I think dealing with all the Stupid in our political discourse has finally had an enervating effect on me. I’m having trouble seeing why it’s worth writing about the nit-wits who are running for the Republican nomination. If they weren’t such a vicious crew, I’d just laugh at them and be done with it. What is there really to say about the hostage crisis over the debt limit that Steve Benen isn’t already saying?
And it’s not like I can promise you that things will get better if Obama is reelected. It’s likely that we’ll lose the Senate, and that means it hardly matters whether or not we can win back the House. We’re basically stuck with the current situation for the next six years, and that’s if we’re lucky.
It’s hard to keep your core energy cranked up when what you’re basically fighting for is all negation. All kinds of horrible things can and will happen if the Republicans gain more power. We cannot allow that to happen. But it’s hard to stay motivated when a shitty status quo is the best that can be hoped for and there’s no chance of vanquishing the Stupid.
The sad part is that we don’t have the option of quitting. Finn is counting on all of us.
I think you’re being too morose about the fate of the senate. Sure, Republicans are likely to win ND, and they can be expected to compete strongly in MO, NE, MT, VA, etc., but they’ve overreached like a motherfucker nationwide. Can any Republican really compete in FL or the midwest anymore after what guys like Scott and Walker and Kasich have shown themselves capable of? And places like NV and MA are eminently flippable.
We’re more likely to see no net change in the senate I would think, than either party winning a whole bunch of seats in either direction. Of course, it is also May 2011, so this is all highly speculative and therefore completely irrelevant to what will happen. And it means nothing to the real issue, which is the filibuster. Which won’t be addressed, leaving us pretty screwed anyway.
that the root cause of all your ennui is Barack Obama’s vacillation and lack of focus in the most powerful year he will ever have. His dithering brought the Republican Party back from the dead in an unbelievably short period of time. The Tea Party’s rise is directly attributable to Obama’s lack of leadership at a time that America thirsted for it.
Obama will be reelected. But what good is it for America?
What good is it for America?
How about having a liberal and highly competent President for eight years? Even if you have qualms about the “liberal” part, nobody could say his administration isn’t one of the most well run and capable we’ve ever seen.
That should still count for something.
I detect some hyperbole here.
1) “most well run and capable we’ve ever seen”? Actually one thing Clinton did was run a tight shop. FEMA and the USPS, for example, became really terrific agencies. I’m not saying Obama’s administration is horrible, because by all measures it’s not bad and orders of magnitude better than Bush’s. But in order for your statement to be correct you have to be too young to remember the Clinton years.
Furthermore, as much as I despise Reagan’s policies he did two things really well. One was bring solid management to Federal administration — I know many people at the time who worked in agencies in government. Those in agencies that were gutted, like the EPA, obviously saw nothing but crap from Reagan. But other agencies, like the VA, saw vast improvements in management. (Reagan’s other good thing was to ignore his hard right advisers and negotiate in faith with Gorbachev.)
And, if you are old enough you’ll remember that Eisenhower was an extremely able administrator, although he got a lot of unfounded crap at the time about being “out of touch” because, the story went, he expected the civilian government to run like the military. That was a time of great expansion of the federal services and it went very well. Look at surveys at the time and people’s faith in government was at an all-time high during his administration. (As were top marginal rates — and I suspect the two are not unrelated.)
2) Depends on your definition of “liberal”. Some of his strongest campaign statements were in regards to Constitutional liberties and accused terrorists. He’s not only broken every one of those promises, he’s actually gone farther than Bush. Both Dick Cheney and Peter King have gone out of their way to praise him in this area. In that area he is certainly not “liberal” no matter which of the many historical definitions of that term you try to apply.
Otherwise, his policies to Wall Street and industry are, at best, moderate. His health care reform matched what was proposed by Heritage in 1993. And so on. Most of the people calling him liberal are the same people who are calling him Marxist, atheist, Muslim, Kenyan, and communist.
Obama is more liberal than Clinton. I’m in my forties. NAFTA, welfare reform, DADT, DOMA, Glass-Steagall, etc. You have to really hate Obama to make this argument. I voted for Nader in 96 because of all of that shite.
Okay, read it again. There were two points. The first was about how efficiently the administration ran, and on that Clinton did very well. That has nothing to do with NAFTA, welfare reform, etc. (You forgot to mention the salvage logging rider).
The second was about Obama being “liberal”. At no point in there did I assert Clinton was liberal, because he wasn’t, for the reasons you mentioned.
