The great debate among idealist and pragmatic progressives has been roiling for two years now. And the idealists are about to get grumpier than ever, because the election results have created a new arithmetic that will also bring a new logic tree. It’s a familiar fork in the road. It’s the same one that Bill Clinton stood at in 1995, before he ambled down Dick Morris Lane.
Morris did not have a role in Clinton’s successful 1992 Presidential campaign, which instead was headed by David Wilhelm, James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, and Paul Begala. After the 1994 mid-term election, in which Republicans took control of both houses of the United States Congress and gained considerable power in the states, Clinton once again sought Morris’ help to prepare for the 1996 Presidential election. It was Morris who proposed a strategy that is now referred to as “triangulation,” where Clinton would appeal to a diverse group of voters by distancing himself from both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Progressives debate each other vigorously, with the more idealistic tending to show a firm conviction that the president has preemptively triangulated and pragmatists equally convinced that he merely followed the logic tree to find the near-best available solutions. For the former, Obama’s lack of forcefulness and his lack of commitment to progressive principles explain his party’s losses. For the latter, the primary responsibility for those losses belong to fates beyond the president’s control and to the scorched earth GOP’s Party of No strategy. Mainstream journalists favor a third view, which is that the president did not preemptively triangulate, and that is why his party was decimated in the midterms.
We could look at these three views this way. In the first, the Democrats would have been more popular if they had pursued more progressive policies even if that meant that major bills did not pass. This is because, they believe, progressive policies are both better policies and more popular policies.
The second view is that it does not make a party or a president popular to achieve a record of failure. A party with an inspiring new president and huge majorities cannot afford to come away empty on their major priorities. In most cases, and with important exceptions, a half-loaf is better than no loaf at all. And the Republicans were willing and able to obstruct, distort, and get their message out to a degree that the options really were between pretty much what we got and nothing at all. The Democrats got pummeled not because their policies weren’t good enough, but because there was no way to climb quickly enough out of the recession with the Republicans refusing any cooperation at all, and with them dominating the media landscape. In other words, there was no magic trick that could have avoided heavy losses in the midterms, but at least we accomplished big things.
The third view, held by most of the media, is that the handwriting was on the wall back in January. Obama’s agenda was perceived as too liberal or progressive and the people were clearly warning against going forward with, for example, his health care bill. They didn’t like the automotive bailout or all the spending on transportation projects. They thought the government was taking over the private sector. And the problem is that Obama didn’t heed those warnings and triangulate while he still had the chance. In this narrative, like the first, the Republicans don’t get much credit or blame at all.
This leads me to this piece by Steve Waldman. Waldman is chiefly concerned with the role of moral arguments in winning political debates. For example, why give a guy a break on his mortgage principal when he signed a no-doc contract he knew he couldn’t afford? The other side of that argument is, why bail-out a company that didn’t require documentation before issuing absurd amounts of risky credit? Who wins that moral argument? Are the Democrats even willing to take a side on the issue? Some of the progressive idealists are tearing their hair out that, while there are solutions to our economic problems, those solutions have no prospect for political success. And pragmatists, both progressive and centrist, are arguing something different.
But the thing is, human affairs are a morality play, and economics, if it is to be useful at all, must be an account of human affairs. I have my share of disagreements with both Krugman and DeLong, but on balance I view them as smart, well-meaning people who would do more good than harm if they had greater influence over policy. But they won’t, and they can’t, and they shouldn’t, if they exempt themselves from the moral fray. One of the stereotyped insults economists throw at one another is that a piece of analysis is “partial equilibrium”. The phrase is shorthand for coming to a conclusion based on assumptions that could not survive the circumstances under which the conclusion would obtain. I don’t want to single out Krugman and DeLong, but technocratic economists in general engage in partial equilibrium social science when they ignore moral concerns and the constraints “legitimacy” places on feasible policy.
It’s not just economists, but political observers of all types. When you sit down to do something huge and unprecedented like passing a bill to provide near-universal access to health care, you have to make a list of the obstacles in your way. And that list can’t be based just on what you’re facing at the outset, but what you can expect to face at each point in the process. It’s not just whether you have the votes at the outset, but whether you’ll be able to hold those votes in the face of the onslaught from the AMA and PhRMA and the AARP and Republican astroturfing outfits and FOX News and talk radio. What’s the economy going to look like in six, nine, twelve, or however many months it’s going to take to get it done? Do you have the votes in the committees to get this or that provision put in the bill?
And you have to figure out how to navigate all this and win at the end of the day. This is why it’s somewhat meaningless to do a poll of Americans to see whether they support single-payer health care. Maybe they might respond affirmatively, but ask them again after all the Tea Parties have happened and the Death Panels have happened and they’ve been saturated with right-wing cries of ‘Socialism.’ Ask them again when the economy still sucks a year later and all you’ve been debating is some hard to understand public option and whether the bill pays for abortions or not. And even if you got all the way to the end and the president somehow kept all the good stuff in the bill, and kept his votes steady, and inspired the people to continue to support the bill, you’d have the filibuster and the Party of No strategy to contend with.
This is the true landscape of American politics. This is the logic tree that the president must use. Progressive policies may be better policies (I think they are). And they may poll well in the abstract. But they don’t have the kind of robust support they need to compete on this battleground. Therefore, we must win the battles we can win and be wise enough to call them victories. They are victories. But we must also make the moral arguments for even better policies, because if we cede that ground, the ground shifts ever further away from us.
The president will now make his decision on what fork to take in the road. I do not expect him to take Clinton’s path. His victories will be much smaller, and idealists’ patience will be challenged as never before. They will write ‘recommended diaries’ about how the president is, and always has been, a Blue Dog. They’ll fulminate against him and stomp. But, I bet he just follows that logic tree. He won’t decide that deregulation is the best way to triangulate. He’ll take what he can get and tell us why morally we need to do more. But, this is not the safer road. He’ll get no credit for it. Yet, maybe doing the best he can and appealing to our better angels in a time of hatred and fear will earn him the respect he deserves in the history books, even if it means his reelection is far from assured.
