Joan Walsh tries to make two points in this column, and I say it’s partly on, partly off.
First, she comments on a talk between President Obama and some Boston college students. The President said that he was being derided both as a crazy left-wing Marxist (from the Right) and a right-wing tool of Wall Street (from the Left). These both can’t be true, he said. Then he brought up the Emancipation Proclamation. Walsh writes,
Obama explained that even though Lincoln opposed slavery, his Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in states that were fighting against the Union; it didn’t apply to slave states that were Union allies. Obama’s not pointing that out to call Lincoln a hypocrite or malign his commitment to eradicating slavery; he’s describing it as a savvy pragmatism, a leader understanding the limits of his time. “Here you’ve got a wartime president who’s making a compromise around probably the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced because he understood that `right now my job is to win the war and to maintain the union,'” Obama told the students.
I agree with his assessment of Lincoln’s values, and Lincoln’s cautious pragmatism. But then Obama went a little too far.
“Can you imagine how the Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, `Lincoln sells out slaves.'”
Walsh thinks Obama went too far because, in fact, many northern editorialists of Lincoln’s day did blast the Emancipation Proclamation as a betrayal and sellout of the Cause; and the Huffington Post isn’t really a mouthpiece of the Left, but a commercial website.
Walsh is right about the Huffington Post, and the President’s statement would have been more accurate if he had cited, for example, FireDogLake. But this does not negate the President’s larger point, which was that the abolitionist purists of Lincoln’s time hated the Emancipation Proclamation because it fell short of what they wanted. The Emancipation Proclamation was to abolitionists what the Affordable Care Act came to be for the firebaggers.
I don’t want to get sidetracked here about the political reasons the Proclamation was written the way it was written. Most of you know about that, anyway. I’ve brought up before that abolitionist leaders opposed Lincoln’s nomination for the 1860 presidential election, because he wasn’t “pure” enough on the slavery issue. Lincoln was willing to compromise and protect slavery in the slave states, in exchange for preserving the Union, and the abolitionists weren’t having it. I don’t recall if there was another candidate the abolitionists rallied behind, but if there was, he wasn’t Abraham Lincoln.
And the moral is, sometimes holding out for “perfect” is stupid. Sometimes you gotta go with what you can get. And sometimes, events take over and go in their own directions in ways that leaders didn’t anticipate. Emancipation finally happened, less because of but in spite of Lincoln’s plans when he entered office. A series of compromises and unforeseen events freed the slaves; Lincoln was just an instrument.
This is not to say that I think President Obama’s political and policy judgments are always right, but neither do I think his policy compromises represent the policies he wants and planned for all along, as some among us brainlessly rant.
So Walsh mostly misses on that one. But she’s right about her next point —
But there’s a deeper problem here: The fact that pundits and talking heads have become a stand-in for a politically engaged left. I watched GOP macher Grover Norquist on “Hardball” Monday; he was terrible. I realized I hadn’t seen much of Norquist on TV before, and he’s really not very good at it. But why should he care? By forcing his no new taxes pledge on Republicans, via Americans for Tax Reform, he’s become one of the most powerful men in the country. I’m trying to think of Democratic activists who have had a comparable impact their party, and I can’t. Instead, the relationship of the Democratic base, and progressives, to Obama and to his constituency is weirdly defined by talking heads, whether Huffington or Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews or the welcome new addition, perhaps temporary, of Rev. Al Sharpton to the MSNBC lineup.
Walsh is right that there is no progressive version of Grover Norquist who can somehow bend Congress to do his will. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it reflects the fundamental difference between those in the U.S. who call themselves “conservative” these days, but who are really reactionaries, and progressives. For all their blathering about “liberty,” the reactionaries are authoritarians, and the base is made up of blind, besotted followers.
The right-wing movement in the U.S. is being orchestrated by a few very powerful individuals in a way the American Left is not. Righties always whine about George Soros, but Soros is just a (somewhat erratic) source of funding. He’s not a grand initiator of movements, nor is he trying to manipulate the public and the government in the same way that Norquist, the Koch brothers, and the other elites of the Right do. So no, there is no progressive equivalent to Grover Norquist.
