Category Archives: liberalism and progressivism

New Media, New Politics

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Jonathan Alter gets it …

Bob Schieffer of CBS News made a good point on “The Charlie Rose Show” last week. He said that successful presidents have all skillfully exploited the dominant medium of their times. The Founders were eloquent writers in the age of pamphleteering. Franklin D. Roosevelt restored hope in 1933 by mastering radio. And John F. Kennedy was the first president elected because of his understanding of television.

Will 2008 bring the first Internet president? Last time, Howard Dean and later John Kerry showed that the whole idea of “early money” is now obsolete in presidential politics. The Internet lets candidates who catch fire raise millions in small donations practically overnight. That’s why all the talk of Hillary Clinton’s “war chest” making her the front runner for 2008 is the most hackneyed punditry around. Money from wealthy donors remains the essential ingredient in most state and local campaigns, but “free media” shapes the outcome of presidential races, and the Internet is the freest media of all.

No one knows exactly where technology is taking politics, but we’re beginning to see some clues. For starters, the longtime stranglehold of media consultants may be over. … just as Linux lets tech-savvy users avoid Microsoft and design their own operating systems, so “netroots” political organizers may succeed in redesigning our current nominating system. But there probably won’t be much that’s organized about it. By definition, the Internet strips big shots of their control of the process, which is a good thing. Politics is at its most invigorating when it’s cacophonous and chaotic.

I’m not sure about Alter’s example, Unity08, which is an organization dedicated to elected a “unity” ticket of one Dem and one Republican in the 2008 presidential elections. The “crashing the gate” netroots initiative to reform an established party — the Dems — seems more practical. We’ll see how that goes.

Last week Jamison Foser called media “the dominant political force of our time.” Foser and Eric Boehlert, in his new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (which I’m currently reading) make essentially the same point: In the past several years the media has made right-wing extremism seem “centrist” while progressivism, which has a long and respectable history in mainstream American politics, has been marginalized as something alien and weird and looney. Media enabled the Republicans to become the dominant party in national politics even though the Dems are more representative of American public opinion on issue after issue.

Certainly much of media does little more than act as a conduit for right-wing propaganda. The reasons for this are complex. Many media personalities (passing as journalists) are ideologues pushing their dogma with an evangelical zeal. But others of them are, I suspect, unconscious of the role they play in the noise machine. Matt Bai comes to mind. He seems sincerely oblivious to the power of mass media politics even though he is immersed in mass media politics. (Which may be the problem; does a fish perceive water?)

We can’t reform American politics without either reforming media or breaking its stranglehold on the political process. Using the Internet to strip big shots of their control of the process seems the way to go.

Jiltin’ Joe

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Once again, Paul Krugman nails it. Of the Connecticut Democratic Convention results that put Ned Lamont on the primary ballot against Joe Lieberman, he writes,

What happened to Mr. Lieberman? Some news reports may lead you to believe that he is in trouble solely because of his support for the Iraq war. But there’s much more to it than that. Mr. Lieberman has consistently supported Republican talking points. This has made him a lion of the Sunday talk shows, but has put him out of touch with his constituents — and with reality.

Mr. Lieberman isn’t the only nationally known Democrat who still supports the Iraq war. But he isn’t just an unrepentant hawk, he has joined the Bush administration by insisting on an upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq that is increasingly delusional.

Moreover, Mr. Lieberman has supported the attempt to label questions about why we invaded Iraq and criticism of the administration’s policies since the invasion as unpatriotic. How else is one to interpret his warning, late last year, that “it is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril”?

Other points made by Professor Krugman:

“A letter sent by Hillary Clinton to Connecticut Democrats credited Mr. Lieberman with defending Social Security ‘tooth and nail.’ … In fact, Mr. Lieberman repeatedly supported the administration’s scare tactics. … Mr. Lieberman was providing cover for an administration lie.”

“Mr. Lieberman supported Congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair.”

“Mr. Lieberman showed far more outrage over Bill Clinton’s personal life than he has ever shown over Mr. Bush’s catastrophic failures as commander in chief.”

The MSM keeps reporting that us lunatic raging lefties out here in Nowhereland are angry at Lieberman only because of his support for the Iraq War. Krugman gets it right.

Mr. Lieberman’s defenders would have you believe that his increasingly unpopular positions reflect his principles. But his Bushlike inability to face reality on Iraq looks less like a stand on principle than the behavior of a narcissist who can’t admit error. And the common theme in Mr. Lieberman’s positions seems to be this: In each case he has taken the stand that is most likely to get him on TV.

You see, the talking-head circuit loves centrists. But a centrist, as defined inside the Beltway, doesn’t mean someone whose views are actually in the center, as judged by public opinion.

Instead, a Democrat is considered centrist to the extent that he does what Mr. Lieberman does: lends his support to Republican talking points, even if those talking points don’t correspond at all to what most of the public wants or believes.

Truth. It’s a beautiful thing.

But this “center” cannot hold. And that’s the larger lesson of what happened Friday. Mr. Lieberman has been playing to a Washington echo chamber that is increasingly out of touch with the country’s real concerns. The nation, which rallied around Mr. Bush after 9/11 simply because he was there, has moved on — and it has left Mr. Lieberman behind.

See also Jane Hamsher.

Today the Wall Street Journal editorial staff is swooning in shock over the “ugliness” shown to senators McCain and Lieberman over the weekend. I addressed the “rude” New School students here; I’d have been disappointed if the students hadn’t heckled McCain. So many young people seem apathetic about politics; it’s good to see some who give a damn.

But WSJ wags it’s finger in warning at the antiwar Left. “It’s not an encouraging trend, especially if you’re a Democrat who wants to take back the White House,” it says.

Let’s see — the most recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll on Iraq says a solid two-thirds of adults polled disapprove of the way President Bush is handling the war in Iraq, and almost that many — 62 percent — say the war was not worth fighting. But if the Dems want to take back the White House, they’d better support the war? On what planet, WSJ?

Alec Russell of the Telegraph (UK) documents that the war is destroying the Bush Administration.

… as the American death toll has risen to more than 2,400 and nightly images on the news of death and destruction have failed to cede to the administration’s hoped-for scenes of prosperity and success, Mr Bush’s image has been in freefall.

In April 2003, 70 per cent of people surveyed in an ABC News/Washington Post poll said the war was worth the financial and human cost.

Three years later the figures were almost reversed with just 37 per cent saying the Iraq war had been worth it. Barely 30 per cent said they approved of Mr Bush’s handling of the war. …

… But now the American public appears finally to have had enough. In living memory, only Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and his father, briefly, in the year he lost his bid for re-election, have sunk as low as Mr Bush. “How low can he go?” asks this week’s US News & World Report.

Yet Beltway conventional wisdom still says that being against the war is politically risky? Weird.

Of course, the trick WSJ is trying to pull is to paint the Left as being soft on terrorism. The editorial continues,

Mr. Lieberman will still be favored to win the primary, but angry-left activists around the country will now descend on the state and the fight may well turn vicious.

The left’s larger goal is to turn the Democratic Party solidly against the war on terror, and especially against its Iraq and Iran fronts.

In fact, the left’s larger goal is to get somebody in Washington to notice that people out here in Reality Land ain’t buyin’ the same old snake oil.

At the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl writes about “reclaiming the Democratic agenda.” Does he mean rank-and-file Democrats are reclaiming the party from the weenies in charge? Of course not.

