I’m not privy to the pre-existing crap that One Pissed Off Liberal is responding to. I don’t know who accused him of racism, although I am certain that whoever did is a moron. I know OPOL. I’ve partied with him. He’s a stand-up guy. I love that guy.
But he’s an anti-Establishmentarian. There’s nothing wrong with that. But some responsible people have to be in the Establishment. This is especially true when a Democrat is in the Oval Office. This is especially true when the right in this country has mutated so far from historical norms that most of us would welcome Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger back as our political opponents. Someone has to keep these fuckers at bay while we figure out how to deal with this malignant pathogen in our political system.
We can disagree about both tactics and strategy, and we can agree that neither party is worth a damn on a host of important issues. But you have to ignore the peril our nation is currently in to say something like this:
If a black man in the oval office is all it took to take the revolution out of your soul, you were never much of a revolutionary to begin with.
Some of us weren’t politically active until the fuckers impeached Clinton. Others waited until they stole Florida in the 2000 election. Others waited until the decision to invade Iraq, or Terri Schiavo, or Hurricane Katrina, or the economic collapse. Maybe others waited until they saw that birth certificate bullshit. Whatever it was, a whole lot of us were never really revolutionaries in the sense that we wanted to uproot the entire system. It’s more like we saw the system we thought we had, which was less than optimal but certainly functional, going rapidly to shit. Then there were others who have been on the front lines working for civil rights, and workers’ rights, and women’s rights, and gay rights, and environmentalism, who could see incremental progress on most (not all) fronts until the right just went absolutely nuts.
People need to be able to hold two distinct thoughts in their heads simultaneously. First, that the Republicans must be kept out of the White House at almost any cost. Second, that we can still work to change the rot in the system while protecting the power that we have and desperately need to keep.
If you get to the point where you think you can risk a President Ryan or Palin or McCain or Romney, then you’ve let your love of revolution turn you into a reckless high stakes gambler, and the pot is the most lethal nuclear military arsenal ever built by mankind.
It goes both ways, though. Just as you can never leave off defending what we have, you can never use the desperate need to defend to create an all-encompassing excuse for unacceptable behavior. You can’t say critics of Obama are full of white privilege and think that is an adequate defense. That’s all bullshit.
You want people to believe in government? You need a government that works and that has support. You tear it down in the name of revolution, and you’ll get a right-wing counterrevolution. Again.
That author is one of several that caused me to walk away from that site a while ago. I enjoyed my time there, but there is a dangerous myopia – and a peculiar hostility to Obama – that I finally couldn’t stand.
Ultimately, pieces like that remind me of the 2000 election, when I lived in the San Fran Bay Area and was surrounded with folks like that that told me Gore was a sellout and it was better for him to lose than to elect a democrat that wasn’t pure.
And about 100,000+ Iraqis and 5,000 American soldiers aren’t around anymore to tell us how that turned out.
It’s the minutae vs the big picture. I feel the latter is more important.
Sure, blame it on the voters and not the crappy politicians. Have you ever read BAR?
I do blame it on the voters. the 2000 election was one of the most cynical in American history. It resulted in utter disaster for this country.
What I saw around me was a profound selfishness that sacrificed decent politicians – who had the flaws that come with not being unicorns – in favor of some sort of nihilistic “we’ll show them!” mentality. And that’s still going on. We all end up paying for it in the end.
What did Gore to make people trust him? We saw what 8 years of Bill Clinton brought us. NAFTA. Welfare “reform.” Most of us know the list. And there was that whole music censorship thing he did(His wife .. but he got tagged with it) with HolyJoe. And Clinton was even going to attempt to “reform” Social Security until the Monica problem showed up. Now tell me again why anyone should have trusted Al Gore? Remember one other thing. He didn’t become the Al Gore we know today until like 2002/2003.
If I only voted for politicians I trusted I would never vote. The fact remains that Gore was the best electable candidate available, and deserved progressive support on that basis.
The late, great Molly Ivins is one of my go-to sources for wisdom and perspective on this subject. If I recall correctly, she advised that “primaries are for voting with your heart, general elections are for voting with your head” (paraphrasing).
