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Against Despair
How our misreading of history harms progressivism today.
On the day in late April when Barack Obama gave his speech at Cooper Union urging financial regulation reform, The Huffington Post, one of the most important liberal websites we have, could hardly have made more clear to its readers what it thought about Obama’s appeal to his audience. “Two Presidents, Two Messages to Anti-Reform Bankers,” ran the headline over photographs of Obama and Franklin Roosevelt an hour or two after the President wrapped up his speech. Obama, the sub-headlines explained, urged bankers to “Join Us,” while Roosevelt had said: “I Welcome Their Hatred.”
Substantively, I can’t say I disagree with the editors’ assessment that Obama’s approach to the Wall Streeters in attendance at the Great Hall was more conciliatory than it should have been. And the reform bill itself, like much of what we have seen in the past year-and-a-half, contained several good and much-needed measures but fell short in significant ways. HuffPo, which I read daily, is right to point that out, just as it was right to cast the proverbial disinfecting sunlight on the White House’s deal with the pharmaceutical lobby during the health-care debate.
The juxtaposition and the wording struck me as representative of a kind of liberal stance that’s been common since Obama took office and that does not serve liberalism’s long-term interests, into the Obama years and beyond them. It’s one thing to be disappointed in policy outcomes, or even angry about them. But more and more it seems that we are in an age of liberal despair–as reflex and first instinct, as motif and explanation, even, it sometimes seems to me, as fashion. Criticism of legislation and proposals is always proper and necessary, as is the application of whatever pressure people can apply to try to produce more progressive outcomes. But I’ve read and heard many critiques that then race right past that into outright desolation. One noticed it in the days after the passage of the health-care bill in late March. There was a brief geyser of euphoria, and then, in two or three or at most five days, skirmishes broke out over why Obama didn’t make more recess appointments than the 15 he shoved through on March 27. By March 31–10 days after the House passed health-care reform–when Obama announced his since re-thought plan to open many coastal areas to offshore drilling, things on the liberal side were more or less back to the dour normal.
The despair has taken many guises. There is the disappointment, wholly ingenuous and therefore shot with some pathos, of the rank-and-file progressive voter who really did get swept up in the overbaked rhetoric of 2008 and came somehow to believe that Obama possessed unearthly powers and ought to have been able to set everything right in seven or eight months, a year tops. There is in other instances the welled-up anger of what we might call professional disgruntleists: people on the left who “just knew” that Obama wasn’t all that he was cracked up to be–or, more pointedly, that he cracked himself up to be–and have taken each apostasy and sell out, on single-payer or the banks or the Copenhagen summit or what have you, as proof that they were right all along. There are many colorations in between: some worth taking seriously, some not; some of them authentic, inasmuch as they represent the legitimate and proper statements of principle from people who work every day in support of certain bedrock ideals and expect some adherence to them, and others the kind of peanut-gallery semaphoring performed more for the sake of constituencies or donors or page views than of the polity.
There has been plenty to be frustrated about. From the too-small size of the stimulus package to the Afghanistan policy (which I support, while I recognize that most progressives don’t) to the lethargic-at-best pace of the dismantling of the Bush-Cheney security state, Obama has given the disgruntleist caucus lots of material. The Democrats in Congress have been–if anything–worse. They passed the health-care bill all right; but could they have contrived in their wildest imaginations to make the process uglier? And that was their signal accomplishment! More generally, the last year and a half has shown the congressional Democrats to be at odds with one another, at war with the concepts of competence and cohesion, and leaving us wondering in some cases why they were even Democrats in the first place.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this tendency. About why, for example, Harper’s Magazine, just six months into Obama’s term, rendered the verdict that he was Barack Hoover Obama; about why the influential Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos was advising his vast audience late last year that the health-care bill deserved to die (to his credit, he changed his position by March and favored passage); about why Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake declared jihad against the bill right to the end, even allying at one point with conservative opponents of it.
I must express my sincere disappointment with the tone of your own article.
If the issue was indeed simply the lack of broad-based progressive change under the current Obama administration, then I could sympathize with your argument that we must be patient in fulfilling such an agenda.
However, President Obama has done, in my view, egregious damage to our standing as a functioning democracy which claims to preserve and defend civil liberties & to maintain the primacy of the rule of law.
His continued use of the 'State Secrets' privilege to prevent any investigation of prior wrong-doing under the prior administration, as well as adjudication of those who suffered in concert with those policies is simply unacceptable. As such, we have every reason to believe that the same, though possibly somewhat toned down, policies are being pursued today.
To give only a few examples, here are some widely reported in the mainstream press:
• 'Secret' prisons at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan where the rule of law is reported to be beyond the reach of our judicial system.
• The continuation of 'preventive' detention at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
• The defense of an expansive application of surveillance of American citizens.
• The expanded use of drones for both surveillance and targeted killings, without adequate judicial or congressional over-sight.
• The continuation of a doctrine that considers the entire Middle East and beyond as the battlefield against terrorism.