This is about a coalition of mostly younger foreign affairs professionals who held mid-level positions at the State Department and the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and who have spent the past several years formulating a distinctly Democratic response to the post-Sept. 11 era — as opposed to a one-dimensional critique of President Bush or Iraq. Now they are beginning to gravitate toward some of the centrist Democrats who — unlike Pelosi or Reid — might actually emerge as serious presidential candidates in 2008, such as former Virginia governor Mark Warner, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

Remember Professor Krugman’s definition of “centrist Democrats” — “A Democrat is considered centrist to the extent that he does what Mr. Lieberman does: lends his support to Republican talking points, even if those talking points don’t correspond at all to what most of the public wants or believes.”

This month they published a fascinating book that lays out what the foreign policy of a winning campaign by one of those Democrats — or perhaps Hillary Clinton — could look like. Sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is an outgrowth of the Clinton-friendly Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), it’s called “With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty.”

The DLC wants to take the terrorism issue away from Republicans by being more Bushie than the Bushies. Essentially they’re on the Bush bandwagon about promoting “democracy,” meaning … well, I’m not sure what “democracy” means to Bushies. It can’t mean, you know, democracy, because it’s obvious from their behavior here at home that they don’t like democracy very much. But they like the word, along with other words like liberty and freedom that sound just grand even if they’ve been stripped of all substantive meaning.

But the DLC is preparing the way for an “extended and robust security and reconstruction presence” in Iraq, which might have been a rational position to take in 2003. Now it makes me wonder what drugs they’re on.

Diehl continues,

[The DLC group] has ideas on how Democrats can build stronger ties to the Republican-dominated military, revitalize NATO and the United Nations, and reverse Bush’s tax cuts in order to modernize and expand the Army. Don’t be surprised if, after all the Internet noise fades away, such ideas are at the center of the next presidential campaign.

In point of fact, some of us making the Internet noise have already made those same suggestions on our blogs. Like most Washington “pundits,” Diehl has bought into the canard that we netroots types are only against the war and couldn’t possibly be promoting a much broader agenda to inject some real progressivism back into national politics.

The upcoming midterm elections are critical, folks. They are just as important as a presidential election. If the netroots demonstrate we can not only get candidates on the ballot but get them elected, we will have served notice on Democrats in Washington that we are not to be trifled with. On the other hand, if the Democrats don’t take back at least one house of Congress in November, the Bush Administration will assume they have a mandate to stumble along on the same dead-end course for two more years.

Religion v. Religion

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For the past several years conventional wisdom has said that Republicans/conservatives were “more religious” than Democrats/liberals. A report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released late in 2003 seemed to back this up. The Pew poll used three questions to measure “religious”; 81 percent of self-identified conservatives scored three out of three, whereas only 54 percent of self-identified liberals hit the religious trifecta.

I’ve been complaining about the Pew poll since it was released. Pew’s questions for determining who is religious were (1) belief in the power of prayer, (2) belief in a final Day of Judgment, and (3) belief beyond doubt in the existence of God. These criteria reflect an understanding of “religious” common to the People of the Book — Jews, Christians, Muslims. But if you are, for example, Hindu or Buddhist, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press you are not religious at all.

Considering that His Holiness the Dalai Lama would possibly score zero for three on the Pew religion test (no better than one out of three, I’m sure), I submit there’s a flaw in the test.

The question about a final Day of Judgment seems especially problematic. Many conservative, evangelical denominations are essentially eschatological sects keenly focused on preparation for the End Times, which they expect any minute now. But liberal Christians are more likely to think the fire-and-brimstone stuff in Revelations is just a metaphor for something. (Exactly what is a matter of opinion. I’ve heard it argued that Revelations was not a prediction of the End of the World but of the fall of the Roman Empire.)

The older Christian denominations mostly teach that there will be a Second Coming of Christ. However, they also take the view that no mere human can predict when this will happen. So while one should always be prepared, don’t quit your day job. My understanding is that there are diverse views on the End Times within Judaism and Islam as well. Some religious people don’t spin their wheels over Judgment Day all that much, even if they believe there’s going to be one.

One major distinction between conservative and liberal Christians (and, I suspect, conservative and liberal Jews also) is that liberals are more likely to consider scripture to be metaphorical rather than literal. This may tie back to the psychological makeup of people prone to conservatism — conservatives don’t like ambiguity and are more likely than liberals to be dogmatic. I postulate that people who are drawn to conservative religion are also more likely to adopt a conservative political view. Both religious and political conservatives tend to be more rigidly dogmatic, more deferential to authority, and to see the world in black and white terms. Political and religious liberals, on the other hand, tend to be less judgmental, more tolerant of ambiguity, and more fluid in their beliefs.

Thus, a test of “religiousness” based on adherence to doctrine will be skewed in favor of conservatives. But adherence to doctrine and religious devotion are not the same thing. Some religions place a higher value on religious practice and on the spiritual journey than on blind faith in a belief system. It’s not what you believe, but what you do, that matters.

I bring this up because of an article in today’s New York Times, “Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility” by Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman. If you are as old as I am you remember a time when religious liberals were visible and politically active, but for the past twenty or so years conservatives have pretty much taken over the religion franchise and obtained a copyright on Jesus. But, say Murphy and Cooperman, “religious liberals across a wide swath of denominations are engaged today in their most intensive bout of political organizing and alliance-building since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, according to scholars, politicians and clergy members.”

Rightie blogger reactions to this article are dismissive. The Left is hostile to religion, they say. “The more Democrats try to appeal to religious voters, the more they’ll alienate a big chunk of their base,” says one. This guy may have a point, sort of. I think it would be a huge mistake for Dems to copy the crass religiosity of the Right in order to win the evangelical vote.

Those alien to Bible Belt culture (Howard Dean, I’m talking to you) often can’t talk about religion without visible squeamishness. This has nothing to do with lack of devotion, however. Many genuinely religious people are uncomfortable talking about their religious experiences for the same reason they’re uncomfortable talking about their sexual experiences — some things are too personal and intimate to flaunt in public. And I say, if that’s how you feel, honor that.

For some, religion is a kind of tribal identity, and their religious talk is a code to let others know they are one of your people. But that same rhetoric will alienate those who recognize the tribe doesn’t include them. This is, I think, where a lot of the Left’s so-called hostility to religion comes from. Most of the time it’s not religion lefties are hostile to, but the exclusionary implication of much religious talk — if you aren’t one of us we don’t like you and you’re going to hell. It’s a tad off-putting.

I will be very surprised if the religious Left makes the same kind of alliance with the Dems that the religious Right made with Republicans. I suspect the religious Left is less interested in electing Democrats than in taking religion back from the fundies. They may be very happy to work with Dems on certain issues, but I don’t see the religious Left becoming an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Or vice versa. And that’s OK; only the most rigidly conservative seem to think everyone has to join the same tribe.

Speaking of tribes — according to Frank Rich, the marriage between the Christian Right and the Republican Party may be on the rocks.

Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to believe that voters of “faith” are suckers who can be lured into the big tent and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by the party for secular profit.