The 2000 election wasn’t Bush v. Gore. It was Republicans v. Democrats. It was the Bush cabinet v. the cabinet Gore would have appointed. It was the hundreds of assistant undersecretaries for (fill in the blank) that Bush put in charge of running the government v. those Gore would have appointed. It’s not that Gore’s party good enough to provide incentives for progressives to vote for him. It’s that Bush’s party was (or should have been) bad enough to provide incentives for progressives to vote for Gore.
Amen. When I vote for President, I’m actually voting for the Supreme Court. A slightly left/moderate appointment is better than the lunatic a Republican will nominate.
Now, can liberals/progressives/the left coalesce around stomping the Citizens United decision? That could turn things around dramatically.
One of the things that the Occupy movement did and is continuing to do is getting local governments and state governments when it can to pass resolutions calling for an amendment that corporations are not persons and money is not speech.
That resolution has passed in many places, ironically in some places that shut down Occupy encampments brutally.
But it runs in the the roadblock at some point that the actual amendment must be passed by Congress (unless there is a Constitutional Convention, which opens up a huge can of worms, or is it snakes) and must be ratified by state legislatures.
The problem is that most folks on the left, not to mention the Democratic-oriented blogs, do not know that this campaign is going on because they are so fixated on Washington and especially on attacking or defending the President.
Uh, Gore won; so, when does the bashing of “progressives” in the 2000 election end? Hell, Jeb! stole more votes for his little bro than Nader got. Add in all the “head” voters thought they were voting for BushI and not his idiot son, Gore’s crappy campaign and horrendous VP choice, and it’s easy to see why it was close.
Love Molly Ivins but don’t find this injunction all that wise. Head and heart are required in primary voting. Bill Bradley was the far better choice in 2000.
Probably not until the last person who could vote in 2000 or has a decent recollection of what happened in 2000 is six feet under. Until then, anyone who does not toe whatever the party line is at any given time shall be demonized and demagogued. ‘Tis the sad reality.
This is why I despair. Facts, rationality, and calm assessment lose out to emotion, hysteria, prejudice, propaganda campaigns, etc. more and more. I’ve come to loathe the self-interested spin-meisters on the left as much as the right and their kneejerk choruses. They distort everything and in the process are making it more difficult to consider real and legitimate issues/problems.
In choosing the Sandy Hook massacre as the time to renew assault weapons ban/registration, the effort was probably set-back because the proposed legislation would have done nothing to prevent that tragedy from happening. The NRA got that (even though the investigators into that crime have yet to make the findings public) and were able to get that resonating with their folks.
The whole Martin/Zimmerman case has similarly been politicized. Both sides have gone off the deep end on this one.
I just see so much that is counterproductive and likely to alienate potential younger activists. In my day, it was listening to endless bickering over the 1972 election. By the early 1980s, there were plenty of other things to focus upon other than how those “dirty hippies” caused Nixon’s reelection. As a then young voter and activist, it didn’t take long to become alienated by what was to me a fairly poisonous atmosphere. Certainly made going in to work the phone banks and handle precinct walking a lot more tedious than it should have been.
Maybe it was better in other locations. All I know is that my eyes began to wander – at which point the ideological positions that I became exposed to as part of anti-apartheid and anti-nuke organizations looked far more promising and positive. I was not alone, as I recall. In a way, as long as the bickering about 2000 continues, I see history sort of repeating. The young folks upon whom the DP will depend upon in 2014 and 2016 simply do not care what happened back when their only concern was when “Spongebob” was on.
Just my two cents.
Either missed that or deleted it from memory. My recollection is that we knew it was over once the Eagleton issue surfaced. Then it was back to observing the Watergate mess very slowly unfold.
Perhaps by the mid-seventies The New Deal programs/regulations had been too successful for white Americans. Lulled them into a false sense of security and belief that they had earned everything all on their own to bother being political. OTOH, radical thought (always the basis for constructive change) was so decimated by rightwing forces in much of the world during the sixties and seventies that there was no public political space for the left. Or a combination of the two.
It’s all so sad. Occurs to me that after a lifetime of always seeming radical within circles of white folks in support of minority rights and viewpoints that what got me there is now considered racist by those who view themselves as left of center. The only acceptable perspective now is that Zimmerman is an evil racist that stalked and gunned down a great young black man and should be locked up and any doubts about that narrative is a demonstration of racism on my part. Yet, I find myself as unwilling to be manipulated by propandists today as I ever was and unable to discard facts that don’t fit that narrative. heh – weirdly enough if someone wanted to make the case that any white person that injures or kills an unarmed black kid is automatically criminally guilty and any black kid that does the same to any white person is automatically innocent as compensation for the hundreds of years of violence perpetrated on black people, that wouldn’t be less unjust than our destruction of Iraq in response to the mostly Saudi 9/11 terrorists. However, would prefer that we make it a law first.
