Maybe it’s because the blogosphere is only really two presidential elections old, or maybe it’s just an inalterable characteristic of the left, but I hope one day we are collectively experienced enough to absorb the futility of which Bob Cesca speaks:
It always happens. When Republicans are in charge, we take the gloves off and fiercely attempt to replace them with a Democrat. But when Democrats are in charge, too many liberals take on this too-hip-for-the-room attitude and either criticize the arrangement of the two party system or insist that both sides are evil.
Neither side is flawless, however, one side is much closer to our values. The other isn’t even close. Shitting on “both sides” only serves to weaken the closer side — the Democratic side.
I’m just reaching middle-age, so it’s not that I am so long in the tooth that I’ve had time to figure out what younger people still need to learn. And it’s not like I’m not guilty myself. I abstained from voting in 1996 because I was displeased with the Clinton administration. When they impeached the Big Dog I woke up.
Electing presidents is only one opportunity for progressive activism. If you want to go out and try to fix our electoral system, I’m fully supportive of that. If you want to work on issues that both major political parties oppose, there are plenty of areas that are ripe for activism: prison reform, the War on Drugs, a less interventionist foreign policy, a smaller military/intelligence/homeland security budget, restoring sanity to our detainee policy, etc. However, you should recognize that changing these policies requires efforts that are largely divorced from electoral politics. Neither party is running many candidates who are on the right side of these issues. Some may pay some lip service to cutting defense spending or closing Gitmo, for example, but they don’t mean it. The ones that aren’t crazy are cowards. And, in any case, there’s not enough of them.
Think about an issue like marijuana legalization in terms of the struggle to win support for gay marriage. You have to convince the people and then the politicians will follow. It’s never going to work the other way around.
I’m still pissed that after we poured our guts into getting Barack Obama elected, a bunch of liberals decided to start attacking him before he could even be inaugurated. And then too many of them obsessed about policies that were dictated by congressional arithmetic, or by the lack of courage and unity of Democrats, or by political reality. Most of what is really wrong about America isn’t questioned by either party and has been a feature of every administration since the end of World War Two. Yet, one of the political parties is not what it used to be. It can be aptly described as:
80% paranoid imbeciles squatting in the rubble of the Space Age raging about Negroes and socialism.
20% hucksters turning a buck by pandering to the rage and paranoia of rubble-squatting morons.
Some of us noticed this during the Bush years. Most of the rest of us have learned it since then.
I mean, even if the president wasn’t the best, most effective, least ethically challenged president we’ve had in over half a century, he’d still be the only thing standing between us and an administration that would make Bush and Cheney look moderate. Did they not do enough damage in eight years to convince you that there’s a difference between the two parties? Really? You need more proof?
As much as you and I argue -and I will HAPPILY argue over the ethics of someone who appoints a Monsanto VP as senior adviser to the FDA- I have had to spell this out:
…more times than i can count to libertarian anarchist idiots who think national politics is a game of kickball, where you can always take your ball and go home, and it’s game over.
They don’t seem to grasp that it’s more like if the Giants stalking off the field in a huff while the Pats go on to score 750 points in unopposed touchdowns.
then there are the idiots who have never read a history book, yet think they want a revolution.
Fucking clowns.
where I get upset is that this is the best we can do, and he’s held up by a lot of people as some kind of fucking Messiah.
I hate it when the Ron Paul nitwits do it, and I hate it when people pretend that Obama can do no wrong (I also hate it when they pretend he can do no right).
Hi Boo!
You have argued here that Newt is helping Romney in the general by helping to define him as a moderate. If that is so, what’s so wrong with “liberals” attacking Obama from the left and thus helping to define him as a moderate?
As it stands, with no primary opponent to his left, Obama is easily defined by Republicans as the extreme leftward edge of the known political universe. If Obama wants to define himself as a centrist moderate, he needs primary opponents and others to attack him from his left
Attacking Obama from the left doesn’t mean that you don’t, in the end, support him as the lesser of too evils. However the greatest enemy Obama can have is apathy, complacency and indifference – where Democrat voters stay at home or pretend to be above or beyond the fray. Almost any engagement with Obama is better than no engagement. Loyal opposition is necessary to make progressive policies possible – to move the overton window as you suggest was required for gay rights.
The problem is that a few “moderate” Democrats have held Obama to ransom in the Senate even when “Democrats” controlled both houses. Its time the progressive caucus exercised a similar veto on moderate compromise “solutions” which merely give the appearance of doing something whilst actually making matters worse.
Nobody believes Newt could actually govern much differently to Romney if he got elected. But by defining Romney as a moderate he is redefining the centre of US politics. If only “progressives” would do the same for Obama.