Our last liberal president? Probably LBJ, although you have to get past all his foreign policy shit and just focus on the domestic stuff.
How about 8 yrs of relative peace and considerable prosperity under Clinton — aren’t those still liberal values? Bringing more people out of poverty and towards the middle class than any prez since the 60s. Tax hike (however small) on the upper income group. Major crime down. No unnecessary wars started. A genuine and mostly competent attempt at attacking the growing int’l terrorism threat of AQ.
Good center-left Scotus picks (which could have been even more liberal, but Mario Cuomo, Bill’s first choice, turned down the offer). A fair number of positive achievements despite the double whammy — MSM and GOP — of considerably powerful and consistently negative forces, to go with a rather tepid and unorganized group of Dems in Congress who weren’t always on his side.
As for LBJ: he didn’t consider himself a liberal (and referred to those that were, like his VP Humphrey, as “red-hots” — i.e., vaguely too lefty in a slightly commie way) and he wasn’t, except as he signed into law some nice liberal bills JFK or he had advocated for which Johnson needed to protect his left flank as he began planning to go into VN. And that war — when is starting a completely unnecessary and insane war a liberal value? And lying about it to the public and Congress, as Bush Jr would later do?
How about LBJ’s lashing out against antiwar activists as Commie-influenced, and having his non-liberal, reactionary RW friend J. Edgar Hoover quietly investigate and infiltrate their ranks? Those the actions of a liberal? On the contrary, he was after ’65 at war with the liberals.
In 1972, when true liberal Geo McGovern went to the ranch to seek his support, the conservative LBJ showed his true colors by refusing to appear in public with McG, and quietly (it has been reported) favored and encouraged Nixon’s re-election (as he supposedly favored Nixon’s election in 1968 even against his own VP Humphrey). All evidence of a true conservaDem, not a liberal.
All good things about Clinton — except the first sentence (I don’t think the estimated 600k+ victims of the several bombing campaigns and the Iraqi sanctions would call that “peace” — but then in the context of America’s Military-Media-Industrial complex that may have been the best we could have realistically hoped for). You could also mention that the prosperity was in large part due to the commercialization of the Internet, something made possible by the Information Superhighway investment Clinton pushed through at Gore’s urging in 1993. I also am very happy that he unilaterally declared massive chunks of the American west as National Monuments, preventing the full exploitation of those areas by the Gingrich congress. Clearly Clinton, unlike apparently Obama, recognizes that certain voters are going to believe he is the second coming of Hitler no matter what he does, so he didn’t worry about losing Utah voters in 1996 when he did that.
However, that has to be balanced by the negatives mentioned in the posts of others above. All in all if you judge by results, not rhetoric, he was, by 20th century standards, a centrist not a liberal.
As for LBJ, I agree with all the evidence you cite, but my point is that when you look at what he accomplished in office (again, results not rhetoric) he was the last “liberal” in the White House by 20th century standards. From Civil Rights to the Great Society (for all its flaws) to stronger worker protections, the accomplishments stand out.
LBJ also accomplished the tearing apart of the country and his own party, as the liberals turned against him and his war while he went to war against them, while at the same time Johnson gave big govt spending for social ills a very bad name for a long time to come thereafter — another peculiar LBJ accomplishment.
LBJ was a liberal only in a very narrow bill-signing way, and that only for a limited period of time (roughly ’63-65). Thereafter he governed largely as a cold warrior conservative and reactionary as he attempted to squelch free speech about his war and presidency, and then personally turned against liberals and the great liberal leaders of the era, RFK and MLK while privately becoming more in tune with Republicans like Rockefeller and Nixon.
Wow! its like the world, politics, media, republicans never like existed before Obama. All this shit is HIS fault? get the f*ck outta here. really.
There has never, ever been any chance of vanquishing the Stupid in the history of the world. If that is your goal, you should take up golf.
Heh.
That’s true.
However, the is more and lesser Stupid. We are definitely getting more of it than I’ve ever seen before. And, no, I haven’t forgotten the Clinton years.
Booman, I share your sentiments. I’m about ready to give up on the concept of representative democracy and just focus on politics at the most local level. The big money has the game rigged, so we aren’t ever likely to get progressive policy-making from the top. Obama is the best President we are likely to see in our lifetime, yet he isn’t much different from Republican Lite. Change has to happen from the ground up. It’s an old, tired slogan, but still the best bumper sticker of all time:
“Think Globally, Act Locally.”