What did Gore to make people trust him?
And looking back at the Iraq War and Great Recession: How’s that line of thought working out for you?
He didn’t become the Al Gore we know today until like 2002/2003.
No, Calvin. He’s the same guy. What you were seeing from 1993-2001 was what what Al Gore, the same Al Gore as in 2003, acts like in a position of actual responsibility.
cruzy,
A small number of people on the internet can make a big enough to look bigger, but they’re still a small number of people.
It was right in the middle of Peak Obama Is a Sellout in the summer of 2012 when the Netroots Nation poll – a poll of people so committed to the liberal netroots that they actually attended Daily Kos’ convention – gave Barack Obama an 80% approval rating.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/Netroots-Nation-Straw-Poll-Obama-206608-1.html
IOW, people like OPOL don’t even speak for left-wing activists who frequent Daily Kos.
Er, summer of 2011.
You mean keeping those fuckers at bay by expanding the drone/bomb attacks, charging more whistleblowers under a 1918 law than all previous Presidents combined, continuing the secret real and personal property and software build-out of the global communications spy operations, and the President’s secret kill list?
If the GOP hadn’t created its own wing of crazies to battle Democrats, the Democratic Party would have been smart to create it for them. It’s wonderful to keep the hoi polloi occupied and feeling engaged in the whole process as the looting by the 1% and the loss of civil liberties continue.
Do you care more about the drone attacks than your own reproductive choice? Just curious.
because you really have to choose here. Either you go with Obama’s more limited drone program, or you go with an expanded GOP drone program, war with Iran, an end to student loans, destruction of medicare, etc, etc, etc, and you give up all your basic reproductive rights.
That’s what filling out that bubble on election day means at this point. As I say above, big picture.
When you fill in the bubble, you must ‘go’ for the less-bad of two choices. That doesn’t mean that you lose the ability to try to make your choice better. I’d say that by filling in that bubble you are taking on the responsibility to do exactly that, in a way that you aren’t when the other candidate wins.
That’s just basic. It’s not a case of, ‘oh, you oppose transvaginal probes? Then you are obliged to celebrate the killing of 12 innocent boys collecting firewood.’
–sigh– reminiscent of “America, love it or leave it.
First, that’s not a real choice that the citizens of this country have been asked to make.
Second, “reproductive choice” is taking more and more extreme hits since 2009; so, we’re getting drones and vaginal probes.
Third, whether “reproductive choice” stands or falls is now dependent on those “hits” and if any state can get it to the SCOTUS quickly enough to take advantage of the current split.
Second, “reproductive choice” is taking more and more extreme hits since 2009; so, we’re getting drones and vaginal probes.
We’re getting vaginal probes in states controlled by Republicans. We are getting none of them in states controlled by Democrats.
Third, whether “reproductive choice” stands or falls is now dependent on those “hits” and if any state can get it to the SCOTUS quickly enough to take advantage of the current split.
A split between the Democratic-appointed justices and the Republican-appointed ones. A split that will go away based on whether the next President is a Democrat or a Republican.
Sigh all you want, but these are the worse arguments about the irrelevancy of party I’ve ever seen.
No progress will ever be made this way. Instead we’ll just go backwards more slowly. Oh wait, come to think of it, that’s what we’re doing.
Well, Marie2, if we’re talking about foreign policy, keeping these fuckers at bay includes pulling hundreds of thousands of troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and successfully resisting putting much more major military operations in Libya, Syria and many other countries. Powerful Republican AND Democratic leaders and parts of the GOP and Dem electoral bases have pushed for us to use our military more aggressively than Obama has.
You, OPOL, and many other liberals seem to give our President no credit at all for that and many other Obama foreign policies which are victories for our point of view. It’s the absolutism that offends this liberal. Obama is NOT “just like Bush” or “worse than Bush”, despite the policy areas you and I agree are offensive. You don’t use those phrases in your statement here, but the inference is there.
