometimes his political analysis leaves you wanting), even when I disagree with him–I guess that gives you a certain air of smugness.
Your second paragraph is what I’m talking about with his political analysis leaving me wanting. They’re always assuming the worst, and you’re never going to be satisfied with any pol when you do that. Whenever I analyze what Obama’s done, I imagine myself in that same situation and how I’d have dealt with it. I ask myself, “What are the odds of passing X without buying off Y and shutting down Z? Could I fight for X and make it possible that Y and Z are irrelevant, or will they bring me down and I risk not doing anything?”
They seem to just yell and scream about him actively wanting to buy off Y and Z, or that he didn’t want X in the first place.
I agree with your argument.. It really appears to me that when you look at Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, the crew at OpenLeft. David Sirota, etc.. you are looking at the fringe of the left.. that would be considered “Radical” by the mainstream. Of course the radicals don’t see it that way. they look at themselves as enlightened.
What is frustrating to me, and I am sure the Whitehouse, Is that cable news gives so much airtime to the opinions of the Left and Right “Radicals”.. Of course that is how cable news makes money..
Even more frustrating is that cable news doesn’t seem to realize that they help make radical positions mainstream by treating them at a level higher than they should be. So in they end major moves forward, which I think has occurred over the past 18 months or so treated as inconsequential.
Lolwut? Your last statement is the opposite, at least when it comes to the left:
The left is never treated as serious. That’s why Malkin calls ANY liberal position “radical.” It’s to stigmatize it, make it seem so far out of the mainstream that rather than examining their claims on the merits, her readers just immediately go, “Radical? Bad!”
Dennis Kucinich is considered a radical in Congress, yet I would say that his positions are “mainstream” among liberals (and some are mainstream among America at large). That’s where the term DFH came about:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dfh
You are right. That last comment I made is awkward and not what I meant. I wish some of the radical left ideas were mainstream.
What I meant to say with my last comment is that complaints of the “radical” left are given so much airtime that it appears to the television viewer that nobody (left, right, or middle) is happy with the accomplishments. When is the last time you heard positive remarks on this administration or congress from “left” pundits who are getting airtime. The only one of prominence I can think of is Joan Walsh.
Just off the top of my head, Maddow has made comments/had guests that were quite positive on Obama’s/Congress’s accomplishments. I don’t know if Elizabeth Warren, the liberal darling of the moment, can be called a pundit, but she certainly celebrates much of the financial reform while calling for further change. Kos has acknowledged the progress that’s been made, even while complaining about its inadequacy.
But of course only the converted listen to the above, so your point is probably valid. I think the real problem is CNN, which seems exclusively committed to freak shows and clueless old men.
BTW, anyone who lists Father Coughlin among left dissenters as Puakev does, has fallen prey to false labeling. Coughlin’s “left radicalism” was the same sort of false flag operation which caused German right wingers to name their party the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS’ Party.
This is nuts. Look at the policies they actually advocate. How is that radical?
I agree. Most of these comments (both global and in this thread) ring of a kind of false equivalency – i.e. that Rachel Maddow is somehow the “professional left’s” version of Beck/Limbaugh/et al or the SDS/Weather Underground/Black Panthers/SLA. The term liberal democrat has been bifurcated into a wimpy middle-of-the-road slogan where promoting Gay and Hispanic rights now, suggesting our war on terra is a mistake, and wanting to punish corporations and the rich for their infidelities in the same way we do the poor and disaffected is somehow disrespectful of wisdom of our democratic leadership. Wow. When you work to get someone elected, support his agenda with constructive criticism and then are told you’re a fucking retard and on drugs I guess you’re just supposed to roll over, play dead and accept the fact that triangulation solves all problems and the Tea Partiers have the best vision for America.
Added note to Rahm E: I’m the legal gaurdian of a developmentally disabled child & have been for 8 years since he was 4 mos old; you’re the fucking retard.
I think what I wanted to say is similar. The only thing he didn’t point out is that the situation in Roosevelt’s day was considerably worse than today, and the Left was a lot stronger.
But, yeah, nothing like a little historical perspective. That diary is an important contribution.