Nowhere is this game more naked than in the Jack Abramoff scandal: the felonious Washington lobbyist engaged his pal Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, to shepherd Christian conservative leaders like James Dobson, Gary Bauer and the Rev. Donald Wildmon and their flocks into ostensibly “anti-gambling” letter-writing campaigns. They were all duped: in reality these campaigns were engineered to support Mr. Abramoff’s Indian casino clients by attacking competing casinos. While that scam may be the most venal exploitation of “faith” voters by Washington operatives, it’s all too typical. This history repeats itself every political cycle: the conservative religious base turns out for its party and soon finds itself betrayed. The right’s leaders are already threatening to stay home this election year because all they got for their support of Republicans in the previous election year was a lousy Bush-Cheney T-shirt. Actually, they also got two Supreme Court justices, but their wish list was far longer. Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist who invented Focus on the Family, set the tone with a tantrum on Fox, whining that Republicans were “ignoring those that put them in office” and warning of “some trouble down the road” if they didn’t hop-to.

As I wrote here, Republicans face an agenda impasse. For years they’ve been making promises to social and religious conservatives to get their votes. This was grand as long as Democrats controlled at least part of the federal government so that the Republicans didn’t have to keep those promises. But now they don’t have an excuse, and appeasing the base will mean alienating the large majority of Americans who are not homophobic and misogynistic knuckle-draggers.

Unfortunately, some among the Dems aren’t learning the right lessons from the Republican experience. Rich continues,

The Democrats’ chairman, Howard Dean, who proved his faith-based bona fides in the 2004 primary season by citing Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, went on the Pat Robertson TV network this month and yanked his party’s position on same-sex marriage to the right. (He apologized for his “misstatement” once off the air.)

Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking “work is a four-letter word” and for having TV’s in their rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. “I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts,” she said.

Dear Lord, how can smart people be so stupid?

Update: See also Pastor Dan.

Dancing With Them That Brung Ya

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The natives outside the Beltway are restless. We lefties threaten to storm the gates and elect Democrats who will be proactively progressive and not GOP Lite. Meanwhile, righties were way underwhelmed by the President’s prime time immigration speech. I notice they’ve started to call him “Jorge,” probably not out of affection. And social conservatives are threatening to withhold support from Republicans in the midterm elections if they don’t hop to it and do something about abortions and gay marriage.

Wow, suddenly we’re one nation again. We’re united in frustration with the politicians in Washington.

In other ways, however, Left and Right are in very different places, and I think the Right’s position is more perilous. Of course, it’s always possible the Dems will blow off opportunity once again and the Republicans will maintain domination of government.

Washington Dems tremble in fear of us raging, wild-eyed, unhinged lefties who are tired of “progressive” policies that are nothing but tweaks to the mighty Right Wing agenda. We want to see substantive progress in health care, an increase in the minimum wage, and protection of the environment. We want investment in education and sustainable energy sources. And we want a foreign policy modeled more after JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis and less after Clint Eastwood in “Dirty Harry.”

Most of all we want a government that works. We want a government that responds to the will of We, the People, not a government that acts as a vending machine for big corporations and special interests.

This is, I realize, lunatic. Some of us even take inspiration from such un-American radicals as Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and John F. Kennedy. We are one wild and crazy political faction. No wonder Washington Dems won’t be seen with us in public (they’ll take our money, though).

However, the Dems’ problems are simple compared to what the GOP faces.

Over the past 30 to 40 years or more Republicans carefully and patiently patched together a coalition of social conservatives, small-government conservatives, isolationist conservatives, imperialist conservatives (a.k.a. “neocons”), plus the flotsam and jetsam of conservatism past — bigots, nativists, fundamentalists, survivalists, etc.

The GOP accomplished this via a two-step approach. Step one, scare the wits out of the natives. Tell them they are about to be overwhelmed by the evils of Communism, or uppity black people, or dirty antiwar hippies, or feminists, or perpetually pregnant welfare queens, or atheist school principals who take Bibles out of the hands of little Christian children. Or persuade voters our country faces ruin because of birth control and legalized abortion and gay people getting married to each other. Using these and other issues Republicans skillfully reached into the darkest and ugliest impulses of the American psyche and exploited those impulses. They used well-coordinated and relentless talking point campaigns (which were especially effective after the rise of conservative talk radio and Faux News) to whip Americans into spasms of fear and outrage. Most of all, they demonized liberalism to the point that even liberals were afraid to use the L word in public.

Once the natives were properly fearful and angry, Republicans moved on to step two — they presented themselves as God’s Chosen Agents to save America from whatever Americans were afraid of at the time. Through use of inflammatory rhetoric, spin, and “swift boat”-style smear campaigns, Republican politicians persuaded Americans they were tougher, more patriotic, more God-fearing, and more moral than their opponents. (Never mind that Republicans get caught up in scandals at least as frequently as Democrats. When a Republican is caught red-handed it’s either an aberration or a false charge drummed up by the leftie media. When a Democrat is caught red-handed, however, it’s proof they’re all corrupt.)

The Republicans’ strategy has been wonderfully effective for them. They created a solid base of voters who would stick with Republicans no matter how inept they were because, you know, Democrats are all perverts. And anything “liberal” is, by definition, insane. This meme works especially well with people who have no clue what liberalism actually is, which is most Americans these days. Republicans (as well as most of the Democrats) have thrived in a system that allows government to lavish attention on Big Money campaign contributors, special interest groups, and mega-corporations, while voters are distracted by demagoguery so they won’t notice the government isn’t working for them.

But now something is happening that the Republicans didn’t anticipate. Now that Republicans have a near-absolute control of the federal government, the conservative base wants results.

El Presidente Bush is in a bind over immigration because, on the one hand, the Big Money guys who put him in the White House in the first place want to import cheap labor. Measures that would effectively reduce the flow of illegals into the country would cut into profits and force rich people to raise their own children. (Oh, no!) But the base wants the illegals gone. So last night Bush pushed his misbegotten “guest worker” program but also threw a bone to the growlers by promising to send National Guard to the borders. Judging by the blogosphere, however, the base ain’t buyin’ it.

Regarding gas prices — one of the Bush Administration’s first official acts was to look the other way while their buddies at Enron ripped off California. Their next official act was to invite oil executives to write the administration’s energy policies. You think they’re going to get tough with oil companies? Yeah, and I’m Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In the area of social issues like abortion, for years the Right has been playing a fired-up pro-criminalization minority against a complacent pro-legalization majority. At least some GOP party leaders must be smart enough to realize that if the GOP were to deliver on their promise to criminalize abortion the backlash would send the GOP the way of the Whigs. And don’t even think about criminalizing birth control.

Republicans face the same problem on issue after issue. The base wants to ban gay marriage; moderates may be ambivalent about gay marriage, but they are definitely turned off by excessive homophobia. Hurricane Katrina taught us that, although volunteerism and self-reliance are fine, sometimes, people really do need a big, strong government to help them. Voters across the political spectrum want the U.S. to gain better control of its borders, but draconian campaigns to deport illegals who are already here would result in heart-wrenching news stories of families being torn apart. This would turn off moderates and liberals as well as ensure that Latino citizens will be Democrats for the next century or so.

The Republicans are even losing the majority on their all-time greatest fear-mongering issue, terrorism. And bringing the troops home from Iraq might please a majority of voters but would infuriate the base.

Thus, Republicans face an agenda impasse; they have to promise one thing to the base while assuring the rest of the country they don’t really mean it. Since issues aren’t working for them, they’re trying to keep Congress by whipping up fear and loathing of Democrats.

And, unfortunately, inside-the-Beltway Dems are clueless enough to let the GOP get away with it.