Are the issues you listed here valid, and is the Obama Administration’s execution of these policies maddening and counterproductive? Hell to the yes! It is important for us to withdraw our support for his Administration’s use of the policies you list. But it’s also worthwhile to note the policies the President is responsible for and the policies he does not control. For example, fair observers would concede that Obama’s desire to close Guantanamo was not stopped by a change of mind on his part, but by constraints placed on him by Congress and others.
The President has proposed many policies to claw back the acceleration of economic inequality, and his first Congress achieved many victories in this area, another thing some liberals are unwilling to recognize. Obama’s Justice Department has done more to punish financial institutions and other consumer abusers than any JD in many, many decades. That these punishments appear pathetically insufficient to change the behaviors of big banks and investment market players does not change the fact that the Justice Department and other regulatory agencies have moved our views forward, in sharp contrast to the escalating losses we suffered in regulatory laws and agency enforcements under both Republican and Democratic Presidencies in recent decades. And now we have the CPFB, which reaches all the way down to the payday lender level in order to protect the lower and middle classes.
The proposal that Barack and Congressional Democrats are facilitating “the looting by the 1% and the loss of civil liberties” offends me due to its unwillingness to see things as they really are. I’d love to hear a deeper response to what I see as the heart of Booman’s post:
“People need to be able to hold two distinct thoughts in their heads simultaneously. First, that the Republicans must be kept out of the White House at almost any cost. Second, that we can still work to change the rot in the system while protecting the power that we have and desperately need to keep.
If you get to the point where you think you can risk a President Ryan or Palin or McCain or Romney, then you’ve let your love of revolution turn you into a reckless high stakes gambler, and the pot is the most lethal nuclear military arsenal ever built by mankind.”
The Establishment needs to be replaced by spontaneously-emerging waves of committed citizens dedicated to public service on a voluntary basis.
Actually, scratch that, because if they’re citizens, they’re citizens of something, so they’ve already been fatally tainted by participation in a nation-state.
The Establishment needs to be replaced by something… Give me a second, I’ll go work something out.
Or Arthur Gilroy will fill in the gaps….
Meh.
DK has been boring and unreadable for years.
And even at their height they were impotent.
For a long time I’ve felt that third-party candidates were the plutocrats’ way of throwing elections for whatever purposes. I think Anderson was a way to guarantee Carter’s demise, although in the end Reagan didn’t need the help. The October Surprise did the trick. I’m pretty sure Perot was there to ensure that Bush I didn’t return to office because of the pile of crap that would otherwise have been investigated. Clinton still delivered most of what was on the agenda. And Nader was hanging around to get Bush II back in.
Bush was the savior of the people and Clinton the evil pawn of big business? Wow! That’s crazy.
That statement says nothing at all about President Obama and everything about a certain group of progressives who bristle at any criticism of the Democratic establishment.
One cannot however keep two disjointed thoughts in one’s head simultaneously. They must be woven into a strategy that acknowledges both. That is what has been missing, and I have asserted since the Occupy movement began that that strategy has to do with changing the political culture and means of political communications. What I advocate flies in the face of the well-heeled communication consultants and political strategist who seek to control one way communication out and to gather communications about voter preferences without talking to any real people. It is a mindset of total political control that originated in the Reagan GOP and has spread to both parties.
But we have to start acknowledging that Rand Beers at DHS or someone above him decided to facilitate the coordinated repression of the Occupy movement in 30-40 cities over the period of six weeks. And that repression was done brutally. And it was done to defend corporate America. And that peaceful anti-Wall Street, racial justice, environmental, and animal rights protesters and activists have been classified and prosecuted as terrorists with the acquiescence of the Obama administration. And that the Department of Justice continues to assert state secret privileges in order to prevent determination of the Constitutionality of warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, the detention of prisoners in Guantanamo, torture, indefinite detention of American citizens, and assassination of American citizens.
There are indeed some things that the executive departments could do without the action of Congress to move in a more progressive direction toward accountability on all of these issues. The same can be said of the disposition of Edward Snowden. US behavior with regard to President Morales and subsequent denial of asylum is a radical break with past US precedents.
You fail to deal with the building pressures in the public and you get a right-wing counter-revolution without the revolution. The blade cuts both ways.
And a lot of use with one foot in and one foot out are not complacent with the default direction this handbasket is going.
