Harper's piece on "The Vanishing Liberal."

Frequent Harper's contributor Kevin Baker—who, according to his byline, is actually a novelist—has a couple of great things to say in an essay in the magazine's April issue (which non-subscribers like Your Humble Blogger will simply have to go out and buy in order to read). The essay's subtitle—"How the left learned to be helpless."—is somewhat misleading, or in any event insufficiently specific. Let's face it, the contention that the left is helpless can in and of itself be said to be controversial only in the sense that it assumes that the left exists. 

What's important about Baker's argument as regards this helplessness is the comparison he posits between today's thoroughgoingly lost and disillusioned left—a group among which I suppose most normal (or even semi-normal) people under the age of 40 must by definition count ourselves—and its intellectual and spiritual forbears in American history: the Populist and and the Progressive movements. Those movements, for all of their flaws, had gravitas. Vitality. Rocks. You get the picture.

It should not be surprising that contemporary left/liberalism/whatever pales in comparison to those often quite radical historical movements. But what's nice is that Baker's piece offers more than the usual woe-is-us routine.

(Not that it's bad to say "woe is us." It's actually necessary for us to say it. However, the usual plodding, overlong and doom-and-gloom-laden fare does tend to get annoying. For example, see the final rant that now-former Harper's Editor-in-Chief Roger Hodge contributed to the magazine before he was—shockingly, and in an ominous sign for the mag's future, as Hodge was an intelligent and ballsy editor—sacked.)

Instead of simply throwing up his hands in despair (although he does do that), Baker threads together a political-historical narrative that serves as a call for genuine grassroots action of an order that we've not seen in this country in generations. He sets the scene by lamenting the fact that President Barack Obama,

[o]ne of the most charismatic politicians of his time, a man who was able to raise the most money and draw the biggest crowds in American political history has apparently decided that his new job is to fluff up the generals and bankers and politicians who not very long ago were in panicked disarray. Armchair psychologists from the Maureen Dowd school of political commentary like to analyze this conversion in terms of the elusive personality of Obama himself. Others prefer to dwell on the surprising ineptitude of his administration. And some simply accept his about-face in terms of the political exigencies of an essentially conservative nation, concluding wistfully that Obama is confronted by so many barriers to change—Republican obstructionism, the treachery of this or that Democratic senator, the nature of the Constitution itself—that the country is now ungovernable.

All of which may be true. But it only skims the surface of a greater tidal shift, one that has little to do with Obama himself and in fact has inundated the whole of our democratic process. This shift, which is subtle and has been many years in the making, might best be understood by considering a design underlying many of the interrogation techniques we employ at the (still-unclosed) prison at Guantánamo or at the black sites we still maintain, wherever they are. That is, bringing about the state known as learned helplessness.

The expression dates from a famous set of experiments by Martin Seligman some forty years ago, in which he found that dogs exposed to repeated and seemingly random electric shocks eventually stopped trying to escape those shocks, even when they could very easily do so. This insight gave rise to “no touch” torture, pioneered in large part by the CIA, whose efforts to “break” prisoners involved all manner of techniques, from the unsavory to the absurd, such as depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, bombarding them with ear-splitting noises, exposing them to extreme heat and cold, shackling them in “stress positions,” tying bras to their heads, making them bark like dogs, and waterboarding them. There is no evidence that such practices enhance the odds that prisoners will provide more useful information to interrogators. It is well established, though, that they will make prisoners docile, and so the techniques remain popular.

For decades now, as our public discourse in general has become more scattered, random, and irrational, Republicans—funded by corporate and other elites in the private sector—have stunned Democrats with absurdist attacks that have proved to be effective at garnering votes and, more important in the long term, at hampering Democrats even when they hold the majority. Democrats have been reduced to a state of psychological helplessness, one in which any political obstacles—ranging from the prevarications of stalking horses like Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, to the plaintive cries of the tea-baggers out in the streets, to the sterner demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Big Pharma—are transformed into insurmountable organic obstacles.

We have learned to be helpless. And in this state of political depression, it no longer matters how many elections liberals win for the Democrats, or how badly Republican, right-wing policies fail or how much damage they do to the country or the world. There is simply no way to do anything differently.