Richard Cohen’s Digital Lynch Mob

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Richard Cohen panned Colbert and got 3,499 nasty emails. In comparison, the emails he got after a column on Al Gore and global warming were much more even-tempered. His conclusion is that we lefties are brimming with foaming-at-the-mouth rage while righties are cool and rational.

This spells trouble — not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before — back in the Vietnam War era. That’s when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

How soon they forget. Back in December 2004, Cohen was complaining that the righties were being mean to him.

When, for instance, I wrote a column suggesting that Bernard Kerik was a bad choice for secretary of homeland security, I got a bucket full of obscene e-mails right in my face. I was denounced over and over again as a liberal who, moreover, never would have written something similar about anyone Bill Clinton had named. This would be news to Clinton.

What struck me about the e-mails was how none of these writers paid any attention to what I had to say. Instead, they preferred to deal with a caricature — someone who belonged to a movement, a conspiracy, and was taking orders in the service of some vast, nefarious cause. E-mails are the drive-by shootings of the common man. The face of the victim is never seen.

Atrios suggests it’s time for Richard to retire. That’s a thought. Political commentary is not for the faint of heart these days.

Reaction to today’s column from leftie blogs so far has been dismissive. Digby points out that “There’s no political downside to hating Richard Cohen,” and he calls the column a waste of WaPo real estate. See also A Tiny Revolution.

It’s easy to be dismissive. One, Cohen is a wanker. He has fleeting moments of clarity — I link to him from time to time — but in the next column, or paragraph, he’ll be settled back into the foggy, clueless comfort of beltway insider conventional wisdom. He’s no Krugman. But then again, he’s no Krauthammer. He tends to bob about in the squishy center of the political spectrum, just to the left of the cognitively impenetrable David Broder.

We might, however, want to take Cohen’s charge a little more seriously. Beltway insider conventional wisdom already says that we netroots lefties are nothing but radical malcontents, and that close association with us is a political liability. Not exactly the effect we want to go for, I think. The VRWC could take charges like Cohen’s and turn them into a full-bore discrediting of us. In effect, we could be collectively swift-boated. Just as we’re trying to crash the gates, Democrats might put up bigger barricades. And a moat.

We know that rightie blogswarms can be vicious. Most of us have been targets of one from time to time. It ain’t fun, but it comes with the territory. However, I suspect — this is just a hunch — that righties are feeling less empowered than they were during the glory days of the Dan Rather smackdown, and are not swarming as strongly as they used to. But we lefties may be getting friskier.

On the other hand, the Al Gore column drew much less attention on the blogosphere than the Colbert column, which was a collossally stupid column. Among Cohen’s dumbest efforts, certainly. Technorati says the Colbert column was linked by 217 bloggers, whereas the Al Gore column had only 105 links.

I haven’t broken down these numbers by leftie v. rightie, but you can see at a glance that prominent bloggers who linked to the Al Gore column were mostly from the Left. The only prominent rightie bloggers (i.e., blogs with names I recognize) who linked to the Al Gore column were Gateway Pundit, Oxblog, Blue Crab Boulevard, and Carol Platt Liebau. No little green footballs; no nice doggie; no power tools; no instahack. The big guns of the Right, in other words, were silent.

The Colbert column, on the other hand — did I mention it was among Cohen’s dumbest efforts? — took fire from nearly all the big guns of the Left. Kos, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars, Wonkette, AMERICAblog, Eschaton, Pharyngula, Pandagon, Steve Gilliard’s News Blog, The Poor Man, The Carpetbagger Report, Booman Tribune, Seeing the Forest, Ezra Klein — definitely the A Team. Plus Democratic Underground, Daou Report, and Alternet. And me. (Links are on the search list.)

Cohen’s comparison of reactions to the two columns, in other words, was hardly a fair trial. Let him piss off Wizbang or RedState, and then see what happens.

Still, the anger thing does worry me. I am not saying we don’t have a right to be angry. And I have argued many times that the righties have us beat in the hate and fear departments. I get angry, too. But I think it’s possible that this angry left meme, as unfair as it is, could hurt us. (Since when is swift-boating fair?) And, as I argued here, displays of anger are counterproductive to persuasion. Cohen is right about the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helping to elect Richard Nixon. I remember it well.

So, I’m asking Mahablog readers to stop picking on Richard Cohen and to not indulge in sending hate emails to pundits or politicians who piss you off. Put your energy into something positive, like supporting Ned Lamont. Thank you.

Update: Avedon demonstrates how to challenge a bleephead like Cohen. Read and learn.

Freud and the Fascists

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In 1938 Sigmund Freud was 81 and close to the end of his life. He lived long enough to see Hitler’s troops roll into Vienna, and in some of his final writing he addressed the question of why people flock to dictators like Hitler. You can read about this in “Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge” by Mark Edmundson, in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine.

(Be sure you read Edmundson before tackling “The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal” by Peter Beinart, also in the NYT Sunday magazine. Beinart would have benefited from reading Edmundson also, I suspect.)

I’m going to skip the historical background and also the explanation of Freud’s concepts of Id, Ego, and Superego in the assumption you’re acquainted with ’em (if not, click the link). Let’s plunge directly into the juicy parts:

Freud had no compunction in calling the relationship that crowds forge with an absolute leader an erotic one. (In this he was seconded by Hitler, who suggested that in his speeches he made love to the German masses.) What happens when members of the crowd are “hypnotized” (that is the word Freud uses) by a tyrant? The tyrant takes the place of the over-I [superego], and for a variety of reasons, he stays there. What he offers to individuals is a new, psychological dispensation. Where the individual superego is inconsistent and often inaccessible because it is unconscious, the collective superego, the leader, is clear and absolute in his values. By promulgating one code — one fundamental way of being — he wipes away the differences between different people, with different codes and different values, which are a source of anxiety to the psyche. Now we all love the fatherland, believe in the folk, blame the Jews, have a grand imperial destiny. The tyrant is also, in his way, permissive. Where the original superego has prohibited violence and theft and destruction, the new superego, the leader, allows for it, albeit under prescribed circumstances. Freud’s major insistence as a theorist of group behavior is on the centrality of the leader and the dynamics of his relation to the group. In this he sees himself as pressing beyond the thinking of predecessors like the French writer Gustave Le Bon, who, to Freud’s way of thinking, overemphasized the determining power of the group mind. To Freud, crowds on their own can be dangerous, but they only constitute a long-term brutal threat when a certain sort of figure takes over the superego slot in ways that are both prohibitive and permissive.

Is some of this sounding familiar?

As the Nazis arrived in Vienna, many gentile Viennese, who had apparently been tolerant and cosmopolitan people, turned on their Jewish neighbors. They broke into Jewish apartments and stole what they wanted to. They trashed Jewish shops. They made Jews scrub liberal political slogans off the sidewalk, first with brushes and later with their hands. And they did all of this with a sense of righteous conviction — they were operating in accord with the new cultural superego, epitomized by the former corporal and dispatch runner, Adolf Hitler.

