More Weisberg Than We Want Or Need

The hits keep on coming. Today's conventional-wisdom-masquerading-as-deep-insight is called Make It Stop! How Obama can Get Behind the Idea of Limited Government. Are you looking for a succinct description of the subservient, paralyzed thinking that goes by the name "liberal" these days? Well look no further:

It's not unreasonable to worry that, in responding to the biggest economic slump since the Great Depression while fighting two wars, the United States will find itself with a more expensive, more intrusive public sector and a less free and dynamic private one.

It's funny, because if I were a Martian who just arrived on Earth and read this sentence, I'd figure that the biggest economic slump since the great depression and two wars we're fighting would probably be the most important things we have to worry about. But I guess those things pale in comparison to the real specter that haunts our dreams: our government might be getting bigger. Yikes!

Now, I know free and dynamic private enterprise=jesus and intrusive public sector=satan. I know this. The American public certainly knows it. And "liberal" Jacob Weisberg knows it. It's so obvious, it's not even worth parsing. Whatever.

Politically, the backlash against expanding centralized government is hardly a new problem for Democrats. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt faced a largely class-based reaction to the New Deal's extension of Washington's role into social insurance, regional development, and last-resort employment. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson was confronted with a racially tinged reaction against his use of federal power to fight poverty and advance civil rights. Since California passed Proposition 13 in 1978, distrust of government has been a primary driver of Republican advantage and a dagger pointed at Democrats, who have only really thrived when they took calls to limit government seriously.

Now Jake, you know you're not really delivering the propaganda the right way. See, you talked about FDR at the beginning of the paragraph--you know, the guy who presided over the biggest government expansion in American history; the guy who created the "welfare state;" the guy who built a liberal coalition that dominated national elections for 40 years; the guy whose agenda was predicated on the notion that government has a moral and practical responsibility to provide relief to its citizens in the form of taxpayer-funded social programs and economic intervention. When you throw FDR in there it kind of confuses your otherwise totally obvious and common-sense point about Democrats only "thriving" when they do the exact opposite of what FDR did. But whatever.

Shifting to the present day, our intrepid reporter explains how Obama is failing to appreciate this totally natural and not at all ginned-up fear of expanded government.

Even now that the fear of excessive, irreversible public-sector growth has provoked an agenda-stalling backlash and resulted in serious people claiming that his proposals equate to socialism, Obama has yet to clarify his ambiguous view of government's role.

For helpful hints about what sort of "serious people" think Obama is a socialist, we can click on the link, which takes us to a Weisberg column from March of last year in which our hero bravely takes on two intellectual dragons, Charles Krauthammer and Newt Gingrich.

(Incidentally, in this column Weisberg helpfully informs us that modern European democracies that provide social benefits to their citizens comes from a historical tradition that "stretched back to Bismarck and Germany in the 1880s," which would make sense if Bismarck wasn't, like, a mortal enemy of trade unions who founded the German state on a profound hostility to workers' movements.)

But whatever. Now that he's proven that it's both possible and necessary for Obama to fix the economy and wage two wars while shrinking the government, Weisberg moves on to the real point of the column: Weisberg!

How, at this late stage, might a Democratic president go about establishing himself as a limited-government liberal? As a younger, more idealistic journalist, I wrote a book trying to square my belief in federal activism with a commitment to limited government. In the 15 years since, my advice hasn't much changed (or been taken). New Democrats and Blue Dogs aside, the party's congressional leadership has never really recognized that the problem of government excess and failure is grounded in reality as well as in the other side's distortions and misperceptions.

I hate to say it Jake, but writing a book about the wonders of "small government" as though you invented the idea, and pretending as though you were some lone soldier fighting back against all those socialists who wanted crazy government expansion back in the 1990s isn't really indicative of "idealism." Ah, Jacob Weisberg, that hopeless romantic. Some say he's crazy, with his theory that liberals should try getting elected on a small government platform. If only they'd taken his advice! (Well, I guess technically they didn't really take his advice because THEY'D ALREADY BEEN DOING IT FOR FUCKING EVER. But whatever.)

Anyway, Weisberg is going to lay his good advice on us now. It's the moment we've been waiting for. How can Obama make it work? How can he trump the tea party nutbags and neutralize the Republican opposition? How can he enact the liberal agenda?