But we have to start acknowledging that Rand Beers at DHS or someone above him decided to facilitate the coordinated repression of the Occupy movement in 30-40 cities over the period of six weeks.
No, we really don’t.
This determination to cling to repeatedly-falsified conspiracy theories should make one anathema in the reality-based community.
Unfortunately, there are FOIA’d documents that trace who called for (Chicago police commissioner), who coordinated (DHS/DOJ-funded Police Executives Research Forum), who attended (DHS Federal Protective Services under Rand Beers and FBI), who who orchestrated the shutdowns (DHS Regional Fusion Centers).
If you rely on the established and approved official media, you will never see these reports.
If the White House did not have a view of what was going down and some feedback to the federal agencies involved, it is either because they tacitly approved, wanted plausible denial, were out of the loop, or were politically scared to stop it.
You have other options?
There are plenty of FOIAed documents out there, and plenty of claims are made about them.
Unfortunately for you, the claims consistently evaporate upon even cursory inspection, and the people pushing the claims shove them down the memory hole three days later, only to turn up again six weeks later with yet another FOIA nothing burger that they flog for three days and then shove down the memory hole.
You really have to be a true believer to cling to Naomi (Crying) Wolfe’s narrative at this point.
I don’t read Naomi Wolfe. Surprised that you do.
If you rely on the established and approved official media, you will never see these reports.
It’s certainly true that the “established and approved official media,” whatever that is, didn’t report on the claims that the DHS was assassinating Occupy leaders. Do you remember that one? The one that was based on a memo warning local police about a right-wing nut that was threatening to assassinate Occupy leaders?
Or did that go down the memory hole, too?
The accusation in that one was that the authorities failed to notify Occupy of this threat and instead, against evidence, treated Occupy as a threat.
I have ignored the reports alleging DHS assassination plots, although under the NDAA there is legal authority likely for the military to do so. And only the President’s pledge that he won’t. And Congress defeated an amendment to clarify this.
The accusation in that one was that the authorities failed to notify Occupy of this threat and instead, against evidence, treated Occupy as a threat.
Don’t bullshit me. I remember when that particular media dump came out, and that was NOT the accusation. You’re making that up in hindsight to cover up the embarrassing paranoia of the actual story.
Anyway, nice retreat into vagueness with the use of “authorities.” The question here is whether the response of local police was directed or coordinated by the feds, and what the memo shows is that the feds were warning the local police about a threat to – not from, to – Occupy leaders. If the local police ignored that warning, that serves to both discredit your theory about the feds controlling things, and put the blame at the feet of the local police – so you use the word “authorities” to try to confuse the issue.
although under the NDAA there is legal authority likely for the military to do so.
Jesus effing Christ.
Links?
Yeah, right.
The very last thing Tarheel wants anyone to do is actually read the documents.
ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-national-security/foia-documents-show-fbi-was-watching-occupy-p
rotestors-some-docs
Jason Leopold: DHS Turns Over Occupy Wall Street Documents to Truthout
Dave Lindorff, WhoWhatWhy: FBI Document: “[DELETED] Plots to Kill Occupy Leaders If Needed Not going to stand by the reporting in the article but it links to an image of the document about the threat report. Occupy folks are wondering why the name of the organization was deleted.
Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing: Report: FOIA’d FBI documents point to secret, nationwide Occupy surveillance
I encourage everyone to click through to the actual documents, instead of just accepting someone’s characterization of them.
I’m doing that right now. I always appreciate your pushback, joe, but:
The ACLU: “In other words, to the FBI, political protests about economic policy pose an unspecified threat to national security.”
The DHS involvement: “DHS’s early monitoring of OWS also included the preparation and distribution of an intelligence report on the movement. The report was cited in an email distributed internally by the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), an intelligence sharing partnership between the FBI, DHS and the private sector. That report advised DHS officials to pay close attention to any threats associated with the growth of the Occupy movement.”
However, “the document, referred to as an intelligence “product,” was apparently unauthorized and quickly scrubbed from the agency’s internal intelligence sharing database because of concerns that it rose to the level of unconstitutional surveillance, according to internal emails.”
The ‘quickly scrubbed’ paragraph is interesting. I suppose we will believe that or otherwise, as however we’re inclined. However, it is true that the DHS did issue a report about intel-sharing between the DHS, FBI, and THE PRIVATE SECTOR at some point.