Freud describes the attributes of a Dear Leader:

In his last days, Freud became increasingly concerned about our longing for inner peace — our longing, in particular, to replace our old, inconsistent and often inscrutable over-I with something clearer, simpler and ultimately more permissive. We want a strong man with a simple doctrine that accounts for our sufferings, identifies our enemies, focuses our energies and gives us, more enduringly than wine or even love, a sense of being whole. This man, as Freud says in his great book on politics, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” must appear completely masterful. He must seem to have perfect confidence, to need no one and to be entirely sufficient unto himself. Sometimes this man will evoke a god as his source of authority, sometimes not. But in whatever form he comes — whether he is called Hitler, Stalin, Mao — he will promise to deliver people from their confusion and to dispense unity and purpose where before there were only fracture and incessant anxiety.

Dear Leader’s appeal and message is simple and unambiguous. It shines forth with blazing moral clarity. And that moral clarity gives permission to hate, to eliminate, anyone who is not One of Us.

For Freud, a healthy psyche is not always a psyche that feels good. … For Freud, we might infer, a healthy body politic is one that allows for a good deal of continuing tension. A healthy polis is one that it doesn’t always feel good to be a part of. There’s too much argument, controversy, difference. But in that difference, annoying and difficult as it may be, lies the community’s well-being. When a relatively free nation is threatened by terrorists with totalitarian goals, as ours is now, there is, of course, an urge to come together and to fight back by any means necessary. But the danger is that in fighting back we will become just as fierce, monolithic and, in the worst sense, as unified as our foes. We will seek our own great man; we will be blind to his foibles; we will stop questioning, stop arguing. When that happens, a war of fundamentalisms has begun, and of that war there can be no victor.

These guys at Berkeley write that “intolerance of ambiguity” is a common psychological trait of conservatives, which I ‘spect is what makes them susceptible to the charms of our own home-grown Dear Leader — who (with the help of Karl and a good camera crew) seems to embody the image of a completely masterful man, a man with perfect confidence who needs no one and is entirely sufficient unto himself. Now, you and I know that’s a crock, but righties seem to see Bush that way.

I want to skip over to the Peter Beinart article for a moment. Poor Beinart has been struggling for years to explain to liberals how we can make people like us better, but he should go into a quiet place and think things through for a while before he writes articles for the New York Times. But Beinart talks about Reinhold Niebuhr —

Niebuhr was a dedicated opponent of communism, but he was concerned that in pursuing a just cause, Americans would lose sight of their own capacity for injustice. “We must take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization,” he wrote. “We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized.” Americans, Niebuhr argued, should not emulate the absolute self-confidence of their enemies. They should not pretend that a country that countenanced McCarthyism and segregation was morally pure. Rather, they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the Communists’, their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism. Open-mindedness, he argued, is not “a virtue of people who don’t believe anything. It is a virtue of people who know. . .that their beliefs are not absolutely true.”

George Kennan, architect of the Truman administration’s early policies toward the Soviet Union, called Niebuhr the “father of us all.” And in the first years of the cold war, Niebuhr’s emphasis on moral fallibility underlay America’s remarkable willingness to restrain its power. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States represented half of the world’s G.D.P., and the nations of Western Europe lay militarily and economically prostrate. Yet the Truman administration self-consciously bound America within institutions like NATO, which gave those weaker nations influence over American conduct. “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength,” Truman declared, “that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.”

In other words, early Cold War liberals like Truman and Niebuhr believed in a style of citizenship, and patriotism, that denied itself the easy gratification of absolutism and nationalism. But conservatives have had no patience with that. Admitting fallibility seems to them to be self-hatred. Deferring to other nations that we could push around seems like weakness. Tolerance of other values seems like immorality. Above all, communists must not be understood, but demonized.

If different views about moral clarity produced different views about American restraint, they also produced different views on how best to defend democracy, at home and abroad. The Marshall Plan’s premise was that the survival of European democracy depended on its ability to deliver economic opportunity. In “The Vital Center,” his famed 1949 statement of cold-war liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. compared communism to an intruder trying to enter a house. The American military could keep it from knocking down the door. But if the people inside were sufficiently desperate, they might unlock it from the inside.

To conservatives, this talk of communism’s root causes looked like an effort to rationalize evil, to suggest America’s real foe was not communism itself, but the forces that produced it. “The fact that some poor, illiterate people have ‘gone Communist’ does not prove that poverty caused them to do so,” insisted Barry Goldwater, the first National Review-style conservative to win a Republican presidential nomination.

FDR’s and Truman’s liberal (and mature) approach to foreign policy was the beginning of the meme that liberals were “soft on communism” and weak on foreign policy. In fact there was nothing weak about either guy. But conservatives’ simplistic, black-and-white mode of thinking made the equation clear — communists were absolutely evil; therefore, we should just wipe them out and damn the consequences. Liberals, thinking ahead to those consequences, counseled caution. Ergo, liberals were weenies. Even if our approach turned out to be the right one, we were still weenies.

In the years since 9/11 restored foreign policy to the heart of American politics, these cold-war debates have returned in another form, with the critical difference that only one side knows its lines. Even before the attacks, many conservatives feared America was emasculating itself yet again. In a one-superpower world, they argued, America no longer had to tailor its foreign policy to the wishes of others. And yet, in the conservative view, the Clinton administration had permitted constraints on American power, playing Gulliver to foreign Lilliputians intent on binding it in a web of international institutions and international law. Predictably, conservatives attributed this submission to America’s lack of faith in itself. The “religion of nonjudgmentalism,” wrote William Bennett in the book “Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism,” “has permeated our culture, encouraging a paralysis of the moral faculty.”

Beinart goes on to blame liberals for not standing up for the old liberal Cold War principles, rather ignoring the fact that for the past several years we’ve been shouted out of the national conversation. He goes ahead and writes a bunch of stuff that we all know about why America is screwed up. But not so long ago Beinart was one of those who argued liberals should get behind the Iraq War to prove how tough we are. Like I said, Beinart needs to go to a quiet place and think it all through.

I’m not sure if we’re going to survive the American right wing. No matter how badly they bleep up the nation, no matter how many disasters they cause, they remain supremely confident that they hold the keys to truth and that we liberals are morally compromised loonies. We need to address the American people and say, look, we let the righties try things their way, and it isn’t working. Let us explain our way. And hope enough of ’em are capable of listening.

However, as long as “liberalism” is being represented on TV by Joe Klein, it’s not gonna happen.

Update: See David Sirota, “Peter Beinart Has No Clothes.”

Protesting 101

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Long-time Mahablog readers probably have noticed I am ambivalent about protest marches and demonstrations. Even though I take part in them now and then, on the whole I don’t think they have much of an effect.

Ah-HAH, you say. The immigration marches just showed you. So why isn’t the antiwar movement marching all the time?

Good question.

Sometimes it ain’t what you do, but the way that you do it, that matters. Some demonstrations have changed the world. But in my long and jaded experience some demonstrating is a waste of time. Some demonstrating is even counterproductive. What makes effective protest? I’ve been thinking about that since the big antiwar march in Washington last September (when I suggested some rules of etiquette for protesting). I started thinking about it more after Coretta Scott King died, and I saw photos like this in the newspapers:

What’s striking about that photo? Notice the suits. Yeah, everybody dressed more formally back in the day. But it brings me to —

Rule #1. Be serious.

The great civil rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s should be studied and emulated as closely as possible. People in those marches looked as if they were assembled for a serious purpose. They wore serious clothes. They marched both joyously and solemnly. They were a picture of dignity itself. If they chanted or carried signs, the chants or signs didn’t contain language you couldn’t repeat to your grandmother.

