This is a weird but interesting column by Robin Marie Averbeck on why she does not consider herself a liberal. I wanted to be more sympathetic to her argument but it left me pretty much unconvinced.
Her point of departure was her attendance of Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the Washington Mall. Of course, Stewart took criticism from liberals for his speech there because it was one more example of the “both sides do it” condemnation which is epidemic in our media. In any case, Ms. Averbeck claims to have had an epiphany.
Standing in the crowd, I felt my eyebrows furrow. True, the antics of cable news conflict do nothing to contribute to the national discourse. True, most American citizens are more complex than the buffoons we rightly dismiss as “pundits.” Yet for all their shameless spectacle-making, the talking heads of the national news media do get one thing right: There are substantial, and fundamental, oppositions between Americans.
Yet if mainstream liberal outlets are your major news sources, you would never know it. Stewart himself drove this point home with his final speech, an earnest paean to looking past our differences, built on the assumption that ultimately we all share the same goals, hopes, and dreams.
I guess my first problem is that I couldn’t along with the premise that Jon Stewart was acting as a representative of liberalism or that most liberals believe that we all share the same goals, hopes, and dreams.
She continues in this vein, insisting that liberals do not believe in conflict and do not like to name their enemies, but this doesn’t strike me as true at all. What she’s right about is that liberals do not understand power. Liberals tend to be so mistrusting of power, whether it be corporate, police, political, or national, that they have trouble seeking it. They also have trouble making others trust them with powers that they seem to feel are illegitimate.
There are plenty of unelected powers in this country and in the world, and they must be contended with. Do you think a president can do anything he wants to Wall Street or the Pentagon or the CIA or the oil executives or the Silicon Valley tycoons? These powers can be bent but they won’t allow themselves to be broken. A president can’t afford to be a simple enemy of such powerful institutions. He must work with them, in some cases manage them, but he can’t just declare them the enemy.
There is certainly a place for mere citizens to critique some or all of these institutions, even to declare them rotten to the core. But they are American institutions that we want to be successful. We just want them to be successful in a way that isn’t exploitative of the rest of us. At some point, the progressive critique of America’s power institutions has to cross over from standing on the outside pointing a finger of accusation to standing on the inside and working for reforms.
When President Obama walked into the Oval Office, he inherited an entire bureaucracy, but he also took instant ownership of everything that that bureaucracy does, from the way the FBI and ATF handle gun-running at the borders to how the IRS decides who gets tax exemptions. All he can do is go to work and try to create as much positive change as these systems can bear. When he tried to close down Guantanamo, the door he opened snapped back in his face and locked. When he pushed as hard as he could to get health care reform done, the electorate took away the keys and left him neutered for the remainder of his presidency. That’s how power exerts itself to protect its interests and cover its crimes.
To me, I watched a lot of liberals fight like hell to beat the Republicans only to turn on their replacements with almost equal fury. This wasn’t purely because they didn’t get the change they wanted. It was partly dispositional. Their disposition is to be critical of the Establishment, period. It’s this anti-Establishmentarianism that has come to define liberalism, and it was hard won in the 1960’s and 1970’s. But you can’t govern a country with a counter-cultural anti-Establishment attitude and demeanor.
Our Establishment is doing little to earn our trust today, but we’re in an immeasurably better place than we were during the Bush-Cheney days, and we certainly are blessed not to governed by John McCain and Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. If liberals want a fairer society, they have to seek power and then learn to live with power’s limitations.
We can go on being counter-cultural or we can become the culture we want to see.
I’m not sure that the debate between the left and liberals is about culture. I think it is about the tendency of some liberals to pretend that mere understanding of the liberal viewpoint on issues or mere election of a candidate carrying the liberal label is insufficient, even if you have a critical mass of people who agree with the liberal viewpoint and working majorities of elected officials who advocate those liberal viewpoints.
The rift between liberals and the left is much more fundamental and has been so ever since the 18th and 19th century revolutions discovered that merchants did not have the same interests as workers although both opposed the entrenched power of inherited wealth. And it did not ease in the New Deal period. Labor conducted strikes although it was not politic for the Democratic Party and desegregated unions certainly were not politic for the Southern Democrats. The disagreement is between those who think that people power is essential and those who wish to be “practical” and trim their sails to ride just a little of the winds of money power if only to counter the gale of money power blowing the other way.