Such hapless fatalism is, of course, in direct opposition to every tenet of American liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human agency is still possible in the modern world—that democratic action can make a difference when ranged against vast, impersonal forces and supposedly immutable “laws” of human society. Liberalism’s antecedents lie in one nineteenth-century rebellion after another—against laissez-faire capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, Social Darwinism, and other efforts to transmute political dispositions into irrefutable “social science.” American voters of the time were regularly assured by authoritative voices that “hard money” was an indispensable economic principle; that women, people of color, and many varieties of European immigrant were inherently inferior; that any attempts to regulate the “natural” workings of the economy, even private charity, would thwart human progress because they interfered with the culling of those who, in Herbert Spencer’s description, were not “sufficiently complete to live.

[...]

And so we arrive at the present moment, in which the people are not asked to do anything. The fine words and able presentation of Obama, whether delivered at West Point or on Wall Street or in the well of the House of Representatives, obscure the fact that they are subtle parodies of a century of liberal argument. Whereas the Populists’ soapbox lecturers or the Progressives’ magazine exposés or FDR in his radio “fireside chats” explained the way of the world to the people and argued for why and how that way must change, Obama—like most Democratic leaders—concedes that the way of the world is wrong but tells us why it must stay that way because, some time in the past, powerful interests decreed it so.

[...]

Now, to be sure, there are problems with Baker's narrative—especially as regards sympathies within some manifestations of historical Progressivism itself toward Social Darwinism and other 'social scientistic' gobbledygook that he ignores completely—but no matter. It's worth a read. And one of its themes—the notion that human beings can and/or should always work to improve the world in which we live, to make it more fair and just, etc.—is a very interesting one about which I intend to say more in the near future. Specifically, I think there are some important details of this Enlightenment spirit that a rejuvenated left-populism needs to get right intellectually and rhetorically.

Glenn Greenwald: Don't kid yourself; this is the bill Obama wanted all along.

Although I have stated that, lousy as it is, I would prefer that the Senate bill pass -- and although I this is still my position -- I must confess that I have begun to feel increasingly icky about what the bill has lately become. So it goes.

It's an awfully difficult time not to be extremely frustrated by the seeming impotence of the Democratic Party as well as disappointed with Obama. I, for one, never lost sight of the fact that the president is a centrist and a pragmatist and that his attachment to various financial and corporate paymasters is inextricable. It's just that, somehow, I must not have remembered just how far right the putative "center" has become in our corporatist nation state. It's not pretty.

But, more than that, I think I had the feeling that Obama would be able to pull off his role -- precarious and self-contradictory though it may be by definition -- with a bit more...I don't know...panache? I mean, in moments at which he looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests, he really looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests. I'm led to wonder why that is. I think it's because of the kinds of posturing that Obama has to do in order to throw bones to the 'progressive' left wing base, while simultaneously keeping the insurance and pharmacological industries happy.

And, as regards this very posturing in application to the matter of a "public option," it looks as if Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald has got Obama's number:

[C]ontrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it.  From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).  Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it.  The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse. As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage.  Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists."  Right.  The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives.  The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.

Greenwald praises Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold for pointing this out:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Seems convincing to me, and if it's true, it isn't all that surprising. But it's still dismaying to see how hamfistedly the Obama administration seems to be in dealing with this stuff. What a mess.....

As matters stand, I still think the bill in its present decimated form is better than no bill and here's why: In almost all of the complaints from the so-called 'progressive' left about this bill, I have not heard a single serious reference to the impact of this law upon poor people. Where are the anti-poverty advocates, and why shouldn't a serious discussion of the problems with his bill include a discussion of poverty? Almost all of the criticism has to do with middle-class concerns and middle-class problems.

Doesn't this bill still help people who can't currently afford ANY health insurance, and shouldn't that be the main priority? Please, if anyone knows more about this angle, fill me in. Nobody seems to be talking about it.

Ron Paul in conversation with Jon Stewart... ...prompts the question: Why can't progressives & libertarians forge a tactical alliance?

Why do I seem to be getting a boner over Ron Paul?

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It's not just, I don't think, that he seems intellectually honest. Nor is it only because his response to Stewart's question about the authoritarian-populist teabaggers is hilarious. It's mainly an idea that I've had swishing around in my head for the last couple of years....

I'm not a libertarian (in the American sense...across the pond, it doesn't mean the same thing), not by any stretch of the imagination. In other words, I disagree vehemently with the central tenet of libertarian ideology: the notion that "big government" or "more government" is always bad.

