The price we pay for not consistently keeping our focus on how Congress actually works is that we get into dumb arguments about things like the proper definition and relative merits of “centrism.” I don’t really disagree with Ed Kilgore’s point about the wisdom of keeping centrism in the Democratic column and defining Republicans out of it. Rather than allowing fools like David Brooks to keep the name all to themselves, we ought to point out that he’s defending a budget plan that would upend eighty years of New Deal legislation. And Krugman shouldn’t yell at centrists. He should yell at people who are trying to shred the New Deal and call them radicals.
But this is all a distraction. What matters is the composition of Congress, the ideological overlap between the parties, and the rules of Congress. We’ve come to a point in our politics where those three factors have combined to make it almost impossible for Congress to do anything, including keeping its own doors open and paying our debts.
It hasn’t been this way for a long, long time. We used to have enough overlap in party ideology that members were free to wheel and deal. Maybe I ran for Congress, in part, to increase funding for mental health care. I might not like the Republicans’ budget for the NIH, but I’d trade my vote for a little money to study bipolar disorder or something. Or maybe I could get a bridge fixed in my district, or funding for a new spur that would reduce commuter congestion. Nowadays, you can forget about it. The GOP can’t offer me any earmarks, their budget is so radical that I can’t support any of it, and my party would freak out if I crossed the aisle anyway. Who knows, I might wind up getting primaried. And the problem is a hundred times worse on the Republican side of the aisle, where I’d probably lose my most cherished committee seat and watch the leadership actively campaign for and fund my primary opponent.
There’s no consensus anymore on what government is supposed to do. And Democratic Party members who are willing to consider the ideas of the other side are really not the type of people who believe in anything. It’s not a matter of contributing something decent to improve a lousy outcome. The House Republicans are offering a completely radical program that no elected Democrat should support or even take seriously.
Yet, because of the rules of Congress which currently require 60 senators to do anything, and the composition of Congress which is split between a GOP House and an inadequate 53-member Democratic Senate, it is simply not possible to do anything without meeting in the middle and doing whatever it takes to get the congressional Republicans to go along. The only outcomes are bad outcomes. Inaction, wherever possible, is preferable to action. Simply stated, no good law can be made.
Who is to blame for this? Not progressives. Not Democrats. Not centrists. The blame falls on conservatives. And only on conservatives. And there is no such thing as a centrist conservative. Not anymore. David Brooks is a party of one.
As for the president, like any other president, his legislative record is going to be exactly as centrist as the composition of Congress over his term(s) in office. Give him the House and 60 nominal Democrats in the Senate and he’ll give you a major health care bill. Give him 57-59 Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans and he will give you an avalanche of progressive legislation. Take away the House, most of the moderate Republicans, and reduce his Senate majority to 53? He’ll give you practically nothing. He’ll be lucky to keep our national parks open or avoid our country losing its credit rating.
But, yeah, please call him a centrist. We don’t want Mitt Romney seizing that label, that’s for sure.
Whatever. At least you’re honest and upfront about it.
The only people who care about protecting “centrism” are those that want to be called centrists. If your self-identity is so wrapped up in the need to be seen as vanilla and common sense, go nuts I say.
your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.
I notice that’s your default rejoinder whenever someone writes something you don’t like.
If you want to say that there is nothing more to read into your post than:
Ok. So be it. How novel. But in my experience, those who bother over defining what is and isn’t “the middle ground” or the “counterculture” or whatever are looking to stake their own personal claim on the positional axis. It’s only natural. I prefer the “sensible moderates” to the self-professed countercultural types, myself.
But I’ve also seen how short the shelf life national positive branding attempts have in politics. In my lifetime, Democrats get to rule only as long as white folk don’t think “the blacks are taking over!!1!” and Republicans only rule until they inevitably fuck up catastrophically enough that even the bigots can’t deny it. What chance do moderation and centrism really have up against that lunacy?
it’s my default rejoinder to people who read a headline and think they’ve understood what’s beneath it.
This is not a defense of centrism. It’s not even close to a defense of centrism. To suggest that means you didn’t get any of it.
We disagree strongly on this being a potent attack
or on why these are so:
The GOP has damn sure found its consensus: don’t provide anything to The Other. The Looming Other. Even if that means shooting ourselves in the foot in the process, after all, it’s what our corporate masters prefer…disregard that last part, heh heh.