This only becomes a huge tactical issue when one is in close elections in which having a little support from the left could put a liberal in power. Far be it from consideration that a little support from liberals could put someone from the left in power. The right does not have this contradiction, Thad Cochran’s race notwithstanding.
No use getting bent out of shape by a pretty standard academic left critique of liberal political action. But what the left knows is that when the right is not a threat to liberals, both will gang up on the left. But when the left is not a threat to liberals, liberals still keep their distance. On insisting on justice related to the arrests during Occupy and even Moral Monday, liberals are MIA because they are afraid of being marginalized in the lopsided political discourse.
It is a continuing contradiction among those most dependent on people power and advocates of policies that on their surface address social problems.
It is the liberals who are going to have to stand up to the right and win before this changes. The left knows that if the assist in liberals gaining power, they will not be place in positions of power nor will their viewpoints be incorporated into policy–even if those people are capable and strategic and even if those policies are correct. Power consists in the capability of being able to persuade another of one’s position, through force of argument, structural power, or influence of money. The left is inherently limited to force of argument and asked to accept that. Even committed liberals have the same problem relative to institutions for which they supposed have the power of management or oversight or the obligation of due diligence.
It’s time to focus on that and not worry about the liberal-left divide and the rhetorical debate from either side.
It would be helpful to agree on definitions of liberal, left, and progressive in our context. otherwise, I’m pretty lost here. [we needn’t go into right hegelianism, etc as far as I’m concerned]
To understand “left” in this context, look at the topics and points of view covered by among other blogs, the one quoted in BooMan’s post-Jacobin. The folks that most Democratic candidates run away from associating with in contrast to the Republican legitimizing of the Tea Party as within acceptable discourse. The last time the left had support from within the Democratic Party was the period between 1938 and 1946, when the support of militant labor (CIO) was essential to the war effort. That alliance created the prosperity of the 1950s. The left was co-opted through fears of the Red Scare. Labor shed its militant organizers. Something similar happened to the Civil Rights Movement in 1965 and allowed some Southern Democrats to persist in the segregationist bailiwicks until they became Republicans or were replaced by Republicans. Ah, the Democratic moderation of the Scoop Jacksons and Fritz Hollingses.
Liberals in this context are those who are in one part of the alliance that arose in reaction to George W. Bush. Various movements for equality under the law, certain peace movement activists, a segment of environmentalists, civil libertarians, and those favoring Keynesian economic policies. There is a lot of New Deal and Civil Rights Movement nostalgia (indeed great moments of liberal-left alliances of necessity).
Even liberals do not totally overlap the current Democratic Party nor have liberal efforts to gain power at local levels within the party in areas in which liberalism needs a voice been successful. The establishment locally likes its sinecures as much as do the DC establishment in the Democratic Party. And too many local establishments have lost influence, if not legitimacy, with voters because of their shady dealings with the local economic movers and shakers. Consider the fate of the last two Democratic governors of North Carolina, the proximate cause of the Art Pope-Pat McCrory governorship.
The left fears co-option and being Sister Souljah’ed yet again. The liberals fear marginalization as radicals. The inside-outside the system argument is divisive and a sign that the insiders trust outsiders in general (and not just lefties) and the outsiders (for a lot of recent good reasons) struggle hard to trust insiders.
Intellectually and by commitment I have a foot in each camp and have since about the third year of the Obama Presidency.
I find that it is increasingly hard to explain the position of one of those camps to the other and to have any acknowledgement from Democratic apologists that this is a serious issue that if Democrats paid attention to it might produce a change in political mood and culture. This change is what so many have concluded was squandered in the staffing of the Obama administration, regardless of the difficulties with Congress.
Similarly in Wisconsin: the thoroughly lackluster Democratic governorship of Jim Doyle (2002-2010) is a proximate cause of the election of Scott Walker. When the Democrats ran the thoroughly lackluster mayor of Milwaukee for governor in 2010, he had a hard time whipping up any enthusiasm among the voters. When they ran him again in 2012, he still had a hard time whipping up any enthusiasm among the voters who by that time had seen two years of Walker.
On a side note, Tarheel Dem, I’ve been wondering: what is your take on the Moral Mondays movement there? The more I look at Democrats the more attractive almost any alternative to Democrats becomes, and MM looks from here like it might be an alternative. What do you think?