Progressivism doesn’t have leaders, exactly, and on the whole progressives make really bad followers. We may rally behind someone for a short time, but we rarely stick to anyone for more than a few weeks or months. There are some politicians and media celebrities — Bernie Sanders, Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman — that we continue to admire, but such people tend to appeal to our intellects; they aren’t necessarily forming us into a movement that is actually going anywhere.
So although it has its cracks and fissures, the Right is much better at working to a single, directed purpose than the Left, which makes it more effective. But I’m not sure there is any way to change that. Progressives just don’t do the queen bee-worker bee thing nearly as well.
“So although it has its cracks and fissures, the Right is much better at working to a single, directed purpose than the Left, which makes it more effective”
I agree though their job (corralling the wing-nut masses) is much easier than an equal position would be on the left. The left could be just as effective at messaging, just that most on the left don’t buy the bumper sticker slogans that are so easily sold to the teabagger crowd.
I think one of the problems with those of us on the left is that we fight too many windmills.
We divide ourselves, and have for a long time. Sure, we gathered around important things like rights for blacks, then women, and now gays – and had success. But, after that’s done, we split ourselves up, each with his/her own pet peeve and agenda. So, with ACA, it became single-payer- OR BUST!!!. Then with DADT, there were groups that wanted a Presidential decision, a decree which could be overturned, instead of a Congressional change. There are still people screaming, and rightfully I may add, about DOMA. But we’re not even together on that. Why? Because abortion rights are being eliminated slowly, immigrant rights need fighting for, we need gun control, or at least control of the size of the clip, etc., etc., etc…
We even fight for the rights of the people who hate us, who’d sell off an ounce of freedom for a pound of authoritarianism, if that’s what would piss-off us Liberals and Progressives.
Look at the issue of the consumer board that Elizabeth Warren was to lead. The Conservative leaders point, and their flying monkey’s obey. And not one of their flying monkeys has the self-enlightenment to realize that they, too, are consumers. It wasn’t going to be a LIBERAL Consumer board – just a board to help protect ALL consumers.
A Liberal leader, if you can clearly define one, looks around, and doesn’t see any flying monkey’s – he see’s other independent agents, many of whom are themselves leaders.
And so, while we jump from fighting one windmill to another, dividing our forces, Conservatives work to conquor by saying to their followers, “Look! Look at all of their windmills. They’re stealing the very wind away from you. Attack ALL of their windmills. Don’t leave one standing. Even if there’s no way to grind grain into bread, you win! By getting rid of their windmills, you may very well be hungry, but you can satisfy yourselves by knowing that you’ll be as free as the wind after they’re all gone.”
It’s easier to be against ALL things Liberal, than it is to fight for causes here and there, like we do.
It’s tough to fight for the rights of all people, when all the opposition has to do is to divide people who don’t want others to have the same rights as they do. And who’ll gladly give up most of their rights, as long as there are some people with less rights than they have.
Does this make any sense, or are my thoughts as disjointed as I’m making our side out to be?
Nicely summed up!
In the foggy corners of the remainder of my mind, I remember someone describing their idea of political progress:
“When I was young I thought it would be a sprint, then I thought it was a marathon, now believe it is a relay race.”
Oh yeah, and don’t get me started on the money aspect.
We depend on a lot of people giving a little to all of the causes.
They get that too, from their base. And they can focus that money better than we do. But they also get money from rich people who have nothing better to do than to spend money making themselver even richer at the expense of the poor and middle class – and that includes their own, schmuck, followers.
That’s why I’m for a heavy progressive income tax. Let them spend money looking for loopholes, rather than pay for politicians to put them in there.
I think this is true internationally, as well. Over the weekend I read a chilling New Yorker piece about the anti-immigrant movement in Britain. The piece focused on the EDL, I believe it’s called, or English Defence League. One of its founding spokesyoiks wanted to make his right-wing bona fides clear, they are absolutely not interested in class warfare in Britain. He put it very succinctly: “We know who our masters are; we just want them to do their jobs” (i.e., throw the brown people out).
We know who our masters are. Sweet baby cheeses, I thought when I read that, what kind of a dumbf*** thinks like that, let alone says it out loud?
Answer: the good authoritarian cattle of the Right, blathering about liberty, but really needing to be controlled and herded.
