liberals – Hank Kalet

The mythology of the middle

There is an unfortunate sense of deja vu to the political discussion in Washington and on the cable shows that follow Washington these days. Thanks to an electoral rout that returned right-wing Republicans to the majority in the House of Representatives, the conventional wisdom folks have been talking up an Obama move-to-the-center.

The president, the argument goes, must forsake his lefty ideals and pivot toward more mainstream centrism. And the appearance last week of Bill Clinton at a presidential press conference only made the narrative seem that much more in vogue.

A piece in Sunday’s Week In Review in The New York Times — “If Bill Clinton Were President” — sought to understand the phenomenon, thought it failed to get very far below the surface because it accepted the traditional narrative of the Clinton presidency and made some assumptions about the Obama presidency that just don’t match with the facts.

Consider paragraph two:

Equally riveting and astonishing, Mr. Clinton’s blast-from-the-past performance in the White House briefing room on Friday afternoon reinforced the impression of political déjà vu, the sense that once again a Democratic president humbled by midterm elections was pivoting to the center at the expense of his own supporters.

The story does go on to acknowledge that Clinton was anything but a raging lefty, but the argument that for Democrats to be successful they must move to the center remained intact, despite the important realities represented by these two different, yet similar Democratic presidents.

Let’s take Clinton first, so that we are clear about what the expectations were for Clinton coming in. First, Clinton made several important moves during his 1992 campaign that made it clear that he occupied not the center, but the right wing of his own party: He called for an end to “welfare as we know it,” made a point of executing a mentally retarded inmate to demonstrate his pro-death penalty bonafides, made several veiled and overt rhetorical attacks on leaders of the African American community (and a minor hip-hop performer) to distance himself from the race issue, made it clear that he endorsed the prevailing free trade wisdom (with some ineffectual caveats) and generally ran against his party’s past as much as he did against the sitting Republican president.

It was an ugly showing, but it was effective. Bill Clinton was no progressive — and the policies he pursued during his first two years further reinforced this. Aside from his push for universal healthcare — which resulted in the monstrous, bureaucratic and unworkable “Hillarycare” proposal, one that endorsed HMOs and would have left the worst features of the system in place — he did little to endear himself to the left.

But, then, that has never stopped right-wing Republicans from demonizing Democrats as crazed longhair liberals.

When the GOP took over Congress, Clinton didn’t pivot as much as he accelerated his rightward push, his legacy ultimately being his dismantling of welfare and the banking/finance regulatory apparatus, the endorsement of bubble economics and a dysfunctional Washington political class.

Barack Obama, while no lefty either, was seen as a more traditional liberal, primarily because of his early history as a community organizer and some of the positions he had taken early in his career. Obama, like Clinton, showed a tendency to move right early in his career, to use his vast rhetorical skills to belittle his erstwhile political allies (read his over-praised Audacity of Hope, which fetishes bipartisanship at the expense of philosophy or ideology) and accept whatever compromise ended up on the table.

The signals were there during the campaign — his vote on telecom immunity, his moves to Hillary Clinton’s right on healthcare, etc. — and they have been born out during the first two years of his presidency. His healthcare triumph — his most notable liberal achievement — is really just a massive giveaway to the healthcare industry and was built not on sound progressive ideals but on the GOP’s alternative to Hillarycare. At every turn, he has allowed progressive priorities to be watered down (financial reregulation, his too-weak-by-half stimulus) or abandoned them altogether (state secrets, Guantanamo, torture). And, now, the tax cut plan.

This is not necessarily meant as a criticism of the Obama administration — or not only a criticism — but of the mainstream media’s propensity for simple shorthand: Democrat does not equal progressive or even liberal and Republican does not necessarily equal conservative. The simple shorthand buys into the mythology of a functioning left-right battle between two parties that allegedly cover all legitimate ranges of opinion in the country and is incredibly effective at marginalizing nontraditional voices and skewing debate to the right.