Moral Mondays will wind up having an electoral strategy of turning out the vote for any candidate that supports all of their positions. If a Republican wants to break majorly from the party line, they will support that candidate. Think of how likely that is to happen. So in the end, after the election is over, it will look to the hardnosed lefties like Democrats co-opted it. But the reality is more complex.
Moral Mondays is the movement whose primary purpose is to ensure the minorities are not disenfranchised through voter registration and voter ID nonsense. The main direction is simple; motivate minorities and liberals and progressives to vote in a midterm election in such numbers that they overwhelm attempts at voter suppression.
If they succeed, that will make them an independent political force of substantial numbers much like the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1970s. Those numbers and that intensity change the political culture from organized evangelical turnout dominating Southern elections.
The test of Moral Monday’s effectiveness will be in the legislatures. If they succeed in removing a lot of the crazies who came in in 2010 and rolling back Republican and Blue Dog Democratic ranks in the legislature, that will signal a turn in US political culture much like Jimmy Carter’s election as governor in 1970 signalled the fact that desegregation (or at least the end of de jure segregation) was fundamentally a settled issue for most voters. Even Strom Thurmond (as a Republican) went looking for a token black staffer after that election.
When everybody votes, progressive policies win. That is why there is so much money spent essentially to discourage people from voting by making high-conflict, dirty politics the norm.
The inside-outside the system argument is divisive and a sign that the insiders trust outsiders in general (and not just lefties) and the outsiders (for a lot of recent good reasons) struggle hard to trust insiders.
You mean the insiders don’t trust the outsiders, right?
The insiders distrust the outsiders (think Van Jones) as dangerous, impractical, or naive. The outsiders distrust the insiders as co-opted, self-serving, or willing to compromise on needed structural changes. Distrust runs both ways, and sometimes rightly so (think Rahm Emanuel).
you must mean insiders “mistrust” outsiders in general? where do you put self described progressives? also are these camps positions of individuals or so you mean also some movements orgs also representative, e.g. what about the UAW, for example, and are socio-economic strata part of the distinction you make?
i.e. wondering how defined these camps are, or are they free floating associations
There is a sense in which insiders do distrust outsiders in general in the same way that workers in businesses often see the customers of their business as a problem. Congressional staffs don’t take voter opinions seriously unless they can wedge them into constultant-provided “issue” pigeon holes.
But more generally, the distrust by outsiders comes from the fear that the outsider reforms will alter the financial situation–institutional or personal–of their situation. Strong environmentalists shift where polluter dollars go, for example. Strong partisans make it more difficult to return civil discourse as a strategy.
UAW are insiders in 2014. They are not about to go to the wall like Walter Reuther did. As a result, their members continue to lose the gains that the UAW under Reuther extracted from the industry.
Socio-economic strata defines who is an insider or outsider. The increased wealth and social status and social connections of insiders tends to co-opt if not corrupt any connection they might have with outsiders. The most extreme examples of this are people brought inside as tokens who understand that they must recite the insider line exclusively. But every environmental activist hired by the EPA, to use another example, has to prove that they are “practical” by cleansing themselves of their previous outside agendas and connections. Insiders, however, are allowed to continue conflicts of interest and insider networks without penalty. President Obama has to prove himself every day. Timothy Geithner and Eric Holder could never be challenged about their agendas and connections.
Being a bridge between outsiders and insiders is very difficult because insiders in this decade feel very threatened by the failure of their decisions and do not want to hear contrary opinions that involve long overdue major changes.
Thanks
both “liberal” and “left”, I find your dichotomizing of the two pretty, erm, “disorientating”.
This is probably related to my longstanding pet peeve with self-styled “progressives”, who were (or would have been) “liberals” until Gingrich, Rove, et al., with indisputable propaganda success, demonized “liberal” into a pejorative. Rather than mount a robust defense of the liberal principles on which this nation was founded; the liberal initiatives responsible for every significant instance of social progress in our history (against which conservatives always had to be dragged kicking and screaming . . . until, of course, it became THEIR SocSec, Medicare, etc. under threat; then what good little socialists they suddenly turn into!); and the currently thwarted liberal proposals whose enactment remains so desperately needed; the cowardly liberals who instead responded to the Rove/Gingrich(/etc.) demonization by re-labeling themselves “progressives” don’t impress me much.