Slightly OT, but on a lighter note, from CNN’s live blog of the Murdoch hearings in London:
[Updated at 2:23 p.m. GMT, 10:23 a.m. ET] It would be remiss of us not to mention the numerous Twitter comments comparing Rupert and James Murdoch and two characters from the Simpsons cartoon: scheming nuclear power station boss Montgomery Burns and his craven assistant Smithers.
[Updated at 3:54 p.m. GMT, 11:54 a.m. ET] Hearing temporarily suspended as protester apparently lunges towards the Murdochs.
James Murdoch rises to his feet to move out of the way of the protester.
â€Do what you want to the old man, but please leave me alone!†–Ed.
[Updated at 4:04 p.m. GMT, 12:04 p.m. ET] Rupert Murdoch was hit “squarely in the face” by the plate of shaving foam, reports CNN’s Jonathan Wald, who was in the the hearing.
Wald added the man told Murdoch “you are a greedy billionaire.” Police officers wiped foam off the man’s face at Portcullis House, where the hearing is taking place.
[Updated at 4:10 p.m. GMT, 12:10 p.m. ET] We’re back up and running. Rupert Murdoch appearing in shirt sleeves, presumably because his jacket is covered in foam.
And no, pie-in-face man doesn’t speak for the Left either. But I do hope it’ll be on teevee a million times this evening. –Ed.
Oy!
More on how Obama is more than willing to go to the right:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-doesnt-want-a-progressive-deficit-deal-20110711
I hope Taibbi’s wrong on this one!!!
Apropos of nothing, ‘gulag, “we depend on a lot of people giving a little to all of the causes,” reminds me of an interesting insight I had once.
I have a friend who is *vehemently* opposed to assisted suicide. Ferociously. It was one of the things that was scary for her, because, while I agree with her on end-stage treatment of dying folks, I don’t feel the same passion to refuse a person the choice of a particular time and method for dying.
But then I realized something important. Let’s pretend that there’s some universal judge of right and wrong. Let’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that one can say that assisted suicide would be the right choice for someone.
The fact of the matter is, we ordinary humans will never solve that problem, to figure out when it’s right and when it’s wrong. We don’t have the answer. There *are* people who claim to have the answer, but they can’t explain their answer. They can argue in favor of it, but it rests on assumptions that we can’t assume are correct.
Under those circumstances, I realized it was probably better for the world for her to be always, angrily, vociferously opposed to any form of assisted suicide, always insisting that better palliative care, more support, counseling, etc., were the correct answers. She might be wrong (in the pretend-world where I assume there *is* a right and wrong answer), but we can’t know, and the world in which assisted suicide is accepted meekly is one where it will happen far too often.
Now, I’m *not* saying that she’s narrowly focused. But she does have an unapologetic and very strong absolute, one that she’ll take a stand on whenever it rises up.
Trying to care, just a bit, about a lot of things seems like a common liberal trait to me (but what do I know?). But I think real strength comes from caring a great deal about a smaller number of things.
But just as importantly (and this was the real insight for me), you can only make real change if you’re willing to be loudly, angrily, vociferously *wrong*. I don’t know if my friend ever has doubts about whether she’s right or not… but I would. And I realized that letting that doubt paralyze me would keep me from ever being as strong an advocate for the rights of the dying as she was.
Lincoln wasn’t actively working against the abolitionist cause however. Obama arranges for big financial backers of progressive organizations to drop funding if the organizations don’t toe the administration’s line – one that is deeply savagely neo-liberal. Like most of what Obama says, this comparison leaves out the important and critical facts that would show it for the lie that it is. The man is a sociopath.
Many abolitionists at the time sincerely believed that he was.
Also, you need to provide a link to a source explaining the rest of your comment. I assure you I have known sociopaths, dealt with them up close and personal, and the President is not one. You, however, may be hysterical. Links?
The last time the left had any leaders with followers, the leaders were all assassinated — John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I don’t recall if there was another candidate the abolitionists rallied behind, but if there was, he wasn’t Abraham Lincoln.”
Gerrit Smith was the “abolitionist” candidate for president in 1848, 1856, and 1860. He ran as a “Free-Solier” and was considered by many to be the natural successor to John Brown. Smith was one of the six financial backers of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. He was pro-civil war, but believed that the north was as much to blame as the south and (along with Horace Greenly) paid the $1m bond to have Jefferson Davis released from prison after the war. For this, he was called a sell-out. (nothing really changes, does it?)