I’m with you. Doing a lot locally — now on my local community board. I suspect the other 8 board members are all Republicans, and probably 7 of those are wingnut teabaggers. None of them know I’m an Independent who is to the left of the modern center-right Democratic party. And they don’t need to — when we focus on local issues and solutions the national rhetoric and tribal identification are irrelevant and the wingnuts actually use their brains. I suspect we’d also agree on about 85% of national issues if I could find some way for them to focus on the issues and not the tribal crap.
Meanwhile, at a national level I figure we’re screwed until the climate gets so bad that the whole Washington-Pentagon-Media consensus collapses. In history there are other examples of regimes that were so thoroughly corrupt and infected with groupthink that their demise was inevitable. Either those regimes are destroyed from external forces (such as the Third Reich) or collapsed of their own weight (such as the Soviet Union). In the latter case, as collapse became inevitable the powers that be are often willing to take huge risks to try to find some solution — as the Politburo did in appointing their internal maverick Gorbachev to power and letting him go wild with policies like cutting military spending, glasnost, perestroika, and ultimately giving freedom to the satellites.
I suspect that at some point in the future the consequences of climate change compounded by the collapse of the middle class (especially the next generation of seniors) will create that kind of crisis in America. We can only hope that it won’t be too late. Until then I don’t see any hope in our current national politics. Barack “Drill more offshore, drill more in Alaska” Obama won’t address climate change during his term of office, and God knows only a few Democrats and no Republicans in Congress would support him if he did.
I pray that someday you get your perfect progressive. I really do.
I’d settle for the return of Eisenhower.
But then I’m a silly dreamer. I remember growing up and reading about the Bill of Rights and the findings of the Nuremberg Trials and — silly me — actually believing in that they were the sort of principles that the U.S. stood for.
You’ve already got the return of Eisenhower. His name is Barack Obama.
Eisenhower fought against the military-industrial complex (he gave them that name) and fought against his own party’s attempt to bring down the top tax rate. He wasn’t owned and operated by big business.
Compare the Republican Party platform of 1956 to the positions Obama ends up with (not the ones he gives in speeches). Obama is to the right of the 1956 Republican Party.
More similarities than not with Ike, imo. Both were big business friendly — Ike had several in top cabinet positions and as advisers, Obama has famously taken his top economic advisers from Wall St and his rather tepid policy approach of helping big business, and not holding them legally accountable, is no better than trickle-down lite.
As for the rest, much depends on the political context of the times. Ike operated largely in a moderate period re domestic economic and social safety net issues — it had to be that way since he had to work with a Dem Congress in both houses — while that period was also much more politically conformist and stultifying compared to today. On FP/Cold War and civil rights at home, things were to the right of where we are today. Ike didn’t act aggressively on the first, wisely, though later, out of office, he did unwisely advise JFK and the LBJ to go militarily into SEAsia. On CR of course, Ike did little but kick the can down the road, leaving a tougher situation for JFK to have to deal with.
Obama has two political openings he’s yet to take advantage of: in FP, withdrawing aggressively and earlier than planned from Afghanistan, basically ending the counterproductive and expensive military-troop-nation building approach to fighting terrorism. And domestically on the economy, he’s yet to aggressively attack unemployment and the housing slump, while failing to hold Wall St banksters accountable.
On the former, he seems unable or unwilling to upset the national security status quo he inherited, and largely has acted only at the margins and with little courage (the killing of OBL being the one big exception). On the economy, he either doesn’t fully understand economic issues and the extent to which the country is suffering, or he basically does but is too trusting in his Wall St advisers’ top-down and incremental approach.
On both nat’l security/war matters and in dealing with the economy, he’s been far more Ike like in doing little and not rocking the establishment boat, and much too little like the last liberal we’ve had in the WH — JFK, who on the economy and in civil rights and in FP was far more the consistent liberal, and often a courageous one, than any president since.
Eisenhower didn’t do much to fight against the military-industrial complex other than mention it in his farewell address. The CIA started their regime change operations and targeted assassinations during his Presidency. Eisenhower laid the groundwork for the Vietnam war by financing the French during their attempt to maintain control of Indochina and preventing national elections in Vietnam.
Obama believes in the basic social safety net and is a social liberal. What’s undoubtedly true is that today’s Democratic Party has moved further to the right on economic issues. The fault lies mostly with corporatist Senate Democrats.