At this point, Obama and the Democrats may be destined to learn the old lesson once again. But if they hope to avoid a repeat of Clinton's 1994 fate in 2010, the president and his party might think about fixing a long-term upper limit on the size of government. Because of the bank bailouts and stimulus, federal spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP this year, and public spending at all levels will exceed 44 percent. But if liberals were clear that, in normal times, federal spending shouldn't be more than 22 percent and that the public sector as a whole shouldn't exceed a third of GDP—the level during Clinton's second term—the fear of Democrats covertly foisting a social-democratic model on America would begin to melt away. This kind of ceiling would mean that government couldn't grow at the expense of the economy, because it couldn't grow faster than the economy as a whole. To substantiate his commitment, Obama should unilaterally propose large, specific cuts in programs and subsidies to be phased in as the need for stimulus spending recedes. Raising the retirement age, privatizing space exploration, and eliminating agriculture subsidies would make a decent start.

I haven't really really been focused on politics for very long. I guess Bush II is who really got me going, and the 2000 election really wasn't that long ago. But I am so exhausted at all the lies. Every time I watch the news or read an editorial I feel like an old man. The bullshit is so broad and institutionalized; so subconscious. One in awhile it gets challenged, usually weakly, by a Democrat who's instantly neutralized by the he-said-she-said news drama thing, and anyway he's probably a crook too, so who cares, blah blah blah. It's so demoralizing. Even when truth does come out it seems like we can only use it to play defense--never to actually have constructive discussions of what we'd like our society to be, because we're too busy pointing out how fucked up it is.

That's why when people like Obama come along and speak positively about liberal ideas, about helping the less fortunate and trying to make things fairer and more equal, it really strikes a chord with people. It's like a breath of fresh air. Listen to Sarah Palin or some other mean little person talk about taxes and terrorist professors over and over and it just makes you desperate for someone who can talk with a tiny bit of conviction about values that aren't based on capitalist greed or dumb white people's sexual/racial/economic insecurities.

Liberalism isn't just a set of governing ideas; it's a philosophy that stands in direct contradiction to the petty selfishness and small-mindedness that comprise most everyone's worst instincts. When columnists talk about liberalism, it's very important that they speak honestly about what it is and what it is trying to accomplish. Conservatives, of course, have been lying about liberals forever. But it's only recently that self-avowed liberals have begun lying about liberalism.

Weisberg is, of course, an unbelievable idiot for believing that if Obama would only cut social programs and promise to keep the federal government from growing, then "the fear of Democrats covertly foisting a social-democratic model on America would begin to melt away." This man actually believes that if Democrats just do what Republicans want them to do, they'll stop accusing them of being socialists. Keep in mind, this man writes for Slate and Newsweek. He reaches millions of people. He is criminally stupid. And dangerous.

But beyond even this is Weisberg's most utterly retarded idea: that liberal goals, and liberal policies, can somehow be enacted through a shrinking of government. That there is a hard limit to the amount of money we should be willing to pay to provide for education, health care, social security, for providing basic services to the desperately poor. That while these are noble goals, liberals really shouldn't SCARE Americans into thinking that we believe in those goals too much or that we believe in some moral commitment or anything. That in the middle of the "worst slump since the great depression," liberals need to cut spending in order to achieve liberal goals. One wonders just what Weisberg's liberals aim to achieve, aside from losing elections and further alienating an already furious public.

But whatever. "There's also a risk of Democrats responding in a way that leaves behind more government than we want or need," he concludes.

What do you mean, "we," white man?

Weisberg Hooray!

It's snowy outside, but don't fear, Jacob Weisberg is here to warm our hearts. He's going to explain exactly who's to blame for the (non-snow related) gridlock in Washington:

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

It's wonderful to see an avowedly liberal columnist fulfill right-wing stereotypes by calling Americans stupid, isn't it?

Anyway, Weisberg continues with the standard litany of complaints pollsters have listed forever: when you phrase a question one way, people say yes, but when you phrase it a different way, people say no. What's up with that? It's an interesting question, one that gives rise to a certain chicken-and-egg sort of scenario.

Basically: are Americans dumber than other people? Weisberg seems to think that our stupidity "or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation" is what "locks the status quo in place." It's an interesting historical question: are we responsible for allowing the rhetorical manipulation (and with it the corporate control, the shredding of the social safety net, the ability of right-wing discourse to seep unchallenged into mainstream discourse), or were these things foisted upon us by a particularly rapacious and insidious kind of capitalism? Most likely these things are intertwined as the result of a history of self-generated, aggressive, individualistic myths, as Weisberg seems to indicate. But he doesn't really get into it.

