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.