The antiwar protests I’ve attended in New York City, by contrast, were often more like moving carnivals than protests. Costumes, banners, and behavior on display were often juvenile and raunchy. Lots of people seemed to be there to get attention, and the message they conveyed was LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT HOW CLEVER I AM, not NO IRAQ WAR. Really. Some street theater is effective — I am fond of Billionaires for Bush — but most of the time street theater is juvenile and tiresome and reminds me of bad summer camp skits. Except raunchier.

Which takes me to —

Rule #2. Be unified of purpose.

One of my ongoing gripes about antiwar marches is the way some groups try to tack their own agenda, which many others in the demonstration may not share, onto marches. International A.N.S.W.E.R. is a repeat offender in this category. Most of the marchers last September were in Washington for the sole purpose of protesting the war. But ANSWER hijacked CSPAN’s attention and put on a display so moonbatty it made The Daily Show; see also Steve Gilliard.

Message control is essential. During the Vietnam era, I witnessed many an antiwar protest get hijacked by a few assholes who waved North Vietnamese flags and spouted anti-American messages, which is not exactly the way to win hearts and minds —

Rule #3 — Good protesting is good PR.

I know they’re called “protests,” but your central purpose is to win support for your cause. You want people looking on to be favorably impressed. You want them to think, wow, I like these people. They’re not crazy. They’re not scary. I think I will take them seriously (see Rule #1). That means you should try not to be visibly angry, because angry people are scary. Anger is not good PR. Grossing people out is not good PR. Yelling at people that they’re stupid for not listening to you is not good PR. Screaming the F word at television camera crews is not good PR.

Rule #4 — Size matters.

Size of crowds, that is. Remember that one of your purposes is to show off how many people came together for the cause. But most people will only see your protest in photographs and news videos. More people saw photographs of this civil rights demonstration in August 1963 than saw it in person —

The number of people who marched for immigration reform over the past few days was wonderfully impressive. It’s the biggest reason the marches got news coverage. The overhead shots were wonderful. On the other hand, last September I wrote of the Washington march —

The plan was to rally at the Ellipse next to the White House and then march from there. Only a small part of the crowd actually went to the Ellipse, however. Most seem to have just showed up and either stayed in groups scattered all over Capitol Hill, or else they just did impromptu unofficial marches as a warmup to the Big March. … It would have been nice to get everyone together for a mass photo, but that didn’t happen. Too bad. It would have been impressive.

As I waited on the Ellipse I could see vast numbers of people a block or two away. The Pink Ladies had a big contingent and were busily showing off how pink they were — LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT HOW CLEVER I AM — but they seemed to evaporate once the official march started. (Re-read Rules #1 and #2.)

Anyway, as a result, there were no photos or videos to document for the world how big the crowd really was. You had to be there.

A sub-rule — IMO, an occasional REALLY BIG demonstration that gets a lot of media attention is way better than a steady drizzle of little demonstrations that become just so much background noise..

Rule #5 — Be sure your opposition is uglier/more hateful/snottier than you are.

In the 1950s and 1960s white television viewers were shocked and ashamed to see the civil rights marchers — who were behaving nicely and wearing suits, remember — jeered at by hateful racists. And when those redneck Southern sheriffs turned fire hoses and attack dogs on the marchers, it pretty much doomed Jim Crow to the dustbin of history. I think Cindy Sheehan’s encampment in Crawford last August, although a relatively small group, was such a success because of the contrast between Sheehan and the Snot-in-Chief cruising by in his motorcade without so much as a how d’you do. Truly, if Bush had invited the Sheehan crew over for lemonade and a handshake, the show would’ve been over. But he didn’t.

This takes us back to rules #1 and #2. You don’t win support by being assholes. You win support by showing the world that your opponents are assholes.

Rule #6 — Demonstrations are not enough.

It’s essential to be able to work with people in positions of power to advance your agenda. And if there aren’t enough people in power to advance your agenda, then get some. Frankly, I think some lefties are caught up in the romance of being oppressed and powerless, and can’t see beyond that.

Remember, speaking truth to power is just the first step. The goal is to get power for yourself.

Any more rules you can think of?

Update: I’ve posted a revised version of this post at Kos Diaries and American Street.

Still Irrelevant

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E.J. Dionne on the GOP meltdown:

President Bush inadvertently underscored the weakness of the Republican agenda when he flew to Bridgeport, Conn., on Wednesday to campaign for his health savings accounts, known as HSAs. Virtually no one other than the president — oh, and perhaps a few ideologues and insurance companies — sees HSAs as anything approaching a comprehensive solution to the nation’s growing health-care problem.

Senate Republicans have already dropped HSAs from their budget, and Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the Finance Committee chairman, has been openly skeptical about doing anything on HSAs this year. The president was thus campaigning for a doomed idea in Connecticut when, just over the border in Massachusetts, a bipartisan majority in the legislature was passing a visionary plan requiring all residents to buy health insurance and providing subsidies for those who can’t afford the full freight. The contrast between the policy energy that exists in many states and the intellectual torpor in Washington could not have been more stark.

Remember what I said about Bush becoming irrelevant?

Dionne’s point is that conservatism is becoming irrelevant. It may be a little early to make that pronouncement, but we’re certainly stumbling in that direction. Just start counting the many ways in which this nation is bleeped up, and then trace the problem back to its source — policies based on conservative ideology. And this is exactly why the Republican-controlled federal government can’t solve those problems. “Republicans are paralyzed because they can’t deal with the core problems without walking away from their earlier policy choices,” says Dionne.

Why is the federal government so impotent to reform the nation’s health care mess? Because of conservatives. For years we haven’t even been able to have a coherent national discussion on health care, because righties shout it down. So the President goes on the road to sell meaningless tweaks as some kind of solution, and he’s so irrelevant even his own party is ignoring him.

Why are we in Iraq? You know the answer to that one.

Why do we have a bleeping out-of-control deficit? “It took no great genius to see that cutting taxes in a time of war and other security threats would create large problems,” says Dionne. “The contradiction between the current majority’s small-government rhetoric and heavy federal spending has been visible for years.” Visible to anyone but righties. As long as Democrats were in control of at least part of the federal government and were the ones mostly responsible for writing the budget, righties could jeer about “tax and spend liberals.” But given the responsibility of making the hard choices themselves, righties proved they can’t do it.

“Big spending on war, defense and prescription drugs for the elderly, combined with big tax cuts, produces a fiscal squeeze,” says Dionne. Not to mention the uncontrolled pork. At this point the only solution is to either raise taxes or declare bankruptcy and turn the country over to the foreign banks who hold most of our IOUs. But you know the Republicans’ heads would explode before they’d raise taxes. They’ll put the nation in hock to China first.

Bottom line, hard-right ideology doesn’t work in the real world. In that way it’s like Marxism — sounds good when you talk about it, turns out bad when you try to do it.

This is not to say that we should run all conservatives out of town. We’ll always need people at the government table making an argument against excess spending, social engineering, and foreign entanglements — what conservatives used to argue about. It’s a necessary counterweight to some of the flightier impulses of liberals.

But I tend to be skeptical of ideology, period. (See Jonathan Chait, “The Anti-Dogma Dogma“). Ideologies are, IMO, just interfaces to reality. They make the world easier to understand by limiting one’s choices and narrowing one’s focus. But it’s the stuff ideologues refuse to acknowledge — because it’s not written into the interface — that always trips ’em up. And this is just as true of leftie ideology as it is of rightie ideology.