If you are suggesting that Obama is another FDR, then I suspect a lot of people will beg to differ. I wouldn’t really know not being all that knowledgeable about U.S. domestic political history. However, in the areas I am most interested in – foreign and military policy – his actions have completely belied his rhetoric. He has been absolutely pathetic when it comes to the Arab and Muslim worlds, and beyond pathetic on matters concerning Israel. Not that any of this has come as a surprise, of course.
What is precisely that you want him to do that he hasn’t done or tried to do? I mean specifically in terms of the Middle East and Israel/Palestine?
Odd question. He has done NOTHING! You tell me what he has done.
He hasn’t done anything. I don’t know why Hurria picks this issue as it’s the one that he has the least control over, but he hasn’t really done anything in favor or against. He’s just assigned a diplomat to try and fix some of it only to be smacked around by a POS fascist Netanyahu.
This issue for him is like the race issue for most Americans. They try and say they’re colorblind, when really they’re saying “please don’t talk about race.”
Obama is just hoping for this issue to go away. “Please, Israel, just stop being a nuisance. Essentially there’s really nothing that I can do for Palestine with a Congress like this and an Israel led by Likud, so just stop…go away go away lalalalala I can’t hear you.”
Of course, wishing it away doesn’t solve anything.
You see, here is where I disagree – and bear in mind this is coming from an Englishman, originally from India married to an Iranian. All my extended family (not in America) love Obama, my mother in law particularly for his approach to Iran. Things like the No-Ruz message and the Cairo speech may seem only symbolic to Americans (or may not even get on the radar) but they are noticed outside of it. Whatever political issues there, people have confidence that Obama gets the Middle East, wants to have an equitable solution for I/P and that appreciate that he has been harsher on Netanyahu than previous Presidents.
And, you know, we just don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes – Israel just agreed to participate in a UN investigation of the flotilla raid – that’s a rarity; Abbas is just about to agree to direct talks with Netanyahu and Obama has constantly been reaching out to Iran for a sensible resolution of the nuclear issue.
Call me when Hamas are involved in the talks. Hamas might not be the legitimate government, in my opinion, but they’re still there and need to be dealt with.
Actually, I have confidence that Obama “gets” it, too. It doesn’t mean anything positive will come of fruition, or that he will pursue policy showing that he “gets” it.
Also, Abbas is a tool.
Whatever Abbas is he has to be dealt with. Netanyahu’s a tool too.
Also, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/hamas-leader-americans-contact
Years ago some public intellectual—I think it was child psychiatrist Robert Coles—described himself as “a social conservative, a political liberal and an economic radical”.
This post and thread brought that to mind, I think because we (and I very much include myself) use words like “liberal”, “radical”, “progressive”, “conservative”, “reactionary”, with great imprecision. (For example, Huey Long was to the “left” of Roosevelt, but Long also had some proto-fascist tendencies.)
The political question I’m interested in is this: for those of us who consider ourselves to the “left” of the Obama administration, how do we speak and act so as to take advantage of the opportunities this administration provides?
The earliest, and still one of the best, examples I can recall is the Republic Windows and Doors sit-in strike organized by 240 UE workers in Chicago in December 2008.
Republic closed the factory on 3 days’ notice after Bank of America canceled the company’s line of credit. Sit-in strikes are illegal, but no Illinois politician called for the police to arrest the workers. President-elect Obama released a statement saying, “”When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right. What’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.” After several days of mounting political pressure, Bank of America reversed themselves and the company reopened for business.
We can, if we want, criticize Obama, his administration, and Democrats in Congress from now until they leave office for any number of failings. It would be more productive (I think) for us to organize to create “facts on the ground” that personalize the consequences of what BOA, BP, Goldman Sachs, et al do (the way the Republic workers did), so as to create opportunities for Obama to take our side.
(Note: It won’t happen every time. But I’d wager that over time, it would have a powerful, cumulative effect—just as the CIO did in the 1930s or the civil rights movement did in the 1950s and 60s.)
Not enough people are today prepared to create tangible facts on the ground, express themselves politically by physical means as did the Republic workers to get their money. It’s all television and the computer folk interactng with each other around the clock. Basically a shadow world determines the real daily life of the masses. Gibbs momentarily broke the spell. Grayson has basically called Gibbs to order saying he needed to show some passion about real issues like unemployment, health care, etc., instead of attacking an illusory ‘professional left’. (Where did that ever come from? Fox news? Here in the Netherlands some politicians have recently referred to the ‘leftist church’.)