We wouldn’t be having this discussion if it weren’t for the “Great Recession”.
Yep, Ike had some interesting MIC comments as he was about to go out the door — which liberals have been swooning over for years — but did little to rein in the military-intel complex which grew increasingly powerful in his 8 yrs, again leaving his successor with plenty of entrenched cold warrior extremism and power-wielding in that complex to have to deal with.
And today, while O has a few more corporatist-Dem types to deal with he also has far fewer in the GOP willing to accept and preserve the New Deal social safety net system. Back in the 50s and 60s, there was actually a moderate-liberal wing of the GOP which joined forces with like-minded Dems to keep things moving ahead domestically.
Still, there’s that bully pulpit opening for O, particularly as the public is beginning to get wary and nervous about changes to fundamental long-standing social program, to get out there and remind people of what we have and what the other party is trying to do to it. An opening to draw the line firmly in the sand — which O apparently is reluctant to do.
I’ve been a little depressed off and on of late for the same reasons. Can’t seem to get this line out of my head.
“Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in some dark woods,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.”
I think it’s important that we pace ourselves with our despair, outrage, and energy. Find something nonpolitical that you enjoy and take some time each week for that. I hike in the mountains once a week. I put the world behind me for a few hours. It helps. As does watching the Bulls smash the Heat in the opening game of the Eastern Conference finals. 😉
Yes, every now and then we can find evidence in the sport world that the bad guys don’t always win. Like seeing the Mavericks kick the Laker’s butts, or watching the Cowboys collapse in the year they were supposed to win it all, or any year the Yankees don’t win.
Not all progress is legislative. The other big news in the world of sports today: A Sports Executive Leaves the Safety of His Shadow Life. I don’t really have anything to add, but I think the article is worth your time.
Not only that, but I think tonight was the first time I’ve ever seen the NBA use their big names to promote gay tolerance. They ran a PSA during the game tonight with LeBron and others saying don’t use “gay” as a derogatory term. Progress.
I didn’t see it, but was it this one? If so, Grant Hill and Jared Dudley are the players involved.
Nope – LeBron was in the one I saw.
Or so I thought. Come to think of it – I was typing – so maybe this WAS it. I assumed it was him because it sounded like him. But this didn’t seem to have the same script, either.
I’m not sure – the one I posted is the only one I’d read about. I doubt that LeBron would have been involved in a similar commercial, he’s been reluctant to take a public stance on any issues that are even remotely controversial.
Steve Nash was calling out a homophobe on Twitter today. Love that guy.
<iframe width=”480″ height=”390″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/WXbHOnHAG-g” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
guess my youtube embed didn’t post properly.
Itr was a link to Jim Reeves singing “wlecome to my world.”
This site isn’t set up to handle embedding using the iframe code. When you have a youtube video you want to embed here, before you copy the code from youtube mark the checkbox for the ‘Use old embed code’ option, and then it will work:
thanks for the tip!
I also think it helps to remember that the arc of history is very long. 100 years ago, I couldn’t have voted. In my own lifetime, racial discrimination as official policy has ended (not that everyone is suddenly tolerant, but it’s finally recognized as wrong to be intolerant). Slavery was a sanctioned practice for over 4000 years; not anymore.
It’s hard to see that you’re winning when you lose so many battles in a row. But Germany came through Hitler to become one of the greenest, most privacy-conscious countries on the planet. I don’t want to have to go through hell to get to the other side. But if we DO go through hell, just remember there IS the other side, and we WILL come out of it eventually.
Keep plugging.
Yes. The importance of taking the long view– decades, generations, or even longer– can’t be stressed enough. I think the really great progressives of the past were able to do that (and I’m sure some of our contemporaries can still do it). It changes the way you think about change and your part in it, and it can give you an abiding, powerful kind of determination that can carry you through discouragement. And that’s not just a feel-good thing.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably say it again, if Obama’s part of the “Joshua generation”, then we should expect an ugly next several years. The Book of Joshua is the book of the conquest, the taking of the Promised Land. Nothing pretty about it.
The great demographic wave that is beginning to make its way through the US is, in some quite literal ways, going to “dispossess” the owners of the land. (Yes, a bunch of dark-skinned people are going to buy your houses, take your jobs and marry your children.)
I knew a (recently deceased) NYC cop who loved to tell the story of finally having enough money to buy a house in the suburbs. (This was in the early 1970s and he wanted more than 3 bedrooms for his 7 children and ailing mother-in-law.)