Why’d it change from being an existential crisis to a veritable war for political survival? Numbers game. Before it was easy enough to flee the inner cities and if minorities should somehow come to power, fuck it, those places are cracked out hellholes anyway, who cares. Jesse Jackson was the most visible black movement leader and politician. The situation barely held, but it held.
The New Deal passed because it was explicitly segregated. But now? Progression dictates that its principles should apply to everyone. That’s the core principle of this nation, and it gets more broadly enforced with each congressional generation. There are black and brown and Asian and Muslim people in our workplaces, in our universities, living next door in middle class neighborhoods. There’s a black president! And white people are fucking scared. Jesus, look at the gun purchase numbers. They’re off the charts.
There’s no positive branding or ode to civility or moderation or responsibility or bygone virtue that’s gonna bring these people back onto the reservation. Nope, brute force.
We have to strip every last white woman away from the GOP that we can, until they have nothing left but the most diehard anti-abortion folks and evangelicals. Fortunately, the anti-woman GOP does love to do our work for us right now. And then we have to grind out enough 50%+1s state and nationwide to stall out the worst of the Great White Crisis until demographics seize and wreck our conventional political machinery, and corporate forces have to go back to the drawing board to find a new way to emerge and succeed (which they no doubt will, and then we’ll fight anew over that).
There is no stable Democratic majority, cycle by cycle by cycle, in the pipeline right now to rebalance Congress and make Washington work. No way of shaming the racist id back into submission either. The “shared values” were never shared. We will continue to face whiplash and chaos and a lot of regular people getting unfairly fucked over.
Think about this:
When our country was being ripped apart by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution, and the rulings of the Warren Court, our Congress still functioned quite normally.
Why?
Ideological overlap.
That simple fact prevented one party from coalescing as an opposition party and grinding the gears of government to a halt.
In the 1950s and 60s, this was a much less tolerant country, but our government functioned.
Today, we are nowhere near as divided on issues of race and war and peace, but our parties are much more divided over them.
As much as I prefer a Democratic Party that is ideologically progressive, two pure and ideologically opposed parties cannot work in our system unless we change the rules in Congress at a minimum, and the Constitution at a maximum.
The Democratic Party is now basically a progressive, center-left, and center-right party. And it still only (barely) controls one house of Congress, and it can’t dictate outcomes on that one house of Congress.
So, no, we can’t go jettisoning off members for insufficient purity. Nor should we be shocked that we have members who are not remotely progressive.
We already own the center and it isn’t enough.
This is why I say the center is irrelevant. You can’t bemoan bipartisan cooperation in a system when you have a split government and you don’t have enough votes to control even one chamber. But even when he had the House and 60 votes, we still we’re constrained by the demands of the five or six most conservative Democrats. At 57 votes or 59 or 53 or whatever, you either get bipartisan cooperation or you get nothing. The problem is not centrists. It’s not bipartisanship.
The problem is that conservatives have too much power, and that our system and rules give them even more power than they’ve earned.
Let me put this another way.
If the government is split and/or the majority in the Senate has less than 60 votes, then the centrists in the minority of the Senate will dictate the terms of all bills. And, therefore, a president must seek to win over the centrists. That is always true regardless of where the center happens to be on the ideological scale. Since this condition is almost always met, it’s stupid to complain about it. The solution isn’t to eliminate aisle-crossing. Without aisle-crossing, the government simply shuts-down.
The solutions lie in either winning big, having more ideological overlap, changing the rules, or changing the Constitution.
Right, but you might as well be telling me that water is wet.
You can’t redeem the Republican Party, you can only cull stray members of the herd and bring them over to your side.
Until business interests demand it, you can’t reforge overlap between the parties. And business wants to take one more big crack at burning its opposition, than see Congress “function.” So unless you can either lobby, sell out to, or frighten Big Business, they’ll continue to fund Republican efforts.
The 60s were more fraught on a personal level, but institutionally white supremacists and soulless corporate interests still had all kinds of tricks left in the bag. 1968-2008 should prove that in a hurry. Those were a strong 40 years for them, but it’s different now and Congress isn’t capable of dealing with a party (and a movement) in its death throes. A party without a future.
That’s where we are, and yes, that means we either have to change senate rules or wait for the GOP base to give up or die out in the face of unrelenting electoral defeats. Water is wet.
