The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Centrists don’t want to the do the right thing

Stuart Zechman, writing about centrists such as Obama, states:

It’s not that they desire or welcome obscenely high foreclosure and unemployment rates –don’t get me wrong– but it’s that they don’t agree that New Deal-style policies to help ordinary people are worth the cost in terms of shifting government into an adversarial relationship with finance and industry. They don’t want the kind of government that has the kind of responsibility we’re talking about, and so they’ll tolerate and even excuse double-digit unemployment and the banks’ rampant fraud rather than accept that role.

Stuart is still falling into the “they’re not evil” trap.

The fact is that high unemployment keeps down wages, and that keeps down the costs of their big donors—big corporations.  It is a win for them.  As for the foreclosure crisis, almost any sensible solution would require some sort of cramdown, which would hurt the financial firms which are centrists largest donors.

No, actually, while centrist politicians might in some theoretical “how many angels dance on pins” sense prefer that there not be a foreclosure crisis, they don’t mind that much, and high unemployment is a positive for the people they actually work for.

You can’t serve two masters.  Centrists serve major corporations.  If they can do something for ordinary people that doesn’t hurt those donors, sure, they may do it, but if not, forget it.

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110 Comments

  1. guest

    Seriously, though, the Nazi’s didn’t WANT to kill tens of millions of people. Many of the Nazi leaders thought it was a truly horrible nasty business. But there was no other way to get rid of all those Poles and Russians and Balts and Jews and troublemakers and degenerates so they could have Europe to themselves. They weren’t just going to disappear into thin air on their own, ya know. It’s one thing to be the nice guys, but not at the price of sacrificing anything that matters in the least to you.

  2. jcapan

    I’ve never found the whole are they evil or stupid (or not) debate all that enlightening. Nor the “what does Obama really believe in his heart of hearts” vs. how he’s actually been governing for the last two years. The democratic party has been dominated by centrists for nearly two decades. All we need to go on are their actions, a generally atrocious record whether in or out of power.

    I suppose these other psychological analyses, hard science surely, are helpful, if one’s goal is staying in the church despite its priests’ crimes against humanity.

  3. David Kowalski

    If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck. The acts of big corporation are lousy and have a terrible impact on Americans. Things like hiring more workers overseas than in the U.S. in 2010.

    These corporate persons are doing harm to a clear majority of the regular (non corporate) people in this country. It is past time to regulate them heavily, tax them appropriately (their share of the tax burden is about half what it was in 1955), and limit their abilities to control government (overthrow the Citizens United balogna).

  4. Jerome Carpenter

    Evil is as evil does.

  5. Tom Hickey

    I see it as “a class thing.” The political establishment of both parties identities with the elite. The way these people think is that if the elite does well the country does well, and since they see the US as the global leader (really the Empire), if the US does well so does the world.

    How do they justify the poverty and suffering “below” them? The way they think, the only way “the little people” survive at all is because of them.

  6. anon2525

    Stuart is still falling into the “they’re not evil” trap.

    Whether “they” are evil or not, they are stupid:

    1) The definition of the housing bubble is that the median price of houses rose faster than the median rise in wages, that is, house prices outstripped afford-ability. A gov’t. jobs program that would employ the unemployed would raise the wages of the unemployed (from the current level, $0), and in turn raise the median wage. This, in turn, would support higher prices for houses, which is the aim of the Fed. Res. and U.S. Treas. policies. Not employing the unemployed is having the opposite effect, reducing the price at which houses can be sold. So, the neo-liberals’ policy of not having a gov’t. (jobs) program is, in fact, hurting the industry (finance) that they support and believe in. Of course, the lack of accounting and auditing has helped to keep the large banks’ insolvency hidden — a hollow “solution.”

    2) The programs that those employed by a gov’t. jobs program would be employed at would improve the infrastructure of the country and the education of the population. This, in turn, would benefit the industries of the country. Not having these programs is a drag on these industries, much like the overpricing of medical services is a not-so-hidden cost to all companies in the U.S. So, the neo-liberals’ policy of not using the gov’t. to employ people to address these problems is, in fact, hurting the industries that they support and believe in.

    That they are persisting in their beliefs despite the fact that it is contrary to their desired goals and reality shows that they are not thinking (or, equivalently, thinking stupidly), but are holding a “religious” belief. A recent and egregious example of this stupidity was Obama’s “summit” with CEOs where he thought that discussing the economy with them would lead to their hiring the unemployed (or, as the evil camp would have it, he engaged in kabuki).

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke

    The Evil versus Stupid debate suggests that likewise, any sufficiently evil thinking is indistinguishable from stupid.

  7. S Brennan

    Centrists? Centrists my ass.

    My political views have changed little since high school 1975.

    Other than I am more liberal on Women’s and Gay rights, I have seen no evidence that FDR’s concepts needed more than a slight tweaking here and there as technology changed.

    In high school I was called a “fascist” by what now is a well known “liberal” news columnist and editor at Newsweek. The cause? Ford had just pardoned Nixon and “J” was going on and on about it. I asked J “what difference does it make at this point, Watergate was a petty crime compared to some of the other shit?” In between the big & little gym, I was informed of my extreme right wingdomness. J was liberal, I was rightwing even though I embraced the Four Freedoms of FDR, while supporting our efforts to hold the Soviet block in check. I believe it was better to deter war, than to fight it. At this point Viet Nam was over except for the final capitulation so far as the US was concerned…and Ford, wisely let it fall in 1975.

    Flash forward to 2002-2003, I am writing emails/letters/phone calls to try to stop the insanity of the Iraq Invasion. J supports it, likes Donald Rumsfield, so do other “liberal” actors such as Josh Marshall, Ezra K, Kevin Drum, Matt Y et al. I’m sorry supporting a war of aggression is not a Liberal “thing”. And the aforementioned are not liberal, they are right of center, or further, particularly when they support Obama’s right wing economics. Which are as far right as any President since the first Great Depression of 1929. Ike was a hard core lefty compared to Obama on both war and economics

    Centrists of today would hard core right wingers 3 decades ago, let’s not get involve in Orwellian language, lets call them what they are. “Centrists” of today embrace near/at proto-fascist policies.

    I am still holding the FDR/LBJ center.

  8. anon2525

    Centrists? Centrists my ass.

    Agreed. The literal definition of “centrist” is to hold the views held by the majority of the population, rather than the minority views. They call themselves “centrist” as a propaganda move and as a matter of ego (“I’m the Reasonable, Serious Person — you’re an extremist nut*.”).

    See Figure 2 in this post to compare what the majority of the population thinks and expects the wealth distribution of the u.s. should be, as opposed to what the neo-liberals think it should be. The neo-liberals are not centrists.

    *The currently-preferred term for an “extremist nut” is “sanctimonious purist.”

  9. cathyx

    If the defenders of Obama and the centrist dems in congress would just take a step back and observe the decisions, votes, and policies that the centrists make, they would be able to see what is so plainly obvious that every decision, vote and policy always favors corporations and banks over the middleclass .
    I wish it weren’t so, I want to be behind my party members and root them on, but I have to face what is, not what I wish it were.

  10. Stupid people don’t manage to orchestrate the largest upward transfer of wealth in world history.

  11. anon2525

    Stupid people don’t manage to orchestrate the largest upward transfer of wealth in world history.

    They do. “Eating your seed corn” and “Killing the goose that laid the golden egg.” They are hollowing out the country for short-term gain. But their wealth does not mean anything if there is not a complex economy to spend it in. What they are doing is stupid. And who is helping them? The Useful Idiots who like to call themselves “centrists.”

  12. Ian Welsh

    Short sighted, and in certain respects incompetent. They are very good at playing the inside game, but very bad at managing real things. For a long time that didn’t matter, the US was so rich that they could stumble along and it would more or less work, but they keep throwing deliberate wrenches into the gears.

    Think of them as courtiers and of the west as a court society. A very capable courtier is usually incompetent outside of court.

  13. Morocco Bama

    Spot on, Lambert, spot on. That’s why Dubya was the perfect prop for president….and so too, is Obama. They’re the veil…..masterfully calculated. Dubya the Big Dope, and Obama the Brown Hope….and people buy it because Marketing is mind control. An army of Derren Browns has convinced people to fashion their own chains and decorate their cells with the blood, skin and bones of the innocents Empire has crushed beneath its feet.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg

  14. anon2525

    For a long time that didn’t matter, the US was so rich that they could stumble along…

    Yes, they have been ruining the country, but there is so much to ruin that it has taken some time.

    Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation — Adam Smith

    (There are a lot of small variations on this quote. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a source that reproduces Smith’s letter that contains it.)

  15. anon2525

    They are very good at playing the inside game, but very bad at managing real things.

    The economist Herb Stein, who worked for Nixon, said something to the effect that “the miracle of the u.s. economy is that 100 million people get up and go to work every day” (I’m paraphrasing what I read once from memory). Despite how badly the wealthy, with the help of the neo-liberals, manipulate the economy, every day millions of people go to their jobs to try to make those bad ideas work.

  16. Ian Welsh

    The problem is some ideas are so bad that if you work at them, try to make them work, you make the world worse. See “Wall Street”, among other things. (To be precise, today’s major financial firms. Some financial sector is necessary, but the way this one does business is actively damaging to the country.)

  17. Lunsco

    If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck. The acts of big corporation are lousy and have a terrible impact on Americans. Things like hiring more workers overseas than in the U.S. in 2010.

    It goes a long, long way to securing their economic grip on their empire, though. I’m sure that they consider that to be the greater good, however much Americans dislike being unemployed and however much the rest of the world dislikes becoming economic satrapies.

  18. anon2525

    Sorry about the HTML in the previous post. The link was supposed to terminate after the word “boss.”

  19. anon2525

    The problem is some ideas are so bad that if you work at them, try to make them work, you make the world worse.

    A less obvious example of this is what Glenn Greenwald has been documenting in his battle against the interviewers (self-described as “journalists”) at corporate media outlets (and, yes, NPR belongs in this category), in which they have been carrying out the bad idea that they (the “reporters” and “journalists”) should be against what WikiLeaks does. It’s a bad idea and they do their best each day to carry it out. If they didn’t then they would not be employed in their position. They likely never would have been hired for it. The corporations are good at finding idiots who will be useful to them.

    The merger of journalists and gov’t. officials.

  20. @Morroco Bama:

    (Awesome handle, BTW)

    Thanks for that fascinating link. (hope my HTML worked there.)

    If one takes it as gospel that that the taxi ride/walk, etc. were all that were in play, that was eerily impressive…

  21. First of all, thanks for taking the time to read this analysis, Ian, it’s much appreciated.

    Second, I apologize in advance for taking so much of your time with this novella-sized response below, but it’s important that I’m clear, and so I hope that you read all of it, and follow the links that I provide to source my claims. Sometimes it just has to be this long, I’m sorry.

    So, you ask “what makes you think they don’t desire high unemployment rates?“, and that’s a question I’d love to answer.

    But before I do that, let me address your sense that the sort of “Third Way vs Conservative, Center vs Right” stuff I’m asking folks to consider is basically a meaningless taxonomic exercise (“how many angels dance on pins”).

    As I’m sure you’re well aware, Ian, we movement liberals are getting our asses kicked down here, politically speaking.

    Our liberal Democrat representatives –the ones who aren’t merely machine pols– seem to be in a miserable state, unable to withstand virtually any pressure applied to them, or to effectively respond to messaging directed against them. And, when I say they seem incompetent at resisting “pressure” or “messaging,” I mean that it looks like they’re the Polish cavalry up against the Wehrmacht of the establishment political press corps, Democratic leadership and the White House. The Polish Army at least knew that they were being blitzed; liberal Democrats don’t even seem to know that there’s a campaign being waged against them. Not that I’m a huge fan of Dennis Kucinich, but when he votes for the PPACA because, as he says (http://www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/dennis-kucinich-health-care-bill-032210#ixzz19XuublLS) “I had a higher responsibility to my constituents, to the nation, to my president and his presidency,” that’s a big indication of how fucked we are. This guy, the supposed paragon of liberal “purity” wouldn’t say “My president” about Bush, but he’ll say that about the Larry Summers-appointing, Petraeus-lionizing, “government can’t create jobs”-proclaiming, New Democrat Obama, and that’s a huge problem for us –and America.

    But there’s a bigger problem, Ian, even bigger than the one you pointed to in your excellent post from July of this year (https://www.ianwelsh.net/netroots-schizo/), entitled “Netroots Schizo,” in which you described two camps of attendees at this year’s Netroots Nation, one being a disparate faction of non-Obama loyalists (in which you and I fall), and the other being:

    “the folks who would characterize themselves, in general, as hard nosed pragmatists and “realists”. These range from the “Obama is the greatest liberal president since FDR” types, who think that the Obama is just wonderful and those progressives and liberals who don’t agree are simply delusional to those who feel that a lot of what he’s done has been watered down pap in general but that it’s certainly better than nothing and that those who are disappointed are unrealistic idealists who simply don’t understand the constraints Obama and Congressional Democrats are working under.