Which is a shame. Because if he really thought about it, he might get somewhere towards understanding what's really at stake here. Instead, he says we have a "national ambivalence" about government. Maybe that's the bird's eye-view. What we really have is a tiny minority of crazy people who hate the idea of taxpayer money paying for anything except churches and war. Their clout is magnified by a sympathetic media--including, not incidentally, people like Jacob Weisberg.

What of these seemingly contradictory desires established by all those polls? They're evidence of people's basic misunderstanding of how government actually works. Where did this misunderstanding come from? According to Weisberg, it's our own fault as Americans; we're just susceptible to propaganda. But where did the propaganda come from? The crux of the article--and the moment where Weisberg really lets it all hang out--is here:

Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general. See, the silly public lives in candyland, and the Republicans are the kindhearted but weak-willed uncle who just can't say no. Kids want candy! It's wrong to make them eat all those facty vegetables without a little bullshit ice cream to wash it all down.

But that's not the worst part.

Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial...Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

It's quintessential Weisberg laziness to use the term entitlement spending at any time, but particularly in this context. It's right-wing terminology, of course; as Marie Cocco explains, it's based on the "premise that federal "entitlements" -- that is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- are bankrupting the country and weighting down generations of younger Americans with the extraordinary burden of caring for their aging parents and grandparents."

In the same article, Cocco explains why these fears about the cost of social programs--these "entitlements," (a word that rich white politicians and media figures typically emit with a characteristic sneer)--are complete crap. The problem, of course, is that seemingly well-meaning people like Barack Obama and Jacob Weisberg continue to buy into the scare tactics. In Weisberg's case, that means he believes that all politicians avoid confronting reality. Republicans campaign and govern like life is a comic book, and Democrats are misguided because...they refuse to confront a crisis that only exists on the pages of the comic book.

By accepting the premise that "entitlement programs" are in crisis, you also accept that the only possible solution to the "crisis" is to cut benefits, or else reduce any other "discretionary" spending (i.e. non-military) to compensate. And this is the entire right-wing plan--to eliminate any and all non-military/national security/Christian church-related government spending.

They've come a long way towards their goal, in no small part because liberals have been unable and/or unwilling to articulate a response to their rhetorical assaults over the last 30-40 years. Weisberg thinks the American public is stupid. I'd say the American public is displaying the natural result of what 40 years of unchallenged propaganda can do.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the public, but in Jacob Weisberg.

History vs. A People's History

Howard Zinn died yesterday. In a related development, I spent part of the night examining the CVs of tenured history professors at the University of Virginia, in search of potential graduate advisors. My wanderings took me to an Assistant Professor named Jennifer Burns, whose past, present and future interests apparently consist entirely of an obscure failed writer named Ayn Rand. (Hopefully Burns's many journal articles, books, and recent appearance on the Daily Show will help generate some interest in this heretofore-overlooked philosophe.)

Anyway, despite her obsession, Burns did find the time to post a non-Rand-related question from one of her readers, who said:

I am currently reading A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) by Howard Zinn. Can you please tell me how this book is viewed in the academic world of U. S. history since it is has a very different perspective.

In answer, Burns linked to an article in Dissent that purported to answer this question through one historian's damning critique.

Now, I should begin by saying that I have no idea what your run-of-the-mill history professor thinks of A People's History, but I'm willing to entertain the notion that he or she might consider it one-sided, heavy-handed, intemperate attack on all forms of privilege; that it paints the American elite as a shadowy, omnipotent, monolithic evil; that it leaves out the rags-to-riches stories, the successful immigrant businessmen, the freedom, and that it does not attempt to provide an answer to the question of why the 99% who gain nothing from the capitalist oligarchy continue to passively live here and consume. In fact, it doesn't take a history professor to see this--it's obvious to any of the millions of kids who picked up this book at age 17 and felt, perhaps for the first time, that history had something important to say to them.

Yes, Zinn leaves out a lot. But as is clear from the first page, Zinn was not attempting to write a comprehensive history. Actually that was the precise opposite of his goal--he wanted to expose that chestnut, the idea of true, non-ideological, balanced history always held as the highest ideal for textbook writers, and expose it for the lie it's always been. After all, a completely balanced history is just a list of everything that's ever happened. And that's not possible. So it's up to the historian to omit and to emphasize. Zinn's trick was that he was honest about what he was doing. And in his honesty, of course, he anticipates every one of Kazin's criticisms.