Liberal, left (as in leftist), and progressive all mean different things to me. I was a child during Gingrich’s reign.
Progressive has its own problems of clarity. In the Progressive Era, it had fairly specific agendas of political reform, women suffrage, trust-busting, scientific orientation, public education, ending child labor, and good municipal governance. In the McCarthy era, “Progressive” was the euphemism for the US left that spawned SDS and some other 1960s groups as a reaction. By the rise of Gingrich, it was the euphemism for liberals. The Progressive Era principles are a more helpful reference for me when I call myself a progressive democrat. That progressivism of 100 years ago was bi-partisan or actually opposed in both parties to a bi-partisan establishment. Republicans wanted to break the machines in the big cities. Democrats wanted to break the stranglehold of finance and corporations in its farmer-labor alliance.
Part of the confusion is that the New Deal was the result of an alliance among progressive, liberal, and a small segment of the left.
Well, this bit doesn’t mesh with my own experience and recollection (and who knows, I COULD be right . . . it could happen!):
My perception is that the rise of people subscribing to “liberal” policies, principles, and proposals, but instead labeling themselves “progressives”, coincided very closely with the highly successful demonization of “liberal” by Gingrich et al.
Success that is ongoing to this day, with many actual liberals continuing to run away from the label. Polls going back at least to that time consistently show substantial majorities/pluralities supporting the liberal position across a wide range of issues, while simultaneously only 20ish% self-identify as “liberal”. I see this as an indicator of how successful the Gingrich et al. demonization campaign has been and continues to be. Rather unsurprising when even liberals are unwilling to embrace and defend actual liberalism.
Anyone who has never read Gingrich’s GOPAC memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” owes it to yourself to do so. It (in tandem with *Suskind’s “Reality-Based Community” anecdote) is a Rosetta Stone for translating what is so broken about our current politics and discourse, who it was that quite deliberately broke them, and to what self-serving purpose.
There you’ll find Gingrich sandwiching “liberal” right there between “intolerant” and “lie” in his list of “contrasting” words to “Apply . . . to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.” Note the glaring absence of any suggestion whatsoever that this application be constrained in any way by any inconvenient niceties such as whether or not there’s any slightest element of truth to the “contrast” (aka, character assassination). (The “contrast”, of course, being with the opposing list of “Optimistic Positive Governing Words” that he counsels his wingnuts to use “to help define your campaign and your vision of public service.”)
That one, of course, belongs in the annals of History not just for how wrong (like 180 degrees wrong, the max possible) Reality proved it to be, but also for the stunning outrageousness of the extreme, Reality-denying arrogance underlying it.
Which one will impress my friends more?
That was their second choice of name. The first choice, “Orgy of Self-regard”, didn’t do well in focus groups.
Somewhat off-topic here, but a little noted effect of the Stewart/Colbert was the bursting of the Glenn Beck bubble.
Beck had gotten tremendous mileage and favorable mainstream media coverage from organizing Tea Party rallies in DC. He’d spend months using his Fox News show to build turnout—turnouts that were, as pretty much anyone who’s organized or participated in a “march on Washington”, ordinary at best.
Then Stewart and Colbert turned out more than twice as many people to their faux-rally in just a few weeks. They made Beck look like what he truly was—a mediocre entertainer.
Boo, I think your assessment is spot on and insightful and generally apart and distinct from the stuff rolling out of the pundit-cy. At least that’s how I see it today and my current state of mind.
I do thnk there is a third choice to add to the two you list at the end; we can also withdrawal to where we have the greatest influence and focus on our own well being and the well being of those we love. And not just material well being but emotional and spiritual well being.
And screw the people who want to battle over power. They will eat each other in the end. Maybe that requires putting our heads in the sand or just minimizing our exposure to their evil, but for a whole lot of Americans they have given up on parties, unions, employers, government, and anything much else to care about, count on, or invest anything in. The news and their power games bore or depress too many now, except when they find their latest victim. Or so it seems.
This also happened in response to the 1960s. In 1972, Pippin opened on Broadway. In the conclusion Pippin seeks to tend his own garden.
People have given up on institutions because institutions continue to act like they don’t need people. And most people who are working are working to distraction from everything else, even their families.
Strict enforcement of the wage and hour laws would be the first step to backing out of this. Too many people are having overtime pay stolen from them because of the vagueness of the Bush reforms to overtime pay. Too many minimum wage employees are working hours off the clock, contrary to the law.