Fascinating info, thanks for link. Interesting that FDR had a potential challenger in Huey Long. No democarat can afford to primary Obama (i.e. $$$). Of course there’s always Ralph Nader, though id call that a challenge from the narcissistic spoiler not a challenge from the left.
Adding onto what lacerda said, this is all well and great. But, like Armando, I don’t know what point this diarist was trying to make. Are they trying to say that every president has had criticism like this so defenders should just keep doing what they do and critics do what they do; that the criticism is a positive thing as it pushed FDR; that we’re going to laugh at the criticism in the future because of all the good that came of Obama?
I don’t get it, but I guess it’s worth mentioning just for perspective? It doesn’t change anything, and it shouldn’t give the critics or defenders reason to cite it given the dynamics are totally different, as mentioned above.
Lastly, “Can we expect Obama to give this speech at the 2012 nominating convention?”:
You know what, a lot of that speech sounds a lot like Obama’s speeches today and on the stump. I’m not sure about the welcome their hatred thing in 2012 (although by then, it is perfectly possible that banks and businesses will have aligned against him – i think that will happen actually) because that’s just not his style but the substance will be the same. the analogy to rolling up our sleeves has just been updated to getting the car out of the ditch or grabbing a mop to clean up.
I think the point about the post about FDR and his critics is not to say stop criticising but to point out substantively that a lot of achievements which may seem weak or tepid now will ultimately be seen as the liberal bedrocks of society 20, 30 or 50 years from now. On healthcare, for example, can you imagine in 50 years that there won’t be true universal healthcare in the US?
I have no idea what kind of speech Obama will give at the 2012 convention except that it will probably be “pretty good”. (As Obama characterized his 2004 keynote speech shortly before he delivered it.)
I’ll just observe that the social/political constraints on a wealthy patrician from one of the nation’s most prominent political families of the day (think Bush or Kennedy today) are significantly different than those on the self-described “skinny guy with big ears and a funny name” who’s lived most of his adult life as a leader in the nation’s largest contiguous African-American community.
Roosevelt could afford to be a “class traitor” during the Great Depression—heck, it was even a political advantage for him. Obama isn’t from that class, so (I would argue) he’s constrained in a different way as to what rhetoric he can effectively use to campaign and govern.
Side thought: Roosevelt and Obama’s campaign both used popular music very effectively. That doesn’t mean it would be a good idea for the Dems to lead with “Happy Days Are Here Again” in 2012. Different times, different candidates/presidents, different popular cultures.
I think the FDR comparison speaks volumes, especially about where we are now, and the differences between then and now are equally telling. The 24/7 media and a culture that demands everything in an instant, combined with a ship of state that’s so enormous that it takes LONGER than ever to effect change, make this a profoundly daunting moment.
I’m sure every one of us was among the chorus of observers during the Bush/Cheney reign of terror who said it would take many years, if not decades, to undo the damage being done in every arena. And that was before the Wall Street crash made the potential for repair many times more difficult. And yet many of us, in what I think is more of a mob mentality of the blogosphere than individual failures to reason, think everything can be turned around in less than two years in a way that will hold in the long term, or that changes can be made and actions taken without severe political consequences in the short term.
I have no problem with legitimate criticism and disagreement with one or another of Obama’s policies. But the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity of the problems facing Obama is disingenuous, to say the very least. Why do so many of us purport to know that he’s actually doing nothing about one thing or another? If you are honest enough to acknowledge the daunting complexity of so many of the problems we face, then surely you can assume there’s more to solving them than meets the eye, especially when our view is mediated by such a degraded fourth estate. Getting out of Iraq and somehow extricating ourselves from Afghanistan were always realistically seen as a set of bad and worse choices. Israel and our relationship to the Middle East is a chaotic tangle of options, all seemingly intractable and with potentially dire consequences. Etc.
A little perspective might cause a few more of us to focus on the present and what can be done in the here and now. Like doing our best to minimize the damage in the mid-terms in order to give Obama some of the time and space needed to get on with the job.
I agree with you 1000%.
For example, the economy is now so global, that it makes many political decisions, both in economics and in foreign policy, much more difficult for President Obama than it was for FDR. This is a MAJOR difference that I don’t see mentioned very often.
