More on consensus (or not).
The peerless Avedon points me to William Greider's new Nation column, "The Rise of the Rebels" -- an approving look at MoveOn.org's potential primary challenge to Lieberman -- assessible at Common Dreams. Greider is maybe the left's finest journalist, and always worth reading. Moreover, a primary challenge against Lieberman, or Feinstein, or HRC or Barbara Boxer for that matter sounds like a fine idea to me. Incumbants should never get too comfortable. And if the will is there to replace Lieberman as the Democratic standard-bearer from Conneticut, then Democratic-identifying citizens should organize to exercise it. I'd vote against him at this point.
Still, the article left me with the mild feeling of annoyance with which articles like this always leave me. In particular, I wonder about Greider's contention that "the right's slow-motion crusade to conquer and transform the Republican Party" could be repeated on the left. I think in terms of the culture war, the answer is yes. The standard Democratic pro-choice position is already broadly appealing and doesn't need to be fudged; the concept of homosexual relationships no longer give vast swaths of the American majority the puritan fits. Appeals to freedom from oppression, individual rights and autonomy -- in which most liberal culture-war positions can be couched -- are quintessentially American and have worked for the right.
But once you get beyond the culture war, it's not so obvious at all. The right's infrastructure was founded on the legacies of anti-union corporate and old-money interests looking to defend their industry and/or inherited wealth. It's money defending money -- and it was and is an astronomical amount of money. Meanwhile, the right's electoral appeals are made to a pretty narrowly-defined notion of private self interest (bolstered by appeals to broader themes like economic liberty) -- relief, in particular, from taxes. The gutsy liberal counterargument rests on the appeal to the public interest -- be it in understanding that poverty is a product of history and circumstance more than bad character, or that those who get rich should pay to maintain the social peace and some basic collective decency. Making people believe that public interest coincides with their own isn't impossible, but it's been hard (ask Walter Mondale), at least when the direct benefits don't accrue to the individual's own class or demographic group. (That's commonly assumed to be why Social Security survived a decade-long attack with little apparent structural damage while AFDC grew ever more unpopular over time). Zack Exley wrote an interesting piece for HuffPo several months ago on how New Labour pulled it off a GOP-style on-message progressive campaign in the last British election. But that, of course, was New Labour, the ideological counterpart (in theory if not fully in practice) of the hated New Democrats. So is what we're talking about here the demand for more partisanship or a different ideology, or some mix of the two?
I'd like to believe that a fiercely argued, public-interest, neo-Great-Society argument could work (and I'd like to see it tried), but then there's this question of what a cohesive, strong, on-message, citizen-fuelled left would stand for. Even if moneyed liberals like George Soros fund a much-needed liberal counter-infrastructure, their liberalism is the liberalism of global capitalism, probably not exactly what Greider has in mind. How much taxation? How much redistribution? How high a minimum wage? How tight a regulatory environment? For or against nuclear power? For or against agressive international peacekeeping? Would American progressives like Greider have settled for the welfare-reform package passed in 1999 by the Blair government, which looked a lot like the plan the Clinton Administration wrote and hoped to pass in 1994 (as opposed to the more draconian 1996 Congressional bill)? On a bevy of issues, you're going to find honest disagreement among liberals, even ones Greider would probably consider ideological fellow-travellers on the left -- remember Robert Kuttner's (convincing) advocacy for a national ID card? Remember, for that matter, what happened to the archetects of the Great Society? I'm fine with liberals who advance specific agendas they argue can attain critical mass and stay sufficiently true to progessivism -- David Sirota's anti-trade-agreement economic populism for instance. I'm less ok with the blanket concept that there is a people-powered "left" -- a united body that stands against the equally homogenous collection of milquetoasts who run things -- and that they can cohese, take things over from the bottom-up and reorient politics.
In fact, people-power itself is part of the problem. Yes, the "40% moderate, 20% liberal electorate" argument against progressive rhetoric and policy is lame for all the reasons that progressives argue it is. But when Greider writes that "the same logic--follow the leaders and keep your mouth shut--that has produced a long string of lame candidates with empty agendas, most recently John Kerry in 2004", he's copping to the problem. The Democratic establishment didn't line up behind John Kerry in 2003. The party's consultant and campaign operative establishment was split, but to the extent that they coalesced, it was behind Wes Clark, who went down in flames. Most of the bigger unions and other traditional interest groups were late-comers to the Kerry bandwagon. Kerry was picked by the voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and the mini-Tuesday states -- like a series of "lame candidates with empty agendas" before him -- going back to about 1972. I buy the argument that the Iowa caucusus are too easily dominated by party operatives and that not enough voters with different interests and backgrounds get a real say in choosing a party's nominee. But the primaries are far, far more democratic than they used to be in the olden days when the party was supposedly more progressive than it is now. And the people who vote in primaries are the party's base. And they chose Kerry overwhelmingly, as they've chosen a selection of candidates from across the ideological spectrum over the years. If anything, Kerry -- save his oppoturnistic-looking vote for war in Iraq -- was the most liberal, not to mention relatively uncorrupt, nominee the Dems had chosen since the last of the big McGovern-Fraser reforms passed. Taken as a body, the Democratic Congress and Senate are also more liberal than they were in the 1980s now that the last of the Dixiecrats have retired or reformed.)