Sure, I am skeptical and even fundamentally antagonistic toward the growth of certain sectors of government, and I am absolutely opposed to the frightening steps that our nation seems to be taking toward establishing a surveillance/police state. I think the military is way too big, and I think the people in government cooking up wars for us to get into are mostly cynical assholes who don't have the best interests of the American citizenry at heart.

But, in comparison to governmental power, I am worried more about the concentration of power and influence in the hands of business and financial interests. I can explain why I oppose unchecked business and financial power more than government power with one very simple statement:

The legitimate exercise of governmental and political power -- formally if seldom substantively (particularly lately) -- is conditioned upon the consent of the governed. By contrast, the legitimate exercise of power by business and financial interests is conditioned upon the dominance of those who exercise it over those who do not.

But, when speaking of reigning hegemonic structures with the greatest capacity and incentive to curtail individual liberty, it seems that the most pernicious of all is the unchecked, oligarchic interrelation of governmental and business power.

Since the latter, to lesser or greater degrees in given cases, is clearly what we have in the United States today (and -- to be sure -- have often had throughout history).

So here's the question to which I have been drawn lately: Why can't progressives & libertarians forge a tactical alliance?

For now, let's leave it as a rhetorical question. It's a discourse that I shall undertake to explore in subsequent posts. As a food for thought, I might hypothesize that it's a problem of discourses, cultural politics and short-mindedness. But, honestly, despite my deep-seated opposition to Ron Paul's core libertarian ideology, I confess that I like a lot about the way he's thinking.

Progressives and libertarians both want a country that protects and promotes the free-exchange of ideas, the ability of individuals to live their lives as they please, to not be spied on, to eschew supporting an endless succession of neoconservative military adventures...

As is illustrated in this exchange between Ron Paul and Jon Stewart, the differences between each side have to do with conceptions of (or dedication to) social justice. I won't pretend that that isn't a lot. But the differences between the two tendencies on an array of issues pertaining to respect for the Constitution and individual liberty are fewer and smaller than we sometimes like to pretend.

Do we have to want to have a beer with someone or share her sense of fashion in order to share common political cause?

Is it a pipe dream to think that progressives and libertarians could place aside their many differences in the interest of political expediency, to forge a tactical/temporary political alliance against our common enemy: the forces of authoritarianism?

Voting for Obama as the First Act in a Long Struggle

If there's any issue on which there's near-consensus among Obama's and younger generations, it's that the rights and privileges of citizenship are meaningless unless they are claimed by the citizens. American political discourse (both local and national) has, since the so-called "Reagan revolution," consisted in the main of the systematic instrumentalization of political power to the designs of economic power. This instrumentalization has occurred on every front imaginable: infrastructural, ideological, cultural and psychological. To vote for Barack Obama today is to acknowledge the necessity of reclaiming this political process for the people. It is at once an act of enormous consequence and an act whose promise will only be fulfilled if (and to the extent that) we mean what we're saying.

Barack & Michelle voted this morning in their & my neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago.

If Obama wins the presidency today, it represents the declared reclamation of the ownership of the political process on the part of the nation's citizens. We -- the citizens -- declare our intention to reclaim our citizenship. Simple as that. It's a cause for celebration, and I will breathe a sigh of relief if and when Obama gives his victory speech tonight in Chicago's Grant Park.

It's important for us to remember what this declaration signifies. It doesn't mean that we've bequeathed the power to invent and pursue policy to a unilateral Obama Plan. It also doesn't mean that the wreckage that has been made of our infrastructure and political process is going to be swept away all in one fell....erm....swoop. Most importantly: it doesn't mean that we ourselves no longer bear the scars of a broken meritocratic, Cold War, my-country-right-or-wrong ideal. Our subconscious is littered with the remnants and curios of the past 30 and 50 years of narrow ideological bullshit. Embedded in our very conceptions of self are innumerable contradictions that will at times be painful and at times liberating to work at resolving.

The first step is to recognize it for what it is: to overcome the fear of seeing the shambles for what is. The second step is to declare our intention to repair what's broken.

That's what your vote for Obama means. It's no small thing, but neither is it an end in itself.

Go vote. Paddy, I'm talking to you.

Thomas Frank on The Colbert Report

Thomas Frank discusses his new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule with Stephen Colbert, the latter in full-tilt on-screen persona mode. Frank: "What you have misunderstood, Stephen, is that the argument of the book is that conservatives suck."