    The second side is angry at what they parody as fairy tale thinking and deeply unrealistic. “Obama couldn’t fix everything, but he’s better than the Republicans will be if they get back in power” is their mantra, ranging from “really, he’s wonderful and you’re insane for thinking otherwise” to “well, yes he sucks but he sucks less than what the Republicans will do when they get in power.” Either way, they see the attacks from what they consider the “purists” as deeply damaging. Democrats may or may not be a ton better than Republicans, but either way, they are better, and there is a moral case to be made for sucking it up one more time and working hard to elect, as the old progressive battle cry runs, “better Democrats”. This is a two party state, with those parties having an unbreakable oligopoly on power. Dissing Democrats just helps the even worse party win, at which point they will do even worse things. So get over your problems, whether they are with economic policy or Obama’s continued shredding of fundamental civil liberties like Habeas Corpus, jump back into the trenches with your bowie knife or bayonet and fight for Democrats, not against them because by constantly bad mouthing Dems all you do is make it more likely that Republicans will win, and if they win, well, that will be baaaaddddd. Very, very baaaaaddddd.”

    That bigger problem is that the latter group you’ve identified, the ones who hold the opinions with which you and I disagree, actually represent the vast majority (79%) of those who self-identify to Gallup as liberals (http://www.gallup.com/poll/145268/Obama-Approval-Slipping-Among-Liberal-Democrats.aspx?utm_source=tagrss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syndication&utm_term=Presidential%20Job%20Approval), down in the tax deal December from November’s obscenely high 88% approval amongst liberals.

    That situation is what allows Progressive Policy Institute’s (formerly the DLC’s) Ed Kilgore to fatuously proclaim (http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2010/06/agony_of_the_liberals_versus_o.php) in “Agony of the Liberals Versus Obama’s Liberal Approval Ratings”

    “Sure, you can find elite opinion on the Left that’s been souring on Obama steadily as we head towards the midterm elections. But it’s a useful reality check to note that when it comes to actual voting Americans of the liberal persuasion, if there’s any “agony” over Obama, it is mostly derived from anger at the president’s opponents.”

    That’s the Third Way ideologue Kilgore exulting over the fact that the very rhetorical position from which movement liberals would prefer to argue, i.e. representing popular small-d democratic reform against neo-liberal elite consensus, has been effectively denied to us. The message that Obama’s opponents from the left are “elites” is also in play, which is another triumph for the New Democrats, one of which they probably had to have been aware when they chose Obama to be their representative: “elites” is code for “white limousine liberals whose pseudo-intellectual disaffection masks unreconstructed racism.” There’s no shortage of those willing to employ arguments like those found in Tim Wise’s Daily Kos diary “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal-Left” (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/8/18/894176/-With-Friends-Like-These,-Who-Needs-Glenn-Beck-Racism-and-White-Privilege-on-the-Liberal-Left) for partisan ends:

    “Class-Based Reductionism on the Left

    Perhaps the most common way in which folks on the left sometimes perpetuate racism is by a vulgar form of class reductionism, in which they advance the notion that racism is a secondary issue to the class system, and that what leftists and radicals should be doing is spending more time focusing on the fight for dramatic and transformative economic change (whether reformist or revolutionary), rather than engaging in what they derisively term “identity politics.” The problem, say these voices, are corporations, the rich, the elite, etc., and to get sidetracked into a discussion of white supremacy is to ignore this fact and weaken the movement for radical change.”

    Even worse, the folks in that latter category you identify are essentially echoing what those with all the messaging power of the establishment are repeating every single day. Very few people exposed to politics hear anything other than this message. The “rank n’ file”, therefore are virtually indistinguishable in this regard from those with the biggest, most repetitive, most strategic and most expensive megaphones, the New Democrats’. Liberal Democratic voters by a nearly 8 in 10 majority, believe a fundamental lie they’re told about Obama and the Democrats who hold all of the Party cards in the capital: he’s a “progressive” like them.

    If you were to speak to fellow movement liberals in the States about Obama and the Democrats, and you told them that Obama was indistinguishable from Bush on the things that matter, you would receive one of a number of fact-based arguments in return, any of which seem intuitively true, correspond highly with received common knowledge, and are therefore understandable to and repeatable by even the least informed. Obama did appoint Sotomayor, Bush appointed Constitution-In-Exilist “Sc-alito.” Obama did repeal DADT, Bush would never have signed that law. Bush did invade Iraq, Obama would not have –even if we can reasonably argue that he probably would have voted for both AUMFs, had he been in the Senate at the time. The Democrats did pass “Health Care Reform,” the Republicans unanimously opposed it. The Democrats did pass a nominally Keynesian “stimulus package,” the Republicans unanimously opposed it. The modern GOP is still the party of the Southern Strategy, and the Democratic President of the United States is Barack Hussein Obama. Over and over again, any liberal Democrat in this country with even a cursory understanding of current politics will mostly likely make the case that the policies of the Democrats are vastly different than the policies of the Republicans. Most Liberal Democrats know who Sarah Palin is, and they hate her worse than anything. Many Liberal Democrats know who Ralph Nader is, and they hate him, too. They’ve won.

    Like I said, we’re getting our asses kicked down here, Ian.

    Your arguments, however useful in many contexts, seem to be of questionable practical value in addressing this ass-kicking, especially because the latter folks you wrote about have heard them a million times, can therefore predict them, and some have already spent decent money strategizing and implementing powerful messaging to counteract and discredit your position. They rarely hear the kind of arguments I am advancing, and tend not to understand them when they do. They will be slow to react to this new kind of rhetoric from movement liberals, and when they do, it will probably be ineffective and predictable.

    The previously-mentioned DLC swell Ed Kilgore warned his New Democrat Network counterparts last year in The New Republic piece “Taking Ideological Differences Seriously” (http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-plank/taking-ideological-differences-seriously) that the center’s strategy may have revealed an ideology-based weakness :


    “on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

    For those of us whose primary interest is progressive unity and political success for the Democratic Party, it’s very tempting to downplay or even ignore this potential fault-line and the left-right convergence it makes possible. “

    What may seem like a Scholastic theological argument about the angelic capacity of pinheads to you is an attempt to address that fundamental lie, by exposing the vast ideological differences between movement liberals and Third Way Democrats, instead of continuing to argue the policy regime similarities between Obama and establishment conservatives. Movement liberals’ failure to make that case have allowed New Democrats “whose primary interest is progressive unity and political success for the Democratic Party” victory after victory. Maybe it’s time for us to do something about that.

    They will do and say things in accordance with certain ideological tendencies. I argue that it is possible to predict what they will do and say, and so it is possible to wage successful political war against them, which is what I’m advocating, since they are currently waging successful political war against us. Because of their victories against movement liberalism, we currently have no political power to stop them from ruining peoples’ lives, and the country’s future.

    It’s not that I’m wrong and misguided about the donor class and its interests, Ian, it’s that I’m correct on the facts about what the Third Way is and who New Democrats are, and I’m trying to do something different with those facts than you are.

    Help me out, man. It might work –maybe, probably not in time, but who knows? It’s my country we’re talking about, and because I truly love my country, I have to ask for you to at least honestly consider that, in addition to being venal, stupid, morally corrupt, other-directed, coward politicians, they might also be in the grip of another horrendously wrong ideology. I’m not asking you to deny what you know, I’m asking you to consider that this explanation may fit at certain times, and therefore it may help our understanding –so that we can win, one of these days.

    Finally, to answer your question, “what makes you think they don’t desire high unemployment rates,” I would point out two things

    1. when Third Way ideologues believe they aren’t speaking to a mass audience, they’re far more honest about what they actually think about anything, including unemployment

    2. based on my reading of what position papers these people put out year after year, it’s not that they desire high unemployment, it’s that they don’t care as much about it as neo-New Dealers do

    You’re absolutely right about their aversion to wage rate increases, that’s absolutely true, although less “stuck” wages is how they’d put it. Their occasional advocacy of the repeal of Davis-Bacon, the New Deal-era prevailing wage laws (here’s PPI circa 2002 blaming Davis-Bacon for schools not being built http://www.ppionline.org/ndol/print.cfm?contentid=250999) is evidence of that.

    But they do consider themselves “New Keynesians,” and, to the extent that Third Way policy people find high unemployment to be an unacceptably unproductive use of human capital, they don’t seem to favor Neo-Classical attempts to get back to an employment equilibrium via wage decrease. They adhere to this brand of economics-speak they call “The New Growth Economics,” which posits that high growth is more important than high unemployment rates, as Robert Atkinson lays out here in “The New Growth Economics: How to Boost Living Standards through Technology, Skills, Innovation, and Competition” circa 2001 (http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=107&subid=123&contentid=2992):


    “As the Progressive Policy Institute has articulated in its New Economy Index, the New Economy is more global, more knowledge-driven, more entrepreneurial and dynamic, and driven by digital technologies. In this New Economy, neither Keynesianism nor supply-side economics provide the right answers because today’s economy is fundamentally different than the one of even 15 years ago. The Clinton Administration moved toward a new conception of economic policy. It’s time to build upon that and fully embrace growth economics

    This means placing the focus of economic policy squarely on boosting per-capita incomes, and that means focusing on productivity. As Paul Romer states, “the most important economic policy question facing the advanced countries of the world is how to increase the trend rate of growth of output per capita.”

    It may seem obvious that productivity growth should be the object of our economic policies, but strikingly, both liberal and conservative economic doctrines want to take a shortcut to growth, focusing not on productivity but on redistribution. Conservatives want to raise after-tax income by cutting taxes — taking from public expenditures to boost private incomes. Liberals want to tax the rich more, dramatically increase the minimum wage, and spend much of the surplus to funnel the proceeds to programs to benefit “working families.” Neither approach recognizes that the only long-term answer to improving the economic well-being of Americans is to focus on productivity.

    In addition, neither liberals nor conservatives embrace fiscal discipline. Conservatives would see the surplus go to tax cuts, not paying off the debt. Some have even recently begun preaching supply-side Keynesianism, arguing that large tax cuts are needed to spur consumer demand. Many liberals continue to believe that because government spending boosts consumer demand it leads to more jobs and in turn higher wages (but lower profits or higher inflation since higher wages would have to result from increased bargaining power by workers, not higher productivity). As a result, they attacked efforts by the Clinton administration to pay off the debt, calling it Calvin Coolidge economics. Yet, with full employment, cranking up large new spending programs or tax cuts would only produce inflation and efforts by the Federal Reserve to counteract the stimulative effect.

    Growth economics also challenges the mistaken notion of natural limits to growth. Until last year, most economists postulated that the economy could not grow faster than 2 percent to 2.5 percent per year without sparking inflation. Growth economics recognizes that the economy can grow much faster without inflation, as long as productivity grows as fast. In fact, the new administration should set a goal to double living standards for American workers within 30 years. This would require maintaining an annual productivity growth rate of 2.5 percent — even less than the 2.7 percent productivity growth rate the country has seen since 1996.

    Embracing growth economics does not mean ignoring past economic policy goals, such as job creation and inflation control. While these still matter, they are no longer central. The information technology revolution, as well as a highly competent Federal Reserve policy, has led to the longest expansion in economic history. Because globalization, increased market competition, and the technology revolution have reduced the threat of inflation, the Federal Reserve does not need to induce anti-inflationary recessions as much as it used to.”

    Listen, I’m truly sorry to have to make you read through that dreck, Ian, but that’s the policy that these people advocate, when they’re so certain that nobody in the public is listening that they can afford to admit that the Fed actually creates recessions to inhibit inflation, something that virtually no politician will ever say (and if they do, they’ll be ignored by the political press corps).

    They don’t desire unemployment as a means to keep wages low to enrich their donors, they desire high productivity as a means to enrich their donors, which they then believe will also enrich the nation. While they don’t advocate abandoning “past economic policy goals, such as job creation,” they don’t ultimately believe the government should knock itself out addressing them, since, while policies that put large amounts of people back to work “still matter, they are no longer central.”

    This is what they say:


    “Under the old economic policy model, it was not clear that there was a role for government in economic policy beyond managing the business cycle and protecting intellectual property rights. Growth economics makes it clear that government policies can boost long-term income growth. It recognizes the conservative insight that free markets, competition, and innovation boost growth. But it also recognizes the liberal insight that government investments, particularly in science, technology, education, and skills, can provide a foundation upon which productivity growth depends. And finally, growth economics recognizes that fiscal discipline underlies all of this.”

    That’s austerity speaking, in February, 2001, but not the market fundamentalist variety, not the GOP variety, and certainly not the popular conservative variety.

    That’s the Third Way. They’ve been looking for an opportunity like this economic crisis we have in the States for years. It’s what they do. They’re better than us at this.

    And having read reams and reams of this kind of stuff, positions and strategies that orgs like PPI have been putting out repetitively for the past sixteen years, and then having watched the Obama Administration and New Democrats in Congress pass as much of it as they possibly could (given conservative opposition), I think they’re telling the truth in these policy papers, Ian. I started reading their “Health Care Reform” proposals from over the past ten years during the Democratic primaries, and then I watched those awful policies actually become law two years later –and watched liberal Democrats vote and ultimately clap louder for the DLC’s premier think tank’s flagship policy.

