The left must push back or admit its impotence

This is one of the better explanations of the disconnect between the Washington realists and the outside-the-Beltway idealist (yes, this is the Washington paradigm) that I’ve come across.

David Sirota, an activist, writer and now radio personality, has made a point of keeping his distance from Washington culture — which has resulted in him having the ability to see beyond the narrow framework that hamstrings progressive change in the capital.

The arguments we are hearing now, that progressives should leave the president alone, are remeniscent of the same arguments made during the two-term Clinton presidency, one of the least progressive on record (welfare reform, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, GATT, the end of Glass-Steagall, Alan Greenspan, expansion of the federal death penalty — should I go on?). Clinton is better than the alternatives, except it was Clinton and not his conservative predecessors who managed to gut the social safety net and deal a fatal blow to the New Deal.

The argument coming from some Obama allies can be boiled down to two words: Grow up — which is pretty ridiculous and dangerously defeatist.

But, as Sirota points out, “you hear this kind of bullshit all the time.”

This is standard fare from from the Beltway insiders in The Chuch of the Savvy. Their catechism says that the public is naive and stupid to believe that a president will even try to deliver on the promises he/she made to voters as a candidate. And really, more than naive and stupid – but unrealistic and unserious, because there supposedly must be some sort of difference between what you tell voters you will try to do as president and what you can even attempt to do as president. We are expected to believe that those who don’t accept this aren’t patriotic believers in basic democracy, but actually like sad, petulant children who refuse “take off their pajamas and get dressed.”

It’s a canard, of course – one designed to justify selling out and betraying voters (in
this case, coming straight from a drug lobbyist). And the real problem with it beyond one or another issue is that it takes a big steaming shit on the entire concept of republican democracy. In that kind of system, we only get to choose our representatives once every two or four years. That forces us to rely on the campaign promises of those representatives as metrics for making our choices. Thus, if the entire idea of the campaign promise becomes an assumed joke, then we have zero metrics on which to elect our government.

There is no substantive reason why what a president cannot push what he promises on the campaign trail – especially when it comes to something like pharmaceutical reimportation, which every other industrialized country has legalized. I repeat – there is simply no substantive reason why a president cannot push what he has promised on the campaign trail. The platitudes from corporate lobbyists insisting that the alleged difference between “campaigning and governing” somehow absolves politicians from breaking their promise is deliberately designed to perpetuate the status quo.

There is another problem, which I focused on in my own column for The Progressive Populist, the danger of a personality-driven movement. I voted for Obama, but without any illusions. I said from the beginning that I thought he was too cautious, too much of a centrist and too Clinton-like, but that the other Democrats were worse and that his lofty, soaring rhetoric might generate a political change, bringing people into the process who had not been in it before.

That happened to a degree, but the cautious politician, the conciliator, returned following the election and opted for continuity rather than change. That wasn’t really a surprise.

The response to Obama’s make-nice approach, however, is disappointing: An apologist left has arisen that resembles the Bush backers to an uncomfortable degree. (I read an essay that made this point last week, that the kind of arguments being made by liberal Obama supporters essentially were no different than the “don’t criticize the president” nonsense pushed by Bush supporters, but I cannot for the life of me remember who wrote it. Please, e-mail me if the specific essay can be identified so I can give it proper credit).

The facts are these: Obama made certain promises — lifting the drug-importation ban, ending DADT and DOMA, getting us out of Iraq, make government more transparent, closing Gitmo — that he has either abandoned or hedged on. He has hired the most inside of Wall Street insiders to manage the economy (see Matt Taibbi’s piece makes clear). And he has allowed the healthcare debate to devolve to the point of it being nearly meaningless.

The left cannot sit back and say nothing, cannot just fall in line behind the president and support him blindly. Unless there is pressure from the left, he will continue the rightward drift we’ve witnessed, a drift made easier by the wind whipped up by a very vocal minority of tea-baggers on the right who have gotten much of the press attention.

If the left sits on its collective hands, then it will only prove that the harshest aspects of Chris Hedges’ critique of liberals is on the money (his essay is a must read and pretty accurate, if you ask me, if a little unforgiving of lefties who opted to vote for Democrats over Nader or McKinney).

Unless liberals stand up to the president and draw their own lines in the sand, unless they accept their responsibility for creating a moral imperative for ethical action, they will prove themselves to be as useless as they always have been.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet