Alterman’s Kabuki Democracy
Eric Alterman has written a must-read online article at The Nation, Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, for Now. It’s long but it makes a good case for why Obama’s been governing as he has, he has quite a bit working against him. One of the things I took away from the article is that we’re not really having the kinds of serious discussions on any issue because certain aspects of our conversation, mostly on the liberal/progressive side never really enter into the discussion.
A few excerpts:
We live, as Tony Judt has written, in an “age of forgetting,” and nowhere is this truer than in our political discourse. Rarely do we stop to remind ourselves that, as a New York Times editorial put it, Obama “took office under an extraordinary burden of problems created by President George W. Bush’s ineptness and blind ideology.” The economy was tanking: for the decade between 2000 and 2009, real growth was at its lowest point since the 1930s, and the fact that two-thirds of all economic gains went to the top 1 percent of the population meant stagnation at best for most workers, actual decline for many. Clear environmental threats had been allowed to fester. The Bush Justice Department was engaged in what appears to be widespread criminal action in a host of areas. We were fighting two wars, hamstrung by the hatred of most of the world’s citizens, and operating torture chambers (and lying about it) across the globe. What’s more, based on the theory of the “unitary executive” Bush and Cheney were claiming near dictatorial powers to ignore both houses of Congress and even the courts when it suited their purposes. What was his successor to do? Should he bail out the banks? Nationalize them? Break them up? Allow Detroit to die? Invite the firing of tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of teachers, police, firefighters and emergency workers by state and local governments strapped by falling tax revenues? Allow the deficit to explode or the economy to implode? Should he close Guantánamo and Bagram prisons? End rendition? Get out of Iraq? Reverse signing-statements? Outlaw domestic spying? Cut carbon emissions? And by the way, exactly how would he accomplish these things—and simultaneously? By legislation? By executive fiat? By magic? Believe me, I could go on.
America’s most irresponsible, incompetent and ideologically obsessed presidency not only left most of these political and economic crises on its successor’s plate, it often masked significant problems that received virtually no attention, so prominent were the crises it caused. Many of these are more worrisome than the ones that made the front page. Entitlements were rising unsustainably. So was US foreign debt to China. Our education system was falling farther and farther behind other Western nations’ as “No Child Left Behind” failed by virtually every appreciable measure, save number of tests given. Fifty-five percent of Americans were on their way to being laid off, having their work hours reduced or being forced into part-time employment. And, almost entirely uncovered by the media, much of our physical infrastructure had corroded to the point of near collapse. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, “More than 26%, or one in four, of the nation’s bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete,” a problem that would likely cost roughly $17 billion per year to repair, or almost twice what had been budgeted. One-third of America’s major roads are “in poor or mediocre condition and 45 percent of major urban highways are congested.” Its drinking water systems “face an annual shortfall of at least $11 billion to replace aging facilities.” Inland waterways, wastewater systems, levees: all of these crucial systems rate a “D” or lower according the Civil Engineers’ report card. What’s more, this neglect at the federal level is matched by an equal lack of interest in these topics by the mainstream media. A valuable study by Jodi Enda in the American Journalism Review revealed an almost total lack of interest in these issues on the part of virtually every major news organization.
The result of this malign neglect is that post-Bush America is one disaster waiting to happen after another, all of which—when they do—are laid at the feet of the current president, regardless of whether addressing them is consistent with his policy agenda. For if he does not find a way to do so, they will likely overwhelm it. The financial crisis that dominated Obama’s early months—and almost brought down the entire world economy—is one obvious example. But consider for a moment the crisis of the moment: the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that so many in the mainstream media have sought to portray as “Obama’s Katrina.” Of course Obama himself is responsible for his administration’s reaction to the spill as well as his ill-considered decision, taken just weeks before it took place, to allow expanded drilling in coastal areas. But almost all MSM debate on the question has treated the oil spill as an act of God, or of BP’s negligence. In fact the conditions that led to the spill—including the egregious malfeasance that empowered BP and the rest of the industry to ignore the most basic precautions—were a direct outgrowth of the Bush/Cheney industry-friendly defenestration of the basic functions of the government’s regulatory functions.
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Whatever the motivation, it is has become easier and easier for a determined minority to throw sand in the gears of the legislative process. America’s system of political representation, now more than two centuries old, has grown ever more anachronistic. For instance, when the United States Senate was created, the most populous state had just twelve times more people than the one with the smallest population. Now it’s seventy times; giving those in small and underpopulated states a massive political advantage over the rest of us. And it just so happens that the best-represented areas of America are also the most conservative. It is therefore no coincidence that the forty Republican senators with the ability to bottle up almost anything in the Senate represent barely a third of the US population.
