It’s not very nice to take Glenn Greenwald on about an article in which he cites me approvingly, but I do have to lodge a complaint about his style of rhetoric. I don’t have a problem with his ranting about Ron Paul and the media. But I do have a problem with the end of his piece, starting with this:
I recall a conversation I had early on in the Obama presidency with a civil libertarian; at the time, progressives were rarely critical of the new President, but because civil liberties was the very first area where he so blatantly embraced Bush policies and revealed how he truly operates, that was the one area where harsh criticisms were somewhat common. I suggested in that conversation that the trend of progressive criticism of Obama would be expressed by an inverted “U”: it would continuously increase as the Real Obama revealed himself in more and more areas of prime importance to progressives, and then would decline precipitously — more or less back to its original levels — as the 2012 election approached. I think that’s being roughly borne out.
For mental health reasons, I have completely stopped reading Greenwald, but I follow him on Twitter and I have a general idea about his theory of The Real Obama. To tell you the truth, I am not familiar enough with it to give it a critique. Suffice to say that progressives would express an inverted “U” of criticism during the presidency of any Democrat, regardless of how “real” that Democrat turned out to be. As the hope built up from victory subsides into the cold realities of Washington’s power structure, progressives will be disappointed with each and every Democratic president, and this will be true until the end of time. They will slowly begin to get frustrated as promises are not kept, or as results are less than advertised, or as priorities get pushed back, and so on. Ugly compromises will get made and we will debate whether they are a feature or a glitch. It isn’t some great insight that progressives will spend the middle two and a half years of a Democratic president’s term whimpering and wailing impotently about betrayal. Then a Republican field of candidates will emerge and focus the mind on the alternative to a Democratic president. I’m as disappointed with this inevitable inverted “U” as Greenwald, but for the opposite reason. I’ll get to that.
Those depressing, destructive trends are exacerbated by the manipulative fear-mongering that drives these campaigns. Every four years, The Other Side is turned into the evil spawn of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. Each and every election cycle, each party claims that — unlike in the past, when Responsible Moderates ruled and the “crazies” and radicals were relegated to the fringes (the Democrats were once the Party of Truman!; Ronald Reagan was a compromising moderate!) — the other party has now been taken over by the extremists, making it More Dangerous Than Ever Before. That the Other Side is now ruled by Supreme Evil-Doers means that anything other than full-scale fealty to their defeat is viewed as heresy. Defeat of the Real Enemy is the only acceptable goal. Election-time partisan loyalty becomes the ultimate Litmus Test of whether you’re on the side of Good: it’s the supreme With-Us-or-With-the-Terrorists test, and few are willing to endure the punishments for failing it. It’s an enforcement mechanism for Party loyalty that — by design — breeds slavish partisan fealty.
It’s hard to know precisely what to make of this. For starters, it appears to be a prime example of something that Greenwald routinely blasts the press for doing. He’s made a false equivalence argument where Republicans’ claims that the Democrats are more radical than ever before are no more false than the Democrats’ same claim about the Republicans. Watch.
None of this has anything to do with reality. For as long as I can remember, Republicans — every election cycle — have insisted that the Democratic Party has “now become more radical than ever,” while Democrats insist that the GOP has now — for the first time ever! — been taken over by the extremists. That was what was said when Ronald Reagan was nominated in 1980 and then appointed people like Ed Messe, James Watt, and Robert Bork; it’s what was said with the rise of the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s 1988 second-place finish in the Iowa caucus (ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush); it’s what was said of the 1994 Contract with America and the Gingrich-led GOP’s impeachment of Bill Clinton, and was repeated after Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “culture and religious war” Convention speech in Houston and again after Buchanan’s 1996 victory in the New Hampshire primary; and it’s what was said repeatedly throughout the Bush/Cheney presidency.
He’s rather explicitly rejecting the progressive argument that today’s Republicans are more radical than the Republicans of the 1980’s. Moreover, he’s rejecting the argument that there has been a trend over the last thirty years, all moving (both parties) in a more conservative direction. So, for example, I have said that in today’s world, Ronald Reagan could never win the Republican nomination using the same policies and rhetoric that he used in 1980. And the Newt Gingrich of 1994 would never become Speaker of the House in today’s Republican Party. Ultra-conservatives like Utah’s Bob Bennett have been drummed out of office in primaries for accepting basic responsibility for preventing a global economic collapse. Or, just look at how McCain and Palin ran on Cap and Trade, and where the GOP is on climate change just three years later. Or, look at the recent debt ceiling debate. That’s never happened before. As for the Democrats, they’re to the left of where they were in the 1980’s on gay rights and probably on racial issues, but on almost everything else, they’re to the right of where they used to be. So, how is it fair to dismiss the alarm bells about the consequences of electing a Republican president? Does the composition of the Supreme Court not matter? Don’t women face the loss of a federal right to privacy and reproductive freedom if Justice Kennedy is replaced by a Republican appointee?
Yes, some of the leading GOP presidential candidates (Bachmann, Perry) are truly extreme — -but no more so than was Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, or (in his own way) Pat Buchanan. Jesse Helms was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and all but threatened Bill Clinton’s life. The GOP is extreme now and has been extreme for 30 years. The “Tea Party” is little more than a rebranding of conservatism in the post-Bush age. That they’re MORE EXTREME THAN EVER!! is a fear-mongering slogan — hauled out every four years — to cause Democrats to forget about, or willfully ignore, their own leader’s glaring, gaping failures.