    That’s why I don’t think they desire high unemployment, despite the obvious logic of their donor class benefiting. It’s not high enough growth policy for these people. It’s by definition unproductive, under-utilized capacity, which their economists seem to abhor, although (laughably) they tend to view unemployment in the context of the current crisis as structural, and therefore out of the bounds of counter-cyclical policy, anyway. In this way, much like the way Project for a New American Century had the recent opportunity to prove they are elite idiots and ideologues, they’re wrong as wrong can be, but will never admit it.

    I hope that answers the question of why I think the way that I do at least somewhat satisfactorily, Ian, thanks so much for reading and considering all of this.

    Maybe someday we’ll get a chance to speak together about this on Jay Ackroyd’s “Virtually Speaking.” I’ve listened to you on that program, and have tried to honestly paraphrase your arguments when Marcy Wheeler and I were panelists this December (here’s the relevant segment of my appearance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaBKmdW3tos ).

  22. David H.

    It goes a long, long way to securing their economic grip on their empire, though.

    For me this hints at the heart of the matter. The ultimate goal is not wealth but power & control. Everything flows from that. So while they may be hollowing out the economy that we think they need to sustain their economic empire, what they’re actually doing is dividing & conquering the population, starving us of income, and draining us of what little power we still have, or think we have.

    Of course we actually have a great deal of power, we just aren’t using it in any constructive manner.

  23. anon2525

    Here’s where I think the case can be made that Obama is evil, and not incompetent or stupid: He sees where political pressure is building to do something that would hurt the corporate class & wealthy, and he finds a way to release that pressure (with the help of other Democrats) so that the corporate class & wealthy are not hurt.

    I don’t think this point is addressed in Stuart Zechman’s analysis.

    Exhibit 1: The insolvent large banks were not nationalized or put into receivership in early 2009. Instead, accounting rules were rewritten (“regulatory forbearance” — could even Orwell have foreseen such a term?), “stress” tests were “conducted”, and the insolvent banks were not found to be insolvent.

    Exhibit 2: There was a year-long campaign, demanded by the majority of the population, to reform the medical services industry (insurance/drugs/hospitals). Obama successfully delayed any reform for a year until the original, non-reform that the “insurance” sector had written long ago to protect itself was enacted. Had this bill failed to be enacted, there would have been enormous pressure to write a new bill that was not what the “insurance” sector had written.

    Exhibit 3: In the face of growing calls for Elizabeth Warren to be put in a position in which, it is believed by some, she would have had the power to reform some of the financial industry practices, Obama used the “Senate won’t confirm her” excuse not to nominate her for the position, and put the senators in the position of having to vote against her.

    Exhibit 4: With the tax cuts for the wealthy due to expire and with unemployment benefits for the unemployed running out, instead of applying pressure on the Republicans not to hold UI benefits hostage to renewing tax cuts, Obama inverted the politics and used UI benefits to force the extension of tax cuts.

    Looking forward, we ought to be able to use this as a guide for predicting Obama’s actions: If there is some political pressure building for some action that will hurt the interests of the wealthy and the corporate class, then we can reliably expect that Obama will take some action to relieve that political pressure.

    An example where we might see this happen is in the foreclosure fraud that is unraveling across the country. If the banks get to a point where they see the possibility that they won’t be able to escape from the consequences of their fraud, then we can expect that Obama will (again, with the help of Democrats in Congress and possibly the Treasury and the Fed. Res.) take action to help them escape the consequences of their fraud.

  24. S Brennan

    Stuart Zechman, I read your comment to Ian several times and wasn’t sure what you were saying or what you were intending, it’s not the excessive words, it’s the excessive use of labels and projections onto those labels.

    Perhaps you might retry beginning with a synopsis of labels and the belief systems you ascribe to them. In this manner, I can check what you’re saying against my observed database a priori to the reading of your treatise on whatever it was you meant to say.

    FYI, I am sure your were saying a lot of important stuff, but all I got was, “we’re getting our asses kicked down here Ian and a” not much else.

  25. S Brennan

    anon2525,

    Good comment above with well illustrated examples, I would add before Obama, most citizens were against the wars and wanted them halted. In the course of two short years, it’s the Dems who’s blood lust must be curtailed, it’s Dems who are calling for expansion of hostilities, using their rank and file [black and hispanic voters] as cannon fodder for the Democratic elites vicarious glory in Asia.

    The fact that so many of my ‘liberal” friends who were at one time against the endless wars switched and now support Obama and his expansion of these senseless killing has made me despise “liberals” as a group. “Liberals” are not an ideology or political group, they are a social networking group that advances their career while concealing their utter lack of humanity. Whereas, the right wing differs only in their desire to openly display their lack empathy, “liberals” lack the wingnuts courage and hide their revolting avarice.

    It’s all a show, once you are over a certain income group [or a wannabee], your first loyalty is to those who gave you your position over others, not Republican, not Democrat, not liberal, not conservative, not right, not left, simply a gentleman’s agreement to steal as much life blood from other human beings as is practical whether through artifice, or by brutal force of arms.

  26. S Brennan:

    Thanks for trying to get through that, sorry about the length and lack of clarity, I’ll get better at writing, hopefully. The sourced material is supposed to be evidence for my claims.

    I’m trying, anyway. Let me attempt to make this brief.

    Here’s the most important part of what I’m theorizing:

    …consider that, in addition to being venal, stupid, morally corrupt, other-directed, coward politicians, they might also be in the grip of another horrendously wrong ideology. I’m not asking you to deny what you know, I’m asking you to consider that this explanation may fit at certain times, and therefore it may help our understanding…

    So, it’s not that they’re not being evil or not being stupid much of the time, it’s that they’re also being ideologues of a certain kind.

    It’s not that I can’t recognize elements of class war happening, it’s that I can recognize that economists like Arthur Cecil Pigou weren’t conducting a campaign to impoverish the working classes when they recommended policies that lowered wages and benefits to end economic stagnation and unemployment in Britain between the wars.

    These 20th century elites were in the grip of a disastrously wrong theory about how advanced economies behave, though.

    I can also see that Baron John Maynard Keynes was not acting as general in a class war when he proposed policies that worked as he predicted to limit unemployment in those extraordinary circumstances.

    Profiteering campaigns are one thing, rent-seeking by neo-feudalists another, authoritarian subversion and domination another, and catastrophically wrong political-economic ideology yet another.

    These particular Democrats, however evil or noble their characters, are basing policy (whatever they believe they can get done, given their ideas of political constraints) on an economic theory called “Growth Economics.” It’s wrong, and couldn’t predict the disasters they created, but it’s all they have, and they’re invested in it heavily. The political-economic philosophy they espouse is called the “Third Way,” and the policy positions they take are best laid out in the memos of a think tank called “Progressive Policy Institute.” The political label for these ideologues is “New Democrat,” and their representative faction is called the “New Democrat Coalition.” Barack Obama told a gathering of their House caucus “I am a New Democrat” in March of 2009. These politicians rely on a strategic, fundraising and messaging apparatus called the “New Democrat Network,” which had a slight falling out with its parent the “Democratic Leadership Council” over the strategy of message-oriented rapprochement with movement liberals (putting centrist policy over the dupe left).

    If you’re interested in verifying this theory against publicly-available evidence, start here:

    http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?contentid=1430&knlgAreaID=111&subsecid=141

    PPI | Policy Report | September 22, 1995

    A New Deal for Medicare and Medicaid

    Building a Buyer’s Market for Health Care

    By David B. Kendall

    Republican proposals fall short of any real change in Medicare’s structure, offering little more than a more tightly regulated version of the status quo — the welfare state on the cheap — that could actually increase Medicare’s reliance on bureaucratic fiat to manage costs.

    Democrats have failed dismally to take a single step toward a constructive alternative, choosing instead to take cheap shots from the sidelines that reinforce their party’s image as an intellectually bankrupt coalition of stakeholders in the welfare state.

    Lost in the partisan squabbling is any clear recognition that: (1) it is not only possible but essential to restrain Medicare and Medicaid costs through fundamental reform that exposes health care entitlements to the same competitive forces and delivery strategies now transforming the private health care sector; and (2) only through such fundamental changes in the health care entitlements can the nation afford to move toward comprehensive health care reform.

    The Need for Structural Reform

    The most fundamental problem of Medicare and Medicaid is obvious: soaring costs. After adjusting for inflation, the total cost of Medicare and Medicaid has grown sixfold in the 30 years since both programs were created…

    Aside from rising numbers of eligible beneficiaries, the structure of Medicare and Medicaid boosts costs. Put simply, the health care entitlements fail to employ rudimentary market mechanisms to govern the supply and demand — and thus the price — for services, relying instead on arbitrary and politically driven regulations.

    The PPI Proposal

    Over five years, the proposal would:

    # Privatize Insurance for Medicare Beneficiaries.

    Medicare would be changed from a government-run, fee-for-service health insurance plan to a system in which Medicare beneficiaries would choose private health insurance plans, selected from menus offered by competing, voluntary private sector consumer cooperatives.

    The government would subsidize insurance purchases through individual Health Purchasing Accounts, at an amount set by the average price of competing plans, keyed to a benchmark benefit package, rather than to budgetary goals as Republicans have proposed.

    Beneficiaries could choose cheaper plans and secure broader coverage or cash rebates; or they could choose more expensive plans, including a fee-for-service option and pay a premium for the difference.

    This approach is superior to conservative proposals to voucherize Medicare in three crucial respects: It preserves Medicare’s collective purchasing power; it strengthens the position of individual beneficiaries through negotiation by cooperatives; and it protects the value of the subsidy against inflation.

    # Cap and Deregulate Medicaid.

    Per capita Medicaid payments to the states would be capped with states given broad latitude to cut costs by enrolling beneficiaries in private health insurance plans, preferably by adapting the competitive system of consumer cooperatives set up by the federal government for Medicare.

    After an extensive campaign to promote the use of private long-term care insurance, total spending in each state for Medicare long-term care would be capped to avoid a massive influx into the program of middle-class nursing home patients when the baby boom generation begins to retire.

    , and then look for the ideologically-based concept “beneficiaries would choose private health insurance plans, selected from menus offered by competing, voluntary private sector consumer cooperatives”, i.e. “Health Insurance Exchanges” imbued throughout current PPACA law/policy.

    The idea here is to verify the theory that the policy New Democrats are trying to achieve is laid out in these Third Way ideologues’ position papers over the past decade and a half.

    Here’s Ari Berman of the Nation laying out the discord between old and new centrist, Third Way guard (that DLC/NDN dispute I mentioned) http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0304-27.htm

    Published on Friday, March 4, 2005 by The Nation
    Going Nowhere: The DLC Sputters to a Halt
    by Ari Berman

    “A public feud also emerged between [the DLC’s Al] From and the New Democratic Network (NDN), which the DLC founded as its own political action committee to elect New Democrats to Congress.

    The NDN had been run by loyal DLC protégé Simon Rosenberg since 1996. Rosenberg eschewed the DLC’s high-profile attacks and ideological rigidity, viewing Dean as the most innovative leader since Clinton. “I didn’t support Dean’s candidacy or agree with him on many issues,” Rosenberg told Time’s Joe Klein. “But I appreciated how he did what he did. I also thought it was time for New Democrats to declare victory in the intellectual wars and make peace with the party infrastructure.”

    To that end, Rosenberg kept the NDN centrist in orientation but competed with the DLC for members and money, launching an expensive media campaign targeting Hispanic voters and forming alliances with blogs like DailyKos and MyDD and organizations like MoveOn.org.

    After ending his bid for DNC chairman, Rosenberg endorsed Dean. “NDN pluralized the concept of a New Democrat,” says political analyst Ruy Teixeira. “You can now say you’re a New Democrat and have very different views from Al From.”

    The idea here is to verify that the centrists’ political strategy in the face of strong, unified movement conservative opposition is to change course to pursue “progressive unity” even at the cost of allowing the dirty fucking hippies to move their ideological furniture up flights of political stairs, thus the Orwellian language (and outright lies) they use when they think they’re in front of the liberal Democratic base.

    There, that’s already too long, probably.

    Thanks again for reading and considering this, S Brennan.

  27. anon2525:

    I’m not disagreeing that “[Obama] sees where political pressure is building to do something that would hurt the corporate class & wealthy, and he finds a way to release that pressure (with the help of other Democrats) so that the corporate class & wealthy are not hurt.”

    I’m saying that you and I think that this is evil, and they think that this is good policy that will ultimately help the US.

    These people in the Obama Administration, the New Democrat Coalition and the establishment Democratic policy and messaging infrastructure have a different idea than movement liberals about what is good and what is evil.

    I could quibble with a few details regarding the policies you’ve enumerated, but you’re mostly correct.

    Another example that I could provide would be the fact that, when High Treasury Officials gave anonymous access to some liberal bloggers, and were asked about the failure of HAMP to actually save ordinary peoples’ economic lives, here’s their response, as summarized by one of those in attendance (http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/933.html):

    The conversation next turned to housing and HAMP. On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt.

    Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least.

    There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock.

    I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”. Treasury officials are not cruel people. I’m sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those.

    Just to be clear, when you say that we can predict that they will do their damndest to enact HAMP-style policies that will put the interests of people last, and the interests of institutional actors first, you’re absolutely correct.

    That’s different than simply predicting that they will be “evil,” though, and a far more useful approach, in my opinion.

    The reasons why it’s a far more useful approach have to do with why it’s much more useful (for the voter) to tell a voter that a politician is a “conservative” than it is to say that politician is “evil.” In this case, because these politicians aren’t conservatives, it’s better to tell voters what they actually are: Third Way Democrats.

    “Evil” won’t be blamed for this incompetent government’s failures, but liberalism will be. That’s why it’s less useful to focus on the satanic qualities of their policies, I think.

    Anyway, I appreciate you taking the time to read through all of that, anon2525.

  28. anon2525

    Stuart Zechman, I read your comment to Ian several times and wasn’t sure what you were saying or what you were intending…

    I had the same difficulty. After several readings of SZ’s first two comments, here’s what I was able to distill it down to:

    1) Here is evidence that these third-way, new democrats actually believe what they are saying. They are as wrong as the neo-cons, but it is what they genuinely believe about economic policy. And what they believe is, in fact, different from what the right-wing (in its various factions: “market fundamentalists”, republican party, and the right-wing rubes) believe.

    2) We need to understand their ideology because the third-way, new democrats are winning the political civil war with the movement-left or New Deal democrats. (Thanks to the corporate media outlets’ monopoly on mass media), they are able to present a distinction between the democrats and the republicans (“We’re not witches. We’re a lesser evil.”) that excludes a movement-left or New Deal position. Oh, and when necessary, they will obscure what they genuinely believe through the use of Orwellian language, or even lie*.

    *Remember: they’re not un-evil — they’re a lesser evil. Like the right-wing, they have their goals, and those ends justify the means.

    If they have to lie in order to get into office (Exhibit 1: Obama’s 2008 campaign) so that they can carry out their policies, well, they know better than the people that they deceived.

  29. S Brennan

    Stuart Zechman,

    I am not afraid to insult people when I believe their motives are self-serving in the personal sense, or just outright evil.

    It is not my intent to insult you when I call your views naive. As Machiavelli [the first political scientist] advised the prince, [paraphrasing here], look not to what people say, or what they say they believe, look to what they do. And in the Democrats case, Obama in particular, the action speak clearly and in a thundering voice, WE, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, REPRESENT THE INTERESTS OF THE RICH AND POWERFUL AGAINST THE INTEREST OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF TAXPAYING CITIZENS IN COMPLETE CONTRAVENTION TO THE OFFICES WE HOLD, but we are cowardly, so unlike the Republicans, we pretend to care, when in fact we do not.

    Need proof? Obama in two years has gotten more US soldiers killed in Afghanistan than Bush in eight years. The Democrats, Obama in particular, actions speak clearly and in a thundering voice. 500 hundred soldiers dead this year alone for a pointless war. No sorry, I think you mean well, but it’s not Obama’s stupidity that caused those deaths, nor his “philosophy”, it’s his socipathic nature…which is common amongst men who have been rejected by their mothers. His venality is not a result of some failed philosophy, his sociopathic venality seeks justification for his actions any philosophy will do.

    Economics has seen the void created by the major religions abandonment of justifications for abject brutality and has stepped into the breach to provide rationalizations for worldwide cruelty. Economics sprung from the loin of religion…and an apple never falls far from the tree.

  30. anon2525

    I’m saying that you and I think that this is evil, and they think that this is good policy that will ultimately help the US.

    Yes, they think they know better than we do, and that therefore they are justified in lying about what they are going to do when campaigning or enacting legislation (note Obama’s lie about why he “had” to support the right-wing’s tax cuts), or the fact that so much legislation was passed in the lame-duck session because no one wanted to be held accountable for their votes. Their motivation in both campaigning and timing of votes is to break the connection between who people vote for and what positions are represented in legislation, that is, to prevent the population from having its views represented. This is a break-down in representative democracy.

    …Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

    They are not thinking that it will help the U.S. They are thinking that it will help their conception of some country where the consent of the governed is overridden by some people who know better. In this way, what they are thinking is no different from Cheney’s view, or the Tories view, or the aristocracy’s view.

  31. anon2525

    Not that I’m a huge fan of Dennis Kucinich, but when he votes for the PPACA because, as he says “I had a higher responsibility to my constituents, to the nation, to my president and his presidency,” that’s a big indication of how fucked we are. This guy, the supposed paragon of liberal “purity” wouldn’t say “My president” about Bush, but he’ll say that about the Larry Summers-appointing, Petraeus-lionizing, “government can’t create jobs”-proclaiming, New Democrat Obama, and that’s a huge problem for us –and America.

    The problem with Kucinich’s rationalization is not that he betrayed some liberal purity or that he said the phrase “my president.” The problem is that he betrayed representative democracy when he did not vote the position that he had campaigned. If politicians are free to contradict their clear campaign positions, then representative democracy is meaningless and there is no legitimate gov’t. What he did was not “un-liberal” — it was un-American.

    (And his justification — “I had a higher responsibility to my constituents, to the nation, to my president and his presidency” — was Orwellian (or Obama-ian) in that his higher responsibility was to represent the people who voted for him based on the position he campaigned on. His higher responsibility was to do the opposite of what he did.)

  32. cathyx

    Stuart Zechman-
    I agree with the difficulty in following what your point was, and I had the same questions as the others. But what I was expecting at the end of your first post was what you think the strategy should be to combat these new democrats. If you have one, please tell me, because I’m very frustrated with how things are.

  33. anon2525

    These people in the Obama Administration, the New Democrat Coalition and the establishment Democratic policy and messaging infrastructure have a different idea than movement liberals about what is good and what is evil.

    I think that we have the same idea about what is evil: Lying and deceiving in order to get what you want. The non-evil approach would be to present your views to the population and attempt to convince them that you are correct. What dictator hasn’t thought that he knew better than the populace? “The king is a good man — he knows better than we do.” What distinction is there from this view and the elaborate rationalization that the NDC has come up with?

  34. anon2525:

    Thanks for accurately restating that analysis, those are two of its major arguments.

    Just one point of clarification: sometimes the Third Way are the greater evil than establishment or popular conservatives, sometimes they are the lesser.

    They are not always the lesser of two, as we have seen recently with their successful Social Security Trojan Horse, the payroll tax “holiday.”

    And yes, they believe in elite rule. They are the party of superdelegates, after all.

    Here’s Larry Summers from his recent farewell address on what makes America great ( http://avedon.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html#1268859764582645570#1268859764582645570 ):

    …our strength must come from establishing uniqueness, establishing that which is difficult to replicate, that which comes from more collective action.

    Any idea or machine or even individual capacity can be transplanted. Far harder to transplant, imitate, or emulate are our great institutions – the national laboratories and the national parks and the national highway system, great universities and great cities and great technology clusters, a diverse culture, deep capital markets, and a tremendous ethic.

    Individuals aren’t unique, America’s “deep capital markets” are. People aren’t a nation, its “great institutions” are. It’s not the population’s variegated cultures, it’s elites’ “tremendous ethic” that makes us great, according to Larry Summers’ ideology.

    As such, Third Way proponents are frequently the worst of both worlds: statists and corporatists.

    I refer to this antipathy toward populism (left or right) in my 2008 piece “Joe Klein Is Not Your Friend” at PoliLag ( http://politicallagoon.blogspot.com/2008/09/joe-klein-is-not-your-friend.html ):

    The main practical characteristic that needs to be understood about Centrism and Centrists is that, if you are in any sense of the word a political activist –even to the extent that you comment on political blogs in your spare moments, or go to your bible-based church a real lot– they don’t like you. That’s it in a nutshell: they don’t like politically active people trying to control their own government. They don’t trust you to make the right decisions that they, the technocrats should be making for you. They trust institutions; they trust themselves. They don’t trust you. They don’t think that you’re up to the job that citizenship in a democracy demands. They think that you should be working and shopping instead.

    It also happens to be that professional class Centrists are scared sh*tless by the tent-revivalists, costume survivalists, antebellum Confederacy nostalgists and latter day Know Nothings who make up the Republican base. This is because they’re threatened by people and popular movements in general. That’s why they love to equate us with the speaking-in-tongues Pentecostals in Sarah Palin’s rural Alaskan church. They think that, Left or Right, we’re all nuts, and should just be out shopping for more SUV’s, like normal, low-information, suburban Americans…

    It is, in fact, a breakdown in representative democracy, although the Third Way people say that there is a vast “Radical Middle” ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-shireman/the-radical-middle-wins-i_b_183212.html ) out there in the electorate, and so their policies are the most reflective of the non-voting majority, if that imaginary base of theirs weren’t so revolted by the dirty f*cking hippies and the church ladies.

  35. anon2525

    Just to be clear, when you say that we can predict that they will do their damndest to enact HAMP-style policies that will put the interests of people last, and the interests of institutional actors first, you’re absolutely correct.

    That’s different than simply predicting that they will be “evil,” though, and a far more useful approach, in my opinion.

    Agreed: In specific instances, specific descriptions/predictions are to be preferred over a general prescription. I was giving a general prescription because I was not describing a specific instance. When describing a general observation, the more useful approach is to use general terms. So, your recommendation is misplaced.

    In general terms, we can predict that when political pressure builds sufficiently to cause action that will harm the interests of the wealthy and corporate class, then Obama and his supporting Democrats will lie, deceive, and hide their goals (“which are for your own good, children”) and will, in an Orwellian manner, use liberal/left/progressive rhetoric to sell/market their actions. Briefly put (too briefly?), “they will be ‘evil’.”

  36. anon2525

    The reasons why it’s a far more useful approach have to do with why it’s much more useful (for the voter) to tell a voter that a politician is a “conservative” than it is to say that politician is “evil.” In this case, because these politicians aren’t conservatives, it’s better to tell voters what they actually are: Third Way Democrats.

    In other words, rely on brands that have been developed with extensive advertising when selling a product.

    One flaw, in my view, with your prescribed approach is that Third Way Democrats is not a known brand. You cannot use a symbol if the population does not know what the symbol stands for. Another flaw is that it allows other brands to keep good qualities that people associate with those brands, when those brands do not, in fact, represent those qualities. The left/liberals/progressives should not refer to the right-wing as “conservatives.” They should uniformly refer to them as right-wing politicians. “right-wing” more accurately represents what those politicians stand for. “Conservative” is an English word that has many connotations that the right-wing only pays lip-service to.

    What needs to be discussed is not “how do we have our brand out-sell their brand?” but “how do we campaign without using brands and how do we campaign against campaigns that use a brand-based approach?”

  37. anon2525

    If you were to speak to fellow movement liberals in the States about Obama and the Democrats, and you told them that Obama was indistinguishable from Bush on the things that matter, you would receive one of a number of fact-based arguments in return, any of which seem intuitively true, correspond highly with received common knowledge, and are therefore understandable to and repeatable by even the least informed.

    The problem described here is two-fold: 1) How do “movement liberals” perform an end-run around corporate media outlets? Corporate media outlets are not going to give “movement liberals” a platform to present their views in opposition to the DNC’s views. 2) What views should the “movement liberals” present to counter the short-hand responses that the DNC has?

  38. S Brennan:

    Thanks for your comments.

    It’s far more important to me that folks on the movement liberal side understand my arguments than agree with them.

    In my view, this analysis isn’t meant to be a “unified theory of everything” that lines up perfectly with everything one already knows about life and politics, it’s just another tool of many in the theoretical toolbox.

    If you understand this different type of analysis, then the next time you’re explaining your opposition to this Administration to some other person who doesn’t necessarily know what you know, you can choose to say you’d never willingly support capitalist running dogs with genocidal blood on their hands, or you can choose to say that you’d much rather vote for a liberal Democrat than a Third Way Democrat, since the latter’s governance always results in a net loss for ordinary people due to their ivory tower fantasies about how things are supposed to work in the real world.

  39. anon2525


    – Obama did appoint Sotomayor, Bush appointed Constitution-In-Exilist “Sc-alito.”
    – Obama did repeal DADT, Bush would never have signed that law.
    – Bush did invade Iraq, Obama would not have –even if we can reasonably argue that he probably would have voted for both AUMFs, had he been in the Senate at the time.
    – The Democrats did pass “Health Care Reform,” the Republicans unanimously opposed it.
    – The Democrats did pass a nominally Keynesian “stimulus package,” the Republicans unanimously opposed it.
    – The modern GOP is still the party of the Southern Strategy, and the Democratic President of the United States is Barack Hussein Obama.

    Over and over again, any liberal Democrat in this country with even a cursory understanding of current politics will mostly likely make the case that the policies of the Democrats are vastly different than the policies of the Republicans.