A party in its death throes would have less chance of controlling both chambers of Congress next year.
They are still a potent force that is at their high-water mark for conservatism.
And you’re still missing the point. I’m talking about what not to focus on. And you’re telling me that the discussion is obvious. If it’s that obvious, then you’re agreeing with me.
There are a whole lot of people who think the problem is Obama is trying to work with Republicans or govern to the center or be bipartisan. My point is that he doesn’t have a choice in that. That’s not the problem. It’s not the problem with his performance and it’s not the reason our government is broken. And the problem isn’t the centrists, either. It’s not Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson’s fault that we crapped out on our credit rating. They took the hard votes when they had to and fulfilled the necessary role of the centrist in our system.
The problem is the conservatism of the GOP. Period.
A party that is so non-confident in its ability to win swing state elections that it would turn to mass voter disenfranchisement is in its last throes, yes. Unless their plot works, somehow. You’re not seeing past 2012.
And I don’t know where you got me confused with a firebagger, but I’ve never in my hundred-plus comments on this site had a single word against the “centrism” of the Obama administration.
What difference does it make if he is or isn’t a centrist? What currency does that gain him with the right? His very existence is radical to them. And always will be.
So fuck it. Fuck centrism. Run for reelection on raising taxes and cutting defense and providing universal pre-K or whatever. It’s not like Mitt or the GOP are gonna come swooping in to reclaim the political space. Crazy racist parties trapped in death spirals spiral to their crazy, racist deaths.
The idiot nation refuses to accept this unpleasant truth, so electoral triage is our best short term option. Changing the senate rules would be better, but fuck if we aren’t cursed with our own southern/corporate problem here in Democratland. Plus, social security privatization and whatnot.
When our country was being ripped apart by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution, and the rulings of the Warren Court, our Congress still functioned quite normally.
I call bullshit!! And you know this as well, Boo. Congress didn’t work for anyone non-white. Or you don’t remember, reading about it at least, how Civil Rights legislation was bottled up in committee. That way, no votes needed to be taken in the full Senate. That’s why the filibuster was seldom used back then. It didn’t have to be used.
Did you really think I was saying that our Congress worked for black folks during Jim Crow. Really? You call bullshit? Really?
We can’t pay our bills right now, Calvin.
I prefer the “sensible moderates” to the self-professed countercultural types, myself.
And what do the sensible moderates ever get us? Status quo at a time when the status quo isn’t any where good enough. When there is rampant criminality among the elites and no one goes to jail.
here’s the thing Calvin. My first point is that the debate about centrists is a stupid debate. Why? Because all federal legislation is the result of consensus among the centrists or the the moderates.
With the exception of non-controversial bills that get near-unanimous support, all new laws are made by getting a few members of the opposing party to cross the aisle. And their price for that is usually to either get some concession in the bill or to get a huge amount of cash donations. More rarely, they’ll cross the aisle out of simple fear because the legislation is popular in their district or state even though it is not popular in their party.
So, for example, Bush was able to get his tax cuts only by convincing Zell Miller and one or two other Democrats to cross the aisle for him. Obama was only able to get a stimulus package by getting Specter, Snowe, and Collins to cross the aisle. His health care bill only passed because he had 60 votes, but demands made by Sens. Lincoln, Landrieu, Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and others made the bill much less ambitious that we would have liked.
But this is how Washington always works. You get progressive change when you have big majorities. Otherwise, it will not happen.
That doesn’t make this or any other president a “centrist.” The center is always shifting, but it always defines the outcome.
-sigh-
doesn’t ANYONE know how to play this game anymore?
With the exception of non-controversial bills that get near-unanimous support, all new laws are made by getting a few members of the opposing party to cross the aisle.
Sure, when Democrats like Huey Long existed, and people like Fightin’ Bob LaFollette were GOPers. But that’s not coming back. We’re moving more towards how British Parliament votes. Meaning if you belong to a party, the whole party votes one way.
No. Not when we had Huey Long and Bob LaFollette.
Right now. Right now, and forever. The only exception in my lifetime of a major bill being passed on a totally party-line vote is the Affordable Care Act.
And you’re making my point for me. Congress cannot vote like a parliament in a divided government or in one where there is no majority at all (our current U.S. Senate where 53 is not a majority, but neither is 47).