I don’t recall Newt, or Cheney, or even Pat Robertson ever saying that Medicare and Social Security are unconstitutional. None of them would have risked a default on our debt or caused a downgrading of our credit-rating. Cheney said “deficits don’t matter,” not “let’s stop paying our credit card bill.” Greenwald is apoplectic that the president might adjust our entitlement system in a way that hurts the poor, but totally unconcerned that Rick Perry, who is currently ahead in the polls, wants to tear up our entitlement system and send that responsibility back to the states. It’s simply untrue that Michele Bachmann and the Tea Partiers are no more radical than Pat Buchanan. Standard & Poor just decided that these folks are so insane that we, as a country, can’t be totally trusted to pay our creditors on time. And who can blame them, really, despite their horrid record of failure and corruption?
The reality is that both parties’ voters, early on in the process, like to flirt with candidates who present themselves as ideologues, but ultimately choose establishment-approved, establishment-serving functionaries perceived as electable (e.g., the Democrats’ 2004 rejection of Dean in favor of Kerry, the GOP’s 2008 embrace of the “maverick” McCain). In those rare instances when they nominate someone perceived as outside the establishment mainstream (Goldwater, McGovern), those candidates are quickly destroyed. The two-party system and these presidential campaigns are virtually guaranteed — by design — to produce palatable faces who perpetuate the status quo, placate the citizenry, and dutifully serve the nation’s most powerful factions.
Yeah, it’s frustrating. It’s soul-crushing in its suckitude. But that’s our system. On many of the issues that most concern Greenwald, the two parties are frighteningly alike. How do we get these assholes to stop the insane War on Drugs? How can we ever shrink the Pentagon down to a reasonable size? Is there any end to the expansion of the surveillance state? It seems like neither party has any interest in budging on any of these questions, and it’s appalling. But how about the areas where they do differ? Obama has overhauled the food safety system, advanced women’s rights in the work place, ended DADT and stopped defending DOMA in court. He passed the Hate Crimes bill. He’s appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court. He’s expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. He expanded the CHIP program. He’s fixed the preexisting condition travesty. He’s invested in clean energy. He overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. The Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, but still extremely worthwhile as a start to re-regulating the financial sector. He created a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s also done a lot for veterans, and he got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks. None of these things were priorities for Republicans. They actively opposed, directly or indirectly through obstruction, every single item on this list. In fact, they succeeded in killing a Cap & Trade bill in the Senate after it had passed through the House.
All of these things are improvements that would not have occurred under a McCain-Palin administration. Moreover, a McCain-Palin administration would have moved in the other direction on most of these issues, or come up with even worse compromises. And then there’s McCain’s white hot-love for Iran and what that might have meant for the country.
Here’s Glenn’s conclusion:
The [two parties] can have some differences — they’ll have genuinely different views on social issues and widely disparate cultural brands (the urbane, sophisticated, East Coast elite intellectual v. the down-home, swaggering, Southern/Texan evangelical) — but the process ensures a convergence to establishment homogeneity. The winner-takes-all, Most-Important-Election-Ever hysteria that precedes it masks that reality, creating the illusion of fundamentally stark choices. That’s what makes the 18 months of screeching, divisive, petty, trivial rancor so absurd, so distracting, so distorting. Yes, it matters in some important ways who wins and sits in the Oval Office chair, but there are things that matter much, much more than that — all of which are suffocated into non-existence by the endless, mind-numbing election circus.
I just don’t buy that the differences between the parties are so insignificant as to pale in comparison to the much more important areas where they agree. But, even if I did, I care enough about the differences that it is truly a matter of life or death to me who wins the presidency. Believe it or not, considering my age, I’ve felt that way since the 1980 election. Poppy Bush, I could live with (unhappily), but I didn’t want a validation of Reagan’s two-terms. Bob Dole I could have lived with, too, if not for the Gingrich Republicans shutting down the government and behaving like lunatics. But, post-impeachment, it’s been an all-out war. The Republicans are the biggest threat facing the country. It was absolutely critical that they lose in 2000, in 2004, in 2008, and it will be again in 2012. If Greenwald can’t see that, then he and I just have such different progressive priorities that we can’t communicate with each other very well.
And that gets me back to that inverted “U” that Greenwald was complaining about. He hates that we don’t complain ALL the time. I hate that we waste time and effort bitching about the only thing we have that can stop a real conservative revolution in this country. I think Greenwald is the best blogger in the business. I think he’s brilliant. I think he’s principled and consistent. And I think he’s right most of the time. But he’s way off on the most important thing. I don’t care that he tends to put an uncharitable interpretation on Obama’s every move so much as I can’t understand why he doesn’t get that there are structural things created by our Constitution and our laws and court rulings that make it impossible for any president, no matter how progressive, to simply impose his or her will. The status quo of which he speaks is powerfully protected by our media, and by the way money is treated as free speech and corporations are treated as people. And when you need 60% of the Senate to be progressive to get a progressive outcome, the bully pulpit can only do so much.
The president has achieved a tremendous amount under the circumstances. And it matters greatly that he not be replaced by Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, or Michele Bachmann. Or even Ron Paul.