But liberalism is, IMO, less an ideology than a value. John F. Kennedy said,

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

Conservatism, on the other hand, seems to be rooted in the idea that people must be controlled by authority. And if they can’t be controlled by law, then they will be controlled by lies, manipulation, deceit, and propaganda. And right now the same deluded rightie Kool-Aiders who yap about Bush promoting “freedom” are sowing the seeds of totalitarianism as fast as they can.

Yet we can hope they are also sowing the seeds of their own self-destruction. The results of their own actions have boxed them in. They can’t even address our nation’s problems because, more often than not, it was their lamebrain policies that caused the problems, or else made an existing problem worse. And “stay the course” is not a policy, especially when most Americans can see we’re going the wrong way.

The extent to which Democrats signed on to rightie policies in the past — out of fear or political expedience or because they were righties themselves all along — compromises them, of course. Just when we need a pride of lions, we get a pond full of toads. But that’s another rant.

Let’s end on a positive note. If you want another clue to Bush’s irrelevancy, check out yesterday’s Froomkin column.

President Bush is throwing Vice President Cheney to the wolves — or, more specifically, to the Nationals fans.

According to longstanding precedent, one of the two of them had to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the home opener of Washington’s home team on Tuesday — and face the inevitable boos and catcalls.

Bush is sending Cheney.

Heh.

Crabs in a Barrel

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At the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson writes about “The Meltdown We Can’t Even Enjoy.”

It’s frustrating. The three overlapping forces that have sent this country in so many wrong directions — the conservative movement, the neoconservative movement and the Republican Party — are warring among themselves, doing their best impression of crabs in a barrel, and sensible people can’t even enjoy the spectacle. That’s because it’s hard to take pleasure in the havoc they’ve caused and the disarray they will someday leave behind.

“Crabs in a barrel” — what perfect imagery! Can’t you just imagine all the righties, all the Bush culties and fundies and neocons and Big Gubmint-hating quasi-libertarians confined together within their shared lies and resentments? And as the reality of their failed ideologies closes in, see how they pull in their eyestalks and scramble for whatever crumbs of self-validation they can find?

Today the Right Blogosphere is swarming over the critical news that Borders Books refuses to stock a magazine that published the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Other recent blogswarms involved displays of the Mexican flag. For the past couple of days righties have labored mightily to assure themselves that the opinions offered by some retired FISA judges was the opposite of what the judges actually said it was. They’re still picking through the intelligence garbage dumped by John Negroponte. John Podhoretz of the National Review criticizes the just-released Jill Carroll for not being anti-Muslim enough. And for the past several days a number of them, led by John Fund, have been obsessed over a former Taliban member enrolled at Harvard.

Crumbs, I say. The same people who spent the past several years congratulating each other for their grand “ideas” are running (sideways) from big issues as fast as their scaly little legs can scramble. Robinson continues,

It would all be entertaining if the stakes weren’t so high. Iraqis and Americans are dying; the treasury is bleeding; real people, not statistics, are at the center of the immigration debate. Iran is intent on joining the nuclear club. Hallowed American traditions of privacy, fairness and due process are being flouted, and thus diminished.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes a gloomier look at the Big Pcture —

It’s not merely that the Bush administration has run aground on its own illusions. The real problem runs deeper, much deeper, and at its core, I think, lies the fact that out of fear and laziness we insist on trying to address new problems with old ideologies, rhetoric and mind-sets.

To put it bluntly, we don’t know what to do, and so we do nothing.

Run through the list: We have no real idea how to address global warming, the draining of jobs overseas, the influx of illegal immigrants, our growing indebtedness to foreign lenders, our addiction to petroleum, the rise of Islamic terror . . .

Those are very big problems, and if you listen to the debate in Congress and on the airwaves, you can’t help but be struck by the smallness of the ideas proposed to address them. We have become timid and overly protective of a status quo that cannot be preserved and in fact must be altered significantly.

The Republicans, for example, continue to mouth a cure-all ideology of tax cuts, deregulation and a worship of all things corporate, an approach too archaic and romanticized to have any relevance in the modern world, as their five years in power have proved.

The GOP’s sole claim to bold action — the decision to invade Iraq in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 — instead epitomizes the problem. The issue of Islamic terrorism is complex and difficult, and by reverting immediately to the brute force of another era, we made the problem worse.

Yet in recent years the Dems in Washington have offered little else but tweaks to the Republican agenda.

It’s not as if the big, bold ideas needed to address our real problems don’t exist. Sure, they exist — among people with no power to implement them. And thanks to the VRWC echo chamber, those people are painted as dangerous, radical, impractical loonies by just about everyone in both parties and in major news media. Eugene Robinson calls on the Dems to “put together an alternative program that will begin to undo some of the damage the conservative-neocon-GOP nexus has wrought.” But the party as it exists now hardly seems capable of such a challenge. It’s too compromised, too tired, too inbred.

What’s a progressive to do?

As a practical matter, the way Americans conduct elections makes third parties irrelevant. If we had run-off elections or a parliamentary system, I’d say abandon the Dems and form something new. But our system marginalizes third parties; there’s no way around that. Our only hope is to reform the Dems.

Meanwhile, conservatives are being challenged to choose between loyalty and principle. On the Blogosphere, loyalty seems to be winning out. And the righties scurry to hide inside fantasies that George W. Bush is a great leader, and the majority of the American people are still behind him. Snap snap snap.

Patriotism v. Hate Speech

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(This is more or less a continuation of the Patriotism v. Nationalism series. See also “Patriotism v. Paranoia” and “Patriotism v. Francis Fukuyama.”)

Very recently Digby published a post called “Haters v. Haters” in which he argues, using very concrete examples, that the Right works a lot harder at cultivating hate than does the Left.

How many hateful liberal books accusing Republicans of treason, slander, being unhinged or ruining the world are there out there? A couple? Probably. But let’s just say that the market for accusing political opposition of capital crimes, indulging in fantasies about their extinction and musing about how someone should be killed as a way of sending a message to others has leaned heavily on the right wing side of the equation for decades.

A rightie responder to this post claims that much of what Digby identified as hate speech is not, in fact, hate speech. For example, when Rush Limbaugh expresses satisfaction and pleasure when Christian peace activists were taken hostage by Muslim terrorists who are threatening to kill them —

I said at the conclusion of previous hours—part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, “Rush, that’s horrible. Peace activists taken hostage.” Well, here’s why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.

— that is not hate speech. “There is nothing hateful about enjoying the suffering of other people when that suffering is due to their own stupidity,” says the rightie.

Digby responds:

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it’s hateful to enjoy the suffering of others regardless of how “stupid” they are. (Psychologists would call it sociopathic.) Let’s just say that I think it’s cold and inhuman and leave it at that.

Digby is right; the Limbaugh quote is sociopathic. And it sure as hell is hate speech, whether the rightie recognizes it as such or not. Which brings us to another distinction between liberals (patriots) and “conservatives” (nationalists).

There’s an ongoing intrablog argument about whether there’s more hate speech on the Right or Left blogosphere. Each side is certain the other is worse. I say the difference is not in quantity, but in quality. The Left Blogosphere hurls a lot of insults at the Right. I do it myself. I call righties whackjobs and idiots and Kool-Aiders and all manner of other derogatory things. No question, there is ugly rhetoric and demonization being generated on both sides of the blogosphere.