And the boingboing link, which seems pretty evenhanded: “Violent crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street in cities around the US may have been coordinated between local law enforcement, the federal government, and banks, even before protests began, according to a trove of documents requested by The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) under the Freedom of Information Act.”
‘May have been.’
But still. This is some extremely borderline shit, even if we take all the disavowals at face value, which I’m not all that inclined to do, personally.
Go look the the PDF FOIA response yourself, beyond the Boing Boing or ACLU or other commentary before you decide.
Once again, I would suggest that you look at the documents themselves, not accept someone’s spin about what they say.
First, acting as if ‘you’re racist’ or ‘you’re full of white privilege’ is an adequate defense against political criticism is, as you say, bullshit.
Second, getting all worked up when someone tells you that you’re racist or full of white privilege is also bullshit.
Third, the biggie: I’d love to hear, Boo (and everyone else, for that matter), about how (in your wildest dreams) you’d fix the system.
Mandatory voting? Campaign finance reform? Repeal the 17th amendment? I mean, clearly you wouldn’t uproot the whole system. But which systemic changes would you make to not only clear out the rot, but make the system more than ‘functional,’ and closer to ‘optimal?’
Some things are going as well as could be expected, like the expansion of gay rights.
Others are going disastrously slowly, like addressing climate change.
If I could fix one thing, it would be to regain a liberal majority on the Supreme Court.
That means, as Al Davis used to say, “Just win, Baby.”
From that we can fix Citizens United and actually get progressive reforms to stick.
The second biggest thing I’d like to see is a settlement of the Palestinian question which would free up our foreign policy to be immensely more sane and popular. And that would allow us the breathing room we need to think about rolling back the security state a bit.
The third thing I’d like to see is more states adopting a California style of elections with non-gerrymandered districts and no-party primaries.
If we can get those three things, we’ll be on the way to righting the ship.
The second biggest thing I’d like to see is a settlement of the Palestinian question …
How would you accomplish that?
I’d see what John Kerry can do and support his efforts.
He only does what Obama wants him to do. Here is the better question. How are you going to get Netanyahu to stop building settlements?
Possibly like this?
http://gulftoday.ae/portal/221d1f56-c391-4be0-b5ac-0d3db10153ca.aspx
We need to find a way to address the very real and growing problem of economic inequality – I actually think that is is job 1 and if we don’t fix it we probably lose the other fights as a consequence.
It’s actually NOT job number one for a very simple reason. There are a number of steps we need to make before that is possible.
It’s like making an ice cream sundae. You have to scoop before you can place the cherry.
If you’re ever casting about for something to write, I can guarantee that I’d end up bookmarking “BooMan’s Twelve Step Program,” or whatever, for all those steps in the proper order.
Been growing for four decades now. (The minimum wage peaked in 1968) As wealth is cumulative, wealth inequality has been growing even faster. That begins to explain why we’ve also been losing all the other fights which only become that much harder as some people are waking up to the fact that “middle class” is shrinking. But everybody can have a creepy little go-anywhere gizmo that lets them instantly and continuously connect to their thousand best friends; so, life is good.
BooMan, I believe that it arose out of the Ask Me Anything post that kos had up yesterday. He was asked about the NSA surveillance.
I don’t give a shit (183+ / 0-)
Seriously, I just don’t care.
NSA spying is bad! So is stop and frisk. So is splitting up families by deporting children to countries they’ve never been to and don’t speak the language. So is harassing American muslims.
Government overreach is bad. But to act like having the government track who you call is the height of government abuse is a very white privileged view of the privacy issue.
But as for Greenwald and Snowden? Seriously, I don’t give two shits.
by kos on Fri Jul 19, 2013 at 12:40:39 PM PDT
[ Parent ]
That explains the white privilege part of it, but it doesn’t appear that Kos leveled any accusation of racism.
Oh, you know how it is. It’s the same game the right-wingers play: If anyone brings up race in any way, you start shrieking, “HOW DARE YOU CALL ME A RACIST? SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE BLACK!”
The diary by OPOL was pretty much all trash. When Markos said:
A lot of people over there heard
In other words they didn’t understand what the word “height” meant. Or something…
(NSA concerns are also not at the top of my political concerns although they are in the top 10-20.)
Most of OPOL’s diatribe reads to me like a person with two problems:
but I don’t have much in common with him in some things.