That said, some of Kazin's points are completely bullshit. The first is his standard claim that Zinn sees only a Manichean world of winners and losers, good and bad:

The ironic effect of such portraits of rulers is to rob "the people" of cultural richness and variety, characteristics that might gain the respect and not just the sympathy of contemporary readers. For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them. They are like bobble-head dolls in work-shirts and overalls-ever sanguine about fighting the powers-that-be, always about to fall on their earnest faces.

I don't really understand this passage, because as anyone who has ever picked up A People's History can tell you, you can't read a page before the voices of long dead, long-forgotten people leap off the page and smack you in the face. The righteous anger in the book is not Zinn's--he's really just the impresario. He is not a particularly eloquent writer. His gift instead was an ear for quotation, like a good journalist, or like a historian who sees the past as living and breathing beside him, and, hey, instead of pontificating and contextualizing and placing history into our neat little rows and making sure we cover all the bases, wouldn't it be fun instead to go and talk to some of these people and see what they have to say for themselves?

Most importantly, the people Zinn quotes are not in any tiny little way like "bobble-head dolls in work shirts." Could this description BE any farther from the truth? Zinn's People range from Spanish nobles, presidents and congressmen to illiterate Indians, union organizers, ordinary witnesses, public speakers, and peasants, but an astonishing amount of them display the active, fervent minds of intellectual people trying to understand the truth about the world in which they live. There is no separation between the rabble-rousers and "the people" (that phrase is always thrown around like an epithet against those leftists who Just Don't Get It)--in a People's History, they are one and the same.

To call Zinn an elitist leftist snob with no true appreciation of culture, as Kazin does, is laughable on its face. Perhaps worst of all, he actually labels Howard Zinn a cynic. A cynic! A guy who spent years after WWII tracking down the names of everyone he had killed in his bombing missions, then sealed up his war paraphernalia in a box marked "never again;" who was fired from his job at a black college for organizing and writing about the civil rights movement; who spent his last class period before retirement standing on a picket line; who spent the last 20 years of his life on lecture tours urging students to organize for progressive causes; who supported Ralph Nader in the face of withering public disdain (twice)? A guy whose commencement address at Spelman College in 2005 was entitled "Against Discouragement" based on his belief, grounded in historical understanding and personal experience, in people's ability to enact change from the ground up? Cynical? To quote the immortal Inigo Montoya: I do not think that word means what you think it means.

So maybe Zinn fails according to the careful historian. The noble history professor, apparently, is an elite scientist who loves nothing more than careful, thorough tweaking of theories and models and rendering all possible contexts until it all points towards something he can safely defend as resembling some kind of actual historical truth in the eyes of his thesis advisor/journal editor. (Kazin likens his preferred historians to bricklayers who dutifully lay their own little brick, while that bastard Zinn just strolls along with dynamite and blows it all up.) Obviously Zinn didn't give a shit about any of that: he just wanted to help average Americans understand that there is a different way of looking at history than the way their textbooks describe it, and that they could be far more active participants in their own history than they had been led to believe. He was trying to open the doors to a new kind of history that is participatory and communal, even oral, as a way to keep alive certain ideas that are all but disappearing from public discourse today.

I guess I'm saying that in a country where 49% of the public believes Fox News is the most trusted news network, Zinn's kind of history is a hell of a lot more important, and necessary, than any bricks the careful historians from "the academic world of U.S. history" might lay.

Another rambling one

These last few weeks I've been digging into the recent stuff at Open Left on Health Care, and of course it's all infuriating and depressing. And it keeps sending me back to the obvious question: why, why, why, oh why in the hell is it that progressives, who have facts and morality and logic on their side, cannot get a damn thing done even when the Democrats hold all the power? Why do these facts and morality and logic all get laughed out of the building when they come to play with the big boys? Why do so many Americans latch onto the most vile, stupid, untrue, immoral, insane ideas and people?

Is it just that people are really stupid? That all the long history of class conflict dressed up as racial conflict has turned them all into Pavlov's retarded dogs? That the media/celebrity infrastructure is so finely-tuned and all-encompassing that it shuts out all dissent? That the vast majority just don't care, and progressives are just less committed and/or mobilized so they always lose to the crazies?

