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.