If Barack Obama, a corporate-backed and supporting Democrat who has endorsed the national security state and the death penalty, has shown an unwillingness to challenge the primacy of money and who seems more willing to thumb his nose at the more liberal wing of his own party than the absolute wack jobs in the other — if he is a lefty, then what does that make Bernie Sanders or the members of the House Progressive Caucus?

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, is available from Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here or by e-mailing the author.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Sad, but not surprising UPDATED

AP file photo from MSNBC

(Update below)

MSNBC has suspended host Keith Olbermann indefinitely because he apparently made political donations to three Democratic candidates.

Perhaps, we shouldn’t be surprisd — Olbermann has been pushing a highly partisan brand of commentary for some time. This wouldn’t be a problem except it is more than just a philosophical or ideological bent. It literally has been pro-Democrat/ant-GOP, which oversteps the boundaries.

Some on the left — or the partisan left, meaning Democrats — will point to Fox’s partisan faux news and say Olbermann offered a counterweight. And I can understand the argument. But my question is this: Since when do we lower our ethical expectations to the level of Rupert Murdoch and the GOP chain gang?

I listen to both Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on podcast most days, and often to The Young Turks and I’d been growing dissolutioned with Keith and Rachel’s creeping partisanship, especially when compared with Cenk Uygar’s unapologetically progressive, but nonpartisan commentary.

The contributions were the final straw in a growing push not to the left but toward the Democrats.

I assume Olbermann will return, but it is unclear when. For now, expect substitutes to babysit the chair (Chris Hayes from The Nation will sub tonight).

***

Hayes apparently is not hosting the show tonight, but more significantly The Nation reports that Olbermann was just one of many political hosts on cable who have made contributions. This doesn’t change my criticism of Keith — he had grown too partisan (and apparently had one of the candidates he gave money to on just before his donation was made, as per The Nation).

It only expands my criticism of a news industry that is built on personalities and not journalists. The fact that Sean Hannity gave money to Republicans does not excuse Olbermann’s political contributions. Neither should be giving money if they want to pretend to host news and commentary shows.

A failure of false equivalence

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Jon Stewart – Moment of Sincerity

www.comedycentral.com

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:363864

Rally to Restore Sainty and/or Fear

The Daily Show

The Colbert Report

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hosted a comedy outing on the Mall in Washington the other day, one that could easily have been mistaken for a political rally.

There were plenty of laughs and too many speeches — and a plea for sanity and reasonableness that, on the surface, may seem, well, reasonable.

But, as Matt Rothschold pointed out in a sharp podcast critique, Stewart’s speech was an abject failure, a call for compromise and bi-partisanship that pays no heed to philosophy or ideology, that equates strong feeling with insanity and raises compromise to the level of belief.

Stewart, in essentially paraphrasing Rodney King and calling for us to “just get along,” ignores the real danger we face. Our problem is not a lack of cooperation, though cooperation has been in short supply in Washington. Our problem is the weakness of liberals, personified by a president who clearly privileges bipartisanship over ideology, who has been willing to bend over backward and gut even modest liberal reforms to gain one or two Republican votes — and this was before Scott Brown won a Senate seat and ended the mythic Democratic veto-proof majority.

The problem is not a lack of cooperation but a lack of cujones on the left.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Keith Olbermann last night bemoaned the false equivalence created by Stewart et al — Olbermann/Maddow equals Beck/O’Reilly — but failed to address the real issues raised by the Stewart rally and the rise of the Tea Party movement and the growing hegemony of the corporate state.

Chris Hedges, in his new book The Death of the Liberal Class, describes a liberal class or mainstream that acts as a bulwark against real and radical change. As Hedges points out, mainstream liberals’ focus on incremental reform and the rivalry between the political parties consigns real structural economic change to the margins. The basic contours of corporate capitalism are never questioned.

Whether we are talking about so-called Obamacare, financial reform, the bailouts of the banks and auto industry, the seemingly endless wars we are waging and continued outsourcing of government services (including warkmaking and intelligence) or the much-to-small Obama stimulus, it is corporate capitalism that was the big winner. This becomes clearer when you place these efforts, which has or will transfer wealth from the middle class upward, beside the rather meager aid offered to the unemployed, underemployed and foreclosed upon and the failure of the liberal majority in the federal legislature to re-empower American workers (anyone remember card check?).