    (formatting added)

    This, I think, was the most useful part of SZ’s post — a description of a practical political problem that should be addressed. What is needed is a concise response to all of these items (and more) that describes the reality so that “any liberal Democrat in the country” can ask “Who are you going to believe, that guy or your lying eyes?” Of course, that will mean that liberal Democrats are going to have to engage in the battle in the civil war against the DNC. When someone says that bush appointed Alito and Roberts, a liberal democrat will have to respond that presidents only nominate judges — neither of these men would be on the court if it hadn’t been for the votes of democrats in the senate. Because those senators don’t have to pay a political price for their votes, they feel free not to represent their constituents.

    James Galbraith: Whose Side is the White House On?

    The Democratic Party has become too associated with Wall Street. This is a fact. It is a structural problem. It seems to me that we as progressives need — this is my personal position — we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership.

    What is at stake in the long run? Two things, mainly, in my view. First, it seems to me that we as progressives need to make an honorable defense of the great legacies of the New Deal and Great Society — programs and institutions that brought America out of the Great Depression and bought us through the Second World War, brought us to our period of greatest prosperity, and the greatest advances in social justice. Social Security, Medicare, housing finance — the front-line right now is the foreclosure crisis, the crisis, I should say, of foreclosure fraud — the progressive tax code, anti-poverty policy, public investment, public safety, and human and civil rights. We are going to lose these battles– get used to it. But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.

    Beyond this, bold proposals are what we should be advancing now; even when they lose, they have their value. We can talk about job programs; we can talk about an infrastructure bank; we can talk about Juliet Schor’s idea of a four-day work week; we can talk about my idea of expanding Social Security and creating an early retirement option so that people who are older and unemployed or anxious to get out of the labor force can leave on comfortable terms, and so create job openings for younger people who, as we’ve heard today, are facing very long periods of extremely aggravating and frustrating unemployment; we can talk about establishing a systematic program of general revenue sharing to support state and local governments, we can talk about the financial restructuring we so desperately need and that we’ll have to have if we are going to have a country which has a viable private credit system and in which large financial power is not constantly dictating the terms of every political maneuver.

    (emphasis added)

    Next month, when Obama and the right-wing propose to cut Social Security, liberal democrats should be responding that Social Security should be expanded, Medicare should be expanded. Are there any liberal democrats in national office? Dennis Kucinich, please put your hand down.

  40. Z

    If the system is extremely immoral … and one that so lavishly rewards wall street ceos for basically defrauding innocent people as it robs tens of millions of people of the opportunity to have happy, productive lives is precisely that IMO … then the people that are supposed to represent the best overall interests of our country but instead are much more concerned with maintaining the stability of this immoral system are immoral as well.

    Z

  41. anon2525

    …you can choose to say that you’d much rather vote for a liberal Democrat than a Third Way Democrat, since the latter’s governance always results in a net loss for ordinary people due to their ivory tower fantasies about how things are supposed to work in the real world.

    I’m assuming that this is not what you would have liberal democrats say. I’m hoping that you would not. I’m hoping that liberal democrats will have specific criticisms and specific proposals, rather than referencing a “third way democrat” label/brand.

    Example: Don’t tell people that under bush and obama habeus corpus has been suspended. (In fact, forget the phrase “habeus corpus” — like you’ve never heard of it.) Tell them that the gov’t. is locking people up and not providing a reason for doing it. Tell them that the gov’t. can come into their house, take away them or a family member, and never provide a reason. People are against the gov’t. locking people up and not even providing a reason. Tell them that Obama, the NDC, and the right-wing are in favor of it. Repeat.

  42. Z

    anon2525,

    It wasn’t more than a few months ago where I was arguing with you in regards to obama and I was on the evil intention side and you were on the side that he had merely bought into the establishment bullshit. I was making similar points that you are now making in regards to his true intent. It’s good to hear that you appear to be giving the evil intention opinion a bit more thought … it’s a sign of an active mind.

    Intention is very important. If obama is someone that has no intention of representing what is best for the vast majority of the population … after campaigning as the exact opposite … then we must work around him, which is the conclusion that it appears that many of the folks on this board have. If obama was someone that has just innocently bought into some bad advice, then he could be persuaded to entertaining our points of view. I think it is very clear by now that he doesn’t wish to be “convinced” that following progressive ideals are in the best interests of the vast majority of this country … and the country overall; he is the biggest barrier to positive change even though the scumbag deceitfully ran as a conduit for it.

    Z

  43. cathyx

    But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.

    This is exactly what I want the democrats to do, even if it means still losing. I want them to fight for what’s right, not compromise on the important issues. Because compromising on the important issues looks (is) the same as losing, and if we’re going to lose anyway, I’d rather lose and stick to my principles.

  44. Z

    cathyx,

    “I’d rather lose and stick to my principles”

    I agree 100% … you may lose, but at least you don’t lose yourself.

    Z

  45. S Brennan

    To this comment by a sincere, decent guy:

    “we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership.”

    I reply. Once the remaining FDR/LBJ Democrats have left the ‘roach motel” of the Democratic party has it ever occurred to anyone that HiFi-Corp funding will dry up for said same? If the Democratic Party has lost it’s scent and it’s ability to hold onto people…what purpose does it serve? Dems would loose every seat they have without FDR/LBJ Democrats, they would go the way of the Whigs. I don’t think evil people are stupid, just venal, why would they pay to watch a bunch of pop-pom girls play against the varsity football team?

    There would be one team in town and one employer and every one of those little douche bags who have betrayed us since at least 2003 would have to get on their knees and give a good Booman just to get hired as a butler. Freed from duplicity of “Careerists” such as the like Josh Marshal, Ezra K Matt Y who call for other men to serve in senseless foreign wars, we could re-establish a party that represented working families, people who have to pull a paycheck to survive.

    The “Labor” Party’s platform must be short, it must protect working people of all classes before and ABOVE any other value. Without “Four Freedoms” the rest of your realized hopes won’t fill a thimble. I say this because I have just spent the last ~45 years watching one working class group after another get systematically peeled off and thrown in the bin. Once the ability to make a living without daily fear is lost, so to the appetite for the justice of other human beings. Once a working person is secure in their person, there desire for justice blooms like a plant with soil and water. Once the Democrats started walking away from the working class in the 1970’s, the return of 19th century economics was assured.

    This has been a long drought that could have ended in 2008 those of us who were not taken it must walk out of this desert. Those that were fooled, but not fools are welcome. Those who used the words cunt, racist and bitch should stay with the “Democratic” party until it dies and is folded into the Republican party. I am not the biggest fan of Hillary, but for group that’s willing to settle for the slightly lesser of two evils, Hillary was a factor of 10 above Obama.

    * I am sure all the wordsmiths will want to label it with clique like “MYIQ2L4O” acronyms…or take their ball and go home, but the US needs a Labor Party, not a Green, Woman’s, African, Gay, Atheist, Mexican, or Methodist party, it needs a party that represents 80% of the population that live pay check to pay check.

  46. Z

    To keep it simple and to draw in the most people, we need a party that focuses on just one principle at this time … the most essential one … a single issue platform: purely publicly financed elections. Without that building block, getting anything else done for the working class is a huge uphill struggle.

    Z

  47. anon2525

    It wasn’t more than a few months ago where I was arguing with you in regards to obama and I was on the evil intention side and you were on the side that he had merely bought into the establishment bullshit. I was making similar points that you are now making in regards to his true intent. It’s good to hear that you appear to be giving the evil intention opinion a bit more thought

    Here’s the distinction in the comments I wrote above versus the comments that I made months ago (which I also made early in these comments*):

    Obama&co have, I think, shown themselves to have “evil” intent when it comes to politics, but they believe (religiously, despite all evidence) in their economic policy. Politics versus economics. What I was arguing months ago is that they did/do believe in their economic policy (which is what SZ is saying in his posts above), but they are dishonest/evil in getting it enacted (politics). For example, Obama can well believe that protecting the insurance and drug companies is the best way to provide medical services to the country (economic policy), but he did not make that argument to the country. “You, the people, don’t agree with me, but I know better than you so I’ll lie and deceive you” (politics).

    *See here: https://www.ianwelsh.net/centrists-dont-want-to-the-do-the-right-thing/#comment-12906
    and here: https://www.ianwelsh.net/centrists-dont-want-to-the-do-the-right-thing/#comment-12911

  48. anon2525

    But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.

    This is exactly what I want the democrats to do, even if it means still losing. I want them to fight for what’s right, not compromise on the important issues.

    1) You’re in good company. James Galbraith also recommends this course of action (see above).

    2) What they “fight for” is in the larger sense unimportant. The more important issue is that we have (actual) representation. If politicians do not vote in accordance with their campaign positions, then there is no representative democracy, regardless of the legislation being voted on. And then the gov’t. ceases to be legitimate. All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. If they are not enacting what we elected them to do, then they no longer have our consent, and therefore they are no longer legitimate. This is what is wrong/evil about Obama&co. — they have decided to substitute their judgement for ours, and they lie to us in order to do it, rather than make the case to the country for why it is the right thing to do.

  49. S Brennan

    Here we go,

    A single Issue, yeah that’s winner, right out of the “Divide and Conquer” playbook.

    Did you read “not a Green, Woman’s, African, Gay, Atheist, Mexican, or Methodist party, it needs a party that represents 80% of the population that live pay check to pay check.”

    Z most people who work for a living aren’t going to make the connection…and if they did…and you succeeded beyond your/my wildest expectations and totally reformed politics as we know it….then your party should go out of business…leaving working people with nothing.

    Go poll people, try “With record unemployment and ever declining wages, which do you think is more important, to feed and clothe yourself, or election reform?” Beyond dumb, it’s in “Public Option” territory.

    Let’s see the PPFEP, the Purely Publicly Financed Elections Party…got it. Yeah, I’ll add that to my “MYIQ2L4O” acronyms list.

  50. anon2525:

    You wrote:

    I’m assuming that this is not what you would have liberal democrats say. I’m hoping that you would not. I’m hoping that liberal democrats will have specific criticisms and specific proposals, rather than referencing a “third way democrat” label/brand.

    But that’s exactly what I would say…to other liberal Democrats.

    As I cited above, most of those Americans who self-identify as liberal Democrats have very little idea that Obama is not one. The Administration and their New Democrat Network message shop work pretty hard, considering their contempt for us, to obscure the fact that they have very different ideas than we do. Most people on our side believe that the Democrats in the capital are “as liberal as they can be, given the circumstance.” They hear about compromise and incremental change, and they (are allowed to) assume that the change is in a left direction, not a center direction. When they consume the messaging “we didn’t get all we wanted, but that’s how legislation is made,” they assume liberal policy is the “we wanted,” and don’t know that Third Way policy is what they wanted, but compromised on.

    Liberal Democrats need to understand that the word “progressive” doesn’t mean what they think it means, and that Democrats fall into two categories: the mini-Party of centrists that control everything, and everyone else.

    That information needs to become widely known amongst liberal Democratic voters.

    Why wouldn’t we tell them? Why isn’t it a good explanation for what’s happening in Washington? Why wouldn’t it compete well with the narratives that have been created to counteract normal movement liberal criticism, anon2525?

  51. Z

    s brennan,

    Oh, here we go, I see that you are off on one of your foolish, arrogant bents again …

    It’s not Divide and Conquer; it’s Unite and Conquer.

    Look at the extremely low congressional approval ratings of the two parties and one can discern that there is a lot of angst about a lack of representation. I don’t think it is a very hard argument to make that big money has taken over control over our government and both republicans … have you ever heard of the tea party? … and democrats can agree to that. That singular issue could conceivably unite a big enough part of the population to vote in representatives that promise to vote for that. Without representation, we can’t get the legislation that is needed to improve the lives of the vast majority of the population. That’sa step one. Is that really that hard to sell?

    Until we neutralize the power of the well-financed forces that continue to corrupt our politics, we are in a very uphill battle. And lots of luck getting a bunch of republicans to buy into a labor party. They should, but they won’t.

    wft were you intending to get across with this garble:

    Z most people who work for a living aren’t going to make the connection…and if they did…and you succeeded beyond your/my wildest expectations and totally reformed politics as we know it….then your party should go out of business…leaving working people with nothing.

    Your poll question is misleading and irrelevant.

    Yeah, sure mate, without an acronym that adheres tightly to the party’s agenda, we don’t have a chance. It always comes down to the acronyms. And what exactly is the democratic and republican party’s acronyms again?

    Z

  52. Z

    anon2525,

    And my argument back then … and still is today … is that looking at the economic carnage that those economic policies have caused, there is no way that obama could possibly believe that it is in the best interests of this country to essentially forge on with very similar economic policies; which is exactly what he has done.

    Z

  53. cathyx:

    You wrote:

    I agree with the difficulty in following what your point was, and I had the same questions as the others. But what I was expecting at the end of your first post was what you think the strategy should be to combat these new democrats. If you have one, please tell me, because I’m very frustrated with how things are.

    First of all, sorry about that. It’s very tough to get this idea across to folks who have never heard it before. Jay Ackroyd agrees with that difficulty, too, here ( http://my.firedoglake.com/stuartzechman/2010/12/26/we-must-be-a-different-base/#comment-2 ), although he’s kind enough not to mention that it’s a function of my writing, as well.