Obama was not a revolutionary. He was a center-left politician. On economics he leaned very much to the center, on social issues he probably leans a little more to the left. On FP he leans a little left, but I think people are right to be disappointed in the degree to which he has kept in place the Bush anti-terror policies. Obama is not a believer in the magic of the “movement” which will come and on the wings of enormous popular support break down all resistance. I am not either. I know some history – the example liberals should seek to emulate is the path conservatives took from the Goldwater disaster to the Reagan victory. That is the only way to power I can see. It took 16 years for the right to get power – and there were many reversals along the way.
I am not a believer in movement politics. They are. You can have a reasonable argument about the tactics, but to some degree the argument winds up being driven by ideology.
I am not as left wing as opol – and my politics are informed by that.
I think we’re using ‘revolutionary’ when we should be using ‘transformative,’ as it’s less judge-y.
I guess what I’m interested in is the institutions of democracy … or of not-quite-democracy. I mean, you’re sort of right that it took the right 16 years to get in power, but how much of that is retrospect? Did the clock start ticking for us under Obama? Clinton? The 50 state strategy?
And if you look from Goldwater to Reagan … well, I’m pretty weak on that period. But does that mean we need to start, and lose, with a Goldwater? Who would be the equivalent? Alan Grayson? Bernie Sanders? Would we be willing to start there, with a tremendous leftie failure? I doubt it. One of the differences between the left and right seems to be that we tend to despise those who are farther to the left than us, while they see them as pure exemplars …
I’m not even sure that we can produce someone as left as Goldwater was right. We’d need someone who was as devoted to a New New Deal as Goldwater was to dismantling the old one, no?
What I’ve never understood, frankly, is the ‘way to power’ from FDR to FDR. How did the New Deal happen? It beggars my imagination. I kinda wonder if the Goldwater-Reagan thing is fighting the last battle. (Not that emulating FDR is any more forward-looking, of course …)
If you’re interested, Rick Pearlstein’s books, “Before the Storm” and “Nixonland” offer compelling, readable accounts of 1) how the Republican Party got from Eisenhower to Goldwater, and 2) how the country went from giving 60% of its votes to Johnson in 1964 to 60% for Nixon eight years later.
As for the New Deal? 1) It was built on innovations tested out by progressives who held power in state governments in the teens and 1920s. 2) It came on the heels of an utterly disastrous 3+ years of Republican rule following the October 1929 crash. 3) It was full of compromises and half-steps (e.g., the NLRA still doesn’t cover farm and domestic workers because southern Democrats in the 1930s weren’t about to give labor rights to Negroes).
Many thanks for the recommendations. I’ve had Pearlstein’s books on my ‘really should read but who has the time?’ list forever. Maybe I’ll finally bump them up.
As for the New Deal, I’m still baffled. I mean, can you imagine us now creating the Securities Act, Social Security, the minimum wage, and the national labor board, the WPA all in under a decade? And this was in in the ’30s, which I’m reliably informed wasn’t actually a time of political and cultural tolerance. I’m not convinced we’d get enough states to give women the right to vote, these days.
I don’t know. I can’t tell if it’s down to structural changes in our politics, cultural changes from generations of complacency, global political changes, all three, something else. Maybe I’m wrong, and there were thriving pockets of progressivism in the states, but it seems to me like we were in a much worse place (not just re. race and gender and such, but in terms of wealth and power, robber barons, Pinkertons, political hegemony) and the New Deal transformed the country (slowly but surely–and in many ways not all that slowly) whereas now it’s 80 years later, we’re so much more liberal culturally, and yet I can’t even imagine a liberal administration doing 50% of the New Deal, even taking into account the compromises and half-steps. The closest we’ve come is Obamacare, which is more like … what? 10% of the New Deal, with all the compromises and half-steps? Is that too generous? And this is after the New Deal was a huge national triumph.
Here’s another recommendation for your reading list: Michael Grunwald’s “The New, New Deal” which is about the Recovery Act, what a BFD it really was, and how the Washington media almost completely missed the story (when they weren’t getting it wrong). For example, in constant dollars, the Recovery Act was more than 50% bigger than the entire New Deal. http://masscommons.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/the-new-new-deal-the-hidden-story-of-change-in-the-obama
-era/
On the flip side, I hear Ira Katznelson’s “Fear Itself” does a good job of examining the racist structures embedded in the New Deal.