Sean — my, you are a history nerd now. That’s my boy!
“You, however, may be hysterical.” Typical, nasty, take my jacks and go home. Just can’t take criticism can you bot?
Projection, much?
The sad truth is that too many progressives confuse politics with emo-fantasies. They lack discipline, the willingness to work and build a movement, and are far happier lamenting the betrayals of those they did not fight for. Until progressives stop cherishing their purity, get off their self-pity trips and get their hands dirty organizing an effective movement, they will remain self-marginalized.
Wow, Morzer can’t even properly fake concern trolling. Lame.
“The sad truth is that too many progressives confuse politics with emo-fantasies”
No the problem is too many liberals call themselves progressives. The rest of your dribble aint worth me time.
Morzer,
Is that first sentence an updated way of saying Libs ‘sitting around singing “Kumbaya?”‘
As for lacking dicipline, and the willingness to work, I’d love to tell you about the people I knew in Fayetteville, NC, with whom I worked. They were tireless in organizing not only our own anti-war protests, but helping with national ones as well. We had to get plans together, get money from one another and small donations. We had thousands of people at our Faytteville protests – no small feat in a town economically dependent completely on the military in Fort Bragg. We had thousands protesting rendition flights out of Smithfield, NC, and well over 1/2 million at the anti-war protest in DC in early ’07-08. Just because you didn’t see it on TV doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. We didn’t get a nickel from George Soros. Do you think we got any corporate sponsorship? Who? DOW? Exxon-Mobil? NO!
And we weren’t motivated by some rich f*cking jackass of a clown on CNBC bitching about a little tax hike, whose little whine was picked up by the Right Wing Wurlitzer into an astroturf movement. We weren’t funded by the Koch brothers, Coors, Scaife, or any of the other trust-fund whores whose families haven’t done a lick of work, except for bitch about taxes, in generations. We didn’t get free rides on buses leased out by them, we didn’t carry signs made for our use by them. We didn’t have Citi, BoA, Exxon-Mobil, etc., underwriting the whole thing. We didn’t have think tank pundits on our side paid for by Heritage or AEI appearing on every TV and radio show that would book them, to try to provide cover that this really was a grassroots movement, and not something more akin to a bowel movement by ancient Birchers and racists, freed from hiding in relatives attics because a black man was elected President to pick up after an unholy mess left by their once beloved President, whose policies racked up the debt they’re bitching about, and who almost brought this country, in 8 years, to the brink of disaster and ruin.
So, Morzer, stuff your f*cking ‘purity’ up your f*cking ass, and the bullshit about self-pity. I’ve gotten my hands dirty before, and I will again. What I am doing right now is, I’m washing by hands of people like you.
If progressives couldn’t organize effctive movements, this country not only would be a lot worse off than it is – it wouldn’t even exist. You might want to read a few history books. They might teach you that the Founding Fathers were Progressives, that rights weren’t giftwrapped, that abolition of slavery came at the cost of devastating war, that prople didn’t find jobs under their Christmas trees during the Depression, that Moses didn’t come down and add SS as an 11th Commandment, that fought a war on two fronts, and that blacks and women weren’t suddenly given the right to vote by noblesse oblige.
And you know who those organizing efforts were aimed at?
Conservatives.
Conservatives who objected to every one of the efforts I mentioned.
So, Morzer, go MARGINALIZE YOURSELF!!!
Mr. Gulag,
I felt like standing and saluting after that! Made my morning!
Picking up on the Grover Norquist thing: There is a core reason why there is nothing on the left that is analagous to Norquist’s juggernaut. It’s all about the pledge. He is able to get right wing politicians to sign the pledge. Why is that? Because if any reasonably intelligent person sits down and ask herself or himself “What’s the easiest way to win an election?” the answer is to promise less taxation. It is simply a variation on the tactic of buying votes. Right wing politicians sign the pledge because it wins elections for them. If it didn’t do that, then either a) they wouldn’t sign it, or b) it wouldn’t matter because they wouldn’t get elected. The problem ultimately comes back to the electorate, unfortunately. Too many voters only care about saving a few dollars in taxes.
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