The false equivalence pushed by Stewart — and endorsers of the rally like Arianna Huffington and Oprah Winfrey — obscures the very real anger and fear driving the Tea Party movement, an anger and fear that need an outlet.

If we had a vibrant left in the United States, rather than an accommodationist one, the working class would not have to turn to the Tea Party (not have to, though many still might do so). Instead, as Hedges wrote yesterday,

The liberal class wants to inhabit a political center to remain morally and politically disengaged.

Were the left to realize its impotence, Hedges says, it might “be forced, if it wants to act, to build movements outside the political system.” Rather than mock the Tea Party, which I admit is emminently mockable, liberals and progressives should be emulating it, co-opting and immitating its energy and organizing skills to force weak, centrist Democrats (this would be most of them) out of Congress.

This would require the liberal class to demand acts of resistance, including civil disobedience, to attempt to salvage what is left of our anemic democratic state. But this type of political activity, as costly as it is difficult, is too unpalatable to a bankrupt liberal establishment that has sold its soul to corporate interests.

What this means, unfortunately, is that incremental reforms are the best we can hope for, that the corporate greed heads will continue to control our economy and politics and the liberty the Tea Partiers claim to be defending will continue to erode and decay.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

About that progressive agenda

I tweeted briefly on this column yesterday, but I wanted to offer a little more by way of explanation. David Leonhardt, who is among the best business reporters/columnists working today, overstates President Obama’s progressive bonafides in his column.

He portrays an aggressive remaking of Washington, but the reality is that the remaking has not been progressive and in many ways — too many ways — has been an extension of the corporate domination and expansion of executive power we have witnessed from previous White Houses.

Yes, we have financial rules and a new healthcare arrangement, but he did not do anything to lessen corporate influence and, in fact, appears to have amplified it.

Leonhardt acknowledges this in a single paragraph — which is incredibly telling:

(T)here are also ways that Mr. Obama and today’s Democrats have accepted, and are even furthering, the Reagan project. They are not trying to raise tax rates on the affluent to anywhere near their pre-1981 levels. Their health bill tried created new private insurance markets, not expand Medicare.

Most striking, the administration is trying to improve public education by introducing more market competition. To win stimulus funds, about 20 states have changed their rules to allow more charter schools or to evaluate teachers in new ways. On Thursday, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado signed a bill that would reward teachers who received strong evaluations and deny tenure to some who did poorly.

To translate, the president is attempting to increase access to private, for-profit health insurance and change schools via the markets — with some nominal regulation to keep everyone honest. It is an agenda that not only leaves the corporate order in place, but very well could expand it.

That’s not exactly what I’d call a progressive agenda.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Obama and the neutered left

I had coffee at Small World in Princeton with Chris Hedges, who is working on a book about the decay and demise of liberal institutions, something he has written about frequently for Truthdig.com. During our conversation — there were several of us at the table talking about a lot of different things — he made the point that the pillars of liberal America (the press, the Democratic Party, labor, the church and the academy — forgive me if I have these wrong) were all in decay and that a corporate social structure has been growing up in their place.

The problem, he said, is our inability to deal with our state of permanent war and what it means for the American democratic experiment.

His argument — which is spot on, I think — comes at an interesting time, given that Barack Obama is in the White House. Barack Obama, the conventional wisdome asserts, represents a triumph of liberal politics, a black progressive in the White House who will push the nation leftward. But the Obama presidency has had the effect of neutering the reform impulse; the basic contours of the military-corporate state are not being challenged, but we continue to believe that Obama represents change, that we have entered a new era.

We haven’t. It is a mirage, a delusion. Real change has not come, nor is it likely to.

“The idea of Obama is what we want. The actuality is more mainstream.” — an anonymous Obama staffer quoted by Ben Austin in the June edition of Harper’s

The Obama presidency, much more than the presidency of George W. Bush and much like that of Bill Clinton, has badly damaged whatever progressive momentum may have existed during the two to three years before his ascension to the White House.