Surely all these dynamics work together and play a part. But I think there's an overarching issue here that becomes apparent with a more historical view.

The rapid industrialization of the mid and late 19th century caused massive demographic, political, economic, and philosophical change in western Europe and the U.S. The ascendancy of capitalism--in a far more ruthless and heartless time than now--provoked not just the rapid rise in earning and political power of the new bourgeoisie, but also a violent backlash in the form of revolutionary movements that eventually coalesced around the ideas of Marx and Engels. In the years before World War I, business and political elites were constantly terrorized by strong left-wing movements, both in Europe and the U.S. One U.S. president was shot by an anarchist. Eugene Debs won nearly a million votes in 1920, out of 25 million votes for president, a not insignificant number. And, of course, the Russian Revolution happened.

From 1917 until 1990(ish), socialist movements worldwide had a vivid, real-life example of a powerful nation that claimed to be guided by Marx's ideas. Never mind the fact that Marx himself had next to nothing to say about how actual socialism was to come about or how such a society would be run, or that the actual functioning of Soviet society was a tad incongruent with standard socialist ideals. What's important is that from the time Marx and like-minded economists and philosophers began addressing the problem of capitalism in the 1850s and '60s, all the way until the end of the 20th century, there has never been a time when critics of capitalism were without a unifying philosophical framework on which they could base their ideas. Even during the left-wing schisms of the 1930s and '40s that divided party-line communists from those who weren't seduced by Stalin, there was still an argument to be made about what exactly socialism was, and how the excess and unfairness of capitalism could be mitigated. In all that time, through its very existence, the Soviet Union offered a counterpoint that was immensely important to intellectuals, students, and left-wing politicians. There are different ways of organizing societies, it said; and not just in wussy Latin American countries but in a superpower country that might actually put a man on the moon before us!

It's true that in some ways the Soviet threat inhibited progressive goals, and led many liberals to fear the communist label. A new Soviet Union with a new emphasis on Marx wouldn't help left-wing critics push a domestic agenda here in the U.S.--in fact, given the current climate, a million teabagger heads would probably explode if the USSR came back tomorrow. Then again, their heads are already exploding anyway. Reality doesn't much matter to the crazies, of course, and the basis for that that can be found in the darker corners of this same 20th century history.

The Soviet Union gave Americans something to define ourself against--and we did so in an historical echo of an earlier time in which the Indians represented "savage nature" to the paranoid Puritan mind. Just as the Puritans didn't really "see" the Indians, we never really saw the Soviet Union--and the Germans never really saw the Jews. The spectre of communism so haunted Weimar Germany that it ran terrified to Hitler, whose rise was predicated on his alliance with the most powerful business interests in the country. These leaders may not necessarily have been impressed with his antisemitism as they were by his anti-communism--his virulent hatred of "Jewish ideas," ideas that seemed to many Germans to be literally seeping in past the border of their country via Poland and the Soviet Union. This is a vital point that's worth focusing on, because it usually comes across as so crazy when we read about it. The monumental evil of the Holocaust tends to cloud our understanding of how the thing managed to happen; it leaves the impression of some incomprehensible hatred, or mass insanity, but the real grease that moved the gears was people's fear of "the Jews."

The hysteria is easier to understand if we think about it politically, because that's the way Hitler framed the issue. "Look out," he said, "the Jews are coming to take over our country!" What Jews? The communists, of course. Rhetorically speaking, "Jews" had a larger meaning than simply as a marker for the Jewish people. It referred to the enemies of capitalism--or at least the capitalist expansion Hitler foresaw for the German state.

Shifting to today: why is it that that the teabag nutjobs are going insane about socialists in the White House right now, at this point in time? American business interests, especially multinational corporations in the financial services, weapons, or infrastructure industries, have never had so much money or power or influence (or money). They control more aspects of more people's lives in more countries around the world than ever before. Sure, there are countries here and there resisting our markets--some of them even have materials our companies want. But in all cases, we either fight them militarily , or economically, until they're either neutralized or defeated. There is religious opposition in Muslim countries that is vaguely based on a hatred of western decadence and corruption, but there is no socialist opposition; no coherent thought behind their reactionary violence.

And so this moment exhibits so vividly the unstable and untenable nature of capitalism. Just when its ascendancy is most assured, when its physical and philosophical enemies have been vanquished, this is the very moment when business and political leaders and their blind followers rush headlong into madness, slashing at ghosts both literally (in Iraq) and rhetorically (Obama is a socialist), while the greedy bankers tank the world economy and receive billions of taxpayer dollars for their troubles.