By all means: run a primary opponent against Joe Lieberman. Toughen the national campaign rhetoric. But it might really help to acknowledge that the Democrats' electoral failures aren't just simple failures of will and vision (though that's part of it) but also a symptom of the need for candidates to appeal to the variety of shades of liberalism embodied in their electorate. It's a very real problem.
Still, the article left me with the mild feeling of annoyance with which articles like this always leave me. In particular, I wonder about Greider's contention that "the right's slow-motion crusade to conquer and transform the Republican Party" could be repeated on the left. I think in terms of the culture war, the answer is yes. The standard Democratic pro-choice position is already broadly appealing and doesn't need to be fudged; the concept of homosexual relationships no longer give vast swaths of the American majority the puritan fits. Appeals to freedom from oppression, individual rights and autonomy -- in which most liberal culture-war positions can be couched -- are quintessentially American and have worked for the right.
But once you get beyond the culture war, it's not so obvious at all. The right's infrastructure was founded on the legacies of anti-union corporate and old-money interests looking to defend their industry and/or inherited wealth. It's money defending money -- and it was and is an astronomical amount of money. Meanwhile, the right's electoral appeals are made to a pretty narrowly-defined notion of private self interest (bolstered by appeals to broader themes like economic liberty) -- relief, in particular, from taxes. The gutsy liberal counterargument rests on the appeal to the public interest -- be it in understanding that poverty is a product of history and circumstance more than bad character, or that those who get rich should pay to maintain the social peace and some basic collective decency. Making people believe that public interest coincides with their own isn't impossible, but it's been hard (ask Walter Mondale), at least when the direct benefits don't accrue to the individual's own class or demographic group. (That's commonly assumed to be why Social Security survived a decade-long attack with little apparent structural damage while AFDC grew ever more unpopular over time). Zack Exley wrote an interesting piece for HuffPo several months ago on how New Labour pulled it off a GOP-style on-message progressive campaign in the last British election. But that, of course, was New Labour, the ideological counterpart (in theory if not fully in practice) of the hated New Democrats. So is what we're talking about here the demand for more partisanship or a different ideology, or some mix of the two?
I'd like to believe that a fiercely argued, public-interest, neo-Great-Society argument could work (and I'd like to see it tried), but then there's this question of what a cohesive, strong, on-message, citizen-fuelled left would stand for. Even if moneyed liberals like George Soros fund a much-needed liberal counter-infrastructure, their liberalism is the liberalism of global capitalism, probably not exactly what Greider has in mind. How much taxation? How much redistribution? How high a minimum wage? How tight a regulatory environment? For or against nuclear power? For or against agressive international peacekeeping? Would American progressives like Greider have settled for the welfare-reform package passed in 1999 by the Blair government, which looked a lot like the plan the Clinton Administration wrote and hoped to pass in 1994 (as opposed to the more draconian 1996 Congressional bill)? On a bevy of issues, you're going to find honest disagreement among liberals, even ones Greider would probably consider ideological fellow-travellers on the left -- remember Robert Kuttner's (convincing) advocacy for a national ID card? Remember, for that matter, what happened to the archetects of the Great Society? I'm fine with liberals who advance specific agendas they argue can attain critical mass and stay sufficiently true to progessivism -- David Sirota's anti-trade-agreement economic populism for instance. I'm less ok with the blanket concept that there is a people-powered "left" -- a united body that stands against the equally homogenous collection of milquetoasts who run things -- and that they can cohese, take things over from the bottom-up and reorient politics.
In fact, people-power itself is part of the problem. Yes, the "40% moderate, 20% liberal electorate" argument against progressive rhetoric and policy is lame for all the reasons that progressives argue it is. But when Greider writes that "the same logic--follow the leaders and keep your mouth shut--that has produced a long string of lame candidates with empty agendas, most recently John Kerry in 2004", he's copping to the problem. The Democratic establishment didn't line up behind John Kerry in 2003. The party's consultant and campaign operative establishment was split, but to the extent that they coalesced, it was behind Wes Clark, who went down in flames. Most of the bigger unions and other traditional interest groups were late-comers to the Kerry bandwagon. Kerry was picked by the voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and the mini-Tuesday states -- like a series of "lame candidates with empty agendas" before him -- going back to about 1972. I buy the argument that the Iowa caucusus are too easily dominated by party operatives and that not enough voters with different interests and backgrounds get a real say in choosing a party's nominee. But the primaries are far, far more democratic than they used to be in the olden days when the party was supposedly more progressive than it is now. And the people who vote in primaries are the party's base. And they chose Kerry overwhelmingly, as they've chosen a selection of candidates from across the ideological spectrum over the years. If anything, Kerry -- save his oppoturnistic-looking vote for war in Iraq -- was the most liberal, not to mention relatively uncorrupt, nominee the Dems had chosen since the last of the big McGovern-Fraser reforms passed. Taken as a body, the Democratic Congress and Senate are also more liberal than they were in the 1980s now that the last of the Dixiecrats have retired or reformed.)
By all means: run a primary opponent against Joe Lieberman. Toughen the national campaign rhetoric. But it might really help to acknowledge that the Democrats' electoral failures aren't just simple failures of will and vision (though that's part of it) but also a symptom of the need for candidates to appeal to the variety of shades of liberalism embodied in their electorate. It's a very real problem.
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