This is just the beginning of the problems Americans face in terms of disproportionate representation. The average age of a US senator is 69, while the median age of Americans, according to the most recent census figures, is just over 35. Women are a majority of the US population but only 17 percent of the Senate. Only four senators are African-American, Hispanic or Native American, while these minorities represent a third of the population. Most senators are also millionaires; most Americans, needless to say, are not. Elderly white male millionaires therefore come to do quite well when it comes to legislation. Underrepresented groups, not so much…
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It was the liberal hero Thomas Paine who first opined that “the government is best which governs least,” and this retains a powerful appeal to many Americans regardless of the merits of any given government program. When more than two centuries later, Texas Governor Rick Perry tells his fellow Republicans that the party should search out candidates who promise to “go to Washington, DC, and try to make it as inconsequential in your life as you can make it,” he is giving voice to a longtime American predisposition that can be found across parties and ideologies. An April 2010 poll published by the Pew Research Center found that just 22 percent of Americans questioned trust the “government in Washington almost always or most of the time,” one of the lowest readings in half a century. This natural skepticism of government action has been reinforced during this same period by a massive ideological investment by conservative individuals and foundations—aided by global corporations—in discrediting activist government and presenting laissez-faire policies as the natural order of things. Neocon pundit Irving Kristol, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley and former Treasury Secretary William Simon made this cause a crusade through much of the 1970s and 1980s with impressive, often astonishing results. They helped channel hundreds of millions of dollars, later mushrooming into billions, into the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute and countless offshoots in Washington and elsewhere to train pundits and politicians to embrace the right-wing view of economic activity. These groups and others championed the likes of Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek and American economist Milton Friedman to replace what had previously been a Keynesian consensus. These ideas were further disseminated by a rash of new publishing outfits, later augmented by an entire alternative media structure we now understand to be a natural part of our political and cultural landscape. This investment, present since the Carter administration, has led to a rush toward deregulation in virtually all areas of the economy under presidents of both parties. There was nothing accidental about any of this. Lower taxes, less regulation, less government: these are seen as goals in and of themselves, regardless of their impact on public policy, because they weaken government’s ability to intervene in the lives of its citizens. Milton Friedman argued that “freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself.” This belief leads a conservative columnist like George F. Will to support policies like the privatization of Social Security irrespective of whether such a transformation would make the program more or less effective, for “reasons [that] rise from the philosophy of freedom.”
Indeed, the entire edifice of “supply-side economics” was constructed and promoted with this goal in mind. As Irving Kristol admitted in 1995, he “was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities.” What were these possibilities? To attack the “fundamental assumptions of contemporary liberalism that were my enemy…. Political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” Conservative ideologues have simultaneously launched a rearguard action against previous Democratic administrations’ achievements for the well-being of millions of Americans through positive interventions in the economy. FDR’s New Deal, Truman’s New Deal, JFK’s New Frontier and LBJ’s Great Society are reinterpreted to fit them into the new paradigm. An extreme example of this is the victory of the conservative Christian majority on the Texas school board to rewrite American history to downgrade the importance of virtually every non–right-winger who has ever had any impact on American life, including most particularly union organizers and opponents of economic centralization. The results of this deliberate dumbing-down of children in Texas and elsewhere will not be visible for years, but it is not difficult to see the results of the right-wing campaign throughout our political discourse. Over and over during the raucous healthcare town hall meetings in the summer of 2009, citizens would stand up and scream some variant of “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” At one such meeting Representative Robert Inglis (R, South Carolina) noted, “I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your healthcare is being provided by the government’…. But he wasn’t having any of it.”
The combination of these factors presents a problem for much of Obama’s agenda as corporate America and its apologists in the media are always eager to portray almost any government program—or even necessary regulation—as the first step on the road to serfdom. Marc Morano, an ex-Senate staffer who now runs the conservative “Climate Depot,” warns his fellow citizens, “The government is going to monitor where you set your thermostat, how much plane travel you do…. It’s a level of control we’ve never even contemplated in America.” So long as one is not too concerned by the veracity of one’s statements, this logic can be applied to almost anything. And it is, both in Congress and on the campaign trail by politicians and pundits eager to remain in the good graces of the powerful and well-funded forces who continue to fund its propagation.
One reason this problem goes largely undiscussed in the media is that it is, to a significant degree, mirrored there. Fox News is by far America’s most popular cable news network and its lead over MSNBC and CNN just keeps growing. In prime time, Fox hosts regularly attract more viewers than both competitors combined. This is a matter of considerable political significance for the potential success of any progressive president because the number one cable news network in America just happens to be dedicated to a program of purposeful misinformation rather than any honest accounting of the news—”Apostles of Anger in their echo chamber of fallacies,” as Charles M. Blow put it. Fox’s broadcasting is deeply biased against liberals in almost every way imaginable. Fox News broadcasters regularly distort what the president says or cut away before letting him finish. They invite Republican politicians and conservative propagandists to come on and lie, outright, about both people and policy and then build on those lies to tell even larger lies. In doing so, they engage in conspiracy theories so lurid and outlandish that one is tempted to turn on The Twilight Zone for a reality check. They all but ignore Republican scandals and obsess about Democratic ones. Their hosts openly raise money for Republican causes, promote and appear at their rallies, and pass along their propaganda appeals. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee (to say nothing of Karl Rove) are paid to play presidential politics on Fox programs. The combination of commitment to right-wing politics, reach and irresponsibility is literally unprecedented in the modern age of American politics; it’s as if Joe McCarthy were not just a senator but a television network as well.