This is quite a moment. Any conscious person knows now beyond any doubt that the capitalist game is not merely rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many-- but that it may, given the existential crisis of global warming brought about by the industrial revolution, actually end up killing everybody on the planet. But where Marxism once offered a way to make sense of this, today we have no real method by which to do so, nor can we really imagine a better future. For awhile Obama looked like he might know a way, or that he at least understood the stakes and was willing to speak directly about them. But now it’s clear that the change we really need is fundamental in nature, and it can't be achieved by just picking the most thoughtful candidate to stand in front while the ship steers itself into the iceberg.

We need to understand our society. And politicians need to explain what's happening to people in a way that makes sense. We need to show people how not to be afraid of ghosts, because the consequences can be very, very bad. But we can't do this by just talking about things like "affordability in health care" and "responsibility on Wall Street." Platitudes like those don't describe reality or attempt to deal with it in any systematic way; they just perpetuate the universal feeling we all share that all politicians are corrupt, and nobody gives a shit.

Yes, a progressive infrastructure needs to be built to fight against the right-wing machine, and it's great that Open Left is all about putting that together. But that infrastructure--the think tanks, policy proposals et al--need to be based on a broader understanding of what the political, economic, and social realities are in the country. That vision doesn't need to be socialist or Marxist or any other -ist, but it needs to be based on an accurate reading of the problem and offer genuine solutions.

Without such a vision, we're really just flailing around in the dark like the teabaggers.

is the President a liberal?

This is going to be a long and meandering one, I'm sorry to say. And it might not be so coherent. Lots of quotations, too. Ok, enough apologizing.

Today in the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne says some innocuous and generally inoffensive things about watching Obama give the Nobel speech with some European buddies:

A French diplomatic veteran ticked off all the good news: Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo, the ban on torture, the continued withdrawal from Iraq, his reaching out to Iran and North Korea, engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the quest for nuclear disarmament, the effort to "reset" relations with Russia. And there is America's new stance on global warming, on display in Copenhagen. This repositioning matters not just to elites but also to a rank-and-file green movement emerging as an alternative on the center-left to social democratic parties, notably in France and Germany.

But these are the days of European second thoughts: Obama is still interesting, he's still not George W. Bush, but what can he show for his efforts? His Israeli-Palestinian initiative has gone nowhere. The fruits of his overtures to Iran, Russia and North Korea are far from obvious. Where is the climate change legislation that was supposed to pass Congress?

Yes. What can he show for his efforts? One would think results would be called for. In fact, lots of people have been complaining that so far Obama seems to be a lot of talk, with no action. Or worse: some have claimed that Obama has betrayed the liberals who first fueled his candidacy by breaking several campaign promises, and that his progressive rhetoric was mere seduction meant to get him elected, whereupon he would govern as a centrist or moderate conservative.

This debate has been picking up steam lately with Obama's Afghanistan surge in particular. That sad, slow, agonizing, utterly predictable move prompted Tom Hayden to write in The Nation that:

Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the eighteen-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

We'll see. To be clear: I'll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era. But no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out.

The response was swift and merciless. Joan Walsh, usually a welcome voice of restrained compassion--two extremely rare qualities in a political writer--ran a post on her blog at Salon.com called "The Poster Boy for Progressive Self-Delusion," in which she remembered Hayden's earlier endorsement of Obama:

Hayden's delusional Obama endorsement in March 2008 made such an impression on me, I can quote whole sentences from memory. Well, one whole sentence, the first: "All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama." Oh, and I remember that he said Obama's "very biography" and his campaign's "very existence" would cure cancer, make my hair silky smooth, and cause pretty, pretty unicorns to dance in my backyard, too.

OK, that last part isn't true.

But I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama.

So yeah, that old "I told you so" demon drove me back to reread Hayden's Nation piece -- co-signed by Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. (but redolent of Hayden's manifesto-writing style) -- and boy, it's even worse than I remember. For those of you saying it's not fair to blame progressives for deluding themselves about Obama, please read this, and then try to make the same argument. Some of my favorite lines below:

"All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grassroots participation, drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama's very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle-down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below….

"We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined…. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter….

"We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman President, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleezza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American President. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons' attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment."