And my larger point was that Newt is savaging Romney and doing him real damage, was it not? Notice how I made a distinction between how Santorum and Gingrich are attacking Romney?
You may have noticed that I’ve been critical of this administration on all the big things. With a few exceptions, like Geithner’s TARP plan that I supported, I’ve complained when other progressives have complained. I even spent a lot of energy arguing against the intervention in Libya that many progressives supported on humanitarian grounds. But I’m not in politics to fight Democrats. So my focus is on the other side. Also, I understand Congress, which too many critics do not. Who should you blame for Gitmo still being open? Hint: not Obama. Russ Feingold would be more accurate.
I agree Obama is not primarily to blame for Gitmo, even if, as commander in chief, he is ultimately responsible. What is to prevent him transferring the prisoners by executive order? (A genuine question to which I don’t know the answer).
However I agree that Obama could rarely rely on a united caucus when the going got tough. In contrast to the Republicans, Democrats rarely showed any party discipline and were allowed to indulge their individual self-interests. The US is supposed to be a 2 party system, but in reality there is only one party – the GOP. Democrats, by contrast, are a loose alliance of self-indulgent political amateurs who have no coherent vision or consistent strategy and who oppose the President at their pleasure with impunity.
Liberalism shouldn’t mean just individualism…or an alliance of convenience to be dumped when it becomes inconvenient. But what has Obama done to impose discipline? Are those “moderates” who flouted his authority going to be primaried? Is anybody (other than the right) afraid of or even respectful of the President? Trying to be the nice guy all the time just doesn’t get you any respect.
PS – have any Democrats savaged Romney in the way Gingrich has?
Even the greats have tried and failed to impose discipline.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."If the DNC were the sole source of campaign funds, there would be strict party discipline.
A lot of the moderates who flouted party discipline were defeated in 2010 and replaced with Tea Party types. Of the remaining ones, many have announced their retirement.
On you PS, not yet but expect clips from Gingrich’s hit job to reappear in the general election.
My guess is that the President is going to run against the Republican Congress and use challenger Democratic Congressional races to build his campaign. So watch which Democrats run for those 2010 Tea Party freshman seats. Also watch the campaigns against Cantor, Ryan, and some of the other players in the 2011 events in Congress.
An act of Congress forbidding him from spending any money to do it, which is something that even Bernie Sanders signed onto in a way past veto-proof vote.
A mountain of courage, that Bernie Sanders.
Maybe you can see why Obama didn’t close Gitmo now?
Does transferring prisoners from one pre-existing prison to another constitute additional expenditure? I think we are splitting hairs with the financial argument.
They didn’t ban “additional” expenditures. They banned ANY expenditures.
This happens in government all the time: bans on funding mean you can’t use a facility the government paid for, and for which the government is paying the utility bill, to do the banned action – even if that building would still be there, and the utility bill would be the same.
For instance, a ban on using government funds for political purposes means no campaign phone calls from a phone whose bill is being paid for by the government, period, even if it doesn’t make the phone bill increase.
Here.
“What is to prevent him transferring the prisoners by executive order?”
Congress passed bills forbidding him to spend any money on transferring them, or on housing them within American prisons.
They can do that. They control the power of the purse.
While I’m not sure you’re right that it’s young people that have the learning to do on this point (from what I’ve seen it’s mostly boomer-age liberals who complain the most about imagined progressive failings), you’re very right about this:
One of the things I believe very strongly is that the issues on which there’s bi-partisan consensus, the consensus is both wrong and those are the issues that can make the biggest difference. Consider:
On both, they’re wrong.
The drug war has so many side effects that are harmful to the country, from creating a permanent unemployable underclass to the violence and fear it creates from a militarized police force to the sheer cost of it to the harm in international relations from our crazed DEA efforts outside our borders.
On economic policy, economic growth shouldn’t be the objective because as it isn’t really achievable any longer due to energy constraints and the consequent limits to growth. That doesn’t mean we have to give up on increasing human well-being, just that we need better economic measures to guide our economic policy away from consumptive, energy-intensive activities.
The consensus is wrong on both issues, just as the media squelches any discussion outside of this consensus.
I should add, I wonder if this is why Carter is hated so much by politicos on both sides: Carter directly questioned and dismantled the consensus on both the drug war and economic growth/energy limits. He tried to set a different course. While he failed, I don’t know that people dislike him just for that. It was that he was right, that he knew he was right, and didn’t back down.
Nach Romney, Wir!