But here’s what I don’t do — I don’t wish the opposition dead. I don’t want them rounded up and shot. I don’t take pleasure in any pain or suffering they experience. And this is true of most of the Left Blogosphere. There are always exceptions. But by and large I don’t see leftie bloggers, especially prominent ones, wishing death, injury or deportation on the Right. I certainly don’t see such rhetoric coming from elected Democratic politicians in Washington or any liberal commentator appearing in commercial print or broadcast media. I can’t say the same about the Right.

(Quibble: One occasionally runs into some fairly ghastly examples of eliminationism coming from the extreme Marxist fringe — marginalized even by most of the Left — and from juvenile anti-Bush protesters with poor judgment and worse impulse control. This is one reason I am leery of public demonstrations; even though most demonstrators are serious-mnded people, there are always a few who don’t understand what is and isn’t appropriate. I’m saying I don’t see eliminationist rhetoric from people who are prominent enough to have some following among liberals, progressives, or Democrats or who hold prominent elected office or positions in the Democratic party. If you are a rightie who wants to disprove my point, you’re going to have to find examples coming from liberal equivalents of Rush Limbaugh, not just something naughty drawn on a sheet by anonymous adolescents and held up at an antiwar rally.)

And the fact that someone who is, I assume, bright enough to tie his shoes doesn’t recognize that what Limbaugh said is hate speech is fairly alarming. Can it be that righties don’t recognize their own hate speech as hate speech? No wonder they think we’re worse than they are. It also makes me wonder if some mild form of sociopathy — a personality disorder marked by an inability to feel empathy or concern for others — is a common trait of hard-core righties.

Dave Neiwert of Orcinus is Da Man when it comes to assessments of rightie v. leftie hate speech. His most recent post, published yesterday, discusses Ann Coulter’s recent address to the Conservative Political Action Committee conference. You know, the speech in which she went on about “ragheads” and oh, how she fantasizes she could assassinate Bill Clinton. The speech that generated some chuckles and a few mild rebukes from righties. Anyway, it’s a good post, and it points to the fact that rightie hate speech is coming from prominent spokespeople for the Right; people who do appear in commercial print and broadcast media and who are invited to speak for the bleeping Conservative Political Action Committee conference.

David has blogged a lot about “eliminationist” rhetoric., which he defines this way:

What, really, is eliminationism?

It’s a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.

… Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself — unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated “enemy” as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary — but not as nakedly eliminationist — are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.

And yes, it’s often voiced as crude “jokes”, the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

The most significant component of eliminationist rhetoric is the desire to inflict harm. David provides examples in several posts: here, here, here, and here, to pick just a few posts at random. As you read, you’ll notice that the examples are not coming from some beyond-the-pale fringe. Many examples are taken from prominent columnists and widely known rightie bloggers.

It is fundamental to rightie orthodoxy that we lefties are the haters, not them. This is how they explain our opposition to Bush; no matter how many concrete reasons we cite for opposing Bush, righties dismiss them with the simple explanation: You’re just Bush haters. Or liberals, or partisans, or variations thereof. And since we hate them, in their minds it is blameless and righteous to hate us back. So righteous, in fact, that taking pleasure in our deaths isn’t actually hate in their minds, as illustrated by the Limbaugh listener discussed above (and here). Fact is, if what Limbaugh spews out day after weary day isn’t hate speech, then nothing is hate speech.

A couple of years ago I experienced a fairly disturbing half-hour cab ride in which the cab radio was tuned to Laura Ingraham’s radio show. The cabbie was a young man so utterly absorbed in Ingraham’s hate speech — she spoke of nothing but her contempt and resentment of liberals — he could barely stand to sit in his seat. He was filled to the brim and quivering with hate. He punctuated Ingraham’s litany of liberal atrocities and her desire to see the tables turned by pouncing his fist on the dashboard and shouting yeah! On close observation it became clear the young man saw himself as some kind of oppressed minority suffering at the hands of a liberal power establishment. The fact that liberals have virtually no real political power in the U.S. today, and that Ingraham’s examples of liberal perfidy came entirely out of her own imagination, mattered little. I’m not saying this guy is typical — one guy does not make a representative sample — but I am saying this is what a steady diet of rightie hate speech can do to a person.

One of the most common bits of rightie shtick is to take something a prominent Democrat or liberal has said out of context and present it to the faithful Right as hate speech, so that righties feel justified in hating back. A classic example was the smearing of Senator Richard Durbin after he remarked on an FBI report on torture at Guantanamo. Durbin did not say that the U.S. was running concentration camps just like Hitler’s, but that’s what righties were told he said. And the reaction from righties was predictable, and sick, and terrifying. A substantial number of of our fellow citizens are, like the cabbie, primed to hate. All the VRWC has to do is yank their chains, and the eliminationism will commence.

I don’t want to put all conservatives in the same boat here. Traditional conservatives whose ideas are based in conservative political philosophy certainly can, and do, find much to criticize in liberal political philosophy and in many progressive policies enacted in the past (not many progressive policies around at the moment to take potshots at). What must always be understood is that the hard heart of our current political Right is not conservative. Whether one thinks of it as a quasi-religious cult or an old-fashioned political machine, or a little of both, I think it’s important to keep it separated from actual American political conservatism, which is an honorable tradition with a legitimate place at the table of government.

But this makes much “MSM” posturing over “balance” and fairness all the more bizarre. They’re no longer balancing opposing political philosophies. They’re balancing people whose opinions are based on political philosophy against a mindless hate cult. And you know this is true because, increasingly, the traditional conservatives are somehow getting kicked over to our side.

Yesterday Matt Stoller at MyDD posted “Reporters: The Right-Wing Hates You,” in which he argues that while we lefties get frustrated with news media for not doing a better job, righties want to destroy news media as we know it entirely.

They hate reporters, blindly. You as reporters can’t do a good enough job to satisfy them, because they are after obedience and not truth. They hate you. They hate what you stand for. They will rejoice in your downfall. They will lie to you because you don’t matter to them. You have no legitimacy.

It’s taken many years of propaganda about the “liberal media” to get us to this point but … we’ve arrived, folks. We’re here. Wake up. (See also ” ‘Marginalizing’ the Press.”)

If you want to see where we’re heading, just take a look at the Middle East. We’re told Muslims still carry a grudge about the bleeping crusades. We’re told Muslim leaders and Muslim schools have been teaching hate for decades. And recently a few imams used a few cartoons to yank the chains, and large numbers of Muslims go on a rampage.

Righties insist we are not like them, even as they use the Muslim rampage as an excuse to ramp up their own anti-Muslim hate speech. I agree that the majority of our home-grown rightie haters are not likely to riot in the streets. Yet. But give ’em time. My cabbie certainly was ready to join a lynch mob had he bumped into one.

I have argued in the past that righties define liberalism in more hateful and demonic terms than lefties define conservatism (click on the link for examples). Liberals who criticize conservatism tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect. On the Right, however, the word liberal itself is such a pejorative that no qualifiers are required. There are always exceptions, but if you start googling for examples of broad-brush demonization of liberalism by righties and of conservatism by lefties, you find truckfuls more of the former than you do of the latter.

And I think that’s because, for too many righties, hate itself is the point. And hate doesn’t need reasons.

[Next (and probably last) in the series: Righties discover intolerance!]

Update: See Arianna Huffington, “Is Sean Hannity Addicted to Coulter Crack?”