The main reason why so many of us purport to know that Obama’s not doing anything about one thing or another is because he and his administration are doing a lousy job of getting the message out there. We’re all sniping at each other because the people who are responsible for communicating to us – the base and the public – are dropping the ball.
People should be ashamed to identify themselves as conservative or Republican after the last 8 years. The fact that they’re proudly embracing these labels is the result of communication decisions made by Obama and his advisors.
This. Their messaging has been consistently awful. I still can’t believe that the same people who ran his political campaign are part of his administration because the messaging for that was at times note perfect and at worse a little flat. The last two years has been full of messaging that is at best a little flat and at worst counterproductive.
What happened there?
Here is a good question. Didn’t Turdblossom go on Limpballs and other RWNJ(aka hate radio) shows all the time? Understand what I mean? Do you ever see Rahm on Ed Schultz or Rachel Maddow? Obviously it’s more complicated but I think you get what my point is. Hell, what ever happened to Hilda Solis? I see assholes like Geithner on MTP but what about Solis?
The major difference is that anyone from Bush’s administration could go on Limbaugh, go on Hannity, go on Fox and Friends – whatever – and be assured that they’d get softball questions, a lot of fawning from the hosts, and a platform to “catapult the propaganda”. Because Fox and Limbaugh and all those guys are functioning as arms of the conservative movement not as independent operators.
Name a place where someone from the Obama administration could go to get the same kind of treatment. There isn’t one. Anywhere they go they have the possibility of being nailed hard – I think the possibility is even greater on the left’s “equivalent” shows to Fox – Maddow or Olberman or Schultz than it is on the tepid “Meet the Press” Sunday talk shows that they’ll get a quasi-hostile set of questions rather than the softball stuff that Hannity would lob at Rove or Cheney.
And overall I think that’s a good thing – I don’t want a liberal version of Fox News catapulting propaganda for Democrats. But it does mean that the WH can’t send people out to do that kind of rah-rah cheerleading crap that the Bush administration did – they have to handle the press differently.
You are right. But does the WH even try? Does Rahm even try to work things out with the left he hates so much? My question about Hilda Solis still remains.
While I agree with you in the short term, I take issue with the long term. Part of the objective of improving communications with the base and the public at large through outlets like Maddow would be to strengthen the administration’s relationship with all the parties. So that when (not if) they do something to piss us off, they have an established premise of good intentions.
I think the short term has been overemphasized, just as it is when counting votes and concluding that it’s not worth bringing up a bill that will end in defeat. I get the sense, though I have no real basis for supporting it, that strategists underestimate the ability of certain actions and speech to change the underlying conditions when assessing the prospects of those same actions and speech. I think this happened during the impeachment debate, for example.
Since Obama apparently wrote his own campaign stuff, I have to think he’s now turned the job over to hacks.
No, I’m not talking about Obama’s speechifying – that’s still pretty good stuff as far as it goes. (Full disclosure: I was never terribly wowed by his speeches during the campaign the way other people were. I’m actually not much of a fan of campaign speeches – I prefer debates, even the fake ones we have in the US, and platform outlines over speeches any day of the week)
I’m talking about the overall message control and delivery. Obama’s team was really good at figuring out what to say when during the campaign. Now they can barely articulate their accomplishments. They really should be bragging about what they’ve accomplished with a Congress that was deadset to stop every little thing they proposed, and yet instead we get Gibbs whining. And we spend days hearing about Gibbs whining. What’s up with that? That’s not good message delivery – that’s getting caught up in unimportant soap opera minutia. And they were good at avoiding that on the campaign trail – it was the Clinton and McCain teams that seemed to always fall afoul of the unimportant soap opera minutia that drove messaging off the deep end. Some of it self inflicted (Palin) and others not so much.
You make some excellent points, especially about the contradiction between our knowing that the Bush atrocity would keep injuring our country for years and years to come, and has no ready or easy cure, and yet carping incessantly about Obama’s failure to fix everything now.
Temperamentally I fit the “radical” camp in that I believe American capitalism and the political system have reached the crash and burn stage unless we make profound changes to both. So at that level, Obama — and any other person even remotely electable to the WH — will never be what I want. But he’s what we’ve got, and still our best bet for at least buying some time.