Finally, most people avoid the news and tune out even when ubiquitous TVs try to force it on them in airports, restaurants, laundromats, doctors offices, and other businesses with waiting rooms.
○ China urges IMF to give more power to emerging markets – January 2014
○ Rejecting crucial reforms, Congress is jeopardizing U.S. global leadership
In certain cases the only way to o become the desired culture is to destroy the old one.
Is something like the mockery of the ‘Green Lantern Theory of Governance’ a sign of liberals’ discomfort with power? We seems extremely fond of focusing on the limits of the possible: we storm the barriers with cries of ‘where are votes? show me the votes!’
I just don’t see any policy doing anything to improve the economic situation for anyone but the upper 20% or so. The rest just can’t compete in the globalized economy we have today. Efforts to redistribute wealth are well meaning, but are really just charity. Charity is good, but that’s all our political system can deliver. Charity for the elderly, the disabled, and the very young. As a democrat, I want to preserve that safety net, but I don’t think we will ever lift large numbers of people out of that situation. The poverty rate has been stuck at 15% since the 1960’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
What we’re left with is a government that tends to do really awful things to people. It wages unwinnable wars around the world. It invites immigration with porous borders then consigns them to exploitation by the business class because they have no legal status. It incarcerates millions in a war on drugs and locks them out of the job market forever.
It is possible to fix the awful things with effective government and we have to be on the inside to do those things. But we’re not ever going to get economic improvement for the lower 80% or address “income inequality”. It was disappointing to see the lefty pundit class go all in on income inequality… it sounds good but is impossible to achieve.
especially the ACA didn’t help at all.
and the undocumented are coming here because of porous borders?? maybe we need a set of locks
The ACA is not really an anti-poverty program. It helps improve quality of life and is insurance to keep people out of bankruptcy in case of medial problems. If you are healthy… it actually has a real cost because you are paying for insurance you don’t use. Kevin Drum made this point clear recently:
“Especially in the under-65 age group, for example, it will do little to reduce mortality. However–and this is something I can’t repeat often enough–this is not the main point of universal care anyway. The main point is to improve quality of life and reduce the life-shattering financial consequences of serious medical emergencies.”
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/07/obamacare-working-and-it-will-probably-continue-work
I don’t know what caused us to have 12 million undocumented immigrants. Maybe it wasn’t porous borders but the policy was to bring them here, employ them off the books, and then keep them down by not allowing them to become legal residents.
I always thought the issue was more properly called health care financing reform.
Of course it’s not an anti=poverty program. but it improves the financial stability of most ppl, and in the long run probably everyone except maybe the 1% who are unaffected, because of how it will improve overall health care delivery in the usa. do you know anything about rural health care delivery before and after ACA, for example? Furthermore, some ppl under 65 never had/ could afford health care, now they can and now they have health care. How many yrs will this add to average under 65 life expectancy? no way of knowing yet.
As far as the undocumented, porous borders? what does that mean? nothing. ppl come here to work, or now, they are sending their children to get them away from poverty and violence. the “borders” aren’t doing anything, they are just sitting there; it’s people, going back and forth. your image is like some kind of shipping locks and water seeking higher lower levels. it’s not water pulled by gravity, it’s people choosing to go somewhere for some reason.
Kevin Drum is wrong, he’s just not thinking it through completely (or maybe he lives in a bubble)
Care to identify specifically where Drum is (purportedly) “wrong”?
I followed the link and read his responses to Cowen, which seemed eminently reasonable and on-target to me. Where no definitive answer can yet be known, Drum’s speculations seem quite reasonable and Reality-Based.
Where’s your beef?
has already been “achieved” to a rather astounding degree of “success”.
That’s the problem.
What does an “exploitative” way “exploitate”, anyway?
Even more to the point, what does “exploitate” even mean?
Is it something one does once one has “orientated” oneself to “preventative” healthcare?
Inquiring minds want to know!
ex·ploit·ative adjective ik-ˈsplȯi-tə-tiv, ek-ˌsplȯi-
Definition of EXPLOITATIVE
: exploiting or tending to exploit; especially : unfairly or cynically using another person or group for profit or advantage <exploitative terms of employment> <an exploitative film>
— ex·ploit·ative·ly adverb
unpersuasive on 2 levels.