I’m still pissed that after we poured our guts into getting Barack Obama elected, a bunch of liberals decided to start attacking him before he could even be inaugurated.
We voted for change, not to give three failures(Geither and Summers .. and later re-appoint B-52 Ben) further chances to screw everything up.
So I was just streaming Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy online the other day, and this line struck me. It’s Gary Oldman talking about trying to turn his Soviet intelligence counterpart:
If we are to assume that this sentiment is genuinely held, then the point is objectively nonsense. For all the west’s faults, the Soviet Union was not its moral equivalent. Or even in the ballpark, really.
But it is as much the first sentence that I thought about, as the second. Perspective has to be fought for. It has to be worked to maintain. It’s all too easy to spend all your time searching out every little weakness in the system, that you lose sight of the system as a whole. And all it still has to offer.
That’s the charitable interpretation, at least. For some people, they genuinely do want things to be as shitty as their worst case scenarios and fears. They thrive and feed off conflict and broken things.
“For some people, they genuinely do want things to be as shitty as their worst case scenarios and fears. They thrive and feed off conflict and broken things.”
That is what I think of many of the articles at places like Alternet and Truthout. They let anyone with a slight grievance ramp it up to something totally outrageous. They do more harm than good to their cause much of the time. It seems that many of these people spent 8 years complaining about Bush and that is all that they knew. They never could get out of that groove, even a little bit. Some of them are Hillary people who STILL can’t move on. Even Bill has adjusted better than they have.
I can’t even count the number of times that I have read (other than at Alternet & Truthout) or heard someone of the PL or their guests say something like “Well, of course he could do (whatever it is), he is the President. That is really stupid and shows that they know nothing about how politics works or the reality of what is possible. Or the determination of the other side to stop everything possible.
And if someone who professes to be a Democrat or Progressive starts telling people (as they did in 2010) not to vote to teach them (the Dems) a lesson, I think that I will start a petition to see how many people would like to see them off the air or out of office etc. If President Obama loses this election, this country is in VERY big trouble that it may not ever be able to recover from. There is just too much insanity on the other side.
If you are interested in preventing further free-fall disintegration of the American government, sitting it out should not be your option.
However, this argument is resisted by:
The reality is that the only two names that will appear on the ballot in all 50 states in the general election for President is Barack Obama and the Republican nominee. Anyone interested in alternatives should find out how to get someone on the ballot in all 50 states in 2016, and get cracking now.
But there will likely be over 300 “third party” and independent candidates for President. If nothing else, your grandkids will tell the story about the year grandpa or grandma ran for President of the United State.
So it’s come to this in 2012. Do you want to solidify what few gains we’ve made since 2008 or do you want to feel morally pure about every single issue? This really is a personal strategic issue for the autonomous action tactic of voting. What exactly is your strategy for getting the country to where it needs to be? For too many people in 2008, it was “vote for Barack Obama and go back to living my life”. Some points in US history that might have been sufficient. But thinking that 2008 was one of those points after the 2000 election, two wars, the clawback in Congress in 2006, a financial bubble meltdown, and a drop in GDP that nearly equaled the Great Depression– thinking that 2008 was one of those years was pure illusion.
And thinking in January 2012 that there are viable alternatives to the “permagov” Presidential candidates is equally an illusion.
The battle is downticket. Let’s start having some discussions about that. Like, who has a strategy for removing Louie Gohmert from Congress? Or some of the other crazies in the House. Or how to deal with states in which incumbent Democratic governors were savaged by the budget fights and the tough decisions they made to balance their budgets? In this regard, who is going to stop Pat McCrory from becoming the governor of North Carolina? How can folks outside Wisconsin support the recall of Scott Walker, and which Democrat is actually going to have the stuff to take the governor’s office?
I very much appreciate your dedication, focus, and clarity, TarheelDem. Thanks for all your thoughtful posts (and calls to specific “doable” action).
But, when it comes to voting, when we only have two choices, you’ve got to grow up and realize there’s a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy Bill Maher
Cesca and many of the commenters on his post say it better than I can!
Even if you’re a progressive who is not enamored of this president, you have to be horrified by any of the alternatives. Remember the mid-terms when the plea from the constituents was “jobs, jobs, jobs” and those who were elected to work on just that issue took their election as a mandate to dismantle unions, deny women freedom of choice, block any bill that the president offered to spur job growth. You’ve got guys out there right now who are right in your face telling you what they intend to do on some issues, and are eeriely silent about others. I can only imagine the mandate they would claim should enough of us decide to sit this out. Not to vote for the president is the exact equivalent to a vote for the bad guys. Don’t let this happen–I promise you will regret it.