    To answer your question, I think that strategies for taking the Democratic Party back from New Democrats include, but are not limited to:

    1) influencing the political press corps, as movement conservatives have

    2) creating media, as movement conservatives have

    3) identifying the New Democrats and their Third Way ideology to fellow movement liberals, by assembling information resources and creating communications opportunities (if that sounds nebulous, I’ll go into greater detail later)

    4) breaking the hold of New Democrats over the national Democratic Party through local campaigns for Congressional seats

    5) getting really fucking clear on what we believe and who we are, which means working on eliminating “Benevolent Democrat” ( http://www.correntewire.com/new_benevolent_democrats ) sentiments, statist-when-it’s-your-party sentiments, pure partisan tribalism, pure personality loyalism and identity politics, and other destructive, counter-productive forces from movement liberalism, and coalescing around a core, recognizable ideological identity

    Each of these points I’ve tried to implement, with some small, yet surprisingly rapid successes, cathyx. Of course, much brighter people than I will come up with better plans, and be more competent in implementing them, I’m sure.

    I hope that begins to answer that important “but what do we do about it?” question, thanks so much for asking.

  54. anon2525

    Why wouldn’t we tell them? Why isn’t it a good explanation for what’s happening in Washington? Why wouldn’t it compete well with the narratives that have been created to counteract normal movement liberal criticism, anon2525?

    The short answer for why wouldn’t we tell them is that they would not know what is meant by “third-way, NDC democrat.” And they would not want to know and should not have to know. Instead, tell them — concisely and if possible, viscerally — what the differences in your policy position is. See my example above about not using habeus corpus, but instead explain that the gov’t. is imprisoning people and providing no reason for doing it.

    Don’t use terminology. Explain policies and point out who will benefit, who will pay, and what side your opponent is on. There is an old saying that politics is about picking winners and losers. That is, the politicians enact policies and legislation that will benefit some people (“you win”) and not benefit or cost other people (“you lose”). Obama’s policies have been about protecting the wealthy and corporate class and letting the benefits of those policies trickle down to the rest of us.

  55. anon2525:

    What I was arguing months ago is that they did/do believe in their economic policy (which is what SZ is saying in his posts above), but they are dishonest/evil in getting it enacted (politics).

    That’s correct. What’s particularly vile about the New Democrats is how they ruthlessly they exploit the safety of hostage populations when pressuring liberal Democrats.

    Remember the “4o million uninsured” who would die, if the PPACA wasn’t passed?

    Didn’t we just have the unemployed’s insurance benefits held over our heads, if our representatives didn’t vote into law the non-binding Kyl-Linoln (that’s right, New Democrat Blanche Lincoln http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=2907&kaid=103&subid=111 ) amendment which raised the inheritance exemption from Bush’s $1 million to a whopping $5 million tax-free ( http://kyestates.com/2010/07/14/breaking-news-5m-exemption-35-rate-sought-amendment-small-business-jobs-bill/ )?

    The New Democrats have a pretty clear strategy: every major piece of Third Way policy legislation requires a hostage population for sufficient leverage over liberal Democrats in Congress. It’s dishonest, and, yes, it’s evil.

  56. anon2525

    And my argument back then … and still is today …there is no way that obama could possibly believe that it is in the best interests of this country to essentially forge on with very similar economic policies…

    And my answer (not to be argumentative) was the clip from the Daily Show which showed Team Evil versus Team Stupid. Both “teams” believed that these were the only two possible explanations: If the people were not evil, then they were really, really stupid. Or, if the people were not stupid, then they were really, really evil.

    And SZ is documenting that they have been saying this stuff for a long time now — fifteen years and more. Obama appears to me to think, “Hey, just give it time — we have to persevere. Clinton’s policies didn’t start to take hold until his second term. I have Clinton’s people running my economic policy.” I’m not the first to observe that in the economic arena, Obama’s just not that capable. But he is arrogant and deceitful enough to think that he knows better than we do.

  57. anon2525

    To give an example of this lack of thought on Obama’s part (blinded by arrogance), there is his interview on the Daily Show in which he says that when he came into office, he didn’t do what Roosevelt did. He took the “responsible” course of action. How stupid and arrogant does a “democrat” have to be to call Roosevelt irresponsible for the actions that he took when he first got into office (the famous 100 days)? (And only a few days before the mid-term election.) Before then only a republican would have done such a thing. (Besides being stupid and arrogant, his remarks were also ignorant about the history.) Before Obama did that, you would likely say, “he can’t be that stupid.”

  58. anon2525

    As I cited above, most of those Americans who self-identify as liberal Democrats have very little idea that Obama is not one. The Administration and their New Democrat Network message shop work pretty hard, considering their contempt for us, to obscure the fact that they have very different ideas than we do. Most people on our side believe that the Democrats in the capital are “as liberal as they can be, given the circumstance.”

    Some months ago, Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report was making this point in an interview on the radio (no link — from memory) that Obama&co worked hard to make sure that there was no position to the left of their position to be seen in the corporate media outlets. This is why I said there was a “two-fold” problem in my comment, above. In addition to countering the NDC’s points, the left/liberals/progressives have the difficult problem of getting their alternatives known to the majority of the country without being able to use the corporate media outlets.

  59. Z

    anon2525,

    I don’t agree that obama thinks that clinton’s economic policies will work in this situation like they did back then. I think that’s absurd … it’s an entirely different economic landscape. What, we need more free trade that ends up sending jobs overseas? More financialization of our economy? That’s going to spark the economy up?

    IMO a lot of clinton’s economic policies have helped put us where we are right now … clinton reaped the short-term benefits of those policies and there are no bubbles or tech revolutions that obama is advancing to help those policies produce the effects that they had back then.

    Z

  60. Z

    anon2525,

    Before then only a republican would have done such a thing. (Besides being stupid and arrogant, his remarks were also ignorant about the history.) Before Obama did that, you would likely say, “he can’t be that stupid.”

    obama is a republican basically … and he does what republicans do: lie like hell to discredit liberal economic policies and serve their corporate masters. He did a hell of a lot to depress the democratic base prior to the mid-terms and he’s elated that the republicans did so well IMO. He pretty much worships Ronald Reagan … who I think was a better man than obama … fuck he even read his autobiography during the holiday break rather than brushing up on his Roosevelt.

    The d in front of the name doesn’t mean a damn thing. A black person was never going to become the president of this country by running as a republican and that’s why he is a democrat.

    Z

  61. anon2525

    Most people on our side believe that the Democrats in the capital are “as liberal as they can be, given the circumstance.”

    These “most people…believe” claims are ones that I have spoken with many people about, and, unfortunately, what most people believe that “most people believe” varies depending on who I talk to. So, I take your claim with a grain or two of salt. Even if “most people believe” this about Democrats, a large percentage do not. A large percentage believe that the democrats did not support liberal policies as well as they could, and as a result did not vote for them in November. Whether or not this large percentage of voters was “most” or not, it was enough that a large percentage of non-liberal democratic politicians lost their elections.

  62. anon2525

    He pretty much worships Ronald Reagan … who I think was a better man than obama … fuck he even read his autobiography during the holiday break rather than brushing up on his Roosevelt.

    Small correction: he read a reagan biography (“Role of a Lifetime”). There is no way the senile Reagan could have written (or even ghost-written) an autobiography after he left office. He couldn’t even have visitors.

  63. Z

    anon2525,

    Whatever dude, the point still holds …

    Z

  64. jcapan

    As someone who’s read Stuart’s work for a few years, I know where’s he’s coming from and think he offers valuable insights.

    The concerns I’ve expressed to him elsewhere are:

    Is this discourse restricted to the democrat and/or liberal intelligentsia? And if it is, as I see it, a closed stream, how are these professionals & intellectuals competing for the hearts and minds of the working class? And how can they as long as they’re asking them to vote Team D, given what Team D has come to stand for since Clinton’s rise.

    Naturally, if the party is redeemable, a blood war within its ranks is going to be necessary. Given my pessimism about the likelihood of liberal victory, this looks like a prospective vacuum, sucking all the energy out of the larger conversation that needs to be happening in America. And this, after wasting our energies on that mock election in 2008.

    I don’t have much faith (particularly after Citizens United) that the dem party is redeemable. They have all the money, all the media, and an egregiously high number of self-described liberals spouting their nonsense. So it’s very difficult for me to sign onto this idea, on the unrealistic notion that we must first “take back the D party” before we begin the far more necessary and arduous task, conveying a coherent, concise, liberal, & populist narrative to a population simply gagging for authentic leadership that speaks to their conerns about the future.

    While I’m far more sympathetic to a 3rd party, at the very least I want to know that liberal energy is going towards the formation of a movement decoupled from the duopoly. The teaparty may have had some temporary influence on the GOP, but they’ve ultimately been coopted (willfully so, as their agenda was ultimately more Bushism). Nothing will better accomplish this that having their energy misdirected to the culture war.

    The notion that my liberal energy is going to be contained in an equally vacuous box by the New Dems, that we’ll be tossed a few scraps from the table, is insufficient. We need to go to war with these people, and from within I just have no faith that it’s possible. By continuing to invest our energy in a rotten party, we’re postponing the inevitable.

  65. anon2525

    I don’t agree that obama thinks that clinton’s economic policies will work in this situation like they did back then. I think that’s absurd … it’s an entirely different economic landscape. What, we need more free trade that ends up sending jobs overseas? More financialization of our economy? That’s going to spark the economy up?

    This is going on in both the U.S. and Europe, not the adoption of Clinton’s economic policies, but the adoption of economic policies that are counter-productive. Absurd? They wouldn’t do it? They are</em doing it. (At the moment, only Iceland is taking appropriate economic steps, and they appear to be doing it because their (very small) country was in extreme crisis, which knocked out all of the previous political officeholders.) And why are they doing it? In part because they believe in an economic theory that has been proven false by history.

    In an interview in 2009, Obama (the self-serving liar — we take it with a grain of salt) said that he selected former Clinton people to run his economic policy because it was a time of crisis and there were not a lot of people with gov't. experience that also had experience with economics and wall street. Never mind his explanation — he chose former Clinton people so we can assume that he expected them to be successful in averting or lessening the crisis of the moment, whether they duplicated to economic policies of the 90s or came up with new policies for the current situation.

  66. anon2525

    I don’t agree that obama thinks that clinton’s economic policies will work in this situation like they did back then. I think that’s absurd.

    obama is a republican basically

    Whatever dude, the point still holds …

    Actually, I think you might agree that you have made my (and SZ’s) point that Obama is both evil (about politics) and stupid (about economic policy), although not definitively:

    1) Many republicans are evil, correct?

    2) Many republicans are stupid (“there’s no such thing as evolution”, “there’s no such thing as global warming”, etc.), correct?

    3) So it is possible that there are republicans that are both evil and stupid, correct?

    4) And since you believe that Obama is essentially a reaganite republican (for good reason), it is possible that he, too is both evil and stupid, correct? (He hasn’t learned that reagan’s policies were a failure after thirty years.)

  67. Z

    anon2525,

    The absurdity is not that obama is doing it … he’s serving the rich, that’s what the deceitful bastard does … the absurdity is your belief that he thinks those clinton era policies are going to “take hold” and turn the economy around.

    Z

  68. cathyx

    Z-
    And the absurdity is all the democrats who can’t see it, and still make excuses for him.

  69. Z

    anon2525,

    You’ll argue forever to avoid admitting you’re wrong. As I explained above, you’ve misconstrued the person who I think is being absurd: it is you.

    The difference between obama and the republicans is that obama ran on, and articulated, an economic view that was a lot different than what he has effectuated; the republicans have not, they’ve consistently ran on tax cuts, deregulation and free trade.

    I guess it’s just an accident that obama’s economic policies benefit his biggest donors; in particular the health care companies, the oil companies, and wall street. Funny, how his “mistakes” and “miscalculations” keep benefiting them and will very likely benefit him in the form of campaign donations if he runs again … I doubt it … or once he leaves office.

    You’re a smart person, but you argue to be right, you don’t debate to get at the truth IMO. You’re never wrong, you’re only misunderstood.

    Z

  70. S Brennan

    Cathyx, has the right call with “the absurdity is all the democrats who can’t see it, and still make excuses for him.”

    But maybe we could we stop using “left”, “liberal” & “progressive” which the media has turned into meaningless crap. Progressives chose their name because they were too cowardly and afraid of being called liberal. Liberal became anything to the left of The Federalist Society and Chamber of Commerce [note it’s wrong to use US when describing a private entity]

    Instead when we mean enlightened policies like FDR/IKE/LBJ or the gilded age policies of Obama/Bush. We should say FDR-like policies, or Gilded Age like policies. That way when Obama trashes FDR, as he done on several occasions, he can be properly labeled as a Gilded Age politician with a lot fascist tendencies.

  71. anon2525

    My statement: Obama appears to me to think, “Hey, just give it time — we have to persevere. Clinton’s policies didn’t start to take hold until his second term. I have Clinton’s people running my economic policy.”