Does Canada have a divided Government? Okay, so the UK right this second is a bad idea. But the overall point remains. It might take another cycle or two, but the Blue Dogs are a dying breed. Eventually, if you are a Democrat you’ll be pro-choice. There won’t be any “pro-life” Democrats, unless you are someone like Harry Reid who won’t pull a Bart Stupak.
Calvin. Work with me. Why was Bart Stupak a pain in the ass?
Answer: because, at the time, when Democrats had a huge majority in the House, the House was pro-life.
Wake up.
Centrism isn’t an ideology. When the bulk of the country is sane, it’s common sense. When the bulk of the country is deluded, it’s “I’m with stupid.”
When the bulk of the country is recovering from a decade of delusion, it’s cowardice.
We have seen centrism become a fetish for the chattering classes. As if there is some alternative ideology there.
Presidents since George Washington have occupied the center, whether it was the natural sentiments of folks or manufactured malarkey. The strongest Presidents have moved the center toward some position different than before.
The question is not whether President Obama is going to capture the center; he has and he has broadened it in a way that pushed the GOP to the extreme. The question is where is he going to move it. What direction is he going? And how is that going to play out in the Congressional elections.
…he has and he has broadened it in a way that pushed the GOP to the extreme.
FINALLY! Finally someone admits the dems are partly responsible for “pushing the GOP to the extreme”; I wonder if anyone here cares to admit it.
Clarification: I maintain the GOP was forced to move farther right way before Obama was elected. Once the powers that be figured out how to get a comicbook doofus “conservative” like Ronald Reagan elected (he was at one time a democrat)– thanks in large part to the passage of the Civil Rights Act with the (predictable) reaction by southern and midwest states; the voters revealed their true bigot colors and switced their support to the GOP– they figured they could keep rolling along with Poppy Bush.
Bush was not supposed to lose to the “hick governor” from Arkansas in 1992, but he did and you saw the reaction by the right.
Unfortunately, Clinton and his people (Emanuel, McCauliffe, etc.) moved the democratic party to the right in order to win reelection in 1996; co-opting several planks of Gingrich’s “Contract on America” (“eliminating welfare as we know it”, getting tough on crime, etc.- the classic conservative red meat issues). In addition, Clinton dems went after corporate money like never before, further blurring the line between democrats and repuglicans. Let’s face it, it’s been downhill for actual progressives since the Clinton years.
In our kind of limited, closed political system/sham, i.e. the much touted “very clearly different political parties”, you can’t have both political parties behaving the same.
The GOP knows this, thus they moved even further to the right (to the absurd point now we’re dredging up long ago resolved, bullshit cultural issues like birth control) in order to not be “out-conservatived” by the now center-right so called democratic party.
Of course Obama seeks to “hold the center”. It’s not a concidence he brought in Clintonistas Emanuel, Summers, etc. On the financial front he has Geithner, (Summers before he departed) Bernanke- sending a comforting signal to the financial masters of the universe- that nothing much would change in that area.
Word.
The Senate Dems had 8 years to deal with the filibuster issue and chickened out each time. Whether that’s centrism, cowardice, corruption, or whatever doesn’t matter. But it’s evidence that the fault doesn’t lie completely with the GOP.
Why are the crazies as strong as they are? Mostly because their stupid agenda is so easy to put on bumper stickers and because they have a plutocrat moneyed conspiracy backing their nonstop propaganda. But I think it’s also because they are seen as standing solidly for their “principles” (which are really nothing more than corporate/plutocrat orders, but who’s paying that much attention?).
I think Obama and the rest of the Dems can be faulted for more than one instance of timidity marketed as centrism, but the reality is that it’s no longer possible to campaign for long-term goals in this country. Long-term change generally brings pain to someone, and that pain will be the focus of the media/PR exhorters even though the long-term is necessary for this society’s very survival. The current crapwave over energy policy/gas prices is only the most immediate example. So I’ve come the think that in most cases Obama has little choice but to try and win enough trust and attention that he’s enabled to pursue real policies beyond useless and dishonest slogans.
eight years?
They barely had eight months…
OK, more like 6 years. Realistically, 2 new sessions where they could have changed the rules. Too hasty of me, but 2 chances should have been enough. I do think this “centrist”/”bipartisan” mindset prevented even any serious talk about doing something about the deadlock that was obviously in the works. In that respect the Dems have been as blinded by the mythical past as the pundits.
or, you know, they are protecting Social Security and Medicare from being destroyed with less than 60 votes.