There are many other concerns I have, including Obama–“€™s passivity in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian issue & the doubling down in the war in Afghanistan. However, the failure to adequately address the necessary restoration and preservation of the rule of law is reason enough to feel extreme disillusionment with the current administration.
I enjoyed Michael Tomasky's article. However, I would like to add a few thoughts regarding the frustrations of today's progressives. There was never going to be another "New Deal", because FDR was dealing with a blank slate with regard to the government activism. In 1932, the federal government was a very minor factor in American life. FDR was free to experiment and create new programs because there were far fewer interest groups and lobbyists and vested bureaucratic interests in DC. Today, progressives ironically find themselves the captives of the very federal government they created as a result of the New Deal and Great Society. Washington has become ossified with lobbyists and bureaucratic inertia, and is increasingly incapable of affecting meaningful change in a wildly diverse nation of over 300 million people.
Meaningful change in our new era will not come from more centralized government. The ineptness in the response to the gulf oil spill and Katrina are indicative of our dilemma, as well as the reaction to the financial collapse. Washington and Wall Street are now joined at the hip. We face two choices, really : corrupt corporatism and crony capitalism, or, a return to genuinely free markets. We must rediscover federalism, and decentralization. This is our only hope for meaningful change. The real creativity in government today is at the state and local level.
Mr. Tomasky introduces some provocative thoughts, but fails to present an argument against despair. In fact, his effort at giving us a perspective of liberalism in the US–“€™ brief history, gives us more reason for despair. Reflect on what he has written and integrate a few unassailable historical facts and the only rational state of liberalism is despair.
Under President Clinton we saw many liberal Republican policies become law: NAFTA was proposed and passed; requirements were developed and imposed on public housing tenants to perform community service in addition to paying rent; Glass-Steagall was repealed; welfare –“€˜as you know it–“€™ was changed to benefit corporations and to hurt individuals; and Ms. Lani Guanier–“€™s failed nomination–“€¦. Well, all of this from a Democrat? Yes. (And recall that while Governor Clinton was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, he interrupted that campaign to fly home to Arkansas and execute a condemned prisoner. Modern liberalism opposes the death penalty. Liberal Republicans did (and do) not oppose it.)
In the wake of the Reagan –“€˜revolution,–“€™ the Democratic Leadership Conference took over the Democratic Party under the Clintons–“€™ (yes, both of them). That conference is a tent for the liberal Republicans, who don–“€™t have another party for their platforms. The liberal Democrats were, and apparently still are, shell-shocked from the Reagan –“€˜revolution,–“€™ and failed to maintain their hegemony in the party. President Bush–“€™s invasion of Iraq received the support of liberal Republicans dressed up as conservative Democrats. The liberal Democrats opposed that police action. Obama held out a slim reed of hope to liberal Democrats with his opposition to that military endeavor. How slim it was became apparent.
After Obama was elected with the announcement of his picks for his economic team, Obama kicked the liberals in his party; he put into positions of power and influence the same liberal Republican team that wrought the discredited economic policies of President Clinton. Obama marginalized the noteworthy and notable liberal economic voices. Were the domestic economic situation so grave and essential to his administration, his picks might not have had the many consequences that they did, but he did not stop there. He kept a Republican in charge of the Defense Department; even his Supreme Court picks have been cut from the cloth of liberal Republicanism.
In deed, there is no liberal movement in the US, and we liberals have little room in the Democratic Party to get one going. Let–“€™s see. Despair? That would appear to be the only appropriate human response for a liberal in the US. Maybe that fact accounts for Mr. Tomasky–“€™s failure.
I agree with Mr. Tomasky that the historical context for the Obama administration is different and in many ways more politically difficult than the situation was for Roosevelt or Johnson. However, my despair is based on the gut instinct, held by many liberals and progressives, that the Obama triumph was an opportunity to begin to address deep-seated challenges that will soon overwhelm us if we do not address them soon - I am thinking of global warming, peak oil, persistent structural unemployment, the dominant role of financial institutions, and the militaristic-nationalistic fury that will accompany the U.S.'s declining ability to control the actions of what we have come to think of as subordinate nations.
Instead of trying to shape public opinion and articulate a new set of communitarian, pluralist values as a prelude to addressing these looming challenges, the President has embraced a technocratic agenda that merely tinkers on the margins of the existing Washington concensus. Think about the Obama approach to each of the issues mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Now we face a difficult mid-term election that will certainly impose even greater limits on Obama freedom of action. Given the challenges we face, can the nation survive six more years of stalemate - perhaps we can muddle through, but history shows that great nations can and do fall into permanent decline. And if that happens, then we may look back upon even this turbulent time as the last period of wide-spread civil and political liberties before the decline of the American Republic.
Remarkable writing. I’ve been reading online articles for many days but frankly speaking I never got so fascinating post to read out unlike yours.And yes i have digg your site www.democracyjournal.org
Apr 17, 2011, 5:51 AMPost a Comment
Michael Tomasky is the editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and a special correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast.
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