My problem with the lefties under discussion is that so many seem to wander around in a virtual world with no idea of where they live. Like the world, or the US, is some kind of blank slate upon which Obama refuses to write the words that would bring on the Age of Gold. We’re supposed to be the ones “making him do it”. That means a coherent agenda, organizing, and infiltrating the halls of power. Just bitching about everything is a lot easier, but doesn’t go anywhere. No matter how much truth there is in the lefty disenchantment with Obama, it doesn’t matter — it’s utterly irrelevant. Until we change the system ourselves, Obama is as good as we’ll ever get, just like the deeply flawed FDR. I think that hard truth is the real value of the FDR diary.
But I thought it was a good think FDR had credible commies to his left? I’m so confused.
And I guess the AP finally got around to asking Kucinich what his thoughts were on Gibbs stupid outburst:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2010/08/kucinich_to_gibbs_youve_read_the_liberals_wrong.php
Can anyone disagree with what Dennis said?
Comparative history is difficult to think about and write in a coherent and meaningful way. When we try to equate comparative terms like “radical,” “liberal” and “conservative” across decades the pond really gets muddy.
Roosevelt had three years of capitalism being seen to fail catastrophically before he came into office. After all of the pipe dreams of instant wealth of the 1920’s were shown to be empty, FDR didn’t need to explain to a shaken middle class that their interests lay with the common folk. They had sorted it out for themselves. Nevertheless, he ran on a very conventional-sounding platform of balancing the budget to set the economy right.
Obama had three months of visible catastrophic failure before he came into office. Even then, no one could be certain that TARP I wouldn’t calm the waters and restore “liquidity,” which was all that was required according to the claims made by “responsible” persons in both parties. Despite an object lesson from the internet bubble a few years before, the middle class continued to believe that this time was different – housing prices would go up indefinitely, profits from innovative financial instruments really were the equal of profits from a productive economy, and so on.
FDR didn’t have to explain that capitalism needed some serious reform. Everyone knew, even the bankers and stock plungers knew in the backs of their minds, that some improved rules would clarify the game for everyone. This is how Wall Street grifter Joe Kennedy was able to make such a good Chairman of the SEC.
Obama needed to explain what had gone wrong, that most of the Chicago School crap we had been fed for the previous thirty years was bad policy that led to disastrous results. But first, he had and his entourage needed to understand that that was the case. So far, the only involved party I have heard even begin to make a radical rethinking of their underlying assumptions about the economy is Alan Greenspan.
So to my mind, one main difference between FDR and Obama is that FDR had the gifts of understanding and desperation: the economy was floating on its side and twitching, and everyone knew that Wall Street had poisoned it. Obama came to office with an economy that was “suddenly” looking very listless and few people understood where the problem came from. Maybe it was Wall Street. But maybe it was reckless homeowners using their houses as ATM’s. Maybe it was government zeal for widespread home ownership. Maybe it was bad management at FANNIE and FREDDIE. Maybe there wasn’t that much of a crisis at all.
In terms of policy formulation, that “maybe” muddle is where we still are. Remember the “liquidity crunch” that TARPs I and II were supposed to solve? It’s still there: small and regional businesses still can’t get loans from small and regional banks with which they have had decades-long relationships to continue projects or start new ones. The bulk of people, not only in finance but in finance policy surrounding the President, are still focused on the invisible threat from inflation, even as the economy begins its fatal slide into depression.
Democratic policy-making today always begins with messaging. What can we sell and how can we sell it? The message determines what the policy should be to our modern Democrats. But a crisis – and this is a crisis – requires that policy-making begin with an understanding of the problem’s causes and what will be required to correct them. THEN leaders figure out how to explain this and sell it to a majority of the voters.
Getting into the game of judging a solution to be “left” or “right,” “liberal” or “conservative” is using the label to determine the contents. It is exactly backwards. When you spread those labels across 70 or 80 years, it becomes utterly meaningless. Leadership seeks solutions to existing problems and figures out how to sell them. Our modern Democrats want policies where everyone is happy about everything all of the time and which sound “moderate” on a comparative scale. It’s simply not possible, and policy pabulum is the inevitable result.
Whatever Obama and the Congressional Democrats’ achievements may be on a relative scale (as good as Johnson, better than the Republicans would be etc.), on the absolute scale of understanding, addressing and solving the problems at hand they come up disastrously short, and we will, rightly, be blamed for it. The Republicans will then give the American people the full lesson in the problem, when the country is turned into a banana republic with an enormous military for a decade or so. We’ll see how tractable the problems are then.