By inserting the often crazy and irresponsible views of right-wing talk radio, Fox News and Tea Party agitators into respectable discourse, the Wall Street Journal is one of the most valuable weapons conservatives have in their quiver. When someone who was once as respected and admired across all political lines as Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami sounds off like Beck or Limbaugh on its pages about what he deems to be the “un-American moment in our history” that gave rise to Obama’s election, this is a kind of victory in and of itself. Gone was “the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics,” Ajami argued, apparently seriously, in the wake of George W. Bush’s fantasy presidency. “A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies,” Ajami went on; Obama interpreted the election “as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic,” and “overwhelmed all restraint.” The influence of this naked attempt to challenge Obama’s legitimacy in so high profile a forum, together with countless other examples like it, presents a barrier to Obama and his agenda that no president has faced before. Not even the same paper’s hysterical campaign against Bill Clinton can compare, because it was undertaken when the far-right media was much weaker and the MSM much stronger. (The editors followed not long afterward with another anti-Obama op-ed by page staffer Dorothy Rabinowitz titled, I kid you not, “The Alien in the White House.”) While the left media structure is not as weak as it was entering the Bush years, neither can it be said to even compare with the Murdoch empire, much less the entire structure of right-wing propaganda masquerading as news. The Center for American Progress (where I’ve been a senior fellow since 2003) and Media Matters for America (which published my “Altercation” blog between 2006 and 2008) are just two of the many worthy efforts to inject sensible center-left policy proposals in the debate in the case of the former and to correct conservative misinformation in the latter, but added together they do not begin to approach to scale of not only Fox and talk radio but also Heritage, AEI, Hoover and the rest of the right-wing counterestablishment. Neither does the recent rise of the “netroots” online, however welcome this development may be.
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Indeed, with regard to almost every single one of our problems, we need better, smarter organizing at every level and a willingness on the part of liberals and leftists to work with what remains of the center to begin the process of reforms that are a beginning, rather than an endpoint in the process of societal transformation. As American history consistently instructs us, this is pretty much the only way things change in our system. Over time, reforms like Social Security, Medicare and the Voting Rights Act can add up to a kind of revolution, one that succeeds without bloodshed or widespread destruction of order, property or necessary institutions.
What’s more, one hypothesis—one I’m tempted to share—for the Obama administration’s willingness to compromise so extensively on the promises that candidate Obama made during the 2008 campaign would be that as president, he is playing for time. Obama is taking the best deal on the table today, but hopes and expects that once he is re-elected in 2012—a pretty strong bet, I’d say—he will build on the foundations laid during his first term to bring on the fundamental “change” that is not possible in today’s environment. This would be consistent with FDR’s strategy during his second term and makes a kind of sense when one considers the nature of the opposition he faces today and the likelihood that it will discredit itself following a takeover of one or both houses in 2010. For that strategy to make sense, however, 2013 will have to provide a more pregnant sense of progressive possibility than 2009 did, and that will take a great deal of work by the rest of us.
To borrow from Hillel the Elder: “If not now, when? If not us, who?”
Some of this was highlighted by Atrios yesterday, Confused About The Politics.
So let’s say Obama’s people have correctly deduced that there’s no chance in hell of getting anything through Congress. They have two basic options. First, they could get on the teevee every day and say, “This is my plan to help. Republicans in Congress won’t pass it.” They could hold rallies in Maine. Allies could run ads. At least people would know who is for and who is against…and just what it was that people are for or against.
Option two is back off proposals you’ve previously made and have Axelrod get on the teevee and say, “there is some argument for additional spending in the short-run to continue to generate economic activity.”
See what Axlerod had to say on the teevee here. The point being that whatever Obama and the Obama administration want to do in their hearts doesn’t really matter at this point. They will only fight for what they think they can get somewhere in the middle.
Here are two other takes on Alterman from Booman.
I have a few quibbles with Alterman’s recitation of the facts, but I want to praise his overall effort. My biggest criticism is that he fails to critique progressives. Everyone else comes in for harsh treatment, but progressives are given a pass. I think that is a mistake, but it’s interesting to think about why progressives deserve criticism. It’s largely because progressives are not familiar enough with the obstacles to progressive change that Alterman exhaustively lays out.
Alterman and I see eye-to-eye when it comes to Obama’s heart.
And Karoli.
Here’s a big sad pug face for Eric Alterman to go with his whining, entitled column over at The Nation today. Yes, you heard me right: He’s a big whiner who needs to put on his big boy pants and get with it. For someone who has been around long enough to know better, his latest column pours rain all over everyone’s sunniest day. You can read it here, but let me summarize it for you: We’re all doomed! Doomed!!!!
Ordinarily, I’d simply fume a little and move on, but there seems to be a real need on the part of the progressive blogosphere to give Republicans some decent ammunition at a point where Republicans are doing a great job of shooting themselves in the foot. It’s one thing to play fair and another to give the opposition a leg up when they’re about to lose, after all.
It’s a lot to take in, what do you think?