The reality, however, is far different as the nominal momentum created by the failures of the Bush White House following Hurricane Katrina, the banking failure and cratering economy, collapsing infrastructure (remember that bridge in Minnesota?), various Republican scandals and a general waning of support for war in Iraq and Afghanistan has dissipated in a fog of what can only be described as liberal incrementalism and a general lack of nerve.

The response to this on the left should be vibrant and aggressive protest, a shouting from the ramparts that makes it clear that much more is expected and much deeper change is required. Instead, we have witnessed a dangerous, ineffectual silence.

The questions is what happened. Why has the election of Barack Obama, the first black man to be elected president, not produced the liberal/progressive rebirth that some envisioned? Why is it that we have moved only nominally away from the policies of the Bush years?

There are three basic reasons, I think:

1. Racism. the fear of a black planet (to quote Public Enemy) has combined with the desperate economy and destruction of working class jobs to trigger the right-wing populist backlash. The Tea Party and the folks on the fringe who question the president’s place of birth are consistent with the historical narrative, with the kind of fear and loathing that rises up at times of unsettling change, a racist, xenophobic and hypernationalistic reactionism that can be likened to circling the wagons.

The visceral nature of the movement, which is really quite small, and its enthusiam have captured the media’s attention, captured its narrative, amplifying its message and forcing this right-wing reaction to be viewed as much greater than it really is. The result is a media narrative that portrays the nation as center-right and a pundit class that views everything through this distorted prism.

Given that the decision-makers in Washington — including the people in the administration — are more in tune with the Sunday talk shows and cable news than with what is happening beyond the Beltway, the result has been a natural drift rightward.

(I should add here that Obama’s rightward shift is not a surprise given his approach to issues during the campaign and his cynical dismissal of ideology in The Audacity of Hope.)

2. Obama’s sell outs. The list is endless, including everything from financial reform and health care to Guantanamo, the Kagan nomination and presidential power. Obama has, like Bill Clinton in the 1990s, shown that he views core beliefs as fungible, that passing legislation with cool names that can be sold as reform (and selling it is the goal) is all that matters. Real reform is secondary, if it is of any concern at all.

U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, following his Pennsylvania primary victory on Tuesday over the Obama-supported, Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, summed up the problem this way (he was not speaking of Obama, but could have been): You make principled compromises in office, but you should never compromise your principles. I leave it to liberals to judge the Obama team on this point.

3. Sycophancy. This is pretty basic — and maybe the most damaging for the left. Too many on the left — and I am not talking about Thomas Friedman or Alan Colmes, folks who are viewed as liberals but are really just purveyors of status-quo ideas — have ceded their independence to a bankrupt Democratic Party establishment. Part of this stems from a messianic streak in our politics that assumes that one fine candidate will save us, that we do not have to do the hard work to defend democracy, that we can leave it to our leaders to fix it all.

That, of course, is absolute nonsense and no one should know that better than the left. Power concedes nothing without a fight and legislative victories can only be won after the people — that would be us — create momentum for change, a moral imperative, if you will.

But that is not what has happened since Obama took office. The messianic streak has only grown stronger even as the president continues to tack right on so many issues, with liberals falling silent. There are exceptions, of course, like Glenn Greenwald on Salon, The Progressive magazine, Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer on Truthdig.com, but they only prove the rule in this case.

Rather than the challenge, we often get the kind of arguments I hear from friends: Barack Obama is only doing what he can given the reality of Republican obstructionism; Barack Obama is a master tactician who is using incremental change to create greater change; Barack Obama is a closet progressive, just you wait and see; and on and on.

Obama, basically, gets no pressure from his left — no one is playing the role that the labor unions did during FDR’s administration (“make me do it,” FDR is purported to have told them, and they did) or that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. played during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, forcing civil rights onto the nation’s agenda. Without that pressure from the left — which should stand against a corporate-dominated politics and culture — the debate gets pulled farther and farther to the right, the incremental improvements become smaller and smaller, withering away to nothing.

And the only winners will be the corporations and their governmental enablers.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.