Do you think change is necessary or don’t you? If so, how do you get change when you’re always playing defense?
I’ve consistently advocated changing the rules because Congress in its current form cannot function. But I am clear-eyed about the fact that the filibuster protects our priorities in a big way and we would live to regret the loss of the filibuster. No doubt we would get the worst of it.
But, at a certain point, you have to make the government work without welshing on your debts.
So you don’t see much need for real change, apparently. We’ll just get by with tiny steps to oblivion. And how does the filibuster protect our interests any more than it protects theirs? Why would we live to regret its loss more than they would? Are you saying we’re just naturally weaker, stupider, what?
And we don’t have “lose” the filibuster. It could be modified to make it difficult enough to become as rare as it used to be. I really don’t get this impulse to defend it from the slightest change. If this were 1776 we’d have just decided the Magna Carta was good enough, forget this independence thing.
Name a government program that the Republicans like.
Agricultural and oil subsidies? Okay, we could perhaps get rid of them.
Other than that, the Republicans want to destroy, destroy, destroy. At least they say they do, and they are getting to the point that their base won’t let them yank their chains anymore.
It’s not because we’re weak or stupid. It’s because we actually want food and product safety, clean air and water, retirement security, health care for all, unemployment insurance, labor rights, workplace rights and safety, protected species, civil rights enforcement, money for job training and education, financial oversight and consumer protection, and so on. The GOP generally doesn’t, and they’d be willing to take a chainsaw to all of that if they could do it with a simple majority.
The worst we could really do is increase their taxes and wipe out some tax shelters.
Your political philosophy is poison…it creates mindless, government zombies whose primary entertainment is American Idol and Facebook…the Romans had bread and circuses…do you Progressives ever study human history? Don’t you see the patterns? Every Empire starts the same, and ends up the same…and every single time, Without exception, government deficit spending, followed by debasing the currency, is the beginnining of the end…
Do you guys and gals study history?
you are a moody one.
One minute you like my political philosophy and the next minute I am single-handedly destroying the Empire.
If I am to take you seriously, you’re concerned that America’s unique right to print its own currency is going to debase the value of our dollar and lead to invasion by Huns and Visigoths, with all the attendant loss of book learning and love of the Classics.
Perhaps you are right, Perhaps we should not have had too gigantic tax breaks in 2001 and 2003, along with two expensive wars on the other side of the planet, along with an explosion of new federal spending on prescription drugs and standardized testing in schools and homeland security departments. Maybe we should have kept commercial banks separate from investment firms. Maybe we should stopped Wall Street from destroying the home financing market in this country and blowing a 20 trillion hole in the global economy. If we had done those things, we’d be back to worrying what to do when he paid off our debt and no one could buy a U.S. treasury. Cuz, you remember that Greenspan was worried about that in 2000, right?
My political philosophy caused that problem, not the one we have now.
You’ve some good points in there…
But you have to understand the movement among certain “Rich People”…We are going to make everyone “Rich”..we know how to do it…
Speaking of circuses, do you actually expect anyone to take you seriously with rhetoric like that?
You are absolutely correct.. there is no more compromise.it’s a 50/50 nation…why?…there is no compromise between poison and health…the stark reality of our political system, where politicians buy votes by promising goodies…then, because they can’t raise taxes too high (rich jerks like me hide their money somewhere else, middle class folks vote the other party in, and poor folks riot), they print lots and lots of money, thereby impoverishing the entire society..
Your model doesn’t work…it didn’t work for Rome, and it won’t work for Washington…
You have a good point about ideological overlap. And I’ve been weary for many years about the reflex too many political commentators have for slapping a “centrist”, “liberal”, “conservative” label on everything. Vague labels make for vague ideas and discussions.
But I have a small quibble with Kilgore’s article and yours. It doesn’t seem that either of you really get Krugman’s point. He isn’t yelling at centrists. Nor is he (as Kilgore claims) calling Obama and Brooks both centrists. He is calling out the phonies who CLAIM to be centrists and support or at least give “serious consideration” to Paul Ryan’s budget. Krugman would agree with your point, “And there is no such thing as a centrist conservative.” at least with respect to the Ryan cult and the Ryan plan.