    Your statement: I don’t agree that obama thinks that clinton’s economic policies will work in this situation like they did back then. I think that’s absurd.

    If you think that there is an absurdity in the above statements, it is of your own making. No one said that Obama is carrying out Clinton’s economic policies. That was your jumping to a conclusion. You then declared that you think that your own conclusion is absurd. Everyone can read the text in the comments above.

    You’ll argue forever to avoid admitting you’re wrong.

    Instead of describing about my psychological state (thanks for the therapy, btw), how about presenting reasons that people reading your comments find convincing? And who cares what I think? All that should matter is that you provide good evidence and logic.

    As I explained above, you’ve misconstrued the person who I think is being absurd: it is you.

    Answered. You’ve jumped to a conclusion and that asserted an absurdity exists. Even you should be able to see that in what you wrote.

    …you argue to be right, you don’t debate to get at the truth IMO.

    Again, who cares what I think or what my psychological state is? Either present good reasoning and evidence for what you think is true or… don’t.

    You’re never wrong, you’re only misunderstood.

    Who cares about me? Why do you keep bringing up my psychological failings? What does this have to do with my argument that Obama is evil and stupid? Why do you not present some evidence that people cannot be both evil and stupid? (there can only be evil geniuses?) Or some evidence that Obama does not agree with the people who are around him and that he’s associated with since before he got into office, all of whom proclaim to believe in an economic theory that has been shown to be invalid?

    A few additional remarks, but these will include some links, which will likely put the post into moderation, or I’ll break them up into small posts with only a few links each.

    (Warning: if the debate is going to degrade into a discussion about my psychological failings — and they are numerous — then I’m going to be dropping out until the debate resumes, if it ever does.)

  72. anon2525:

    You wrote:

    How stupid and arrogant does a “democrat” have to be to call Roosevelt irresponsible for the actions that he took when he first got into office (the famous 100 days)? (And only a few days before the mid-term election.)

    In the Beltway, that sort of rhetoric is pretty common amongst the Democratic think tank-ocracy and the Village cocktail partiers , and it has been for more than a decade.

    In this sort of company –the company of people like Joe Klein, Tom Friedman, Pete Orszag, Larry Summers, Hilary Rosen, Paul Begala or Barack Obama– it doesn’t seem stupid or arrogant to say these things about FDR at all, even while simultaneously exploiting the “Great Democratic President” brand. That’s what they do, they’re all very used to it.

    Consider this piece of effrontery: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html

    Or how about this cretin, Stephen Rose:

    PPI | Backgrounder | April 25, 2006
    The Trouble With Class-Interest Populism
    By Stephen Rose

    Democrats…must recognize that today’s working Americans have a very different economic outlook than the blue-collar workers of yesteryear. Their outlook is more aspirational and less infused with class grievance or resentment. In the post-industrial economy, the great question is how government can equip workers with new tools for economic success, not how government can insulate them from the rigors of competition or restrain business power.

    Yet, class-interest populists cling to an outdated concept of workers’ interests — a holdover from the New Deal-to-Great Society era, when a large blue-collar class was fight-ing for a fair share of the industrial economy’s rewards. Today, most people work in offices or high-end service jobs and they believe their economic interests are more closely aligned with the companies they work for.

    This is the intellectual currency of the establishment, the political-media class, the Village cocktail party swells, and the academic and think tank technocrats.

    To truly understand them, one has to know that these people don’t believe that Barack Obama was being wrong or arrogant in the slightest –they all merely nodded their heads, as they have done for years and years now, every time they heard Obama’s New Democrat lines repeated. Third Way political-economic philosophy is the ideological and even cultural water they swim in (politic in, report in).

    This arrogance and stupidity isn’t recognizable as such to them. It’s just like saying “America has the most powerful military in the world,” or “the United States has the best health care in the world.” It’s thoroughly unremarkable to them.

  73. anon2525

    Here’s an example that Krugman writes about in which people who have been shown to be wrong by events continue to believe that their approach is correct:

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/grownups/

    Then there’s this: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/they-have-made-a-desert/

    (continued…)

  74. anon2525

    (continued)

    And this: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/conventional-madness/

    And this: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/talking-to-a-dining-room-table/

    And finally, this: The case for expansionary policies in the face of a slump is intellectually difficult; Keynes described the writing of the General Theory as a painful process of discovery, and so it is. The natural instinct of almost everyone is to think that tough times require tough measures, and that if the economy is suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. It would take a clear consensus from economists to overcome that natural bias.

    And that consensus has, of course, been lacking — largely because a significant proportion of the economics profession has spent the last three decades systematically destroying the hard-won knowledge of macroeconomics. It’s truly a new Dark Age, in which famous professors are reinventing errors refuted 70 years ago, and calling them insights.

    These are all instances of people holding economic viewpoints that have been shown, and in the process of being shown as we write, to be false. This is across many countries and different groups. Are they all evil geniuses, or can we admit that people can un-absurdly believe economic theories that are and have been shown to be false and inapplicable to the present situation?

  75. anon2525

    Consider this piece of effrontery: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20081124,00.html

    Sorry, but as a rule I don’t read Time. Maybe when the adult version comes out:

    http://www.theonion.com/video/time-announces-new-version-of-magazine-aimed-at-ad,17950/

  76. As you know, JC, on this discrete point “We need to go to war with these people [the New Democrats]”, you and I completely agree.

    As far as “Is this discourse restricted to the democrat and/or liberal intelligentsia? ” the original post to which Ian is responding is a commentary response to patricksartor at Swampland: http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/12/24/merry-christmas/comment-page-1/#comment-226940 , but Jay Ackroyd thought this particular post made the argument with such clarity, that he literally urged me to post it at FDL, so that he could link to it.

    You know as well as anyone that the nature of my arguments are that they are meant to be consumed by ordinary people –I’m the one explaining in mainstream commentary what movement liberals, us neo-New Dealers are to movement conservatives in front of partisan Democrats.

    This is not an elite affair, you must know that.

    That’s part of the strategy.

  77. anon2525

    Reposting the final Krugman quote, above. I screwed up the HTML (again) and omitted this link

    The case for expansionary policies in the face of a slump is intellectually difficult; Keynes described the writing of the General Theory as a painful process of discovery, and so it is. The natural instinct of almost everyone is to think that tough times require tough measures, and that if the economy is suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. It would take a clear consensus from economists to overcome that natural bias.

    And that consensus has, of course, been lacking — largely because a significant proportion of the economics profession has spent the last three decades systematically destroying the hard-won knowledge of macroeconomics. It’s truly a new Dark Age, in which famous professors are reinventing errors refuted 70 years ago, and calling them insights.

    The ancient Greeks had a saying that Krugman puns on: “Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain”

    We should be more worried about Obama&co stupidly believing in a discredited economic theory than their having an evil economic point of view (that is, if they knew that their public economic reasoning was incorrect and a lie). Overcoming a discredited-but-plausible theory is much more difficult, especially when the more correct economic theory is unintuitive.

  78. anon2525

    Stephen Rose quote, above: In the post-industrial economy, the great question is how government can equip workers with new tools for economic success, not how government can insulate them from the rigors of competition or restrain business power.

    Spoken like a man whose livelihood is insulated from competition. Economist Dean Baker has tirelessly pointed out that the people who have erected legislative barriers to protect themselves from competition, especially lower-priced international competition, are usually the ones who espouse its benefits: economists, lawyers, doctors, drug-company executives, newspaper editors… (Is there anything that a newspaper or magazine editor hates more than all of the writers on the internet, or all of the people who are willing to investigate all manner of corruption and injustice, and in doing so, implicitly pointing out how badly these news editors have been doing their jobs?)

  79. jcapan

    “You know as well as anyone that the nature of my arguments are that they are meant to be consumed by ordinary people –I’m the one explaining in mainstream commentary what movement liberals, us neo-New Dealers are to movement conservatives in front of partisan Democrats.

    This is not an elite affair, you must know that.

    That’s part of the strategy.”

    SZ, I know that you earnestly believe this is true, but I’m afraid ordinary people is a pretty nebulous and subjective term. Ordinary folks like engaged news consumers at Time.com? Engaged blogospherists here or at FDL? Or just ordinary Americans getting their news from a glance at dead tree papers and/or their local newscasts or whatever pap smear CNN is streaming across their telly. Folks busting their ass 24/7, with time for their families, maybe their church, and, god willing, some football.

    Listen, I know we’re on the same team. I simply have grave misgivings about the course you envision. Not saying that my own ideas are concise or coherent either, BTW, or that I have the magic formula. I think your response to Cathy is a way forward, but it’s marginal at best at a time when small steps are very unlikely to prevent some particularly unpleasant things from occuring. You approach leaves me observing most of our rhetorical energy designed to communicate liberalism to people who already think they’re liberal, or that Barack and Bill are champions of the working class.

    And here’s my rub–what if the ordinary Americans aren’t paying attention to this conversation at all. What if, in lieu of taking to the streets, door to door, on behalf of some as yet unnamed/unformed movement, we’re merely preaching to our peers, a largely educated, professional class with the leisure time to post/consume blog commentary day in day out.

    IMO, these people, if they don’t already see the light of day, it’s often b/c they have no interest in waging the type of battles that I think are necessary to prevent collapse. They’re still too comfortable–more radical (i.e. necessary) steps might threaten what they have, all for whom, the migrant workers, Walmart employees, truckers? See Chris Hedges for the type of visceral contempt such “liberals” deserve.

    There’s a silent majority out there that’s a ready-made base for another new deal. All our money, all our energy, should be directed at them, not the likes of Patrick Sartor.

    Finally, I’m curious about what you think of Ian’s contention the day after the midterms:

    “The left must be seen to repudiate Obama, and they must be seen to take him down. If the left does not do this, left wing politics and policies will be discredited with Obama.”

    B/C if you’re not onboard for such a movement, you’re very likely putting any of this desperately necessary work off until 2016. Every day he’s in office, liberal dies a little bit more. Your party (no longer mine, at least not until further notice) will not begin rehabilitation until he’s rejected soundly.

  80. Eureka Springs

    this anon person comments entirely too much on every thread. I quit reading them at all months ago… yet even scrolling past the name endlessly just about runs me off. I cannot help but thin that is anons intent. Or lots of amphetamines.

  81. Z

    anon2525,

    Psychological failings? You really take things too personal.

    I never said that people can’t be both evil and stupid; you jumped to that foolish conclusion. I’m not arguing about that pointless hypothesis. You said that obama is evil politically and stupid economically. I said that obama … who hasn’t fought a damn bit for the 99ers and did little to fix the foreclosure crisis and has instead focused much more on restoring wall street’s wealth and power … is evil on the economic front. But hey, maybe he just is incapable of understanding why certain progressive economic policies would benefit the country even though he articulated during his campaign why those policies would work. And hey, why change course now that everything is going so well.

    And who cares what I think?

    There you go … that’s the most meaningful point you made in our whole discussion.

    Oh, and hold your warnings to yourself … arguing for argument’s sake on matters such as whether people can be both evil and stupid hardly interests me. I just don’t find it that compelling. That’s just plain stupid IMO.

    Z

  82. anon2525

    That’s just plain stupid IMO.

    OK. I didn’t see any new points in what you just wrote relative to what you’ve written previously, so I don’t have any response. good luck.

  83. S Brennan

    I’ll speak a kind word for anon2525, he and I have not always gotten along, but his words are far more worthy than his outspoken critics have been.

    jcapan, you are right on the mark with your last remark! A return to FDR/IKE/LBJ domestic policies would restore the republic. The Gilded age policies ushered in by Friedman/Jarvis/Reagan 32 years ago have been disastrous.

  84. Morocco Bama

    jcapan, you are right on the mark with your last remark! A return to FDR/IKE/LBJ domestic policies would restore the republic. The Gilded age policies ushered in by Friedman/Jarvis/Reagan 32 years ago have been disastrous.

    Don’t fall for this again, folks. It’s a fail safe, containment measure to save the Plutocratic Oligarchy when they lose their bearings and go off the wagon sucking up every last ounce of blood, sweat and tears like a foaming at the mouth rabid dog. The U.S. is not a Republic, and never was. It was always a Plutocratic Oligarchy designed to protect the status and vested interests of the budding Empire’s Elite. I’m not advocating a return to the conditions of the gilded age, but I am advocating eschewing the notion of returning to the containing capitulation of FDR and LBJ. It’s time to shred this Plutocratic Oligarchical system once and for all and replace it with something just and equitable. I know that’s not going to happen, but it’s what should happen. I also know there’s no going back to the FDR/LBJ capitulationist containment policies. That’s not in the cards, and you’re powerless to change that fact. You have no say in the matter, nor do I, but I’ll continue to bark at the moon until they rip my vocal cords from my cold, dead throat.

  85. S Brennan

    ” A return to FDR/IKE/LBJ…Don’t fall for this again, folks” – Morocco Bama

    How old are you buddy? Did you experience life when we landed on the moon and even our enemies praised our efforts. For the last 35 years working class people in the US have been working longer hours, retiring later and becoming poorer. How old are you buddy?