He found a nice house (5 bedrooms, 1 shower) just outside the city. They moved the same month as two other Catholic families which each had seven children as well. All of a sudden, this nice, quiet little (Protestant) suburban township was overrun by Irish and Italian Catholic children. “They didn’t know what had hit them,” he used to say, chortling gleefully.
That’s what’s coming for the xenophobes and racists who are driving so much of the Republican discourse these days. No wonder they’re freaking out. It’s the fear of not knowing what’s hitting them.
don’t become discouraged, BooMan. that the GOP is full of truly evil and insane people is a given. work from that point, and let it ebb and flow about their insanity.
Welcome to the fog of war, BooMan. The anxiety about the denouement of the debt limit stalemate is getting to all of us whether we are conscious of that or not.
But there are some interesting signs. Newtie is trying to put some daylight between himself and Tea Party folks like Ryan. I see Boehner and McConnell sacrificing the Tea Party vote in order to ensure Wall Street support at some point. But only if President Obama hangs tough, as he seems to be doing.
Second thing to know. The stupid is more on the media now than among the voting population. The adults are beginning to reappear. If it’s happening here, it’s likely happening elsewhere. The GOP sweep of legislatures in a lot of states has allowed the same overreach that we see in Congress.
What to write about are new ideas and new framing of old ideas. What constitutes progress beyond the New Deal-Great Society liberalism that we have been defending the last 40 years? Now is time to press the advantage of better ideas. Not reciting the same old, same old quotes from FDR (although there will remain a need for that when we need to show that we aren’t that radical).
Some areas to look at:
International labor, environmental, accounting, legal, and other business infrastructure standards that level the playing field by negotiating higher standards in other countries. Breaking the race to the bottom. It will be a long tough road that requires the international cooperation among labor, environmental, and so on, organizations. But it beats arguing for tariffs and the organizations we need to have a coalition with are getting stronger in the countries that present the greatest problems.
The international system after the decline of US hegemony. China thinks it’s their hegemony. Every major power in the top 25 countries is jockeying for position. Nationalism is reasserting itself, a troubling development especially in Europe.
The US national security environment and the structure of national security institutions needed to do the job effectively and in accordance with the best of traditional US principles of foreign policy. We can’t indulge a military that seeks another war to justify its budget, its jobs, and its contractors. But we need as progressives to have a serious structural alternative proposal. This of course means reining in the many dark budget programs that suck up tax dollars without accountability.
What constitutes the federal, state, and local infrastructure responsibilities for the 21st century.
How to get out of the prison industrial complex that is draining state budgets.
Reform of police administrations, including support for police unions, better rules of engagement, reduction in dependence on tasers. And demilitarization of the police force through reductions in riot control equipment for crowd control.
Restoration of the Bill of Rights now that OBL is gone. What needs to be repealed. What needs to be enacted.
Real education reform. Teachers know what to do. Their voices must be heard in the drafting of legislation.
Single payer healthcare. Period. The country will be ready by 2012.
The biggie. Taking money out of politics. Forbidding charging for campaign ads would go a long way to reducing the need for campaign cash. Strengthening bribery laws to include revolving door lobbying offers. A comprehensive set of ideas to establish popular momentum and force legislators to do what they don’t want to do.
Strengthening anti-trust laws and breaking up too big to fail corporations and too big to fight corporations. Progressives need to at least put a marker down on this issue in terms of recommended legislation.
Revision of the tax code. Everyone talks about it in general terms. Progressives need a specific proposal (with a catchy name) to push. One that reduces the tax burden on ordinary folks instead of shifts it to them.
Prohibition of public-private partnerships that are a source of corruption.
Reduction of the use of contractors to provide core government services.
Reining in non-state military actors regardless of ideology. This includes the burgeoning private security industry that essentially is becoming private armies.
Last of all, remember that the Stupid is held in being by billions of dollars of expenditures for a privately held “total propaganda” system. We are subsidizing that system through purchasing campaign ads, allowing tax breaks for the expenses associated with that system, and other institutional gimmes. Cut off the repetitive megaphones and people begin to restore their sanity. A society in which emotions are continually goosed by the media cannot think straight.
If progressives can push forward on momentum when the Tea Party charade collapses, we can change the political culture of the debate. Change the political culture and it doesn’t matter who is in the Senate; they will have to do what the people want.