Oh, and I searched the whole thing: Not one word about Afghanistan. Not even the word "Afghanistan."

[...]

Struggle mightily and cheerfully to forgive yourself for your self-delusion, Tom Hayden and friends...

Clearly, and as Walsh admits, there is some bitterness left over from the 2008 primary here. But leaving that aside for a minute, we can probably all agree that in picking the Afghanistan escalation as his moment to shed his allegiance Hayden is making himself an easy target. Obama certainly spoke at length about Afghanistan being a "just war" both before and after the election; in fact even in his very first speech of note, when he opposed the Iraq war in 2002, he was careful to state "I am not opposed to all wars, just dumb wars," and in this belief he has been quite consistent.

More broadly, Walsh is also correct to note that Obama was never as left-wing on many issues as many liberals seemed to think he was. While there was a widespread belief that Obama was the more progressive candidate, did Obama ever really say he wouldn't staff his White House with ex-Clintonite, New Democrats from the Robert Rubin school of laissez-faire capitalism?

No. But I will say this: he sure as hell let us think so.

Walsh and the "realist" if not "moderate" Democrats that she channels here (she'd dislike that term, but it suits her argument) want us to believe that we're fools to think Obama was somehow different than Clinton or any other frightened, triangulating, centrist Democrat. But in asserting this smug superiority, they want to have it both ways. They want to bask in the president's inspiring rhetoric--in his ability, as Walsh said in a later post on the Afghanistan speech, to be carried away a bit by Obama's trademark rhetorical magic. Yet at the same time, they say that the details--the actual content of that magic--doesn't matter, or should be ignored. Because if we listen to what he actually says in his inspiring speeches, they do not describe a wussy, triangulating New Democrat. They describe a strong, resolute, committed liberal.

***

In his most widely celebrated speech, Obama recited a passage from Dreams From My Father that said:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

He's talking about the universality of the African-American experience, but not only that. He's also explaining his political beliefs. The movement from slavery to freedom and the constant striving for rights, representation, and one's fair share is something that represents, in a very profound way, the aims and beliefs of American liberalism. In other words, there is a deeper meaning here, particularly given the larger context of the speech as intended to move past the Revered Wright uproar. He was trying to explain the important things about himself, and his beliefs, and why, in a country that had been scarred for so long by right-wing hateful rhetoric, people had nothing to fear from confronting the mistakes of the past--whether inflicted by Bush or by even worse legacies. He was trying to legitimize liberalism.

Think I'm reading too much into it? How about this?

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

Expanded education, health care, unions, expanded services for veterans, an end to the war in Iraq. (Not Afghanistan, no. But a stirring, emotional antiwar note nonetheless. Was it wrong to think he believed it?) These are all LIBERAL policy proposals. It's a speech aimed at defining Barack Obama as someone who does more than believe certain things. They animate his being. He is a crusader. He believes with all his heart.

***

Or at least he seemed to. And that "seemed," of course, contains all of Hayden's bitter disillusionment. Obama was a man who presented himself as an unrepentant liberal, specifics be damned. Whatever else you might say about Tom Hayden, he's a man who's spent his life believing passionately in certain things. Can you blame him for feeling inspired by that speech, for believing that it meant Obama was different? And can you really mock him now for feeling so betrayed?

In Obama's Afghanistan speech, Walsh found herself disappointed. The Obama magic wasn't there that night. Well, why not? Surely it couldn't have had anything to do with the content of the speech he was trying to make? With the fact that he was trying to justify escalating a war for bullshit reasons?

Obama was never about simple beliefs and magical unicorns. It was about liberalism. He won people over because he articulated liberalism. And now it turns out it was all bullshit. This is going to be a very difficult thing to handle.

Dionne finishes his piece by praising Obama's speech to the Nobel committee as mixing realism with idealism in some sort of ideal package. "It turns out that there is an Obama doctrine based on a quest for moral balance. Its central insistence is that it's possible to be tough-minded and idealistic, to adhere to a realism rooted in values." Unfortunately, right now that "moral balance" seems to consist mainly in appeasing as many Joe Lieberman Democrats as possible, until the liberal goals he claimed to have in the first place are extinguished altogether. I guess Dionne's point that, well, he hasn't really done what he said he'd do, but he still says it really nicely!

I guess we should have known better than to care about what his pretty words actually meant.

p. s. Obviously I don't buy the theory that Hillary voters knew all this ahead of time. They never truly heard him in the first place.