There is a big difference between FDR and Obama. We can see clearly what FDR did; the memos have been studied; most of the secret documents have been declassified; we’ve gone through the apotheosis and the demonization of FDR.
Obama hasn’t even finished two full years, and we’re making historical judgments about him? It really is too early to tell.
The fact is that there is no Left left in this country. Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy lopped it off. It hasn’t really had a resurgence. And part of the reason is that the Roosevelt liberals are frightened to acknowledge it when it appears. Cowering before charges of being leftwing has been a habit of the Democratic Party since Woodrow Wilson and the Palmer Raids.
This has an important impact on political positioning in the US. It is what continues to hold back liberals from dealing with the growing and now almost absolute power of now transnational corporations. The fear of being labeled a communist for mainstream liberal views is still out there. And folks like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck smell that fear and depend on it to permit their bullying. And the Tea Party seeks to drive mainstream liberals cowering back into their caves, the caves they inhabited between 1980 and 2006.
The controversy is not ideological; it is a matter or tactics, style, and in some cases personality conflicts. Those folks that Gibbs was talking about as being the “professional Left” are far from the Left. And in disparaging the seeking of a Canadian healthcare system, Gibbs did exactly what Democrats since Wilson have done–made a little more of mainstream aspirations for a better society off limits; made just a little more of life subject to the measure of wealth and power.
That is the issue as nicely and as least arrogant as I can state it. When the 14th Amendment to the Constitution is too far to the left, the US is in big trouble. So Gibbs lops off a little more of the mainstream, calling it the Left. Is it any wonder folks are losing their patience?
It is clear that what needs to happen in November is a massive defeat for Republicans and a reaffirmation that the American people really did vote for Obama’s agenda. Why can’t Democrats make that case? That’s not an ideological issue at all. It is one of competence in political rhetoric.
The left certainly was in the ascendancy in the 1933-5 period, which wouldn’t happen again until roughly 1963-5, and hasn’t happened since.
The left and the union movement were strong and getting stronger back in FDR’s first term. This gave Roosevelt room to maneuver on his left, particularly after the very successful midterms of 1934 where Ds and the left again made gains at the expense of the GOP and banker-right. The voters spoke nationwide and clearly wanted bolder progressive measures. 70% of Congress now in the hands of the Ds/left — another advantage to Roosevelt over Obama.
Re Gibbs and a few other top aides, Obama needs to make some changes, get some different more Dem base-friendly voices in the upper echelons of the advisory food chain. His WH currently seems overloaded with key advisors who are antagonistic to the liberal base which elected their boss. Successful Dem presidents (FDR, JFK, and to some extent Clinton) tended to have both wings of the party represented in key advisory positions and those presidents respected the various points of view and learned how to channel or reconcile differences constructively.
Obama just seems a little too willing to listen to the Gibbs-Emanuel wing of anti-lefty cynicism. He badly needs a liberal’s liberal Ted Sorensen or tough guy liberal Ken O’Donnell either as CoS or overall domestic advisor.
Don’t make “being bold” equate to being in the ascendancy.
And don’t jump to the conclusion that the workers pushing for unions or African-Americans pushing for civil rights, or even college students pushing to end Vietnam, were “the left”. The left were organizers but not all organizers were from the left.
All that happened during the Roosevelt administration and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is that the “the left”, minus the CPUSA had somewhat more freedom to operate and to state their case.
The leftmost figure in the FDR administration was Frances Perkins, and Social Security initially came out minus healthcare and somewhat compromised. The leftmost figure in the JFK administration turned out to be Robert Kennedy, but that was a matter of a practical view embedded in rhetoric about principle. Kennedy could not outflank J. Edgar Hoover, who nominally worked for RFK as part of the Department of Justice.
My reading of the Obama administration is that they sense more political danger (and possibly personal danger) from taking an aggressively liberal (but hardly left) position than they do from disappointing the so-called Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. And I think that this sense is not based on national opinion polls but on the diversity of opinions across specific localities. It is political geography, not ideology, that is driving the Obama administration’s political strategy.