We can debate how significant the Affordable Care Act, but one way to think of it is as the capstone of a century long effort to build a social welfare state—starting in the Progressive Era, continuing through the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the Great Society.
was not a conservative or much beloved on the right. Reagan opposed him in ’68. The right made their piece with Nixon, but he was never theirs.
Nixon won in ’72 because he ended the war, and because the Democrats nominated their own Goldwater.
And here I thought the Vietnam War (at least, the US involvement in it) ended in the Ford administration….
We can debate how “conservative” Nixon was, but between Nixon and Wallace in ’68, there’s your “new Republican majority”.
The US-Vietnam peace pact was signed on Jan 27, 1973. Well before that, though, it was clear the US was getting out. The number of US troops went down substantially in ’72, and there was little doubt that on election day in ’72 that all US forces would be out shortly.
The US supported South Vietnam after the pact, but not with boots on the ground – which was what mattered to the US>
You really miss, though, the significance of the Reagan-Ford primary in ’76 and what it meant.
Thanks for the response. I’m not sure how you know I miss “the significance of the Reagan-Ford primary in ’76” since we haven’t discussed it yet in this thread, but I’ll play along.
Is the significance of the ’76 Reagan-Ford primary that the party realignment that began with Goldwater’s race in ’64 and continued with Nixon’s two victories kept proceeding (on its way to, say, Reagan’s ’84 blowout victory, the Gingrich Revolution and today’s tea party-dominated Republican party)?
as a proxy for Goldwater – but Goldwater won the nomination.
It is really important to understand Reagan’s ascension, and that it came from a state house.
Sometimes it’s hard to not take stuff like this personally, even though I really ought to know better, because I’m never going to be a revolutionary. It’s just not who I am. I may be “principled” and a “leftie” but those are relative terms like “Scotsman” and for some Scotsmen I will probably never be wearing the right kilt. I always assumed that when the revolution comes, I’ll be thrown up against the wall eventually, if not immediately:
I’ve just become really turned-off by the judgmentalism on all sides of every argument. Nobody listens. Everyone thinks they have the answer and that anyone who disagrees is the bastard spawn of Hitler and Satan.
Fuck that noise. I’m gonna watch Game of Thrones and listen to some baseball on the radio and make some music with my yuppie friends and write another vanity pulp book and if anyone derides that as caving to the bread and circus mentality I will write them off and tune out even further.
I’ve finally become that thing that I used to hate (and judge), 10 years ago: the person who pays attention to politics for five minutes a year. I’ve finally become that, and I’m fine with it.
You’re fine with it. I’m not. To pay no attention to politics does not logically follow from simply not being a revolutionary. I’m not a revolutionary but I pay a lot of attention to politics.
If your “revolution” consists of saying things on the internet, you’re not a revolutionary. You’re a poseur.
OPOL is one of those left-wing ANSWER types who thought that the entire political left was with him when we all joined together to oppose the Iraq War, and can only conclude that he’s outnumbered better than 3:1 on drones by self-proclaimed liberal Democrats because they all changed their position.
The fact is that people who think like him were a fringe of a wing of a segment of that coalition.
Nice stereotyping job there.
The truth hurts.
Without reading any comments here, or the 1421 comments on OPOL’s DK post, I will say:
OPOL is stand up. We may vary in degrees of agreement or disagreement, but I would never, never, never think he was not completely honest or righteous, for that matter.
OPOL is the farthest thing from a racist that exists. Period.
I never thought ill of OPOL, but he is begging for trouble by writing a diary on sensitive topics without any reference to the initial comment he is responding too. It isn’t until one of the comments that it becomes clear.
Secondly, he misinterpreted the comment he is responding to.
Stuff happens. Even the best of us can write badly from time to time. Context is everything. Unfortuately sometimes people write diaries based on the DK controversy du jour as if every reader has had the 3 hours per day needed to be familiar with all the background.
I was camping for the weekend, and so don’t have the background necessary to speak to OPOL’s point. But I will say this–I am not a revolutionary. I don’t WANT a revolution. The entire point of participating in politics, for me, is to improve the chances that revolution will not be necessary. I know we may reach a point where it is unavoidable, but that would be a failure for all of us who just want a safe and peaceful life for our children. For ALL of our children.