    “It’s time to shred this Plutocratic Oligarchical system once and for all and replace it with something just and equitable. I know that’s not going to happen” – Morocco Bama

    How old are you buddy? I suggesting we go back to what worked, had somebody suggested in 1964 we would go back tot he idiocy of the Gilded Age most folks would have said something like “there’s no going back”. You “bark at the moon” and suggest a better plan is your head.

    “Well brother, we would all like to see the plan” because you sound like an Obamanaught with the dreamy eyed “Pubic Option” instead of the straight forward LBJ plan of expanding Medicare downward. How old are you buddy?

  86. Morocco Bama

    How old are you buddy?

    Not that age has any bearing on this, whatsoever, but I’m old enough to separate fact from fiction.

    Since I’m apparently not old enough for you, though, I’ll let this recently deceased elder clarify matters in my stead.

    The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history. With a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. It is a country so powerful, so big, so pleasing to so many of its citizens that it can afford to give freedom of dissent to the small number who are not pleased. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred – by economic inequity – faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices.

    Howard Zinn – A People’s History of the United States

    That’s the system that FDR and LBJ did their damndest to preserve and perpetuate, and the following is what they, by their actionable policies, contained and mitigated…..The Second Revolution….the Real Revolution…..the Revolution we must have.

    http://www.hermes-press.com/completing.htm

    Here’s a snippet:

    The first American Revolution was completed with the end of the Revolutionary War in 1781. The second American Revolution is seldom if ever taught in our schools. Because it would make clear just what kind of a country this is: a plutocracy–the rule of the wealthy. And it’s this second American Revolution which we must now complete. Only a few of its battles have been won and much work remains in our efforts to rid ourselves of the ideology and practice of plutocracy.

  87. jcapan

    Morocco,

    “That’s not in the cards, and you’re powerless to change that fact.”

    You’ll find no greater admirer of Zinn. And while I fear you’re right about the first half of your statement, he would surely disagree with the latter point.

    In one of his last interviews before his death, he said:

    “I guess if I want to be remembered for anything, it’s for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality, for getting more and more people to think that way.

    Also, for getting more people to realize that the power which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, that the power ultimately rests in people themselves and that they can use it. At certain points in history, they have used it. Black people in the South used it. People in the women’s movement used it. People in the anti-war movement used it. People in other countries who have overthrown tyrannies have used it.

    I want to be remembered as somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.”

    http://bigthink.com/howardzinn/

    Not that I’m accusing you of the sentiment, but Zinn never stood for apathy.

  88. Morocco Bama

    he would surely disagree with the latter point

    I also appreciate Zinn, but I disagree with him on this point. Zinn believed in petitioning for regress within the current system, and I find that to be futility. I believe he did so because he wanted to give people hope, but it’s a false hope, IMO. I know he was trying to empower people, but activating within the current system will ultimately leave you dispirited, because you will never get at the root cause. This system cannot be changed with this system, and you can’t reform something that is already working as designed. I can’t help but think he must have known this, but he would have turned his audience off if he’d dropped such a bomb on their heads, so instead he gave them hope. I have a different take on hope. Hope, as false as it is in this case and as it relates to this system, keeps this system alive and perpetuating because people believe, nay hope, that somehow the system can change from within….and yet it never does. Hope keeps people from doing what needs to be done, and that is to put a stake through this thing once and for all.

  89. I think SZ’s analysis (that I have read in this thread) is spot on, and jibes entirely with my experience of mainstream econ blogs and suchlike: they really don’t believe that the people can ever be capable of economic self-government, collective or individual. That may be a stupid belief; it may be an evil belief. But a whole lot of things flow from that particular belief. For example, it becomes imperative to support the existing financial industry, rather than convert the distribution of money into a public utility (or to permit reversion to a gold standard for that matter).

    The PPACA can be explained that way too. A single-payer system puts health care allocation under at least nominal democratic (small d) control. As this is unacceptable, they must create an arcane system that *attempts* to keep health care out of popular control BUT somehow “bends the cost curve” which we know it cannot do…

  90. Well! And a happy new year to y’all too. Party in steerage!

  91. Z

    Mandos.

    It would be rather convenient of them to decide for us that we are incapable of economic self-government and that we are better off having them look after our economy and deciding what is best for S>them us. And, by the way, they seem to be okay with allowing people to make stupid economic decisions, such as buying a house that that they can’t afford, when it benefits wall street.

    Z

  92. Z

    I struck out with my strike-out …

    Mandos,

    It would be rather convenient of them to decide for us that we are incapable of economic self-government and that we are better off having them look after our economy and deciding what is best for them us. And, by the way, they seem to be okay with allowing people to make stupid economic decisions, such as buying a house that that they can’t afford, when it benefits wall street.

    Z

  93. Z

    Oh, fuck it … I intended to strike out the “them” near the end of the first sentence of the posts above.

    Z

  94. This guy’s analysis is excellent, another angle, but essentially the same drift as mine: http://www.openleft.com/showQuickHit.do?quickHitId=15758

  95. Just in case that link doesn’t get you far enough down the page, because of all of the wait time while the ad widgets load, the comment to which I’m referring starts as:

    Thanks Glacier for focusing attention on the Brits
    This will be a long comment, related to your post but going much deeper. Forgive me perhaps, for hijacking your thread, but this screed has been floating around my brain all week and this seemed like a good place to park it.

    The thing about Britain is that their debate is closer to the real meat and potatoes of what this argument is all about. Ours is frustratingly diverted into “Like or Dislike Obama” or “Is the Tea Party Racist” and other tangential questions.

    Britain makes it clear: it’s really about social democracy vs. neoliberalism.

    It is important that an Open Left understand this. This is the debate that is barely allowed to be mentioned on our side of the pond but it’s the crucial distinction.

    When Paul Krugman argues for Keynesianism he’s taking the social democratic side of this argument. But he’s not allowed to say so, or at least not willing.

    The mistake of our side in the past period was in not understanding how strongly our opponents believed in the other side of this argument. It was indeed their central rationale. It wasn’t “just politics”. ..

  96. anon2525

    The thing about Britain is that their debate is closer to the real meat and potatoes of what this argument is all about.

    Britain makes it clear: it’s really about social democracy vs. neoliberalism.

    In the many comments in the discussion above, I understood that there were three viewpoints being argued (I could be wrong in my understanding, of course):

    1) The “centrists” (NDC/DLC) support neo-liberal economic policies because they are evil (that is, they don’t really believe neo-liberalism (or “growth economics”) will provide a good economy for the country — they actually think it will benefit themselves only and don’t care that it will not produce wide-spread prosperity).

    Or, 2) They support neo-liberal economic policies because they are stupid and have a religious faith in neo-liberalism despite experience. They are not evil and think these policies will or can work.

    Or, 3) It doesn’t matter whether the “centrists” support neo-liberalism because they are evil or stupid — all that matters is that they do support it.

    What is not terribly clear to me is what Stuart Zechman is arguing beyond the point that the “centrists” believe neo-liberal (“growth economics”) will or can work. OK, so they believe in it. What is to be done with that understanding about the “centrists,” if it is true? Why is it so important that people think that the “centrists” are sincere (stupid and religious zealots, but sincere)?

  97. Formerly T-Bear

    I see the children are babbling on.

    The Guardian has this collection of pictures that speak volumes.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit

    These are image memories of the future for a place that has no future.

    Endless prattle, mostly inane, raising gossamer words to obscure what should be perceived

    unaided; what is, that is plain before their eyes.

    Words without the weight of thought, carelessly strewn about; language without the anchor of shared meaning, adrift in a swirling sea of belief driven by the word-winds of the moment. Helpless. Cartoons of credibility. Existing. Solely to prove:

    “Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, that to opine away, and remove all doubt.”

  98. Formerly T-Bear

    “The kingdom” for an edit:

    … should be perceived unaided; what is, …

    and

    … adrift in a swirling tides of belief …

  99. Formerly T-Bear

    Since I’m at it, might as well …

    Anon-whatever has been spreading their opinions as thickly as sand on the seashore of late. A reminder, when your opinions are so common as sand on the seashore, each opinion, like a grain of sand, has neither much significance, nor value. Furthermore, should there be a grain of diamond amongst the sand, no-one would ever know it. Hopefully you will gain a modicum of maturity this coming year; do wipe the cheeto dust from your fingers.

  100. BlizzardOfOz

    look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

  101. Morocco Bama

    I think we all should adopt T-Bear’s Doris Day approach to these matters. It’s much less stressful, and some would argue downright blissful…in its ignorance.

    God, how I love Doris Day. She’s what America should be. Here’s to Doris Day. Enjoy!!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbKHDPPrrc

  102. Morocco Bama

    Nice, Blizzard. To it, I add…..

    “The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.’”

    “But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it appeared to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This,’ they told me, ’is the best; it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.”

  103. It’s mostly a self-serving myth that, in general, the quiet are the wise.

  104. Patrick Sartor

    Stuart Zechman sent a link to Swampland, where I have been posting to let me know about the discussions here.

    Anon, whom I had, also, seen there even referred to me in a post.

    After Reagan (who was elected when I was a child) Bush Sr with eight tolerable years of Clinton (who’s mistakes I hold most responsible for the financial meltdown with the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act and his refusal to regulate derivatives) having a tolerable president such as Obama is better than the alternative, but, nothing to dance in the streets about.

    He, clearly, ran from the left and governs from the center. (Clinton refuted Bush Sr.s remarks about “liberal liberal liberal” by always running as a centrist).

    Two things that fueled liberal Democrats are now hard to find:

    Unions

    Civil Rights activists

    The only somewhat strong force is from the Universities.

    By contrast, corporate America and far right Evangelical Churches are stronger than ever.

    It is easy to forget from our history books how liberal Democrats ever made large victories in America and Western Europe. The Great Depression shut down most of the corporate elites.

    Western Europe had another ten years of economic uncertainty from the end of the second world war until the mid 1950s and, therefore, had an era of progress lasting twenty five years rather than fifteen (late 1929 until Mid 1945 – almost 16 years).

    I, absolutely, do not believe that Obama is evil. I believe he, like John Kerry and Bill Clinton wishes not to offend anybody and likes to find a place where we all can be halfway infuriated rather than anybody being totally infuriated.

    The Tea Party, brought to you by the Koch brothers, wishing for lower taxes, a balanced budget, increased military spending with no cuts to Social Security are so mathematically impaired that they are, already, I believe, well on their way to self imploding.

    So, with two years of economic stagnation and constant infighting between a far right house sworn not to compromise and a centrist Senate along with a centrist president where is the anger going to show up from?

    Left is the only political direction left untried for 30 years.

    Stuart’s ideas for a brighter, more liberal future I admire.

    Just stating that Obama is only with us half the time (if that often) is not as productive.

  105. anon2525

    Anon, whom I had, also, seen there even referred to me in a post.

    Must be a different anon. We are legion. I’ve never been to Swampland (that’s at “Time,” correct?)

    I, absolutely, do not believe that Obama is evil. I believe he, like John Kerry and Bill Clinton wishes not to offend anybody and likes to find a place where we all can be halfway infuriated rather than anybody being totally infuriated.

    “absolutely?” Does this mean that you know him personally or have spent much time around him. It’s awfully difficult to know someone “absolutely,” or even “very, very well.” Or is that just rhetoric?

    It’s fairly clear to me that Obama is willing to substitute his judgment in favor of representing the judgment of the people who elected him. He lied repeatedly about what he was going to do when he got in office. The argument or discussion in the set of posts, above, is whether or not his economic policy is evil (meaning that it is intended to benefit a few while being sold as benefiting the whole of the economy, as opposed to benefiting the whole of the economy while being sold to benefit the whole). As far as I can tell from what people have written, above, there is general agreement that his politics are evil (that is, he lies to get what policy he wants).

    (O/T: Why would people want to frequent a website called “Swampland?” The name sounds as though the people who set it up hold the people who write there in contempt. They didn’t name it “The Wetlands” or “The Biologically Diverse and Useful Area” or “The Tropical Rainforest.”)

  106. anon2525

    He, clearly, ran from the left and governs from the center.

    Obama only governs from the center for those people who have a personal definition of what “the center” means. If you use the English language definition of what the term would mean, then he does not.

    In order to avoid repeating myself, I refer to my earlier comment, above.

  107. anon2525

    Relatedly, for those who have not read it, Jon Walker has written a dialog between a Progressive and a Corporatist Democrat.

    Unless I have misread them, I don’t think that anyone in any of the posts above supports the position of the Corporatist Democrat.

  108. S Brennan

    While Utopians trash talk those who do not subscribe to their ethereal vision of Nirvana, resulting in having people who just want to get this nation out of the ditch being shouted down.

    WaPo is a pretty unreliable source, but these graphs illustrate what I was talking about in regard to the the FDR policy years 1932-1968.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101196.html

  109. sona

    “It’s not that they desire or welcome obscenely high foreclosure and unemployment rates …… ”

    somehow ‘they’ are not responsible for the consequences of thier actions – only their “desires” count – wherever do these people (‘they’) get their moral compass from?

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