I think there was a little more result in that period of the 30s than the left merely stating their case. A sort of left uprising was underway by 34, and by the next yr FDR was acting more boldly with his Second New Deal, a beefier version of the first. And, as I thought I noted above, in the 34 midterms a number of pols to the left of FDR were elected to office. Ferchrissakes, even in CA, the Dems nominated a recent Socialist to run as gov — Upton Sinclair — and he would have won but for the campaign dirty tricks.
As for JFK, our last true liberal president, he was probably the most consistently liberal of those in his admin, with top domestic aide Sorensen (former conscientious objector) right there too along with Bobby and O’Donnell. Re RFK, he was more successful “outflanking” J Edgar than you allow, w/r/t going after the Mafia and aggressively moving on civil rights. And, speaking of Rbt Gibbs, JFK’s press sec’y Pierre Salinger wasn’t exactly out there bashing the liberals. And when he got the opportunity in 1964, he ran as a solid liberal for senate in CA (losing to a Repub who demagogued the then-hot issue of racial discrimination in private housing). Then there are liberals Arthur Schlesinger Jr and JK Galbraith, always or nearly always in the loop or being consulted on a range of issues.
As for Obama, I think he missed his big chance to govern more progressively when in the early months he played it soft and centrist. But in my view that had more to do with the stronger anti-lib voices of Rahm and Gibbs outweighing and outvoting whatever soft resistance Axelrod put up, all against a backdrop of a president who’s temperamentally averse to taking on big fights despite the campaign talk of admiration of transformational presidents.
One thing that isn’t discussed enough is the timing of Obama’s presidency. It caused a bit of a problem that he was suddenly presented with a situation (or an opportunity) that he didn’t campaign on. We can debate the size of the stimulus, but it was a gigantic bill that Obama had Obey lard up with every liberal goodie on the wish-list. That provoked a degree of shock on Capitol Hill, but also a lot of resistance. And it made Obama look like he was lurching far to the left of where he was on the campaign trail.
In a lot of ways, that early clash set the tone for everything that followed. The socialist calls had some resonance. The political shop got a little spooked. The budget hawks get nervous. And further aggressive moves to the left became a very hard sell across the board from the Capitol to the West Wing to the commentariat.
What the diary doesn’t explore is to what extent the lefty critics were right about FDR. History has determined that he was one of our very greatest presidents because he was a great war leader and took bold steps to ameliorate some effects of the Depression. The critics rightly pointed to his feet of clay, but history is written in broader strokes.
I think Long, Perkins, and others were correct in seeing that FDR’s accommodation with, and even active construction of, the corporate-run state represented a historic defeat for the hopes of the left. I think the current situation validates their fears. FDR applied some really great band-aids but did little to resolve the fundamental contradictions between a free/democratic society and a political/economic permanent oligarchy.
The War and the Depression set the stage for real revolutionary change. FDR, for better or for worse, co-opted that opportunity. It was the beginning of the end for the American Left. Today we still have no coherent agenda, no effective organization, no real strategy. Apparently it’s supposed to be Obama’s job to single-handedly take on the burden of redeeming our feckless efforts — while at the same time paying homage to our power and importance. Ultimately, politics is about ideas. It’s way past time for us to quit the gossip and bitching and develop analyses and policy that actual Americans can relate to. And hope Obama buys us enough time to give it our best shot.
In FDR’s defense, history has perhaps shown that his financial reforms prevented the type of “speculative euphoria” we saw in the last decade.
Alan Greenspan is now in his “Fog of War” stage.
Exactly. And it’s a wonder Glass-Steagall got passed Congress, even then.
Glass-Steagall passed Congress because Sen. Carter Glass and Rep. Henry Steagall, both Southerners and both close to the banking industry, saw that there had to be a wall between investment banking and depository banking, especially since the act also put the US Government on the hook to depositors with the founding of the FDIC.
Please note also that Gramm-Leach-Bliley passed the Senate 54-44 – i.e. with no SINGLE Democratic Senator (as Booman likes to point out) or a threatened filibuster gumming up the works of this banking “modernization” act’s passage. It was signed by Bill Clinton in 1999.
I didn’t know the Gramm-Leach-Bliley vote was strictly party line. So why did Clinton sign it then? Another one of his “bipartisan” things?
Have you seen the recent research regarding personality tendencies being pretty well set in stone by 1st grade age?
Is the American public any different?
I think not.
And leftinesses are no exception.
AG