Here’s Matt Yglesias today on “Obama’s Obsessive Focus“:
[P]olitical success and policy success are deeply intertwined in a recession, and a White House that thinks “too much policy focus” has been its big sin is unlikely to turn things around.
As much as Yglesias wants to focus on the “what next,” his commenters at Think Progress were more interested in re-hashing what went wrong, leading to a familiar round of “Obama’s a wimp” and “we needed FDR and we got a moderate Republican” comments at ThinkProgress. I responded as follows:
…sure, maybe he could have tried “New Deal 2.0 to the power of Krugman,” but, in playing alternative history, it’s easy to underestimate what a high risk strategy it would have been, and to overestimate preparedness among the real existing Dem leadership and infrastructure to follow through consequentially on an agenda that a year or two earlier would have been two or three extra notches to the left of conceivable. Obama opted for policies that should have been “consensual,” and was forced by Republican/conservative intransigence and opportunism to settle for “defensible” within the standards of that mostly ruptured consensus – a consensus which, unfortunately for left-progressives, has moved center right over the course of 40-50 years. You don’t just wake all the way up from that overnight. You now have the opportunity to prepare for the next perceived crisis, for the exhaustion of the rightwing wave, for the new confrontation however it shapes up.
Adam Serwer in a post entitled “How Partisanship Works” offers an argument in somewhat the same vein as Yglesias’, but focused more narrowly on what the right calls Obamacare, what the left calls “health care reform,” or, more incisively, the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The reason why Democrats didn’t produce a more liberal bill is because the coalition of preening centrists needed to move right every five minutes in order to locate themselves in the “middle” between a GOP sprinting to the right and a left willing to take major steps in the same direction. Moderate as policy, there was no way for the ACA to be “centrist” in the sense that the Village [left blogosphere] understands it, because Republicans were never, under any conditions, willing to consider voting for the bill.
But that’s how Republicans win the game, because they’re essentially playing with a different set of rules: Democrats have to cooperate, Republicans don’t. And there’s no political cost for the GOP because they understand that voters care about results more than anything else. It’s just pure political self-interest.
Serwer probably doesn’t care that mirror images of the same argument appear regularly wherever rightwingers gather. True Conservatives also like to say that “compromise” to leftists means surrendering to their presumptions. Serwer’s commenters responded like Yglesias’, and I ended up leaving a similar comment to the one I left for Yglesias (I confess I’ve cleaned it up a bit):
What you’re not getting is that the activist conservative base consists of fantasists at least as far to the right as most of you all are to the left, while the political culture that produced all of our current political leadership was formed in the shadow of the Reagan Era. “Socialism” and its variants are swear words, enemy talk. Even “liberal” is widely treated as embarrassing.
The belief that America is a “center right nation” is widespread. That’s the conventional wisdom. It’s hardly even questioned. It pre-defines what’s achievable: Anything that isn’t center right is therefore virtually treasonous. In terms of public discourse, it means that a Rand Paul, Glenn Beck, or Sarah Palin can get away with saying incredibly rightwing things, and recover – because “everybody” hates and distrusts government as much as they do, and also sees no contradiction in squaring this position with hyper-patriotism and support for a massive security state. And that’s what Obama had to deal with – a situation calling for social democratic repairs that would have to be justified in terms of free market, anti-statist dogma. That’s an “American solution to American problems” in the post-Reagan Era.
If Obama saves ACA and a few other elements of his agenda, then maybe you all can help out by putting up a new generation of leaders who either find a new language or who are as little afraid of going left as Palin and the rest are of going right.
As of this writing, no one’s turned up to play in the American Prospect/Serwer sandbox, but a sharp Yglesias commenter did turn up for another round. He questioned whether having gone further and more firmly left would really have been so high-risk for Obama, and, focusing on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka, “the Stimulus”), suggested that “by fighting for something larger — and loudly warning the public that GOP obstruction to government stimulus spending was a danger to the country — he might have helped position Democrats better to fight the 2010 midterms.”
My further reply ought to sound familiarly pessimistic to the unhappy few who gather here, but conducting such arguments can at least lead to the discovery of new, possibly better, at least more concise ways of repeating oneself:
It’s questionable whether the system itself is capable of producing more than a muddle, and whether “American solutions to American problems” really can suffice anymore, at least in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed. So maybe Obama is managing as best as he can the inevitable relative decline, and the left should consider more self-consciously how to deal with that – the exhaustion of the American idea as we’ve come to know it – going forward.
The exhaustion of the Zombie Contentions idea is, for me, corollary – in a sense the same exhaustion. If someone could show me how to escape this theme – which would equate with demonstrating how we could escape whatever is true in it – without settling for mere escapism, I’d be grateful. For now, I’m still more oriented to developing my own decline management strategies.
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As you say in your response, Colin, “the activist conservative base consists of fantasists at least as far to the right as most of you are are to the left.” The left is the right, since both sides have been swept up by blind faith. Jesus Marx = Karl Christ. The world is going through a stage of rhinoceritis.
http://www.jochnowitz.net/Essays/Rhinoceritis.html
What’s to be done? Facts. There is nothing so beautiful as a fact. The world is real. The world is what’s important.
The two parties have been fighting for ages about winning the title of Party of Hate. At the moment, the Republicans are way ahead, but these battles can seesaw. Instead of fighting, the two parties can resort to research.