Thomas Frank is unquestionably one of my favorite people: he's a great writer, he's funny as hell and his politics are exactly on the money. Most importantly, he takes the piss out of hypocrites and con-artists in a voice that updates the polemical stylings of the old-timey, mustachioed populists.

See his regular column in The Wall Street Journal 'The Tilting Yard', read his books, all of which are outstanding, and either recall fondly or discover afresh the grandeur that was/is The Baffler.

Why progressives should vote for Obama

In an article that appears in the current issue of The Nation, Christopher Hayes does a pretty good job of describing why I think it should be fairly obvious to anyone who is progressive (or lefter) that Barack Obama is a candidate worth supporting. Hayes's analysis, which I'll get to in a moment, endorses implicitly what I believe to be the best response to question:

But why should I support Barack when his platform is indistinguishable from Hilary's? Just because of his rhetoric?

My answer is: yes--with one caveat--because of his rhetoric! All of the most important things that presidents do have to do with rhetoric: how to set the terms of a discussion, how to be convincing, how to establish and maintain moral authority, how to say things that people don't want to hear, how to speak to lots of different kinds of people without condescending to some and sucking up to others. And thus my caveat: the idea that the political platforms of Obama and Clinton are 'indistinguishable' carries weight only insofar as we ignore the embeddedness of rhetoric in all aspects of presidential leadership. Of course rhetoric is too small a word to encompass the qualities enacted through Obama's gifts as a communicator, through his very persona, through the fact that historical circumstances combine with very existence a moment of profound possibility.

And I must insist that descriptions of Obama as "charismatic"--as it's used in reactionary rags like The New York Times--is pretty much a term of diminution. Such a term serves to deemphasize Obama's brilliance, savvy and astonishing fitness to rise to the challenge of our troubled political moment and focus attention instead upon his mere appeal. More specifically, upon the novelty of this appeal--folded into which is the unprecedented alignment of people/interests to whom he appeals--particularly as perceived by the James Carvilles of the world. Career technicians or "experts" who have build their "expertise," relevance and livelihoods upon rhetorics, logics and configurations of voters that are now disintigrating before our eyes. In fact, it's this very disintegration that is so vexing and even scary to these professionals.

A better description of Obama would take stock of the political, moral and rhetorical realignment that constitutes this moment--a moment that I think we should all admit is Obama's moment--and that points to the ways in which he and he alone is positioned to take the reigns. "Charismatic?" That description hardly captures it. Obama is a brilliant and empathic communicator. And it helps that Obama is a brilliant and empathic communicator while also being a brilliant and empathic person.

Anyway, this paragraph from Hayes's article does a pretty good of showing how Obama's skills as a communicator apply to the context of foreign policy, and differentiate him from Hilary in all of the ways that matter most (italics mine):

[F]oreign policy is where the President's agenda is implemented more or less unfettered. It's here where distinctions in worldview matter most--and where Obama compares most favorably to Clinton. The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama's dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran's president.

Continuing on the topic of foreign policy, the rhetorical differences between the two candidates aligns with and bespeaks another important distinction between the candidacies of Obama and Clinton: namely the kinds of people each will be likely to appoint to advisory and Cabinet positions during his or her presidency (an aspect of a candidacy of which the example of George W. Bush's administration should make us all the warier):

Her hawkishness relative to Obama's is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it's a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama's circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake.

As Hayes points out: Hilary's got the ideological militarism thing going on among her likely appointees/brain trust.

The single most important reason to get off your ass and vote for Obama, one that has to do both with his skills as a communicator and his stance on Iraq is that he's the only candidate by a mile whom we can trust to restore and preserve the rule of law:

"We need to bring to a close this sad chapter in American history, and begin a chapter that passes the might of our military to the freedom of our diplomacy and the power of our alliances. And while we are at it, we can close down Guantanamo and we can restore habeas corpus and we can lead with our ideas and our values."

- Barack Obama, Richmond, Virginia, May 8

God DAMN. That's the voice of someone who's got a chance of becoming president. Let's do this, people! No excuses. Now is not the time for the lethargy that tempts you to demur; now is not the time for the masochism that compels you--like high fiber cereal--toward Clinton. The Clintons' time is done. Bill was the candidate for a certain moment. But, Barack Obama is the candidate for this moment. Fuck the assholes, and give this man your vote!!!